RIP Culture War Thread

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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. The New York Times already has a reputation, but for some people this was all they’d heard about me.

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.

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1,069 Responses to RIP Culture War Thread

  1. Alsadius says:

    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.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      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.

      • C_B says:

        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).

      • Mikescher says:

        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

      • Joseph Greenwood says:

        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.

  2. Le Maistre Chat says:

    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.

    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?

    • Nick says:

      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?

      • CthulhuChild says:

        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.

        • toastengineer says:

          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.

          • Viliam says:

            I’m noticing that MRA-type ideas are becoming more mainstream lately … And yet, I don’t see MRAs themselves getting any more popular.

            I noticed similar things happening also outside politics: An unpopular person says “X”, the mob goes “booo!”; later a popular person says “X”, and the mob goes “oh, what a deep wisdom!”.

            (And if you remind them “but the unpopular person said X yesterday, and you disagreed”, they will go like: “no, that’s not true… that person said something else… I do not remember what exactly, but it was something stupid”.)

            My model is that most people do not really care about ideas, but they care about humans and their status. (Actually caring about ideas, that is typically called being a nerd.) So when someone says “X”, they do not really hear “X”, and they definitely do not start thinking about the logical consequences of X. Instead, they check the person’s status, and if the status is high, they get a warm feeling that something wise was said, but if the status is low, they feel like something stupid and repulsive was said. And because people remember their interpretations of events, they go home remembering “an unpopular person said something stupid” instead of “an unpopular person said X”. So when the next day a popular person says “X”, they feel like they heard something wise, and they see no contradiction. Although, in this case they are probably more likely to remember some details of X.

            Similarly, most people do not remember “MRAs say X, Y, Z”, but rather “MRAs say something bad… I do not remember what exactly, and frankly I don’t care”. It is not because they disagree with the ideas technically, but rather because they refuse to think about them. (Thinking about low-status things makes you low-status, and most people work hard to avoid that.) This means they may be open to hearing the same idea again, as long as it does not remind them of the MRAs. Which usually requires restating the same idea using different words (replacing keywords of the outgroup by keywords of the ingroup).

            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?

            I suppose that happens when the first high-status person publicly declares they agree with the new answer (and does not get horribly punished in response).

            As an unrelated example, worrying about superhuman AI is silly when Eliezer Yudkowsky is doing it, but becomes a serious topic overnight when Elon Musk says something similar. It is not because people started thinking about the topic seriously and decided it was legitimate. Rather, people decided that the topic is legitimate if Elon Musk talks about it, and that allowed a few of them to start thinking seriously about it.

          • toastengineer says:

            That effect doesn’t explain what I’m observing, though; this is something I’ve been noticing get more intense over the last few years although I only recently, like, NOTICE noticed it, and I haven’t seen any Musk-like figures come out and say any of these things.

            I’ve even heard it from people who seem to otherwise be well above neck-deep in the koolaid otherwise, who would start screaming “lynch the traitor” in that case rather than going along with it.

          • mtl1882 says:

            I think @Viliam’s post is right in general–it encapsulates something that I find so infuriating and cannot seem to rise above. People have such definite opinions and judgments of people, and immediately reverse themselves without a second thought. That in itself is not that surprising, but they are all around me trying to discuss things, and they seem reasonable enough. And then they slip into these ugly, ridiculously simplified remarks (when they perceive something as lower status), which stuns me, because they were making sense before. And they are so disgusted by those people/arguments, that when you try to make sense of it, you look like a bad guy. And *then,* the next day, they assert the same statement is a great point (it now being made by a higher status person), and point it out looking to discuss it. And they are totally unaware of the shift and will vehemently deny it, clearly having no idea of what the claims were, just the speaker’s likeability. And then you look like a pedantic jerk. But it is so off-putting to me, and so prevalent, that there seems no way to evade, and it is actually very upsetting and frustrating. Like, I expect people to be rather ignorant and thoughtless, but this is something else altogether. At least with the ignorant, I can avoid significant discussion of politics–but when I know the people well and they are half-reasonable, the frustration, and honestly the resentment, is unbearable. Not sure how to maintain calm in this area.

            @toastengineer But my main reason for replying is that I think there is also a lot of truth in your argument, although I think it is a bit more complicated. Progress is not nearly as linear or direct as it is portrayed. Usually, there is a social mood that recurs based on various factors, that makes it ripe for agitators and also other changes. There is a lot more going on, which I cannot claim to completely understand. But I do have a theory that there is some sort of weird convergence point, driven in part by activists who publicly push their views in a manner most find very extreme and unpopular. For example, take gay rights or just minimal social acceptance of being gay. I admit I don’t know my history very well here, so I apologize if this is not a good example, but I think the illustration works. Initially, Gay pride parades were probably not thrilling to most Americans–they were probably offensive–and almost more importantly, impudent, to most Americans. At some point, many of these people start saying to themselves, “why can’t they just be gay quietly and not so in our faces about it? Why is that necessary? It doesn’t get them anywhere!” And in doing so they’ve just sort of mentally gotten to a place where they see “quiet” gay people as no big deal. So now if they learn the local TV news anchor is gay and lives with a partner, it just seems like “no big deal,” whether they like it or not. Trying to make it a scandal just seems silly at this point, “who cares?” The prominent agitation that annoys them brings them a point where they’re content to accept the cause when it is comparably not “annoying” to them. A lot of people’s irritation at loud opposition to authority outweighs their other prejudices.

          • LadyJane says:

            @Viliam: Elon Musk is a successful tech entrepeneur, so people assume he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to technology. Most people don’t know who Elizier Yudkowsky is, and many of the people who are familiar with him think he’s just a random crackpot. I don’t think it’s necessarily unfair or even logically unsound for people to make assumptions along the lines of “this random crackpot doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but this expert in his field probably does.” If some homeless guy on the street was ranting about how Planet X was going to crash into the Earth and kill everyone, I’d think it was nonsense; if the consensus of the world’s leading astronomers was that Planet X was going to crash into the Earth, I’d be a lot more worried! You might think that’s proof of elitism, but if George Clooney started talking about Planet X, I wouldn’t take it much more seriously than the homeless guy’s claims, even though George Clooney is higher status than the head of MIT’s astronomy division. I’m as strongly opposed to unwarranted forms of discrimination as you can get, but “has a verifiable history of success in the field being discussed” seems like a perfectly warranted basis for judgment.

            The MRA situation is a different issue. In that case, it’s that the MRAs have a lot of views that are wrong (either in the sense of being factually incorrect or in the sense of being morally reprehensible, or both), but occasionally they’re right about a few things, often things that don’t even tie into their core narrative that much (e.g. male circumcision). So it makes sense that people would agree with a few of their points while still dismissing the movement and its adherents as a whole. It’s just the Stopped Clock effect.

          • Baeraad says:

            @LadyJane

            This, and also, when you despise 99% of someone’s beliefs and opinions with the power of a thousand suns, you begrudge them the distinction of being right about the remaining 1%. Because if they are right about some things, then that gives credibility to their opinions in general, and that creates the risk that those opinions will gain wider public support. It’d be much more convenient for you if they were really consistently wrong about absolutely everything… and when something would be convenient for you, it’s awfully tempting to believe it’s true.

          • Viliam says:

            @LadyJane

            occasionally they’re right about a few things, often things that don’t even tie into their core narrative that much (e.g. male circumcision).

            I wonder what do you consider to be the core narrative of MRAs.

            I though it was something like “it is not true that the traditional gender roles assign everything good to men and everything bad to women; in reality each sex gets a mixed bag of advantages and disadvantages” (which is somehow a bad thing to say, but if you only take a half of it and rephrase it as “patriarchy hurts men too” it becomes okay); and then there is the more specific claim that “it is difficult for women to get respect, and it is difficult for men to get empathy“, which quite fits the situation with child genital mutilation (a typical American freaks out when you talk about hurting girls’ genitals, but remains perfectly calm when you talk about hurting boys’ genitals). Men are seen as competent and expendable (if they suffer or die, it means they were not as competent as they should have been, therefore they kinda deserved it), women are considered precious and incompetent (we should protect them and help them all the time, but if they achieve something, it is assumed that only happened as a result of the protection and help they received, not their own skills).

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Men are seen as competent and expendable (if they suffer or die, it means they were not as competent as they should have been, therefore they kinda deserved it), women are considered precious and incompetent (we should protect them and help them all the time, but if they achieve something, it is assumed that only happened as a result of the protection and help they received, not their own skills).

            This view may be incorrect today, but it makes perfect sense that people held this view in the past, because it lined up perfectly with a society’s need for survival in pre-industrial days. If a society didnt treat its men as expendable, it would not be able to defend itself properly. And if a society didnt treat its women as precious baby factories, it didnt reproduce.

            In the modern world these assumptions seem to be on much shakier ground, and we can afford to experiment a little bit with them. But because humans are irrational, social, and bipedal apes, we cant express it that way. We need to wrap this up in flowery language about human rights, female liberation, and patriarchy.

            Im not part of the rationalist community and my only exposure to it is from this blog. But I would expect the rationalist community to rise above this sort of talk and view these kind of problems from an engineering perspective as to how to build a prosperous and long-lasting society. It seems to me such an approach would remove much heat to CW topics and add some light, because it shows that the conservative is not a hateful misogynist who takes perverse pleasure at oppressing women, but instead someone who clings to the view that brought about the modern world, and the liberal is not an irresponsible hedonistic idiot, but someone who wishes to see how life can be improved when certain constraints are removed.

            Both perspectives are needed if we have any chance of building a good society. Any effort to shut down conversations between liberals and conservatives, as described in this post, should be seen in this light.

          • carvenvisage says:

            Not sure how to maintain calm in this area.

            Just remember that humans evolved from apes and that we’re all born utterly ignorant knowing nothing but pain and confusion, not even that we know nothing, trying to make some sense of it all and carve a place for ourselves amidst zero-sum pressures to be more certain than is justified by the facts.

            (not an endorsement of your peceptions, applies to all cases where confronted with (perceived) animalistic behaviour)

      • LHN says:

        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.

        • acymetric says:

          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.

          • CthulhuChild says:

            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.

          • A1987dM says:

            AKA “September 1993 never ended”.

        • Doug says:

          I’ll add another datapoint. In the mid-2000s, I was the admin of a pretty large Internet message board. About on par with the size of /r/ssc, pretty likely that at least a few people here would have remembered it.

          Not once was anything Scott describing ever a problem. The forum ran with pretty much total free speech rules. No spam, no illegal content, NSFW work content had to be labeled NSFW. That was it. The forum itself had no shortage of less than PC content and posters.

          Never once did anyone threaten or dox me. I posted my real name, photo and even contact details on at least several occasions. Plus at least several dozen people had me in real life at various times. So it’s definitely not like I was anonymous.

          It’s just hard to convey had monumental the shift in Internet culture has been recently. This was only thirteen years ago. Internet culture pre-social media was an amazing place. It has some of the most dynamic, interesting and open communities of any time and place in human history. That’s all fallen into dust. I just feel bad for my kids and anyone else under 25 that they’ll never get to experience that.

          • BBA says:

            I think about this xkcd from 2006 a lot. Just a few years later it could never have been made. The attitude was immature, probably wrong even at the time, and obviously in this day and age no responsible adult can endorse it. But I miss it.

          • Vorkon says:

            I just wanted to say that this is gut-wrenchingly true.

            The Internet of the early-mid 2000s was an amazing place, and it saddens me to think that it will never exist again.

            I’m sure every generation feels something similar about their formative years, but it really was a unique transitive time in history, like the Wild West or the Industrial Revolution, but much more hopeful, and with more animated gifs.

          • toastengineer says:

            I remember when cat declawing was the worst discussion topic in existence.

          • LHN says:

            A few years later the same cartoonist was posting this one, where he endorses boycotts and job loss for people who eschewed “being careful and constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up”. https://xkcd.com/1357/

          • Clutzy says:

            Yea, XKCD never had self awareness on the level of the South Park guys (as an example). They always knew they would be targets so they took up arms and attacked while also shoring up their defenses (for instance, ManBearPig and Book of Mormon). The people most vulnerable to these sorts of attacks are the people the other side considers “reasonable”.

            And that has been Scott’s mistake as it might have been XKCD (who I haven’t followed for a while so I don’t know). The only way to survive in the middle is to laugh at people who attack you. If they call you racist, make a Tawana Brawley joke; if they call you communist, link to the Chapo podcast; etc. Being a wimpy centrist will never work because you will just end up getting bullied by the louder side (in this case lefties). And once you get bullied you will just keep getting bullied until you disappear into a corner or snap and go manmode on them (like you should have at the beginning).

            So if you don’t want to have to become a parody of yourself, its always been necessary to be a good version of yourself. And no one has ever been even an above average version of themselves if they didn’t understand the following children’s poem:

            Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you.

          • hilitai says:

            A few years later the same cartoonist was posting this one

            Hah! Beat me to it. That was my exact thought on reading the first cartoon.

        • mtl1882 says:

          I think it is due to size/the sort of person who would join. It attracted curious people who wanted to participate. They would feel uncomfortable if they did something that the rest of the group gave the side eye. Now, thousands of people are essentially thrown online, no curiosity or even desire to talk about a topic needed, in numbers great enough that the side eye does not work or cannot be perceived, and go online almost exclusively for social reasons, creating a different culture and rules that are driven by certain mob instincts. There’s no way for people to get a sense of the “self-policing” culture, but really, I think just the element of curiosity and deciding, personally, to join a community of interest is the major thing. I think the founder effect is very real, but the amount of people arriving at the same time makes it impossible to perceive existing norms or how they relate and benefit the forum.

      • Doctor Locketopus says:

        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.

        • Ozy Frantz says:

          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?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            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.

          • Ozy Frantz says:

            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.”)

          • toastengineer says:

            The trouble with violence is that the bad guys tend to be better at it.

          • vV_Vv says:

            (“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.”)

            And then face the risk of Scott killing them.

            The point of a honor culture, with duels or just ritualized fist fights, is to disincentivize interpersonal conflict by creating a credible threat of escalation to physical violence. The drawback is that people who are better at physical violence, or just less risk averse, will be able to get away with more bad stuff, while people who are bad at violence or more risk averse will be the target of abuse (although somebody could gain honor by defending them, or they could just hire a champion, actual honor cultures were complicated).

            Fun trivia: teenage Abraham Lincoln regularly defeated local ruffians in street fights.

          • toastengineer says:

            The trouble then is that to get any improvement, we’d have to import an entire fully-functioning honor culture all at once, including the part where everyone already knows how to and is willing to fight.

          • vV_Vv says:

            The trouble then is that to get any improvement, we’d have to import an entire fully-functioning honor culture all at once,

            How did honor cultures come into being in the first place? Clearly it must not have happened at once, there must have been a phase of cultural evolution before they reached a relatively stable state.

            It possible that whatever cultural evolutionary pressure caused Western civilization to transition from honor culture to dignity culture to victimhood culture could under some condition be reversed and cause a transition in the other direction. Maybe it could be possible to balance the pressures to keep civilization in a dignity culture. Or maybe civilizations irreversibly move from expansion to prosperity to decadence to collapse, and this cultural dsyfunctionality that we are witnessing is just the death thores of Western civilizaiton before it will inevitably be replaced as the world’s hegemon by the Chinese, the Muslims or whatever. Hard to tell.

          • Nick says:

            Or maybe there’s a state after victimhood culture that isn’t just collapse. If the gulf between moral statuses of victims and oppressors becomes so great that violence is back on the table—which doesn’t, of course, have to take the form of duels, much less to the death—could we transition to an honor culture, and thence to a dignity culture again?

          • The Nybbler says:

            I don’t think we can return to honor culture; both sides would have to agree to the concept of a “fair fight”, which implies a degree of cohesion which isn’t there. In an honor culture you have a fair fight with your peers who you feel have wronged you; your actual enemies you attack without such restraint.

          • John Schilling says:

            Fair fights are generally considered preferable to unfair fights, with “It’s unfair in my favor so I like it this way” usually being a minority position with the failure mode of too many bystanders deciding to stand with your victims. That being the case, there is strong pressure to adopt norms of fighting fair in an environment where there is a great deal of unfair fighting going on. Renaissance dueling traditions evolved to mitigate drunken tavern knife-fights, for example.

            If fighting is rare, there’s more advantage to just winning the fight you’re in right now however you can. If laws against fighting are effectively enforced, then you’ll probably want to win that fight anonymously and so there won’t be reputational penalties for doing so dishonorably.

            So, in this respect, things would have to get worse (more fighting) before they can get better (fair fighting). And that may happen whether we want it to or not, but I expect most people here would not favor that first step even if it might facilitate the second.

          • Nick says:

            I wanna read a Foundation-esque novel now about a startup founder trying to shepherd our divided country through the coming age with an app to match you with fair dueling partners. If he succeeds, he might just reduce thirty years of conflict to one.

        • Kyle Rowland says:

          The idea is that while at first things are strictly worse, because now the assholes can challenge you to a duel, they end up better, because all the assholes duel each other and thin the asshole herd.

          A fine notion, just totally out of line with first-world values and the way the world is moving.

      • thecromulentman says:

        “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.”

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Ada Palmer and Cory Doctorow are working on a history of censorship. I don’t know when It’s due to be published.

    • eigenmoon says:

      Is it rare or unprecedented for voters to polarize into two tribes that will not communicate without the state falling into civil war?

      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.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        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?

        • eigenmoon says:

          “Resolved” in the sense that Dreyfus was exonerated. It doesn’t mean that the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards hugged each other and lived in harmony ever after.

          I don’t know how deeply the social consequences went, but Zola had endured a lot.

    • Erusian says:

      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

      • thecromulentman says:

        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.

        • Erusian says:

          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.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            There have been attacks on both the Senate and the Electoral College as insufficiently democratic. There is (I hope) no chance that either gets changed by amendment, so what are the attackers to do? I read today that the number of states that are majority-conservative is actually increasing.

            The path to armed conflict on that point is that the heavily blue states come more and more to treat the Senate and Presidency as illegitimate because they are not one-man-one-vote, and enact state laws that conflict with Federal laws. This is happening already. At some point the disconnect becomes great enough that the Federal government takes steps to enforce its laws, and maybe that includes shutting down a state legislature or two. Whether armed conflict ensues is an open question — we didn’t get a civil war when Kennedy mobilized the national guard in Alabama — and it seems equally plausible to me that the worst that happens is division of the U.S. along the lines of Brexit or the Indian Partition (though the latter shows that it could be plenty bad).

        • Rachael says:

          “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.”

          Are you trying to make a pun, or do you not understand what “civil war” means?
          It doesn’t mean nonphysical or nonviolent war. It means actual war, but within a country rather than between countries.

      • The Nybbler says:

        You missed some issues. Gun control. Immigration. Land policy in the west (which is tied into environmental issues) is always there, ask the Bundys.

        I think some of the issues you did mention could lead to war as well. Racial issues; suppose the Woke get enough power to institute explicit reparations and ubiquitous and open discrimination against whites? A heavy-handed move the other way (which I think is less likely) could get us to the open violence of race riots. Environmental policy could do it too — imagine the Bundy case writ large. Abortion seems less likely.

        • Erusian says:

          You missed some issues. Gun control. Immigration. Land policy in the west (which is tied into environmental issues) is always there, ask the Bundys.

          All are less divisive than the three issues above. But yes, there are other splits and one of them could become more important. I don’t see which of those fit the needs of my definition either. Which of these is the equivalent to declaring that people don’t have any right to determine government policy and all of their leaders are illegitimate and have no power? Or to destroying over half of the wealth held by half the country?

          I think some of the issues you did mention could lead to war as well. Racial issues; suppose the Woke get enough power to institute explicit reparations and ubiquitous and open discrimination against whites? A heavy-handed move the other way (which I think is less likely) could get us to the open violence of race riots. Environmental policy could do it too — imagine the Bundy case writ large. Abortion seems less likely.

          Riots aren’t a civil war. There will be riots. Civil war requires two political factions to have standing armies trying to destroy each other.

          We already have a system of (almost) open racial preference. Besides, numerous countries have existed with similar discrimination and no civil war. If the woke crowd decides that the Nazi’s fears are right and white genocide is a swell idea, then sure that would lead to a civil war. Probably the same in reverse. But if the Democrats want to start a bunch of transfer payments to minorities with the goal of getting them to the US average income (their stated goal) will that lead to rebellion? Rebellion has an exceedingly high threshold. You can discriminate against, steal from, even enslave people and they might never rebel.

          As for Bundy write large, I’m skeptical for two reasons. Firstly, I doubt Bundy could get a big enough army together to overwhelm the cities. Secondly, I doubt most city dwellers are willing to die over Federal land policy. If it gets that contentious and Bundy-ites are able to stand up to the government, I suspect the rest of the population will concede.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Riots aren’t a civil war. There will be riots. Civil war requires two political factions to have standing armies trying to destroy each other.

            That happens when the US Army itself splits. The standing armies are already there.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            Guns might be less divisive, but the relevant minorities might be more committed to the fight. There are a lot of gun owners who are essentially single issue voters. If you come for their guns, they will obstruct as much as possible. If you come into their homes anyways, they will shoot you. A significant chunk of LE will also obstruct any effort at serious gun control, and in a non-trivial portion of the nation, they will probably also shoot at any other LE or military forces coming to take guns.

            I know online people say there aren’t any people who want to take all the guns, that this is a mischaracterization of the issue and not really held by people in meatspace. And in most cases like this, that’s true. But not guns. Even the partisan GOPers in my Blue Tribe enclave do not understand why people want guns, think anyone who has guns basically has a mental disorder, and want the government to take the scary guns away.

          • Vorkon says:

            I was just about to say the same thing.

            I’m fairly confident that, if there ever is another civil war in our time, a large scale gun confiscation is likely to be inciting event.

          • mtl1882 says:

            @Vorkon and others–yes, if I had to pick the most contentious issue that comes to mind, it would be strong gun control. To me it is so obvious that this would involve significant violence, but others seem to think it is the easiest thing in the world. They are appalled when I don’t show much support for gun control. I get their argument and agree with them on much, but I find the entire thing extremely unrealistic, and while it can be done, the ugliness it would cause seems to be totally unperceived by them. These are in some sense existential, visceral matters–usually the only kind that leads to Civil War.

            They can’t really be described as logically as they have been by @Erusian, IMO, but I think there’s truth in it. Certain conflicts are inherently threatening to a large portion of society’s sense of self and values. The issues usually are quite major, but there is a more philosophical problem. The economics of the South were definitely in play, but the South’s fear of slave revolts and increasing feelings of insult by the moral attacks made by some Northerners meant that they essentially tried to ban discussion of the issues in congress and in the mail. Northerners were really unhappy about the Fugitive Slave Act and about not being able to discuss what they saw as an issue very much in need of discussion–this offended them at a visceral level. Slaves and ideas were going to cross from one region to the other, and the sense of insult/violation/humiliation resulting from the controversies was intolerable. Northerners felt they were forced to cooperate in wrong actions; southerners felt insulted in other ways. Both sort of misjudged the other in some sense.

            Gun control has some similarities, in that guns can travel through states, so the problem is one that is hard to isolate and one that causes resentment among states. The violence that sparks calls for gun control is viscerally upsetting and to some people, unquestionably in need of intervention. Therefore, those who oppose it seem to them complicit in the violence. This is not crazy. Those who oppose it see it as a shocking invasion of their homes and rights, and impractical, unlikely to do much. It seems like gun control supporters are just not dealing with reality, and doing what they say is absurd and insulting. There’s a lot more going on, but I’m pointing out the points that could really lead someone to a place where they just can’t avoid really visceral conflict. That being said, I think any attempts to implement real gun control will immediately show people how difficult and violent it would be, and the issue would resolve in some sense long before Civil War. I just don’t think any portion of America has enough commitment or sense of principle that would sustain such a fight. A small group of gun owners do, though, and its hard to see how the opposition would be able to see a way to get what they want through a war. I just don’t think enough Americans care about much to set off a Civil War–tensions and instability and riots though, are going to be an issue in the coming years, I think. But the courage and focus needed for some sort of “holy war” would not arise for some time, and it’s hard to channel them in the current media environment and the sheer size of the US and federal government. Insults are diffuse and impersonal. We’re just too big.

            I think cultural changes could happen that would allow this sort of dynamic, but I think they’d be aimed more at some sort of “awakening” than war. It’s hard to see war settling any of the issues currently on the table. The lines aren’t drawn distinctly enough.

          • PeterDonis says:

            Re gun control: I think a key factor in opposition to gun control (it’s certainly a key reason why I oppose it) is that gun control is based on a false picture of who has guns. The false picture is that the only people who have guns in the US are career criminals, crazy people, and law enforcement. That’s not the case. In most of the US, the vast majority of people who have guns are law abiding citizens who have guns for sport or self defense, and most guns that are there for self defense never get fired except for practice. The crazy people who are responsible for things like mass shootings are a vanishingly small fraction of the people who have guns. And the places in the US where the majority of people who have guns are career criminals are very limited (mostly inner cities), and the imbalance in gun possession there is due to bad governance (basically a combination of unwillingness to properly punish violent crimes and the war on drugs).

            So people who oppose gun control see it as trying to penalize all the law abiding citizens because of the misdeeds of crazy people and criminals and the failure of governments to deal properly with them. Which doesn’t sound like a good policy in what is supposed to be a free country.

    • MawBTS says:

      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.

  3. CthulhuChild says:

    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.

    • NLeseul says:

      Universal basic income? Rejuvenation therapies and thousand-year life expectancy? Ubiquitous cyborg implants? Faster-than-light space exploration?

      • CthulhuChild says:

        God you are optimistic. I really fucking hope you are right.

      • Elephant says:

        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.

        • Nornagest says:

          High society, or, you know, high school.

        • LukeReeshus says:

          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

          At the risk of gifting our modern apparatchiks more fodder to wield against Scott, I have to say: this is a point Joe Rogan sometimes makes when commenting on our current state of civilization.

          He connects much of our current virtue signalling / piety contests, which pass for intelligent discourse nowadays, to the fact that modern people’s lives just aren’t that hard. We don’t have to worry about food, we don’t have to worry about large-scale violence, we don’t have to worry about plagues… We don’t have to worry about a multitude of serious problems with which most human beings, throughout most of history, had to contend. Which is weird, right? I mean, it’s unprecedented, right?

          When I first heard Rogan allude to this idea—that our modern material abundance and physical safety deprive people of the struggles within which they would otherwise find deep meaning—I thought it was dumb. I considered it a part of the ramblings of an MMA-obsessed stoner with some unresolved interpersonal issues.

          But over the past couple of years I’ve reconsidered it. I mean, won’t people always try to be above other people, in some way? Won’t status competition always be a thing, even once it’s decoupled from competition for material resources or whatever? I mean, how could it not be? Isn’t that the way we’re wired? Heh.

          I don’t have a solution, but I do think it’s an interesting problem. And I don’t think the UBI / automatized-future folks have thought seriously enough about it.

          P.S.
          Hey NLeseul, not to be a dick but,
          “Faster-than-light space exploration” cannot be a thing. Curb your optimism.

    • Plumber says:

      @CthulhuChild

      “…given how incredibly well off our society already is…”

      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.

      • CthulhuChild says:

        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.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          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.

          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.

          • CthulhuChild says:

            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!

          • orangecat says:

            I mean, the people I know who are least likely to have kids have stable jobs, savings, and generous mata/pata leave policies.

            Right, and I think the Two-Income Trap comes in here. Having kids exposes you to a several expenses whose costs are approximately “everything you have”, e.g. college savings and a home in the best possible school district. If you have a high income, this can mean giving up awesome vacations, the ability to easily move around for interesting work, and the option of retiring at 50. If you’re poor, there’s much less of a difference between your lifestyle with and without kids.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            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.

            I’m afraid I have a higher bar for “thoroughly refuted”. Economic concerns are not the only issue with respect to having kinds but it is certainly a major one.

    • thecromulentman says:

      ” 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.

  4. Viliam says:

    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.

    • Randy M says:

      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.

      • CthulhuChild says:

        I think its popular because it is so obviously effective, at least short term. Moloch at work.

      • Plumber says:

        @Randy M

        “…as the left shifted from being concerned about economic justice to being concerned about social justice”

        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.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          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.

          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.

          • baconbits9 says:

            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.

          • Plumber says:

            @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.

          • marxbro says:

            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.

            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.

      • Brandon Berg says:

        Here’s hoping that having tired of “economic justice” and “social justice,” the left develops an interest in actual justice.

        • LadyJane says:

          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?

          • toastengineer says:

            Stop that.

          • LadyJane says:

            @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.

          • theredsheep says:

            If the monkey throws poop at you, and you throw poop back, the main change you have effected is to get poop on your hand as well as your body.

            Also, Brandon, please stop throwing poop. It’s gross and smells bad.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            This is the sort of post that would usually get you banned, but since you were provoked into it by another post that got banned, I’ll let it pass for now. Don’t expect this kind of post to fly outside that kind of provocation, though.

          • toastengineer says:

            I read it as “perhaps we can stop hyperfocusing on specific ills, turning them in to games of Haves Vs. Have-nots and instead focus on actually making things better for everybody,” but maybe I’m compulsively steelmanning too hard.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          Obviously unhelpful, banned for two months

          • C. Y. Hollander says:

            I have to say, a two-month ban for that comment seems extreme to me, especially without a prior warning. I’m all for promoting productive conversations and discouraging unhelpful contributions, but I don’t think hair-trigger banning is the best way to accomplish this.

          • Joseph Greenwood says:

            I think this is a reasonable ban. Posting so CY Hollander’s post doesn’t read as consensus.

    • moonfirestorm says:

      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.

      • albatross11 says:

        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.

        • Rick Hull says:

          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.

          • azhdahak says:

            “It makes little sense to hate the one faction that can do this and does it all the time” is… certainly a take. But at some point you have to admit that there’s only one faction that can do this and does it all the time. I’ve never seen a news article trying to get a pastry chef fired for supporting the Russian Occupation Government conspiracy theory — nor, for that matter, have I seen people get fired for saying that what their field of work really needs is a violent leftist paramilitary and then slipping references to Communism into the documentation of their employer’s products, like Steve Klabnik did.

            I mean, really. Compare what Steve Klabnik can get away with with what people who don’t share Steve Klabnik’s politics can’t get away with.

            Nobody does this sort of thing when it comes to the unethical behavior of political factions in foreign countries. If the White Army had won, maybe they would’ve had gulags too — but that doesn’t exonerate the Bolsheviks. And, you know, anyone could burn crosses on people’s lawns.

            As far as I’m concerned, anyone on the left should be assumed to support this shit unless they can make it very clear that they don’t. And people who support this shit are the online equivalent of, I don’t know, knife-wielding meth addicts on the streets of Detroit. (Sometimes also the offline equivalent.) They’re not people I’d want within a football field’s distance of me.

          • Plumber says:

            @azhdahak

            “…Steve Klabnik…”

            I had no idea who this “Steve Klabnik” person was before your post, a quick web search indicates that he’s probably a computer programmer who plays Pokemon and has a blog the first few paragraphs of which are so opaque in meaning to me that they may as well be written in Greek, so little to I get.

            From your post I get the impression that he gives you the impression that he’s “Left” and thus you reject the Left because of Klabnik and the Bolsheviks?

            Well I don’t know about Klabnik but I’m pretty sure that most all the Bolsheviks died decades ago, and if any are still alive I don’t think anyone who’s over 100 years old is much of a theat to you anymore.

            Anyway, unless someone says otherwise, I think most are against piles of skulls, as am I.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        “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.

    • Dissonant Cognizance says:

      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.

      • azhdahak says:

        The ant people mostly went after journalists, who — given that they recently ran an article trying to get a pastry chef fired because apparently she buys into the QAnon thing — could maybe stand to have some good reasons not to act up. And of their two highest-profile non-journalist targets, one of them delivered a speech at the United Nations and one got enough positive publicity to pivot into a run for Congress.

        • hilitai says:

          Sorry to be the annoying newbie here, but discussions on this site are often conducted in a jargon that is impenetrable to the uninitiated. “Ant people”? “Ant controversy”..? What…? Can someone explain in a sentence?

          • martinw says:

            Google the term for “reproductively viable worker ant”, then plug that word back into Google with “controversy” added.

            Sorry to be so circumspect; I wrote a more direct explanation with a link, but it turns out that the word itself is banned, which is why people need to use “ant people” as a euphemism.

          • theredsheep says:

            I was assuming you were talking about communists. That is a thoroughly bizarre linguistic coincidence.

          • CatCube says:

            One of the ways that Scott has tamped down on “Culture War” issues (those than erupt into the same arguments over and over) is to ban the use of the word itself, though not discussion of the issue (referred to as “tabooing” the word). By forcing people to use ridiculous circumlocutions, discussions turn out to be less likely to burst into flame. This then gets carried over to other topics by the commenters. Neither Mencius Moldbug nor discussion of him is banned, but people tend to refer to him as “Voldemort.” Though I vaguely recall that his name may have been tabooed at one point, and people kept using “Voldemort” after the taboo went away.

            It’s effective, but it does mean a lingo pops up.

            Also, there are some things that he doesn’t necessarily mind discussion on, but doesn’t want turning up in a quick Google search by people hunting for witches. This is why some of the issues don’t have an easy “key” posted in, say, the Comments page; then a Google search would just pull up that page with the replacement word, and the witch hunters could then just do a search for that word instead. This way, you have to put in some effort to figure out if your topic is discussed and to hunt for examples to post on Twitter.

          • Plumber says:

            @hilitai

            “Sorry to be the annoying newbie here, but discussions on this site are often conducted in a jargon that is impenetrable to the uninitiated”

            They sure are!

            ““Ant people”? “Ant controversy”..? What…? Can someone explain in a sentence?”

            I was confused about this as well, and I tried to post links to explain, but that didn’t work (I guess blocked), anyway back in 2014 an internet kerfuffle erupted about of all things reviews of video games, some accusations and/or acts of “misogyny” occurred and many pixels were used about a subject that I’ve never heard anyone speak of face-to-face, from this I concluded that internet discussions are oft very different from “meat space” discussions.

            A label for the 2014 video games reviews “controversy” happens to match closely a name for a type of ant.

            I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried!

          • Lambert says:

            >It’s effective, but it does mean a lingo pops up.

            Perhaps that’s a feature.
            Forces people to Lurk Moar.

          • Vorkon says:

            If I recall, it was specifically the name of the group that Moldbug led/inspired that is (or was?) banned, because people tended to either misapply it or use it as a way to say “Boo, outgroup,” and it just generally caused more heat than light when the word came up (much like the words “SJW,” or “Nazi,” to be honest) so people ended up calling that group “Death Eaters,” so in turn it eventually became common practice to call the leader of that group “Voldemort,” despite the fact that his name was never banned, per se, because Voldemort was the leader of the Death Eaters.

            I generally think that tabooing words is mostly counterproductive, (because it just gives rise to more impenetrable jargon) but I do think it’s a fun story. I also rather like the term “Horrible Banned Discourse” arising to replace the term for the racial theory with the same acronym.

    • Walter says:

      “(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.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      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.

    • Doctor Locketopus says:

      > 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.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        I think by definition someone who neither has nor wants a job must be independently wealthy. Granted it’s not a central example of the category, but what else could the phrase mean?

        It’s a serious breakdown of our national character that there can be a large number of people who are independently wealthy and yet poor.

        • Nornagest says:

          I think by definition someone who neither has nor wants a job must be independently wealthy.

          Or a housewife, or living off disability or other welfare payments, or living in the proverbial mother’s basement…

        • John Schilling says:

          I think by definition someone who neither has nor wants a job must be independently wealthy.

          Strictly speaking, any job is inferior to an equivalent combination of handout + hobby(*), because the latter gives you everything a job does plus the option to not do the work and still get the cash. Therefore, anyone who believes a handout comparable to the best job they can hold is plausibly on the table, will not want a job.

          * Meaning unpaid voluntary activities generally, and consider that some of the most rewarding human activities are almost never done for pay.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          I don’t exclude the examples you cite from my definition, but there are nuances.

          A housewife does have a job, though it’s one where they are paid in kind rather than by a salary. It’s not a job where (usually) publicly expressing an unacceptable political opinion can cost them that job — though if we started seeing lots of housewives tweeting support for Trump, I expect we would see attacks on their spouse’s livelihoods.

          The 30-year-old “kid” living in mom’s basement is, for the moment at least, independently wealthy by any reasonable standard, and a central example of the breakdown in national character I mentioned. Ditto for somebody who is able-bodied but content to live on welfare.

          Someone who is actually disabled is a special case. I know such, and I certainly did not mean to denigrate them.

          Somebody for whom no job exists that would pay as well as the dole is, as I said, independently wealthy in the sense that he never has to worry about where his next paycheck is coming from. He is also pretty poor.

          Maybe I’m just playing with words. Doctor Locketopus’s point is that there is in fact a class people who can safely express an unpopular opinion but who are not rich, which is why the left does not see these attacks as simply empowering the rich as Villam described. And maybe the expansion of that class is at least part of what underlies the push for UBI.

          • Aapje says:

            Somebody for whom no job exists that would pay as well as the dole is, as I said, independently wealthy in the sense that he never has to worry about where his next paycheck is coming from. He is also pretty poor.

            ‘Independently poor’?

          • Walter says:

            Yeah, I think it is just word games. We all agree on the existence of the folks who can safely heckle, and that they aren’t only the wealthy, but also those who are judgement proof because they leaped out of the pages of a Theodore Dalrymple article.

    • herbert herberson says:

      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.

    • INH5 says:

      (Also, the underclass, who have nothing to lose. But they probably spend less time online.)

      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.

    • ajakaja says:

      It’s disingenuous and harmful for you to say that the political left do that in general. Especially if you’re extrapolating from this.

  5. Cariyaga says:

    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.

