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I. I Come To Praise Caesar, Not To Bury Him
Several years ago, an SSC reader made an r/slatestarcodex subreddit for discussion of blog posts here and related topics. As per the usual process, the topics that generated the strongest emotions – Trump, gender, race, the communist menace, the fascist menace, etc – started taking over. The moderators (and I had been added as an honorary mod at the time) decreed that all discussion of these topics should be corralled into one thread so that nobody had to read them unless they really wanted to. This achieved its desired goal: most of the subreddit went back to being about cognitive science and medicine and other less-polarizing stuff.
Unexpectedly, the restriction to one thread kick-started the culture war discussions rather than toning them down. The thread started getting thousands of comments per week, some from people who had never even heard of this blog and had just wandered in from elsewhere on Reddit. It became its own community, with different norms and different members from the rest of the board.
I expected this to go badly. It kind of did; no politics discussion area ever goes really well. There were some of the usual flame wars, point-scoring, and fanatics. I will be honest and admit I rarely read the thread myself.
But in between all of that, there was some really impressive analysis, some good discussion, and even a few changed minds. Some testimonials from participants:
For all its awfulness there really is something special about the CW thread. There are conversations that have happened there that cannot be replicated elsewhere. Someone mentioned its accidental brilliance and I think that’s right—it catches a wonderful conversational quality I’ve never seen on the Internet, and I’ve been on the Internet since the 90s – werttrew
I feel that, while practically ever criticism of the CW thread I have ever read is true, it is still the best and most civil culture war-related forum for conversation I have seen. And I find the best-of roundup an absolute must-read every week – yrrosimyarin
The Culture War Roundup threads were blessedly neutral ground for people to test their premises and moral intuitions against a gauntlet of (sometimes-forced!) kindness and charity. There was no guarantee that your opinion would carry the day, but if you put in the effort, you could be assured a fair reading and cracking debate. Very little was solved, but I’m not sure that was really the point. The CWRs were a place to broaden your understanding of a given topic by an iterative process of “Yes, but…” and for a place that boasted more than 15,000 participants, shockingly little drama ensued. That was the /r/slatestarcodex CWRs at their best, and that’s the way we hope they will be remembered by the majority of people who participated in them. – rwkasten
We really need to turn these QCs into a book or wiki or library of some kind. So much good thought, observation, introspection, etc. exists in just this one thread alone–to say nothing of the other QC posts in past CW threads. It would be nice to have a separate place, organized by subject matter, to just read these insightful posts – TheEgosLastStand
I think the CW thread is obviously a huge lump of positive utility for a large number of people, because otherwise they wouldn’t spend so much time on it. I’ve learned a lot in the thread, both about the ideas and beliefs of my outgroups, and by better honing my own beliefs and ideas in a high-pressure selective environment. I’ve shared out the results of what I’ve learned to all of my ingroup across Facebook and Twitter and in person, and I honestly think it’s helped foster better and more sophisticated thought about the culture war in a clique of several dozen SJ-aligned young people in the OC area, just from my tangential involvement as a vector – darwin2500
On one hand, as other commenters in this thread have said, I recognize it does have a lot of full-time opinionated idiots squabbling, and is inarguably filled with irrationality, bad takes, contrarianism, and Boo Outgroup posturing. I agree with many of [the criticisms] of overtly racist and stupid posts in there. Yet it also has a special, weird, fascinating quality which has led to some very insightful discussions which I have not encountered anywhere else on the Internet (and I have used the Internet 8+ hours a day almost my whole life). – c_o_r_b_a
There is no place on the internet that can have discussions about culture war topics with even an approximation of the quality of this place. Shutting this thread down [would] not mean moving the discussion elsewhere, for a lot of people it means removing the ability to discuss these things entirely – Zornau
I feel that the CW thread, for all its flaws, occupies a certain niche that can’t easily be replicated elsewhere. I also feel that its flaws need to compared not to a Platonic ideal but to typical online political discourse, which often ends up as pure echo chambers or flame wars. – honeypuppy
It’s one of the only political forums I can read online without reaching for the nearest sharp stick to poke my eyes out. It has a sort of free-flowing conversational feel that’s really appealing. There are some thoughtful people and discussions there that I hope can continue and be preserved. – TracingWoodgrains
Thanks to a great founding population, some very hard-working moderators, and a unique rule-set that emphasized trying to understand and convince rather than yell and shame, the Culture War thread became something special. People from all sorts of political positions, from the most boring centrists to the craziest extremists, had some weirdly good discussions and came up with some really deep insights into what the heck is going on in some of society’s most explosive controversies. For three years, if you wanted to read about the socialist case for vs. against open borders, the weird politics of Washington state carbon taxes, the medieval Rule of St. Benedict compared and contrasted with modern codes of conduct, the growing world of evangelical Christian feminism, Banfield’s neoconservative perspective on class, Baudrillard’s Marxist perspective on consumerism, or just how #MeToo has led to sex parties with consent enforcers dressed as unicorns, the r/SSC culture war thread was the place to be. I also benefitted from its weekly roundup of interesting social science studies and arch-moderator baj2235’s semi-regular Quality Contributions Catch-Up Thread.
The Culture War Thread aimed to be a place where people with all sorts of different views could come together to talk to and learn from one another. I think this mostly succeeded. On the last SSC survey, I asked who participated in the thread, and used that to get a pretty good idea of its userbase. Here are some statistics:
Superficially, this is remarkably well-balanced. 51% of Culture War Thread participants identified as left-of-center on the survey, compared to 49% of people who identified as right-of-center.
There was less parity in party identification, with a bit under two Democrats to every Republican. But this, too, reflects the national picture. The latest Gallup poll found that 34% of Americans identified as Democrat, compared to only 25% Republican. Since presidential elections are usually very close, it looks like left-of-center people are more willing to openly identify with the Democratic Party than right-of-center people are with the Republicans; the CW demographics show a similar picture.
Looked at in more detail, this correspondence with the general population is not quite as perfect as it seems:
The pie chart on the left shows people broken down by a finer-grained measure of political affiliation. We see very few people identified as straight-out conservatives. Right-of-center people were more likely to be either libertarians or neoreactionaries (a technocratic, anti-democracy movement that the survey instructed people to endorse if they wanted to be more like “for example Singapore: prosperity, technology, and stability more important than democratic process”). Although straight-out “liberal” had a better showing than “conservative”, the ranks of the Left still ended up divided among left-libertarians and social democrats (which the survey instructed people to endorse if they wanted to be more like “for example Scandinavian countries: heavily-regulated market economy, cradle-to-grave social safety net, socially permissive multiculturalism”). Overall, the CW thread is a little more to the fringes on the both sides, especially the parts of the fringes popular among its young, mostly nonreligious, kind of libertarian, mostly technophile demographic.
It also doesn’t like Trump. Although he has a 40% approval rating among the general population, only about 14% of CWers were even somewhat favorable toward him. RCP suggests that anti-Trumpers outnumber pro-Trumpers in the general population by 1.4x; among CW thread participants, that number increases to almost 5x! This fits the story above where most right-of-center participants are libertarians or skeptical of democracy/populism as opposed to standard conservatives. Still, I occasionally saw Trump supporters giving their pitch in the Culture War thread, or being willing to answer questions about why they thought what they did.
During the last few years of Culture War thread, a consensus grew up that it was heavily right-wing. This isn’t what these data show, and on the few times I looked at it myself, it wasn’t what I saw either. After being challenged to back this up, I analyzed ten randomly chosen comments on the thread; four seemed neutral, three left/liberal, and three conservative. When someone else objected that it was a more specific “blatant” anti-transgender bias, I counted up all the mentions of transgender on three weeks worth of Culture War threads: of five references, two were celebrating how exciting/historic a transgender person recently winning an election was, a third was neutrally referring to the election, a fourth was a trans person talking about their experiences, and a fifth was someone else neutrally mentioning that they were transgender. This sort of thing happened enough times that I stopped being interested in arguing the point.
I acknowledge many people’s lived experience that the thread felt right-wing; my working theory is that most of the people I talk to about this kind of thing are Bay Area liberals for whom the thread was their first/only exposure to a space with any substantial right-wing presence at all, which must have made it feel scarily conservative. This may also be a question of who sorted by top, who sorted by new, and who sorted by controversial. In any case, you can just read the last few threads and form your own opinion.
Whatever its biases and whatever its flaws, the Culture War thread was a place where very strange people from all parts of the political spectrum were able to engage with each other, treat each other respectfully, and sometimes even change their minds about some things. I am less interested in re-opening the debate about exactly which side of the spectrum the average person was on compared to celebrating the rarity of having a place where people of very different views came together to speak at all.
II. We Need To Have A National Conversation About Why We Can No Longer Have A National Conversation
This post is called “RIP Culture War Thread”, so you may have already guessed things went south. What happened? The short version is: a bunch of people harassed and threatened me for my role in hosting it, I had a nervous breakdown, and I asked the moderators to get rid of it.
I’ll get to the long version eventually, but first I want to stress that this isn’t just my story. It’s the story of everyone who’s tried to host a space for political discussion on the Internet. Take the New York Times, in particular their article Why No Comments? It’s A Matter Of Resources. Translated from corporate-speak, it basically says that unmoderated comment sections had too many “trolls”, so they decided to switch to moderated comment sections only, but they don’t have enough resources to moderate any controversial articles, so commenting on controversial articles is banned.
And it’s not just the New York Times. In the past five years, CNN, NPR, The Atlantic, Vice, Bloomberg, Motherboard, and almost every other major news source has closed their comments – usually accompanied by weird corporate-speak about how “because we really value conversations, we are closing our comment section forever effective immediately”. People have written articles like The Comments Apocalypse, A Brief History Of The End Of The Comments, and Is The Era Of Reader Comments On News Websites Fading? This raises a lot of questions.
Like: I was able to find half a dozen great people to do a great job moderating the Culture War Thread 100% for free without even trying. How come some of the richest and most important news sources in the world can’t find or afford a moderator?
Or: can’t they just hide the comments behind a content warning saying “These comments are unmoderated, read at your own risk, click to expand”?
This confused me until I had my own experience with the Culture War thread.
The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did.
But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons.
Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are. Each of these views has, at times, won over entire cultures so completely that disagreeing with them then was as unthinkable as agreeing with them is today. I disagree with most of them but don’t want to be too harsh on any of them. Reasoning correctly about these things is excruciatingly hard, trusting consensus opinion would have led you horrifyingly wrong throughout most of the past, and other options, if they exist, are obscure and full of pitfalls. I tend to go with philosophers from Voltaire to Mill to Popper who say the only solution is to let everybody have their say and then try to figure it out in the marketplace of ideas.
But none of those luminaries had to deal with online comment sections.
The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time.
“So they should deal with it! That’s the bargain they made when deciding to host the national conversation!”
No, you don’t understand. It’s not just the predictable and natural reputational consequences of having some embarrassing material in a branded space. It’s enemy action.
Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal.
So let me tell you about my experience hosting the Culture War thread.
(“hosting” isn’t entirely accurate. The Culture War thread was hosted on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit, which I did not create and do not own. I am an honorary moderator of that subreddit, but aside from the very occasional quick action against spam nobody else caught, I do not actively play a part in its moderation. Still, people correctly determined that I was probably the weakest link, and chose me as the target.)
People settled on a narrative. The Culture War thread was made up entirely of homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis. I freely admit there were people who were against homosexuality in the thread (according to my survey, 13%), people who opposed using trans people’s preferred pronouns (according to my survey, 9%), people who identified as alt-right (7%), and a single person who identified as a neo-Nazi (who as far as I know never posted about it). Less outrageous ideas were proportionally more popular: people who were mostly feminists but thought there were differences between male and female brains, people who supported the fight against racial discrimination but thought could be genetic differences between races. All these people definitely existed, some of them in droves. All of them had the right to speak; sometimes I sympathized with some of their points. If this had been the complaint, I would have admitted to it right away. If the New York Times can’t avoid attracting these people to its comment section, no way r/ssc is going to manage it.
But instead it was always that the the thread was “dominated by” or “only had” or “was an echo chamber for” homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the subreddit was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the SSC community was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that I personally was a homophobic etc neo-Nazi of them all. I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat. I lost distant family in the Holocaust. You can imagine how much fun this was for me.
People would message me on Twitter to shame me for my Nazism. People who linked my blog on social media would get replies from people “educating” them that they were supporting Nazism, or asking them to justify why they thought it was appropriate to share Nazi sites. I wrote a silly blog post about mathematics and corn-eating. It reached the front page of a math subreddit and got a lot of upvotes. Somebody found it, asked if people knew that the blog post about corn was from a pro-alt-right neo-Nazi site that tolerated racists and sexists. There was a big argument in the comments about whether it should ever be acceptable to link to or read my website. Any further conversation about math and corn was abandoned. This kept happening, to the point where I wouldn’t even read Reddit discussions of my work anymore.
Some people started an article about me on a left-wing wiki that listed the most offensive things I have ever said, and the most offensive things that have ever been said by anyone on the SSC subreddit and CW thread over its three years of activity, all presented in the most damning context possible; it started steadily rising in the Google search results for my name. A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking me personally and Culture War thread participants in general got started; it now has over 2,000 readers. People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most.
Some people found my real name and started posting it on Twitter. Some people made entire accounts devoted to doxxing me in Twitter discussions whenever an opportunity came up. A few people just messaged me letting me know they knew my real name and reminding me that they could do this if they wanted to.
Some people started messaging my real-life friends, telling them to stop being friends with me because I supported racists and sexists and Nazis. Somebody posted a monetary reward for information that could be used to discredit me.
One person called the clinic where I worked, pretended to be a patient, and tried to get me fired.
(not all of this was because of the Culture War thread. Some of this was because of my own bad opinions and my own bad judgment. But the Culture War thread kept coming up. As I became more careful in my own writings, the Culture War thread loomed larger and larger in the threats and complaints. And when the Culture War thread got closed down, the subreddit about insulting me had a “declaring victory” post, which I interpret as confirmation that this was one of the main things going on.)
I don’t want to claim martyrdom. None of these things actually hurt me in real life. My blog continues to be popular, my friends stuck by me, and my clinic didn’t let me go. I am not going to be able to set up a classy new FiredForTruth.com website like James Damore did. What actually happened was much more prosaic: I had a nervous breakdown.
It wasn’t even that bad a nervous breakdown. I was able to keep working through it. I just sort of broke off all human contact for a couple of weeks and stayed in my room freaking out instead. This is similar enough to my usual behavior that nobody noticed, which suited me fine. And I learned a lot (for example, did you know that sceletium has a combination of SSRI-like compounds and PDE2 inhibitors that make it really good at treating nervous breakdowns? True!). And it wasn’t like the attacks were objectively intolerable or that everybody would have had a nervous breakdown in my shoes: I’m a naturally obsessive person, I take criticism especially badly, and I had some other things going on too.
Around the same time, friends of mine who were smarter and more careful than I was started suggesting that it would be better for me, and for them as people who had to deal with the social consequences of being my friend, if I were to shut down the thread. And at the same time, I got some more reasons to think that this blog could contribute to really important things – AI, effective charity, meta-science – in ways that would be harder to do from the center of a harassment campaign.
So around October, I talked to some subreddit mods and asked them what they thought about spinning off the Culture Wars thread to its own forum, one not affiliated with the Slate Star Codex brand or the r/slatestarcodex subreddit. The first few I approached were positive; some had similar experiences to mine; one admitted that even though he personally was not involved with the CW thread and only dealt with other parts of the subreddit, he taught at a college and felt like his job would not be safe so long as the subreddit and CW thread were affiliated. Apparently the problem was bigger than just me, and other people had been dealing with it in silence.
Other moderators, the ones most closely associated with the CW thread itself, were strongly opposed. They emphasized some of the same things I emphasized above: that the thread was a really unique place for great conversation about all sorts of important topics, that the majority of commenters and posts were totally inoffensive, and that one shouldn’t give in to terrorists. I respect all these points, but I respected them less from the middle of a nervous breakdown, and eventually the vote among the top nine mods and other stakeholders was 5-4 in favor of getting rid of it. It took three months to iron out all the details, but a few weeks ago everyone finally figured things out and the CW thread closed forever.
At this point this stops being my story. A group of pro-CW-thread mods led by ZorbaTHut, cjet79, and baj2235 set up r/TheMotte, a new subreddit for continuing the Culture War Thread tradition. After a week, the top post already has 4,243 comments, so it looks like the move went pretty well. Despite fears – which I partly shared – that the transition would not be good for the Thread, early signs suggest it has survived intact. I’m hopeful this can be a win-win situation, freeing me from a pretty serious burden while the Thread itself expands and flourishes under the leadership of a more anonymous group of people.
III. The Thread Is Dead, Long Live The Thread
I debated for a long time whether or not to write this post. The arguments against are obvious: never let the trolls know they’re getting to you. Once they know they’re getting to you, that you’re susceptible to pressure, obviously they redouble their efforts. I stuck to this for a long time. I’m still sort of sticking to it, in that I’m avoiding specifics and super avoiding links (which I realize has made my story harder to prove true, sorry). I’ll try to resume the policy fully after this, but I thought one post on the subject was worth the extra misery for a few reasons.
First, a lot of people were (rightfully! understandably!) very angry about the loss of the Culture War thread from r/ssc, and told the moderators that, as the kids say these days, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation”. I promised to do this, so now I am.
Second, I wanted there to be at least one of these “here’s why we’re removing your ability to comment” articles that was honest, not made of corporate-speak, and less patronizing than “we’re removing the comment section because we value your speech so much and want to promote great conversations”. Hopefully this will be the skeleton key that helps you understand what all those other articles would have said if they weren’t run through fifty layers of PR teams. I would like to give people another perspective on events like Tumblr banning female-presenting nipples or Patreon dropping right-wing YouTubers or Twitter constantly introducing new algorithms that misfire and ban random groups of people. These companies aren’t inherently censorious. They’re just afraid. Everyone is afraid.
Third, I would like to offer one final, admittedly from-a-position-of-weakness, f**k you at everyone who contributed to this. I think you’re bad people, and you make me really sad. Not in a joking performative Internet sadness way. In an actual, I-think-you-made-my-life-and-the-world-worse way. I realize I’m mostly talking to the sort of people who delight in others’ distress and so this won’t register. But I’m also a little upset at some of my (otherwise generally excellent) friends in the rationalist community who were quick to jump on the “Oh, yeah, the SSC subreddit is full of gross people and I wish they couldn’t speak” bandwagon (to be clear, I don’t mean the friends who offered me good advice about separating from the CW thread for the sake of my own well-being, I mean people who actively contributed to worsening the whole community’s reputation based on a few bad actors). I understand you were probably honest in your opinion, but I think there was a lot of room to have thought through those opinions more carefully.
Fourth, I want anybody else trying to host “the national conversation” to have a clear idea of the risks. If you plan to be anything less than maximally censorious, consider keeping your identity anonymous, and think about potential weak links in your chain (ie hosts, advertisers, payment processors, etc). I’m not saying you necessarily need to go full darknet arms merchant. Just keep in mind that lots of people will try to stop you, and they’ve had a really high success rate so far.