    • Hyzenthlay says:

      I’ll second this. By objective he probably meant “non-psychological damage,” but psychological damage still counts as a real consequence, and certainly has a tangible effect on a person’s life. And I’d guess that for most people who’ve been the target of these types of harassment campaigns, that’s the case. Not everyone loses their job or their friends or their support network, but everyone who becomes a target has to deal with the plausible risk that those things will happen, and that’s objectively stressful for almost anyone.

    • Walter says:

      I mean, they tried to get him fired. That is absolutely damage, and nothing dude should expect from running a blog. I’d be sad, but understand, if he closed the entire blog down after that, not just the CW thread.

  6. sentientbeings says:

    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.

    • John Schilling says:

      +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.

      • sentientbeings says:

        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.

      • eigenmoon says:

        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.

    • MawBTS says:

      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.

      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.

    • b_jonas says:

      > You’re a good man.

      For a moment I thought this would be one of those prompts from the the open threads, and this line was the setup that describes the very unlikely hypothetical scenario, like the zombie apocalypse or the djinn giving me choices or the railway line crossing the Atlantic.

      It’s not. You’re just addressing Scott, not me.

  7. philipkd says:

    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.

    🤷‍♂️

    • azhdahak says:

      If I were running a meetup and someone started rattling off nonsense like that, that’d be as instant a permaban as if they started bringing in armed goons from the Westboro Baptist Church — for the safety of any other attendees who, if they stick around, they might decide are also vile reprobates.

  8. baconbits9 says:

    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.

    • sentientbeings says:

      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.

      • baconbits9 says:

        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.

        • sentientbeings says:

          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.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          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?

          • baconbits9 says:

            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.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Oh, don’t get me wrong: Willful ignorance is my strategy. It’s easier to avoid these things.

            I’m just worried that there is a big failure mode I’m not seeing by, well, deliberately not seeing things.

    • Nornagest says:

      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.

      • albatross11 says:

        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.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Most people will probably never have their jobs threatened by the internet hate machine — I probably won’t, for example

        Man, of course you don’t have to worry, I can’t even tell which witch opinions you hold.

      • whereamigoing says:

        “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.

        • Nornagest says:

          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.

          • hilitai says:

            Attempting to have a good-faith discussion is “stupid”? Was Scott “stupid” also in setting up this blog, or being involve with the CW reddit?

          • theredsheep says:

            I don’t know if I’d call it stupid. More oblivious. He didn’t realize that, in any company, calling out the official company culture is asking for trouble. Dude was hired as a software engineer; he was supposed to fix problems. He saw a problem, he thought he saw a solution, he tried to fix it.

          • brad says:

            What exactly is the distinction between oblivious and stupid? I know the nature of intelligence is a long long discussion, but surely being unaware of what is going around oneself is not something that is going to be strongly associated with a general factor of success.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            Attempting to have a good-faith discussion is “stupid”?

            Attempting to have a good-faith discussion about hot button political issues at work is stupid, especially when your employer has officially come down on the opposite side of you, and your fellow colleagues are the most vocal opponents of your beliefs (to the extent that they think you are Nazi-adjacent if you actually said your beliefs out loud).

            Your employer says lots and lots and lots of things that are not meant to be taken seriously. A lot of things your employer says are outright lies.

          • theredsheep says:

            He was quite obviously aspie, so I call it “oblivious” rather than “stupid.” It’s not stupid for a blind man to fall down a hole and die; it’s just sad.

          • brad says:

            I suppose you were reacting to the word ‘stupid’ in the sense of foolish which has at least a tinge of culpability, and I was thinking of it in the sense of unintelligent regardless of culpability.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Your employer says lots and lots and lots of things that are not meant to be taken seriously. A lot of things your employer says are outright lies.

            This needs repeating, because it’s true and lots of people don’t realize it.

            He heard that management wanted to Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom and did not realize it was a trap.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            Was Ned Stark stupid for confronting Cersei Lannister and making a good-faith effort to spare her life and the lives of her children? (Yes)

            What Damore did was fall for the corporate version of “Comrade Stalin loves freedom and welcomes criticism from his fellow citizens” and he got the corporate equivalent of being sent to Siberia. This is a textbook aspie mistake by an inexperienced nerd who hasn’t yet realized that neurotypical society is based on lying.

          • Walter says:

            I definitely got the twilight zone vibe when I read JD’s thing. Like, ‘how could anyone who knew enough to put this down on paper not know enough not to put this down on paper?’.

            It feels pretty much exactly like the stories that start with someone making a Science Mistake. Like ‘After all that AI work I’m pretty confident it is not a murder bot, I’ll just turn it on’, or ‘this time machine will let me fix history’, or ‘I’m pretty sure this genie will generously interpret my wish’.

            It is like Scott said about Nick Land and grail quests, once upon a time. If you make a mistake at the beginning you end up at the drug store. If you make a mistake at the end it is very very bad. JD managed to figure out all this stuff, and somehow, having carefully painted a beast, he thought that standing in front of it was a good idea.

          • albatross11 says:

            Walter:

            Let’s step back a level. What does it tell you about a culture or society, when you see someone carefully making true statements and documenting them in the service of an argument that they’ve been asked to contribute to, and your main thought is “No, you fool, they’re going to screw you to the wall for writing that!”

            My guess is that:

            a. Societies where that’s a common reaction to making true/defensible statements in such a forum are societies that are worse at making good decisions than ones where that’s a rare reaction to true/defensible statements.

            b. In particular, by firing Damore, Google sent a message to all their other employees that pretty-much guarantees they’ll never get useful heterodox feedback in a company discussion again. Keep firing the people who tell you no, and you are guaranteed to end up hearing only from yes men.

            c. Yes, there’s always some stuff that’s true and socially unacceptable, everywhere and everywhen. But don’t fall off the cliff of the fallacy of grey here–societies differ on how much of the space of true or plausible things is forbidden, often by a great deal, and what we are ultimately discussing here is where *our* society should fall on that spectrum. Google made an explicit decision here that moved themselves further along the “more things are forbidden to say” line, and this will affect the kind of internal feedback and discussion they are able to have for the forseeable future.

          • Plumber says:

            @Walter

            “I definitely got the twilight zone vibe when I read JD’s thing. Like, ‘how could anyone who knew enough to put this down on paper not know enough not to put this down on paper?’…”

            When I first heard some details my initial thought was “Someone showboated for attention and they got it”, but as I learned more details such as “Raised in suburban Illinois” and “Not neuro-typical”, my view changed.
            I think someone put it as “Like a story of a blind man falling into a hole“, obvious to most but too bad barriers weren’t around to warn the guy.

          • Walter says:

            @albatross:

            I pretty much agree with those 3 points, but my point is that JD should have also had those thoughts, before he posted. Like, “You only hear what you want to hear!” are not words you should ever say, because you clearly know that the person you are talking to won’t hear you.

            I guess it is like the song says, “if you don’t know, now you know”.

            @Plumber:

            Yeah, I always feel bad for folks like that. I hope he lands on his feet.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            I enjoyed Walter’s characterization:

            how could anyone who knew enough to put this down on paper not know enough not to put this down on paper?

            One place my mind went, was to management: how could anyone who knew the history of calling for heterodox feedback not know to not call for heterodox feedback?

            I’m reminded of an episode of The West Wing where the White House encourages one of their own to throw his hat in the ring, and then they discover new dirt on him, about the same time as his opposition does, which ruins his career.

            There is such a thing as setting a trap for someone else by accident.

      • Garrett says:

        James Damore only posted internally, and to small groups which were reasonably associated with the topic at-hand (the integrity/diversity/respect teams, and eventually the skeptics group). It was others who decided to bring attention to everyone in the company his heresy, which lead to public distribution and calls for his dismissal.

        Also, something as well-intentioned as that getting someone fired creates a hostile work environment where people who aren’t part of the majority opinion are afraid that if they say anything they will be drummed out – that’s why I left.

        • Viliam says:

          Putting a heresy in writing is already a huge mistake, regardless of where you post it. Especially when you connect it with your name.

          But it’s one of those things that only become obvious in hindsight, for an aspie. (Speaking as a self-diagnosed aspie.)

          It is probably a good rule of thumb that if something seems like a bad idea to do in a communist regime, it is probably also a bad idea to do in a corporate environment. Except you only get fired (in worst case, blacklisted) instead of getting shot.

      • rachelhaywire says:

        Little people are not fine. Where are you getting this idea? Little people get mobbed and deplatformed all the time. The only difference is that we don’t make the news when it happens.

    • gbdub says:

      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.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I get the impression that this has gotten worse since he moved to the Bay.

        Gee, I wonder why?

  9. oneoff_throw says:

    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.

    • Randy M says:

      This is true, hopefully Scott realizes he is respected by a much wider swath than he is hated by.

      • Walter says:

        That is definitely true, but it may be cold comfort.

        Like, those of us who respect and appreciate his work are not sending him money. We aren’t working as his bodyguards, we just click on his page once in a while.

        One maniac writing doxxing twitter bots or calling his boss and trying to get him fired might outweigh the lot of us, in terms of impact on his life.

        • Randy M says:

          Since Scott has not gotten fired or assaulted, but mostly suffered from anxiety over it, comfort is what I’ve got.
          If he gets fired, I might have some money for him.

    • detroitdan says:

      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?

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        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.

  10. aristides says:

    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.

  11. benjdenny says:

    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.

    • Aapje says:

      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.

      • liskantope says:

        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.

      • Vorkon says:

        I hope you’re right. I’m not so sure, though.

        It’s absolutely true that a convoluted chain of “TheMotte is filled with fans of his, who started it after he closed the thread they posted to in his subreddit, but he once wished them luck, so obviously he secretly supports all the Nazis there” will not convince any low-information observers in the same way that “his subreddit is filled with Nazis” might, but there’s two problems with that.

        First, there’s nothing stopping the obsessed people from lying; “his subreddit is filled with Nazis” was never an accurate assessment of either r/SlateStarCodex or even just the CW thread in the first place, but it didn’t stop the obsessed people from saying it. They can still just say, “his subreddit is filled with Nazis” about r/TheMotte without going into all the details of how it started or why it has a weird name, and will be just as convincing to any low-information observer as they would be when talking about r/SlateStarCodex. They might be stretching the truth even farther, but they’re stretching it pretty far to begin with.

        Second, was it ever really the low-information people who were a problem? As others have pointed out, I’ve never run into an “ew, SlateStarCodex is just a bunch of Nazis” comment in the wild myself, and I’d imagine anyone who would be convinced of anything by such a comment is already so far down the rabbit hole that it wouldn’t take any special effort to convince them in the first place. The obsessed people will say, “ew, they’re a bunch of Nazis,” and the low-information observers will say, “oops, I shouldn’t have followed this link from a Nazi, sorry they fooled me” and that will be that. Like Scott said in this post, anyone who has actually cared enough to do any digging easily comes to the conclusion that the obsessed people are crazy, so I don’t think them convincing anyone was ever really the issue. The issue was that the obsessed people were making the argument loudly, and to many different people, in the first place, and that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.

        I really do HOPE you’re right, though…

  12. whereamigoing says:

    “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.

  13. drethelin says:

    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.

    • Nornagest says:

      “Police, I’d like to file a restraining order against xXx420BlazeIt666xXx.”

      • drethelin says:

        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.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          The cops could likely track down the caller if they cared. But the trick is getting them to care.

        • MawBTS says:

          In Eichenwald’s case I believe he had an epileptic seizure (obvious and financially quantifiable harm), plus he had a huge media platform, which helps.

          And I don’t know if Eichenwald considers this a victory. It hasn’t stopped the trolling – he’s one of the most heavily ridiculed journalists on the internet.

  14. Winja says:

    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.

    • Heather says:

      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.

      • detroitdan says:

        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.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          the liberal left really needs to win against the identitarian/authoritarian left. the same is true of the right but from my perspective, whereas the identitarian/authoritarian right is broadly despised and has very low status, the identitarian/authoritarian left is higher status than the liberal left. this is concerning.

          • Viliam says:

            I suspect this is a problem of the “no enemies on the left” meme. Authoritarian left is — arguably — further on the left than the liberal left, therefore a liberal leftist would feel bad for opposing them.

            (And of course, any liberal leftist opposing them would immediately be labeled “Nazi” and “alt-right”.)

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I suspect this is a problem of the “no enemies on the left” meme. Authoritarian left is — arguably — further on the left than the liberal left, therefore a liberal leftist would feel bad for opposing them.

            This is exactly correct. National Review types also have “no enemies to the left”. Only people who have yet to understand the logic of trickle-down economics. But if they have to denounce Richard Spencer, then you’ll see them bare their teeth.

            You rarely see progressives call out other progressives for excess of progressivism. An exception seems to be the Bret Weinstein type thing and this only occurs after they’ve been bitten by the mouth they were feeding.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        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.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          Some of the crazies.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Well, most of that particular kind of crazies, unless you can cite me lots of examples of the behavior Scott reports enacted by people on the right.

            I am unaware of any, but I freely confess I might be missing them because they don’t feel like attacks on me. This is a legit request for education if I am wrong.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        “The right” has as strong a desire to make sure no one hears the bad opinions as “the left” does. It’s just that the left is more effective at it, for now.

        “A plurality (45 percent) of Republicans say the courts should have the power to shut down news outlets that publish stories that are ‘biased or inaccurate.'” — that is from National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg, poll here.

        We need these tactics off the table.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          We need these tactics off the table.

          Agreed. But lest Paul Zrimsek think this is an example of what I am missing, note that there is a well-established difference between the courts doing something and the mob doing something.

  15. Ouroborobot says:

    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.

    • LHN says:

      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.)

      • Ouroborobot says:

        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?

    • Reasoner says:

      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.

      • Reasoner says:

        Another idea: Get a job at a social media website, preferably as a project manager, and tweak the internal algorithms to try & solve the toxoplasma of rage problem. Give online moderators tools to help prevent their communities from going to shit.

    • mtl1882 says:

      I think there will be backlash–it’s just going too far. Many, though not all, simply won’t be able to handle the backlash. They don’t seem particularly tough or informed–they think they are doing some sort of favor to society but are becoming a parody of themselves. I think even members of that crowd will begin to feel embarrassed. The apologies will stop. I think it will stop soon, but the damage in the meantime will be extensive. And when it starts losing power, a few truly committed while do desperate things. But I just don’t see it being able to last very long. I do think some of them may be susceptible to a certain type of historical education. If they read about some really tough, skilled abolitionists who made good, vigorous arguments, they may see a better approach, or at least start to feel embarrassed about theirs and aware that they aren’t being quite as enlightening to society as they think. That goes for other groups as well, with different role models. Hearing someone put your ideas so clearly and strongly is a real relief in some ways.

  16. 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.

    • John Schilling says:

      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 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.

      • albatross11 says:

        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.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        So far as I know, Gish gallop is atheist/skeptic, not SJW.

      • Salentino says:

        The first time I came across the term ‘concern trolling’ was on /r/TheDonald when I left a genuine comment asking how people could still support Trump after some news story painting him in a bad light. My comment got deleted, I was accused of concern trolling and banned.

        • albatross11 says:

          If I’m looking for reasons to discard your argument unread/unheard, then I’ll usually manage to find one. It’s like your mind’s immune system, protecting you from contrary facts by deciding that you can ignore this unwanted claim of fact because it’s coming from the notoriously liberal New York Times or that unwanted claim of fact because it’s coming from a white male Republican. Trying to overcome this tendency is hard, and few people bother. It saves so much thinking….

        • PeterDonis says:

          @albatross11:

          Your point is valid, but it’s also worth noting that, since practically every mainstream media outlet (and certainly the New York Times) has been caught outright lying (never mind putting spin on stories), it’s hard to argue that not trusting them is a bad idea. So the first problem is not so much figuring out how to deal with an unwanted claim of fact, but that there is basically no trustworthy source for facts in the first place.

          • albatross11 says:

            PeterDonis:

            Yeah, I’m not saying “Trust everything the NYT writes,” I’m saying “Don’t dismiss unwanted claims of fact or arguments that make you uncomfortable just because they come from the NYT.” Substitute in “Fox” for “NYT” as needed. The desire to throw away an uncomfortable argument or claim of fact is natural, strong, and dangerous.

  17. J Mann says:

    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.

  18. Heather says:

    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.

    • AG says:

      “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.”

      • Heather says:

        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.

        • gbdub says:

          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.

          • albatross11 says:

            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.

          • gbdub says:

            I agree fully.

          • Heather says:

            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.

          • gbdub says:

            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)

          • Bugmaster says:

            @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.

          • LadyJane says:

            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.

          • PeterDonis says:

            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.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            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.)

          • LadyJane says:

            @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 expresses 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. No, “I am outraged because I am transgender” is not an argument, it’s a statement of fact, and no less justified than saying “fuck off, don’t be such a dick” to someone who just personally insulted you.)

          • Sniffnoy says:

            LadyJane: Hey, if you want to shout as you make an argument, go ahead. I mean preferably don’t if you can avoid it, but the important thing is whether or not you’re making an argument. Civility helps but is not the key thing.

            But I agree you don’t want to waste your time arguing with actual bigots. Really in that case I’d say just downvote/report and move on. Is that shutting down argument? Well, yes. And, I mean, I’d advocate the same for dealing with cranks. So I guess I don’t fundamentally disagree that at some point this is OK (although, again, I’d really recommend just downvoting/reporting if possible rather than shouting at the person); you can’t always worry about shutting down argument. Just, like, some things really are not clear, really do need to be hashed out, and there’s a lot of common cases who will round things off to the nearest cliche and then shout at people on that basis. And I’m particularly wary of shouting at people in place of an argument. Downvoting’s not an argument either, no, but, the thing is, it doesn’t claim to be. Whereas I worry that a lot of shouting at people conveys the impression that it’s basically the same thing and is a generally-acceptable substitute and it’s really not.

            Yeah, I dunno. I guess I don’t have any easily delineated line or conclusion here. If I had to try it’d be something like “Does it seem like this person will actually respond honestly to an argument, or are they just being superficially ‘civil’ in a bad-faith attempt to get taken seriously?” And it seems to me that cranks and bigots both fall on the wrong side of that one (although a crank would be unlikely to actually appear superficially civil, but anti-Semites are notorious for it). But like I said I don’t know? I guess I’d just say you should be pretty damned sure someone’s not an honest arguer before you start doing things that will scare off honest arguers. And like I said — if you make an actual argument, the shouting is not so much of a problem, because hopefully people will recognize the shouting is not essential and ignore it.

          • PeterDonis says:

            @Lady Jane:
            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.

            If it really is an open forum where all ideas can be discussed, then that someone should not post in that forum unless they are actually going to discuss them. As others have pointed out, simply verbalizing someone’s reaction to a dehumanizing statement is not discussing it.

            In other words, you can have forum where all ideas get discussed. Or you can have a forum where people can feel free to verbalize their reactions to dehumanizing statements and have those reactions validated without being argued against. But you can’t have both in the same forum.

            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

            But if you’re allowed to take it as an insult, you can’t have an open forum where all ideas get discussed. If you’re unable to read such a statement without taking it as an insult, then you should not participate in that forum; you should participate in other forums where the social norms are different. You don’t have to have exactly the same social norms in every forum; that’s what different forums are for.

          • PeterDonis says:

            @Sniffnoy:
            you don’t want to waste your time arguing with actual bigots.

            In the case described, the way you would tell whether the person was an actual bigot or was genuinely interested in having a discussion would be to respond with: “What basis do you have for making that claim?” Then the person will either come back with an actual defense of their claim, or they will just continue to make it with no supporting argument. In the latter case, yes, the forum should have norms in place where people who make claims without supporting argument get shut down. (This is one of the key tasks of moderators.)

            The issue with an immediate response of “you are dehumanizing me by making that statement” is that it does not even allow for the first option above.

          • 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.

            I think whether taking it as an insult is justified depends on the statement, on whether it is put as an insult or as a statement of belief.

            Suppose what he says is “The reason there are no female math professors at Harvard is that there are no women that good at math. That isn’t surprising, since math professors at Harvard represent the very tip of a distribution, and the distribution of abilities is tighter for women than for men.”

            That’s a negative categorical statement, but it isn’t an insult.

            Suppose you happen to be a female math professor at Yale who Harvard math professors regard as a peer—perhaps you have rejected a job offer from Harvard. His statement is wrong, but it still isn’t an insult. It doesn’t become an insult until he starts making ignorant claims about why your work isn’t really any good.

            In the case of a statement that is emotional and obviously intended as an insult you are entitled to reply in kind, but it is probably more effective to either ignore it or reply by rebutting it as if it were a serious argument, thus making his emotionalism look bad in contrast with your calm reason.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            Suppose you happen to be a female math professor at Yale who Harvard math professors regard as a peer—perhaps you have rejected a job offer from Harvard. His statement is wrong, but it still isn’t an insult. It doesn’t become an insult until he starts making ignorant claims about why your work isn’t really any good.

            I think the notion of insult you’re using here is much narrower than the way the word is actually used.

            Possibly you could distinguish between “direct insults” and “indirect insults”.

            But even then, it looks like you’re trying to draw a line that would come between “all members of a group you are a member of smell” and “you smell”, and I don’t think that’s a sensible place for a line – or, rather, it is, but the former should be viewed as a stronger statement, not a milder one.

          • 10240 says:

            A negative categorical statement about a group is sometimes justified. More relevantly to the transgender topic, members of a group sometimes claim that a statement is negative, when it actually isn’t.

            That certain topics should be avoided outside the CW threads reflects that they are hot button issues that are liable to cause a flame war that crowds out other topics, nothing else. It doesn’t imply anything about who is right. The claim that black people shouldn’t be enslaved isn’t currently controversial, as virtually everyone agrees with it (while its negation would be very controversial). Transgender topics are currently controversial.

          • Clutzy says:

            Just as a general observation. It seems to me that the transgender debate inspires great confusion in many people because there is little about it that appeals to people’s “common sense”. On top of that, the people who are the biggest trans advocates appear to believe they need not appeal to people’s common sense, nor need they appeal to science, or any other standard method of persuasion.

            Thus, those who are not inclined initially to think transgenderism is genuine, have no reason to ever accept it. And I think, generally, it is the fault of the community which hasn’t learned how to convey the message properly. And maybe I’m a jerk and its not possible to present me with stats about how gender surgery gives $10 of benefits per $1 spent, and maybe my lame “common sense” is just a series of apelike instincts, but that is what I see as the biggest obstacle in such debates.

          • theredsheep says:

            I think it’s rancorous (in part, at least) because it’s at least two distinct issues that get packaged together. On the one hand, it’s a simple matter of deferring to individuals’ choices about the way they’d like to be treated, in a way that causes little apparent harm. If somebody wants to be identified as the opposite sex–even if it’s really, really obvious that they aren’t–it’s hard to think of how that would have terrible consequences for most scenarios. There are things like women’s bathrooms, where I can see how women would be weirded out and it doesn’t seem fair to defer automatically to the smaller group’s sense of psychological comfort at the expense of the larger, but by and large it seems like accommodation should be possible–on that level.

            But it’s not restricted to that level. We’re also asked to accept the philosophical presuppositions behind it all, to modify our beliefs about what constitutes a man or a woman. The two get bundled together, and that’s a much taller order, because the idea that sex and gender are two totally different things is, to me (and I think to many others), like pointing at an object and arguing, “that object is purple, in spite of not reflecting the longer wavelengths of light, because it can be thought of as purple in a socially constructed and culturally informed sense.” It sounds like gibberish, and I can’t even wrap my head around how it could be taken as a true or useful way of thinking. But because the two are bundled together, we are faced with “you must endorse this belief you find ludicrous or you’re morally equivalent to a Klansman.”

            It costs you little or nothing to offer incense to Caesar, to trample on an icon, to eat beef or pork, or to recite a formula about unfalsifiable beliefs. But people have fought and died to avoid doing all of those things, because what’s at issue is not the thing itself, but the ideological surrender such an act would represent. Something similar applies here. I don’t really feel that strongly about where people pee, provided it’s hygienic, but I do feel strongly about not being pressured into mouthing beliefs I don’t agree with. TG is culture war because it gets down to touchy, fundamental questions about what it means to be human.

            No, I don’t know what a practical middle ground would look like.

          • Nick says:

            @theredsheep You’re right as far as that goes, but if that’s not controversial enough, there’s the question of children: if my seven or eight year old child isn’t very masculine, should we consider raising the child as a girl? How about liking to dress up as a girl? What if the child says he would feel more comfortable being treated as a girl? And to top it off, at what point should that expression start being treated medically, and how, and under what legal obligations are the parent, doctors, and/or the medical system? With these questions the idea of a compromise goes from difficult to, as far as I can tell, basically impossible.

          • Viliam says:

            If my three years old child identifies as a dog, will history judge me as a bigoted monster for not giving her dog hormones?

            Yeah, I know what is the sane position now, but the question is how the correct answer will change in ten or twenty years. Because I will probably still need a job 20 years later…

          • LadyJane says:

            The claim that black people shouldn’t be enslaved isn’t currently controversial, as virtually everyone agrees with it (while its negation would be very controversial). Transgender topics are currently controversial.

            @10240: Yes, which is part of what makes this so frustrating for people like myself and Heather. I know that we need to deal with the world as it is and not as we’d like it to be, but it’s still upsetting that our very existence is a source of controversy! And yes, the fact that there was a time when the basic human rights of Black people was a matter of controversy is upsetting too. That’s something that never should have been controversial in the first place. I’m fully aware that these are subjective moral and emotional claims, not rational arguments, but it’s how I feel nonetheless.

            On top of that, the people who are the biggest trans advocates appear to believe they need not appeal to people’s common sense, nor need they appeal to science, or any other standard method of persuasion.

            @Clutzy: Trans activists do make those arguments, all the time. They talk about scientific research indicating a biological basis to gender dysphoria, they talk about the existence of intersex people and how that proves there are people who don’t neatly fit into traditional gender categories, they make semantic arguments about how the concept of sex is an abstraction referring to a strong but by no means absolute distribution of frequently correlated traits, they make historical arguments about how many pre-modern cultures have had a concept of a third gender. People who reject trans identities always end up rejecting those arguments too, and I have little faith that those people are willing to change their minds, regardless of what anyone says to them; I don’t see any degree of evidence that would convince Ben Shapiro to change his views on trans issues.

            The two get bundled together, and that’s a much taller order, because the idea that sex and gender are two totally different things is, to me (and I think to many others), like pointing at an object and arguing, “that object is purple, in spite of not reflecting the longer wavelengths of light, because it can be thought of as purple in a socially constructed and culturally informed sense.”

            @theredsheep: Interesting example, because if you have a pattern of blues and reds that are meshed together finely enough, the human brain will perceive it as purple, even though no individual part of it is emitting violet wavelengths of light. I don’t think many people would object to calling it purple regardless.

            Likewise, if someone appears to be a woman, identifies themselves as a woman, presents themselves as a woman, and has sex characteristics associated with women (at the bare minimum, secondary sex characteristics like feminine features and developed breasts; possibly an artificially crafted vagina if they’ve had sexual reassignment surgery), then it seems reasonable to treat them as women. Anatomically, they might not be cis women, but they’re clearly not cis men either, so claiming “trans women are just dudes in dresses” is objectively wrong by any definition that isn’t wholly based on genitalia or chromosomes (and in practice, regardless of what they might claim, almost no one’s mental definition of sex/gender is wholly based on genitalia, and literally no one’s is wholly based on chromosomes).

            So at that point, the only options are to classify trans women as some other thing (which is usually met with resistance from the same people who insist trans women aren’t women, considering all the “only two genders” arguments), or to default to treating them as either men or women even if neither of those are entirely accurate from a purely anatomical perspective. And if we’re going with the latter option, treating them as the gender identify as (and, in many cases, the gender they better resemble) seems both more ethical and more practical.

            If my three years old child identifies as a dog, will history judge me as a bigoted monster for not giving her dog hormones?

            Yeah, I know what is the sane position now, but the question is how the correct answer will change in ten or twenty years. Because I will probably still need a job 20 years later…

            @Viliam: Ah, the old Slippery Slope fallacy. Funny how allowing gay people to get legally married didn’t result in people being able to marry dogs, despite all the arguments to the contrary just 10-15 years back. People taking dog hormones seems like an even more ridiculously unlikely outcome.

          • Anatomically, they might not be cis women, but they’re clearly not cis men either

            If the only context for such arguments involved people who were by all obvious measures women and men only if you checked their DNA or took a careful look at their genitals, the trans position would be much more convincing. But, so far as I can tell, the argument actually being pushed is that one is obliged to treat someone as the gender that person claims to be, whether or not you perceive the person as that gender.

            That’s a lot less convincing, a lot more like the demand that people accept other people’s orders about what they must believe, or at least pretend to believe.

          • 10240 says:

            @LadyJane Yes, you are upset that transgender issues are controversial. But, as you seem to acknowledge, pretending that they are not controversial (e.g. by allowing your transgender-related views in non-CW threads where politically controversial topics are normally not allowed) wouldn’t make them uncontroversial.

            Your existence is not controversial. Nobody is claiming that you don’t exist. Certain claims most transgender people make are controversial.

            In Categories…, Scott wrote

            The project of the transgender movement is to propose a switch from using chromosomes as a tiebreaker to using self-identification as a tiebreaker.

            If the transgender movement actually phrased it like that, asking people to change the definition of certain words, the debate would be much less heated, with less mutual flinging of insults. Not all of us would necessarily agree with the request, but the fact that you feel like you are a woman in some sense, and the fact that you would like people to use definitions of words such as ‘man’, ‘woman’, under which you are a woman, are uncontroversially true. But in my experience this is not what most transgender people say. They say that the only legitimate definition of ‘man’, ‘woman’ etc. is one under which they are [their claimed gender] (actually they usually don’t even acknowledge the possibility that a word may have multiple different definitions), and anyone who doesn’t think so is ignorant and transphobic — even though most of us have been used to a definition different from yours since forever.

            ——

            Much of the controversy is, I think, caused by the apparent lack of understanding of the distinction between a disagreement about facts and a disagreement about definitions by many people on both sides of the debate. (Explained in Categories…, I guess you’ve read it. Scott wrote that post to argue against the notion that “an MtF transgender is a woman” is a false factual statement, but it’s an equally valid argument against the notion that “an MtF transgender is a man” is a false factual statement.)

            It’s clear (assuming we realize that a word may have multiple definitions in use) that there are definitions (including definitions in popular use) under which you are a woman. It’s also clear that there are (popular) definitions under which you are a man. When Alice says that you are a man (knowing that you are MtF transgender), it’s clear that she is using some definition under which you are, in fact, a man. She knows that under the definition under which you consider yourself a woman, you are a woman. There is no factual disagreement between you. Why does it bother you? Why is it a problem that there is some categorization under which you are a blah and not a bleh, and some people use ‘man’ to mean ‘blah’, and ‘woman’ to mean ‘bleh’? I’ve never seen any transgender person explain that.

            The definition I (and I think many of us) have picked up during our formative years is
            (1) Sex is an immutable, abstract categorization of a person that’s constant throughout one’s lifetime. The main categories are male and female, though a small number of people may not fall into either. — I think we are on the same page here. Indeed, most transgender people say they have always been the gender they identify as, rather than that it has changed at some point.
            (2) It is (or it is determined by) a physical, biological/anatomical trait. Definitely not a characteristic of one’s mind. I haven’t been told a single, official definition; the definitions/characteristic traits I’ve picked up over the years include ones based on appearance, genitals, internal anatomy, chromosomes, fetal hormones. — This is the part where we depart. (2) implies that only anatomical intersex conditions may fall into neither male nor female. (1) implies that current genitalia cannot be the basis of the definition, as it can change during one’s life — a genitalia-based definition must be based on genitalia at birth. (Indeed, we would agree that a man whose genitals are severed in a freak accident is still a man.) (1) implies that appearance can only be a clue, not the defining trait, as it can be easily changed.

            I wanted to ask a trans person this for a long time: When you say “I’m a woman” or “I feel like I’m a woman”, what’s the definition of the word “woman” in these sentences? It’s clearly not a biological definition (especially if you are pre-op, more especially if you say you’ve always been female). The alternative definition I’ve seen, promoted by trans people, is that women are those people who identify as women. However, this is a circular definition. Clearly “bluh are those people who identify as bluh” makes no sense, at least without some other definition of bluh (and if we have some other definition, that may end up conflicting with this one).

            When you were a child, you learned the words ‘boy’, ‘girl’. You were told various defining traits, like boys have willies, girls have pussies. You had a willy. You were told you were a boy. What made you decide you were a girl? What made you think ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ didn’t actually mean what your parents and everyone else told you they meant?

            ——

            Actually the notion of abstract categories I’ve talked about gives me some idea what you might mean, and it might give you some idea what I mean. It looks like we have this notion in our mind that there are these abstract, invariant categories of people that roughly correspond to sexual anatomy. Indeed, your claim that you are a woman wouldn’t make any sense without the notion of abstract categories that don’t always exactly correspond to one’s current anatomy. And I presume something in your mind tells you that you are in the category that contains most biological females.

            But if these are categories of people, it follows that other people also fall into one of the categories. And given the definitions we learn, and given the fact that we tell other people’s sex based on physical characteristics, for most of us the categories are based on biology, at least when considering other people. (Perhaps ourselves as well, at least for those of us who don’t have a mental switch — it seems to be under debate if everyone has one.) As such, it may be that Bob falls into a different category in my categorization, yours, or his own.

            Also, it’s still not explained why you insist on defining ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘she’, ‘he’ etc. using a categorization based on self-identification, rather than based on biology (approx. the definition I’ve outlined above), even though they have traditionally been used the latter way, and why most trans people insist that in societal situations where we categorize people based on sex, we use a self-identification-based definition rather than another one.

            Note that the fact that we usually determine someone’s sex based on appearance doesn’t imply that our categories must exactly correspond to appearance. We humans have the notion that there is a truth independent of what we currently see or know. (We would agree with the sentence “If 16-year-old Jack claims he’s 18, even if he manages to convince everyone that he’s 18, he’s still actually 16”, even if everyone who talks to him would say he’s 18.) Indeed, if the categories are invariant, they can’t exactly correspond to appearance, as apparent gender may be different at different times.

          • LadyJane says:

            @10240: In common usage, ‘male’ and ‘female’ are defined by an entire set of traits, not just genitalia. I’m not even going to get into the idea of social gender roles, because that would complicate things even further; just talking purely in terms of anatomy and biology, there are several different characteristics that define sex.

            There’s genetics (men have XY chromosomes, women have XX chromosomes), biochemical factors (men and women have different estrogen-to-testosterone ratios), primary sex characteristics (men have penises, testes, and all the equipment to impregnate others; women have vaginas, uteruses, and all the equipment to be impregnated), and secondary sex characteristics (men have facial hair, significantly more body hair, narrower hips, and flat breasts; women have no facial hair, significantly less body hair, wider hips, and developed breasts). You can go even further and talk about tertiary sex characteristics, which are more like trends and tendencies (men tend to have larger noses, chins, and brows, while women tend to have rounder faces; men tend to be taller and more muscular, women tend to be slimmer and have narrower shoulders; women tend to have finer hair, and smoother and softer skin).

            About 99% of people fit neatly into one of those two boxes. Some of them might diverge on the tertiary characteristics, but not on the primary or secondary ones; there are tall muscular women and slender effeminate men, but those women still have have vaginas and developed breasts, and those men still have penises and flat chests and facial hair. But then you have people with chromosomes that don’t match their sex characteristics, or primary sex characteristics that don’t match their secondary ones. Some of those people get classified as “intersex” at birth, but those are the ones who tend to be visibly intersex as infants (i.e. have mixed or ambiguous genitalia). Others don’t develop their intersex traits until later in life (e.g. assigned-males who develop fully-formed female breasts during puberty, assigned-females who develop penises during puberty), or only find out they’re intersex from genetic testing (e.g. assigned-females who have XY chromosomes, but developed wholly female anatomical traits due to androgen insensitivity).

            I’d argue that anatomically speaking, trans people should be considered intersex for three reasons: First, gender dysphoria itself seems like it’s simply a particularly subtle intersex condition, involving some kind of mismatch between the neural wiring of the brain/central nervous system and the body’s hormone levels and/or limbic system. Second, many trans people have some other naturally-occurring anatomical intersex conditions (I’ve known two other trans women who had developed breasts, wide hips, a lack of body hair, and a distinctly feminine scent, despite having never taken any kind of hormone treatments). Third, even trans people who don’t naturally develop any anatomical intersex conditions will still end up developing intersex traits if they take hormone treatments (a trans woman will develop breasts, a trans man will develop facial and body hair). That last one might seem controversial because it involves an alteration of the body’s natural state, but nonetheless, a trans woman’s doctor will have to take her breasts into consideration just as much as her penis when assessing risks and making diagnoses.

            If we lived in a world where “person that looks and smells female and has all the associated secondary sex characteristics, but has male genitalia” was considered a valid gender identity in itself, separate from ‘man’ or ‘woman’, then I wouldn’t feel a need to classify myself in the same category as cis women. But since our society only gives those two options, it just makes sense for me to identify myself with the category that I feel closer to and resemble more.

          • As I said earlier, I don’t think the disagreement is entirely over the definitions. It would be if the definition used by one side was “you are a woman if you say you are a woman,” and there may be some for whom it is. But I think it is pretty clear from Lady Jane’s post that that isn’t her definition. Hers is something more like “If you have mostly characteristics typical of females you are a woman, even if you have some characteristics typical of males.”

            That definition doesn’t solve the problem of how to classify people who don’t fit clearly in either category, both because there is no clear rule for weighting characteristics and because, even if there were such a rule, there would be some people who ended up somewhere in the middle. But it does take care of the question for at least some of the not-quite-entirely-male or female people.

            But given that rule, someone who claims that Lady Jane is male may be disagreeing with her about facts. He may feel that if enough of her factual claims were true he would agree that she was a woman, or at least not a man. But he may think she is exaggerating the facts in order to get her desired classification, in which case he really is disagreeing with her about the facts.