Fifth, if someone speaks up against the increasing climate of fear and harassment or the decline of free speech, they get hit with an omnidirectional salvo of “You continue to speak just fine, and people are listening to you, so obviously the climate of fear can’t be too bad, people can’t be harassing you too much, and you’re probably just lying to get attention.” But if someone is too afraid to speak up, or nobody listens to them, then the issue never gets brought up, and mission accomplished for the people creating the climate of fear. The only way to escape the double-bind is for someone to speak up and admit “Hey, I personally am a giant coward who is silencing himself out of fear in this specific way right now, but only after this message”. This is not a particularly noble role, but it’s one I’m well-positioned to play here, and I think it’s worth the awkwardness to provide at least one example that doesn’t fit the double-bind pattern.
Sixth, I want to apologize to anybody who’s had to deal with me the past – oh, let’s say several years. One of the really bad parts of this debacle has been that it’s made me a much worse person. When I started writing this blog, I think I was a pretty nice person who was willing to listen to and try to hammer out my differences with anyone. As a result of some of what I’ve described, I think I’ve become afraid, bitter, paranoid, and quick to assume that anyone who disagrees with me (along a dimension that too closely resembles some of the really bad people I’ve had to deal with) is a bad actor who needs to be discredited and destroyed. I don’t know how to fix this. I can only apologize for it, admit you’re not imagining it, and ask people to do as I say (especially as I said a few years ago when I was a better person) and not as I do. I do think this is a great learning experience in terms of psychology and will write a post on it eventually; I just wish I didn’t have to learn it from the inside.
Seventh, I want to reassure people who would otherwise treat this story as an unmitigated disaster that there are some bright spots, like that I didn’t suffer any objective damage despite a lot of people trying really hard, and that the Culture War thread lives on bigger and brighter than ever before
Eighth, as a final middle-finger at the people who killed the Culture War thread, I’d like to advertise r/TheMotte, its new home, in the hopes that this whole debacle Streisand-Effects it to the stratosphere.
I want to stress that I will continue to leave the SSC comment section open as long as is compatible with the political climate and my own health; I ask tolerance if there are otherwise-unfair actions I have to take to make this possible. I also want to stress that I’m not going to stop writing about controversial topics completely – but I do want to have some control over when and where I have to deal with this, and want the privilege of being hung for my own opinions rather than for those of other people I am tangentially associated with.
Please do not send me expressions of sympathy or try to cast me as a martyr; the first make me feel worse for reasons that are hard to explain; the second wouldn’t really fit the facts and isn’t the look I want to present. Thanks to everyone who helped make the CW thread and this blog what it was/is, and good luck to Zorba and the rest of the Motte moderation team.
The direct link to the article hasn’t been working, and that’s where the comment link seems to point, so I couldn’t get to it directly. I thought I had an explanation (it looked like Facebook links worked for a minute), but as I’m testing to try to pin it down, all my explanations are falling apart. Looks like the link just fails intermittently, no explanation as to why. It works about half the time, and it can work and then fail and then work again within a few seconds.
Edit: And now the ten comments that were here, including Scott’s that I was replying to, seem to have disappeared. Did you re-post the article?
Edit 2: Since I didn’t say this at first, let me also add that I found this to be an extremely interesting post, if one that makes me somewhat sad (not that you reacted this way, but that you needed to in the first place). I don’t like that this is how society seems to want to act, but sadly I can’t exactly alter society single-handedly. Thank you for your attempts, even though you can’t fix the whole world single-handedly either.
I deleted and reposted because I couldn’t fix the issue above. Since you seem to be able to comment now, I think it worked.
I had the broken link issue described above, but the reposted version appears to be fine (as long as this comment shows up when I hit post).
FYI: Seems like I can only get to this site by clicking on the thread from the homepage. If I navigate here by clicking the link from my RSS feed or by manually entering the URL in a fresh browser I get a “page not found”. It looks like it depends on my referrer (?). Definitely strange
I got a second email notifying me about this article, I assume as a consequence of the repost. It is cleanly accessible to me now.
Someone from the commentor community here should do a historical study on censorship like this (not exactly like this, of course, since the internet didn’t exist) under representative governments. Is it rare or unprecedented for voters to polarize into two tribes that will not communicate without the state falling into civil war? Or is it common and just feels like a coming civil war because we haven’t lived a large enough sample size?
I’ve been wondering about this. I always hear about the lively bars or whatever of Revolutionary America or the coffeehouses of London or the salons of France. How did they deal with problems like this? Does the Internet as a medium have differences from the sort of public, neutral spaces we would be inclined to compare them to? Or were those spaces just as polarized or just as regularly tarred and feathered as ours?
Yes, they were. Both of those institutions were seen as seething cauldrons of unrest which threatened society in their own time, it is only in hindsight that we have romanticized them as hotspots of social progress.
My view is that society tends to embody the public morality it can afford. If the world eventually changed in ways that the coffee house patrons would have approved, I think it would be a mistake to attribute causality to mere correlation.
I was thinking of something along these lines a while ago. I’m noticing that MRA-type ideas are becoming more mainstream lately – hell, a few months ago I saw a feminist say something along the lines of “look, no-one is saying women who make false accusations shouldn’t be jailed, all I’m saying is…” And yet, I don’t see MRAs themselves getting any more popular.
We attribute women’s sufferage, the end of sex-discriminatory labor laws, etc… to the feminist movement agitating for them, even though at the time it seems everyone hated them too. We assume it was their doing, because they were the loudest about wanting it at the time it happened, but I’ve never seen anyone actually causally link specific acts by the women’s rights movement to advancement in womens rights, or specific acts by the gay rights movement to advancement in gay rights.
So… could it be that actually, people just agitate for crap all the time, with the actual movements not doing anything more than getting the common people to realize that the questions of e.g. “should women vote/should sodomy be illegal/etc…” exist to be asked at all?
And then after a few years, around a critical point where the average voter is actually thinking about the issue, everyone suddenly converges on the answer that actually is more just and right and in line with the fundamental principles of our society, and then that becomes the new norm?
That would explain why “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” even though there’s plenty of people campaigning for injustice – the campaigning doesn’t actually matter, and democracy really does, in fact, work.
Usenet in the 80s and 90s managed to sustain a wider range of tolerable opinions and comparatively civil exchanges (though certainly with trolls of all flavors and lots of healthy exercise for the killfile).
Occasionally there was targeted action aimed at intimidating people by drawing the attention of the (usually academic or government) institution to the terrible views their money was helping to spread, but it was relatively rare and there were strong norms against it.
(Sysadmins would exclude certain topics– e.g., the refusal to create a rec.sex newsgroup because that really might get them in trouble led to the development of an alternative newsgroup hierarchy. But they generally didn’t enact viewpoint-based restrictions.)
Maybe it was just that it was too small to matter. But while the numbers were tiny compared to the modern net, by the 90s they were still pretty large compared with any number of premodern cities that might support coffee shops or agoras or the occasional brutal civil conflict.
I’ve been surprised at how little any sort of founder effect in norms (whether cultural or designwise) seems to have carried over from there to later commenting systems. We seem to keep reinventing worse wheels.
Keep in mind that (while it certainly had a wide range of demographics), the category “people who were were using Usenet in the 80s and 90s” is very different than the category “people using the Internet in 2019”. I would guess that, combined with volume, explains a lot of it.
Also, while there may have been more usenet users than 19th century coffee house patrons in absolute terms, as a percentage of political society usenet was a fragment of a fragment. Once the tidal wave of general public broke into the internet commenting space they brought a very different culture that swamped any existing founder effect.
AKA “September 1993 never ended”.
One thing that discouraged such behavior was the probability of pistols at dawn, if one were considered a social equal, or merely being dragged into the street and horsewhipped, if one were not.
Of course, such things did happen with some regularity. The difference is that defamers knew they might have to face actual concrete consequences. Nothing like the anonymous Twitmobs of today.
Okay, so someone is going to challenge Scott to a duel and maybe kill him for allegedly harboring Nazis, how is that supposed to help?
Not that I agree, but the point was that the person defaming Scott would need to face the chance of Scott kills him in the duel.
This theory implies a touching faith in the unwillingness of people to falsely claim to have been defamed when they were not.
(“Scott hosts r/ssc, which is full of racists, and racists are insulting me, a person of color, therefore I should challenge him to a duel.”)
The trouble with violence is that the bad guys tend to be better at it.
“Does the Internet as a medium have differences from the sort of public, neutral spaces we would be inclined to compare them to?”
They took place in person, for one thing. And that makes quite a quantum of difference.
In the 1990s people would go to public arcades and play video games against strangers, lose and be frustrated, but it rarely led to a fistfight.
Play a competitive game online and you’ll see incredible lengths people go to in order to destroy each other from the comfort of their own home if they lose in some match and consider it “unfair.”
Ada Palmer and Cory Doctorow are working on a history of censorship. I don’t know when It’s due to be published.
The Dreyfus affair was very polarizing but didn’t lead to a civil war. Or maybe the Vichy France was one side of the war.
The Dreyfus affair was resolved 35 years before France declared war on Germany, resulting in the unrelated creation of the “Vichy” state. So no, it’s a good example.
I’m going to need a refresher on the social consequences. Which side was the witches? I know the affair popularized antisemitism, but did gentiles have to prove that they weren’t Dreyfusards to not lose their jobs?
Polarization is a vicious cycle that is a precondition to civil war. But it’s necessary, not sufficient. France, England, and the Netherlands all underwent periods of extreme polarization that didn’t result in appreciable civil wars.
In the United States, I count sixteen internal crises* (over roughly three hundred years) that led to extreme polarization. Three** led to war, one led to a successful revolt.*** Only one of them after the constitution. Each of them had winners and losers and were the result of fundamental conflicts of interest.
I doubt we’re heading for civil war. What is the fundamental conflict of interest today? The irreconcilable interest that the two sides will fight and die for? Because that is what leads to war. Civil War is a way to settle domestic questions that normal politics cannot and which people are willing to die over. Are the Blues willing to die over the SALT? Are the Reds willing to die over the National Debt? Because you need that.
Pew says the three biggest gaps between Reds and Blues are abortion, environmental policy, and racial policy. Imagine one side completely wins. Abortion is now completely legal/illegal. The EPA is abolished/all powerful. Affirmative action is now legally mandated everywhere/banned. Who’s going to get a gun and die for that? (Amusingly, the biggest point of agreement is dislike for politicians and that the government is inefficient.)
There were three civil wars and one revolt. The first Civil War was about whether King or Parliament was supreme in the state. The revolt was about whether Americans had any rights whatsoever (seriously, the King’s representative said the only right the colonists had was to not be sold into slavery). The third was about whether American government meant anything or it was just a suggestion Parliament could take into account. The fourth was about whether the economic system of half the country would be abolished and whether a significant portion of the population were legally people.
We just don’t have anything like that today.
That isn’t to say it doesn’t matter. We might very well be looking at a polarizing world. It might be for the next century even small towns in America will have two dancing halls, two social clubs, even two schools like tiny hamlets in England did in the 18th century during the Tory-Whig split. It might be there are protests and even riots with some regularity like London and Norwich were famous for for nearly a century. We might have two parallel fashion styles, two parallel elites, two parallel ideas of what a good person is. But that’s not civil war.
*English Civil War, Yorkist Crisis, American Revolution, Confederation Crisis, Administration Crisis, Crisis of 1812, Jacksonian Crisis, Crisis of the 1840s, Crisis of the 1860s, Redemption Crisis, Progressive Crisis, Depression Crisis, Roosevelt Crisis, Democratic Crisis, Crisis of the 1970s, Trump Crisis.
**English Civil War, American Revolution, and Crisis of the 1860s.
***Yorkist Crisis
Consider re-framing.
Extreme polarization is an *actual* Civil “war.”
Once it gets to war it stops being civil. Hence, why the state of split tribalistic partisanship can be accurately described as “civil” war. It was just the olden term for culture war when it’s in this preliminary state.
That said, to answer this question: “What is the fundamental conflict of interest today?”
You said it yourself, both sides agree that there is a fundamental conflict of interest in the ruling body that runs the show and what the electorate actually wants done. Pretty much every side recognizes that those in command long ago stopped listening and need to be evicted from power and replaced. The sides just disagree on who the replacement should be and how that should be accomplished.
The civil war will stop being civil and just be war if and when the Communist and the Conservative finally come to compact to kick out the corporatist cronies.
However if it’s to be a war between the red and blue teams, the most likely flashpoint increasingly seems to be immigration, as the Trump presidency has kicked a much more radical counter-position into gear rhetorically: open borders advocacy. This same issue is slowly, but surely shaking the EU to its core too, and it’s something that was a dark horse contender for a long time, but increasingly, it seems people are more and more willing to risk much over. Potentially even their lives.
I agree that civil war is an outgrowth of the conditions I describe. But I believe you’ve misunderstood my point. At least three of the previous four conflicts were not about what the electorate wants done but about whether the institutions actually held power. The question of 1775 was not whether or not the colonists supported the Boston Harbor Act. It was about whether the Massachusetts legislature was a legitimate legislature at all. The rebellion against Governor Andros wasn’t about whether he was accurately representing a faction. It was about whether colonial charters had any force at all, whether colonists had given up all their rights by decamping from England.
I’m not aware of anyone trying to undermine the authority of the US Senate or state legislatures as such. That would be the equivalent, not simply disagreement on a specific issue.
While I agree immigration is likely to be a major issue, the last few times the US went door to door arresting or expelling immigrants or even American minorities no war broke out.
My opinion is that the world is in an extremely peaceful period, and that without external threats, close neighbors tend to fight.
I think both sides would immediately depolarize in the face of a Martian invasion or something.
I have been reading a lot about the rise of totalitarianism in the late 19th and early 20th century, and also studying well documented “modern” controversies (corn laws in England, child labour, etc) that look really uncontroversial in hindsight.
All I can say is that Scott’s experience fits perfectly into the history of terrifying mass movements. That is to say: frusteratuon and alienation among the greater population finds release and relief with the joy of being part of something (and DOING something) becomes literally intoxicating, with predictably terrible results.
Arguing nuanced social policy is hard, and leaves most people feeling impotent. Doxxing a “villain” feels deliciously righteous. So much so that there is an incentive to AVOID considering whether the target is actually evil in any meaningful. See also: pogroms, lynchings, the reign of terror, the haulocaust and the entire history of Russia since 1850.
The only action that seems to have ended this pattern in the last 200 years is a sudden rise in living standard that makes a life spent in purpetuak outrage seem unappealing. When this happens, the people pleading for santiy during the crisis tend to be vindicated and subsequently get to set new cultural norms in the aftermath, which is vaguely comforting. Unfortunately, it is hard to imagine what kind of material improvement could provide the sort of satisfaction required to quench this rage, given how incredibly well off our society already is.
Universal basic income? Rejuvenation therapies and thousand-year life expectancy? Ubiquitous cyborg implants? Faster-than-light space exploration?
God you are optimistic. I really fucking hope you are right.
I sometimes wonder if everyone being very well off (or having something like UBI) would make things worse: with nothing much to do, we’ll have plenty of time to spend on social climbing, petty bickering, etc. When one reads about the idle members of “high society” of past centuries, there’s plenty of shallow, vindictive behavior.
High society, or, you know, high school.
@CthulhuChild
Um, about that, I think the perception of lower living standards than one’s parents and grandparents when they were the same age (see our host’s “Considerations On Cost Disease” for some of what may be driving that perception) is driving some of that rage.
I know that for myself continually rising housing costs compared to wages for decades, and the huge increase in visible “urban camping” these last few years have made me feel more glum.
I 100% agree with your perception, but every time I try to quantify it I run into a brick wall.
For example, I earn less (inflation adjusted) than my parents did (they were 48/49 boomers, I’m an 85 millennial). I bought my first home later than they did, and it is a smaller home (I live in Victoria BC, which is about the same as Vancouver and Toronto for criminally overheated housing markets; their first home was in Toronto, so it’s quite comparable). On the other hand, it’s better heated, better insulated, easier to clean, and has nicer appliances. Renovations I do myself are proportionately cheaper (material costs). My TV and computer provide unlimited free entertainment for almost no cost. I am really into woodworking, and I can buy better tools for a weeks wage than my dad could buy for a month of his wages. My dad tells me his public school education had him in neat rows memorizing times tables, my mom tells me she was beaten by nuns on a regular basis. My (public, free) high school had a direct connection to NASA and was named after a famous Canadian astronaught, despite being built in a slum district of Toronto. I am a youth mentor for a kid whose (public, free) education has him designing airplanes and attending flight school.
I know n=1 and all that, but it’s REALLY hard for me to square this reality against the narrative that everything is getting worse all the time. I’m not denying cost disease (I think it’s a huge problem), but I think that a purely quantitative focus ignores many of the serious qualitative improvements that have occurred. And trying to quantify the qualitative inevitably reveals bias. Those who think things are getting worse would consider an iPhone a basic amenity, comparable to decent shoes or a functioning wrist watch. Or you can say that an iPhone is the equivalent of a 20 million dollar super computer circa 1990, and the owner of a used nokia handset is effectively many times richer than ANYONE alive in the 1980s.
I also think that trying to do direct generational comparisons is difficult because it is SO intensely personal/experiential, and because there is so much statistical noise (lots of my friends/peers/acquaintances are doing worse than their parents, even adjusting for improved quality of consumer products and education, while others are doing much better).
So when I say we are materially well off, I am comparing across centuries. The angst of the early industrial era ended with electrification and running water. The angst of the depression era ended with a consumer society and global supply chains. Basically everyone in the west, even the very poor, has access to material luxuries that the kings of 18th century Europe simply did not. Even “urban camping” is a huge step up over what destitution meant in the 1930s. Please do NOT misinterpret this as an endorsement of the status quo. Rather, consider how much of a jump getting to the current status quo really was, and whether a similar jump seems to be imminent.
This rings very true. With me, N now = 2. And I think it will ring true for millions of people in Canada and the US, and probably Europe as well. I’m in Ottawa so the cost of housing is more reasonable, but when compared to earnings it is still much more than what my parents had to pay. It’s quite clear that some things are getting better and some things are getting worse. It matters which things are getting worse and which things are getting better, if you want to find out whether in the balance, we are better off or worse off.
Generally housing is harder to find and entertainment is much easier to find.
This means that raising kids is much harder now and not having kids is much more appealing. Also, people are having fewer kids. No society that is discouraging families to the extent we are will survive for long. Conclusion: we are worse off.
Funny, I just had my first (and probably only) kid. I was thinking about the demographic crash, and I see it more a problem of status than of economics.
I mean, the people I know who are least likely to have kids have stable jobs, savings, and generous mata/pata leave policies. The people who seem to have children more readily are the poor, and this isn’t exactly a recent observation or a western specific one. So the idea of a demographic crash being caused by economic instability seems thoroughly refuted.
What DOES seem likely is that people have typically had kids for three reasons: old age security, status, and existential satisfaction. In the modern welfare state, the first doesn’t really exist. In the post feminist culture, the second has been erroded (not a shot against feminists, but it would be shocking to me if it could be demonstrated that the legitimization of non maternal roles for women and the diminishment of pariarchal priviledge had NO effect on the incentives to have kids). That leaves existential effects, and the middle/upper classes have always had more opportunities to leave their mark on culture and history, which obviates the need to do it with babies.
I am not sure that means we are worse off on an individual level (lived personal experience and life satisfaction), but it sure doesn’t bode well for society!
” Unfortunately, it is hard to imagine what kind of material improvement could provide the sort of satisfaction required to quench this rage, given how incredibly well off our society already is.”
There are none. It’s entirely mindset driven/ The only thing that can quell the rage is philosophy and meditation on it. Particularly, the left needs more Stoicism. The right, less.
I wonder what made “attacking people’s livelihoods” so popular strategy for the political left. Isn’t this exactly the kind of weapon that gives disproportional advantage to the rich over the poor? If it becomes a norm that expressing your opinion costs you a job, only independently wealthy people will be allowed to have opinions.
(Also, the underclass, who have nothing to lose. But they probably spend less time online.)
I wouldn’t try to get fired even people who genuinely have horrible opinions, because I do not want to legitimize this strategy. It makes the world a worse place.
Maybe it’s not a coincidence that the practice gained in popularity as the left shifted from being concerned about economic justice to being concerned about social justice.
I think its popular because it is so obviously effective, at least short term. Moloch at work.
@Randy M
Just this last year there’s been a big switch in emphasis of political canidates to focus on “economic” rather than “social” justice (at least in the media I usually read), driven (I imagine) by the upcoming 2020 election and the many polls showing “center-left” economics is more popular, and “center-right” social is more popular.
Especially in swing states I expect an economic emphasis by Democrats and everywhere in the U.S.A. I expect to see social issues emphasized by Republicans.
I hope you are correct. This was the reason behind Bernie’s appeal in 2016 and a big reason behind why Trump won also. When you’re unemployed, the thought of unskilled immigrants crossing the border illegally to potentially compete with you on the labor market cannot be pleasant. Trump’s talk against free trade also certainly helped.
Like Bernie said, open borders is a Koch brothers proposal.
But I’m not optimistic. I dont think the identitarian wing of the Democratic party will give up that easily. I think it’s clear that a reasonable, pro-working class, leftwing candidate who could echo some of Bernie’s talking points without Bernie’s socialist baggage would absolutely crush Trump in a presidential election. But that candidate will never win the Democratic nomination. It appears the establishment has selected Kamala Harris, as she is ideologically compliant and suitable on identity grounds.
The UE rate in the US in Jan 2016 was under 5% and was lower than 13 of the 16 years since 2000. That is a modest (at best) portion of the electorate and smaller in terms of UE rate than the 2012, 2004, 1996 and 1992 elections and right at the rate of the 2008 and 2000 elections. Even adding in the decrease in Labor Force Participation rate there isn’t any reason to treat the 2016 election as uniquely economically insecure for the electorate.
@jermo sapiens,
You’re likely right, as over the past few years since Trump started campaigning a mighty rush of voters who care about immigration have come to side with one or the other Party based on that issue, but I’m doubtful of most Republican office holders commitment, as for the Democrats some newly elected ones seem sincere but most of the rest didn’t raise much of a fuss over Obama’s deportations (just as the Republicans didn’t fuss over Bush’s lack of same).
More were deported during Obama’s presidency than Bush’s, and Trump had a Republican controlled Congress for two years that could’ve funded a border wall extension (somehow it keeps getting forgotten that there already are border walls).
There must be some core principles, but in thinking of stuff like free-trade agreements the parties have flip-flopped with the main continuity of just being against whatever “the other side” wants.
There’s a three-way tension between base, donors, and appealing to swing voters.
Strategists of both parties recognize that the typical swing voter is more likely a social-conservative/economic populist rather than a fiscal-confiscal-conservative/social-liberal, but donors are more likely to be the latter rather than the former, plus the incentives are to rise within a party before changing tack for the general election.
Neither Democrats or Republicans are the majority of voters so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Bernie having “socialist baggage” is an asset, not a hindrance. It’s about time that the US working class became a little more class-conscious and ready to discuss Marxism openly.
Here’s hoping that having tired of “economic justice” and “social justice,” the left develops an interest in actual justice.
By actual justice, do you mean the Jeff Sessions brand of justice? The Blue Lives Matter brand of justice? The “shoot anyone who looks suspicious and comes near my property, and while you’re at it, throw poor brown people in jail for 50 years for smoking weed because fuck ’em” brand of justice that so many conservatives seem to love?
Stop that.
@toastengineer: Yes, it was uncharitable, but so was Brandon’s snide implication that leftist views are incompatible with justice in any real moral or ethical sense.
It’s likely just because it’s a weapon that’s effective. An internet mob is much more capable of getting you fired than, say, getting your significant other to stop loving you.
And I’m sure the weapon is being applied without thought of what might happen if it’s normalized. Or possibly with the belief that their political enemies have already thrown away any sense of decency and will already use any weapon available to them, so no reason to hold back yourself.
Collectives aren’t rational the way individuals are. The left (or SJWs or the Woke or whatever name you want to give the broad movement from which most of the no-platforming drive is coming at present) doesn’t have a Pope who can decree that this set of tactics are a bad idea because they’ll ultimately undermine their group’s goals[1]. Instead, there are millions of individuals who act in ways that make sense to them–either to meet their own personal desires to mete out justice to evildoers or their goals of becoming more influential on the internet or their fear of being purged as insufficiently dedicated to the cause. And together, they destroy worthwhile things in the same way that all the shepherds in the village overgraze the pasture despite none of them wanting to see the pasture overgrazed.
[1] They will, of course, undermine most of those goals. No-platforming and outrage mobs are like terrorism in that they’re tactics, not ideologies. The right can do them at least as well as the left, and probably will, to all of our lasting cost.
This is a great insight. It’s why it makes little sense to hate The Left or The Fash. What outrages us is the worst behavior in any group, Muslims, SJWs, white males, etc. There really is such a thing as toxic masculinity, but also toxic musliminity. Our brains naturally bind the outrage material to the group that spawned it.
Of course, the best thing to do is ignore the assholes in any group, and don’t try collective punishment or killing the father for the sins of the son. We do have one asymmetry though: presumably related to the rise of social media, socjus has the conch right now and cannot simply be ignored.
Harassment is bad. Doxxing is bad. Slavery is bad. Holocaust bad. Orange man bad. One thing the CW thread tends to get right is that it focuses on bad acts and condemns the actors. Yes, many or most of the highlighted bad acts source from socjus. This isn’t balanced, and the map might not match the territory, but the CW thread is at its finest when its Eye of Sauron is dissecting the issue rather than smearing its entrails across large groups of individuals.
“And I’m sure the weapon is being applied without thought of what might happen if it’s normalized. ”
I haven’t seen people thinking about the causes or cures, but I’ve seen people on the left *very* worried that all their potential presidential candidates will be discredited in advance.
It’s effective, it can be done easily without getting up from your chair or even switching phone apps, and most importantly, it feels good to people motivated by a sense of justice and fairness, provided they’ve adequately dehumanized the victim first.
Considering how quickly the political right (or at least, the anti-left) picked up the same strategy during the ant controversy, I’m with CthulhuChild in thinking it’s Moloch at work. If any side is fighting a Cultural Total War, all other combatants are very quickly going to learn that nobly charging cultural machine gun nests across cultural barbed wire while honorably holding your cultural chemical weapons in reserve is not going to win you any points.
“(Also, the underclass, who have nothing to lose. But they probably spend less time online.)”
I feel like this part kind of explains the first part. It isn’t the workers spreading the meme that only the rich and the judgement proof can post, it is the judgement proof.
I also strongly disagree with the ‘spend less time online’ part. Most of the folks I know with no job are online a terrifying amount of the time.
I think it’s popular among people with economic stability. The worst trolls I run into online who try to ruin other people’s lives are engaging in asymmetric warfare: they have no job to be attacked.
They tend to be on the left, but this is not universal. For example, the guy who ran someone over at the Charlottesville protest was living off of a trust fund from a dead relative. He didn’t need to be engaged in his community, so he wasn’t.
> If it becomes a norm that expressing your opinion costs you a job, only independently wealthy people will be allowed to have opinions.
Also people who simply neither have nor want jobs. I suspect a rather large percentage of the Internet hate mob falls in that category. It’s not possible to destroy the career of someone who doesn’t have one.
Part of it is that it doesn’t need to be popular. There are a lot of people who don’t like the Culture War thread, and I think the vast majority of them wouldn’t support doxxing Scott.
But it only takes one who feels otherwise to fuck his life up.
Actually, in my experience long-term unemployed people, often living with their parents, seem to be highly over-represented among online activists of all stripes. They can’t/won’t get a job for whatever reason, they have a lot of time on their hands, they often have trouble making meatspace friends for the same reasons that they have trouble getting a job, and so they look for a higher purpose online.
These people may not be the sort of underclass you are thinking of, but there are clearly a lot of people with nothing to personally lose involved in online political/cultural fights.
It’s disingenuous and harmful for you to say that the political left do that in general. Especially if you’re extrapolating from this.
I hope this doesn’t come across as an expression of sympathy, but I feel the need to point out that panic attacks and defensive behaviour seem like fairly objective damage.
You’re a good man.
The discussion platform I’ve wanted to build for a while is one in which all content moderation is user-adjustable. Users could create, modify, share, or revoke any rule or moderation action, such that anyone can create his own content filter. Rather than put in the all the work individually, users could start using someone else’s template and just tweak as necessary. You could gain some of the benefits of massively collaborative networks like open-source projects or Wikipedia, while also generating “truer” information about what people actually want to see (assuming you had some sort of preference tracking and aggregation) and maybe a reduction of some bad types of signaling.
I’d hope that a secondary effect of having a custom content moderation/filtering system like that would be to undermine anyone’s accusations of contamination-by-association or demands for de-platforming. That might be overly optimistic, but it’d still be a good platform, IMO. I know I’m not the only one who has thought about how to implement it and I’m sort of surprised it doesn’t already exist.
+1 on Scott being a good man.
But your proposal seems to be a reinvention of the usenet killfile, with a side order of “If you don’t feel like compiling your own, here’s someone else’s killfile to copy”. And while usenet was a pretty good think while it lasted, the killfile approach does have a few limitations.
First, if you’ve got a polarized community half of which applies the Red Tribe Consensus Killfile and the other half the Blue Tribe Consensus Killfile (or whatever), discussing the same subject in the same space, that can get very confusing. Particularly when each participant is unclear as to whether the person they are talking to/at, is even aware of their existence. Is Bob’s reiteration of the same crude point after Alice’s elegant rebuttal a rude rejection of Alice’s effort, or is Bob talking to a third party while Alice goes unnoticed because Charlie put her in the killfile template that Bob adopted last year. Now Alice is outraged, understandably so, and that doesn’t help civil discourse.
Second, and more important in the long run, it’s hell on newbies. They come in to a space filled with a mix of vitriol and confusion that the regulars don’t even know is there because it’s all filtered out for them. They aren’t going to stick around long enough to curate a personalized killfile. If there’s a default killfile for recommended all newbies, then whoever curates that killfile might as well just be the group moderator and we tell the few dissidents who won’t go along with the consensus to take it to email. If there’s separate Red Tribe and Blue Tribe (or whatever) Newbie Killfiles, then you only enhance the colliding-polarized-bubbles effect and you effectively make people declare their tribal allegiance on day one.
Maybe there’s a way to make this concept work, but I haven’t found anything that seems promising yet.
I’d never heard of the killfile. I’ll have to look into that a bit. I think your objections can be handled though. With respect to the first objection, I think the key is to incorporate a partial sharing of filter preference information in the comment space, so that it’s easy to verify whether some can see something, and also easy to toggle one’s preference. I also think that encountering that problem is actually a feature, because it’s a signal to someone that he or she is failing communicate with someone. That can act as gentle way to persuade someone to loosen restrictions. It’s also internally-motivated, which might be more effective long-term than externally-driven attempts.
As for the newbie issue, absolutely that exists, but I think the mitigating affect of “having a good mod” would be pretty substantial. This sort of system wouldn’t make mods obselete; it would supplement/complement the actions of a mod team. The key is that it could also lighten the load for moderators if you aggregate preferences and share filter algorithms, because they could measure and consolidate certain sentiments, like “this topic is a valid one for discussion but I would prefer not to see it in every thread” and then create (or crowd-source) a filter to accommodate it.
Publicly posting stats on filter use might be useful as well. In my head I’m thinking of it like checking pull requests for a public code repository. The numbers would reflect the quality of filter in addition to people’s preferences and could shape those preferences in turn. I worry a lot about the bad ways that preference falsification shapes behavior and in turn affects real beliefs. I think this sort of system could alleviate some of the falsification problem in public discussion.
https://i.imgur.com/Pjm8KSu.png
I’ve saved that image for future use. Thank you.
And the general point is well-taken. My proposal is no panacea. I have no general solution to offer for murderism, only mildly effective ways to cope.
Fediverse works kinda like this, but newbies don’t have to get involved because it’s the job of server admins to ban other servers.
Here’s the SJW blocklist.
This sounds similar to 1990s newsgroups, which had big problems.
It wasn’t time efficient. If the community had 10,000 members, “banning” a troll required 10,000 separate actions (versus a moderated forum, where it requires one).
Also, conversations tended to disintegrate into confusing verbal confetti, with some people getting some messages and other people getting others. For discussions to work at a large level, everyone needs approximately the same content settings.
Thank you for this. I went to a SSC meetup in Berkeley around a year ago, and someone went around smugly saying, “I used to be a fan of SSC, until I realized it was a festering heap of intellectualizing of alt-right, neo-monarchist, yada yada.” Everybody loves an apostate. Heck I listened to him, at the very least to make sure I wasn’t accidentally reading a neo-Nazi site.
That’s one. Another one is that last year, I tried to refer SSC to a friend who I thought would absolutely love the site. He replied with a curt, “Sorry, not my thing.” The only way that I think he could have gotten to that place so quickly is that he Googled SlateStarCodex beforehand and encountered a whiff of alt-right chic, suspected that I may have been ensnared by it, and decided to stay far away from it, and maybe me.
I believe and hope that with your incredible critical thinking skills you will find a framework that makes the current policy OK. Maybe it’s a matter of finding the right rhetoric. I just noticed the phrase, “brand safe” algorithms to describe content-blockers that would moderate so precisely that YouTube would still be able to have open comments without repelling advertiser. While that phrase isn’t the answer, maybe we can evolve the conversation such that SSC is still see as a bastion of free thinking but also a safe brand. What’s a better way of saying, “Intellectually stimulating Culture War-free conversation”?
I notice that the small SSC meetups steer clear of culture wars, despite individuals disagreeing on some culture war-y topics. The ones that get too inflamed self-select out. But nobody is forcing them to leave. Moderation is forcing people out. Maybe the Internet isn’t a great technology for salons.
I think a possible black swan solution is that a social network emerges with moderation and anonymity. The pepe-friendly Twitter-clones aren’t the answer, but there is probably a middle-ground somewhere that hasn’t been explored yet. Maybe something involving chat. Or maybe we need to bring Plastic.com back.
🤷♂️
Forgive me if I am being obtuse but it seems like 75%+ of the damage that has been caused could be prevented by avoiding twitter etc, and that most of the damage of doxxing is caused by people worrying that it will cost them their job with only a small fraction of people actually get hit with that penalty.
You are underestimating the mental toll exacted by the knowledge that someone knows your name and harbors serious, unjustified ill will. It’s impossible to predict the behavior of that sort of person. It’s worse when there is more contact, but just the knowledge that someone like that is out there is pretty bad.
No, I appreciate that, what I am saying is that the majority to overwhelming majority of that harm can be avoided by being willfully ignorant of the doxxers.
That seems like a workable strategy if adopted beforehand. Not sure if it can be done once you know they exist.
But you’ve just reaffirmed my long-standing decision not to use Twitter.
Willful ignorance can a good strategy. But when they start calling your boss 40 times a day, are you better off not having been prepared for that?
There is no perfect solution, but in general I think that
1. Being active in these spaces will make it more likely for your boss to be called 40 times a day. The point of many of these attacks is to get a reaction, once you start to defend yourself against you simultaneously elevate them to your level (or lower yourself to theirs) to at least a degree and feeding their actions.
2. Its not obvious that being ‘prepared’ for those calls, but also being stressed, anxious and irritated about the entire issue will lead to a better result when your boss calls you into his office than being surprised by the issue.
Most people will probably never have their jobs threatened by the internet hate machine — I probably won’t, for example, unless I do something as stupid as what James Damore did. But most people aren’t as prominent as Scott. He’s not famous famous, but he’s high-profile enough in our weird little community (and the equally weird little community of people who hate it) that plenty of people want to count coup against him.
But I think that should still worry us on another level. Sure, little people are fine; you only have to worry if you’re smart, articulate, and prolific enough for people to actually read you. In other words, you get to participate in the marketplace of ideas as long as you aren’t a threat. So magnanimous!
Anyway, avoiding Twitter is probably a good idea no matter your profile.
Scott’s talking about providing a forum in which people can discuss socially unacceptable ideas. If a relatively small group of activists + a large group of low-information consumers of outrage can shut such fora down, then there simply won’t be any such fora.
Destroying such fora will make the world a much worse place, but it will also be popular–just as shutting up the hateful atheists talking about how we’re descended from monkeys would have been popular. The people doing this stuff are the common enemies of mankind, and they honestly think they’re doing good.
I don’t disagree.
Man, of course you don’t have to worry, I can’t even tell which witch opinions you hold.
Just as keikaku.
“as stupid as what James Damore did”
Was it really? He did the rest of us a favor by raising awareness of what Google’s working environment is like. He probably wouldn’t have wanted to continue working at what he considered to be an “echo chamber” anyways, and he’s found a new job now and seems to be doing fine.
It wouldn’t have been stupid if he’d wanted to martyr his career so that the rest of us could catch a glimpse of Google’s internal culture w.r.t. identity politics. But I don’t think that’s what he was trying to do. I think he was genuinely trying to spark a genuine discussion within Google, and didn’t expect any serious fallout from it. And that is in fact very very stupid.
Unfortunately the attacks on Scott seem to have bled into his meatspace social sphere.
I get the impression that this has gotten worse since he moved to the Bay.
Gee, I wonder why?
Even though there are people who act in bad faith, and would like to associate you with Nazism etc, I think the majority of people see through the smears, even on the left. One example that comes to mind is Ezra Klein.
I wasn’t aware the culture war thread existed, but this blog has provided a lot of clarity to me over the years, and you have probably shaped the way I form my views more than any other individual. Thank you for that.
This is true, hopefully Scott realizes he is respected by a much wider swath than he is hated by.
Yeah, I’m new in the last year or so to SSC, and never went to the culture war thread. I’ve found this blog immensely refreshing and helpful in making sense of the world. Who knew of this troubling parallel universe that Scott has kept well away many of us?
I was aware, but stayed away because I knew they would be toxoplasma for me. I would enjoy seething there too much. It’s nice to see the nice things that came out of it even if I stayed away.