            And she may reasonably feel insulted by the claim that she is either lying or deluding herself.

          • theredsheep says:

            @Nick: I think child transition anxiety is something of a downstream effect from the main issue of parroting-nonsense. I see people argue passionately about it, yes, but I also see people argue passionately about women’s athletic records being broken unfairly, and I’m pretty sure those same people never cared about women’s athletics before. Which isn’t to say their anxiety for their kids isn’t genuine, just that it’s more a subset of a generalized fear of “the crazy is catching.”

            @LJ: As DF said, this is not limited to total, near-perfect transitions, but also to term-swapping, gender fluidity, and broad claims like “biological sex is a social construct.” But as for the total transitions, imagine you employ a sci-fi combination of hormones, genetic tinkering, and plastic surgery to slowly turn a man into a perfect facsimile of a horse, including the mind. At some point in the process, it would become ludicrous to call this person human anymore. I would, personally, not be terribly bothered about where that point is, because I would be too busy screaming and/or ingesting controlled substances to banish the thought of it. My anxieties would not be much eased by the knowledge that the man brought this on himself knowingly and deliberately because he felt he would be happier as a horse. Apologies for being blunt–and you probably know this already–but that’s pretty much what you’re up against here. Only less so.

          • Nick says:

            I think child transition anxiety is something of a downstream effect from the main issue of parroting-nonsense.

            That could be. It’s certainly seemed to me, the last year or two, that the child angle is a really big deal and the driver of a lot of concern about trans issues. But a big part of that might just be my reading Rod Dreher.

          • theredsheep says:

            I read Rod too, but I try to keep some perspective on him, because he’s quite excitable.

            Since it’s too late to edit, I’d like to apologize if my last remarks went a little too far, LJ. It was early in the morning after a night of little sleep and before I had caffeine. I could have expressed that more delicately. I’d so so now with elaboration, except I still haven’t caught up on that sleep.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          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.

        • albatross11 says:

          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.

        • “Hey, I exist,” but Bob is worried that Alice will say “I disagree,”

          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.

          • LadyJane says:

            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.”

          • Aapje says:

            @LadyJane

            You are not the equivalent of an economist though. You are the person buying some things at some stores, not the person analyzing all buying decisions at all stores.

            If you argue that some products don’t need to be produced because you never buy them, that’s not something that I’m going to believe, because your opinion is largely based on singular experience.

            The false claim that being a domain expert makes one knowledgeable about everyone else with a (supposedly) similar trait is actually a common claim in SJ circles, but one that I dispute.

          • 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.”

            I thought the argument was over whether your argument against what they were doing belonged in a CW thread or not.

            My reaction to your hypothetical would be that if the person goes out of his way to misgender you, he is probably behaving badly and should be treated accordingly, although even there I can imagine a more charitable interpretation of his behavior.

            If he simply refuses to use your preferred gender–deliberately avoids gender specific language when talking with you–I don’t think he is behaving badly. That is how I act with regard to someone who self-identifies as one gender but comes across to me as the other. Using the preferred gender would be a false statement about my view of the world, which I would much prefer not to make, using the other gender would call attention to the disagreement between my view of the world the other person’s view, or at least claimed view, which is rude if there is no reason to do it.

          • It occurs to me that there is an interesting older equivalent of the issue Lady Jane and I are discussing.

            Consider the attitude of a Catholic who does not believe in divorce to a woman who has divorced and remarried. His actual belief is that she is living in sin. Under most circumstances it would be rude for him to call attention to it. But it would also be rude for her to insist on his referring to her as “Mrs Smith” when, from his standpoint, she isn’t Mrs Smith, she is still Mrs Jones.

          • 10240 says:

            @LadyJane The claim that someone isn’t a real scholar can be considered a negative factual claim. The claim that (say) “an MtF transsexual is a man” (which is I guess the sort of claim we are talking about) is not a factual statement, but mainly a statement about the speaker’s preferred definition of the word ‘man’, as explained in The categories were made for the man. Scott wrote that post to argue against the notion that “an MtF transsexual is a woman” is a false factual statement, but it’s an equally valid argument against the notion that “an MtF transsexual is a man” is a false factual statement (a claim that transsexuals commonly make, which seems to be their main reason of getting offended).

          • @10240:

            The statements you are discussing are in part a matter of definition, in part claims of fact.

            Consider my reaction to two “transsexuals” I know. One is a young woman who has adopted a male name, claims to be male, but presents just as she did before making that change–as an ordinarily female woman. The other is an MtF transsexual, post surgery, who comes across to me as a slightly odd woman, not a man.

            In my view, the first is a woman–and so is the second. I am using the same definitions in both cases.

            When I say that the first is a woman, I am making a factual claim—that by any reasonable definition other than “what this person says she wants to be regarded as”—she is a woman. I wouldn’t say that the second is a man in that sense, because she isn’t.

            If the first’s definition is “you are whatever you say you are,” we are disagreeing about definitions. But I don’t think that is the definition that most people on either side of such controversies have in mind.

          • 10240 says:

            The statements you are discussing are in part a matter of definition, in part claims of fact.

            True: once a definition is fixed, “X is a woman” is a factual claim. However, most of the time X calls Y a man/woman and Y gets offended because they are transgender and consider themselves a woman/man, there is no factual disagreement: for any fixed definition of man/woman, they would agree about whether Y is a man/woman. They only disagree about what definition of man/woman should be used. This is much like the disagreement about whether ancaps are anarchists.

            If the first’s definition is “you are whatever you say you are,” we are disagreeing about definitions. But I don’t think that is the definition that most people on either side of such controversies have in mind.

            It definitely seems to me that this is the definition many pro-transgender people insist on using (though some accept that this is not a reasonable expectation when someone entirely presents as not their claimed gender). More precisely, I think they would say you are whatever you internally consider yourself/identify as. This differs from the definition based purely on what one claims in that they would say that a man who claims to be a woman but doesn’t actually think of himself as a woman, and considers his claim a lie, is a man.

          • baconbits9 says:

            as explained in The categories were made for the man.

            Really? We are going to start linking anti-semantic sites in this thread?

          • John Schilling says:

            The claim that someone isn’t a real scholar can be considered a negative factual claim.

            Perhaps, but it can also be considered a statement about the speaker’s preferred definition of “scholar”. And the bit where it is being qualified as “real scholar”, makes this seem like the most appropriate interpretation.

          • 10240 says:

            @John Schilling It could be, but the offensive interpretation is the one where it’s a factual claim. I think “not a real scholar” would still be interpreted as being a factual claim at least in part, and that’s why it would be considered offensive; I’d assume the “real” would probably be put in the claim to avoid nitpicking about that the target is technically a scholar by virtue of (say) having academic employment or published papers.

        • toastengineer says:

          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)”.

          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?

        • Sebastian_H says:

          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.

          • theredsheep says:

            I’m going to second this, though I’m perfectly straight and really can’t claim the moral right to be so blunt myself.

          • Nick says:

            Good post. I just want to make explicit something I think was implicit in your comparison at the beginning, Sebastian: while some folks here are trans and no one here is a fetus, nevertheless for anyone whose mother considered an abortion, or whose mother was counseled to have one, or whose mother was in a very difficult spot where some think it is a just decision for the mother to have an abortion, this is a live concern. It’s very much a question for children of poor, unmarried mothers whether they or their older siblings should have been carried to term or not, and whether there is personhood at conception or at 12 weeks or 24 or what have you.

        • AG says:

          @Heather:

          I deliberately obscured who is what group in my comment because the people getting outgrouped, and want to strike back with “I AM HUMAN” responses changes from forum to forum.

          I’m sure that you, too have an outgroup, whose members are angry that you question their validity and have chucked them into the Culture War box.

          And in every forum I’ve seen this play out “the personal is political” nearly instantly gets exploited by bad actors to justify bad behavior. Such as deciding to harass and doxx the person hosting a CW thread…

    • Hoopyfreud says:

      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.

      • Hoopyfreud says:

        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.

        • gbdub says:

          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.

          • InvalidUsernameAndPassword says:

            Some CW-relevant views seem to be held mostly because they are controversial (aka “triggering the snowflakes”).

    • whereamigoing says:

      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.

      • Heather says:

        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.

        • wanda_tinasky says:

          Disclaimer: I’m aware of the irony of engaging in CW-worthy debate in a post explicitly about the dangers of CW. Mea Culpa.

          I take offense at something someone said because it invalidates my experience

          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?

          • Heather says:

            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?

          • gbdub says:

            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.

          • wanda_tinasky says:

            @Heather

            I have a lot more justification in feeling offended

            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?

            they’re providing ammunition to oppress me

            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.

          • arlie says:

            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.

            If I had a dollar for every time someone told me (all) X is Y, when I was X but not Y, or stated this “fact” in my presence, I’d be richer than Bill Gates.

            “Math is hard – no one likes it”. “Women this and men that.” “Everyone agrees with obviously-false-idea”. “Everyone loves music”. “GUIs are much easier to use than anything involving text”. “No one would ever behave ethically unless they were scared that an all-knowing all-powerful being would punish them for breaking His rules.”

            When I was younger, this could pretty easily get me questioning my own experience.

            If all people from my country have certain attributes that I don’t have … and just about everyone I hear from agrees on the first part, while like-as-not trying to convince me that I really do have those attributes – it basically means that they have no interest in me or my experience, except to demand that I portray them as consistent with their beliefs.

            Or else it means I’m crazy, and I really do want/enjoy stereotypical-thing-I-actually-hate yet somehow can’t admit this to myself.

            Ditto if the label applies to my gender, race, appearance, religion, profession, age group, etc.

            And yes, it is perfectly possible to wind up wondering if you actually are crazy, and the experience you think you had probably isn’t real. After all, people occassionally do experience hallucinations, or simply misremember experiences.

            Now you can get into a nit-picky argument about whether to refer to that as “invalidating my experience”, “attempting to invalidate my experience”, “displaying their own cluelessness” or “commiting normal verbal oversimplification, while really meaning ‘most’ rather than ‘all’. But if you insist on that argument when I’m trying to describe my experience, or particularly if I’m trying to explain why I don’t like it when you insist on saying such things to/with/at me, I’m going to get increasingly angry with you.

            And the more people have been unanimous about either insisting that Black is White or keeping silent while others insist on it, the more annoyed I’m likely to be.

            Fortunately, I’m not in the same position as Heather – I don’t have to deal with the same level of denial of my experience that she’s going to get from the people who routinely insist that humans come in exactly two distinct categories, each plainly labelled and identifiable at birth.

            But I can certainly empathize with that part of her experience. Listening to that opinion has got to get incredibly old. And I think it does attempt to invalidate her experience, and exclude it from the domain of what is possible – in fact, that’s precisely what the people stating these views want to convince everyone to believe.

            I’m still not keen on having every thread be about this class of issue, but that’s because I suspect it would destroy any feeling that there’s any common ground among people on the list, and that might ultimately destroy the entire value of the space for discussing controversial topics. But I can see why Heather wants her experience (in this important-to-her area) to be part of normal discourse, not pushed off into a corner.

            I’d be unhappy if e.g. software engineering became a taboo topic, to be mentioned only in designated areas. Lots of others would doubtless be unhappy for parenting to be treated similarly. (Whereas I probably wouldn’t notice.) And those two aren’t even controversial in most circles.

          • InvalidUsernameAndPassword says:

            Gbdub, your point is well taken but I feel you missed a distinction that would have made your post so much better: yes, accepting the fragment of gender theory necessary to conceive of the existence of trans people might be threatening to the personal gender identity of the cis listener. On the other hand, denial that trans people are a thing is invariably a big deal for the trans listener. That’s an asymmetry right there.
            Because let’s not pretend that there aren’t a lot of interactions that can be summarized as:
            Alice: I am a woman.
            Bob: Yeah right, lol…

            I mean, I’m trans and I sometimes pretend not to care what pronouns people use to refer to me, but that’s just me poking some light fun at the performative, over the top wokeness of some cis people. Ultimately of course I care, greatly, and I don’t there’s one trans person on Earth who doesn’t.

          • Rana Dexsin says:

            Ultimately of course I care, greatly, and I don’t there’s one trans person on Earth who doesn’t.

            I don’t know if I could name them right now, but I have memories of knowing several who at least at one point seemed pretty solidly in the camp of “don’t care much”; I think some of them later changed their positions, but to say that this reflects the underlying reality for all of them seems like an exaggeration. (It may be relevant that many of these people come from some circles I’ve been around where there were very strong norms of respecting self-declared pronouns to start with, in ways I imagine would be considered extreme around here. That may affect how loose they are willing to be a lot of the time, given the backstop of being able to return to being strict when they need it without finding the rug pulled out from under them in the meantime.)

            I definitely know one today who cares in some social contexts, but doesn’t care on the ground level in others. Except that she finds this position too awkward to explain in practice and worries that it might cause social noise (“wait, what? I thought…”) if the contexts ever collide, so she winds up correcting people in a large subset of the don’t-care contexts regardless.

        • Nick says:

          And someone else is saying, “I take offense that I am being asked to be inoffensive by slightly changing my speech,” more or less.

          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?

          Like, I haven’t met anyone, anyway, who has suffered any real trauma or danger from being asked to use gender neutral pronouns.

          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.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            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 😛 ).

          • Nick says:

            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.

          • gbdub says:

            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?

            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.

          • Nick says:

            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.

          • gbdub says:

            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.

          • Nick says:

            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).

            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.

          • gbdub says:

            I don’t think we’re in significant disagreement, you’re just talking about SSC in particular, and I’m being general.

          • arlie says:

            Where is the falsehood?

            Many of the theories advanced re gender identity are pretty weird. The terminology is hard to remember for non-specialists and aggravating. At least two thirds of what people say about the reasons for this, or how it works in general, is probably wrong, and we mostly don’t know which two thirds.

            But anyone who believes that humans come in two categories, always distinguishable at birth, is either a small child, or willfully ignorant.

            Google Guevedoce. Yes, that’s a special case, with known biological causes. But one exception is all you need to invalidate an incorrect theory.

            Sure, you can rescue your theory by adding epicycles.

            But there will still be people who don’t identify with any gender, people who oscillate between feeling/acting male and feeling acting female, and people whose genitals appear female at birth but masculinize at puberty. And of course people who identify with a gender that doesn’t match their physique .. or who changed that phyique to match their identity.

            Being rigid about which of those you are willing to call “he” or “she” has nothing to do with truth or falsehood.

            On the other hand, insisting they don’t actually exist IS simply commiting falsehood.

          • Nick says:

            @gbdub Agreed.

          • Being rigid about which of those you are willing to call “he” or “she” has nothing to do with truth or falsehood.

            Let us suppose that 49% of humans are unambiguously male, 49% are unambiguously female, and 2% are in neither category. Calling someone you perceive as unambiguously male “she” is a falsehood.

            If that isn’t obvious, apply your argument to the question of guilt and innocence. Do you really want to argue that, because some defendants are not clearly either innocent or guilty, rigidly refusing to say someone is guilty when you are sure he is innocent has nothing to do with truth or falsehood?

            The fact that there are some ambiguous cases has been known for thousands of years—Jewish law provides for two categories other than male and female and discusses how gender related religious obligations apply to them. That doesn’t mean that whether someone is male or female is defined by what that person says he is.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            yet from time to time there appears persons of sex so doubtful, that it remains uncertain from which sex they take their name; though it is customary to give them a masculine name, as the more honored. For no one ever called them Hermaphroditesses.

            — St. Augustine, City of God Book XVI Ch. 8

            Intersex people are an empirical fact that no one ever had to mindlessly adopt transgender ideology to accept. Good thing, too, since the ideology was practically invented last week.

        • whereamigoing says:

          “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.)

        • liskantope says:

          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.

          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.

        • Sebastian_H says:

          You’re giving them too much power. Lots of people in my youth thought that I wasn’t a real man because I was gay. Sometimes they would call me “she” or “girl” to hammer that point home. That doesn’t invalidate my experience.

          Also part of me thinks you’re overdrawing it. I’ve seen huge offense taken at someone merely assuming a seemingly obvious gender. Assuming gender is going to be right a huge percentage of the time, just like assuming heterosexuality will be right most of the time (though less often than assuming gender). Taking offense at that level is just wrong. Nowadays people assume my heterosexuality at weird times, and I either correct them or don’t depending on the situation. But getting mad about the 90% guess (or 99% guess for cis) really is hyper sensitivity. If we ONLY got mad at the people who refuse to be gently corrected, that would be one thing. But the current social stance seems to be that we should get offended if they assume the overwhelmingly majority case, and that’s just being too touchy to be productive.

        • arlie says:

          Yes. Exactly. Heather’s experience is so different from mine that she’s likely to ‘invalidate’ mine every time she generalizes from her own.

          But I don’t care.

          From where I sit, the requirement that we apply a gender tag just to speak about a person is unfortunate at best, and actively harmful at worse.

          Imagine that we had 4 pronouns instead, beong O, A, B, and AB, and the first thing announced about every baby was their blood type. Why would this be a good idea?

          The only real reason (other than tradition) that it’s important to split people into two categories, and label them accurately, is if it’s also customary to treat them differently based on category.

          That leads to an entirely different CW argument, with a certain set of people insisting that because the averages are different, individuals should be treated as if they were exactly equal to the average for their gender, even if they are obviously something else. (Joe of the Weak Back should carry Jane StrongWoman’s packages and open doors for her, Ms I-Have-no-Soft-Skills should be put in customer service, and Mr Math-Phobe should be trained as an engineer….) That kind of crap, though rarely expressed quite this bluntly. (Usually the claim is that none of those individuals matter, and/or that none of them exist.)

          Depending on how that perennial argument erupts, Heather and I will probably be on opposite sides of it – she wants to be treated as a woman, and I want to be treated as a human.

          But frankly, this felt need to tag everyone “correctly” makes me expect an agenda of treating people differently based on their tag, in ways that I probably won’t like.

          So why not try insisting that AB people love children, and should do all the child rearing, while O people are natural engineers and scientists, A’s should be in management, and B’s should do customer service? Or whatever.

        • The only real reason (other than tradition) that it’s important to split people into two categories, and label them accurately, is if it’s also customary to treat them differently based on category.

          Correct. And it is. For a very good reason.

          Humans, like other organisms, are “as if designed” by evolution for reproductive success. Hence we put a lot of effort and attention into mate search. Hence the categories “possible mate” and “not possible mate” are of great importance to us. For most of us, a potential mate is someone of the opposite sex.

          Obviously, not all women were possible mates for me—and at this point no woman other than my wife is. But because mate search is a pattern that runs through human behavior, that simple binary categorization is natural and useful and common to, I think, all human societies, although some have additional categories as well.

        • PeterDonis says:

          @arlie:
          From where I sit, the requirement that we apply a gender tag just to speak about a person is unfortunate at best, and actively harmful at worse.

          I agree; I wish our language had a neutral pronoun that could be applied to anyone without giving offense.

          One option might be “they” (and its corresponding forms for other cases), which seems awkward but maybe we could get used to it. At least it might be better at avoiding offense, since, as Douglas Hofstadter once remarked, “There is/are no group(s) actively demanding equality between singular and plural”.

        • Vorkon says:

          At least it might be better at avoiding offense, since, as Douglas Hofstadter once remarked, “There is/are no group(s) actively demanding equality between singular and plural”.

          I dunno, the conflict between collectivists and individualists seems pretty central to modern discourse, if you ask me. :op

        • arlie says:

          @DavidFriedman It sounds like what you really want is 3 categories:
          – person of reproductive age, capable of bearing children, seeking co-parent
          – person of reproductive age, capable of siring children, seeking co-parent
          – other

          Both of the first two categories are much smaller than the third. If the primary goal of pronouns really were “helping people identify potential mates”, then English would be overdue for an update.

          But also, if that were the primary goal of pronouns, there wouldn’t be languages that support a non-gendered 3rd person singular.

        • Clutzy says:

          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.

          To be frank, this is simply untrue. While it may be true in the small sample size of people who consistently interact with you and you have conditioned to your preferences, it is entirely the opposite with the remaining segment of society. Most people are not memorable. As an example, on this forum there are only a dozen or so commenters that are memorable to me: David, Cass, Lady, HBC, John, Plumber, and maybe a few others. Most are fairly forgettable and don’t have a unique voice. Am I to recall all of their political positions, or simply take each post as it is? Obviously I must take each on its own, otherwise the garbage collection system in my brain would become overloaded with trash.

          Now simply apply this to the world. The burden is much greater to the world to call you “she” if you appear to be “he” or vice versa, than it is for you to just nod. To bring up a significant culture war incident that is on topic that happened recently, there was the transwoman in Gamestop that went ballistic on a teller. Who was imposing the burden? Any objective observer would say it was the crazy person stomping around, throwing a tantrum, not the polite person making $10 an hour.

        • Clutzy says:

          I agree; I wish our language had a neutral pronoun that could be applied to anyone without giving offense.

          Why would this be good? It is simply a desire for large majorities to lose information that they are entitled to for what gain?

        • RC-cola-and-a-moon-pie says:

          Hi, Heather. Like many others in this I feel conflicted about weighing in on the merits of controversial sociopolitical issues in this particular post — I’m half expecting for Scott to wait until the dust settles and pronounce a mass ban on all of us!

          But in the interest of mutual understanding I figured I’d make one point on the asymmetry issue. I honestly view the question of asymmetry the opposite way that you do. I am a passionate adherent of an intellectual worldview where what matters most is intellectual liberty and where accidents of birth like race or sex are obviously important but are what should be deemphasized in interpersonal discussion. That’s why if you told me that you believed I was a different race than I believe I am, or that I am the opposite sex that I believe I am, I might view your opinion as puzzling and be curious why you hold it but I would never view that sort of thing as a deep assault. That isn’t because I care any less than you do about what sex I am. It’s just a disagreement and we should celebrate polite disagreement. It’s precisely the opposite situation, where people on one side are told that refusal to acquiesce in the opposing conceptual framework, that presents a basic threat. This whole thing, everything good about our society and culture, was built on the premise that the way we do things is that we need to express our opinions respectfully but our beliefs are our own. I appreciate that you don’t want to shut down views opposed to your own but I have seen some on your side express views that basically discredit those who disagree with them as evil people who should be ostracized or worse. I probably can’t hope to convince you that I’m right about all this in a short blog comment, but I hope that at least you may recognize that there is a good-faith view on the other side that sees the asymmetry in harm as working the other way.

        • arlie says:

          It is simply a desire for large majorities to lose information that they are entitled to for what gain?

          Why are they entitled to know someone’s gender, by whatever rules they happen to be using?

          In particular, does this mean they are entitled to strip anyone they aren’t sure of, and check what’s between their legs? Perhaps demand a sample so as to do an instant DNA test? Is knowing a person’s gender that important to you, that it matters more than someone else’s privacy or bodily integrity?

          Would it be reasonable for someone to do this to you? Even if you look 100% like a particular gender, and follow all your local sterotypes 100%, never ever violating gender norms, you might just be some trannie trying to pass, particularly if you present as male.

          Or are you one who advocates for labelling all people clearly, while allowing for the occassional change of label? (I.e. trans people exist, but intersex – physically or mentally – do not, according to yourr beliefs.)

          Put bluntly, I don’t see that a random stranger is entitled to information on my gender. If they meet me in person, or hear my voice, they’ll make a guess. Sometimes they’ll guess based on other attributes even without meeting me. And sometimes people will tell them my gender, based on their own best guess.

          Given current pronouns, and people’s crazy reactions to finding they’ve misgendered someone, I might correct errors. But then again, I may not bother. Your need to colour me pink or blue in your mind is not my problem. It’s yours.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          @ Arlie:

          That leads to an entirely different CW argument, with a certain set of people insisting that because the averages are different, individuals should be treated as if they were exactly equal to the average for their gender, even if they are obviously something else. (Joe of the Weak Back should carry Jane StrongWoman’s packages and open doors for her, Ms I-Have-no-Soft-Skills should be put in customer service, and Mr Math-Phobe should be trained as an engineer….) That kind of crap, though rarely expressed quite this bluntly. (Usually the claim is that none of those individuals matter, and/or that none of them exist.)

          That’s a fairly obvious strawman. Most people don’t think that people should be treated as if they’re exactly average to their gender even when this is clearly not the case, but rather that gender differences serve as a useful heuristic for guessing what somebody is going to be like as a person. Heuristics don’t have to be 100% accurate to be useful.

          Imagine that we had 4 pronouns instead, beong O, A, B, and AB, and the first thing announced about every baby was their blood type. Why would this be a good idea?

          It wouldn’t, because people’s gender tracks with more aspects of their behaviour, personality, skill-set, etc., than their blood type.

          Why are they entitled to know someone’s gender, by whatever rules they happen to be using?

          Because for people to interact successfully, they need to have some understanding of the other person’s personality, preferences, etc. Gender provides a useful heuristic for guessing these. So by preventing people from knowing someone’s gender, you’re depriving them of valuable social information.

          In particular, does this mean they are entitled to strip anyone they aren’t sure of, and check what’s between their legs? Perhaps demand a sample so as to do an instant DNA test? Is knowing a person’s gender that important to you, that it matters more than someone else’s privacy or bodily integrity?

          Real people, as opposed to straw men, are capable of balancing different goods against each other. It’s good (in the sense of helpful for social interactions) to know somebody’s gender; that doesn’t mean that it’s the sole good, or that it overrides any other good, like that of not being strip searched by random strangers.

          Given current pronouns, and people’s crazy reactions to finding they’ve misgendered someone, I might correct errors. But then again, I may not bother. Your need to colour me pink or blue in your mind is not my problem. It’s yours.

          You are, of course, perfectly entitled to that position, although I’d say the currently-prevailing attitude of “My self-expression is more important than all these rules developed to help people interact successfully” is a large part of the reason for why the culture war has got as bad as it has.

        • Clutzy says:

          @arlie

          Why are they entitled to know someone’s gender, by whatever rules they happen to be using?

          You have framed this completely backwards. The question is why should we be deprived of the value that gendered pronouns give us in everyday life. If you are talking about a 3rd person and the person telling you the story says, “then he jumped in the pool” this is useful. Your plan of eliminating gender pronouns is actually just eliminating information from the world.

        • arlie says:

          @The original Mr. X

          I wish what I said was entirely a straw man. But then I wouldn’t have said it.

          Unfortunately, we have had people in CW threads on this blog expressing the idea that given two people – one with qualifications and/or experience at a task, but of the group that’s less good at it on average, and the other with no qualifications or experience, but of the more talented group, the right person to hire for the job is the second person, and it’s intelligent and rational to start your search by throwing out all resumes from the less talented group.

          They may have meant “provided there are enough applicants that you are pretty much guaranteed to find one who is a trained and experienced member of the statistically more talented group”. But that’s not what they *said*.

          I can’t remember now, whether the group they had in mind was gender or race based – indeed, I may well have seen multiple instances of people advocating for this decision process, for multiple categories of people.

          Yes, I could have steel-manned this basic attitude, or at least tried to. And I could have framed this extreme belief as rarer, rather than simply making an existence claim that could easily be read as suggesting the attitude was common. (The truth is, I don’t know how common it is, and am too lazy to research that.)

          But I stand by my claim that the attitude exists, and has been seen by me in at least one CW thread on this blog, and very probably more.

        • nkurz says:

          @Clutzy
          > Your plan of eliminating gender pronouns is actually just eliminating information from the world.

          More information is good if it helps us make more informed decisions, and bad if it reinforces unwarranted prejudices. If you haven’t read it before, I think you’d enjoy Douglas Hofstadter’s classic satirical essay “A Person Paper on Purity in Language“.

          It viciously makes the point that if the English language used race rather than gender for our pronouns, it would strike us as absurdly prejudiced. But likely because we’ve grown up accustomed to unnecessary gendering, we hardly notice the downsides and feel like a change would involve giving up a lot for very little benefit. I don’t do a good job of always using non-gendered speech, but I’d credit the essay with making it clear to me that gendered pronouns have significant power to affect my thinking.

          Rereading the essay, I’m also reminded that I’ve never managed to find the essay that Hofstadter references in a footnote as a good complement. He says it’s named “The Tale of Two Sexes”, and appears in the book “The Nonsexist Communicator”, by Bobbye Sorrels. I can find snippets on Google Books, which show that it uses Mngl (pronounced mingle) and Mrd (pronounced murd) to refer to single and married males. Does anyone know where to find the full essay?

        • Nornagest says:

          But likely because we’ve grown up accustomed to unnecessary gendering, we hardly notice the downsides and feel like a change would involve giving up a lot for very little benefit.

          There’s a hidden assumption in here.

        • cuke says:

          nkurz, I had that book many moons ago, had forgotten about it.

          As someone who grew up feminist in the 70s, there was a stretch in there when it felt like we might actually stop using words like “mankind” to refer to people. Or at least in my tiny corner of the world.

          I don’t know if this is Nornagest’s point, but unnecessary gendering in our language and in other ways has grated on me as long as I can remember.

          I wondered if it might come up in this conversation since that was a similar tussle around pronouns and I had a lot of debates back then with people about the “harm” and “effort” on each side of the issue.

          I’m somebody who is perfectly happy in my body but who finds gender roles utterly annoying — I don’t like performing them, I don’t like the expectations around them, I don’t like the feeling of “shoulds” and shaming induced by them. They carry no comfort or goodness for me at all.

          So my challenge in learning about trans people’s experience, is the strand of it that is about moving from one definite box to another. I hate boxes and my anti-box bias gets in the way of my understanding a certain part of that experience. People who identify as “they” and being genderfluid I have a more intuitive affinity for. But that doesn’t mean it’s all that hard for me to just empathize at the level of someone who is suffering and looking for a way to suffer less. I wholeheartedly support that.

        • nkurz says:

          @Nornagest
          > There’s a hidden assumption in here.

          Surely there are many, and probably some of them are false. My goal with this sentence was mostly to summarize Hofstadter’s post script, explaining why he wrote the piece. I’m guessing you are pointing out that especially today, some people notice the downsides very much? Or did you have a different assumption in mind?

          In the meantime (not directed at you) I’ll quote directly from another part of the post script where he makes another interesting assumption that seemed quite relevant to Scott’s blog post:

          Numerous friends have warned me that in publishing this piece I am taking a serious risk of earning myself a reputation as a terrible racist. I guess I cannot truly believe that anyone would see this piece that way. To misperceive it this way would be like calling someone a vicious racist for telling other people “The word ‘n****r’ is extremely offensive.” If allusions to racism, especially for the purpose of satirizing racism and its cousins, are confused with racism itself, then I think it is time to stop writing.

          [The expurgation required to avoid the spam filter strikes me as particularly ironic. Perhaps a good rule, but still ironic.]

        • Clutzy says:

          It viciously makes the point that if the English language used race rather than gender for our pronouns, it would strike us as absurdly prejudiced.

          It would not strike me as that way. I actually find the hypothetical (as with the one brought up elsewhere with blood types) actually quite useful. In fact, if the language people invented Xir, Zir, etc and one meant White man and one meant black man, I would be more open to the new pronouns. As they would be more useful.

        • albatross11 says:

          arlie:

          Consider the idea that we should treat individuals based on their group average rather than their individual traits. I am probably one of the more vocal advocates here of the idea that there are group differences that matter in daily life, but I’d argue against that (and have argued against it) on the basis of it leading to bad decisions. I wouldn’t bother trying to argue that we should make changes to the structure of our language to prevent people doing it–that seems like a pretty backwards approach.

          IMO, gendered pronouns are useful in describing/explaining some situations–they save some words and some letters. OTOH, they sometimes sneak in an assumption you didn’t want, like if you use the generic “he” for all your examples in a user’s manual, you may convey the impression that only men are going to be using this product. Unless the product is a jock strap, this is probably not what you intended. It’s not clear to me that trying to change the structure of the language is all that great of a solution to this–alternating male and female pronouns in examples works fine, as does the somewhat clunky swapping in of “they” instead of the generic “he.”

        • albatross11 says:

          Clutzy:

          So, this leads me to an entirely intellectual question: Are there languages where the language makes a built-in distinction between races or castes or religious groups or some such thing? (I’m wondering specifically about Indian languages making a caste distinction, since caste distinctions are old enough to have been incorporated in the language.)

          I am no linguist at all, but I can give one somewhat parallel example: there is a formal/informal distinction in Spanish (and there used to be one in English) that has the effect of coding for social position–I can offend an adult by addressing them as tu instead of usted (though my thick Gringo accent will probably buy me a fair bit of tolerance), because it can come off as putting myself above them. Depending one which Spanish speaking country you’re in, this may be more or less of a big deal. This doesn’t code for race, but it does code for social position in a way that might be analogous to race.

          Also, as a SF reference: In Bujold’s Vorklosigan universe, there are hermaphrodites with both sets of sex organs (referred to as “it” without any sense of that being offensive), also sexless constructs (the “ba”, I don’t remember their pronoun) and gendered constructs somewhere on the road to transhumanism (referred to as “haut”).

        • if the English language used race rather than gender for our pronouns,

          The Romany do something rather like that. There is a word for “Male Romany.” There is a word for “Female Romany.” There are words for male and female non-Romany. There is no word for “man” (Romany or not) or “woman” (Romany or not).

        • Clutzy says:

          @albatross

          I’m also not a linguist so I have no idea. I have experience as you do with tu/ustedes.

        • Viliam says:

          Hungarian language does not have gendered pronouns.

          I wonder whether this makes any actual difference in everyday life, such as less sexism in Hungary, etc. I assume it does not, but I am open to evidence, of course.

        • liskantope says:

          Many, many of the world’s languages (if not most when considering the number of languages rather than the speaking populations!), belonging to many of the world’s language families, do not distinguish between gender in 3rd person pronouns. (For example, Chinese, Finno-Ugric languages e.g. Finnish and Hungarian, many Austronesian languages e.g. Malay, many Bantu languages e.g. Swahili, etc.) They find a way to get along just fine. Yes, less information is conveyed in those languages whenever referring to someone with a 3rd person pronoun (just as less information is conveyed using English “you” rather than pronouns in other languages which distinguish between singular and plural 2nd person, or English “we” rather than inclusive vs. exclusive 1st person plurals in other languages). But one can still get along without them, and in fact broader categories for distinguishing pronouns save a bit of effort in using them. So there’s a give and take: we could distinguish between a whole lot of categories in our pronouns (e.g. race and marital status, as pointed out above, but also things like proximity, age, etc.) and then our pronoun use would convey more information but require more processing and risk of error on the part of the speaker. So there’s clearly a limit to how far we should go in that direction, and it’s up to those on either side of this thread’s debate to defend why it should or shouldn’t stop at distinguishing (perceived) gender, or exactly how far it would ideally go.

    • wanda_tinasky says:

      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:

      A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others.

      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.

      I could probably also just have quoted: “the personal is political”.

      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

      opposing, hateful views

      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.

      • gbdub says:

        Yes, 1000 times all of this.

      • Heather says:

        > “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/

        • AG says:

          No one is saying that the issue needs to be apolitical or apersonal to be discussed. Things that get labeled CW is about tone, not content.
          People can get as personal as they want about pineapple on pizza, and that conversation won’t get tossed into CW, because the discussion and responses to that do not result in a degeneration of the discussion space.

          “The personal is political” is a doctrine that encourages a certain tone of response, that it is justified to degrade the discussion space because the content, not the tone, is personal. Therefore, those things fall under Culture War.

          In addition, it seems like you should prefer the state of affairs now where personally-political topics get silo’d into a CW section. It means that you can go into any of the discussions outside of that silo without suddenly encountering an attack on your personhood. It’s making the majority of the forum a safe space, by relegating the most volatile topics to a designated non-safe space. Why wouldn’t you want the majority of the forum to be a safe space?

    • SaiNushi says:

      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.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Throw the fact that roughtly half of SJW’s are TERFs,

        [citation needed]

        Anecdotally, I was under the impression that SJWs had thrown TERFs into outer rightness, on the Wrong Side of History.

        • SaiNushi says:

          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.

          • AG says:

            Nah, it’s fairly popular for people to take TERF posts, sand off the overtly transphobic bits, and proudly re-post the edited version with an “OP was a TERF so I stole their post”. I guess they feel that the TERFs have mottes worth promoting?

            (Well, I say motte, but really, those posts are just used to gleefully attack another outgroup.)

            You could probably take incel rants, switch the genders, re-post them, can get a slew of “Amen!” notes from TERFs and non-TERF leftists alike.

    • Humbert McHumbert says:

      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.

    • LadyJane says:

      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.

    • awal says:

      From the replies to this comment I’ve learned why some people believe there is an anti-trans sentiment here; at least one shared by more than the self identified 7% of people against using trans people’s pronouns. It is not that there are more people who are against using those pronouns, it is that there are a lot more people who engage in criticising the normative enforcement of using preferred pronouns.

      Regardless of one’s position on whether preferred pronoun use should be mandatory, the is a pattern of asserting or implying the equivalence of things that I believe are fundamentally different, and doing so without acknowledging a fundamental difference.

      Some examples from the above thread: (there is more context, but I genuinely don’t believe I am misrepresenting their expressed opinions).
      Gbdub using as an example of what it may be like to be forced to use pronouns they don’t believe in:
      People with “brown eyes who kept insisting they have blue eyes”
      Bugmaster discussing why it is problematic to assert ones view that they are trans as uncontroversial, notes that debaters of “vi vs emacs” may react just as viscerally to a differing opinion.
      DavidFriedman equating the questioning of someone self-identitying as anarchist with questioning someone self identifying as a gender different than the one they were assigned.

      There are a couple more but the above are illustrative. I don’t believe the commenters are malicious, I believe that at some level they may not understand the difference of impact that perceptions and experiences and socio-cultural consequences of gender identity can have on a person that does not identify as the gender they were assigned at birth.

      The differences are at least two-fold:
      1: Systemic discrimination and oppression.
      2: The constant internal experience of your gender as different from the experiences of gender-conforming people, as confirmed by them.