Thank you for writing this Scott. I never went on the culture war subreddit for all the reasons you listed. I have now subscribed to r/TheMotte. Explaining your actions is risky and I am grateful that you did so and for everything else you have previously posted.
+1
I’m not anywhere near 100% sure this would work – it sort of assumes that people found the culture war thread, and then decided to work backwards from it to destroy Scott. This isn’t what happened, really; it’s people finding Scott, then finding he’s not exactly on a particular narrow political spectrum, then searching for anything to hang him with. I’m doubting putting a paper-thin new layer between the CW thread and Scott will stop the kind of person who goes “I disagree with this man and thus must destroy him” who was then searching out the CW thread to hit him with before.
I think that the layer will work. The nasty people are obsessed, but they get their power from convincing low information people. These can be convinced by the name of the Reddit being the same as this blog, but will have a hard time with more complex conspiracy theories.
I don’t know, when reading this post I kind of was wondering why Scott made such a point of plugging for the new Reddit discussion board (apart from the fact that he obviously feels it deserves plugging). It seems to me that he is still going to be associated with the new group, which many will discover in the first place by this blog pointing to it — the fact that Scott isn’t an honorary moderator this time around doesn’t make him that much less connected to it.
“there are some bright spots, like that I didn’t suffer any objective damage despite a lot of people trying really hard”
Having seen a number of these cases by now, it seems that usually the targets end up doing OK materially. The exceptions are not typical Culture War, but whistleblowers like Snowden or Reality Winner (that’s her real name), or the very rare assassination for offending a certain religious sect. E.g. in about a year, James Damore mentioned having a new job, probably in Austin; it seems like he was hired soon after he finished dealing with the media and a lawsuit.
In the U.S. in particular, keep in mind that most people still oppose firing for political differences.
So it seems like the main damage is social, not financial. Of course, this could change if free speech norms weaken further. But personally, I’m sufficiently asocial and frugal that I don’t intend to self-censor.
Also, I guess this is another reason to support Reporters Without Borders or the EFF.
All Cops are Bastards but at what point do you sic the bastards on the bastards?
If people are fraudulently calling your work to try to get you fired that seems like a pretty clear case of stalking and/or harassment.
I can’t tell if you’re being cautious, forgiving, or if you’re actually under-reacting to people legitimately trying to ruin your life. We have attempted murder as a charge for a reason, “They didn’t actually succeed” does not mean what is happening is at all ok.
“Police, I’d like to file a restraining order against xXx420BlazeIt666xXx.”
You jest but eg in the case of Eichenwald vs Twitter user @Jew_Goldstein, the cops were in fact perfectly able to track him down and take him to court. A lot of people have really bad opsec, and the self-righteously angry often have no idea that posting the things they do under their real names could have consequences.
If someone is calling the business he works, I think there’s better than even odds they used their own phone.
The cops could likely track down the caller if they cared. But the trick is getting them to care.
I’ve watched with increasing alarm how the left has gotten more strident in their willingness to attack anyone who isn’t a full-blown adherent to a leftwing orthodoxy that is continually hurtling ever further leftward into a space that, to my eye, resembles complete insanity.
Frankly, this scenario is basically one of my worst nightmares, and is largely the reason why I have massively curtailed my online presence in the last few years.
Scott, I really am sorry that this has happened to you, being relentlessly attacked like that well and truly does suck and you don’t deserve any of it.
We should be careful about how we frame things as “the left” vs “the right” for a start. I consider myself on “the left” side of things. I sympathize deeply with Scott that misguided people on “the left” are targeting him. I think he did a good job of explaining how that has affected him and what sort of people have been responsible, while avoiding tying the actions of individuals to the political movements that motivated them or that they claim to represent.
In contrast, I think that your characterization suggesting that all of “the left” is hurtling towards “complete insanity” is unfair, and more importantly unconvincing. Reading the first paragraph of your comment in a vacuum just makes me want to double down on “leftism” because here you are, putting me in the same box as the crazies.
Yes, I’m definitely a lefty (Bernie Sanders camp), but I’ve faced some insane attacks from other lefities(?) in the anti-Bernie camp. The labels don’t really help.
Fair enough, but it’s still a problematic consequence of the growing interconnectedness of the world. Not all Muslims want to kill us, but enough do that it’s worth being aware of the fact. Not all of the left are doing the stuff Scott has experienced, but the people doing that stuff are all leftists, and it’s self-destructive not to notice — if only so you know what “objectionable” comments you need to suppress in order to survive.
In other words, sorry: As long as left and right are the boxes you want to draw, then you are in the box with the crazies.
Some of the crazies.
Just want to say that I’m a longtime libertarian-ish lurker, and I love that this a community where heterodox ideas can be rationally discussed by people from all over the political spectrum. Never really paid any attention to the SSC reddit, but reading this I can’t help but be outraged that this would happen to Scott. Honestly, I struggle with conceiving of an effective way to fight this trend. It’s starting to feel like a real center-cannot-hold type of situation. I’m one of those people who usually just keeps my mouth shut in any kind of non-anonymous discussion for fear of being associated with wrongthink and facing IRL consequences. How can people push back on this type of thought and behavior in a way that actually works without making themselves a target? Because it feels pretty hopeless.
Especially since a lot of extant suggestions are ones that can’t be used without effectively losing the conflict regardless. It’s not possible to wage Total Culture War in retribution if doing so destroys the culture one is trying to preserve as effectively as total surrender would. (It’s certainly possible in principle to have a right-wing e.g., deplatforming mob, but not a libertarianish one.)
Pretty much this. I don’t want to be forced to choose between mobs. I think if you react to shouts of “nazi” by just rage-quitting from all rational debate and going full /pol/, you’ve already lost. But what can you do when any attempt to rationally discuss certain subjects is met with a wall of hatred that can effectively lose you a job, get you shunned by certain people, or at the very least get you publically dragged through the mud?
Donate to https://www.electionscience.org/. They’re working to pass approval voting, which makes it easier to elect moderate compromise candidates. This looks cool too.
I appreciate this post very much, though I never participated in the CW thread. Notwithstanding the assigned category, I stoutly hope that Scott will not have cause to regret writing it.
I recently read Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. I’m hopeful that there will be increasing pushback against shaming campaigns, among the same people (like Ronson himself) who used to participate in them. It’s akin to how everyone who joined the Internet in the 1990s had to learn the norm of “don’t forward hoaxes”.
I also note the emergence of lots of interesting new terms for varieties of unfair or misleading tactics, such as concern trolling, gaslighting, lampshading, Gish galloping, sealioning, etc., etc. With the enormous volume of written discussion and commentary, compared to any past era, it looks like greater sophistication is emerging among the consumers of this content.
I don’t know where this is leading, but I don’t think these terms are just new insults to fling against the outgroup.
I am skeptical. In my experience, which is admittedly limited and may be biased, these terms are almost only used by stereotypical SJWs for the purpose of bingo-card dismissal of dissenting views. Presumably some of them at least will be adopted by the right for similar purposes, and maybe this has already started, but that’s hardly an improvement. We need effective defenses against poisoning the commons for civil discourse, and I think we are instead getting sophisticated tools to defend our bubbles against outsiders telling us what we don’t want to hear.
Concern-trolling, gaslighting, and sealioning seem like a far less useful set of tools for finding problems in arguments than, say, Motte-and-Bailey, or the Toxoplasma of Rage, or steelmanning, or proves-too-much.
The basic problem here is that when you’re looking for an excuse to dismiss someone’s argument without considering it, it’s *really easy* to find one. They’re associated with some bad person or side in some argument, or they’ve taken some position in the past that is offensive or can be described as offensive with careful enough excerpting, or they’re tone-policing or demanding political correctness or whatever. Most of the time, when confronted with an argument or idea you dislike, you really kinda want to find a reason to dismiss it. (Along the same lines, arguments for stuff you want to believe are really easy to construct–link to a couple papers that don’t have much to do with the claim, throw in a handwave, and people are convinced.).
It takes a real effort to consider a POV different from your own, and lots of people have learned a lot of mental techniques for filtering them out.
So far as I know, Gish gallop is atheist/skeptic, not SJW.
It all makes me sad. I guess the rationalist thing to do is spend some time thinking about how to interact with people who want to shut you down.
As a transgender woman, the issue I had was not so much with transphobic posts to the culture war threads, but with the idea that discussing transgender status had been relegated to “culture war”.
I feared that any mention of my transgender status, or experiences of transgender people in general, would be singled out as inappropriately culture-warry in OTHER threads even if salient to the topic of discussion. Even my “woman” status feels that way, based on the apparently-hard-right tenor of the comments in the CW threads and elsewhere.
All of this despite knowing how wonderful and lovely a person Scott is, particularly including his expressed views and behavior towards gender/sexual minorities!
Staking out “culture war” as a place to talk about things like “gender” means that a salient part of my own experience was delineated as inappropriate.
And blanket-labeling “transgender issues” or “women’s issues” as being culture-warry takes away expressive power from people like me, while at the same time bolstering viewpoints in opposition to my rights and experiences. Assuming for the sake of argument that transgender women are systematically oppressed in many different parts of life, to say “we can’t talk about your issues” would be just effectively preserving an oppressive status quo. The implicit requirement to focus on the non-culture-war things that EVERYONE sees as salient just takes power away from people who are already at a weaker bargaining position.
And to characterize the sharing of experiences, demand for rights and fair treatment, and other non-hateful speech by minorities like me as “culture war,” seems to give implicit credence to opposing, hateful views. If I’m just one side in a “culture war” then maybe a blatant transphobe will be perceived as just my counterpart, the “opposing side.” But surely there is more value in hearing the pleas and troubles of minorities, than in the hateful speech we suffer in so many venues? I have felt a definite pressure to just stay silent or find other venues to discuss issues of importance to me, because of a fear (whether well-founded or not) that I will be shouted at and mischaracterized as a disingenuous bleeding heart who doesn’t care about the “real issues” that affect EVERYONE including white cis dudes.
I love Scott’s writing, but the “culture war” threads (and the implicit delineation of topics of interest to me being “culture war”) are a hostile environment that I avoid participating in; I’m satisfied with the gems that filter into the subreddit as top-level posts or make their way into Scott’s writing. I have a perception, which may be inaccurate, that other people like me are also avoiding contributing to the blog comments and subreddit in general, because issues that are important to me would likely be classified as “culture war,” but I don’t see them that way and would rather discuss them in a context where people don’t have their fingers on their cultural gun triggers, so to speak.
It just sucks that a community of people who like to sit around over-analyzing things is trained to see my issues as culture war, to be deferred so we can get down to more important business. It’s the same shitty feeling that arises when people frame the rights of minorities as a “wedge issue” or a “distraction.” Not for us it’s not.
I could probably also just have quoted: “the personal is political”.
So RIP indeed, I don’t really want anything to do with the “culture war” threads and I’d rather we tried to cultivate polite discourse everywhere, without delineating some topics as being more “culture war” than others and without any topics having a lower bar for politeness.
“the personal is political” is what got gender dumped in the CW box, though.
Some opinions/argument on gender would get stated politely, and receive an outraged response. The outraged would claim that the content itself, regardless of its tone, required the dropping of politeness in the response. In fact, that the opinion was stated politely was itself considered an offense, as it reflected how thoroughly the person who stated that opinion had dehumanized their outgroup.
And so, politeness became a tool of the enemy, because “the personal is political.”
I feel a lot of sympathy for people who felt outraged and didn’t know how to better express their outrage, particularly when it was because they felt that their identity and validity as a person was being attacked. I wish those people had been able to express the motivation behind their outrage more productively.
(But I also have a really hard time parsing out exactly what group(s) you are saying were outraged, polite, or whatever in the scenarios you described so maybe I misunderstand you).
If I’m understanding right, an exemplary exchange may have gone like:
Alice: I don’t think that transgender identity is real.
Bob: I AM OUTRAGED BECAUSE I AM TRANSGENDER AND YOU ARE INVALIDATING ME.
Well, there are probably some naive Alices out there who just wanted to talk facts. But Bob has also met a lot of people who said that and really meant “I don’t think you are valid as a person (and that invalidity justifies tangible harms against you)”.
Bob’s outrage was inappropriate and didn’t help Alice improve understanding of the situation.
Now Charlie steps in and says, “Whoa, that got way too political, can’t we just find common ground and table this for our Culture War debates?”
In that particular case, maybe everyone needs time to cool off, and Bob needs to think about how to respond in a way that is healthier and more constructive.
But here’s what Bob can accurately infer: ‘Your existence and validity are a political issue. We don’t talk about political issues at the dinner table. Thus, we don’t talk about your existence and validity at the dinner table.”
I mean, basically I’ve just tautologized “the personal is political” again, because Bob’s existence and validity ARE political whether Bob wants them to be or not; Bob can’t live in a world where existence and validity are taken for granted, because people like Alice doubt Bob’s validity, and because people like Charlie (accurately) point out that it’s a hot topic that leads to hurt feelings.
Well, maybe relegating “personal is political” content to CW is the right call for sanity in the other fora, but it’s pretty shitty for Bob. Bob just wants to occasionally point out, “Hey, I exist,” but Bob is worried that Alice will say “I disagree,” and/or Charlie will step and say, “whoa now, let’s not open that can of worms…”.
Bob’s outrage may have hurt the discourse, but the fix to the discourse hurts Bob. As is the theme of this whole blog post and comments section, I don’t know if there’s any good answer. I want Bob to be more polite; I don’t want Bob to bring a bandwagon to punish Alice for insensitivity. But I also know that Bob has already suffered a lot of harms for transgender status, and that there is practically zero threat of harm to Alice in putting up with Bob’s outrage (at least, unless Bob brings a bandwagon… now things get ugly).
Ugh.
You can’t have a “discourse” or a “discussion” or a “debate” when only one set of views is allowed to be expressed and engaged with. It is tautologically impossible. What you have then is at best a support group, and at worst an echo chamber.
Maybe what Bob needs is a support group, and I fully support the existence of such places. But free discussion zones have to exist too. If Bob can’t detach the discussion from his personal identity enough to avoid attacking anyone that expresses positions contrary to his on transgender issues, then yeah, it’s gonna be Culture War. Better to contain it with a big sign that says “enter at your own risk” than to censor it away and turn everything into an echo chamber. Or to let the War bleed over into every other topic.
If we are talking about ideas that actually matter, then many of those ideas are going to upset or offend or threaten some people. Start talking about how you think religion is a giant con game and God is a delusion, and you’re going to offend and upset and threaten many people. And yet, suppressing that kind of conversation seems like a pretty bad way to get to the truth.
I agree fully.
I deliberately stopped short of calling for anyone to shut up about their offensive views.
What upsets me is that Bob’s view is lumped in as being one of the controversial views.
Here’s what I would summarize as my opinion of the scenario I described:
Alice should be free to be controversial.
But if the controversy causes problems, our attempts to control/contain Alice’s controversy should never involve censoring Bob.
So Bob should be allowed to talk, even in ways that break the content neutral rules, and
Alice should be forced into silence, even if she is approaching the discussion in good faith and following the rules.EDIT this part was uncharitable of me based on your last post.You’ve predeclared a winner and predetermined what views are out of bounds and which views can be defended by any means necessary. That’s not a conversation, that’s a lecture.
Worse, for the sake of any other discourse, you’ve weaponized victimization. Whoever is most offended wins. That’s how you turn every debate into a bravery debate and every discussion into a war.
Again, I’m not saying there should be no safe spaces, just that not everywhere can or should be a safe space. This space was designed to be a free debate zone, with content neutral rules of conduct (one of which is “you can politely discuss things likely to result in someone getting offended, but please confine it to certain threads”). It is good that such a place exists, even if (or precisely because) it means that Bobs and Alices get exposed to offensive views every now and then.
(I would note here that no one has said Bob shouldn’t be allowed to hold or even express a pro-transgender opinion – just express such opinions only when he can do so in the bounds of true, kind, and necessary (pick two), and that this same courtesy extends to Alice, although she should not have made the comment in the first place outside of a relevant or CW allowed OT. Both Alice and Bob broke the thread rules in your scenario)
@Heather:
The problem is that Alice doesn’t think of her views as controversial. From Bob’s point of view, Alice is denying his very existence; from Alice’s point of view, she’s just stating a common-sense opinion that is in no way intended to act as a personal attack.
It’s very tempting to put the blame on Alice here: she should’ve educated herself more before engaging in discussion, should’ve been more compassionate toward those she disagrees with, etc. This is all true; however, the problem is that all of us are Alice; and that it’s impossible to predict ahead of time which sentiment will put our interlocutor into Bob’s position.
As albatross11 mentioned above, some religious people react as viscerally to atheism as Bob would react to anti-transgender sentiment. The same goes for Communism vs. Libertarianism, vi vs. emacs, what have you. Censoring Bob is not the solution; but neither is censoring Alice, nor demanding that Alice self-censor — because in that case, no one would be able to talk about anything except maybe the weather.
If one person was arguing that people with [color] skin aren’t really people, don’t deserve human rights, and should be enslaved, is that also just an opinion like any other? If a person with [color] skin responds by saying he is a person, does deserve rights, and shouldn’t be enslaved, should that be treated as a controversial opinion just like the first one, and shelved for Culture War discussions? I think when it comes to issues about the fundamental validity of someone’s very existence, it’s understandable to take a different approach than you would to a debate about marginal tax rates.
If one person was arguing that people with [color] skin aren’t really people, don’t deserve human rights, and should be enslaved, is that also just an opinion like any other?
If a particular discussion forum is supposed to be truly open and allow discussion of all viewpoints, then it has to be, yes.
If some particular viewpoints are going to be deemed out of bounds, then you don’t have a truly open forum: somebody is going to have to decide what viewpoints are out of bounds and what viewpoints are allowed for discussion, and those decisions are going to have to be enforced based on the judgment of whoever is making those decisions, even though some forum participants might disagree with them.
I’m not necessarily arguing that either of these is better than the other, just that they are different and there’s no way to have both in the same forum.
Heather: The problem here is, “I AM OUTRAGED BECAUSE I AM TRANSGENDER AND YOU ARE INVALIDATING ME.” isn’t an argument. Rather, it’s the sort of thing that shuts argument down and prevents it can happening. If Bob can state what his actual factual or moral disagreement with Alice is, without shouting, then great! We can have an actual argument and maybe learn something. But if Bob is trying to shut down argument, or just isn’t willing to put in the effort to truly participate in it, then what, exactly, is the problem with censoring those posts of his? The point isn’t speech for the sake of speech, it’s argument that actually goes somewhere.
(I mean, gbdub already said more or less the same thing, but I think it’s worth making this explicit.)
@PeterDonis: My problem isn’t even with the idea that someone should be allow to discuss the sorts of dehumanizing ideas that I mentioned. As a matter of policy for an open forum, that’s fine.
My problem is less with policy and more with a certain kind of social norm, where someone is expected to have the same impartial emotionless response to a dehumanizing statement as they would to any other claim, even if they’re part of the group being dehumanized. My solution isn’t necessarily “ban all mention of statements that could be considered dehumanizing” (though just for pragmatic reasons, banning overt racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. is probably a good idea for most forums that aren’t explicitly meant to be for open discussion of everything; on a forum for discussing Netflix shows, statements about the master race are just going to derail conversations and needlessly raise tensions).
What I want is just a social norm where if someone makes a negative categorical statement about a group of people, someone who’s a member of that group isn’t considered unjustified or “overly emotional” for taking it as an insult and reacting accordingly. That’s the thing about these hyper-rational open discussion spaces that really gets me; not the fact that someone can say “Hitler was right, the Jews all deserved to be sent to concentration camps,” but that fact that if someone who’s Jewish gets offended by it and expressing their outrage, they’re the ones who always up being condemned for it. (Sniffnoy’s response above is a perfect example of what I mean.)
I don’t know about the subreddit, but here Charlie’s procedural rebuke would most likely be limited to “This is a non-CW thread”, and would be aimed at Alice for bringing up the subject in the first place.
I had two very close friends in college, let’s call them Alice and Bob. At some point in college, Bob came out to all of us as a transvestite. After college, Alice became rather fundamentalist Christian, and Bob eventually decided he wanted to transition to a woman–let’s call her Roberta. At some point, the distance between them increased until they simply couldn’t associate with one another–Alice couldn’t accept Roberta as a woman, and Roberta wasn’t going to pretend to be someone she wasn’t to keep Alice happy.
Alice and Roberta are on two ends of a CW issue at a level that seems very hard to resolve. Alice thinks Robera is just Bob with some weird sexual kinks he demands everyone play along with; Roberta considers herself a woman and wants to be treated as such. There’s neutral ground in the sense that Alice and Roberta could avoid discussing the issues on which they differ, but not in the sense of Alice being able to interact with Roberta on anything like a friendly basis. They could remain at peace, but they couldn’t remain friends.
I don’t know that there’s a deeper lesson here than that this is tragic–these two people were close friends at one time, and now they can’t even speak to each other. I know which one I think is being more reasonable, but I also know I don’t get to dictate my friends’ heartfelt beliefs to them. And this has happened throughout the years, and will continue to happen, with any number of different heartfelt beliefs that separate friends.
In your story, Alice isn’t saying that Bob doesn’t exist, she is saying that she does not believe his view of himself is correct.
I get to have whatever view of myself I want, but other people get to have whatever view of me they want as well—I don’t have rights to the inside of other people’s heads. An anarcho-communist who claims anarcho-capitalists are not really anarchists isn’t denying that I exist, he is disagreeing with part of my view about what I am. He is entitled to do that, I am entitled to either try to persuade him (or others) that he is mistaken or ignore him, as I prefer. Similarly here.
Of course. And I’m just as entitled to let other people’s expressed views of me affect my views of them. If someone says you’re not a real anarchist, maybe you don’t take offense to that. But if someone says you’re not a real economist, wouldn’t that incline you to have a negative opinion of them? Maybe not, you might just be an easygoing person! But I’d imagine that most academics would feel personally insulted if someone said they weren’t a real scholar of their field, and would not be pleased with the person saying so, to put it mildly. And since challenging someone’s credentials and profession is typically seen as socially unacceptable (unless warranted by circumstances that would justify the claim), many other people might likewise take a negative view of that person based on their statements about you.
That’s fundamentally what’s at stake here: No one is saying “if someone misgenders me, they should go to jail.” They’re saying, “if someone repeatedly and deliberately misgenders me, I’ll consider them a total jerk and probably stop associating with them, as will other people who are sympathetic to me.”
The idea of “validity” and “not valid as a person” is completely alien to me; that phrase doesn’t even parse. I suspect many other people are in the same boat. What does this mean?
I mean, I’ve had chronic pain all my life, and I’ve dealt with plenty of people who just don’t get the concept of “yes, it does hurt right now, it ALWAYS hurts, the answer is ALWAYS YES, I am IN SEVERE PAIN 90% OF THE TIME EVERY DAY.”
I’ve had some other issues, especially when I was in elementary school, and have gotten a lot of “it would be inconvenient for me if you were experiencing the very serious thing you are experiencing, so therefore your claim of experiencing it is a malicious lie, how dare you.”
The first is just a little bit of a pain in the ass sometimes, the second was a lot more hurtful when it happened but way less hurtful than getting physically beaten or verbally abused. I’ve never had the response of utter existential dread “invalidating my existence” seems to imply. Am I just not getting it or what?
The abortion debate also tries to deny the very personhood of one of the key components. Do you think it isn’t CW like?
I’m gay. Until very recently that was a huge CW issue. And I’m very much old enough to have experienced it. I had a friend stabbed to death for cruising the wrong guy. So I understand the fear of having your very real self exposed in the wrong way.
But you can’t just define away the culture war because you wish it weren’t culture war associated. This is actually the world we live in. You actually have to deal with it as it is. You aren’t going to gain ground usefully by taking a position which doesn’t need stand the reality of where we are now. You aren’t going to get where you want to go without dealing with the real world now.
You can either chose to deal with the fact that being trans is what being gay was 20 years ago when I was young, something you either hide, or that you engage with as a “difficult” topic for some people. You can choose to hide or not. Hiding comes with some internal costs. Engaging comes with costs. You might choose to hide sometimes and engage other times. Those are all choices that make sense depending on what is going on and how strong you think you are and how realistic hiding is.
Those are the choices. Your identity IS PART OF THE CW at this moment in time. Sorry. It is. That kind of sucks. If you want to talk to older gay people who lived that exact same thing, you might get some insights. I’d be happy to share, though ive noticed that younger trans people prefer to think of it all as entirely new so I try not to push it too much. But that’s the reality. Trans is at an inflection point. Probably the next generation won’t care much at all. But we do t live there yet.
I think this is a good post – not because I agree with everything in it (and I don’t disagree with everything in it either, to be clear), but because it perfectly lays out how and why the “I don’t feel like I can talk about things comfortably” problem manifests. “Just talk about them uncomfortably” is a bad solution, and so is “make sure it’s possible to talk about them comfortably EVERYWHERE.” Because people care about different things, and a disregard for the things one person cares about can be (totally justifiably, oftentimes) considered a hostile attitude.
No truly public forum can be truly welcoming. I think that’s tragic and enables some really toxic behavior. I also think it’s an inevitable conclusion.
And to add, I think there’s a bit more go away, shut up, or stop feeling the way you do than I’d like in your shoes in these comments. You’ve done nothing but exhibit the politeness you’re advocating for, and as far as I can tell it hasn’t actually made anyone more willing to consider the things you’re saying or extend goodwill in your direction (not to say the comments are particularly hostile, just that they’re not exactly warm).
I think you’ve done a good job of expressing exactly what you mean and how it makes you feel, and I don’t think anyone’s come out and said, “oh, that makes sense.” As far as I can tell, nobody’s responded to how you feel at all. (Partly that’s down to object-level disagreements that I sort of agree with the contrary opinion on, but still…)
Anyway, just want to throw in that I get where you’re coming from, and I agree that it’s hard. I won’t do you the disservice of pretending it isn’t. And I’m glad you posted this.
I agree it was a good post, made eloquently, and I appreciate Heather for continuing to engage in good faith. But I just can’t agree with the content in an “oh that makes sense” sort of way.
Basically Heather seems to be saying “My views shouldn’t be controversial, and it’s not okay to label them as controversial, because labeling it controversial offends me”
But everyone thinks that about their deeply held beliefs! That’s like, the whole point of the Culture War framing.
You do realize that someone who, for example, sees pressure to use gender-neutral pronouns as bad for free speech, could make much the same complaint about not being able to bring up transgenderism as an example in general free-speech-related discussions? Probably that doesn’t seem as significant to you, but that’s what makes it culture war — people tend to see any offense taken by those who disagree with them as unjustified or irrational. Avoiding culture war is a burden we all share (I realize it’s a bit ironic to write that in this comment). (For the record, I generally support acceptance of transgender people.)
“without any topics having a lower bar for politeness”
I don’t think the Culture War Thread has a lower bar for politeness; maybe even the opposite. But the topic attracts impolite posts (before the mods get to them) and disagreements inherently sound more offensive, no matter how they’re worded.
There is a fundamental asymmetry between me using whatever-given-rhetorical tool to defend myself and someone else using whatever-given-rhetorical tool for the sake of speaking freely. I value free speech and, to be clear, don’t want to silence anyone, but it’s pretty disheartening to equivocate the two sides of this asymmetry. The burden is not shared equally, when it comes to discussing a topic where people have different stakes. Taking everyone at face value, I have a lot more belief that people are harmed by incorrect pronoun use (or deliberate, insensitive misuse) than that people are harmed by being asked to change the way they use pronouns.
So here I’m thinking, “I take offense at something someone said because it invalidates my experience and plays into a framework that contributes to direct harms to people like me,” and I can generally at least try to explain why I am offended. And someone else is saying, “I take offense that I am being asked to be inoffensive by slightly changing my speech,” more or less. These two kinds of offense are not the same. And it’s kind of hurtful to suggest that the offense I feel, which is deeply tied to pain I have experienced, is somehow equivalent to offense about being asked to maybe use gender neutral pronouns.
Just looking at your comment, “I generally support acceptance of transgender people,” — good for you, I’m glad (although… what are your exceptions?). But that’s the burden we (and other minorities) face in fora like this — if we’re well behaved we can be “generally” accepted, but because no one can measure the sincerity of offense, it gets compared to the “offense” people feel that isn’t in any way linked to real persecution or trauma. Like, I haven’t met anyone, anyway, who has suffered any real trauma or danger from being asked to use gender neutral pronouns.
Disclaimer: I’m aware of the irony of engaging in CW-worthy debate in a post explicitly about the dangers of CW. Mea Culpa.
How can someone else’s speech invalidate your experience? I object to that notion on fundamental grounds. Everyone’s experience is their own, and I’m not aware of any force in the universe that is capable of separating them from it.
I fully endorse the notion that everyone should authentically live their own perceived experience – I think that’s sort of a sacred value, actually. Isn’t that one of the major arguments on your side: that you should be able to express your gender as you experience it? Well it seems to me that basic intellectual consistency demands that you extend that principle to others, including those who don’t perceive your gender the same way you do. Who are you to demand that they express your perceptions, rather than being free to express their own?
I think I have a lot more justification in feeling offended (worried, threatened…) if someone expresses their perception of my gender differing from my own, than they do in feeling offended (etc.) because I express my perception of my gender which differs from their own.
But also, I never asked for anyone to not express their perceptions. I actually would rather everything be “out in the open”. But I also don’t think there is any semblance of equality between me expressing MY OWN PERCEPTION OF MYSELF and someone else expressing THEIR PERCEPTION OF ME. Especially when, if we remove ourselves from the vacuum of this discussion, if I say “hey, I’m a trans woman” and someone else says “I don’t think that’s a thing,” they’re providing ammunition to oppress me, whereas I’m just describing my own experience.
Like, can we agree to honor the freedom of speech and still recognize that there is an asymmetry in how these issues affect two people on different sides of an argument?
You’re not just asking them to accept your perception of yourself. You’re asking them to accept a framework of gender identity that is fundamentally decoupled from biological sex. Or perhaps to accept gender as a collection of performative, perhaps stereotyped, behaviors. Do you not see how that might threaten their personal gender identity, likely just as critical to their selves as yours is to you?
You are on the one hand arguing that the words of other people are profoundly important to you, while denying that those same words could be profoundly important to them. You are saying that your feelings about their words are paramount, but their feelings about their own words are trivial.
I don’t agree with TERFs or religious opposition to transgenderism, but I don’t think it takes an unreasonable amount of charity to see why they might have their own identities threatened by widespread acceptance of transgenderism (particualry if it starts getting legally enforced).
Now if we’re talking consequentially, yeah, clearly transgender people face a lot of oppression (up to and including violence and all sorts of other bullshit) and people are on average less accommodating to them than we ought to be. This is a big part of why I disagree with TERFs. But I think “consequentially” is how we need to have that discussion. Predeclaring that some opinions are more valuable than others is not a good way to have an honest debate.
@Heather
I’m not sure what that has to do with anything. Anyone can feel however they like about anything, and I don’t think that debates about what constitutes ‘justification’ for one’s feelings are productive. I think the only sane response to statements like are to point out that everyone’s feelings are their own responsibility and no one else’s, and if you get offended by something someone else has said then that’s no one’s problem but your own. Personal feelings have no productive place in public debates, and only serve to muddy the waters when they’re introduced. Everyone always believes that their own feelings are better justified than anyone else’s.
>But I also don’t think there is any semblance of equality between me expressing MY OWN PERCEPTION OF MYSELF and someone else expressing THEIR PERCEPTION OF ME.
Why not? Use can use all the caps-lock you like, it doesn’t change the fact that they are exactly the same. Now the emotional impact, presumably, lies more heavily on you than it probably does on someone else, but as I said above that’s 100% your problem. Your feelings don’t matter to anyone but you and the very few people who are close enough to you to care. Part of being an adult in a free society is having the courage of your convictions; it’s a rather childish narcissism to demand that other people take your feelings more seriously than they take their own.
After all, if you want to take feelings-utility seriously then I think the transgender camp comes out pretty badly. People on the other side feel pretty strongly too, AND there’s a lot more of them. If we’re going by the feelings-matter-more-than-principles-like-free-speech-or-minority-rights metric, wouldn’t the preferences of the majority pretty obviously outweigh those of a very small minority?
Every criticism ever levied against another person is potential “ammunition for oppression”. So what? Disagreement is not oppression, and tolerance is not the same as celebration. Read’s Scott’s “I Can Tolerate Everything Except the Outgroup.” If you’re unable to distinguish between those two concepts, you’re going to have a very hard time existing comfortably in the world – and an impossible time advocating for yourself to those who disagree with you.
But that is not what they are being asked to do. What they are being asked to do is repeat what are, as far as they are concerned, falsehoods. Can you see how that bothers folks, especially ones unusually interested in truth-seeking, potentially a lot more than just being asked to slightly change their speech?
I haven’t either, but:
1) I’m always worried when someone else is setting the terms of polite debate, especially declaring that I’m hurting them no matter how polite, kind, or considerate I am, unless I repeat things I believe are false;
2) I’m even more worried about what things are going to be added to that list, once I’ve accepted one;
3) if your condition for things that are required to be said, or required not to be said, is that it causes some folks “trauma or danger,” you’re incentivizing bravery debating and performative hurt which, done long enough, will through a quirk of human psychology become quite genuine.
I agree with what Nick is saying. 3) is especially pernicious: it’s not just demanding white lies like that dress making your wife look thin; you’re making incentives for disutility monsters.
“It hurts me so much that you called me ‘he’ for failing to pass! More than a cis white dude getting surgery without anesthetic!”
It also looks suspiciously like a power trip. “You cannot disagree with me on this issue without harming me. Harming people is unethical. Therefore I’m correct, QED.”
It’s not even necessarily that people fake hurt after adopting these you-can’t-disagree-with-me-without-harming-me identity positions. The lived hurt can be entirely real, but they need get over themselves. Learn Stoicism, or Buddhism, or something (religion/philosophy certainly helped me prevent gender dysphoria turning into full-blown transgender ideology 😛 ).
Addendum: please ignore my use of “require” in (3). It’s too strong, especially given your later clarifications, making it sound as though you want to folks who disagree with you to be shunned or mocked or something.
To be honest I’ve never really liked this line of argument, as I think it trivializes it and isn’t a great model of why most anti-trans people are anti-trans. Like, I doubt many TERFs are super scrupulous about never telling white lies to spare someone’s feelings. More productive would be to explore why that particular “falsehood” would be particularly meaningful to them.
Well, are we talking about why most anti-trans people are anti-trans or about why the anti-trans people at r/ssc are anti-trans? I mean, I expect we have hardly any TERFs there, but am I just misinformed about that? I didn’t read the CW thread much.
But as for whether it’s too broad, you have a point, and I should have been more precise. In my defense, though, I think the context of my post helps, especially points (1) and (3). Those clearly exclude merely being concerned about white lies.
1) and 3) explain why you might be opposed to being forced to call somebody by a preferred pronoun, but not why you’d refuse to do so voluntarily out of politeness (or why you’d go out of your way to call them by a non-preferred term).
And I’m not saying there are zero people who are particularly scrupulous about honesty (if they exist anywhere, it’s probably here!), just that I kind of tend to lump “I cannot tell a lie” in with “I’m just being real” as an eyebrow cocking phrase that might theoretically indicate scrupulosity but in practice is most frequently used by people trying to justify being a dick.
I don’t think we have a problem with people going out of their way to do that here; I can only remember one person doing that off the top of my head, but maybe it’s more common at r/ssc. But as for the first point, fair enough.
I don’t think we’re in significant disagreement, you’re just talking about SSC in particular, and I’m being general.
“what are your exceptions?”
It’s not that there are people who are “exceptions”, but I think one can acknowledge that gender and sex can be different while maintaining that most kids who call themselves “transgender” will in fact grow up without gender dysphoria (or maybe they won’t; I have no strong opinion either way, but it seems like a legitimate question).
“is somehow equivalent to offense about being asked to maybe use gender neutral pronouns”
The offense is not about the pronouns themselves (which are arguably more convenient regardless of transgenderism).
The context of these comments is Scott being harassed for being vaguely associated with the Culture War thread. Someone who hasn’t grasped the biological nature of transgenderism (like Scott for many years!) might see it as part of a pattern — the fallacy “X implies Y; Y offends me; therefore X is false” being applied to harass people and stop reasonable discussions. From their point of view, previously the fallacy was only used to defend standard left-leaning views, but now, in a show of power, they are being forced to say something obviously false. There is no harm in saying “2+2=5” in itself, yet it’s deeply humiliating when Winston in “1984” is tortured until he says it.
“opposing, hateful views”
Like I said before, it’s Culture War if neither side can imagine the other side having the views they do except out of hatred. One more attempt: If I met someone with brown eyes who kept insisting they have blue eyes, my instinctive reaction would be to think it’s some kind of prank or show them a mirror. And if people threatened to socially shun me unless I say they have blue eyes, I would start to wonder whether it’s some kind of cult or strange political ideology, and why eye color matters so much in the first place.
From your perspective, it’s a small matter of using gender-neutral pronouns. But for someone who doesn’t understand gender dysphoria, it seems like a small matter of ignoring what pronouns they use — even granting that they disagree on what gender you have, gender isn’t so important, so it’s like obsessing over whether someone has dark blonde or light brown hair. (Note that Scott was similarly confused before studying medicine, despite his current views.)
I don’t want to spend more time arguing for a view I don’t agree with, so I hope that provides some intuition why transgenderism is a CW issue.
(Edit: Apparently other people already covered this while I was writing it.)
I share this belief with you, and that’s the main reason my policy is to comply with people’s preferred pronouns and want others to do the same.
My problem with your framing, though, is that it seems to me you’re begging the question: you and I believe, based on evidence coming from our perceptions of human behavior, that not calling people by their preferred pronouns causes more harm than everyone being compelled to use others’ preferred pronouns. But our interlocutors on other sides of these debates typically don’t share that belief in the first place. The Jordan Peterson types, for example, might believe (based on evidence coming from their perceptions of human behavior) that many or most trans-identifying people who demand different pronouns are doing so not because of trauma or genuine harm they suffer by being misgendered but for status-grabbing political motivations, while any kind of compelled language is a restriction on language smacking of totalitarianism which inflicts a very real harm.