      If you are someone who matches internal traits usually tied to green eyes, but have blue eyes, you may express that and try to reclaim a concept seperate from sex that means internal eye colour. However, in reality, your internal experience of the world is not much different with one eye color than another, and you are not systemically denigrated and denied opportunities because of that.

      With gender, it is entirely different. Imagine that you wake up tomorrow with the genetalia/secondary sex characteristics of your opposite gender and sense some differing emotional reactions… But otherwise are mentally the exact same as you are now. I imagine that you would strongly still identify with your current gender; you still like the same things, and probably feel like you should have your original genetalia back. Now imagine being questioned, mocked, denigrated, and marginalized because you are expressing the gender you currently are. Up until recently, a vast majority of people thought you were simply insane, and even now people don’t think everyone should necessarily validate you.
      If you experienced that, you would find it ridiculous to have the validity of your identify critically debated.

      With that in mind, I believe being upset that people believe you are incorrect about your gender is meaningfully different than being upset that people think emacs is better than vi or even that you aren’t a real anarchist.

      • baconbits9 says:

        The issue with this approach is exactly what gbdub said- you have weaponized being offended. Imagine the opposite scenario where instead of choosing benign analogies they instead compared being trans to being a pedophile, I would expect that a trans person would rightly feel that would be a dehumanizing comparison and not feel welcome in a place where that is common. To be in an environment where posters are actively* considering their words to avoid being directly offensive and end up considering it hostile because their words are now to weak to be more direct analogies is to effectively (try to) box in the conversation around the wants of the most easily offended individual.

        *A guess but given the posting history of some of them a good one based on their posting histories.

        • awal says:

          I’m not sure how I personally am weaponizing being offended. I think it is okay to be offended in some scenarios, and to expect for others to be empathetic in those scenarios, but that doesn’t have to shut down debate.
          Also, a pedophile analogy would be weak as well, for different reasons.

          Yes, both are at least somewhat important to your identify and you can be oppressed for them.

          However, pedophilia inherently entails an urge to do unethical acts that would harm others.
          Being trans does not.

          Thus the potential harm of normalizing or enforcing the normalization of transgender people and pedophiles is much much different.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I’m not sure how I personally am weaponizing being offended. I think it is okay to be offended in some scenarios, and to expect for others to be empathetic in those scenarios, but that doesn’t have to shut down debate.

            Your quote

            I don’t believe the commenters are malicious, I believe that at some level they may not understand the difference of impact that perceptions and experiences and socio-cultural consequences of gender identity can have on a person that does not identify as the gender they were assigned at birth

            The socio-cultural effects are largely internal, a trans person who doesn’t particularly care if they are mis gendered doesn’t suffer as much as a trans person who does. You stated that you didn’t think the posters were being malicious, but also seem to be saying that they are creating a negative environment despite their intent/lack of intent to create one.

      • gbdub says:

        For what it’s worth, the blue/brown eye example was not mine, and I don’t really endorse it.

        More thoughts later, but I appreciate the comment.

      • AG says:

        @awal:

        The anti-trans sentiment isn’t rooted in the object level. It’s an extension of fearing the ways in which meta-level rhetorical superweapons have been constructed, of which battling anti-trans sentiment is only one application.

        “Systemic discrimination and oppression” and “the personal is political” were also used to created the kerfuffles exemplified in Scott’s infamous “untitled” post, as well as attacking Scott for hosting a CW thread. The sentiment here isn’t about the specific argument concerning trans identities, it’s a stance that these doctrines have been entirely too co-opted to be used as enforcement standards. There need to be better, less-exploitable standards.

        A different identity could have been chosen (for example, what it means to be a man), but if they tried to advocate for using the same meta-level superweapons, the same kinds of counter-arguments would have been trotted out.

        • awal says:

          I’d like more details on things where the main arguments for normalizing trans people’s identities could be correctly used, but with an undesirable outcome.
          The arguments including:
          Central to the self
          Does harm to not be normalized
          Not changeable by the self
          An uninhibited fulfillment does not inherently harm others

          • AG says:

            “used correctly” is doing a lot of rhetorical work. Motte arguments are always welcome.

            A lot of the claims here are that most people way too easily fall into frolicking in the bailey, and that, indeed, the baileys are often the popular version of the arguments being advocated for. That policy put into practice is rarely based on the motte.

            For example, I’ve seen pronoun policies be extended to prohibiting fiction that includes characters coming to terms with their feelings on gender, because those characters hadn’t arrived at the Correct Conclusion already. They also tend to be classist, by penalizing those without the means to get educated on the latest acceptable lingo. And there’s been the way “central to the self” has had a baby with horrible appropriation concepts to denigrate GNC people, nonbinary people, crossdressers (and drag specifically) as transphobic.

            The kneejerk response here isn’t about the trans topic, it’s about having little faith that these kinds of proclamations (much of the same bones used to advocate for other minority demographics as well) will retain a sense of nuance and charity, instead of happily tarring the well-meaning, the apathetic, or the weakly opposed. It’s a knowledge that a loud sector isn’t interested in making any allies (with the give-and-take the original tactical meaning implies), instead of sticking to alienating everyone else as Other.

      • whereamigoing says:

        “I imagine that you would strongly still identify with your current gender”

        The thing is, I honestly don’t think I would. I admit that I’ll probably never be able to understand transgenderism on an emotional level, any more than I could understand what it’s like to be a cat — “having a strong gender identity” simply isn’t an experience I have. All I can do is to try to apply the Principle of Charity.

        To be clear, I don’t think the experience of being misgendered is actually equivalent to the experience of having brown eyes but being told you have blue eyes. Rather, the way someone without a strong gender identity intuitively perceives misgendering is probably the way transgender people would perceive a “trans-eye” person.

        I can’t fully understand transgender people, but maybe I can at least encourage transgender people by helping them understand non-transgender people. And the analogy is aimed at that: many people who are careless with pronouns don’t hate transgender people — they are just confused the same way transgender people would be confused by “trans-eye” people. Admittedly, it might not be that encouraging to hear “Even people who don’t hate you will often fail to understand you due to fundamentally and irreconcilably different experiences.”. Again, I don’t see a solution apart from consistently applying the Principle of Charity.

      • eh says:

        I don’t think it is entirely different, for me. I’m not particularly attached to being male – in fact, when I was a kid I had occasional recurring dreams about being a woman, and what I think was mild gender dysphoria, that eventually went away during puberty – and the empathy I feel for trans people has to be filtered through layers of metaphor for me to understand it. This makes it hard for me to tell the difference between a linguistic power grab and a good faith request that would make someone more comfortable.

        The way I usually tell the difference is costly signalling and alignment with either end of the gender binary. If a trans person is presenting as a particular gender then I’m happy to go along with it; if a man with a beard wants me to call him “them” then it feels like an assertion of power, which I’ll acquiesce to while nursing a grudge.

        It’s hard to understand whether transpeople consider this bigotry or not. In practical terms I’ve never misgendered someone to their face, but depending on how you worded your survey I might easily end up in the 7%.

      • Vorkon says:

        It occurs to me that while “People with brown eyes who keep insisting they have blue eyes” isn’t a particularly good analogy for how people feel in this situation, “people who see a gold dress while everybody else tells them it’s blue” or “people named ‘Laurel’ who keep running into people insisting their name is ‘Yanny'” just might be.

        • whereamigoing says:

          Yes, those analogies are better for “how transgender people feel about non-transgender people”. But the eye analogy is aimed at “how people without a strong gender identity feel about transgender people”.

      • Clutzy says:

        Some examples from the above thread: (there is more context, but I genuinely don’t believe I am misrepresenting their expressed opinions).
        Gbdub using as an example of what it may be like to be forced to use pronouns they don’t believe in:
        People with “brown eyes who kept insisting they have blue eyes”
        Bugmaster discussing why it is problematic to assert ones view that they are trans as uncontroversial, notes that debaters of “vi vs emacs” may react just as viscerally to a differing opinion.
        DavidFriedman equating the questioning of someone self-identitying as anarchist with questioning someone self identifying as a gender different than the one they were assigned.

        To be honest, your listing of these examples makes me less charitable to your POV. People can, in fact, be colorblind or visually impaired. This is provable. vi vs emacs is a debate with blurry lines, but if you are investing, its worth your time. Anarchist vs. anarcho-communist is an easily identifiable difference when it comes to order of operations.

        How does a person walking into the average transgender person’s office know they are actually not as they appear? It is much less scientific than the colorblind man thinking his eyes are the wrong color; it is not as interesting and useful as the various ways of choosing your coding architecture; and it is less evident during a blank debate than a communist vs. capitalist. In other words, its almost impossible for the average person to know what is going on before you become offended. And, even if they were informed, they rarely will have an incentive to remember (if you disagree, please tell me all the names of your high school and college teachers, preferably in order, with their genders and whether they were Republican or Democrat).

      • 10240 says:

        Experiments that wouldn’t get IRB approval #327: Raise children in such a way that they can’t determine their own sex. A device is mounted on their eyes that prevents them from seeing their own body, they are prevented from touching their genitals (perhaps some numbing drug is also applied to their genital area so they don’t feel them, or just ensure they don’t learn what the genitals of each sex are like). Make sure that nobody ever tells them their sex. Put a device on their mouths that distorts their voice into an androgynous voice.

        How many of the children would be able to guess their sex at (at certain ages)? How many would be right? How many would say they have no idea?

        • As you may know, a version of this experiment was done, unintentionally, with a sample size of one. The baby boy who, due to a slip of the scalpel and the advice of a psychologist who wanted to prove that gender was socially constructed, was told he was a girl and raised as a girl, was unwilling to fill that role and when, eventually, he was told the truth, shifted to a male role.

      • Bugmaster says:

        I will grant you everything that you said about gender, sexuality, and pronouns. However, I cannot grant you your conclusion:

        I believe being upset that people believe you are incorrect about your gender is meaningfully different than being upset that people think emacs is better than vi or even that you aren’t a real anarchist.

        Now, personally, I don’t really care that much about text editors or anarchism. However, the majority of your comment dealt with describing the internal experiences of trans people; experiences that can be extremely painful and mentally taxing. In your conclusion, you are implicitly denying that other people might have internal experiences that are completely different from the trans experience, yet are similarly painful and mentally taxing (yes, I will grant you that “vi vs. emacs” is a silly example, but I picked it deliberately to be inoffensive).

        Furthermore, you seem to be missing my original point: just because you personally, or your demographic group in general, finds certain opinions highly offensive and even painful; does not mean that expressing such opinions should be disallowed. To be sure, there’s absolutely room on the Internet for “safe spaces” for each affected group; however, the entire Internet (and, by extension, our society at large) should not become such a safe space; nor, I believe, should SSC.

        Keep in mind that many other social subgroups experience offence at lots of other issues. I’m sure you can come up with a fairly long list of such groups, including adherents of certain religions or political leanings, conspiracy theorists, etc. It might be tempting to say, “their opinions hurt trans people and therefore they should be suppressed”, but guess what — this is exactly what they say about you.

    • HelloYesThisIsDog says:

      Why does labeling things as culture-warry take away power from you?

      I understand that sometimes there is a trivializing tone around things that are deemed culture war, but for the most part I read the definition of culture war as “topics that are highly polarized,” with typical characteristics like “it being hard to have rational conversations without excessive mudslinging.” The criteria seems to be more “people tend to get angry about this” than “this is trivial.”

      Clearly “Gender” fits that definition, without necessarily being trivial. Similarly, “whether we should have capitalism or communism” fits that definition, while definitely is not trivial. Similarly, for many (most?) Culture War topics.

      As for the trivializing tone around discussing the Culture War:

      1. Yes, sometimes this is just straight-up inappropriate minimization. I sympathize. But also

      2. Sometimes this is a coping mechanism. Most of us have been exposed to awful awful mudslinging in one form or another, or seen others go through it at some point. Sometimes it’s just cathartic to laugh rather than cry. I don’t think many people literally want people to experience awful things, just because we also don’t want to be on red alert 24/7 about every issue. I am not even capable of being on red alert 24/7 about issues that directly affect me. Most of the time I just tell jokes and worry about existential risk. Sometimes it’s nice to just roll my eyes and go “oh alas, the culture war” – not because I hate you or don’t want your issues fixed or don’t think they’re important, but because life can be awful and tiring.

      The extremely bad behaviour of many people (on both sides) of many (all?) culture war issues doesn’t help. There is of course a bias where people will gravitate towards issues that are more accessible and don’t literally ruin their lives to engage with, and then will minimize cognitive dissonance by minimizing issues we don’t want to engage with.

      All of this is of course possibly Not Rational^TM, but I sympathize with all parties (those minimizing for these reasons, and those having their issues minimized, especially those like yourself who are probably not bad actors, but bear the flak of many tangential bad actors).

      3. Sometimes these issues are trivial compared to other things being discussed. I don’t mean this to be heartless and this mostly isn’t how I think personally. But I understand why someone worrying about “bigger issues” than gun control might be tired of the debate about gun control, and explicitly minimize it, for example.

      I don’t think any of this has to take power away from you. But we should talk about it, just in case, and because biases and etc.

    • 10240 says:

      You, like many (pro-)transgender people, say that people who disagree with the usual transgender claims are transphobic/hateful. That claim is not only false, but also one of the main reasons transgender topics are so controversial.

      As to why the claim is false, look at the issue from the perspective of a typical non-transgender person. Take the common controversial question of how the words ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘her’, ‘him’ etc. should be used. We have learned these words in childhood, before transgender questions even became prominent. We typically weren’t told a single, precise definition, however the definitions we picked up were clearly based on biology, definitely not mental states. Then a group of people comes and says that people who claim to be men/women (who clearly aren’t accodring to the biological definition we have always used) are men/women, period — usually without any explanation other than that if you think they aren’t, you are wrong and transphobic. It shouldn’t be hard to understand that many of us find this nonsensical. We don’t hate you, we don’t understand you.
      (I’ve read the Categories… post, and I’d had similar ideas myself before: a claim like “MtF transsexuals are women” can’t be proved because it’s a question of definitions, not facts. However, this doesn’t explain why (pro-)transgender people insist so strongly on one particular definition. Indeed, in my experience (pro-)transgender people tend to be the ones who make claims of this nature the most strongly as if they were factual claims.)

      I also disagree that transgender people are the underdogs. There are a lot of mainstream venues where people are expected to use the terminology preferred by trans people, sometimes on the pain of bans and in some places even legal action, or where people who contest the usual trans claims are hounded out as transphobic. There are not a lot of venues where the opposite is expected.

    • eigenmoon says:

      @Heather

      When you say the validity of your existence shouldn’t be CW material, I can sympathize with that. But then in the same post you fire 3 other controversial CW shells:

      1) Let’s change the social rules.

      “Everything is allowed” is a perfect Schelling point. What are the new rules? Would they be a good Schelling point? Is Canadian C-16 too much? This is a very CW topic because everybody except the far Left is afraid of slippery slope problems.

      2) We the minorities…

      The idea of an alliance of the minorities is a specifically far Left one, and is a laughing stock of the Right (especially if the Muslims are brought in).

      I’m a migrant. I’ve already earned the right to exist where I live, but actually I want to live elsewhere, and I still have to earn the right to exist there. Once someone told me that everyone should be locked in the country of their birth. Another time someone did a Nazi salute almost to my face.

      But they’re not the reason migration is so damn difficult. The reason is the fat welfare systems supported by the Left and the necessity to jump through a lot of hoops to prove that you’re not going to use that welfare. I would gladly sign something to the effect that I never want to touch that welfare. But as with the student debt, the Left would want to override that. So the Left has robbed me of the power to credibly commit to not taking welfare. Also in principle there could be different levels of citizenship, like in Ancient Rome. I’d gladly pick the lesser citizenship. But the Left would shout “two different levels! that’s inequality! boo!” and so this possibility is out, too.

      This is why simply saying “we the minorities” is already CW.

      3) Everything is political

      I didn’t understand it from your post, but the article that you gave makes it more or less clear that the apolitical people are the problem. They get to be apolitical because they’re privileged. They go shopping or watch TV instead of caring about your situation! By cutting grass in their garden they silently agree with your oppression. So you’re totally justified when you knock down the door to their apartment and shout “How dare you peacefully have sex instead of listening to my political viewpoint? Shame on you!”.

      But this is not only CW, this looks like the sort of hateful ideology that makes people gang up on Scott. Apolitical people did nothing wrong to me. It’s politicized people I have problems with, especially those who assume without calculating that open borders and lots of welfare are possible to achieve at the same time. That’s why my issues belong to the CW thread.

      … and so do yours, partly because your post that says “my views should be uncontroversial” would be more convincing without those controversial views on it.

      • Nick says:

        But this is not only CW, this looks like the sort of hateful ideology that makes people gang up on Scott.

        Do you want to qualify this statement? It doesn’t seem to come from anything you’ve said before—where does Heather’s problematic position cross a line into “hateful ideology” that gangs up on people? Remember she has explicitly agreed that she’s in favor of free speech and that she doesn’t want folks silenced.

        • eigenmoon says:

          Heather didn’t explicitly cross that line. But her post didn’t explain enough. A couple of comments above HelloYesThisIsDog asks a reasonable question: “Why does labeling things as culture-warry take away power from you?” Why indeed?

          It’s the article Heather posted that I have a problem with. It says that people who think they do something apolitical are quite wrong about it. They’re not apolitical, they’re your political enemies:

          “We don’t appreciate these people pushing their politics and anti-American views at our football game!” says the beneficiary. Only the beneficiaries of the dominant class can naively proclaim that entertainment was innocent before others mobbed it. Only they can accuse others of politicizing, when in fact, beneficiaries consume and propagate politicized language and behavior all the time.

          They might tell you that they are not your enemies – but don’t believe that, they’re totally guilty:

          Equally dominant and blissfully unaware of their dominance, they have concocted a perception of innocence. To recognize their own politicization would shatter that illusion of innocence, and no one likes sentencing themselves as guilty.

          What’s more, those totally guilty people commit an additional sin by not wanting to give all power to SJWs for some reason:

          The apolitical (that is, the dominant social identity) not only deny the political nature of their environment; they also deny the political necessity of the solution.

          etc etc.

          This ideology is hateful because it marks all neutral parties as enemies. That seems to be very similar to the idea that not banning alt-right is the same as being alt-right.

          • Nick says:

            Thanks for responding. I’m reading the article now—I totally missed the connection, that that’s what you were calling a hateful ideology, and not what Heather was saying here—and it’s just bad. A few problems:
            1) It seems to be dividing problems into personal and structural. I don’t see why this has to be true, unless the category “structural” covers, say, biology too.
            2) It’s assuming that if a problem can be shown to be non-personal, or specifically structural, that the appropriate solution is structural. Now, it’s obvious that non-personal problems can be mitigated personally: antebellum slaves who bought their freedom are proof of that. Of course, this is a personal solution pursued under a radically, incredibly unjust system, and one in which structural forces (the legal enforcement of slavery) was the cause. But consider a man who practices small-s stoicism to manage his anger. That he has high testosterone is hardly his fault, and the same goes for a fair bit of the bell curve of men, and yet he’s solving it personally. In other words, I don’t see how it follows that if we have identified a structural problem we can be sure that a structural solution exists—much less that we should support whatever particular one is being proposed.
            3) (1) and (2) together mean the analysis of the “majority” is all wrong. The article says toward the end, “to portray suffering as personal is to dismiss the possibility of structural failure.” This is simply false: we may be suggesting a personal solution to a structural problem, or some non-structural, non-personal problem, like health or biology. There’s no justification for supposing the possibility is being dismissed or that, by not “dismissing” it, that a structural solution will be found.

            With that said, I don’t see how it’s hateful, or how it’s advocating ganging up on people. It illustrates many of the major ingredients in what’s wrong with toxic social justice, to be sure—assuming solutions exist, imputing collective guilt (literally!), stratification based on identity and degree of victimhood—but I’m still not seeing anything in here that would license the sort of things done to Scott and others. I mean, take it for what it is, right at the beginning of the article: a (bad) defense of Kaepernick kneeling at football games. You still need something else to get from there to a “rules don’t apply to us, we’re justified in destroying our political enemies” attitude you say it looks like. Whatever its flaws, in other words, it’s not fair to identify Heather with the folks who did that to Scott.

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            A great way for any ideology to justify harming innocent people in pursuit of the Greater Good is to assert that there are no innocent people, and that those who choose to remain neutral and uninvolved are the enemy, and that by quietly living their lives instead of fighting for your Grand Cause, they are in fact actively oppressing you.

            It’s not an exclusively left-wing phenomenon by any means; when I was younger it seemed like the socially conservative/religious right was the one telling people that stuff and the left had a more individualistic and libertarian approach to talking about moral/cultural issues. Arguments for legal abortion and gay marriage were based on the premise of individual rights: “you don’t have to like it or even approve of it, just let other people do their thing and you do yours.”

            But these days it seems to be mostly the left using phrases like “your silence is violence.” The pendulum will eventually swing back the other way, I imagine. It all depends on who’s currently winning the culture wars.

            The more hard-line approach may successfully pressure some ambivalent people into fighting for a cause, but in the long run I think it contributes to the downfall of whatever ideology is in power. If you keep telling people “you’re either with us or you’re the enemy” eventually even the most mellow, neutral people will start saying, “Fine, I’m your enemy. You want a fight, you’ve got one.”

          • The original Mr. X says:

            With that said, I don’t see how it’s hateful, or how it’s advocating ganging up on people. It illustrates many of the major ingredients in what’s wrong with toxic social justice, to be sure—assuming solutions exist, imputing collective guilt (literally!), stratification based on identity and degree of victimhood—but I’m still not seeing anything in here that would license the sort of things done to Scott and others.

            You don’t think imputing collective guilt is hateful?

            As for how it justifies the sort of thing that happened to Scott, it’s pretty simple. Any “neutral” space or activity is really oppressive; Scott claims to run his comments section as a neutral space for discussion; therefore Scott actually runs an oppressive comments section, therefore he’s an oppressor, therefore we’re justified in making him stop. QED.

          • Nick says:

            You don’t think imputing collective guilt is hateful?

            It’s terrible for a lot of reasons, but being hateful is not one of them. “Hate” has transubstantiated in the last decade or so into applying to any sort of view, no matter how calmly proffered or soberly held, that someone finds particularly offensive. Is original sin hateful?

            Look, it’s totally an ingredient in the “everyone to my left is a Nazi who deserves punching” attitude we’ve grown all too familiar with. But it’s not enough on its own. Belief in original sin isn’t hate, especially when you combine it with a recognition of the dignity of all human beings. Neither is this, especially when, as Heather did, it’s combined with an explicit affirmation of free speech and the wrongness of silencing.

            As for how it justifies the sort of thing that happened to Scott, it’s pretty simple. Any “neutral” space or activity is really oppressive; Scott claims to run his comments section as a neutral space for discussion; therefore Scott actually runs an oppressive comments section, therefore he’s an oppressor, therefore we’re justified in making him stop. QED.

            Again, nothing about “Scott is an oppressor” licenses any means necessary. You’re completely leaving that step out here. The article is terrible, but not for this reason.

          • cuke says:

            The argument from this particular angle, as I understand it, is not that “you all” are evil oppressors so much as that there is no such thing as a “neutral” space. In this view, power dynamics in society exert their influence on everyone and ideological filters exert their influence on everyone. There are no “pure” bystanders. We all bring power, ideas, biases, etc and when we speak or act — or refrain from speaking or acting, those ingredients become part of the collective soup.

            I get that to many this will read as “if you’re not with us you’re against us.” And I know there are people at both ends of the political spectrum who for various reasons tend to view the world that way in general. It’s a borderline kind of a view and it’s prevalent in humans.

            And I get that “silence is violence” could also be seen as equivalent to “if you don’t actively join us then you’re oppressing us.” But then there is also the sense in which historically, in many times and places, to stand by silently while people in front of you are being harmed is to be in some sense complicit in that violence. We could argue that one up and down all levels of abstractions and it’s a worthy argument to have. I’m not seeking to have it here, only to acknowledge that many people across history and political views have understood that we social humans share some individual and collective responsibility to protect others from harm. How much responsibility, how much of the time, etc is all up for debate. But we’d be debating about where the line is drawn, what are the expectations and norms around that line, and not “if that guy gets mowed down by a sadistic bus and is lying bleeding in the street, I don’t so much as owe him a 911 call.” Though I’m sure we could find someone willing to argue that position.

            So this is a conversation about how much responsibility in what kinds of situations do we have to each other? If you can quickly brand someone as “the enemy” or even better, prove that they have already labeled you as “the enemy,” then it lets one off the hook very quickly, because in general we don’t owe the enemy a damn thing.

            Scott’s space here, from this point of view, is absolutely not a neutral space. It’s shot through with his biases and the biases of all the commenters. All kinds of norms and boundaries are being negotiated here all the time. Even in this one thread people have hugely been pushing against the norm of no CW topics outside of designated areas. The question of who gets banned for what, who reports whose comments and so on are all influenced by power relations and ideologies.

            So this view holds that while power is at work everywhere and there is no such thing as a neutral space or an entirely neutral bystander, that does not does make you or me evil. We are all swimming in the same soup. We are all imperfect; we all have some choices as we swim in the soup in terms of how we conduct ourselves and with what self-awareness about the effects of our behavior and about our intentions and so on.

            The process whereby a person translates “there is no neutral space and the effects of power are everywhere” into “Oh you think I’m your enemy, fine I’ll treat you that way” involves several interpretative steps. It’s possible to make other interpretive steps and to arrive at a different translation.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Again, nothing about “Scott is an oppressor” licenses any means necessary. You’re completely leaving that step out here. The article is terrible, but not for this reason.

            The article doesn’t explicitly say that, but I think you’re letting it off the hook too quickly. If someone were to write an article accusing Jews of being a bunch of societal parasites who control the world media and use the blood of Christian children to bake their bread, I think it would be reasonable to describe the article as exemplifying “the sort of hateful ideology that makes people attack Jews”, even if the article itself never explicitly called for this.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            Cuke, good post.

            Let me add: There are some people out there who you will never be able to convince that your “silence is not violence;” but you may be able to convince them to forgive you for your silence, perhaps by convincing them you’re a good person with genuine convictions that you’ve thought through clearly. I’ve found this (getting them to see you as a person) to be a lot more effective as a way of convincing SJWs to chill out than trying to convince them their whole ideology is bankrupt.

            It doesn’t work online, though.

          • 10240 says:

            Note that a claim here seems to be not only that silence is wrong, but that silence is wrong at any time anywhere, or that excluding a particular topic from any particular space is wrong.

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            @cuke

            It may be true that no space is truly neutral, but continually returning to that point strikes me as a fallacy of gray type of argument. In practice, neutrality usually means tolerating a wide variety of viewpoints and not banning people solely on the basis of their views. It might be impossible to do that perfectly, but we can still acknowledge that some places are doing it better than others. We can still strive for neutrality as an ideal.

            Regarding your other points, yes, it does take a bit of interpretation to go from “you are complicit in my oppression” to “you are my enemy,” but I don’t think it’s that big of an interpretive leap.

            And I get that “silence is violence” could also be seen as equivalent to “if you don’t actively join us then you’re oppressing us.”

            I think that’s pretty clearly what’s being implied, yes, and I don’t really buy that the people who use phrases like that aren’t trying to imply it. “Violence” is an extremely loaded term. And it’s not even “your silence enables violence” but “your silence is violence,” which is a different implication. There’s a general belief that if someone is engaging in direct violence against you, then direct violence against them is just self-defense. So telling a bystander “you are engaging in direct violence against me” and not expecting that to be read as antagonistic and menacing strikes me as unreasonable.

            I mean, there’s been a lot of pushback against phrases like that and people continue to use them, so I have to assume they’re aware of how those phrases tend to be interpreted and consider that to be a feature rather than a bug. I don’t think there’s a misunderstanding happening or that the people who read those implications into the statements are being unreasonable or making unwarranted interpretive leaps.

            To use an example from the other side, I think people who use the phrase “cultural Marxist” are very aware of the negative implications of that term. It’s not meant as a mere descriptive phrase, it’s meant as a condemnation, and pretending otherwise would be disingenuous.

            I am aware that a person’s interpretation of tone and intent tends to be heavily influenced by how they feel about the viewpoint itself, so I find that a good technique is to imagine that same rhetoric being used to describe a viewpoint I agree with. I kind of assume that you wouldn’t like the term “violence” being used to describe your views. Most people don’t.

          • Aapje says:

            @cuke

            Leave aside the question of whether the article is objectively hateful.

            If every space that doesn’t have SJ culture is oppressive to minorities, is the end goal not to change all those spaces? To those here who believe that SJ culture doesn’t allow them to say what they want to say or do, that is then going to feel like a threat.

          • albatross11 says:

            That’s what I was wondering, too. The claim that the very existence of a space where people express offensive ideas X, Y, and Z is a threat to society/some group, even if you don’t have to take part in any way, seems like it works well for justifying shutting down any such space. It’s hard to see a middle ground between:

            a. “Allowing you to say X is a threat to my well-being and must be stopped.”

            and

            b. “You are allowed free speech but aren’t entitled to an audience.”

            I think you can choose only one of those two.

          • eigenmoon says:

            @Nick

            it’s not fair to identify Heather with the folks who did that to Scott.

            I didn’t identify her like this.

            Is original sin hateful?

            Could be, but there’s a special song and dance “we hate the sin but love the sinner” that Christians must perform on demand to make it not hateful. I guess the SJW equivalent would be committing to free speech (which Heather did).

            @cuke
            Both “there’s no neutral space” and “silence is violence” can only be accepted with a huge stretch and lots of clarifications. Their conjunction requires a stretch to the Moon. And yet people derive corollaries like “we need to flood all spaces with our message” as if both statements were plain, 100%, Boolean truth.

            “Neutral space” doesn’t mean a space where nobody has any ideas or biases whatsoever or a space where the rules never get negotiated. It’s simply a space where people have something other (not necessarily better) to do than to discuss controversial topics. Saying that SSC “is absolutely not a neutral space” sounds to me like saying that a library is absolutely not a silent room because there are sounds of pages turning and people breathing.

            As for “silence is violence”, why take only people in front of you? How about this: those who aren’t protesting the war in Yemen have blood of Yemeni children on their hands? I can’t even say this viewpoint has no merit. But I hope that the stretch of which I’m talking is visible enough on this example. Namely, if people do things you consider evil but understand the issues involved differently than you do, then they might or might not be actually evil or guilty, there’s not enough data yet.

            If you combine “no neutral space” with “silence is violence”, you get results like this: if we agree to discuss the war in Yemen only once per two weeks rather than twice per week, then we have Yemeni blood on our hands. I’m not sure if it sounds absurd to you but to me it does.

            I didn’t really get where your enemy-enemy thing comes from. It is as if you read my argument as “Heather considers us the enemy, so let’s confine her issues in the CW thread because we don’t owe her anything”. Needless to say this is totally not what I’ve said. I said that Heather’s issues belong to the controversial space because many of them are controversial (of course they are, just look at the size of this thread).

        • I read the article too. My biggest problem with it is that it lumps together people who are opposed to various specific changes to specific cultures into one big oblivious homeless hating bourgeois conservative monster, as if somehow people who are concerned about certain kinds of activism driven changes to their favorite gaming or movie franchises highly correlate with being upper middle class homeowners who want more anti-homeless spikes at the bus shelter, and this homogenization is never justified with any data. I’m willing to countenance the reasonable idea that all spaces are implicitly political, but if you want to convince people of that, this isn’t the way to go.

      • 10240 says:

        1) To be fair, heather didn’t propose to ban anything from the CW thread, but to allow transgender topics that endorse the usual transgender views in non-CW threads as they shouldn’t be controversial (but presumably contesting them would remain banned in non-CW threads as it would lead to a CW flamewar). That’s still not a fair proposal, but it wouldn’t ban anything that’s currently allowed. Note that I’m not sure that mentioning that one is trans or anything related to it would actually be considered CW, but it’s true that it leads to CW quite easily.

        • albatross11 says:

          There is no neutral way to decide what is and isn’t controversial. In some places/times, a black man mentioning his white wife would have been extremely controversial and offensive; in other times, a man talking about how he got maximal output from his West Indies sugar plantation would not have been controversial or offensive.

          The best we can do in practice is to look at what topics and discussions reliably lead to a lot of anger and generate more heat than light, and then coral them into CW threads or otherwise try to contain the anger and outrage so that we can get more productive discussions.

          • 10240 says:

            Your second paragraph provides a neutral way to decide what is controversial, and that’s exactly the current policy. It still depends on the current prevalence of various views in society, which is not neutral, but the person who applies the rule is neutral.

            I didn’t mean that a rule that pro-transgender views are allowed but disagreement isn’t would be neutral; a claim that a particular thing shouldn’t be controversial is clearly not neutral, and it’s clear that transgender topics are currently controversial (which heather didn’t dispute but dislikes). I wrote my comment purely because some commenters seemed to imply that heather suggested banning something that is currently allowed, which doesn’t seem to be the case to me.

        • DragonMilk says:

          So in such a system, where would someone who posted the following view stand?

          It would seem that transgender individuals have elevated gender to an obsessive level that it forms the core of their identity. Just as in past times, when asked the question, “Who are you?” respond, “I am a [Roman, slave, merchant, duke, priest]”, I would expect a MtF to declare, “I am a woman,”
          However, this sense of identity seems to be taken to an extreme nowadays – in what other circumstance has the treatment for what medically is still classified as a mental disorder been to feed the delusion so much as to allow the individuals to irreversibly mutilate their own bodies? I am all for disagreeing with society’s assignment of feminine or masculine roles by simply adopting the roles that suit the individual. I hesitate to go further into radical irreversible surgeries, and further recommend that children who do not adopt roles neatly also be subjected to these irreversible surgeries. I have no problem with a tomboy or a boy who likes playing with dolls, but I take issues with those who advocate for castration of the latter.

          The view would not have been controversial a few decades ago, but may be labeled as nazi now. Would you ban the post if it wasn’t in a CW thread?

          • 10240 says:

            I think this post would would be allowed in a CW thread but not in a non-CW thread under the current rules, and that wouldn’t change under heather’s proposal. The reason for having non-CW threads is that CW topics tend to create a lot of heated debate, and crowd out other topics where they are allowed. For that purpose what matters is whether something is currently controversial; it’s irrelevant if it was not controversial a few decades ago, nor if it “should” be controversial (which is of course subjective). Also note that I didn’t propose any change to the rules, heather did.

      • DragonMilk says:

        So random tangent, I’ve suggested to a friend that since a big talking point of anti-immigration pundits is that immigrants can come into the country and take advantage of welfare, why not auction off certain legal immigration slots to support welfare?

        Nativists would then have to argue they’re not paying enough, etc, and welfare states could be preserved…as is, what do you think will be the future of Sweden’s welfare state? Is the media over-reaching when it says Nativists will come back to power due to the refugee influx?

        • Plumber says:

          @DragonMilk,
          I’m not Swedish nor am I strongly anti-immigration, but what I find convincing about arguments to reduce immigration is the likelihood that wages are bid down and housing is bid up by in-migration, plus it reduces any urgency to train-up people born here, the “welfare” arguments are a side-show to me, and come to think of it having lots of immigrants who are even more desperate because they can’t access welfare seems like a bad idea to me.

    • Blueberry pie says:

      Just wanted to say that I agree with this take and I am glad you voiced. I also understand why the other responders find it hard to understand. I also have no solutions.

    • Sinclair says:

      I also wish my gender identity wasn’t so politicized – it’s part of the reason why I try to avoid culture war type discussion.

  19. 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.

    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.

    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.

    *Applause* Ain’t that the truth?

  20. jstr says:

    Thank you for this illuminating post. In honor of it I have subscribed to r/TheMotte. (Didn’t follow the CW threads before.)

  21. Hoopyfreud says:

    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.

    • 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.

      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.

      • Hoopyfreud says:

        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 consider people who don’t care about me or the people and things I care about friends, as a rule. … It just means that, even when I’m talking to them, I feel alone and uncared for.

          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.

          I dare you to tell me those feelings aren’t justified.

          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.

          • wanderingimpromptu says:

            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.

            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?

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            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.

            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.

          • 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.

            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.

          • gbdub says:

            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.

          • There are good people with bad opinions and bad people with good opinions.

            Interpersonal kindness may be underrated on the internet because we don’t encounter it as often as in the real world, partly because the medium provides less options for it. I seem to remember a thread a short while ago discussing the decline in virtue morality revolving around personal traits such as kindness, loyalty, honor, braveness etc, versus morality that focuses mostly on what people believe. On the internet we are deluged with opinions on controversial topics, so it becomes natural to judge by that beyond the level that the correlation between the two would realistically justify.

          • cuke says:

            I’m glad you’re here Hoopyfreud and hope that you stick around. I’ve enjoyed reading your comments.

  22. entropy68 says:

    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.

  23. Viliam says:

    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.

  24. BBA says:

    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.

    • 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.

      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.

      • Ouroborobot says:

        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.

      • gloriousg999 says:

        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”.

        • awal says:

          To add to this, there isn’t necessarily a strong correlation between how easy it is to defeat/disprove an argument or believe, and how wrong or dangerous it is.
          If every thread is openly debating lizard-people theories, or holocaust denials, it may be that both of those are more defensible than expected, but it doesn’t mean that the first isn’t 100% wrong and the second isn’t 100% wrong and 100% hurtful.

        • Some people really will relish talking to extremists.

          Most conversations, at least on topics such as politics or economics or religion, are with people who have views I am already familiar with, so I am unlikely to learn much new from them. The odds are better for someone whose views are either ones I have never heard of or ones I and everyone else I know are confident are wrong.

          True story, which I may have told here before. Many years ago I was invited to participate in a conference in Paris. A little before it happened, I was informed that many of those planning to attend had withdrawn, in protest against the inclusion of someone they regarded as a fascist.