It follows from my object-level belief about the harms of non-preferred-pronoun-use that I agree this is very unfair to trans people. But on breaking outside of the object-level view, I don’t see a good solution, because “Always give precedence to the party claiming greater harm done” is an obvious recipe for trouble, and a lot of the time all parties are claiming equal degrees of harm anyway.
In his essay “Tense Present”, David Foster Wallace opined that highly-charged political issues can only be tackled in what he called a Democratic Spirit:
I think the major factor in labelling a topic CW is the observation that a significant percentage of the people who participate in debates about that topic do so with a lack of proper Democratic Spirit. It’s not a judgement of either sides’ argument, it’s a recognition that the topic is emotionally charged enough to prevent an acceptable fraction of participants from engaging in good faith. And regardless of your object-level beliefs on the topic, ‘transgenderism’ is a topic on which both sides regularly display an inability to engage in good faith. It should be pretty uncontroversial to observe that discussion about it regularly devolves into unconstructive mud-slinging.
And with all due respect, your post betrays exactly the kind of attitude that got transgenderism classified as CW in the first place.
Indeed. The fact that it’s so personal for you means that you’re unable to treat it as anything other than a political topic. That’s not what SSC is really about. SSC aims to have dispassionate, nuanced, academic discussions; not zero-sum political ones. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t feel the way you do – I probably would too, in your shoes – but SSC isn’t interested in the types of discussions where each side views the other as necessarily holding
I realize you see it differently, but you are, in fact, just one side in a multi-sided discussion, and all of those sides are just as a priori valid as the others.
Yes, 1000 times all of this.
> “the personal is political”
It’s not that I have to treat it as political because it’s so personal.
It’s that even if I wish it could just be a personal issue, it’s not, because there are systematic factors that prevent me from just keeping to myself about it.
I can’t explain it better than this post: https://ordinary-times.com/2019/02/13/apolitical-myth-making/
Throw the fact that roughtly half of SJW’s are TERFs, (the other half of them are LGBTQ-friendly), together with the fact that all SJW’s are militant about their opinions being the One Truth with a side of Death to the Haters (and Hater = anyone whose opinion is different from ‘mine’), and it’s no wonder that any topic that SJW’s have an opinion on becomes culture war, doubly so if the SJW opinions differ.
It’s a shame, because it also means that any cause SJW’s champion immediately becomes part of the Culture War.
[citation needed]
Anecdotally, I was under the impression that SJWs had thrown TERFs into outer rightness, on the Wrong Side of History.
I have attempted to avoid SJW’s for the past year, rather successfully, so my headspace data on their views of transgenderism is over a year old. It is quite possible that it’s simply out of date.
Good, helpful post. I have an anecdote to share that may communicate why some would disagree with your position.
I was once a member of an online writers’ forum. It was an excellent network of friendly people. Discussion of politics was disallowed, which helped keep everything friendly.
Then came the social media politics era. The marginalized members of the forum began to say things like “Our identities are not political, we need to be able to talk about them here.” Once it became settled policy that they had free rein to do this, the next step for many of them was, “Which racist/sexist/transphobic Republican writer should we Twitter mob today?” Anyone who objected to this was told that their objections were policing people’s attempts to discuss their identities.
Thank you, Heather. I often feel the same way in spaces like this, and it’s frustrating. You put that feeling into words and explained it better than I could.
I know that people have made comments like this on the Reddit thread, but nonetheless I want to say:
I honestly had no idea that this was going on, despite being someone who spends a lot of time reading this blog and stuff about politics on the internet more generally. IRL I cite Scott Alexander in class participation or discussions with people I don’t know too well or whatever in a way that I would never publicly cite someone like Steve Sailer. If I want to share a great insight from Steve with normies, I vaguely attribute it to “a writer that I really like,” because I really wouldn’t want the people I’m talking to to Google search his name, have their crimestop programming activated and then realize/suspect that I hold heterodox views.
Whereas, if not for this post, it never would have occurred to me to have this concern with regards to SSC. Like, I emailed a classics professor of mine a story that Scott wrote retelling The Iliad with lawyers, and she really liked it and read a section of it to the class, which also really liked it. I would never email a professor a Steve Sailer column, even if it was on something innocuous like film. Indeed, even after having read this post I think I will continue to openly reference (non-culture war) ideas I got from SSC, because I don’t think the “Scott Alexander is all-trite neyo-nahtzee” meme has percolated far enough yet to make mentioning SSC the catalyst for an exhausting and pointless debate the way that, say, mentioning Charles Murray or Arthur Jensen might be.
P.S. Despite not usually reading
PlebbitReddit, I will be sure to check out The Motte, because the OP makes the discussions sound interesting and to spite the bad people who have been trying to destroy the thread.Tangent: could you please link me to “a story that Scott wrote retelling The Iliad with lawyers”? I can’t find it.
http://web.archive.org/web/20120528122510/http://www.raikoth.net:80/atreus.html
“Atreus, Atreus, and Pelides: Attorneys At Law”, summarized on the fiction page as “when Prince Paris of Troy abducts Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, the Greeks’ course of action is obvious – sue him!”
Well said. I speak as a lurker who got something out of the debates, and glad they were created kept alive. I’m glad you wrote this post.
*Applause* Ain’t that the truth?
Thank you for this illuminating post. In honor of it I have subscribed to r/TheMotte. (Didn’t follow the CW threads before.)
Breaking my newly-self-imposed silence for the second time…
The internet is a terrible place to have friends, and “the search for understanding” is a terrible sole qualifier for friendship.
This makes the internet a very confusing and frustrating place, because in real life the pleasant and generally nice people we disagree with can be tolerated without being welcomed – we can treat them as compatriots rather than intimates. We can talk to them productively without liking them. And then later, of course, we can later retreat into our warm and familiar groups where we know that our existence is not merely tolerated, but appreciated. We can let our guard down in the knowledge that the people around us love us, appreciate us, are made happy by our presence and existence. On the internet, there’s no ground to retreat to.
This isn’t inherently tribalistic, I don’t think, at least not in the sense of ideological bubbling or identification – I’ve never been a part of a group that I’ve really agreed or identified with, and I’ve disagreed with my friends often and loudly. But there’s a sense of mutual care that underpins that sort of relationship – a desire to see others succeed for their own sake in ways that transcend ideological or philosophical positions about mores and laws and social dynamics – that just isn’t there online. Online, you can’t tell the difference between being among friends and being among compatriots (and enemies, of course, even for the most restrictive definitions of the word).
It’s exhausting and depressing to engage with for too long, and incredible that the greatest tool for communication since the Tower of Babel is utterly incapable of reproducing the feeling of friends sitting around a fire, looking up at the stars, talking amongst themselves about their hopes and dreams and fears and struggles, avoiding hurting each other because they care and they can, as, one by one, they drift off to sleep.
There are lots of people here who I might like to be friends with, but can’t because of where we are and who else is here. And there are lots of people here I could never be friends with, because of what you believe and care about. That’s not an indictment – you, my compatriots, have just as much right to be here as I do. But I don’t think I can be blamed for wishing for something more. (I [and you, the people that Scott is calling out] could be blamed for being a shit and poisoning the well of discourse, of course, which is why I try not to)
Anyway, the point is, Scott, I don’t blame you for ending up worse, insofar as you have, and I don’t blame you for being afraid. I’ve gotten worse and more afraid too. And as for the reason people can be so shitty – I think, deep down, they want the internet to be a place where they can feel safe. Where they can have friends. I know that’s what drives most of the bitterness and pettiness in my own heart.
Take care. I mean it. And know that there are a lot of us who, in another place, across another medium, would be happy and honored to have you for a friend.
I don’t see any particular reason why I shouldn’t welcome and like someone I disagree with. My emotional reaction to someone depends on a variety of characteristics which have little connection to whether we have reached the same conclusions.
Because this isn’t about disagreement, David, but about emotional investment. I can welcome and enjoy talking to people I don’t like and wouldn’t want to share the intimate details of my life with.
Other people want things that directly contravene the things I want, and for one of us to get our way the other must suffer for it.
To use an example that doesn’t pertain to me, but does pertain to people close to me (because I’m a coward and the last time I talked about the way this pertains to me, it went miserably) take the people who strongly support the establishment of a social norm that women should not be technical professionals. I’m enormously bothered by this view because this is the sort of norm that hurts the people I care about, so I say so. I get the response that on the net, this helps people. Even if I grant that argument, it’s essentially of the form, “I don’t care that it hurts the people you care about because I have other compelling reasons to do/say [thing].”
I don’t consider people who don’t care about me or the people and things I care about friends, as a rule. That doesn’t mean I try to eject them from the spaces I visit, or that I can’t be pleasant enough towards them, or that I can’t agree with their arguments (I usually disagree with their stated desires, but that doesn’t mean I reject the arguments behind them – though I usually do that too). It doesn’t even mean I’d appreciate it if, entirely unprompted, they went away. It just means that, even when I’m talking to them, I feel alone and uncared for.
I dare you to tell me those feelings aren’t justified.
I don’t think of people who don’t at all care about me as friends, but that has very little to do with their political views.
When i made my previous comment, I was thinking about a real case. Recently at an SCA event I encountered a woman I knew and liked who had moved away years ago and happened to be in town. I was delighted to see her and made it obvious.
As it happens we had a conversation years ago from which it seemed reasonably clear that she thought the word would be better off without human beings. That is about as extreme a rejection—of my entire species—as I can think of. But it doesn’t mean she doesn’t like me or that I don’t like her.
They are justified if the person doesn’t care at all for you. They are not justified if the person merely believes that policies are desirable which you believe would harm you and people like you.
Which, in my experience, is what political disagreement often comes down to.
That view is both so extreme and so broadly targeted, that no particular group of people is plausibly threatened by the possibility of that view spreading. Views that are closer to the edges of the Overton window and that target people like you in particular are far more likely to trigger your defense response.
Imagine if she thought the world would be better off without white men. That’s less extreme by your reckoning, but doesn’t that feel less friendly to you, and make it less likely that you two can enjoy spending time together?
I’m still reeling from a rather unpleasant thread on the topic of hostility from several weeks ago, and my belief at this point is that any definition of “doesn’t care for” that doesn’t involve someone blatantly insulting me by name is going to get me yelled at by someone.
Well so be it, but I’m still going to use my best judgment. There’s a difference between making statements that are “a rejection” of me and making statements that indicate that someone doesn’t care about the things that are important to me. Hell, “the world would be better off without you in it” is much too close to my internal monologue for me to be entirely comfortable being friends with a person with that belief, and it’d definitely keep me from being able to open up to them. It’s not such a large issue that I wouldn’t want to talk to them (I probably would), but…
Anyway, you’re welcome to believe I’m a bad person for that if you want. I’m going to go away again, which I’m sure will be a relief.
I don’t think you are right. The implication, in practice, is not that we should wipe out the human race but that we should give little weight to the welfare of humans compared to that of other species.
That is an attitude that threatens quite a lot of people–for instance any landowner who might be forbidden to do things with his land on the grounds that there is an endangered species on it. Anyone who is at risk of a medical problem that might be resolved by information produced by animal testing.
There is an interesting book entitled, At the Hand of Man, by an environmentalist critical of other environmentalists. One of his points is that environmentalists are frequently willing to sacrifice the well being of African humans in order to protect African animals.
I think that “good person” and “good opinions” are not nearly so correlated as is tempting to believe. There are good people with bad opinions and bad people with good opinions. There are people who will be kind and generous to individuals of a group while viciously attacking that group in the abstract… and vice versa.
Now there are plenty of good people with good opinions, enough so that you never have to really voluntarily engage with any other group (and maybe that’s best, if you’re prone to your own mental demons).
But I do think that we are subconsciously biased strongly enough toward the false equation of “bad opinion” with “bad person” that it’s healthy to make a bit of conscious effort to find good in those we disagree with. It will often make you a better person and improve your opinions.
As a long-time reader and very infrequent commenter (here or at the sub), this just makes me sad. I understand and support your reasons even though the entire situation is infuriating.
Unfortunately, I think this is the reality of human online interaction. I’ve been debating online since the dial-up, basement-run BBS days in the early 1980’s. We had “war” rooms then too and not much has changed except today it’s much, much easier to maliciously troll people IRL.
Scott, thank you for making SSC what it is. When I have enough free time only to regularly read one website, it is yours. And during those months when LW was “dead”, SSC was the only website worth reading that I knew.
I have already decided long ago that if I ever have a regular blog, it will have no comment section. Because moderating an active comment section feels like a full-time job, and it is not the kind of a job I want to have.
And I also noticed that participating in political debates too much makes me a worse person. There is something unhealthy about arguing with people all the time. In real life, disagreements makes less than 5% of my time; but on internet it is more than 50%, which probably makes my brain think that I am living in an incredibly hostile environment, and it changes my behavior towards less open and more defensive.
I feel bad for Scott, being unfairly tarred by association with something his fans came up with that spiraled way out of control. And the doxing/stalking stuff is just plain evil, no question.
That said, I give three raspberries to the CW threads. I had a few interesting conversations there, but the one that sticks in my mind is when the NYT profiled a neo-Nazi, not just a white nationalist or a Sailerite but a full Hitler-and-swastikas guy. And all the thread just sympathized with him because he lost his job as a result of the internet finding out about him. And I was like, hello, I’m Jewish and he wants me dead, why should I sympathize with him? To which someone responded, is there anything in the article that suggests he wants you dead? How do we know he’s not just being unfairly maligned?
And I just blew up at whoever it was that asked me that.
Now I get that we want to have a free and open discussion, including of issues that are taboo to mention in other places. It’s certainly better than discussion norms elsewhere, where disagreeing with the party line gets you banned or blocked or denounced as a paid Russian troll. But start with the premise that you’re not going to just dismiss the extremists out of hand, and sooner or later you end up dominated by extremists and people who are just too gosh-darn open-minded to oppose them. And I don’t think the people here understand just how bad it was getting over there.
Why would you expect that to happen? If you argue with people with extreme views you may find out that their extreme views are more defensible than you thought, you may demonstrate to others in the conversation that the views are not defensible, you may get a clearer idea of why people believe those particular mistaken views, making it easier to predict their behavior and possibly influence it.
All of those look like better results than the result of dismissing the extremists out of hand.
I think you are assuming that an argument can actually be had. All too many activist types will simply see your attempt to engage in an exchange of ideas as evidence of your guilt, mentally tag you as the enemy, and react to you as something to be dismissed or destroyed rather than engaged. This has always been the case, but in the age of social media the labels that get attached to you persist and spread, regardless of whether they are justified, and so entering the arena at all risks more than any one person could hope to gain.
It’s somewhat complicated. So, bad opinions can sometimes drive out good opinions.
Some people really will relish talking to extremists. I don’t think I’m a bad/dishonest person, but I kinda find it frustrating. I think that’s somewhat normal. To think through an example, it makes sense to talk about economic policy with somebody who generally believes that government works the way the news reports that it does, as the conversation is likely to flow well and be productive. However, if you spend your time talking economic policy to 9/11 truthers, you may learn something, or you may just get frustrated at explaining the difficulties in concealing a long-term conspiracy for the nth time, and find your efforts to talk policy somewhat frustrated, as you can’t move from “the government as the conspirator against the people” into “interesting policy ideas to play with”.
I think most groups(& people) have practical boundaries for “diverse enough to have a pleasant conversation” vs “too diverse: now I have to explain & defend 20 basic concepts to an uncharitable audience, and can’t get anywhere I find interesting”.
There’s an important difference between sympathizing with a person and sympathizing with their ideas. Between thinking someone shouldn’t be destroyed just for their (reprehensible) views and actually agreeing with those views. Between supporting freedom of speech and supporting the content of that speech. That’s exactly the distinction that the “Scott’s a nazi” doxxers fail to grasp (or consciously reject).
On the other hand to your hypothetical, once you start destroying Nazis, it starts to get awfully tempting to destroy the people just to the left of Nazis… then the people just to the left of that… and so on till democratic debate dies and it’s just might makes right.
In the event, I can’t say I’ve seen a lot of people coming around to supporting Naziism because of the open thread. Or because of Charleston or Skokie. But I do see the idea of “destroy people we disagree with rather than give them room to speak” and “MAGA hats are the same as Klan robes” getting a lot more popular with people who claim to be liberal. So I know which threat I consider more dangerous.
Did you mean Charlottesville (VA)?
I did. Combo of bad memory and bad autocorrect. Whoops.
One good way to get people to avoid sympathizing with neo-Nazis would be not to subject neo-Nazis to grave injustices.
Whether it’s a grave injustice that someone loses their job for being an open neo-Nazi is exactly the question at hand.
I think that it’s typically accepted that punishment must reasonably fit the crime. So it probably depends on the one hand on how bad one thinks that losing their job is or how one imagines the exact circumstances. I think that there is a difference between merely losing a job and being free to find another vs being haunted out of every job you get.
Similarly on the other hand there seems to be a big difference between a neo-Nazi who actually tries to hurt people physically vs a guy who merely posts on Stormfront or who goes to demonstrations where a dozen protesters have to be protected from a much larger antifa group by the police.
Note that one specific individual at Charlottesville seems to have become the archetype for a neo-Nazi in the eyes of many, even though that person seems like an outlier to me.
PS. Also, there is the separate question whether punishment and isolation actually help to make these people behave differently. I think that isolation and anger at perceived mistreatment often is a main cause for them to be susceptible to certain conspiracy theories and being nice to them probably has a far better chance of changing their views (especially in real life).
Choosing not to hire someone is probably morally equivalent to firing someone.
Would it be an injustice to choose not to hire someone because they are an ardent neo-Nazi? If it is an injustice, it is tiny. Employers choose not to hire people over the smallest social miscues. An ardent neo-Nazi is going to be a complete wierdo at best, and more likely just a bad person. Why would you hire a bad person instead of one of the many good people that need jobs? Wouldn’t it be unethical to do otherwise?
What would firing someone in repsonse to a concerted social-media campaign aimed not only at that result, but in scaring off anyone else who might consider hiring that same person be equivalent to?
Social media smear campaigns are so foul, and universally done by awful people, and so ripe for abuse, it is hard to imagine a case in which it was just.
But as an employer I would want to know if a potential hire was a neo-Nazi and I would be angry if a third party withheld the information.
<aybe this is a theoretical case where it is just even though in general it is better if these campaigns never happen. This is really a longer debate though and I don't think this is the appropriate spot to debate this.
Ugh. Just ugh. What’s the world coming to?
This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him.
I don’t see why not. A policy of “you can’t post your personal manifesto everywhere, your posts need to be of reasonable length and on topic” would do it.
If that seems like you’re unfairly shutting them down, it might help to frame the issue the way you did in your post not too long ago, as such people nominating themselves for the short end of a tradeoff.
We Need To Have A National Conversation About Why We Can No Longer Have A National Conversation
Short answer: you can’t. The fact that things have gotten to the point where we can no longer have a national conversation is why we call it “Culture War”. If we could still have a national conversation about such things, we would be calling it “Cultural Diplomacy”. The very term “war” implies that conversation is no longer possible.