          My response was that if there was going to be a fascist present, that was a reason to go. I had never, so far as I knew, talked with a fascist, and the position was obviously sufficiently defensible to have persuaded a lot of people, hence probably worth understanding.

          I went. The “fascist” (actually I think a member of Le Pen’s party—father not daughter) also withdrew in counter protest, but I arranged to have dinner with him.

          It was quite interesting. He wasn’t, so far as I could tell, a fascist. And he was anti-semitic only to the extent that he was anti-Christian. His view was that the pagan Roman Empire had been the high point of European civilization, rotted by Christianity.

          His view of the U.S., which he had probably never visited, was more or less wall to wall McDonalds. So I enjoyed telling him about the SCA. An interesting dinner conversation for me and, I suspect, him.

          • gloriousg999 says:

            Most conversations, at least on topics such as politics or economics or religion, are with people who have views I am already familiar with, so I am unlikely to learn much new from them. The odds are better for someone whose views are either ones I have never heard of or ones I and everyone else I know are confident are wrong.

            I understand. I prefer to read extremists. Usually when you read an author, you get to pick a good advocate, there is more emotional distance, it’s easier to fact-check hard to believe claims, and you can skip past any bizarre rhetoric.

            I suppose a good example of the difference may be Murray Rothbard. Reading Murray Rothbard will help you understand a decent segment of libertarian ideology today. Talking to the average libertarian will help, but it might be frustrating as they may be unreflective or unsophisticated. It’s also easier to keep your cool if you read that the government is a “predatory gang of robbers, enslavers, and murderers”, than if you listened to it in person. If there’s a statement like “fractional reserve banks … create money out of thin air. Essentially they do it in the same way as counterfeiters. “, reading it allows you to stop right there and do a bit of research on the fractional reserve banking system. Lastly, if any of this seems too absurd to need to listen to, you can skip past it, unlike in person.

            Intellectual study of extremists can be heavenly, but having them as your conversation partners is often a form of hell.

    • gbdub says:

      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.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      One good way to get people to avoid sympathizing with neo-Nazis would be not to subject neo-Nazis to grave injustices.

      • albatross11 says:

        Whether it’s a grave injustice that someone loses their job for being an open neo-Nazi is exactly the question at hand.

        • Aapje says:

          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).

          • awal says:

            I don’t think that it’s about that person, it’s about signaling to society that hating people based on born characteristics is capital-b Bad, and preventing the normalization of those ideas and their uptake bg others.

        • LesHapablap says:

          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?

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            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?

          • LesHapablap says:

            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.

          • gloriousg999 says:

            “Choosing not to hire someone is probably morally equivalent to firing someone.”

            Disagree, firing causes more direct harm than not hiring. So, when you refuse to hire somebody, their financial situation before you decided not to hire them just isn’t changed. In many cases, they’ve already made the financial plans to accommodate this(and may already be employed). It’s entirely possible they have another interview that will hire them in 2 weeks.

            When you fire somebody, their financial situation is thrown into chaos. They have to make the plans to manage the financial issues. It is not likely they have another interview in 2 weeks that may lead to a job offer.

            Just quibbling though, honestly.

          • LesHapablap says:

            If the employee moved across the country for the job, and he gets fired on his first day, sure. But if he’s been there for a year and the employer has paid for lots of training, the employee could well be better off than if he had just not gotten the job. Depends on a lot of variables.

          • gloriousg999 says:

            It does depend on a lot of variables, but if we assume that people who weren’t hired will generally be hired for another (broadly equivalent) job, whereas people who get fired were not already prepared for the loss of their job, then it’s clearly imbalanced.

            I think the set of circumstances where an unreceived opportunity costs more than the loss of the existing opportunity one already has is higher is fairly rare, and really more likely in certain high-wage growth/prestige driven job markets.

        • Walter says:

          It is, at the very least, questionable tactics.

          Like, Fred the Nazi Accountant is busy 9-5 filling out forms. He spends the majority of his adult life hiding his depravity, smiling with utmost servility at his customers. He might even, at some point, decide to quit this expensive and shameful hobby and devote himself full time to the ‘accountant’ part of his identity.

          The unemployed version has nothing to lose, and is correspondingly far more dangerous.

    • BBA says:

      Look, I’m glad we have so many Vulcans posting here, diversity is strength and all that. But I’m a human, I have my limits, and there are some topics I just can’t discuss rationally.

      • albatross11 says:

        That’s true for everyone, but they’re not all the same topics. And so there’s a benefit to having fora where it’s possible to discuss a really wide range of topics, and people who can’t discuss X rationally know that if they go to those fora, they’re probably just going to need to ignore some discussions as unproductive for them.

  25. wanda_tinasky says:

    Ugh. Just ugh. What’s the world coming to?

  26. PeterDonis says:

    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.)

    • Joseph Greenwood says:

      +1

      And thank you for this.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      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.

    • 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

      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.

      • PeterDonis says:

        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.

        • gloriousg999 says:

          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.

          • PeterDonis says:

            In practice, I think the enforcement will be subject to a LOT of subjective judgment and hand-wringing.

            The subjective judgment part is true of any moderation policy. To have a moderated forum, you need moderators, and that means their subjective judgments are going to be the basis for enforcement.

            I’m not so sure about “hand-wringing”. I don’t see a reason to agonize over something that can’t be helped. If the issue is fear that one’s moderation decisions might be too much based on one’s personal opinions, the way to fix that is to have multiple moderators and have them discuss particularly difficult decisions before taking action.

          • 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.

            Aren’t we made of sterner stuff here? I like to think we can be willing to be guinea pigs for moderation experiments without too much complaint. That seems rationalist to me.

          • gloriousg999 says:

            The subjective judgment part is true of any moderation policy.

            Yes and no? So, some moderation rules are much clearer than others, and/or tie back to clearly demarcated wrongs better. “No insults” is much clearer. “No trolling” also can be clear as well.

            The big issue is that any time an ambiguous decision must be made, you may be facing a personal cost, but also potentially a political cost. If UBI Steve has become a delightful part of your forum’s ecosystem, then you really just can’t enforce this rule, even if it would help you with Hitler Fetishist Mike.

            I’m not so sure about “hand-wringing”. I don’t see a reason to agonize over something that can’t be helped. If the issue is fear that one’s moderation decisions might be too much based on one’s personal opinions, the way to fix that is to have multiple moderators and have them discuss particularly difficult decisions before taking action.

            So, clear rules, where every person can agree on the transgression, are very easy to enforce. If corner cases are possible, then it’s plausible to expect at least one person to act as a corner case, which creates a political nightmare in enforcing rules.(unless there are extreme variances in status!)

            Even further, I think the “multiple moderators all talk everything through” goes back into the “in a perfect world where everyone is well-staffed”, which doesn’t strike me as how voluntary moderator positions always work.

            Also, to be clear, I’m not saying subjective feelings are the only aspect. So, there is psychological cost, but also social cost. Every time you punish somebody, but members of the forum don’t 100% agree, the moderator team has taken on some social risk.

            Aren’t we made of sterner stuff here? I like to think we can be willing to be guinea pigs for moderation experiments without too much complaint. That seems rationalist to me.

            “Rationalist” just speaks to the ideology/orientation, not the emotional substance. So, when I think about rule-design, I think about ease on my end to enforce rules.

            Also, the root problems with moderation are political, not “rational/irrational”. Different group norms may react differently to a mismanaged political event, but they don’t reduce the cost of mismanagement.

          • PeterDonis says:

            some moderation rules are much clearer than others, and/or tie back to clearly demarcated wrongs better. “No insults” is much clearer. “No trolling” also can be clear as well.

            Even those “clear” ones still involve subjective judgments. There is no objective insult detector or troll detector.

            The big issue is that any time an ambiguous decision must be made, you may be facing a personal cost, but also potentially a political cost. If UBI Steve has become a delightful part of your forum’s ecosystem, then you really just can’t enforce this rule, even if it would help you with Hitler Fetishist Mike.

            What rule do you think can’t be enforced in this case? I have already said in other posts upthread that if, for example, you have a rule “no 10,000 word manifestos about your pet belief”, you have to enforce it the same against people posting beliefs you agree with as you do against people posting beliefs you disagree with. So UBI Steve can’t post his 10,000 word manifesto any more than Hitler Fetishist Mike can.

            I think the “multiple moderators all talk everything through” goes back into the “in a perfect world where everyone is well-staffed”, which doesn’t strike me as how voluntary moderator positions always work.

            That’s true. But it also suggests a rule of thumb: if there are a very small number of moderators and no easy way for them to talk about difficult cases, the forum will have problems. So people who are contemplating starting a forum should think about that.

            Every time you punish somebody, but members of the forum don’t 100% agree, the moderator team has taken on some social risk.

            And the response to this is that all moderation decisions are final (which is not to say there can’t be an appeal process), and at the end of the day, people’s final recourse if they absolutely can’t stand the decisions moderators are making is to go post somewhere else. It is impossible to make decisions that will please everyone all the time, no matter what the forum rules are.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        The real problem isn’t so much deciding what to let people post, it’s third parties who try to wreck Scott’s peace of mind and reputation because of who he gives room to.

    • gbdub says:

      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.

      • whereamigoing says:

        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.

      • PeterDonis says:

        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.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      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?

      • PeterDonis says:

        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.

        It’s always possible to make up outlandish hypotheticals. That doesn’t mean we should seriously consider them when deciding on a moderation policy for a discussion forum.

        To answer your question as you ask it, such an extraordinary claim would require extraordinary evidence. Which, by your hypothesis, this person would not be able to provide. So yes, they would most likely get banned as being a crackpot or insane.

        What exactly do you think this proves?

        • So yes, they would most likely get banned as being a crackpot or insane.

          You are aware that twelve and a half (plus signs of puberty) was the age, under Rabbinic law, at which a woman not only could be married but was an adult and so could be married without her parents’ permission?

          Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
          George Bernard Shaw, “Ceasar and Cleopatra”

          • PeterDonis says:

            You are aware that twelve and a half (plus signs of puberty) was the age, under Rabbinic law, at which a woman not only could be married but was an adult and so could be married without her parents’ permission?

            I am now. 🙂

            To clarify my previous post, the reason I said the person in the original hypothetical would be banned as being a crackpot or insane was not the claim that 12 year olds having sex is beneficial to them. It was the claim that they know this because they’re from the 24th century and it’s common knowledge then. Someone who backed up the claim about 12 year olds by citing Rabbinic law and giving evidence about the societies that used it would not be treated the same way.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            @PeterDonis

            Of course the point isn’t about people saying they’re time travelers. It’s about how somebody who is right and knows he’s right but is outside the moderator’s overton windows would manage to be part of the conversation. If the answer is “he can’t”, that’s ok, but you can’t call it an open conversation anymore.

          • PeterDonis says:

            Of course the point isn’t about people saying they’re time travelers. It’s about how somebody who is right and knows he’s right but is outside the moderator’s overton windows would manage to be part of the conversation.

            The problem with someone claiming they’re a time traveler is not that it’s outside the moderator’s Overton window: it’s that it violates the laws of physics, at least as we understand them today, so the burden of proof someone would have to meet to convince someone that they really did have a sound basis for the claims you describe is so high that it’s going to be impossible in practice to meet.

            If the answer is “he can’t”, that’s ok, but you can’t call it an open conversation anymore.

            It’s not that he can’t be part of the conversation; it’s that he can’t reasonably expect to convince anyone that he’s not a crackpot or insane, after he has had a chance to say what he wants to say. I didn’t say the person would get banned as a crackpot or insane without being heard. My point is that in an open forum, he would be heard, and would make his claims, and would state what the basis for those claims was, and those statements would be so outlandish to everyone else that there would be no practical way for them to be accepted as valid. And once everyone concludes he’s a crackpot or insane, he would be banned. Unless you are claiming that even crackpots or insane people should be allowed to post without restriction in order for the forum to be considered “open”?

          • Radu Floricica says:

            @PeterDonis

            You misunderstand 🙂 I don’t mean he’ll say in public he’s a time traveler. Just that he knows he’s right – for whatever other reason you want to imagine.

          • and those statements would be so outlandish to everyone else that there would be no practical way for them to be accepted as valid. And once everyone concludes he’s a crackpot or insane, he would be banned.

            I think that policy, classifying someone who argues for something you are sure is false as a crackpot or lunatic and banning him on that basis, is a mistake for two reasons.

            The first is that you might be wrong. It may be very unlikely–but the very fact that you are sure his claim is false suggests that if it is true, knowing it would substantially shift your view of reality towards being more nearly correct, which is a large benefit.

            The second is that, even if he is wrong, if he offers intelligent and coherent reasons for his false belief you may learn a good deal from arguing with him.

            If you are going to ban someone for being a crackpot, it ought to be on the basis of how he argues, not what he argues for.

          • PeterDonis says:

            I don’t mean he’ll say in public he’s a time traveler. Just that he knows he’s right

            But it’s not enough for him to know he’s right. He has to defend his claims by arguments and evidence, otherwise there is no discussion, just him making an assertion and everybody else ignoring it. What arguments and evidence is he going to give other than that he’s a time traveler if his basis for his belief is that it’s common knowledge in the 24th century?

          • PeterDonis says:

            If you are going to ban someone for being a crackpot, it ought to be on the basis of how he argues, not what he argues for.

            This is a fair point. If there were a way for the time traveler to give credible evidence in favor of time travel on an internet discussion forum, he might actually be able to convince others that he was telling the truth when he describes what things are like in the 24th century. But there would still be a very, very strong Bayesian prior to overcome (though evident recognition of this fact on his part would count in his favor–see below).

            Or, alternatively, if he were able to give good arguments in favor of his views without relying on information that could only be verified by someone who lived in the 24th century, yes, there would be a good discussion and no reason to ban him. I was assuming that the original hypothetical ruled out this possibility by saying that the person doesn’t have any special knowledge of why things are the way they are in the 24th century with respect to the sexual relationships of 12 year olds, just that he knows it is common knowledge that they are beneficial.

            On the other hand, if all he did were to keep repeating that he was a time traveler and describing the 24th century, without showing any sign of recognizing that everyone is going to need more than just his unsupported word to believe in time travel, then he probably ends up getting banned. Part of discussion and argument is recognizing where your audience is starting from.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            > Unless you are claiming that even crackpots or insane people should be allowed to post without restriction in order for the forum to be considered “open”?

            Well, this kindof is what we’re talking about. Do people that moderators believe to be utterly wrong, but are otherwise coherent and polite, have a right to be in the conversation or not?

            The main reason you should … always? almost always? can’t really think of an edge case here, but there probably are some… so the reason you should almost always say “yes” is Intellectual Humility. Which is the possibility that you yourself are utterly wrong. If you eliminate this possibility, then like David Friedman said, you’re also eliminating the possibility of growing in interesting ways.

            I did at least one 180 in my life, and the main lesson from that was how wrong I could be. And I wasn’t even particularly young, it happened in my 30s. After that, I’m going to listen to everybody. Decide they’re wrong, of course, but I’m definitely going to Listen to them.

            A whole section of the Sequences is dedicated to that, btw:
            https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_Mind

          • PeterDonis says:

            Do people that moderators believe to be utterly wrong, but are otherwise coherent and polite, have a right to be in the conversation or not?

            I agree with DavidFriedman’s point that people should be banned based on how they argue, not on what they are arguing for. See my response to him.

        • gloriousg999 says:

          It just ties back to the issues of how this is a delicate balance.

          I mean, if I had to be honest, it’s hard for me to say that I have much evidence that consensual teen sex is bad for development. The closest I have is the correlative evidence that MIT students lose their virginity later, and I’d bet that the later loss of virginity is an effect.

          That being said, there really isn’t a way to handle the overall balance 100% well. The impression I get is that the best types of solutions tend to be cultural, and also finding ways to get “bad participants” to break explicit rules or be unliked. Forums are semi-public, and one’s actions in a forum speaks well(or ill) of you, and so it is a bit of political management.

          “Teens should have sex!” person can probably be nudged into either coming off as just acknowledging the reality that teens will have sex, or pushed into sounding like a pedophile(and violating rules involving local laws/trolling/being unliked).

  27. 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

  28. Deiseach says:

    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.

    The Curse
    BY J. M. SYNGE

    To a sister of an enemy of the author’s who disapproved of ‘The Playboy’

    Lord, confound this surly sister,
    Blight her brow with blotch and blister,
    Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver,
    In her guts a galling give her.
    Let her live to earn her dinners
    In Mountjoy with seedy sinners:
    Lord, this judgment quickly bring,
    And I’m your servant, J. M. Synge.

    ON THOSE WHO STOLE OUR CAT, A CURSE

    On those who stole our cat, a curse:
    may they always have an empty purse
    and need a doctor and a nurse
    prematurely;
    may their next car be a big black hearse –
    oh may it, surely!

    May all their kids come down with mange,
    their eldest daughter start acting strange,
    and the wife start riding the range
    (and I don’t mean the Aga);
    when she begins to go through the change
    may she go gaga.

    And may the husband lose his job
    and have great trouble with his knob
    and the son turn out a yob
    and smash the place up;
    may he give his da a belt in the gob
    and mess his face up!

    And may the granny end up in jail
    for opening her neighbours’ mail,
    may all that clan moan, weep and wail,
    turn grey and wizened
    on the day she doesn’t get bail
    but Mountjoy Prison!

    Oh may their daughter get up the pole,
    and their drunken uncle lose his dole,
    for our poor cat one day they stole –
    may they rue it!
    and if there is a black hell-hole
    may they go through it!

    Unfriendly loan-sharks to their door
    as they beg for one week more;
    may the seven curses of Inchicore
    rot and blight ’em!
    May all their enemies settle the score
    and kick the shite of ’em!

    I wish rabies on all their pets,
    I wish them a flock of bastard gets,
    I wish ’em a load of unpayable debts,
    TV Inspectors –
    to show’em a poet never forgets
    his malefactors.

    May rats and mice them ever hound,
    may half of them be of mind unsound,
    may their house burn down to the ground
    and no insurance;
    may drugs and thugs their lives surround
    beyond endurance!

    May God forgive the heartless thief
    who caused our household so much grief;
    if you think I’m harsh, sigh with relief –
    I haven’t even started.
    I can do worse. I am, in brief,
    yours truly, Michael Hartnett.

  29. emiliobumachar says:

    Tangent: could you please link me to “a story that Scott wrote retelling The Iliad with lawyers”? I can’t find it.

  30. baj2235 says:

    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.

  31. CheshireCat says:

    (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!)

    Not to be insensitive but I find this personally interesting, care to elaborate?

  32. marxbro says:

    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.

    • SaiNushi says:

      “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.

      • gbdub says:

        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.

      • marxbro says:

        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.

        • reasoned argumentation says:

          Let’s not forget stuff like Charlottesville in which a leftist was run over by a right-winger and multiple others injured.

          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

          • marxbro says:

            “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.

            No one was run over.

            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.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            Well, he was convicted on hit-and-run and first degree murder charges.

            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.

            “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.

            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.

          • marxbro says:

            @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 haven’t seen the video, but I’m guessing that reasoned’s point is that the car did not actually run over anyone. That’s consistent with it having hit someone, injured him, even killed him.

            On the other hand, the video he links to has Fields saying that he “waved him off” with his rifle, not, as reasoned claims, that he chased him.

    • The Pachyderminator says:

      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.)

      • marxbro says:

        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.

          • marxbro says:

            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.

            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.

          • gbdub says:

            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.

          • marxbro says:

            @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.

          • eyeballfrog says:

            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.

          • marxbro says:

            @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.

          • gloriousg999 says:

            “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.

          • marxbro says:

            @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.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            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.

            This isn’t explicitly saying “you had it coming to you”, but it’s feels as though hinting in that direction further than I think is OK. If that’s not you’re intent, you might want to clarify that.

            Punching people in the face is not an acceptable response to their espousing awful opinions.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            .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.

            That’s two very different requests rolled into one.

            Not shutting you up is a reasonable request, but I’m afraid I think that taking you seriously and having calm discussions with you about Stalin is not.

            I think that your views on Stalin are a long way outside the zone of things worth taking seriously, and while people who attempt to force you into silence are acting unreasonably, people who just laugh you off or dismiss you and talk round you, or openly mock you, are not.

          • @marxbro:

            Is your basic complaint that people shouldn’t respond to arguments, however wrong, with violence, or is it that your argument wasn’t wrong, hence should not have been responded to with violence?

            To put the same questions differently, suppose you observed the same scene except the person who was attacked was defending Hitler instead of Stalin. Would you have the same reaction?

            On the issue of Stalin, two comments. First, you might want to compare Soviet economic growth under the USSR either with the growth rate in late Tsarist Russia or with the growth of capitalist countries starting at similar levels. By the end of the Soviet period, Russia was strikingly poorer than other countries, such as Japan, that had been similarly poor at the beginning.

            Second, I recommend the book Conspiracy of Silence by Alexander Weissberg. It’s by an Austrian communist (and physicist) who got caught up in the Great Purge and describes his experiences. He was eventually handed over to the Gestapo (he was Jewish) at the time of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, but survived.

            It might give you a different view of Stalin’s Russia.

          • @marxbro

            Maoists like myself

            My impression of Stalin is that he’s competent evil with some upsides; he industrialized the Soviet Union (at the expense of millions of lives, since grain confiscation for export was a big part of how imports of industrial equipment were paid for)*, and did the most important work in defeating Hitler. I think he’s evil because he was paranoid and brutal, employed slave labor on an enormous scale, purged party members for wrongthink, assassinated class enemies on a massive scale, and artificially contributed to famine through forced collectivization and grain requisition. We surely disagree on how much of that is true, but I think the upsides are the rapid industrialization, and the USSR’s role in WWII, and the rapid industrialization was surely required to defeat Hitler, whose General Plan Ost would have unleashed anti-slavic genocide on a scale that would have made the Holocaust look like a tea party. I also think that besides his paranoia causing him to misstep and kill people needlessly at times, he was overrall competent and did what he said was going to do. He did industrialize the USSR, and he did defeat Hitler.

            So I can understand Marxism-Leninism/Stalinism; we just disagree about whether central planning works beyond a narrow context, and whether the deaths were justified/Western exaggerations/propaganda.

            Now, Maoism, I can’t understand at all. Stalin can be reproached with killing millions while industrializing his country at breakneck speed. Mao can be reproached with killing millions while de-industrializing his country at breakneck speed.

            Mao did objectively crazy things like trying to kill all the sparrows or like melting down most of the country’s iron into useless slag in backyard foundaries. The Great Leap Forward was a cosmic scale tragicomedy.

            These things aren’t even particular to communism, and so don’t need to be defended on those grounds, so I’m kind of fascinated when I meet a Maoist, because I know that even if I became convinced by Marxism and communism, my opinion of Mao would be almost exactly the same as it is now.

            *Although I see wildly conflicting information about this, and I’m not sure who to trust:
            @DavidFriedman

            On the issue of Stalin, two comments. First, you might want to compare Soviet economic growth under the USSR either with the growth rate in late Tsarist Russia or with the growth of capitalist countries starting at similar levels. By the end of the Soviet period, Russia was strikingly poorer than other countries, such as Japan, that had been similarly poor at the beginning.

            My impression has always been that Stalin massively industrialized the USSR (there are some graphs of steel production I recall that show it shooting past other countries, but I don’t have them to hand) by copying Fordist assembly line techniques and combining them with central planning and collectivization (and the slave labor figures for raw resources are kinda crazy). The Soviet system seemed to fail to adapt to new conditions, but it seems like it was able to copy what the West had already established, and then run the Industrial Revolution program on fast forwards (hence the need for huge amounts of state force and murder compared to the much more drawn out capitalist process that happened earlier in Europe and America).

          • but I think the upsides are the rapid industrialization

            I’m not an expert on the subject, but I think you are mistaken. As I suggested earlier, you might want to compare what happened in the Soviet case with what happened in comparable non-communist societies. For a simple case, compare modern Russia with modern Japan.

            Also, you need to use Soviet economic statistics from after the fall of the USSR, because it is now known that the official statistics were largely bogus.

            For a picture of late Soviet Russia, the book The Russians is interesting. The general impression I get is a poor first world capital in a mostly third world country.

        • Deiseach says:

          marxbro, the best I can say is that I hope you get your wish, and get to live under the beneficient rule of another Stalin in another USSR busy lifting millions out of ignorance and poverty and into the sunlit truth of the workers’ utopia.

          I dearly, dearly hope you get the wish of your heart.

      • LadyJane says:

        As someone who’s highly critical of socialism, I can say it’s largely because of the way that the term is interchangeably used for 1.) Nordic-style Social Democracy, 2.) some kind of totally untried and quite possibly non-viable system where the economy is democratically controlled, 3.) an authoritarian command economy like the USSR or Maoist China, or 4.) some kind of poorly defined movement to overthrow capitalism without any real idea of what’s going to replace it, beyond some vague fuzzy appeal to the spirit of human cooperation or some such nonsense. I’m fine with 1, but I think 2 is probably a utopian fantasy that either couldn’t actually exist or would fall apart rapidly, and 3 and 4 both seem horrible and likely to lead to truly awful outcomes.

        So yes, whenever I hear a Marxist-Leninist or a Maoist defend Stalin’s totalitarian nightmare state and talk about how the Kulaks deserved to be wiped out, it makes me just the slightest bit more reluctant to entertain socialist ideas in general.

        • marxbro says:

          I don’t consider Mao’s China or the USSR to be “authoritarian”, indeed they did a pretty good job mitigating or, in some cases, eliminating the authoritarianism/totalitarianism of liberalism, capitalism and monarchy.

        • LadyJane says:

          From Scott’s anti-Trump article:

          If you’re a Jew fighting anti-Semitism, the absolute minimum you can do is not actually kill Christian children and use their blood to make matzah. Likewise, if you are a principled classical liberal fighting the social justice movement’s attempt to smear anyone who disagrees with them as an overprivileged clueless hateful Neanderthal, the absolute minimum you can do is not actually be an overprivileged clueless hateful Neanderthal.

          When someone talks about how they’re skeptical of socialism because they associate it with authoritarian regimes, responding with “those regimes weren’t actually that bad!” sure isn’t the response that’s going to make people more amenable to socialism.

      • 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.

        I don’t actually think that’s how it works. At the very least, Stalinists have the same effect on the success of democratic socialism as Malcolm X had on the success of MLK, Jr.

        And then there’s this video: “Why ‘Communism’ is Important.”

    • Basil Elton says:

      Ok, let me try to explain to you, calmly and logically, why some people might get pretty upset about this whole “Stalin isn’t so bad” thing. As I am definitely one of those people.

      In short terms – you say someone punched you in the face, and you’re rightfully pissed off at anyone assuming that’s a legitimate way to lead a political discussion. Now imagine somebody shoots down your relative, then a guy shows up and says that was a legitimate way to lead a political discussion and the killer was basically a good fella.

      Here’s the links to three non-profit organizations in the former USSR which exist solely for the purpose of gathering and preserving information about the victims of repressions in the USSR. One of them lists over 3 millions records. The other 1.7 mln. I wasn’t able to find total numbers from the third one but it has scans of documents containing names of tens of thousand of people signed to death by Stalin personally. Unfortunately the first two websites are in Russian, and so are all the documents and records on the third one. But you can get an impression from google translate.

      Of course, I’m not claiming those are exact numbers of people killed and imprisoned – that’s not the point. Point of these organizations is to preserve memory of actual human lives behind those numbers. You see, those lists are composed by volunteers, with many of stories and photos taken from family archives. When you think of it in terms of imprisonment rates, it seems very important whether those are higher or lower than in the modern US. When you remember those were actual living people with their families and memories, even 10000 executed for no good reason sounds like way, way too many. And there were orders of magnitudes more than 10 thousand. Almost every person from former USSR I asked have at least one relative who suffered from the repressions – and I was born and grown up in Russia, so I’ve met quite a few people from there. My own great-grandfather died in gulag. So when you say “Stalin was a good comrade”, to people like me it sounds “It’s generally OK to kill innocent people, if you really need it to advance your politics”. And by “people like me” I don’t mean only those who themselves originate or has relatives from the former USSR. There’re also individuals genuinely capable of compassion with people they’ve never ever met, who lived in another country decades ago. Rare as they are, maybe the guy who punched you was just one of those strange creatures.

      PS: Oh and don’t even get me started on Russians who love Stalin. This comment is long and off topic enough already.

  33. Jacobeus says:

    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.

    • gbdub says:

      +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.

    • mindslight says:

      +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.

    • SaiNushi says:

      +1

      Scott, thank you for being a voice of sanity on an increasingly insane internet.

    • Eternaltraveler says:

      +1

      This is one of the last places where rational people who disagree with each other can have a conversation. I thank you for that, and I thank you for writing about what it costs you. I agree with your writings more than I disagree, but disagree strongly in some areas, and that’s ok. It frankly makes me sad that one of the most reasonable people on the internet is experiencing this kind of nonsense.

      This brand you’ve created has real value. Perhaps another means of defending yourself would be to more effectively monetize that value so at least a portion of your livelihood would be secure. Write a book and sell it for money. Use this platform to find patients for a private practice (do or don’t take insurance, I’m sure there is a market for the world’s only rationalist psychiatrist). I’m sure there are very many things you could do.

      I guess I would like to see you win, and not merely fight the long defeat.

      I also live near Berkeley (and a few years ago I worked at UC Berkeley for a couple years). I haven’t been to a rationality meetup since 2010, but maybe I’ll come to the next one.

    • Joseph Greenwood says:

      +1

      As a Christian, I have learned more about charity from you than from Paul the apostle.

  34. Freddie deBoer says:

    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.

    • marxbro says:

      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.

      • Freddie deBoer says:

        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.

  35. hroark314 says:

    “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.

    • gbdub says:

      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.

        • gbdub says:

          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.

          • hroark314 says:

            “Scott is on most issues a lefty”
            That comment goes to the heart of my inquiry. Historically, left wing countries have suppressed freedom of speech far more severely than those we call right wing (I deplore the binary political classification system, but that’s a giant topic). Mao’s China, present-day North Korea and Cuba, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, etc. – there’s no question that leftism is, in the real world, associated with repression of free speech to a greater degree than any other political ideology. So, since Scott evidently abhors the repression of free speech, I wonder what aspects of the left wing platform are so positive in his mind (or others’) to justify supporting a group that promotes an ideology that’s heavily associated with the repression of speech – both historically around the globe and at present in this country.

            I’m a libertarianish conservative, but I’ll give you an example of the cost benefit analysis I’m trying to elicit. I think civil asset forfeiture and federal laws against using drugs are unconstitutional, immoral, and bad for society. I think a border wall is stupid. However, I voted for Donald Trump, who supports all three policies. I voted for him because Clinton would not have done anything to change civil asset forfeiture or federal laws against drug use and I think the border wall is an issue of incredibly minor importance. However, I care deeply about de-regulation, the creation of a strict-constructionist judiciary, and reform of the corporate tax code. Honestly, my support for Trump against Clinton involves a great many more nuanced issues than the ones I’ve listed, but I think you get my gist. I don’t like everything about Donald Trump, but on balance I think he is better than Hillary. I’m wondering what calculus leads a lefty who supports free speech to support the Democrats.

      • hroark314 says:

        I think you’re saying I’m confusing the party’s radical fringe with its mainstream backers. I’m not doing that at all. I’m questioning why a person who is not a radical would support a party that enables these fringe radicals to wield great power. If mainstream Democrats roundly condemned the small minority of radical leftists, those groups wouldn’t have any power. I think most of us here can agree that silencing discussions is a bad thing, so I’m asking what are the positives of the Democratic platform that outweigh the negative of empowering the anti-free speech crowd. That’s not meant to be a loaded question; it’s simply meant to be an invitation to explain one’s point of view.

    • John Schilling says:

      “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.

        • gbdub says:

          “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.

          • hroark314 says:

            Except I didn’t say he was irrational. I asked why he thought it was rational to vote Democrat in spite of their support for (or at least their reluctance to criticize) people who engage in behavior he obviously despises. I’m just asking what’s so important that free speech takes a back seat. I even offered an example of what that explanation might be in my original comment – maybe it’s economic issues. I don’t know; I’m interested in hearing what people with different positions think.

      • hroark314 says:

        I apologize for seeming to offer an attack. If you look at some of my other comments on this thread, I think you’ll see I’m really not trying to attack anyone; I’m trying to understand the value systems that drive people who are different than me. For example, I just posted a short list of reasons why I voted for Donald Trump, even though I think he’s dead wrong on many issues. Nobody agrees 100% with any politician or political party they support. However, Scott seems pretty committed to free speech and, based on this post, he seems pretty angry at his treatment. The gist of my question is – “In what respect are conservatives so terribly wrong that supporting the opposition party, even when it gives support to people who suppress free speech and threaten your own career, is worth it?”

        • cuke says:

          I obviously can’t speak for Scott.

          I strongly support free speech. It’s far from self-evident to me that the historical record shows that left-leaning regimes have been harsher to speech rights than right-leaning ones. I think we can both cherry-pick examples from the broad sweep of history, so I’m going to spare you mine.

          Right now today, if you live in the U.S. South and voice pro-labor union views, that can make you almost unemployable. If you are a non-Christian in certain parts of the U.S. South and/or you go to the “wrong” church, you may have difficulty with employment. If you are a nun in the Catholic church who has been raped by a priest, Catholic priests can censor you or remove your livelihood. If you are a woman seeking medical counseling for abortion in some parts of the country or world, your doctor may be prohibited from (ie, censored) from speaking to you about abortion as an option. If you are a family whose child has legitimately experienced an adverse reaction to a vaccine, you are likely to be shamed for even raising the topic of medical exemptions. If you are a person with mental illness and are on disability, you are likely to be shamed online for being “lazy” and “just not wanting to work.” A Republican in the U.S. is more likely to want to insert Christian views into secular politics (via prayer in school, Bible commandments in public parks), which I consider a First Amendment problem. The Republican president of the U.S. right now is still calling the free press “the enemy of the people” and seems perniciously confused about the First Amendment, speaking of freedom of speech.

          My experience is that intolerance comes equally from both ends of the political spectrum. In your corner of the world at this moment in history and based on your political views, you may feel that conservatives are more shut down by liberals than vice versa. The world is larger.

          Because this has been my experience, living in multiple parts of this country and in other countries, that intolerance comes from both ends of the political spectrum, intolerance on the left is not an argument against it. That allows me to focus on the specific policies of researchers and thinkers all across the political spectrum and to match them up with my values and priorities.

          Some U.S. conservatives have made a different calculation about Trump than you have because they see his threat to democracy, truth, and to the rule of law to be bigger issues than any one policy he might advance. You are of course free to disagree with them. We all have our priorities. But your priorities do not mean other people do not equally value freedom of speech.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      supporting a party whose supporters use mob justice to suppress dissenting points of view.

      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 says:

        I could have worded that better. Most Democrats are fine people. I live in northern Virginia and work in DC. Most of the people I know are Democrats who wouldn’t engage in this behavior (though I also know a small number of them whom I am sure would).

        Let me state this differently. The Democratic party in the U.S. is clearly more tolerant of the anti-free speech actions of its radical fringe than Republicans are. While there have been a small number of cases in which Republicans/conservatives have managed to use mobs to repress free speech or destroy the careers of those on the left, they’re far outnumbered by the number of cases in which Democrats/the left suppress Republican or conservative voices. Historically, the global left has also been far more closely associated with censorship than the right.

        So, my theory – and by all means criticize it if you think it’s wrong – is that voting Democrat is more likely to result in repression of free speech than voting Republican. Assuming my theory is true, I’m wondering what issues would lead a person who values free speech to vote Democrat rather than Republican. Maybe your response is that my theory is crud and I realize I should have explained my theory in my original comment. However, assuming my theory is not crud, there could still be many reasonable justifications for supporting a party that is less supportive of free speech. I’m just interested in hearing what people think about that.

        • Reasoner says:

          Republicans do the same thing when they have the chance. See these posts for instance.

          • cuke says:

            Is there perhaps a Colin Kaepernick for every James Damore? A James Hodgkinson for every Cesar Sayok.

            I wonder when we can stop pretending that “our side” is better behaved, more reasonable than the “other side”?

          • The Nybbler says:

            I wonder when we can stop pretending that “our side” is better behaved, more reasonable than the “other side”?

            Perhaps it is. There is no law of conservation of evil. Not even with your examples. Colin Kaepernick used his company’s public events to make a personal political statement. James Damore posted some stuff about his own industry that his company didn’t like in an internal forum, where no one outside the company could see it. Damore was quickly fired after someone else made it public. Kaepernick was not even fired, he wasn’t re-signed after he quit.

            Cesar Sayok mailed fake bombs. James Hodgkinson fired real bullets.

            Yes, both (or all) sides do evil. No, not all of them the same amount.

          • Reasoner says:

            Here is a libertarian Forbes blogger who analyzed the data in 2017 and found:

            Terrorists inspired by Nationalist and Right Wing ideology have killed about 10 times as many people as Left Wing terrorists since 1992.

          • cuke says:

            Does it really seem to you, Nybbler, that this line of argument wherein we compare the length of our battle scars is going to get somewhere useful? What if we manage to compile every iota of evidence of every bad thing that’s been done going back to the start of political tribes and we’re able to determine that “your” side has committed 0.0003% fewer “violations,” where would that get us? And if we determined that your side had committed 0.0003% more violations, where would that get us? Honestly, how does this advance the conversation?

            Let’s say I concede to you, even despite whatever evidence exists (I too am aware of the research that Reasoner cites, which you may find yet another way to nitpick), that our side is “worse” at some list of bad behavior as determined over some timeline and geography, now what?

          • The Nybbler says:

            Does it really seem to you, Nybbler, that this line of argument wherein we compare the length of our battle scars is going to get somewhere useful?

            If it’s not useful to compare, it’s not useful to insist they’re the same either. The argument that they are comes off as similar to the Soviet Union’s famous tu quoque

            (As for the Forbes/Cato accounting, it suffers from quantization noise. Two events dominate the dataset)

          • sentientbeings says:

            @Reasoner

            I looked at that Forbes article.

            The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the second deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, killed 168 people and accounted for 77% of all the murders committed by Nationalist and Right Wing terrorists.

            I think that categorizing Timothy McVeigh’s political views as right wing is probably not appropriate. I don’t know about the other guy. But as with the other major incident dominating the data (9/11), one large attack isn’t particularly useful in describing the patterns of the other much smaller attacks.

          • 10240 says:

            It’s not merely a quantitative difference. Left-wing actions against right-wing/heterodox speech, as they stand, lead to some views getting excluded from the marketplace of ideas to a significant extent. Right-wing actions don’t.

        • sclmlw says:

          Not sure where I stand with my traditional view of free speech: I’ve always been strongly on the pro speech side. I’ve always thought the SCOTUS view that the solution to speech we detest is not to restrict speech, but to allow more speech. Thus, instead of making an idea taboo, where small groups will develop ideas in secret and unchallenged, you have open discourse where a minority of stupidity will have to counter a majority of voices calling out bad reasoning.

          But I don’t think that view accurately describes current trends in speech suppression. Before reading this post, I listened to Dan Carlin explain that he basically shut down his Common Sense podcast for exactly the reasons described above. I used to see the idea of speech-as-supression as largely theoretical, but more and more I see it impacting real people’s ability to speak out.

          The internet allows small anonymous actors to crowd out the speech of others. You couldn’t do that with the printing press, but in an era of Russian troll farms the idea of free and unrestricted speech is allowing speech suppression through that mechanism. It’s like making it illegal for the government to mug you, while at the same time taking away police power to stop muggings altogether. You’re still going to get mugged, but you can console yourself it won’t be a cop doing it.

          It’s to the point where I see celebrities talking about how any off comment taken out of context can kill your career, or transform it into nothing but that one comment. Any interview could accidentally demolish you, but none would make you famous, so why risk it? Better to say as little as possible, and certainly nothing of substance. I’m not certain fame is a thing to be desired anymore, given the power of anonymous masses to destroy you with baseless but relentless attacks.

          What’s the answer? I don’t think granting government the power to restrict speech is a good idea, since there’s a bad track record in that department. Maybe it’s a culture thing we need to learn to treat each other like human beings? There has to be a better solution than the two we’re normally given.

          This is why we can’t have nice things.

          • hilitai says:

            in an era of Russian troll farms

            I don’t think it was “Russian troll farms” that caused the events leading to our host’s breakdown.

          • sclmlw says:

            I agree it sounds like it was regular trolls. I’m making a more general point that I’ve seen multiple people either silenced through direct action, or by watching what happens to others they silence themselves. If you can’t express opinions for fear of reprisals, and there’s nothing the government can do about it, do you have freedom of speech in any meaningful way?

            I just used the Russian troll farms as one example of how easy it is to game the current system and use speech as a weapon to eliminate speech.

        • arlie says:

          There are several types of suppression of speech.

          First, speech can be suppressed by a government. There are plenty of examples of that in history; at one time, this was normal and respectable. In some countries, it still is. To many purists, this is the only kind properly referred to as “censorship.”

          Then we have “social pressure” – sometimes by much of one’s local community, sometimes by particular individuals, sometimes by internet mobs or even SWATTers and similar.

          And then we have suppression by people with specific (and often temporary) power over the speaker – parents, employers, schools etc.

          What I don’t know is whether people more likely to tolerate either of the latter categories are more likely to commit the first of these – particularly when it’s a case of “our lunatic fringe does ‘social pressure’ a lot, but we tolerate them because they’re on the same side”. Will that lead to more official censorship if that group’s electable majority gets into positions of political power?

          I don’t see why that’s an especially strong bet. There are things I’m pretty sure either US party would do, if they can, and this isn’t one of them. So why vote on those grounds? (Amazingly, I can now simply vote my pocketbook, and still vote for the party that tends to favour more government, thanks to Trump’s soak-the-coastal-states tax bill ;-( )

          • 10240 says:

            This is probably not a strong enough reason to vote Republican in itself, but hostile workplace environment law (primarily supported by Democrats) may have some role in companies suppressing political speech. In the Damore case, I’ve read some commentators say that Google would have exposed itself to sexual harassment lawsuits if it hadn’t fired him.

            Even if a particular firing is a result of social pressure not law, law makes it harder to create market differentiation and have companies that don’t suppress political speech, and provide alternative employment to the Damores out there. A company that made a point of not suppressing speech would have disproportionately many witches, and thus it would be exposed to disproportionately many harassment or discrimination lawsuits — and the laws are vague enough that it’s impossible to definitely avoid lawsuits by doing what the law requires but not going beyond that.

          • The Nybbler says:

            The idea that people who do nothing but challenge the corporate/woke orthodoxy have to be fired to avoid sexual harassment suits is one of two things. If it is false, it is merely cover for the woke to do what they want while passing responsibility onto someone else. If it is true, it is a First Amendment violation, with the government using corporations as their agents.

            I suspect it is mostly false. The famous line about firing the Archie Bunker types was dicta in a case that was decided in favor of the company in question (Monsanto).

            Furthermore, corporations (including Google) have been changing their policies to allow lawsuits rather than arbitration in cases of sexual harassment, but not in cases of wrongful dismissal for accusation of sexual harassment. This argues against fear of lawsuits being the main issue.

          • 10240 says:

            @The Nybbler My impression is that much of hostile workplace environment law is a First Amendment violation that they got past the courts using some legal contortions as usual, as it’s not a content-neutral time/place/manner restriction, nor does it fall into any of the generally accepted categories of non-protected speech. I don’t think there have been many First Amendment challenges to it, and I’d like to see some, especially about edge cases.

            Unfortunately it’s hard to create a test case, as it would require a constellation of (1) an employee who is willing to risk getting fired by saying something that may be considered harassment of a particular form, (2) a company that’s willing to risk a lawsuit by not firing him, (3) another employee who actually sues the company, and (4) that the company doesn’t settle, and makes a First Amendment challenge.

    • Plumber says:

      @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.

    • SaiNushi says:

      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.)

      • hroark314 says:

        I’m a libertarianish conservative, so I recognize I’m biased, but I think the silencing of debate has been slowly ramping up over the last decade. I heartily agree that it didn’t really explode until the last few years. Still, I get back to my original question – what motivates someone like you to vote Democrat? Is it just that you think their economic ideas are superior or is it something else? I have lots of friends on the left IRL, but I always feel like this is an east is east and west is west sort of issue – we just can’t seem to understand what motivates the other side.

        • cuke says:

          I understand from what you write here that fairly conventional conservative issues are what motivate you to vote Republican, despite the things you don’t otherwise love about Trump: deregulation, lower corporate taxes, and desire for more conservative judges. Unless I’ve misunderstood you, your motivations are not mysterious to me.

          A fairly conventional list of liberal issues motivate me to vote Democrat. I don’t even need to name them. They are the kinds of things that show up on the DNC platform since literally FDR.

          The oldest sources of disagreement between Democrats and Republicans are over what they each consider the appropriate role of the state to be. This disagreement is further grounded in differences in moral priorities — not even wholly different moral values, just differences of priorities given finite resources. And then there are a whole host of disagreements over the best tools for a government to use in regulating an economy.

          These are very obviously things over which smart people can disagree, because we’ve been disagreeing about them for generations.

        • but I always feel like this is an east is east and west is west sort of issue – we just can’t seem to understand what motivates the other side.

          Like many people who refer to Kipling’s line, you have almost entirely reversed the meaning.

          For East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet
          Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
          But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
          When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

          It’s a statement about geography, and the point of the line (and the rest of the poem) is that it isn’t true about people.

        • Plumber says:

          @hroark314

          “…what motivates someone like you to vote Democrat?…”

          I’m pro-union, and pro-welfare state, and I judge the post New Deal mid 20th century as the time when things worked better for the majority of Americans (with it’s lowest percentage of Americans below the poverty line and highest median hourly wages on record I judge 1973 as the peak).

          Within a five minute walk from my house are sidewalks stamped “W.P.A. 1940”, the nearest library branch was originally a 1936 W.P.A. project that was rebuilt and expanded as part of the 2009 stimulus, I and my son have eaten groceries bought with food stamps, and we’ve been seen by physicians because of Medicaid, love getting bookd from public libraries, I take my son to public playgrounds, I get mail thanks to the Postal Service, “less government” doesn’t seem compelling to me.

          Some things advocated by Republicans sound good to me, for example vouchers for schools and “social” issues being decided by local voters instead of far away judges, and I was (briefly) a registeted Republican, but despite times when Republicans controlled Congress and had the Presidency (like last year!) those things never seem to happen, instead tax cuts that only marginally benefit me get enacted, and when post offices get closed and public library hours shorten the savings don’t seem worthwhile to me.

          To be fair, most of what Democrats accomplished that I support happened before I was born, or shortly afterwards, and I increasingly had a “Well what have you done for me lately?” attitude, I even said as much to my State Senators face in 2004.

          Obamacare was the game changer. 

          The “Affordable Care Act” seemed to me the first legislative change from the status quo for the better in a very long time, and it was done in a brief two year period when the Democrats had Congress and the Presidency.

          Last year and the year before Republicans had Congress and the Presidency and they accomplished?

          Another tax cut.

          That’s why I vote for the Democratic Party candidates.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I’m pro-union, and pro-welfare state, and I judge the post New Deal mid 20th century as the time when things worked better for the majority of Americans (with it’s lowest percentage of Americans below the poverty line and highest median hourly wages on record I judge 1973 as the peak).

            You do realize that the “great society” started in the late 60s, right?

          • hroark314 says:

            You’re the only person who actually answered my question. Thanks, I really appreciate it. While I don’t agree with your conclusions, they make perfectly good sense to me. I do wonder whether Democrats like yourself will move away from the current incarnation of the party, which seems more focused on identity politics and much less focused on blue collar/middle class economic issues. Healthcare is definitely an important issue for the working class and middle class, but I question how many working class/middle class people care about a $15 minimum wage or free college tuition. It seems like Democrats are increasingly focused on immigration, anti-gun, anti-religious, identity politics issues that won’t resonate with people who are primarily concerned about economics.

          • brad says:

            Free college I get. But who is going to care about a $15 minimum wage if not the working class?

            N.B. Let’s not rehash minwage at the object level.

          • Theodoric says:

            Free college I get. But who is going to care about a $15 minimum wage if not the working class?

            I guess it would depend on your definition of “working class.” If it includes anyone making a wage up to a certain amount, then sure, lots of them would care about minimum wage. But if there is a floor to what constitutes “working class” as well as a ceiling, then depending on the floor is, most of them would be making more than minimum wage anyway.

          • brad says:

            The nomenclature around this is so totally screwed up, all in the service of well off people needing to desperately deny, even to themselves, that they are well off.

            America!

          • Plumber says:

            @baconbits9

            “You do realize that the “great society” started in the late 60s, right?”

            1965, after Johnson was re-elected, is when the “Great Society” legislation was passed. While it often is, the post 1973 decine can’t be absolutely ascribed to Johnson who stopped being President in 1969, nor to Reagan who wasn’t President until 1981, so I don’t think either “Liberalism” or “Neo-liberalism” may be absolutely confidently blamed. Since 1973 is the year of the oil embargo and the end of the draft I speculate that those factors figure somehow, but so far I haven’t read a compelling narrative reason.

            @hroark314

            “You’re the only person who actually answered my question. Thanks, I really appreciate it”

            You’re very welcome!

            “While I don’t agree with your conclusions, they make perfectly good sense to me”

            Thanks, I feel the same way about the many who’ve told me that they vote Republican because they’re anti-abortion, I could pick and choose a few counter examples, but by-and-large the Democratic Party has defended the Roe v. Wade decision, and if someone tells me their “pro life” so they vote Republican, I’m not going to disrespect them and tell them that they shouldn’t base their vote on that issue.

            “I do wonder whether Democrats like yourself will move away from the current incarnation of the party, which seems more focused on identity politics and much less focused on blue collar/middle class economic issues”

            Habits may die hard, but enough voters switched from voting for Obama in 2012, to voting for Trump in 2016, and then voting Democrats for Congress in 2020 to show that which issues are emphasized may decide elections, and maybe, given enough time, only lip-service isn’t enough. 

            Trump campaigned hard on decreasing immigration in 2016, and Congressional canidate Democrats campaigned very strongly on preserving Obamacare in 2020, both won.

            It doesn’t take a genius to imagine voters who may find both compelling, unless you’re blinded by “Left” and “Right” labelling.

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            Healthcare is definitely an important issue for the working class and middle class, but I question how many working class/middle class people care about a $15 minimum wage or free college tuition.

            Anyone who’s currently making less than $15 an hour has a built-in motivation to increase the minimum wage. There are (valid, I think) concerns that companies will be more cautious about hiring people if they’re paying them a higher wage, and it’ll make it tougher for some workers to get jobs, but it’s obvious why workers would care about it. It’s really tough to get by on minimum wage.

            As for free college…that’s relevant because many people are recognizing that an increasing number of employers will only hire someone with a college degree (even for a McJob), so it’s understandable why they would think “well, if more people have college degrees then more people will be able to get jobs.”

            The problem is that if you make college more accessible and more people end up with degrees, it just becomes the norm, like a high school diploma; if you don’t have it it’s a disadvantage, but having it doesn’t really give you an edge. So employers will just start using something else as a filtering mechanism. Maybe in the future you’ll need a Master’s degree in order to get a McJob.

            https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/

          • Lambert says:

            > Anyone who’s currently making less than $15 an hour has a built-in motivation to increase the minimum wage.

            Assuming they don’t get laid off. There’s two sides to this thing.

          • baconbits9 says:

            @ Plumber

            1965, after Johnson was re-elected, is when the “Great Society” legislation was passed. While it often is, the post 1973 decine can’t be absolutely ascribed to Johnson who stopped being President in 1969, nor to Reagan who wasn’t President until 1981, so I don’t think either “Liberalism” or “Neo-liberalism” may be absolutely confidently blamed. Since 1973 is the year of the oil embargo and the end of the draft I speculate that those factors figure somehow, but so far I haven’t read a compelling narrative reason.

            1965 is the passage of legislation, but funding was incremented up through 1969 (iirc).

            Is it particularly hard to imagine that major legislative changes would not have full effect for several years? You appear to associate ‘progressive’ federal policies with materially better conditions for the working classes but the association is closer to the opposite. Large scale government interventions tend to precede decline in the share of income that labor receives.

          • Plumber says:

            @baconbits9 "...Large scale government interventions tend to precede decline in the share of income that labor receives." In looking over the 1947 to 2016 Labor Share of Output I don’t see that pattern, I see peaks in Labor Share around 1947, 1954, 1960, 1970, 2001, and then mostly a decline in Share until 2014 and a modest rise afterwards, two of those peaks coincide with the rather large interventions of undeclared wars in Korea and Vietnam.

            If you have an explanatory narrative I’d like to learn it.

          • baconbits9 says:

            @ Plumber

            Individual peaks don’t mean much in that data, you can see that peaks often correlate with recessions, you can get such peaks by assuming that businesses lay people off after they notice a decline in income (which sounds pretty reasonable) and then hire people when they notice an income boost.

            You can get a better picture of what is going on by dividing the total labor share by the labor force participation rate, which is (given your posting here) probably what you personally feel is a better metric.

            Here you see that if there is a break its right at 1970 where returns to labor start a fall that doesn’t really halt until 2006. This is not proof that the decline is caused by the great society, but it pushes the timeline a lot closer than a 1973 break, and correlates well with the last federal surplus in 1969 until 1998.

          • Plumber says:

            @baconbits9,

            That chart you provided is very interesting!

            Thanks for that.

          • baconbits9 says:

            @ Plumber

            Your welcome, but I must also advise that it is only another bit of information, other shifts (such as non monetary compensation and transfers) aren’t captured there.

    • ilikekittycat says:

      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.

      • hroark314 says:

        I agree completely, but – if one of the things you really believe in is the value of free and open debate – then I think you must view that as a negative of supporting the party that’s less supportive free speech (i.e. the Democrats). Thus, the Democrats must support other positions you value enough to support them in spite of their relatively limpid support of free speech. I’m wondering what those positions are.

    • DM says:

      ‘That comment goes to the heart of my inquiry. Historically, left wing countries have suppressed freedom of speech far more severely than those we call right wing (I deplore the binary political classification system, but that’s a giant topic). Mao’s China, present-day North Korea and Cuba, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, etc. – there’s no question that leftism is, in the real world, associated with repression of free speech to a greater degree than any other political ideology.’

      So, my immediate reaction to this as a European (British) with left-liberal but not socialist views, is that this is a typical failure mode of US conservatives in thinking about the moderate left in Western democracies. Most of these people see their tradition of trade union backed large parties in Western democracies like the Dems, the British Labour Party, the German SDP, etc., as a largely *separate* political tradition from the horrific kinds of communism you mention (albeit with some overlap of origin in some cases, although not really with the US Dems who have *never* been an avowedly socialist party, and are not trade union founded.) Often, when I read conservative criticisms of leftist authoritarianism, they seem to act like the best way to compare the relative authoritarianism v. respect for freedom of left and right parties within developed democracies, is for some reason to compare the record of mainstream right parties in developed democracies to leftist dictatorships, rather than to mainstream left parties in developed democracies. (I’m aware there is a shameful history of *some* involved with the latter making excuses for, or even directly supporting, authoritarian communism, but for Scot’s voting habit, the relevant thing is how these parties typically behave in power in their own countries, and on foreign policy, not whether some of their leaders or intellectual supporters have side nice things about awful foreign dicators, something which otherwise democratic and respectable figures on the right have also done on occassion.)

  36. Prussian says:

    *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:

    I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat.

    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.

    • whereamigoing says:

      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.

    • reasoned argumentation says:

      Now, I have to ask:

      I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat.

      Okay. But would this be okay if you were a WASP who voted republican, and was a seventh day adventist?

      Yes, that certainly seems like his implication.

      • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

        That’s an uncharitable interpretation. A more charitable one – that I think is more in keeping with Scott’s past writing- is that 1) the harassment makes no sense (as it’s attacking “your own“ side*) and 2) that this could happen to anyone and nobody is too “pure” to avoid.

        Charitable interpretations should be the default – certainly at SSC.

        *This obviously assumes that the CW is entirely about sides rather than purity.

        • Hyzenthlay says:

          A more charitable one – that I think is more in keeping with Scott’s past writing- is that 1) the harassment makes no sense (as it’s attacking “your own“ side*) and 2) that this could happen to anyone and nobody is too “pure” to avoid.

          Yeah, that was my interpretation. I don’t think Scott would consider this to be okay if it were happening to an actual conservative; he’s just highlighting the irony. The people who attacked him presumably consider themselves champions of the oppressed and justify their behavior as being necessary to protect vulnerable minorities.

          But an increasing number of victims of these mobbing tactics are minorities. Left-wing mobs frequently attack women, gay people, trans people, people of color, etc., for expressing wrongthink. And when they do that I think it’s important to point out…not because it’s inherently more wrong to attack a minority than a straight white male, but because it makes it harder for the aggressors to hide behind claims of being protectors of the oppressed.

    • CatCube says:

      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…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.

    • But would this be okay if you were a WASP who voted republican …

      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.

      • marxbro says:

        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.

        • gbdub says:

          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.

          • marxbro says:

            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.

        • Sebastian_H says:

          You got harassed in the US, while people like Scott got killed in the USSR, and that’s the difference.

          • marxbro says:

            Not really, many liberals in the USSR simply were educated better and then got on with their lives. Others liberals/conservatives didn’t externalise their hatred and therefore didn’t get in trouble with the law by doing things like punching communists. I wish the same were true in the US.

          • whereamigoing says:

            Is this what you’re referring to as being “educated better”?

          • baconbits9 says:

            Why are you guys engaging here? What’s the point? Would you engage if he was a holocaust denier presenting evidence?

          • whereamigoing says:

            @baconbits9

            Maybe? I imagine that for every Holocaust denier, there are 5 people who are a bit skeptical of Jews reading the comments. But yeah, I probably won’t reply again.

        • Deiseach says:

          As a Maoist

          I already lived through the 70s once, I refuse to do so again!

    • Scott Alexander says:

      “Okay. But would this be okay if you were a WASP who voted republican, and was a seventh day adventist?”

      Being called a transphobic etc Nazi would be reasonable if I were actually a transphobic etc Nazi. It seems to get less reasonable the further away from transphobic etc Nazi I am, which to me makes it worth mentioning that I’m actually quite far away from that.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Scott: Leftist activists have backed themselves into this weird position where they want to call everyone to the right of them Nazis, even if they’re Jews. This becomes so nonsensical that others on the left have to tone it down, like Hillary Clinton saying that half of Trump-supporting Republicans are deplorable Nazis while half are okay (presumably including Jared Kurshner and the donor class).
        Obviously it’s always going to be libelous to post that you’re a Nazi, but I think at some point you’re going to have accept the “right-wing” label, since witch hunters have made it a broad tent that includes every sort of witch in addition to the Red tribe.

        • cuke says:

          I can’t tell if this is a joke about having to accept the right-wing label.

          Because someone name-calls you, you should relent and re-define yourself to accommodate their whacked world view?

          How is this different from saying conservatives should start calling themselves liberals because they evidently have a few neo-Nazis in their ranks?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Because someone name-calls you, you should relent and re-define yourself to accommodate their whacked world view?

            If different someones in the same faction name-call you over and over, to your employer, to strangers on the internet, etc., maybe you should relent in your attempts to make that faction like you! Yeah, it’s a whacked world view, but if it’s big enough to practically be the state religion on the West coast, there’s not much you can do besides stop treating that group as your in-group and move somewhere with different demographics of belief.

            As to your last point, it is kind of common for people in the conservative tent to call themselves classical liberals or libertarians.

        • Just ignore the labels and let them fall as they may, because you can’t stop it. Your views stand for themselves. If people think you hold views you don’t, neither capitulating nor resisting their description of your faction will work. If you think your views put you in a faction, but you’re popularized as not belonging to it, then in most practical settings, you don’t. The only thing that will work is broadcasting your actual views. People who can’t go with the flow of a mainstream faction don’t have the luxury of using that system as an easy short hand for their views; they have to constantly re-explain them to each new person who comes on the attack.

          The left/right categorization system is too low resolution for these kind of disputes. It’s a system for designating which faction you side with. You can’t be left if you are pushed out of the left by activists, but this doesn’t mean you can just label yourself right when all that means is that you are swearing your allegiance to another faction with views you don’t hold.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            If you think your views put you in a faction, but you’re popularized as not belonging to it, then in most practical settings, you don’t.

            This is the nub of the issue. Scott thinks that Jewish descent, dating Ozy, making an irrational decision to move to the Bay Area, etc., make him a good member of the anti-racist, transphilic, rich urban leftist tribe. Yet for years, people from the internet have been popularizing him as a crypto-racist, transphobe, etc etc. So why keep fighting for acceptance as a member?

            You can’t be left if you are pushed out of the left by activists, but this doesn’t mean you can just label yourself right when all that means is that you are swearing your allegiance to another faction with views you don’t hold.

            We’ve reached the point where witch-hunts have made the right such a big tent that you don’t have to swear allegiance to be welcomed in right-wing society when the left denies you your first choice of label. Look at how socialist outlets redefine women whose first choice of label was “radical feminists” as merely “self-proclaimed ‘feminsts'” for their heresy.

        • Betty Cook says:

          To be fair, as far as I know Hillary Clinton did not call the “basket of deplorables” Nazis. Sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and probably other things I am forgetting, but not Nazi.

      • Prussian says:

        What I’m disagreeing with is that you or my hypothetical WASP (or _me_ for that matter_) are closer to being Nazis. In any case, that’s not how this game is played.

        The left licensed daisy chains like this:

        “Wanting to restrict immigration” = “Against all immigration” = “against immigrants” = “against other races” = NAZI!

        or

        “Thinking that capitalism provides an answer to poverty” = “Being against the welfare state” = “Being against the poor” = “Wanting to kill the poor” = NAZI!

        (Hell, I’ve been on the receiving end of daisy chains that literally start with my being against the murder of gays, jews and minorities, and arguing against slavery. )

        Now it is trivially easy to link you to that chain just by adding “Being willing to discuss…”= at the top.

        We’re all in this together. People on my side of the spectrum have been dealing with this shit literally for decades. So I offer you my unconditional solidarity in this mess, and I’ll donate if you need the help, and I also reserve the right to point this out.

    • DM says:

      If you’ve given up on the left over this kind of thing, aren’t you basically letting social media chatter dictate your political opinions rather than issues of economics, war, social policy, climate change, etc. (Not saying the left positions on these are obviously right, just that people going on twitter calling for James Damore to be fired doesn’t give evidence against them, however well grounded they are or aren’t.)

      Maybe that’s a bit glib; free speech norms in universities isn’t a totally trivial issue. But I do think it’s a weakness in the world view typical of people on this site to assign *far* more political importance to the pathologies of online social justice culture than it deserves, relative to say, the fact that the US imprisons a greater % of its population than almost anywhere else on Earth. Something has gone terribly wrong when the former gives people a sense of crisis but not the latter. (Even if you think that the US is locking the right number of people up, you should still feel a sense of crisis about it having to lock up so many.)

      • If you’ve given up on the left over this kind of thing, aren’t you basically letting social media chatter dictate your political opinions rather than issues of economics, war, social policy, climate change, etc.

        My guess is that the people who pay a lot of attention to SJW issues here are mostly people who feel personally threatened by them. If you work at Google and your daily experience is that you have to conceal your views because you think making them public would at the least create a lot of hostility in your co-workers and might end up with you losing your job, that particular problem is going to be a lot more obvious to you than the fact than high imprisonment rates, or civil forfeiture, or a variety of other and arguably more important issues.

        In just the same way, discrimination against transsexuals now or gays a few decades ago was almost invisible to those of us who were not transsexual or gay, but of enormous importance to the minority who were.

        Also, most of us, naturally enough, generalize from our own environment. If you are in an environment where SJW views are being enforced it’s natural to imagine that applying everywhere. And it’s not entirely unreasonable to fear that over time it will apply everywhere, since it’s only started applying where you are relatively recently.

        • Plumber says:

          @DavidFriedman

          “…most of us, naturally enough, generalize from our own environment. If you are in an environment where SJW views are being enforced it’s natural to imagine that applying everywhere. And it’s not entirely unreasonable to fear that over time it will apply everywhere, since it’s only started applying where you are relatively recently….”

          As I think I’ve posted before, I’ve been confused by many posts (including some from our host) that decry “these SJW’s that have suddenly appeared”, and as far as I can tell the term “SJW” is often used here to be synonymous with “militant feminist”, and taking my son to a playground by an elementary school last weekend, seeing the familar looking signs there, the many up-thread mentions of James Damore, plus your: “only started applying where you are relatively recently“, has given me a guess of what’s going on.

          My own perception is that I hear many more right-wing voices than in the 1970’s and ’80’s, reaching a peak in the mid 2000’s, which is was working further and further from where I was born (by the tomato fields just north of Hollister was the furthest that I worked).

          U.C. Berkeley recruits “the best and brightest” from California, plus many out of State and “International students”.

          Our host says he grew up in Irvine. 

          Google recruits “the best and the brightest” from the world.

          James Damore grew up far away in Illinois. 

          They’re foreigners. 

          They didn’t learn the catechism as children. 

          Many SSC’ers list their jobs as “in Tech”.

          They’re migrants.

          The orthodoxy taught in the schools I attended in the 1970’s is new to them.

          This isn’t about times changing, it’s migration caused culture clashes (well it is a little bit times changing, due to the disruption of ‘Tech’, but not everywhere at once).

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        If you’ve given up on the left over this kind of thing, aren’t you basically letting social media chatter dictate your political opinions rather than issues of economics, war, social policy, climate change, etc.

        Scott can have whatever opinions he wants on economics, war, and climate change without being a leftist. Being on the left is a matter of being accepted by the left, which he desires and isn’t getting.

        • brad says:

          Who are you to speak for “the left”? What does that even mean? Do you think there’s a vote where all the at least tens of millions of people in the US alone that are left of center vote on who we will and won’t accept?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Brad, people make generalisations about views held by groups of people all the time — “The scientific consensus is X”, “Such views are generally rejected in academia”, and so on — so I don’t know who you’re trying to impress by pretending not to understand LMC’s meaning.

          • martinw says:

            Or telling someone that “your side” believes this-and-that, when they have only expressed an opinion on one very specific point.

          • brad says:

            @The original Mr. X
            You and Le Maistre Chat make hostile, evidence free generalizations about the very large amorphous group of people you label “the left” all the time. Such posts are bad. I see nothing wrong with pointing that out when the mood strikes me. If Scott thinks otherwise he can let me know.

          • Plumber says:

            @brad

            “Who are you to speak for “the left”? What does that even mean? Do you think there’s a vote where all the at least tens of millions of people in the US alone that are left of center vote on who we will and won’t accept?”

            You didn’t get the “members only” discount card and decoder ring?

            [/sarcasm]

          • The original Mr. X says:

            You and Le Maistre Chat make hostile, evidence free generalizations about the very large amorphous group of people you label “the left” all the time.

            The fact that Scott recently had to close down a Subreddit after being on the receiving end of a harassment campaign by left-wingers is evidence that he isn’t accepted on the left, surely? No doubt there are left-wingers who know about Scott and accept him as one of their own, but it seems that their voices are currently being drowned out by those who disagree.

          • theredsheep says:

            Compare “I was mugged by three black dudes; are you suggesting that African-Americans do not all want to rob me?”

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            @The original Mr. X

            The fact that Scott recently had to close down a Subreddit after being on the receiving end of a harassment campaign by left-wingers is evidence that he isn’t accepted on the left, surely? No doubt there are left-wingers who know about Scott and accept him as one of their own, but it seems that their voices are currently being drowned out by those who disagree.

            It’s evidence that there exist enough left-wingers who dislike him to mount a harassment campaign.

            1000 people can put together a truly terrifying harassment campaign, while still representing one thousandth of one percent of the American left. And even if the entire rest of the left disagree with them and say so vehemently, because of the wonders of the internet that won’t do much to stop the harassment.

            In actual fact, I’m sure that more than one thousandth of one percent of the American left dislike Scott, but not that a majority do.

          • hilitai says:

            No doubt there are left-wingers who …accept him as one of their own, but it seems that their voices are currently being drowned out by those who disagree.

            Volume doesn’t tell you much about numbers, though. I suspect these people (the ones doing the drowning-out) are a small percentage of what you would call “the left”.

          • Prussian says:

            As you are perfectly well aware, this is hardly the only such incident. This is a relentless pattern of behaviour from the Western left. Come on, was there really any chance that Scott would be targeted by MAGA hat wearing types trying to cause trouble about him being gay friendly? Isn’t lefties lying about his views just what we’ve come to expect?

            Again, people on my side of this spectrum have grown so used to this it’s unreal.

          • theredsheep says:

            If there’s a relatively small body of insufferable zealots and prigs with tons of free time, how are the more reasonable leftists supposed to fight or stop them? It’s like complaining about why the moderate Muslims don’t fight harder to suppress the radicals. They do fight, but they have work and families and such, and they can’t spend all their free time trying to counteract horrible people who claim to speak and act for them.

          • This is a relentless pattern of behaviour from the Western left.

            There is a pattern of behavior from some part of the Western left that contains enough people to make things very unpleasant for someone such as Scott. That could easily be as few as one percent–about a million people.

            A possible response is “why don’t other people on the left criticize them for acting that way?” To which the obvious response is
            “Some people on the left do. Scott, for instance.”

            It’s hard, from the outside, to judge whether the SJW left represents a majority of those politically and ideologically active, or only a very energetic minority. Also hard to judge whether the rest of the left sees them as an unfortunate movement that there isn’t much to be done about or as “our people, even if a bit overenthusiastic.”

          • Plumber says:

            @DavidFriedman, 

            I think it’s underestimated here how unlikely one may even lesrn about “outrageous actions of SJW’s”.

            When I went to the Labor Temple to do volunteer precinct walks for my union I was handed a list of who’s votes to solicit, not any lists  of dubious actions of anyone “on the Left”.

            Labor Notes detailed the horrible working conditions at Tyson foods slaughterhouses, not a tale about James Damore’s memo.

            When a right-wing-ish co-worker spoke about “George Soros funding radical groups” I asked him “What radical groups?”, he answered “Anti-Fa”, so I did a web search, and I found many references to them, which I had no memory of seeing before. 

            “Donglegate” I learned about here when I asked for examples.

            One isn’t likely to decry what one’s ignorant of.

          • LadyJane says:

            @Nornagest: You’re right, but some social groups are much more representative of a movement than others. I’d imagine someone who participates in labor union meetings has a much better idea of what the American left actually looks like in practice than someone who participates in online debates against SJWs.

            As someone who works in local politics, I can say that the labor unions have a lot more influence, and a much greater effect on what policies actually end up being implemented. Likewise, middle-class Democrats like Plumber comprise a much larger percentage of the party’s voter base than college activists, and they’re the ones who politicians are aiming to appease first and foremost.

            In my opinion, a lot of Anti-SJW sentiment is really just tilting at windmills.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            The problem with silent majorities is that, being silent, their influence over the group’s overall tone and direction is limited. If the non-SJ left keep silent whilst the SJ left go around noisily denouncing people, they effectively cede to the SJ left the ability to set the tone and direction of the left as a whole, even if the non-SJ left are in the majority and the SJ left are just a noisy minority.

          • LadyJane says:

            @The original Mr. X: True, but I also think you’re overestimating just how noisy they’re being. I’m reasonably certain that the average registered Democrat doesn’t know or care about things like “intersectionality,” and if they do hear something like “White people should be banned from everything,” it’s in the context of “LOL this is what right-wingers actually think we believe.” There’s a reason most people quickly and correctly deduced that the “Ban Father’s Day” movement was a right-wing false flag; it displays very poor modeling of the average left-liberal’s mindset.

          • ManyCookies says:

            @LadyJane

            Yeah the internet is in itself a bit of a bubble, the most important issues for voters are usually stuff like health care / economy / immigration (that last one is CW-releated, granted) rather than CW or even Kavanaugh stuff.

            N = 2, but my Democrat parents were just completely lost during the PC Principal season of South Park, they had no clue what the hell Matt and Tray were making fun of.

          • Plumber says:

            @LadyJane

            “…I’m reasonably certain that the average registered Democrat doesn’t know or care about things like “intersectionality”….”

            As one data-point I’m a registered Democrat and I really don’t know what “intersectionality” means (I’ll do a web-search now).
            (EDIT:
            I looked it up and my interpretation is that it’s saying that someone may be more oppressed by multiple “statuses” than jusr one i.e. a poor black women may have a harder time than someone who is just poor, just black, or just a woman.
            Doesn’t seem like much of a revelation, my reaction is “So what else is new?”.
            Seems like academics on the obvious, though I’d argue that a women is less likely to wind up in jail or homeless so I’m not sure if a “points system of oppression” is quite right, but whatever)

          • albatross11 says:

            Yeah, complaining that nobody on the left complains about the excesses of SJW/woke/callout culture/whatever ignores a huge number of people on the left doing exactly that–including not only Scott, but (for example) most of the notable people in the IDW, and most of the people involved in Heterodox Academy.

          • cuke says:

            Plumber’s experience captures my own accurately, I’d like to add, from door-knocking to workplace conversations to reading material and so on. From living in various parts of California, the South, mid-Atlantic, and New England, and working with people who are employed in a wide range of industries.

            What’s happening on social media, in some specific tech sectors geographically, and on some college campuses, is a very small subset of what’s going on generally. It’s not insignificant or unimportant, not by a long shot, only that it’s one slice of experience and there are many other slices. So conversations on here sometimes go awry it seems to be out of an assumption of shared experience or universalizing from one’s experience.

          • The Nybbler says:

            If the non-SJ left keep silent whilst the SJ left go around noisily denouncing people, they effectively cede to the SJ left the ability to set the tone and direction of the left as a whole

            It’s worse than that. When the denouncing works, they’ll happily go along with it. If the denounced complains, they’ll often say dismiss it with “well, you knew that would happen” (as if knowing an unjust response to one’s actions is possible justifies that response), or justify it directly, often with resort to ad-hoc standards or selective demands for rigor (e.g. people claiming the Damore firing was OK because he shouldn’t have brought up politics at work)

          • ManyCookies says:

            @albatross11

            Yeah, complaining that nobody on the left complains about the excesses of SJW/woke/callout culture/whatever ignores a huge number of people on the left doing exactly that–including not only Scott, but (for example) most of the notable people in the IDW, and most of the people involved in Heterodox Academy.

            Oh of course, and those are important viewpoints in our circle. But note those examples are all heavily online; what we’re saying is folks like us who spend too much time online have different priorities and experiences than baseline, we’re in something of a soft bubble. My parents aren’t criticizing SJW because they’re complicit with its excesses, they aren’t criticizing SJW because they barely know it fucking exists! And they’re not politically oblivious either, like they’ll go to events, watch the Daily Show religiously, dad reads DailyKos.

            @Plumber

            I too had no idea what intersectionality was for a while, and I’m still confused why it’s such a boogie man term. Like I get the perceived threat of “cultural marxism”, but intersectionality just seems at absolute worst like privilege theory, why is it a term!

          • Aapje says:

            @ManyCookies

            There are actually two conflicting definitions of intersectionality in use.

            The original academic one is that you can’t just add up oppressions. A black woman is not the oppression of a woman + the oppression of a black person, but the combination results in specific kinds of oppression.

            Then others used the same word for pretty much the opposite: that you can add up separate oppressions. It seems to me that this latter definition is essentially a rebranding of oppression olympics, which got a bad rap, trying to ride the coat tails of the more respectable academic definition.