Once again, I think it helps to think of people who insist on poisoning every conversation by acting in bad faith as nominating themselves for the short end of a tradeoff. As someone who moderates a forum myself (I’m one of the moderators at Physics Forums, which admittedly is focused on less confrontational topics than your subreddit was, although you’d be surprised what people can find to argue about), I feel no compunction about shutting down people if I judge them to be acting in bad faith. (Although it’s not just my judgment; before we shut someone down we discuss it among the moderators to make sure it’s not just one person’s opinion.)
This, btw, is why I think you might be too hard on yourself when you say “I don’t know how to fix this”. I’m not sure there’s anything that needs to be “fixed”; being able to distinguish between people who genuinely want to have a discussion, and people who are simply taking advantage of your good nature to abuse you (and then refusing to give the latter the time of day), is a valuable life skill. (And as for this blog, this is your blog; IMO you don’t need to have any reason for shutting someone down other than “I think this person is a net loss to the discussion”, and you’re not obliged to give a detailed explanation for why. I don’t view blog comment sections as public spaces; as I see it, those of us who come here to comment are being invited into your living room to have a discussion, and we should behave accordingly, and are subject to being asked to leave, or forcibly ejected if necessary, if we don’t.)
+1
And thank you for this.
The person who just Will. Not. Let. Go of their pet issue goes all the way back to Usenet. They don’t need to publish their screed, just use every opportunity to bring up their pet issue. A solution — that never works — is for other people who are fed up and done with that person to not take the bait. But they always do.
That isn’t what Scott is describing. He is talking about people who take advantage of his tolerance to make arguments for things he believes are mistaken.
I agree that one could reasonably have a policy of not allowing people to make long posts on lots of different subjects, all directed to pushing their hobbyhorses–but that would apply to people pushing views Scott agrees with as well as to ones he disagrees with.
That isn’t what Scott is describing. He is talking about people who take advantage of his tolerance to make arguments for things he believes are mistaken.
I think he described both kinds of people in the post as a whole–the kind who take advantage of tolerance to post 10,000 word manifestos about their pet issue, which could be taken as trying to post in good faith but having a very skewed idea of what “good faith” is, and the kind who take advantage of tolerance to post in bad faith from the start. When Scott said “I don’t know how to fix this” in the post, I took him to be referring to the second kind of people and the effect that their actions had on him.
I might be misunderstanding the facts of what happened in the subreddit–I thought the people who were harassing Scott for his role in that were doing so within the discussion there as well as outside it.
I agree that one could reasonably have a policy of not allowing people to make long posts on lots of different subjects, all directed to pushing their hobbyhorses–but that would apply to people pushing views Scott agrees with as well as to ones he disagrees with.
Yes, that’s right. The person who insists on posting 10,000 word manifestos in every thread about how basic income is a good idea would have to get the same kind of moderation as the one who does it about pedophilia.
In theory, I think having the policy is possible.
In practice, I think the enforcement will be subject to a LOT of subjective judgment and hand-wringing.
* How many posts/what percent can one make before it’s “directed towards pushing their hobbyhorses”?
* Does length matter?
* What if, somehow, you’re very good about making it seem like a natural part of the conversation?
In theory, these are answerable questions. In practice, most people are really only comfortable punishing clearer moral transgressions. Moderating has a psychological cost/social risk.
I agree you can quite fairly prune out people who only want to beat their dead hobbyhorses.
But I think Scott’s main point is that they only have to post once or twice for your tolerance of them to be seized on by people who want to tar you by association.
You can’t have a free discussion space without anyone ever using it to politely say something really outside the Overton window.
Yeah, the hard part is not those “taking advantage of tolerance”, but those using the forum as intended. If no one ever posts anything outside the Overton window, is it really a free forum? And if everyone only makes one or two posts outside the Overton window, collectively, that’s a lot of posts.
I think Scott’s main point is that they only have to post once or twice for your tolerance of them to be seized on by people who want to tar you by association.
Fair point.
This view isn’t falsifiable.
Say that X is coming from the 24th century and knows for sure that children having sex at 12 is very good for their psychological development. X doesn’t know most of the technical details – only just as much we’d know now about how smoking is very bad. He’s not even a man on a mission, he talks about other topics.
How could he navigate this labyrinth you put in front of him? He’s right, he’s willing to spread the word, the forum is open. What are the chances you wouldn’t ban him in 1 week?
Excellent piece, Scott, very interesting. The whole trajectory of our national online conversation sure does seem like one of the most important factors in why things are the way they are. Is it mostly cause or mostly effect? I was pretty strongly in the “effect” camp [social media etc is simply reflecting/amplifying how Americans think and talk about each other not shaping it]. But am nowadays closely to “not sure”…neither answer is particularly heartening.
Anyway I wonder if you’ve seen this essay from 2017, which I found to be a disturbingly-accurate description of my own online experiences from long ago [I’m old enough to have launched Usenet newsgroup readers from Unix command lines] right through today’s social media. Some aspects of your CW Thread tale seem to connect to it:
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-shouting-class.html
Scott has said he does not want expressions of sympathy, and fair enough.
These are not expressions of sympathy. Poems by two Irish writers, the playwright John Millington Synge (1871-1909) and Michael Hartnett (1941-1999). I’m not saying these are in reference to any pestiferous poxbottles pretending to be people parading around causing pain and distress, I am simply sharing the literary heritage of my country with you all.
As a moderator of both /r/Slatestarcodex, and /r/TheMotte, I’d just like to thank you for writing this Scott. I know we personally exchanged some rather angry words about this (many of mine were misspelled – grammar is not my strong suit), and I am sorry about that, though I stand by much of what I said at the time. I will say that having any group attached to your identity is hard, I’ve never really experienced this online though I have as “community leader” (albeit it wasn’t called that) of pseduo-public/pseudo-private spaces in real life. One advantage I had is that words that were uttered in those spaces died when the sound-waves dissipated. The words you speak online are forever. Words spoken online by others in you name are similarly permanent. In short, I don’t envy you.
Since you advertised us, I’ll go ahead and reach out to everyone who comments on the blog and invite them to participate. The Culture War Thread, now located in /r/TheMotte is a really, really odd thing that is hard to explain. It brings together posts by a diverse set of mostly anonymous posters and forces together in one feed, displaying comments in their full form so you can’t purely react to them based on title. As “arch-mod” (Scott’s words, not mine) I have always tried to highlight what I thought the best comments the thread generated that represent differing views from across the political spectrum. He linked to one of my many “Quality Contributions Roundups” above, and I encourage everyone to read through those comments to see what I mean, though fair warning – someone in somewhere within almost certainly said something you vehemently disagree with. I know, because as a “sanity check” to make sure I wasn’t flattering my on political biases I made sure to posts I personally disagreed with in every single roundup. The Culture War thread was not perfect, and perhaps we could do better. All I can say is I have always done the best I could.
If anyone has any questions, I’d be happy to try and answer them.
Not to be insensitive but I find this personally interesting, care to elaborate?
That’s really unfortunate that people threatened you. A calm and charitable political discourse is almost impossible to achieve in liberal Western society I think. For example, my own personal experience as a Marxist and someone who does not shy away from historical communism, I’ve been slandered and even outright attacked for stating my opinion. The worst incident is that I said that Stalin was a good comrade, and for this I was attacked (punched in the eye) by a right-winger. This was totally out of nowhere, I didn’t even have time to take off my glasses, which were fortunately not broken although I was left with a black eye.
Even though this is the political atmosphere in which I’ve grown up, I think there’s some reason to be sanguine. I’ve seen US political discourse open up slightly in the last decade, now left-wing opinions such as mine are a little more common in the mainstream. I see a lot of young people who are looking more rationally at taboo subjects such as socialism and Marxism and are more comfortable taking on board those political insights.
Although that’s probably cold comfort for those like us who have been attacked in the recent past, it’s definitely something to look towards as a positive development.
“The worst incident is that I said that Stalin was a good comrade, and for this I was attacked (punched in the eye) by a right-winger.”
Hm… I wonder if this is why the left feels justified in “punching Nazi’s”…
I don’t think you should be punched for your views. I do question though… what is your opinion of Gulags? Of people starving to death because the government redistributed the food they spent all summer growing? Of people being beaten for collecting the bit of grain left behind after the government took everything else? In light of all that, I have the opinion that Stalin is just as bad as Hitler.
I too would like to know what made Stalin a “good comrade” but that’s probably best saved for the actual CW thread.
More importantly, let’s all agree we shouldn’t normalize punching anybody on either side.
Even though I was explaining that the gulags never had the high percentage of inmates as American prisons I still got punched. Being actually assaulted is the worst I’ve faced as a communist but I’ve been threatened or just shouted down plenty of times too. Let’s not forget stuff like Charlottesville in which a leftist was run over by a right-winger and multiple others injured. Honestly, considering some of the irrational rage I’ve faced just for stating my views I feel really lucky that the worst I’ve ever had is a black eye.
That’s a straight up lie about something where there’s video. No one was run over.
Dwayne Dixon put up a confession on his facebook page that’s since been set to private that he chased James Fields with a rifle and he admitted it in a lecture at Harvard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz9mKPiDrv4
“Intimidating” people (waving people off, not “chased” as you describe it) with a rifle is perfectly fine and the US constitution protects the bearing of arms. Left-wingers are increasingly recognizing the benefits of arming themselves, and as a Maoist I welcome this. If James Fields was so much of a snowflake that going to a protest where people are carrying guns caused him to freak out and run protestors over, then that’s on him, not a random left-winger.
Well, he was convicted on hit-and-run and first degree murder charges. If you have exonerating evidence I suggest you get in touch with the police.
You said he ran people over – no one was run over – there’s video evidence. You were lying. Period.
Conviction of murder or hit and run are separate matters because legally you don’t have to hit someone with a car to be convicted of either.
Bullshit. Going out in public with a rifle and declaring yourself the law by threatening people with deadly force because you designed yourself as traffic control is isn’t fine. He got away with it for the same reason he was invited to speak at Harvard about it.
@reasoned argumentation
Please don’t use words like “bullshit” – this gives the discussion an uncivilized edge which I think is unneeded.
Again, if you have evidence to the contrary regarding the hit-and-run I suggest linking it here (to bolster your argument of which you’ve presented no evidence) and then taking that evidence to the police so that it can be brought before the authorities.
Unlike yourself, I’m totally in favor of the 2nd Amendment and I encourage all left-wingers to start organizing and carrying guns in public where possible. An armed society is a polite society, I fully believe that, and also Mao’s fundamental truth “political power flows from the barrel of a gun”.
I identify somewhat with democratic socialism, and I’m glad that socialism is coming more and more into the Overton window. I hope you realize that every time you open your mouth to defend Stalin, you help to reverse that process. (And rightly so.)
No, I did not “reverse” that process. I was calmly explaining my views to a right-wing guy when I got punched in the face. Later, other people who were part of this discussion and were somewhat left (certainly not as left as me although I doubt they were Republican voters) told me that the whole debacle really made them more sympathetic to communist views and asked me for leftist literature to read.
If you just explain your views calmly and lay it out in a rational way I think people will mostly be interested. I suspect one or two in the group would have asked me for followup reading anyhow. However, I also think that seeing the violent irrational response from the right definitely pushed them more towards a leftist view.
I think the situation as you describe it probably had two opposite effects. Defending Stalin probably made people less sympathetic to Marxism. Your being punched for doing so probably made them more sympathetic to Marxism, less sympathetic to attacks on it.
If that isn’t clear, consider the analogous case of someone defending Hitler as a good conservative and being punched for it.
Huh? That’s not what happened though. One irrational right-winger got so mad at me he punched me, while a number of other people asked me later (in private, when they couldn’t be assaulted) for relevant leftist literature.
If people can’t discuss the pros/cons of communism with a communist rationally and without lashing out violently than I’m not sure I want their “sympathy”. However, it does have the effect of pushing people on the fence further towards leftism, which is good for me in some ways, so I guess it’s worth it.
You’re vacillating between “discussing the pros/cons of communism” and “defending Stalin”. They uh… aren’t quite the same.
That said, there is still no excuse for you being subject to violence for that.
@gdub
As Stalin was the leader of a communist country that lifted millions out of ignorance and poverty, he deserves a spirited and clear-minded defence. Most Americans are taught to hate him irrationally, which leads to a usually one-sided conversation and even physical assaults on peaceful Maoists like myself.
Maoist? You mean the guy who directly caused the deaths of tens of millions of people through political purges and famines? You have some strange idols.
For the record, the guy who punched you probably had family who lived under Soviet rule. They tend to have a rather different view of Soviet communism than the American college marxist.
@eyeballfrog; I very much doubt it. In any case, even if his family had lived in the USSR he should have still been able discuss the case without assaulting me. That’s truly irrational. If he didn’t like the USSR or Stalin he could have made his points calmly, politely and logically.
Regarding Soviet opinions on the collapse of the USSR, there are many who miss communism and recognise Stalin as a great leader:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/29/in-russia-nostalgia-for-soviet-union-and-positive-feelings-about-stalin/
I don’t know of any comparisons with American college students but I suspect that the approval ratings for Stalin are much higher in the former-USSR than they are on US college campuses.
“Stalin was the leader of a communist country that lifted millions out of ignorance and poverty”
I think the tension is also that if somebody wrote
“Hitler was the leader of a fascist nation that restored economic prosperity and hope to millions”
It would also be right.
And in some circles, the deaths due to governmental actions are perceived in a broadly similar light to the actions by Hitler during the Holocaust.
I am not trying to say that you should agree that Stalin = Hitler, but… there a coherent line of reasoning that would reach similar conclusions. And of course, while some people would agree that people should be able to “discuss the pros/cons of fascism rationally”, it is a more contentious claim than “discuss the pros/cons of buying diet soda”.
Only pushing back, because you stated “Americans are taught to hate him irrationally”.
Also on:
“I suspect that the approval ratings for Stalin are much higher in the former-USSR than they are on US college campuses.”
Actually, I also expect that. I don’t think it signifies much, as the US also put Andrew Jackson on the $20. On average people don’t think rationally about their history, or anybody else’s history either.
@glorious999 No, the American hatred of Stalin is largely irrational which is why people assault me or shout threats at me instead of simply discussing their views. I realize that the average SSCer is more intelligent than average US citizen and might be able to construct something of an argument against Stalin, however that’s not the case for most.
I really don’t think it’s too much for me to ask people to have a calm discussion about Stalin rather than trying to shut me up.
I won’t send you any expressions of sympathy or cast you as a martyr, but I think it’s important to point out a fact that very few people seem to mention: You are an honest, good, decent, and – not saying this to flatter – also a very wise person. I don’t see many people give you compliments, possibly because it seems too fluffy for a high-brow intellectual blog, but honestly, if we don’t, how will you ever get the psychological upkeep necessary to continue your work? This is not to presume that your psyche feeds on social approval (clearly you would not be doing this if that was all it needed), but I think most human beings need at least some evidence that they are appreciated on a more personal level, and as you have just finished explaining, so far you have mainly received the opposite signal.
Our era is one of a staggering decline in the quality and available of decent information, communication, and transmission of thought, and this place you have created is one of the few great strongholds left. It couldn’t have been accomplished if you weren’t as brave and morally developed as you are. I leave out “intelligent” as a descriptor because of the decline in usefulness of that word and also it goes without saying.
Now I will return to my normal lurking.
+1.
Scott, you may not be the most sympathetic victim of this particular problem, nor have you paid the highest cost.
But your efforts and suffering here are meaningful. Please accept praise and support where it is due and deserved, and here it most definitely is.
+1
I have to wonder if a large part of the problem isn’t just sheer fan-in, with negativity having more legs. If I leave a comment insulting you, you’ll feel it and every bit wears down your tolerance. If I appreciate a post and send it to a friend, you simply see your hit count increase.
So: Thank you.
+1
Scott, thank you for being a voice of sanity on an increasingly insane internet.
It is certainly a thing, when your rep becomes toxic enough that people don’t want to associate with you. I am somewhat inoculated by having come up through far left activism and survived, to pick an example, the ANSWER wars. But it is annoying when other people start having to answer for you.
You can always tell them to go to hell.
Yes, reputations can become toxic through no fault of your own, and smears can spread like wildfire even though there’s no factual basis for them. Thankfully I’ve never had to deal with anything like that on the left, I think most people are pretty honest at heart and wouldn’t threaten violence or maliciously spread false rumors. Like Scott said, it only takes one.
I am in the unusual position of having been on both sides of the equation, although not, in fairness, entirely in a rational state of mind.
“I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat.”
I’m an SSC dilettante, so I don’t have a deep knowledge of Scott Alexander’s background, but the posts I’ve seen make me curious about this statement. Generally, Alexander’s posts seem critical of liberal orthodoxy and, in this case, he seems to accuse liberals of using Maoist or Stalinist tactics to muffle free speech. As I’m not a regular here, I may not fully understand the term rationalist, but I’d like to hear the rational defense for supporting a party whose supporters use mob justice to suppress dissenting points of view. Maybe the argument is that the Democrats’ economic platform is so superior to that of Republicans’ that it’s worth sacrificing free speech. Maybe it’s something else. In any case, I’m interested to hear the argument.
Don’t homogenize the outgroup.
One could say that about every political movement. Or do you think every Bolshevik or NSDAP supporter was as radical as Hitler and Stalin? I’m not trying to argue modern Left is morally comparable to Hitler and Stalin, my point is that it’s the effects that matter. When a group is stepping on your neck, what percent of it truly supports the neck-stepping policy is not that important a question.
Actually, it is THE important question, especially when you sympathize with a lot of views within the group.
Even if you don’t, failing to distinguish your moderate opponents from extremists is a good way to turn the moderates extreme.
Scott is on most issues a lefty, and doesn’t want to see his political allies go off the deep end of a purity spiral into extremism.
As someone who would rather not see either of the two major parties in the US go crazy, I wish him the best of fortune in that endeavor.
“I’d like to hear a defense” is nearly indistinguishable from “I am offering an attack”, and I’d like to see you go away disappointed as Scott and everyone else here ignores your attempt to turn this into a flame war over your political pet peeves.
I’m not understanding how politics is irrelevant to the topic of the post. Politics is the topic of the post, or if it’s something else, I’d like for you to tell me what.
“You’re irrational for not voting Republican because a small group of leftists tried to silence you” isn’t “politics”, it’s straight Culture War of the kind that Scott decries in this very post.
This is extremely uncharitable. Though it may be mostly leftists that use this particular brand of mob justice, it is certainly only a small minority of leftists. That is the biggest problem with the issues that Scott discussed here. It takes very few crazies to make one’s life miserable as a public figure. The biggest issues Scott had were in meatspace that were done by people in the single digits.
@hroark314
Of my three co-workers who are most outspoken about voting for Republicans one of the three has gleefully read out loud accounts of :liberals” being beaten up, shall I infer that a third of all Republican voters advocate political violence?
The most outspoken voters for Democrats that I know have never told me of silencing anyone.