          • ManyCookies says:

            @Aapje

            Ah interesting. A similar thing happened with “virtue signalling”; it started as a “Low-value, possibly high-cost action to show commitment” action of sincerity, and it morphed into an “Your slacktivist ass doesn’t really care about X” accusation of insincerity.

      • tayfie says:

        I don’t believe @Prussian or anyone here is letting social media dictate their political opinions so much as using it as evidence of the proper labels to describe those opinions. Those are different things.

        “Left” and “Right” are more alliances than philosophies. If you think you are on one team, but the other members of team conspire to turn your compatriots against you, then you get shunned. A common consequence is joining a different alliance.

        People with consistent philosophies have the world move around them and need to change labels to accurately communicate about themselves. As Reagan said, “I didn’t leave the [Democrat] party. The party left me.”

        • Prussian says:

          Thank you.

          And in confirmation-the-upteenth, Martina Navratilova, with years of gay rights activism behind her, is now being unpersoned for saying that MTF transsexuals, with the strength of men, shouldn’t compete against biological women.

          The point isn’t whether you disagree; it’s the way she’s treated. This is what the western left does.

          • The Nybbler says:

            They’re not unpersoning her. One LGBT organization cut ties with her. Nobody’s trying to to revoke her titles or remove her name from past issues of Sports Illustrated or Martina Hingis or anything. She did try to do something like that to someone else a few years ago, so I’m a bit short on sympathy for her over this.

    • Prussian says:

      I should have seen this coming, but to make it explicit – Scott’s one of the most epistemologically decent people I’ve encountered on the web. He’s written in defence of generosity in discussion with rare sincerity. It is just that that phrasing allowed me to make a point, which was neatly underlined by people like DavidFriedman, who said “Of course it would be unacceptable, but…” – you know the rule. Everything before the “but” is meaningless.

      The point I’m getting at is not only that this is the way the Western left behaves, but that it can behave no other way. If the central tenet of your ideology is “we are the nice people, they are the nasty people”, then there is no real way to avoid this kind of behaviour.

      • cuke says:

        I sure do wish there were a way to talk about the entire left hand side of the political spectrum without such a broad brush. I have spent my whole life as part of “the Western left” and I don’t recognize my ideology as “we are the nice people, they are the nasty people.”

        I see everywhere people calling each other names and accusing each other of bad behavior. In this instance it was evidently people on the left who hurt Scott.

        Just in the realm of people who are semi-well-known who write things on the internet, we could probably do a survey of people in that group, and we would find an incredible array of hateful and threatening behavior also coming from the right. Sometimes you’ll see journalists post samples of some of the threatening hate mail they get. What Scott experienced, as awful as it was, was a tiny taste of that. Women journalists, bloggers, pundits get emailed vile, threatening, misogynist stuff every day. They know better than to equate those bad actors with the entire right wing of Western politics.

        Part of what you do when you describe the left in these very broad and broadly negative terms is you essentially perpetuate the same essentializing dynamic you are criticizing. “We’re nice, but you’re nasty.”

        When I sit down at a family gathering, we have leftists and centrists and conservatives. We have Catholics, atheists, Protestants, Buddhists, Jews, and Muslims. No kidding, all these people are nice people, except sometimes when some of them aren’t, but their lack of niceness is in no way related to their ideology. It’s related to how much they had to drink or how unhappy they are in their lives or how generally intolerant they are as personalities.

        There’s such a long history of conservatives of various stripes telling people on the left of various stripes that they are nasty, evil, etc. People going to get abortions or other kinds of women’s healthcare being screamed at and threatened, LGBTQ people being told they are disgusting and shameful, being physically beaten for how disgusting and shameful they are said to be. The president regularly tells us that Democrats just want to let rapists into the country. What kind of people actively want more rapists around them, other than nasty people?

        Isn’t it possible to condemn the actions of these specific people who harmed Scott without needing to condemn an entire half of the political spectrum?

        I know this is the theme I keep hitting on in this conversation, so I am sorry for repeating myself. I am gobsmacked that there are people who are absolutely confidently convinced that “you people over there are the nasty ones” hasn’t been literally going on forever wherever differences have existed.

        If I’ve misunderstood you, please help me understand better what you are saying.

        • Prussian says:

          I sure do wish there were a way to talk about the entire left hand side of the political spectrum without such a broad brush. I have spent my whole life as part of “the Western left” and I don’t recognize my ideology as “we are the nice people, they are the nasty people.”

          Uh-huh. All I can say is, it is painfully obvious to anyone who spends, e.g., five minutes listening to Bill Maher, John Stewart or just about any prominent leftwing commentator.

          This isn’t a view I’ve come to easily. It’s something I’ve noticed over nearly two decades of this. May I ask that you read the following? It’s my piece on why Atheism is toast as a movement, and it covers a great deal of this ground.

          There’s such a long history of conservatives of various stripes telling people on the left of various stripes that they are nasty, evil, etc

          Yeah, but what I have not heard of is right wingers – at least, not until the last three years – trying to get people fired, blacklisted etc. And the level the left does this at is unbelievable. For example, I remember when the Daily Beast doxxed Pamela Geller’s daughters, and the rest of the media went along with trumpeting “HEY, YOU KNOW THAT WOMAN WHO LIVES UNDER 24/7 PROTECTION BECAUSE NUTCASES WANT TO KILL HERE? SHE’S GOT DAUGHTERS! AND HERE ARE THEIR NAMES AND WHERE THEY WORK!”

          And Scott’s hardly the first to notice this. If you read my little post, you’ll come across Julie Bindel getting the same treatment by these lefty mobs that they deal out to Milo Yiannopoulos. Now, pause and reflect for a moment: the right happily welcomes a gay drag queen into our midst, while the left instantly turns and hammers a radical feminist with decades of activism behind her, for the crime of speaking up about Islamic misogyny.

          And this fits too easily into so much else. Re-read Scott’s article on Macolm Muggeridge. If you read Jung Chang or Kang Chol-Hwan, you find the same tired story playing itself out. Hell, go and read how the left attacked Christopher Hitchens for daring to speak about Bill Clinton’s racketeering and racism.

          I guess I’ve just given up any real hope. And the reason I’ve given up is that I think there is a significant difference here.

          I’m an Objectivist, and I will be able to explain to you why laissez-faire capitalism is the only moral, and practical, system, and why the seven virtues are the foundation of all successful human endeavor. I really don’t think there’s something equivalent on the western left; I think it is purely that “Anything is good and righteous if done by a lefty, and corrupt and hateful if not.” Basically, it seems as though it’s all murderism-theory, all the time.

          I think there’s a space for acceptance and tolerance on the political right – just look at Dave Rubin for example – but I have completely given up any hope of it from the left. Scott’s sad story is just the latest in a long line of such.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            Ward Churchill, the Dixie Chicks, and Colin Kaepernick would like a word with you.

          • BBA says:

            *spittake*

            Your go-to for an evil leftist is Bill Maher, of all people? The SJWs all hate his guts. His show back in the ’90s was literally called “Politically Incorrect” and to the woke crowd he represents the retrograde white male liberalism that condescended to people of color, women, and the LGBT even as it claimed to be championing them. And then there’s the Islamophobia and the fact that he’s still friends with Ann Coulter…

            (Jon Stewart retired a couple of years ago but some of these criticisms have also been applied to him – old out-of-touch white dude, etc.)

            If nothing else, this should give you some comfort that the social justice left will never “win” because we keep moving leftward and eating our own.

          • Prussian says:

            Your go-to for an evil leftist is Bill Maher, of all people?

            Did I write “evil” anywhere? As for the rest of this – yes, I’m aware that Maher isn’t liked (see here), for the simple crime of not being completely unthinking. And he still spreads the same ideology.

          • Yeah, but what I have not heard of is right wingers – at least, not until the last three years – trying to get people fired, blacklisted etc.

            I don’t think I have observed it much in my lifetime, but in the immediate post WWII period there was a Hollywood blacklist of people viewed as Communists or Communist sympathizers.

          • theredsheep says:

            Bill Maher really doesn’t represent the same phenomenon as the SJWs at all. From their perspective he’s a deeply flaky fellow-traveler at best, and more often a revolting heretic. The fact that there are a bunch of people who disagree with you from the same general direction (very broadly defined) does not make them a united front.

  37. DrBeat says:

    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.

    • toastengineer says:

      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.

      • LadyJane says:

        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.

      • theredsheep says:

        I suspect, but of course cannot prove, that most people really, really hate self-appointed moral authorities, and will ultimately go out of their way to destroy them, regardless of what morals the authorities purport to defend, because they hate the feeling of being stifled. Moral authority is a finite and consumable good, and there are too many stories out there about asinine panics now. Every time prominent people rush to agree with a Jussie Smollett, it makes the obscenity–and worse, absurdity–of it more clear. The time will come when this kind of tactic simply becomes unprofitable.

        • Jiro says:

          Moral authority is a finite and consumable good, and there are too many stories out there about asinine panics now. Every time prominent people rush to agree with a Jussie Smollett, it makes the obscenity–and worse, absurdity–of it more clear.

          Smolett was an outlier because he was careless enough that the police got involved and were able to find evidence against him, which not only provided a smoking gun, but forced the normally left-wing press to cover it. If the Smolett-equivalent is a little more careful, they won’t get caught this way–Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser made only unprovable and vague accusations, and she has lost no moral authority with the people who originally believed her.

          • In a way, this is like the question of whether TSA does any good. I think it’s pretty clear that it has little effect on the ability of a careful and competent terrorist to kill a lot of people. But it may still be useful if a lot of potential terrorists are incompetent.

            Similarly here. A competent fake hate crime probably won’t be caught. But if it’s clear that fake hate crimes are doable and effective, get the purported victim publicity, status, other benefits, incompetent fakers will attempt them as well—Smollett apparently being an example.

            And each time one of them tries and is caught, both real hate crimes and competent fake hate crimes have less ability to get sympathy—a good thing in the one case, a bad thing in the other.

          • theredsheep says:

            I think most criminals are actually much dumber than we tend to think they are, thanks to criminal geniuses on TV and movies. Smolett was quite spectacularly inept, and I don’t think most fraudsters are that dumb, but even so.

          • albatross11 says:

            Smollet is probably smarter and more competent than the average criminal. (Think 19 year old knucklehead who can barely read, and whose main talent is hurting people.) Most crimes don’t get solved, but probably that’s because most crimes don’t get massive media attention and the perp usually doesn’t walk into the police station and report that he was the victim of a crime.

          • Aapje says:

            @Jiro

            Your comment implies that Kavanaugh’s accuser intentionally lied like Smolett, but was more careful about it, but there is no evidence that she lied.

      • carvenvisage says:

        Gordon Ramsay was perfectly comfortable calling college students “snowflakes” in an interview recently

        It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Like watching a canary resuscitated as the cage comes up from the coalmine, truly refreshing to see a delicate soul unfurling like a flower touched by the light. If you want to see an even surer sign of the gentle dawning of a new spring, might I recommend a gentleman named Alex Jones?

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I think it’s possible that there’s no way to fix it, but that doesn’t mean it’s stable. It’s entirely possible that enough people will get tired of it that it will just go away.

    • Hey, you’re alive! I always (unironically) enjoy the latest prognostications from our local Prophet of Doom.

  38. ManyCookies says:

    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 stalked a 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.)

    ——-

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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:

    However, I think it is dying and there really isn’t a way to stop it. It has metastasized. Too polarized, too big, too much of a mod headache. The end is in sight. I will mourn it but it will end either in surgery or in immolation.

    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.)

    • gbdub says:

      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.

      • ManyCookies says:

        I mean, do you really need another place for constant bitching about Trump?

        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*

        Still, I think part of the problem here is an equation of “anti-SJW outrage culture” with “right wing”.

        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.)

        • but Trump declaring the national emergency probably warrants a meaty thread?

          As best I can tell, what Trump is doing is probably legal, and demonstrates why the National Emergency Act is a bad law. If you look at the list of past national emergencies, very few of them were emergencies in any serious sense of the term. For example (from Wiki):

          Prohibiting Trade and Certain Other Transactions Involving Nicaragua (Executive Order 12513)[21] – The United States embargo against Nicaragua,[23] followed the victory by Sandinista candidate Daniel Ortega in the 1984 Nicaraguan general election over the U.S.-backed Contras

          Prohibiting Certain Transactions with Respect to Haiti (Executive Order 12775)[20] – followed the 1991 Haitian coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Re-declared by Clinton on May 7, 1994 (Executive Order 12914)[26]

          But I’m not sure that gives you a meaty thread–is anyone here willing to defend the law (as opposed to Trump’s particular exercise of it)?

          • orin says:

            The whole point of the law is to enable fast response to actions that congress would later ratify or defer on, not as a loophole to allow unlimited power of the executive over the other branches of government. So it’s “legal” only to the extent that it is defensible under the spirit of the law and the constitution, which it clearly is not. Usurpation of powers by the executive in the name of a made-up anti-immigration “national emergency” seems about as good a topic for a CW threads as I can possibly imagine.

          • The whole point of the law is to enable fast response

            And can you think of any reason why either of the examples I cited required fast response?

            There are two things wrong with what Trump is doing. One is that illegal immigration across the Mexican border is not a terrible problem. That’s something that can be reasonably debated–there are some here and many elsewhere who think it is.

            The other is that whether or not it is a problem, it is not a problem that suddenly appeared and requires an immediate response, which is what “national emergency” implies. I’m not sure any reasonable person would claim it is.

            But that is equally true of many of the things for which previous national emergencies were declared. The only thing different this time is that we know that what Trump wants to do via a national emergency declaration is something that Congress is unwilling to do, not merely something they couldn’t do quickly.

      • brad says:

        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 think what drives some of us a little batty is the motte and bailey around this. If people need a safe space to vent about other people in their lives that hurt them, fine. Of course such a place is not going to be particularly charitable, intellectually stimulating, or rational. It is going to have the feel of a support group. So don’t go around saying it’s a magical place where people of any ideological persuasion can come and have polite, thoughtful discussions about their disagreements.

        It’s a don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining situation. You can’t be constantly slagging on my friends and then turn around and pat yourself on the back for being charitable.

        • Nick says:

          I think you’re right about this, Brad—and incidentally, this is possibly the first example of motte and bailey I’ve seen in ages. This can’t simultaneously be a safe space and a free and open exchange of ideas, and this is the very problem gbdub was pointing out in Heather’s post above (a criticism I agree with!).

        • cuke says:

          I think what drives some of us a little batty is the motte and bailey around this. If people need a safe space to vent about other people in their lives that hurt them, fine. Of course such a place is not going to be particularly charitable, intellectually stimulating, or rational.

          This is a central tension to this comment section and I don’t think both things can be accomplished here. If Scott clarified that he wanted this to be a safe space for conservatives to vent about liberals, I would absolutely defer and not come back.

          • albatross11 says:

            A safe space for conservatives to vent on liberals, or for liberals to vent on conservatives, seems like more of the poison that’s making us sick, rather than an antidote. Having a place where conservatives and liberals (and people who don’t fit either category well) can have civil, productive conversations seems like an antidote for something that is damaging our society and making our world a worse place.

            My best guess is that the dynamics of social media have created an increasingly intolerant public sphere–one where there’s a lot of outrage and anger and ridicule for the other side, and not much careful listening or discussion or understanding. This is really bad for us, in the same way that a marriage where the two spouses are mostly consumed with anger and outrage and ridicule for each other is in bad trouble. I think in this case, the bad actors were mostly on the left, but the behavior we’re talking about that was directed at Scott is a tactic, not an ideology–it can be and has been and will continue to be used by amoral people of all ideologies, who care a lot about winning and not so much about fairness or collateral damage.

            FWIW, I feel like I’ve learned from and enjoyed seeing your take on things here. I hope you stick around SSC, whether or not you stick around this particular comment thread.

          • Nick says:

            I wonder a lot about this, as far as effect vs. cause. I think of the research I’ve heard about (…not actually looked at) that venting doesn’t make you feel better, it just makes you feel worse. Anecdotally, though, there have been plenty of times when saying how I feel, to a sympathetic ear, even if it amounts to a series of complaints, is damn helpful. Am I fooling myself, or are there healthy and unhealthy ways to vent?

            Carrying this over to safe spaces, are there healthy and unhealthy ways to engage in “owning the libs?” When Scott wrote about this, he was of the opinion that the folks at r/atheism (to take his example) needed that outlet from their repressive home life. Was he wrong? Were they setting themselves up for a life of being angrier at Christianity than they otherwise would?

            To refine the question: undoubtedly there are healthier and less healthy ways to own the libs. But how well does that scale, that is, to the culture of a whole community? And how well does that work across time? That is, is it sustainable in the short term but not the long term, as people push the bounds of acceptably savage owns? Does it work for new users who just need a safe haven from the madness of the outside world, but not for powerusers who are looking for an ever bigger fix? That’s the frame I would put on the question, anyway, @albatross11.

          • cuke says:

            As is often the case, I agree with everything you say here albatross11.

            I didn’t mean what I wrote to come across as “then I’ll take my football and go home.” Without any rancor, if Scott or this group collectively felt that safe space for this particular batch of conservatives/libertarians/anti-SJWs to vent was a more urgent goal than figuring out how to speak about difficult topics across differences, that’s totally fine for me. I came for the psychiatry and stayed for the intelligent conversation. If I leave, it would be because of the constant griping about “those sucky liberals/feminists/sjws.” And maybe too for the rationalist posturing with a lot of disowned rage behind it.

            I am very interested in the process/norm experiment that this comments section represents. Scott has created a space where fairly intelligent people are attempting despite multiple kinds of difference to have elucidating conversations grounded in some semblance of evidence. It also allows long-form enough responses that it’s made room for some genuine sharing of self and for showing some modicum of vulnerability, which from my point of view is when things start to get interesting. And in that way, just in terms of process, this space is like an antidote to the social media crap that has proliferated around it.

            It’s not surprising to me that Scott’s space and the norms he’s carefully cultivated ran afoul of the very different norms operating out there in social media land.

          • cuke says:

            Nick, I hear you asking when is venting anger/injury helpful and when does it just feed itself and make the sense of grievance worse. If I have that right, I love that question.

            This is right in the center of my work as a psychotherapist, and while I have no answers, I have some thoughts and am very interested in this terrain. One of the things I’ve found compelling about engaging with some folks on here is seeing if there’s a way to keep having difficult conversations even while we’re having trouble regulating our frustration. it feels to me like a productive zone of practice, like a dojo rather than just a feeding frenzy. Or at least that’s the potential I see.

            So, I sit all day (in my capacity as a psychotherapist) listening to people’s grievances — about the world, about their loved ones, and about themselves. One thing I can say unequivocally about this (and also based on my experience as a parent of now adults) is that if you don’t show that you acknowledge and see as legitimate the other person’s pain, they will never stop speaking from it or move past it and nothing you say will be heard. That’s the “sympathetic ear” part that you say is helpful.

            Conversely, it seems to me if people come to a space like this and just voice some grievance they’ve been harboring but they keep it very intellectualized, and they don’t risk saying why it hurts them personally, and then everyone else responds by piling on with their sense of grievance without likewise sharing in some more personal way, that seems more like just activating nervous systems and whipping up anger. Because no one goes away feeling particularly heard by a sympathetic ear. They go away feeling more righteously entitled to their anger, maybe slightly and temporarily relieved at having gotten to stick it to the enemy side, but medium-and-longterm, my experience is that’s a recipe for emotional stuckness and that growth doesn’t come from that kind of practice. I’m all about learning — if we’re just reflexively re-enacting our injuries, I would rather eat doughnuts.

            So I’m always listening for that when I work with clients. If it’s going well, and they feel I’m hearing their pain accurately, then they start to talk about other things eventually — things they’d like to do, hopes and dreams they have, a sense that they might have some new choices they didn’t see before, and a fresh sense of acceptance and competency about the path of their lives. Things they were adamantly opposed to before (potential actions or ways of seeing) suddenly don’t seem so threatening; a wider landscape of possibilities opens up. I mean this all quite concretely; there’s nothing airy fairy about it. And I see how it leads people to make change — change jobs, go back to school, get out of crappy relationships, start listening and communicating in their current relationships, lighten up on themselves and enjoy life more, stop self-medicating for suffering, move through the world less burdened by rage and grievance, and so on. And if I’m not hearing their pain accurately, they are more likely to come in and just say the same things to me week after week. People repeating themselves is a sure sign they haven’t been heard.

            So I don’t think there’s any long-term grownup satisfaction to be had from owning the libs, needless to say. I do think the people who feel the need to re-enact over and over this performance of owning the libs (or lefty equivalence) without ever showing more skin or moving the conversation in new directions — they have pain that is not being heard by a sympathetic ear. And they lack the self-awareness or resources maybe to find that sympathetic ear or to know how to give it to themselves, which is one of the things it’s good to be able to do for oneself once one reaches adulthood. Sometimes it’s just easier to pursue one’s addictions and numb out in-between the re-enacting the rage sessions online.

            One other thing I notice is that among my most “stuck” clients, whether it’s my failing still to accurately hear their pain or whether their pain is just a lot deeper and we haven’t gotten to it all yet, these folks have a harder time stepping away from the toxic rage machine of social media, partly I think because their negative self-appraisals are more accurately reinforced there. I have clients who gravitate to the shaming and criticism and judgemental rage-fest of social media like a form of self-harm. They may get a dozen positive messages in a week from friends, random strangers, co-workers, caregivers, but none of those register anywhere near as real as the one smack-down they got that week on Facebook by a total stranger. And they seem to completely lack the capacity to give themselves positive messages, so the only things perceived as real and true are the shitty things they feel about themselves, the shitty things they feel about other people, and the shitty things other people say they feel about them. It’s a filter very clouded by pain.

            So I think about that as I read all the words typed here over some rage post or blog post or radical perspective by some stranger promoting some online agenda, like it represents an existential threat to whoever “us” is. I’m not speaking about the kind of harm inflicted on Scott over the CW subreddit, mind you. I’m just talking about the sense of outrage that someone else’s outlandish argument can engender in us.

            We know this, but I’ll say it — it’s a form of taking responsibility for oneself to stay away from things that are unhealthy for us, just like once we get to be grownups, it’s also our jobs to listen for when we’re hungry or to get to sleep a little earlier if we’re tired. We have a job to take care of ourselves, in part so we don’t harm other people. Because unless we live alone in a hut in the woods without any internet connection, we all have a lot of capacity to harm other people.

            One last thing and then I’ll stop. The people I work with who feel most aggrieved are also the people I know who feel most alone and who are, in fact, most alone in their lives. The unprocessed pain (and therefore rage) they bring to any social interaction makes it hard to sustain satisfying relationships. So from my point of view, if people come to a space like this for something like fellowship, whether that’s “safe space” fellowship or it’s “have difficult conversations across difference” fellowship, that sense of fellowship is hugely impaired by the re-enacting rage dance. Even at the most simple level, I’ve found myself numerous times in the midst of starting to explore an interesting topic with someone in here and it’ll push someone else’s buttons and they’ll drive by and say “but the libs do that MORE and WORSE” and then it’s like SMH, okay, that’s the end of that interesting conversation. So the more that interesting conversations on here get hijacked by someone’s need to vent rage, the more it says to me that we need a way to be a sympathetic ear, as you say, for people’s pain, if nothing else so that we can get back to having interesting conversations. But also because it’s the kind thing to do.

          • arlie says:

            @cuke

            So, I sit all day (in my capacity as a psychotherapist) listening to people’s grievances — about the world, about their loved ones, and about themselves. One thing I can say unequivocally about this (and also based on my experience as a parent of now adults) is that if you don’t show that you acknowledge and see as legitimate the other person’s pain, they will never stop speaking from it or move past it and nothing you say will be heard. That’s the “sympathetic ear” part that you say is helpful.

            That whole post is fascinating. I think you are right, but I have nowhere near the kind of experience you have to back it – only self-observation, and observation of small handfuls of others.

            That said – and from a place of agreeing with you 99% – I think there are some cases where where “safe spaces”, both on-line and in person, can provide that feeling of being heard, even though they also involve a lot of venting.

            I’ve been in a few on-line support groups, and what I find is that, eventually, I move on. After reading enough about other folks’ experience of the condition in question, and expressing my own experiences, and having my reactions framed as normal and reasonable, and then doing the same for other new posters – while at the same time picking up information on coping with the problem – I’ve eventually spent enough time on it, and it becomes part of the background of my life.

            Often there’s a stage where I become a crank, and it’s all about how people in my situation are insufficiently supported and/or outright oppressed. Sometimes that stage lasts as long as a decade. But so far I’ve always eventually(*) gotten tired of it, and impatient with others still coming from crank mode.

            I see the same thing happening face to face, but there my sample size is smaller. (Only one type of group.) And I left early because of internal politics. I suspect face to face is usually better and more effective, but can’t say that’s actually been my experience. But OTOH, those weren’t explicitly support groups, which may have been part of my problem.

            So that’s my 2 cents.

            (*) Technically, there are a couple of topics where I’m still going through the cycle. I’m sure some people can easily figure out what I’m currently cranky about 🙁

        • Montfort says:

          I agree.

          Though I’ll also say that what muddies the waters is that I think Scott and the reddit mods, etc. intended for it to be an open space. But when a bunch of people show up and use it as a safe space instead, your choices are basically to ban them, live with it, or import other people who they’re trying to be safe from. And if you needed the safe space, it might be hard to tell the difference between the intention and the result.

          • The Nybbler says:

            It was an open space. SJWs were not excluded. They may have found the space “unwelcoming”; so be it. Some of the flameouts from those who left the space, however, were quite telling: a lot of rage about how other people were making comments they (the SJWs) disliked, and how those comments were being upvoted. If SJWs cannot abide a space where those who disagree with them are allowed to speak, then a space where relevant issues are discussed will be either SJW-dominated or SJW-lacking.

          • Montfort says:

            @Nybbler,

            Why would you think “flameouts” are a representative sample? What about everyone else who just left quietly?

          • hilitai says:

            Echoing what Nybbler said: In what sense was it a “safe space”? Not a rhetorical question – I’m new here and never visited the site.

          • brad says:

            @hilitai
            Scott wrote this post, which unfortunately I can’t find right now, which included a section on internet atheism several years back. He made the point that the kind of rants, arguments, memes, and jokes that were were making the rounds–stuff about how stupid religions and religious people were and how could anyone believe that garbage–were silly and offensive even to a lot people that weren’t ever religious (FWIW including me). But that a lot of the people in that community had grown up in horrible oppressive religious communities and that venting was just the kind of thing they needed to work out their pain. It wasn’t fair to religious people, it wasn’t intellectually compelling, or even particularly interesting or funny to most, even most non-religious–but it was something that those people needed.

            That’s the kind of thing that’s meant by a safe space for anti-SWJs.

          • ManyCookies says:

            @brad

            You’re thinking of All Debates Are Bravery Debates.

          • hilitai says:

            That’s the kind of thing that’s meant by a safe space for anti-SWJs.

            That’s interesting, because it’s not what I think of when I think of “safe space”. I’ve always found it associated with the active suppression of opposing viewpoints, not just allowing a particular viewpoint free rein.

          • brad says:

            @ManyCookies
            Thanks. Of course his version is much better written.

            @hilitai
            I don’t know that I’ve seen enough examples to come up with a rule like that. As best I can tell the term started originally with physical rooms on college campuses and then blew up more in mockery than in praise.

            In any event, I think what I’ve laid out reasonably qualifies even if it isn’t the central example. You don’t need to explicitly ban religious push-back in a space dedicated to “an extreme strawmanning of religious positions with childish insults and distasteful triumphalism”. That’s going to serve as a sufficient filter all on its own.

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            That’s interesting, because it’s not what I think of when I think of “safe space”. I’ve always found it associated with the active suppression of opposing viewpoints, not just allowing a particular viewpoint free rein.

            Yeah, this is my understanding of it. In a safe space for trans people, anti-trans views are grounds for banning; in a safe space for Christians, anti-Christian comments are grounds for banning, in a safe space for Trump voters anti-Trump comments are grounds for banning, etc.

            I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with safe spaces as long as they’re clearly delineated as such. But they aren’t defined by which views are most popular within the space, they’re defined by rules about what people are and aren’t allowed to say. In some cases the rules aren’t made explicit but are still enforced, which I think is where the frustration comes in. If a place presents itself as a place for open discussion but predictably bans certain viewpoints, there’s an element of dishonesty in that.

          • albatross11 says:

            One other purpose of a safe space is wanting to have conversations within a framework of existing assumptions. If a bunch of Catholics get together to discuss Catholic theology, we’re probably not so interested in an evangelical atheist showing up to demand why we’re so obsessed with pleasing our invisible sky friend. This isn’t necessarily about emotional safety (though it may be), it’s also about allowing those conversations to take place without being constantly derailed. I’m interested in discussions about evolution and how it shaped our world, but not generally interested in a battle royale with creationists about whether evolution happened or not. It’s not that I want the creationists’ speech suppressed, I just don’t find that discussion worth my time.

        • gbdub says:

          If people need a safe space to vent about other people in their lives that hurt them, fine. Of course such a place is not going to be particularly charitable, intellectually stimulating, or rational. It is going to have the feel of a support group.

          Which is exactly why I describe it as a “problem” I “don’t know how to fix”! I’m not endorsing it as a good thing, just that the “y’all are a bunch of hopeless right wingers, no matter what you say your views are” framing you (and some of the flameouts, kudos to you for sticking around) have frequently put around the issue is unhelpful and misses a big part of why the problem exists. This is very different from saying it is not a problem.

    • awal says:

      I agree with this and would like to hear Scott’s take.

  39. ManyCookies says:

    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.

    What bothers me deeply about the CW thread is that it’s mostly made up of a bunch of people who get their jollies complaining about the SJ-woke-left community, and has the predictable biases and blindspots that you’d associate with that kind of person. When a news story shows up that paints the Left in a bad light, there are going to be about sixty thousand people who talk about it and upvote anyone else who does. When a news story paints the Right in a bad light, the reaction is “… who cares?”, if it even comes up at all.

    Try and empathize with this. From someone who reads SJ-criticism and feels criticized, the thing that’s truly angering about the CW threads is to see yourself being criticized by a milquetoast “classical liberal” who is ideologically indistinguishable from Michael Bloomberg in almost every way, and then to see yourself criticized by a guy who just finished posting about how Africa consists almost entirely of violent criminals who for [Voldemort] reasons could never be capable of forming a functioning government, and then to see those people look at each other – whether aware or unaware of how wildly different their politics are – and say “Yes, we are on the same page and in the same tribe”.

    The response tends to be “Well, there aren’t many racists”. There aren’t many bad people on the Left either! But you’ve secluded yourself into an area where every time the Left does something bad, you circlejerk about it, and when the Right does something bad, you don’t care – it doesn’t come up, and when it does it fizzles out. This leads to the widespread subconscious idea that the Right does not do bad things – even though you intellectually know that it does – and that the Left does them constantly. This unspoken idea is an ever-present premise for the majority of the discussion on the Culture War thread – if you reject it, or even recognize when an argument leans on this assertion without explicitly asserting it, then you do not belong there.

    And around this point the mask tends to slip. People say “Yeah, many of us are pretty anti-SJW and maybe a lot of us are here to hate on them, possibly sometimes a bit more than they deserve. But that’s because we mostly come from dark-blue enclaves and are ourselves reacting to the stupid shit our Facebook friends from high school are saying. Give us our space for that.” Which, like, sure! Own your biases! But recognize that you’re doing exactly the same thing you’re hating on the other side for doing – tolerating witches on your own side because of a somewhat-irrational aversion to the other side, and driving the other side out of common spaces because you’d rather bitch about them then engage them.

    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:

    To build on this: I actually use a couple forums where far-right people are constantly debating with far-left people, and everything in between. While the far left posters call the forums Stormfront Jr, and the far right posters call the forums “unforgivably [cheated on] and run by Jews,” there’s a general understanding from people who go there that you’re likely to see both far right and far left posts OFTEN.

    The centrists, interestingly, don’t call it either of those things. They see it as a place where you see extremist arguments on both sides.

    This is not the case, in my experience, with r/SSC. It is primarily some center-left posters with some antipathy towards SJWs, some center-right posters with lots of antipathy towards SJWs, and a couple fringe extremists who tend to really, REALLY hate SJWs. While there are (and used to be more) far-left posters, this was primarily an anti-SJW subreddit above else.

    Scott can cite stats about people who self identify as “left of center” and “right of center,” but the reality is that most people who stumble across r/ssc is going to find surprisingly homogenous opinions on: SJWs, the far left, [Voldemort] (if not its political implications), Whose Fault Outrage Culture is (it’s the left’s), Whose Fault General Discourse Degradation is (the left’s again!) etc etc.

    And he adds his own thoughts on perception:

    Note that in my experience that “pro-SJW” and “far left” are VERY different and plenty of pro-far-left people ALSO strongly dislike SJWs. But those people are likely to be turned off by the lack of other far-left opinions; few extremists like the idea of “starting from zero,” so to speak. Eg, if 97% of people on the sub already believes that the USSR was the single biggest atrocity in human history, what far leftist is going to bother stick around and debating that, when they would have to start mostly from scratch? Just find another forum where people already are aware of the basics of a pro-USSR view and debate the specifics there; it saves everyone’s time.

    Scott could probably make a dent in this by doing for tankies what he did for neo-reactionaries: charitably assume their arguments are based on deeply coherent, compelling logic, and see how well he can translate it via a 50,000 word polemic.

    Or, even spicier – a 10,000 word charity exercise in which he tries to defend the more defensible parts of outrage culture and talks about the social utility of community censorship and strong norms.

    I’m not trying to imply that he SHOULD do this – just that r/SSC is likely not going to be seen as a place for “healthy, thoughtful, charitable debate” if you’re one of the people who holds one of the sub’s No-No views that most of the sub spends their time ridiculing. One of those No-No views is defending SJWs; not unsurprisingly, it appears to be SJWs that are the most pissed about r/SSC.

    I felt paanther’s post assigned too much “blame”, and PB34 ends his post with a similar sentiment:

    ALSO, I WANT TO MAKE IT VERY CLEAR that I do not consider this Scott’s “fault.” Objectively I think he is in the top .01% of people compared to commenters here wrt charity, attempts to be reasonable to far leftism in general as well as SJWs, and desire for interesting and varied posts from all over the political spectrum. This is more “what I would consider doing if I was Scott AND I was heroically motivated to try and improve r/SSC culture war discourse for some god forsaken reason rather than just writing good blog posts.”

    ——

    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.

    • whereamigoing says:

      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.

      • hnau says:

        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.

    • hnau says:

      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.

  40. LadyJane says:

    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.

    • hnau says:

      You aren’t the only one who got this impression (see ManyCookies commenting above). Fortunately Scott explicitly acknowledged it in his post:

      I acknowledge many people’s lived experience that the thread felt right-wing

      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.

      • LadyJane says:

        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, the 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.

        • albatross11 says:

          LadyJane:

          It seems like this might turn on whether you see “SJW” as describing desired policies or ideas or tactics. My sense is that the set of blog commenters here is much more aligned to SJW activists in terms of policies than, say, the median voter.

          On the other hand, I think largely because of Scott’s essays over the years, the blog has attracted a set of commenters who are often opposed to many SJW-aligned ideas (cultural appropriation, structural racism, white privilege).

          And there are specific tactics which are often associated with the SJW movement (no-platforming, doxxing), but which are also done by lots of other people, which are pretty unpopular here. Though I’ll note that there are regular participants here arguing for boycotting people for their beliefs, trying to get self-described fascists fired from their jobs, and suppressing certain topics of discussion, so it’s not like even those tactics are 100% out of favor here–just that my sense is most commenters don’t agree with them.

          There’s also a tribal component–SJWs are definitely the outgroup to most SSC blog commenters, which leads to the usual tribal mechanisms kicking in and blanket-accusations of everyone in the movement for whatever bad thing one guy does.

          • brad says:

            As much as I dislike SJW and think it is category that exists to use as a bludgeon more than a word that accurately describes something out in the world, I think it is much much better than “the Left” which is also not-uncommon. For that one there isn’t even a plausible motte.

    • Sebastian_H says:

      Isnt it kind of interesting that some of the the pro-SJW set then illustrated exactly why lots of people are anti-SJW by hounding even someone like Scott? If it can happen even to him, we know for sure it could happen to the rest of us. Maybe the reason so many on the left and the right and the center are anti-SJW is because they legitimately see that its tactics don’t go well with what they want in a functioning society. It’s a little weird to argue that Scott and forums associated with him aren’t pro-SJW enough for your liking when this very case precisely illustrates why so many people are hostile to it.

      This very case perfectly illustrates why the SJW “punching Nazis” argument isn’t well received by the larger community. SJWs are so bad at identifying Nazis and at training their fire only at Nazis that they would punch Scott. And just like Trump is properly associated with the Nazis he refuses to rein in, SJWs are associated with those who want to attack Scott’s livelihood.

      • LadyJane says:

        By the same standard, isn’t it unfair to judge the entire Social Justice movement for the actions of a few extremists, hypocrites, and bad faith actors?

        • Sebastian_H says:

          Sure. I don’t judge the whole Social Justice movement that way. I judge the part of it that focuses on call out tactics, violence normalization, and/or hyper sensitivity to identity validation. But it’s an interesting defense that you’re currently offering because the SJW call out culture is about denying that moderates and extremists deserve to be separately treated. It’s about the idea that small offenses need to bring down the hammer. It’s about the idea that defending procedural concerns for unfavored people is “protecting the Nazis”. It’s the left wing equivalent of “objectively pro-Saddam” if you didn’t support the war in Iraq.

          My objection is to that whole discourse. You can make limited arguments and not be “objectively pro X”. You can defend free speech, and not be a Nazi lover. The problem with the Social Justice movement is that it doesn’t really allow for the idea that people might have legitimate concerns/thoughts that disagree with each other or have to be balanced. It divides the world into exactly two camps. The idea that someone might hate Nazis AND not like SJW is hard to stomach when there is only 2 categories.