I have seen some rather inflammatory language used by a former friend that I believe in now a “left-anarchist” writing for the “Long haul” which I sometimes see at the lobby of a local library branch, but they aren’t Democrats (or Republicans).
I’m quite sure that among millions of Democratic Party voters some are anti-free speech, likewise among the millions of Republicans voters, Hell among any group that I can think of with more than a 1,000 people I suspect the same thing, but (please refresh my memory) the last time they’re was a majority Democratic Party congress, with a Democratic Party Preside was 2010 and I don’t remember any “Thought Police”, to be fair I’ll try to remember when Republicans held Congress and the Whitehouse, I think it was 2018? I don’t remember any jackboots then either.
Gee, it’s almost like both the Democratic and Republican parties have existed in our Republic for over 150 years.
I really don’t think a civil war is about to erupt over a difference of opinions on what marginal income tax rates should be.
Up until the last election, the politically active Democrats were not pushing to silence dissenters. I personally think the Democrat push to start doing that is part of why they lost the last election. A lot of people who would’ve voted Democrat looked at the tactics being adopted by the party and decided to stay home. (Personally, I was going to write in Bernie Sanders, but I was flooded out of my apartment so I had to spend Election Day moving.)
I would argue if you really believe in something, changing sides because people were mean to you is not a rational choice. It’s kind of “tu quoque” writ large; the badness of the people who hold a bad interpretation of the ideas you believe in doesn’t tar the ideas in your good interpretation.
*long, highly detailed throat clearing coming up*
It is absolutely outrageous that this was done to Scott . I’m deeply saddened to hear what he went through, and glad that he seems to be feeling better. I do hope he will continue this blog, and keep the comments open as SSC is one of the few oases of sanity left on the interwebs. The people who did this are human scum, and S.A. and /r/TheMotte deserve all the support we can give.
Now, I have to ask:
Okay. But would this be okay if you were a WASP who voted republican, and was a seventh day adventist? Or even, say, an Objectivist who thought that Trump was ghastly but Hillary Clinton was more likely to cause a massive disaster?
I hear this a lot, “But I’m totally left-wing…” Yeah, and?
This sort of ghastliness has been going on for years, which is why I have completely given up on the left. The risk is just too great. This is why I wrote previously that I think the core of Western left-wing ideology is simply “We are the nice people, they are the nasty people. So there’s nothing to debate – either fervently agree with everything the nice people believe, or be cast out. After all, we don’t need to be nice to the nasty people, right?”
And it’s why you have really only one choice: get the left-wing lobotomy – agree to support every shop-worn bromide, every lie and cliche with all your heart and all your soul – or move rightwards. Go Right or Get Out.
I had this conversation with someone on Twitter, who’d experienced similar things and was feeling bummed out, but didn’t like me calling him “right wing”. I told him, “You don’t get it – you can be in favour of Scandinavian social democracy and, if you don’t agree with every jot and tittle of the SJW agenda, you’re a right wing maniac”. In a too perfect irony, he turned out to be a social democrat form Scandinavia, and we got on swimmingly.
I’m not sure whether this addresses your point, but remember that most of the left (in terms of actual voters, but maybe not public figures) is more moderate than Twitter.
Yes, that certainly seems like his implication.
I…don’t think Scott is implying that this would be OK, he’s saying that he is personally the exact opposite of what he’s being accused of. Further, you don’t have to work too hard looking over what he’s written to know this, so people who are saying that he’s a Nazi would either have to be either deliberate liars or so sand-poundingly stupid that they shouldn’t be allowed to play with grown-up scissors.
Why would you (and/or reasoned argumentation) think that was the implication of the paragraph you’re quoting?
Scott claims that he was directly and indirectly harassed by people who described him as a homophobic/transphobic/neo-Nazi/member of the alt-right. One reason that he objects to this is that it was a libelous claim: he claims he is not any of those things, and cites as evidence his publicly stated beliefs, behavior and ethnic background, which would be very unusual in someone who did fall into those categories.
This claim would also be libelous if it was made about a “WASP who voted republican, and was a seventh day adventist” or an “Objectivist who thought that Trump was ghastly but Hillary Clinton was more likely to cause a massive disaster.” There is no reason to believe that the author of the OP would be in favor of being libeled if he had different religious beliefs, different ancestry or different political views.
However, these things would be less strong evidence against the—still presumably false— contention that he is a neyo-natzee of some sort in the hypothetical examples you describe.
Note that there I only dealt with the question of harassment/doxxing/censorship based on false claims, not true ones. However, Scott’s other writings, for instance “In Favor of Niceness, Community and Civilization” and “Guided by the Beauty of Our Weapons,” strongly suggest that as a general principle he does not support threats/harassment/censorship as a tool of political change, no matter the religious beliefs, ethnic background or political views of the victim. (Nor, for that matter, would I and I assume most other readers of this blog.)
However, given that it can be extremely difficult to change people’s minds about such a fundamental philosophical difference, it is perfectly rational that, in addition to arguing from principle that doxxing/threatening/harassment etc. are bad, you also argue that are you being doxxed/threatened/harassed on false pretenses, so please stop. I don’t see that this is contradictory, if you take the time to spell out the thinking.
It wouldn’t be okay, but it would be much more understandable and probably less threatening. We take it for granted that a lot of people dislike those who have very different political views from theirs.
But Scott’s crime wasn’t having bad views, it was being willing to interact with other people who have bad views and help them interact with each other. So the people attacking him are not merely acting as if they believe having bad views is bad but as if being willing to interact with other people who have bad views is bad too.
Part of what used to be implied by “liberal,” even in its 20th century sense, was the attitude implied by “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That was part of the image of the ACLU, defending the right of Nazis to march. This is an example of the extent to which that norm has broken down.
That liberal norm never really existed, just look at all the ways the FBI infiltrated, harassed and persecuted leftist political parties and organisations (“COINTELPRO” and other similar programs).
As a Maoist I’ve been physically threatened by liberals and conservatives alike simply for voicing my views.
The fact that liberals sometimes fail to live up to their ideals doesn’t mean the ideals don’t matter at all. And there is of course a matter of degree – you got threatened, and that’s awful. But I think I’d rather be a communist in America than a liberal under Mao or Stalin, and it’s not close.
I don’t think the FBI thought of themselves as liberals.
Do you have relevant polling as to which party FBI members usually vote for? I guess I shouldn’t assume the political makeup of an organisation but I sort of assumed the people infiltrating and harassing leftist organisations on behalf of the US government were probably either liberals or conservatives (I consider modern conservatism as a branch of liberalism).
edit: I had a quick look and cannot find any specific polling so I’ll assume FBI is roughly 50/50 liberal and conservative. I’d be very surprised if there were not many liberal FBI agents assigned to COINTELPRO-like operations.
There is no way to fix it, and it will only become worse.
Their power only grows and does not ever diminish. They cannot be stopped or slowed.
Please, God, please, just notice this. All of you. Just notice it. It keeps happening. It happened here. To someone you like. It happens the same way every time. It never does not happen. Their power does not diminish. Please notice it.
Assuming “they” are who I think you mean “them’ to be:
Things are way better on this front than they were ten years ago. Twelve Rules For Life is a bestseller, Gordon Ramsay was perfectly comfortable calling college students “snowflakes” in an interview recently, and I’ve seen leftists all over the Internet concede points that they would have been frothing at the mouth to hear people say ten years ago.
It’s a pendulum, and it’s starting to swing back the other way. If there’s been a general “leftward” trend overall over the last hundred years, then it’s because the left were genuinely right about a few things.
On the other hand, there’s this. Support for right-wing views, especially those associated with the Trump administration, is decreasing. And studies show that mainstream liberalism is accepted by the general public in a way that mainstream conservatism isn’t. For instance, there’s a reason this study classifies “traditional liberals” as part of the moderate crowd, but puts “traditional conservatives” with “devout conservatives” on the right wing. There’s also a reason it has “passive liberals” as a group, but not “passive conservatives.”
So maybe you’re right, and the graph line that’s been going up for the past few decades is now dropping back down. Or maybe it’s just briefly dipping, and it’s going to keep going up, or at least finally level out. It’s hard to say, it’s still to early to know what to make of this current confusion.
So I did in post in the CW thread as a leftie before getting frustrated and leaving (under the screen-name mc_dark), and I think your view of the thread is too rosy. Vague rambly thoughts:
@Survey: As you said, the CW thread diverged from the subreddit and SSC itself. The sample of people that care enough to take the survey here and post in the CW thread is different from the sample of people who post in the CW thread.
On the more general point, there’s a lot of issues the CW thread is firmly on the left on… but they don’t really discuss those things. Yeah Trump isn’t popular, but he’s not
not obsessively stalkeda common or emotional topic, maybe one or two smaller threads a week. They’re on board with LGBT rights (mostly), but they’re not posting updates on conversion camp legalization or what pastor Y said today about the homos or whatever. What is very frequently talked about is the movements of Social Justice and gender/race studies and moments, and on those topics the thread takes a hard anti-progressive stance. Hence the subreddit’s comments and discussion will mostly be “right-wing” (“anti-progressive” is much more accurate) even if the individual posters agree with much of the left’s viewpoints – and of course this’ll attract folks with broader right-wing views.(As a more extreme example, a popular anti-SJW subreddit had a poll and it was like self-reported 65:35 Left:Right, but it’d be pretty insane to say that subreddit has a balanced take on affairs.)
——-
If I recall correctly you looked at top-level comments, which have stricter guidelines on editorializing (“setting the tone” and all that) and don’t necessarily reflect the opinion of the subreddit. Like if I posted a “Nerds in tech suck” article, it’d be neutral/left-leaning under that count even though it’d get a super negative response from the commentariat.
I remember doing a double-take when you posted that, because there was dubious trans thread in recent memory and I was wondering how you missed it: turns out it was the fourth week out from where you checked! (entirely by chance, this isn’t a p-hacking accusation)
Anyway I don’t think the thread was overtly LGBT hostile, but there were some iffy posts that got a community pass here and there like that one.
——
@Few Bad Actors: Yes there were a few bad faith actors… who were often praised and supported by the community at large. People weren’t (just) cherrypicking mass downvoted comments from a random asshole that everyone disagreed with and used that as evidence, they were looking at comments that received praise and upvotes (a classic being near-verbatim quoting nazi words and being at like +40), they’re looking whole threads and systemic reactions and patterns. You can’t claim “a few bad actors” if they’re not actually recognized as bad actors!
@Testimonials: You posted some testimonials, but I’ll bang that selection bias hammer and say those were from after a lot of great left-wing commentators like yodaisracist got frustrated and left (along with poorer quality left-wing commentators that had some pretty spectacular flameouts). And I agree there were a lot of great posts, there’s a reason I personally stuck around for over a year. But the signal:noise ratio just got worse and worse, I was spending less time in interesting conversations and more being pissed off at steadily less charitable takes, and eventually I blocked the thread for my own productivity. That first testimonial from werttew continues in the same train of thought:
To be frank, I think the thread reflects pretty poorly on SSC and its ideals. Had my first exposure to SSC been a glance at the thread, I’d have stayed away.
All that being said: it goes without saying this was super shitty outcome, you weren’t particularly responsible for how the CW thread behaved.
(Apologies for weird structure, was trying comply with the filters.)
I mean, do you really need another place for constant bitching about Trump? I mean that seriously, because I think it’s a core part of the problem: my gut sense is that a lot of the posters are people who are not particularly right wing, but who spend a lot of time in hard-SJ company and use CW threads as their safe space to vent.
This degrades the quality of the conversation but it’s a bit inevitable. The SSC audience is one that mostly isn’t going to be comfortable in actually far right spaces, but who can’t be open about certain views in their other social spaces lest they get hit with the same problem Scott just did. This is going to make conversation mostly “right wing”.
I don’t know how to fix this.
EDIT – I see now you address this point in the post below. Still, I think part of the problem here is an equation of “anti-SJW outrage culture” with “right wing”. The debates are somewhat orthogonal. I think “the thread spends too much time griping about leftist outrage culture” is a reasonable criticism – but calling that “right wing” weakens your case. You’re kind of conceding one of their main gripes – “if I don’t spend my time marching against Trump I get labeled a right winger”.
And you can’t completely ignore the context that the participants live their lives in outside the Reddit. I feel like the left wing complaints are expecting SSC to be a perfectly balanced place… while comfortably living in a bubble they mostly agree with. Meanwhile for the right leaning posters, this is their only place to be open after spending the rest of their day in blue tribe bubbles.
Again, I don’t know how to fix this.
Oh no no, not at all! I just mentioned that as a left-wing topic the thread doesn’t talk about. Kind of to a weird degree actually; don’t need the r/politics FINISHED NOW play by play, but Trump declaring the national emergency probably warrants a meaty thread? *shrug*
Agreed, as I mentioned the more accurate accusation is anti-progressive or anti-SJW. That said, the anti-progressive sentiment extends beyond disdain for campus/internet outrage culture and into the fundamentals like “Is there structural racism” and “Do SJWs hate white people”, along with adjacent topics like immigration. And I think this attracted folks with anti-SJW views and more right-wingy views, especially if they were coming from reddit instead of the blog. “Y’all post right-wing opinions” is confusing cause and effect here, but I don’t think it’s an entirely unfair accusation either.
(Also “anti-progressive” is like 4 more characters and weirder to type, give our fingers a break.)
Oh, here’s two posts from the reddit thread that managed to say what I wanted to say way more competently than I did:
The first was u/paanther’s thoughts on his experiences, who was a well-liked leftist regular.
I pretty much agree with his grievances there. Paanther goes to talk about the “If you write a bunch of articles critical of SJW, you’ll attract the people critical of SJW regardless of how many disclaimers you put that you’re not writing to them” stuff. Which I also broadly agree with, but I think he overstates the case here and puts too much “blame” on you, rather than on the subreddit or bad actors.
(I’ll note this is pretty spicy by his standards, I don’t think he was warned or even downvoted once during his time in the CW thread.)
——
The other post was PB34’s response to the above, talking about his experiences on another “extreme” forum:
And he adds his own thoughts on perception:
I felt paanther’s post assigned too much “blame”, and PB34 ends his post with a similar sentiment:
——
I hope this is more nuanced and detailed criticism of the thread than “CW thread is rightist and sucks rawwr” or whatever. The discussion after the posts was pretty good too.
I don’t get it. “r/SSC is a place where all people, whether center-left, center-right, far-right or even far-left came to agree that outrage culture is terrible.”? That sounds like success.
I dunno… the world “culture” is doing a lot of work in the statement “outrage culture is terrible”. It combines the idea of “a set of beliefs” with the idea of “a way of behaving”, so it could easily be used to fudge between the two.
I’m anti-SJW myself, but from my own background I’m sympathetic to the claim that excluding a type of discourse is harmful to epistemology. It seems possible to nix censorship (including “soft” censorship– threats, doxxing, de-platforming, etc.), while still allowing (parts of) outrage discourse as a valid and maybe even a necessary way of discussing certain beliefs.
See also:I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup. Especially the last section. It sounds like the Blue Tribe was frequently the outgroup in these discussions, even though the Red Tribe was further away ideologically from most of the participants. (Full disclosure: I’ve never actually read or participated in the CW thread.)
I see that as being fine and natural, as long as participants were out-grouping the ideas and not the actual people. Discussion happens where the friction is. Flat Earthism is in some sense “more wrong” than $CONTROVERSIAL_BELIEF, but generates much less discussion, and rightly so. I’ll speculate that the CW thread was mostly Gray Tribe vs. Blue Tribe, but some Blue Tribe people still saw it as Blue Tribe vs. Red Tribe and weren’t happy that Red Tribe got off so easy– when the real reason Red Tribe issues didn’t generate as much discussion is that there weren’t any Red Tribe folks around to defend them.
Here’s the thing about the SSC Culture War thread (and the Discord #CultureWar channel, which I was banned from, and to a lesser extent, this comments section). It doesn’t have a right-wing or conservative bias. It has an Anti-SJW bias.
You can be an Anti-SJW Liberal (see: most of the Intellectual Dark Web). You can be an Anti-SJW Social Democrat (see: some of the more obnoxious Bernie bros). You can be an Anti-SJW Libertarian (see: about 50% of the people in any Libertarian group). You can be an Anti-SJW Communist (see: basically any Orthodox Marxist or Tankie). So the statistics above can be completely accurate, and that’s still not incompatible with the idea that SSC-affiliated spaces have a particular bias that’s typically aligned with (but not exclusive to) the Cultural Right.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the idea that the SSC community is some kind of hotbed for Alt-Right Neo-Nazism is pure nonsense, and I think it’s horrible that people went after Scott and his social network like this. The fact that someone tried to get him fired is absolutely disgusting. But I don’t think these spaces are as unbiased as people seem to think. Maybe I’m wrong, I haven’t done a survey, but that’s definitely the vibe I personally get from them.
You aren’t the only one who got this impression (see ManyCookies commenting above). Fortunately Scott explicitly acknowledged it in his post:
Your point of view is totally valid and welcome. It may even be correct, but that’s not really the post’s point. The problem is more around how people react to something they find biased or “anti”. Leaving perpetuates the problem by further skewing the discussion. Blaming the maintainers / moderators is unfair for the reasons Scott describes. Treating it as wrong because it’s “biased” begs the question. Trying to get it shut down or disavowed for being “biased” is, as you’d probably agree, terrible.
Fortunately, there are two excellent options open to anyone who sees this as a problem. One is to engage and do one’s part to change the debate. The other is to stop caring about People Being Wrong on the Internet.
I know, easy for me to say… except that I’m a somewhat conservative Christian, which isn’t exactly a position that gets a lot of love on this side of the Internet. Believe me when I say I read plenty of things here that make me cringe.
Scott acknowledged the point about people’s subjective personal experiences, but not the Anti-SJW bias.
Again, I could be mistaken, but I think this is more than just a feeling. I’d be willing to bet that if you took a poll of the Culture War thread asking if people’s opinions of Social Justice were positive or negative, at least a slight majority of people would lean negative. If you asked people’s opinions of “campus activism” or “online Social Justice activism,” the results would probably be even more pronounced.
Courage isn’t the lack of fear, but [fill in rest of stock motivational statement to taste]. What looks like provisional cowardice to you looks like heroism to many of us. You have been and continue to be an inspiration.
Scott is the hero we deserve.
I never had any interest in the culture war threads/posts, but it would have been a loss to many people if you blogged less because of the reaction to it. I’ve been reading your posts since 2011-2012 back on LW. Just wanted to say thanks for all your thought-provoking posts throughout the years.
At least on person on the right (Vox Day) wrote an instruction manual on how to deal with it.
It’s not a solution for every case, but it does have good stuff to say. Also, his Quantum Mortis series is just brilliant mystery cyberpunk.
Yes, but Scott wants the hate mobs to succeed – just not against him because their specific charges in his case aren’t true. He wrote an entire post about it and he basically declared that the left doing this is sort of like the weather – just something that kind of happens for no real reason other than something something the internet.
Small favor: Do you know what that article is called?
Only asking, because while I find it possible that Scott could write something broadly accepting this part of reality(and even finding good in it), the general thrust of Scott’s writings have tended to oppose hate mobs.