          • Clutzy says:

            Another problem, as I would define it, is that the Social Justice movement has an aspect of “de-legitimization” built into the ideological framework. In some instances it is overt, such as “Racism = Prejudice+Power” (where power is defined as being white), in others it is less so, and simply comes out in the application of the ideology.

            This is kind of like the Torah vs. the Talmud. The “SJW Torah” only contains a few instances that explicitly tells people when they must shut up, but the “SJW Talmud” is littered with the idea that people must shut up if they aren’t oppressed in the proper way.

    • onyomi says:

      I think this is a key point where maybe both sides engage in a bit of conflation: probably a majority of SSC readers are against SJ warriors, because, as I understand it, the definition of SJ warrior is someone who both holds certain views on race, gender, colonialism, etc. and who also think public shaming, censorship, doxxing, harassment, or even violence are justified as tactics to use against those who don’t agree. In theory, one can hold all those views but not support shaming, censorship, harassment, etc. as tactics (to some degree this seems to be the view Scott himself holds), and in theory, one could hold entirely different views yet also support using the above tactics to enforce them, but in practice, it sure seems like there’s a lot of overlap between the “SJs” and the “warriors,” at least in the West (I’m sure if we were talking Saudi Arabia we would find a very different set of views most often backed up by threats of this or a harsher kind).

      Nassim Taleb suggested what I think is a relevant idea in his recent book: the dictatorship of the most intolerant. The basic idea is that having a zero-tolerance policy on something, whether animal products or apostasy, can imbue a group with outsize influence because it starts wielding a kind of baseline veto power on the limits of social acceptability. For example, he attributes a lot of the success of the spread of Islam to its “zero-tolerance” policy on apostasy: on Taleb’s account, at least, it was historically easy to become a Muslim but usually dangerous to try to stop being a Muslim because of Islam’s “zero-tolerance policy” (we will execute you) on apostasy. Hence, many people who only became Muslim out of convenience of some kind would nevertheless remain Muslim for life because, even if a majority of Muslims don’t actually feel that strongly about the “execute all apostates,” policy. After all, who says “guys, maybe we don’t need to be so harsh on the whole apostasy business?” but someone who is secretly thinking about renouncing the faith himself?

      Overall, I think saying “I support your cause but not your methods” is one of the hardest and most thankless tasks out there, so we should be all the more appreciate of Scott’s willingness to publicly do so.

      • cuke says:

        as I understand it, the definition of SJ warrior is someone who both holds certain views on race, gender, colonialism, etc. and who also think public shaming, censorship, doxxing, harassment, or even violence are justified as tactics to use against those who don’t agree

        I support using this definition in all future conversation here. I find this extremely clarifying, particularly the emphasis on the linking “and.”

      • gbdub says:

        Yes, Scott is someone who seems to agree with a lot of SJ goals while being strongly against SJW tactics. And that’s why people get annoyed that the forum just gets labeled “right wing” – it’s conflating the object level discussion with the meta debate.

      • You can definitely distinguish SJ from the SJ Warrior, but the SJ ideology itself can be further distinguished from what was the mainstream American left up until about ’12 onwards. SJ is most recently derived from the intersectional ideas that came out of the 80s collision of critical race theory and feminism, and that was in an academic/radical setting; it didn’t become the mainstream until relatively recently. As recently as the 2000s, raceblindness (as in “I don’t see race, I see people!”) was the American center-left mainstream (and therefore the English speaking internet mainstream) and the main way to fight racism, but now race consciousness (towards and for historically discriminated groups only) is the American center-left mainstream, to the point that corporations are advertizing on that basis. I know this is the case, because when I was a Paulbot back in the late 2000s we used the phrase “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” to describe libertarianism to normal uninitiated people, but this phrase makes absolutely zero sense anymore. Things have changed a lot really quickly.

        So does Scott really have SJ goals or just socially liberal ones with a dash of pragmatism? I think you can take away some SJ concepts from the ideology, such as converting trigger warnings into content warnings, but I worry that the reason the SJ Warrior became prominent is because conflict theory is built into SJ ideology. It could be separated, but then it would be something else relating to SJ’s concerns, but missing the theories to do with oppression, privilege, and standpoint theory. Would it still be right to call it SJ at that point?

        • onyomi says:

          I do think this is an important point: while theoretically any set of policy goals could pair with any set of strategies, different strategies are nevertheless more coherent with the different worldviews that lead to different goals in the first place.

          I do recall when I was in a humanities PhD program c. 10 years ago, it was pretty commonplace to hear things like “it’s all about power.” It doesn’t sound as sinister in that ivory tower context where you’re contemplating Foucault as it does when you then attempt to follow that to its logical conclusion in political activism. My vague impression is that Foucault et al. are not as in vogue now as they were ten years ago, though may also be, by the same token, more “in the water supply.”

          So yes, I think that a lot of the intellectual underpinnings of the current wave of SJ theory tend toward a “conflict theory” view of the world which, in turn, tends to justify more ruthless tactics and less good-faith debate (because, it can imply that ideals like “good faith debate” are themselves subterfuges the powerful use to remain powerful).

        • Vorkon says:

          While I (and probably a fair number of other people here) happen to agree with you that the philosophical underpinnings of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality are flawed, and are probably contributing to why the Social Justice movement has attracted so many people of the “warrior” variety, I don’t think that this belief is anywhere near as widespread among the SSC community as opposition to the “warrior” methods onyomi described above. It’s not an uncommon position here, mind you, but it isn’t a central unifying feature, the way that opposition to those tactics is.

        • @Vorkon

          To our credit, representatives of any ideology here are usually a lot more thoughtful and pragmatic about their beliefs than anywhere else.

        • LadyJane says:

          I know this is the case, because when I was a Paulbot back in the late 2000s we used the phrase “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” to describe libertarianism to normal uninitiated people, but this phrase makes absolutely zero sense anymore.

          I still see plenty of libertarians use that exact term! Hell, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld used it on the campaign trail in 2016. The Onion had an article satirizing the concept a few years back (okay, it was written in 2011, but I still see people in libertarian groups sharing it, so it clearly still holds some resonance to people). And in Political Science, the term “libertarian” is still used to describe people who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal (the term “populist” is typically used to describe the inverse, and has been since well before Trump and Bernie made populism a popular term again).

          More broadly, I don’t think there’s as much of a contradiction between libertarianism and social justice as you seem to be implying. If your only exposure to libertarians is here on SSC or in similarly Anti-SJW spaces, then of course most of the libertarians you see are going to be against Social Justice. But that’s hardly true for the liberty movement as a whole. I’ve seen countless libertarians attack progressives from the cultural left, using social justice terminology to explain how gun control is racist and rooted in white privilege, how Bernie’s protectionism and anti-immigration policies are discriminatory against people in developing countries, how Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris are tied to the racism and classism of the prison-industrial complex. The Libertarian Party makes a huge show of the fact that it’s the only political party that endorses fully open borders and sex work decriminalization, and the only sex workers to run for office or have positions in a political party have been Libertarians.

          So broadly speaking, I think “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” still applies to libertarians, even if you’re defining liberal in terms of the social justice left. If anything, it’s the fact that mainstream conservatives have become more populist (supporting protectionism over free trade, criticizing the corrosive effects of capitalism on traditional family values) that’s called the definition into question, because “fiscally conservative” no longer necessarily means “supportive of free-market capitalism.”

          • albatross11 says:

            ISTM that a major defining feature of the SJW movement, or whatever you want to call it, is that they’re politically liberal in most ways, but not particularly wedded to individual freedom. Libertarians agree on many goals (the ones consistent with personal freedom), but not generally on methods or on underlying ideology or models of the world.

          • I’ll retract the hyperbolic claim that it makes “no sense”. There’s still something to work with, but there’s a growing tension over what liberal means, with a liberalism that is generally for individual rights when it comes to personal expression (with some discrepencies here and there such as on guns) moving towards something more about ensuring an outcome and protecting people from more distal harms.

            I’m familiar with the libertarianism you describe though. Jeffrey Tucker is an example of that kind of personality. There’s even a whole sub-ideology of anarcho-capitalism represented by the C4SS site that reframes itself as left wing with “markets not capitalism”, with some neo-mutualist revisioning of when property rights should give way to possessive rights. You even see them using explicitly Marxist class analysis.

            The important thing though – as albatross11 eludes too – is that while a certain faction of libertarians may utilize some of the same rhetoric as the SJ left (this even went on back then as libertarians tried to court the left during the Bush years before mostly going back to courting the right during Obama), they aren’t actually interested in applying the same policies, because they don’t share the same underlying worldview. Previously the effects of that worldview difference could mostly be ringfenced through the use of the “economic vs social” distinction, but I think that’s broken down. The phrase “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” was a shorthand for saying that you wanted to (more or less) have government economic policy that conservatives want and government social policy that liberals want. The idea being that both sides claim to want individual rights prioritized in one realm of politics, and that libertarians are better and more consistent because they want to combine the best of both worlds.

            If “fiscally conservative” means”wants the government to have conservative-ish fiscal policy” then “socially liberal” doesn’t suddenly mean “doesn’t want socially liberal policy but wants to use the rhetoric”. It should mean “wants the government to have liberal-ish social policy”. That’s what it did mean. If you restrict the range it can still mean that, but more and more policies that could be described as liberal are diverging from what they used to be.

            My point is that what counts as “socially liberal” has changed because the social policy that liberals talk about favorably has shifted to bring ideas like differential legal treatment for minorities into the Overton Window, mostly copying the European progressive example, which is profoundly un-libertarian. Libertarians who use social justice rhetoric still aren’t going to support the social justice policy idea of European style hate speech laws. To the extent that the First Amendment prevents such laws, American liberals can’t have such things in the first place, but there is a growing group on the left who want such things (as shown at the top).

            It’s worth pointing out that American progressives have no actual plan for redressing things like, say, the wage gap, and so long as there’s no actual plan, libertarians can safely use the same rhetoric (that’s why I admit saying it makes NO sense was going too far), but there’s definite tension there since there’s a strong implication that the government should do something about it, as Britain does by making companies publish the data: The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) – which enforces the gender pay gap rules – said that forcing companies to report their pay gaps was not enough to eliminate pay disparities.

            “We believe that it should be mandatory for employers to publish, alongside their pay gap data, action plans with specific targets and deadlines,” said chief executive Rebecca Hilsenrath.

            The libertarian mainstream has always been “leftist” on the issues of sex workers, immigration, drug legalization, police brutality etc, and so it’s a small step for them to add in “because white privilege”, but it’s quite another thing for them to start supporting leveling efforts through legislation.

            Even regards issues like sex, more generally libertarians had a stance that “liberals stay out of your bedroom” but SJ ideas like affirmative consent are only compatible with that so long as they remain an insistent nagging and nobody ever tries to enact them politically in any way.

            So broadly speaking, I think “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” still applies to libertarians, even if you’re defining liberal in terms of the social justice left. If anything, it’s the fact that mainstream conservatives have become more populist (supporting protectionism over free trade, criticizing the corrosive effects of capitalism on traditional family values) that’s called the definition into question, because “fiscally conservative” no longer necessarily means “supportive of free-market capitalism.”

            This is a good point, but there’s some data showing that the left shifted this way more dramatically on the relevent issue prior to the shift from the right, which was much less organic and almost entirely driven by Trump.

            Some of this might be a kind of international pull effect where American progressives/liberals started making a more serious effort to align their policy goals with Europe.

    • theredsheep says:

      The reason for this seems perfectly clear to me. The primary virtue on here is to give absolutely every idea a fair listen, and to argue based on facts and reason, even if the idea is transparently stupid or horrible. The belief/behavior that SJWs are best known for is saying that certain ideas or statements absolutely must be suppressed for the public good, without argument. I’d say that’s the main reason they’re hated. Whether any of us agrees with them on racial justice or homosexuality or [thing] is beside the point when their single firmest principle is directly opposed to our single firmest principle.

      Closely related: a lot of us are on the spectrum, and getting on the bad side of social taboos is an ever-present danger IRL. The SJW phenomenon is an attempt to make those taboos explicit and formal, and organize the shunning for greater efficiency.

      • Reasoner says:

        If we’re giving absolutely every idea a fair listen, shouldn’t we also give a fair listen to the idea that not every idea should be given a fair listen?

      • The SJW phenomenon is an attempt to make those taboos explicit and formal, and organize the shunning for greater efficiency.

        I would expect “explicit and formal” taboos to be easier for ASD people to handle, not harder: I think this is the source of much of the pseudo-nostalgia for a romanticized version of Victorian etiquette. Rather, the SJW impulse is to establish a reverse privilege hierarchy (e.g., the “progressive stack”) in which some groups may arbitrarily declare new taboos that must be respected by other groups.

      • Aapje says:

        @theredsheep

        The SJW phenomenon is an attempt to make those taboos explicit and formal, and organize the shunning for greater efficiency.

        SJ taboos are actually so many and so inconsistent, that any application is going to be a matter of power more than actual law. Those who get to choose which taboos are punished in a certain situation, will get their way.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      FWIW, as someone who could fairly be described as an anti-SJW liberal social democrat (although not as anti as many SSCers – I try and avoid using the phrase SJW in favour of less loaded terms when describing people who don’t use it to describe themselves) that tallies closely with my impressions.

      • John Schilling says:

        I somewhat agree. But then, people who are accused of “anti-SJW bias” are frequently asked to either define or stop using the “SJW” term, and it’s reasonable to hold the people making the accusation to the same standard. So, if SSC is a hotbed of anti-SJW bias, how are we defining “SJW”?

        I think that there is a pretty strong consensus among the anti-SJW people that the “W” part of SJW refers to the use of tactics designed to suppress the expression of dissenting opinions in any space where they have any influence. I am pretty careful to use the term only in that context, but I will use it unashamedly and unrepentantly in that context. And by that definition, any space that promotes civil discourse among people with diverse social or political opinions, is going to have to tell the SJWs that they aren’t welcome unless they leave the “W” at the door. And the same for people using those tactics in the service of other ideologies, but that mostly isn’t an issue in the contemporary west and the one notable exception (militant Trumpists) hasn’t been a major problem around SSC.

        So, guilty as charged and proud of it. But if the claim is going to extend to SSC has a bias against Social Justice even in its non-militant incarnations, that’s more serious and is going to require more supporting evidence.

        • Tatterdemalion says:

          I think the problem here is precisely the phenomenon Scott outlines in “Weak men are superweapons”.

          If you talk critically about “SJWs” without being super-precise and unwieldly in specifying exactly what you mean (and, hey, what SSC poster would ever do that?), anyone who identifies with the social justice movement is going to see that as referring to them personally (and most people who aren’t part of the social justice movement will see it as referring to the entire movement, to); in Scott’s terms you’re recentering the category of people in the social justice movement around ones who use warriorish tactics.

          And that’s going to up the hostility of the discussion in precisely the sorts of way you’d expect.

          Even though the shorthand is sometimes convenient, I think it’s generally better to avoid it expand out into longhand, so that those people you don’t intend to insult don’t come away feeling insulted and respond accordingly.

        • The Nybbler says:

          I do not think the tactics are entirely separable from the beliefs. For example, if you believe that every effort should be made to allow underrepresented minorities to succeed, and you believe that “microaggressions” are sufficent to cause URMs to fail, then you’ve set yourself up with an obligation to micromanage everyone’s behavior to prevent these “microaggressions”.

          If you believe the very presence of “too many” men in a space inhibits women, and you value the presence and participation of women above most other values, you have signed yourself up to discriminate against men.

          And, relevantly, if you believe that “empowering people to reassure each other that their terrible beliefs and behaviors are just fine is still damaging to a culture even if you personally ‘know better’ than to watch them while they’re doing it”, you’ve signed yourself up for a witchhunt to take down all the places these terrible people might discuss their terrible beliefs.

          • Aapje says:

            +1

            I think that the very ideology as taught by the strong believers is essentially set up for abuse, similar to how communist states seems to inevitably become abuse.

            That said, many SJ advocates are not inherently bad people and don’t seek to hurt people, but I think that the ideology does push them to do so or to not intervene when others do so.

            Furthermore, many people have cobbled together their own version of SJ, especially those who are not strong believers.

    • arlie says:

      Agreed – the repeated explicit slanging of SJW types in this blog – as far as I can tell almost(?) always of left-associated SJWs – came close to causing me to abandon the place, particularly as at least 90% of the behaviours attributed to them were things I had never seen – including, as it happened, labelling themselves as “SJWs”. One look at the reddit, via some link someone posted in the blog comments, caused me to decide to stay far far away.

      I persevered here, and I’ve learned to treat “SJW” as something a bit less noxious than “tag I attach to people I disagree with to encourage all of my team to be nasty to them” – which is frankly how it appeared to me for quite some time.

      But I still presume a person who vents about SJWs here probably holds a lot of stereotypical red tribe views, with emphasis on those I see as least rational.

      • cuke says:

        For what it’s worth, your perceptions and experience here match mine as well.

        One common strand I’ve encountered is equating feminists with SJWs. My efforts to explain that I am a feminist who also supports speech rights and doesn’t support online harassment or name-calling led me to being told I wasn’t actually a feminist.

        “Democrats want open borders.” I’m a Democrat, I don’t want open borders, and further my lived experience tells me that very very few Democrats want open borders. It’s like that.

        There’s a kind of rhetorical warfare that happens here that conveys an absence of good faith in the conversation. Or clarifies that the motivation is venting and not mutual understanding.

    • I agree that the clearest ideological consistency of SSC posters (I didn’t read or participate in the reddit culture war thread) is probably hostility to the SJW approach to political controversy. One possible explanation is that posters who support that approach get banned, but I can’t remember ever seeing that happen–can you?

      Another is that posters who support that position don’t enjoy participating in a conversation where many people not only are allowed to criticize their position but do so. Insofar as that pattern is discreditable to anyone, it’s not to the people who do participate.

      • cuke says:

        This is interesting. My assumption was that the large proportion of anti-SJW sentiment had more to do with the demographics of the group — 90% male, mostly white, often libertarian-adjacent views, and heavily from the tech sector. This is a fairly affluent group of people who put a very high value on not being regulated by others and whose collective experience of oppression (not to speak of individual experiences) has come in the form of demands for left-wing ideological compliance (or retaliation for failure to comply).

        If you enter a space of people with different demographics, you will find their largest targets to be likewise adjusted in reaction to the source of their largest perceived threats.

        • Nick says:

          There’s a big early effect where Scott wrote about the excesses of social justice (in particular feminist) activism and these posts became a big deal. This has a lot of consequences, including:
          1) regular readers who like Scott or found the arguments compelling grew more anti-SJW;
          2) new readers disproportionately saw those posts, and the ones who liked those posts became regular readers.

          It seems to me that the demographics are downstream of things like this.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        I agree that the clearest ideological consistency of SSC posters (I didn’t read or participate in the reddit culture war thread) is probably hostility to the SJW approach to political controversy.

        I don’t think it’s as narrow and intellectually justifiable as that. I think that a large majority of SSC posters view the social justice movement as an outgroup, with all that entails.

        It’s not just that we intellectually disagree with one aspect of their philosophy, it’s that a lot of people here (including me) have an instinctive, visceral, negative reaction to them, and many of those treat them much less charitably than any other group (including many I despise far, far more strongly on an intellectual level – intellectually, I think that they’re one of the less bad groups around, it’s just that their differences with me strike a particular nerve and their dominance in their social environment make them an outgroup rather that a fargroup) as a consequence.

        Blaming them for not staying around to be insulted strikes me as adding insult to injury.

        • Aapje says:

          I think that they have a far higher chance to actually have their plans implemented to a very dangerous level than other groups, like neo-Nazis, communists, conservative Christians, etc.

          Danger is chance * badness, not just the latter.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            I think you’re right that they’re more likely to succeed than any other current social movement – history does seem to have a build in leftward drift.

            But I think you’re wrong to use the word “dangerous”. The social justice movement increasing in power will have some significant negative side effects, but “dangerous” is far too strong a word for that when you compare it to the alternatives, especially when you factor in the massive positive consequences.

            I don’t like the social justice movement one little bit, but I do want many of the same things they do, albeit for different reasons, and I think that their total success, while not as good as total success for liberal rationalists, would do far more good than harm.

            I suspect that you’re either overestimating or overvaluing the things that (I guess we both think) would be negative consequences of a rise in power for the social justice movement (e.g. increase in the amount of officially-sanctioned discrimination against and bigotry directed towards white people), and underestimating or undervaluing the things that (I at least think) would be positive consequences thereof (e.g. decrease in the amount of not-officially-sanctioned discrimination against and bigotry directed towards non-white people).

          • But I think you’re wrong to use the word “dangerous”. The social justice movement increasing in power will have some significant negative side effects, but “dangerous” is far too strong a word for that when you compare it to the alternatives, especially when you factor in the massive positive consequences.

            Social justice/intersectionalism holds disdain for color blindness because even though it shares the view of the view of the liberal left on the dubiousness of biological racism (sometimes… it’s complicated), it views race as a social hierarchy used to oppress others (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), and therefore if we try to remain blind to race what happens is we miss the racial oppression going on all around us (supposedly… some of it is hard to prove, elusive, subconsious etc).

            Is this less dangerous than neo-nazis? Yeah, no question about it… in the short term. SJ makes me and others of my ilk nervous because it recenters race in politics after an era when we finally appeared to be moving away from it (color blindness was en vogue in the 90s-2000s on the left). It’s not surprising to me that the rise of SJ preceded a return of white nationalist rhetoric on the other side. When you recenter race that is simply what happens. That is the result when the major faultlines are racial rather than economic or foreign policy based (as it seemed to be during the 2000s – the irony being that much of this stuff got momentum from Occupy Wall Street that started for economic reasons; “Isn’t this supposed to be an egalitarian movement”).

            Now how could SJ ever be as bad as the Nazis? Or better yet, why isn’t it as bad as the Nazis now? I would argue the main reason it isn’t as bad as the Nazis isn’t because of some inherent relative softness in the ideology by comparison, but because the demographics simply aren’t there. Nazis had the luxury of being mostly “Aryan” while having an ideology that centered on how bad non-Aryans were. SJ is mostly white, straight, cis etc but focuses on how bad that group is, so while that’s true, there is a limit to just how far self-flagellation can go. However, what happens when demographics change? What about when white people become a minority (you should be getting a little nervous about what I’m saying now; that’s healthy).

            Imagine what an SJ movement looks like when it’s 90% colored people with some token whites rather than the inverse. Extreme but hazy ideas like reparations and land appropriation start to solidify into real and actionable policies. These are no longer social genuflections and hail marys but things to organize towards and actually accomplish. When you paint “whiteness” as an identity of oppression, it doesn’t really matter if you add “but race not biological tho” because the end result is still that white people don’t get to cast off a social identity that is painted onto their skin. The irony of this is not lost on me.

            Does this mean that SJ will inevitably decay into black or POC nationalism? No, but we get nervous because that potential is built into the narrative of whiteness as an oppressive force. So social justice is not dangerous… at least for now.

            I suspect that you’re either overestimating or overvaluing the things that (I guess) we both think would be negative consequences of a rise in power for the social justice movement (e.g. increase in the amount of officially-sanctioned discrimination against and bigotry directed towards white people), and underestimating or undervaluing the things that (I at least think) would be positive consequences thereof (e.g. decrease in the amount of not-officially-sanctioned discrimination against and bigotry directed towards non-white people).

            This is THE disagreement I think when it comes to SJ on SSC.

            (Pathetic disclaimer: if this post seems melodramatic, it’s because I want to give you a sense of the threat a lot of us are detecting at the core of the SJ ideology)

          • albatross11 says:

            Personally, if there’s a serious danger to SJW tactics (as described by John Schilling above), I’d say it comes in two parts:

            a. The backlash/reaction to it seems likely to be really destructive. Bringing back explicit white identity politics as a major thing in US politics seems like a real possibility, and that isn’t going to end well for anyone. Trumpism is like 1% of the badness we could get with this stuff. I seriously think we could end up in a world where someone like Steve Sailer is seen as a squishy liberal on one of the two major factions making decisions about how to govern the country.

            b. SJW ideas seem to hold way more power in our society’s “idea factories”–universities, tech companies, media, publishing, the arts–than elsewhere. But our idea factories are where we’re developing the technology and policies and ideologies and mental models and tools that will shape the world in the next fifty years. I see the tendency to shut down dissenting views and suppress some ideas and even some unarguably true facts as really scary in that environment–we can easily end up with policies and technology and ideology that is born broken, because it was formed in an environment when obvious and important parts of reality were excluded from any discussion by social forces.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            @Forward Synthesis

            (Pathetic disclaimer: if this post seems melodramatic, it’s because I want to give you a sense of the threat a lot of us are detecting at the core of the SJ ideology)

            “Melodramatic” was not the first word that leapt to mind, although I admit that it technically applies…

            “Now how could SJ ever be as bad as the Nazis? Or better yet, why isn’t it as bad as the Nazis now? I would argue the main reason it isn’t as bad as the Nazis isn’t because of some inherent relative softness in the ideology by comparison, but because the demographics simply aren’t there. “

            There are plenty of valid criticisms of the social justice movement, and plenty more that I think aren’t valid but do deserve to be taken seriously. “The main reason they’re not as bad as the Nazis is because they’re outnumbered” is a long way from being in either of those categories.

            I very much hope that absurd and awful opinions like this do not start getting taken seriously on SSC.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            @albatross11

            I think I agree with you that both those things are likely to happen and that both of them will be bad, but I think that neither of them will be as bad as I think you think.

            I think the likely backlash is unlikely to gain too much traction – I’m more worried about what will happen if and when the social justice movement wins than what will happen if they lose. If it does, it might be bad, and I think that social justice activism replacing liberal individualism as the dominant left-wing ideology makes that more likely, but not massively more likely; I think it’s more likely that – as has happened in the UK – the right-wing party will ultimately be dragged to the left on social issues.

            And I think that the places where the most valuable ideas come from are quantitative and science-side, which are generally less prone (although not immune) to the worst bits of social justice activism, and more prone to produce people like Emma Pierson, whom I very much admire and would hold up as a model of someone with social justice concerns addressing them in what I think is the Right Way TM. Yes, we will go through a few generations where any research coming out of a social science department and compatible with a left-wing ideological narrative has to be treated with extreme suspicion, and that will have negative consequences, but compared with the negative consequences most other ideologies would have if they gained power I can live with it.

          • LadyJane says:

            I think that they have a far higher chance to actually have their plans implemented to a very dangerous level than other groups, like neo-Nazis, communists, conservative Christians, etc.

            Those groups have all killed people, SJWs haven’t.

            But let’s say the SJWs “win.” What would happen? People would stop being allowed to express racist and sexist views in public spaces? Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s bad in principle, but would it really make the world that much worse of a place to live in? I mean beyond the fact that people would be afraid to express their actual views (which I agree is a very bad thing in itself), is there any way in which having those particular views suppressed by social pressure/corporate policy would lead to worse outcomes for society or the individuals within it? Keep in mind, the other three groups you mentioned would suppress free expression too, and probably through outright government force. And they would suppress a lot more than just racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic views.

            Also, given that conservatives currently hold vastly more power within the U.S. than liberals or leftists or social justice advocates, I’d question your claim that the SJWs are the group most likely to win.

          • is there any way in which having those particular views suppressed by social pressure/corporate policy would lead to worse outcomes for society or the individuals within it?

            Yes. One result of having views that SJW’s consider racist and sexist suppressed would be an enforced orthodoxy according to which any difference in outcomes by race or sex must be due to unfair treatment of those with the worse outcomes—except for any case where whites or men get the worse outcomes.

            The result of that would be enforced racial and gender discrimination, up to a much higher level than now exists. That would create a lot of individual unfairness and a sizable lowering in the general welfare.

          • John Schilling says:

            But let’s say the SJWs “win.” What would happen? People would stop being allowed to express racist and sexist views in public spaces?

            “People would stop being allowed to…”, means “people will be arrested if they…”

            And some fraction of them will be killed resisting arrest, whether they actually resist or not. And even if they do actually resist, you’re a murderer if you’re the one who sent the police to arrest them for something that shouldn’t have been made a crime.
            And you’re very nearly as much of a monster for all the people you put in jail and all the ones who go into “re-education camps” when the jails are full, and “look what you made me do” won’t be a defense for any of this.

            Given the scope of the people-expressing-racist-and-sexist-views problem, for SJ definitions of “racist” and “sexist”, and the apparent lack of concern from SJWs for things like due process, I expect the number of arrests, the size of the camps, and the number of dead, won’t be small if SJWs win control of the nation’s law enforcement and judicial apparatus.

          • LadyJane says:

            @John Schilling: Germany has laws against hate speech, and while I’m very strongly opposed to them, and would fight tooth and nail to prevent similar laws from being implemented here, I don’t exactly consider Germany some kind of oppressive nightmare dystopia for that alone. I certainly don’t see vast numbers of German citizens being killed by police or sent to re-education camps for being politically incorrect.

            And I’m not even sure that making controversial speech illegal is actually a goal of American SJWs. They typically focus on prohibiting controversial speech within certain public spaces (e.g. workplaces, universities, social media platforms), I haven’t heard any of them argue that there should be actual laws against it. I’m sure you can find some examples on the internet if you look hard enough, but are there enough SJWs who support that for it to be a credible threat if they “won” the Culture War? (Unless “winning” means “the most extreme adherents of the ideology get literally everything they want,” in which case this becomes a rather pointless thought exercise since every ideological movement would end up being horrible.)

          • albatross11 says:

            LadyJane:

            A consequence of SJWs winning is that there are whole sets of facts which are moved out of the public sphere, including academic fields and research. In a world where the SJWs have really won, I don’t see there still being a lot of people doing evolutionary psychology or psychometrics research, or research into a genetic basis for any kind of behavioral differences. Those are fields and research topics that tend to get protests and outrage from SJWs now.

            That seems almost guaranteed to make future decisionmakers do a worse job (they will be deprived of relevant facts and models of the world), and to make every area of science that touches those facts less good at learning about the world. I think you can see some of this effect on existing academic work–lots of researchers know that going into some areas of research is a political minefield, so they steer clear, and the result is that we learn less about the world in those areas.

          • @Tatterdemalion

            There are plenty of valid criticisms of the social justice movement, and plenty more that I think aren’t valid but do deserve to be taken seriously. “The main reason they’re not as bad as the Nazis is because they’re outnumbered” is a long way from being in either of those categories.

            Do you dispute that SJ enables POC ethno-nationalism? Unless you are just disagreeing on what SJ is (I often prefer to use the term intersectionality, as there is an agreed definition with an established literature). The right of the oppressed to hate their oppressor, post-colonial theory, cultural appropriation, progressive stack, racism is prejudice plus power etc etc etc are all component ideas aimed in one direction at one homogenized target. Try one of those browser filters that replaces “White” with “Jewish” some time and see if you can see the same thing I see.

            No, this is not because intersectionality is an especially evil idea on its face (if it was merely limited to the banal observation that people can be hindered in multiple ways as some think here I wouldn’t care a jot), but because in crafting a matrix of intersecting oppressions (the kyriarchy) it singles out an enemy responsible for them; the cis white het patriarch.

            Simply for demographic reasons, most of those within intersectional social justice circles partly fulfill some of that criteria themselves; most of them are white for a start. This alone limits the potential damage and gives a false impression of what’s going on. White activists are willing to hate themselves, and willing to empty their pockets, but they aren’t willing to slit their own throats.

            But do they spew hatred against white people as a group? They aren’t ranting that they should all be dispossessed and killed, sure, but in every relevent issue “whiteness” and often “maleness” (at least there’s no demographic scissors for that one) are centered in a way that seems odd unless you swap out the term white for something else. There seems to be a glee not at the idea of some neutral powerful elite losing their power, but at the idea of whites specifically losing power in politics, in media, in everything. You know this is what the AR then uses to craft its white identity fightback.

            So, do they attack that identity? Yes, they absolutely do.

            You might counter that most of these articles are focused on things white people and white men have done (such as Kavanaugh), or focused on white responsibility for past racism, but the important thing is that the target is the white man as a group. Even if it’s contested that the goal is equality, the overall method seems suspicious. Racism is being used to fight racism. If whites are permanently tarred as the most racist race, that’s still racism.

            Sure, they’ll make disclaimers like this:
            “This may sound like hyperbole. But no one is saying that all white men are inherently violent or that they are the biggest threat to America. To make sweeping generalizations about any group is to make the same mistake that racists and anti-Semites make.”

            …but then the rest of the article will be denouncements of the “angry white man” backed up by statistics on how enthralled by Trumpism and racist projection he is.

            If the Anglosphere is bathed in this stuff, and if it’s taught in Universities, then every new generation grows up with this in the background, and since every new generation is less and less white there’s no inbuilt limitation of self-sacrifice. We don’t know where it could end up, but we can look over at the politics of South Africa and get a few ideas. What does it then look like when the ideology is not so white, when it is has given birth to something else? What happens when a hated group is outnumbered?

            You seem to be interpreting this as if I’m saying that all SJ advocates are secretly plotting and waiting to “outnumber” their enemies, but this ain’t it. In reality, I think they’re oblivious to what they’re crafting. The end result may not be as bad as the Nazis – it may only be as bad as South Africa – but you are not interrogating why there should be any specific limitations here. We don’t even know how bad the South Africa situation will really get, but we know that the potential for extreme violence against the minority is there.

            I guess you just don’t agree that white people are singaled out by intersectionality as a target. If you are able to observe the same hatred I can see, then I don’t see how you can discount the usual historical result of such hatred, unless you are just running on some sort of absurdity heuristic of “Well the SJ people I know are too nice. They aren’t stormtrooper material”, but then you’re missing the point entirely.

            Intersectional Social Justice is not Nazism. It couldn’t be further from it. Its goal lies in justice and equality, not domination and survival.

            However, at its core it contains the demonization of an enemy, and as that enemy dwindles in power, I don’t see why it is unlikely (I see it as historically natural) for the methods used to counter that enemy to become more decisive. What has been justified today already seems more severe than what was justified yesterday, so why shouldn’t we be guarded against this continuing?

            That’s the answer as to why a bunch of mostly white males who are mostly well off and occupying positions in programming and other careers may have a few concerns and fears about what they think social justice is pointing towards.

            I very much hope that absurd and awful opinions like this do not start getting taken seriously on SSC.

            I would very much prefer that you would justify why you think it’s absurd and awful.

            Just so we’re on the level, you don’t think I’m saying something like “SJ is like Nazis so we need to treat them like we’d treat Nazis” do you?

            Because that would be absurd and awful.

            @LadyJane

            People would stop being allowed to express racist and sexist views in public spaces?

            Remember how racism is defined as “prejudice plus power” under social justice rules. This is not determined neutrally. A white guy says something racist, he gets fired. Sarah Jeong, an asian woman says something racist, she gets hired.

            I don’t trust that our definition of racism is shared.

          • What’s happening on social media, in some specific tech sectors geographically, and on some college campuses

            How many college campuses?

            That’s a real question. The universities I’m familiar with have cultures ranging from soft left to hard left, but that’s a very small and relatively elite subset of all universities. If someone goes to a a big state university, will he be propagandized with control left ideas and feel social pressure to agree with them or will most students be unaffected by all that?

          • Aapje says:

            @LadyJane

            Micah Xavier Johnson killed five and was motivated by BLM.

            @Tatterdemalion

            We already see men failing more and more, like at academia, yet the narrative remains the same: men oppressing women.

            When men do worse, they get blamed individually for being losers or collectively for having traits that don’t fit in a better world. Yet when women do poorly, it is seen as societies problem to fix.

            It’s not a given that men will keep trying in the face of impossible demands. In Russia they mostly have given up and many just started drinking a lot (not that the cause in Russia is the same, it was communism there).

            Aside from that, the goal of a multicultural society without borders and a strong safety net, where people are extremely different yet work together in harmony seems like a hopeless fantasy. The very nationalism that allows people to work and live together on a larger scale is being demolished. This can potentially turn society back to a state before the Peace of Westphalia. War between groups convinced that their specific (sub) ideology is not just right, but that it is absolutely necessary for others to share that ideology.

        • Prussian says:

          What I find interesting about these threads is that I say “Western lefties do X” and then half of my respondents are shocked, shocked that I should say such things, and the other half proceed to prove me right

          Case in point, LadyJane

          But let’s say the SJWs “win.” What would happen? People would stop being allowed to express racist and sexist views in public spaces?

          Oh, I don’t know. Maybe, or maybe:
          – Mobs would attack children without getting all the facts
          – Mobs would attack the wrong children due to mistaken identity
          – Decade long rape and abuse would be covered up
          – War crimes and similar would be excused
          – Victims of the worst oppression would be lied about and vilified
          – Former slaves would have their stories ignored and whisked away
          – Free inquiry would be stifled

          …oh, wait. That’s now. So goodness knows how bad it would get if the SJWs “won”.

          • LadyJane says:

            Regarding hate mobs, doxxing, etc., the other side of the Culture War is just as guilty, they both use the same awful tactics.

            Regarding the rest of the list, I’m not even sure where you’re getting this stuff from. Covering up rape? War crimes? Slavery? I’m not sure how any of these things are related to SJWs or the Culture War in general, it seems like you’re grasping at straws here.

          • Prussian says:

            Well, if you want to know about rape, google “grooming gangs”. If you want to know about war crimes, go look up “No one left to lie to”. If you want to know about slavery, speak to any of the Yazidi refugees I have, who say their persecution in the West is being ignored and their voices go unheard.

          • LadyJane says:

            The logic for most of these seems to be “someone associated with SJWs did [bad thing] and tried to defend it/cover it up, thus SJWs endorse [bad thing].” Or simply “SJWs don’t criticize [terrible thing] even though they criticize [much less terrible thing closer to them], thus SJWs endorse [terrible thing].” Needless to say, I don’t find those sorts of arguments to be very convincing; it’s hard to imagine a way in which the Yazidi would end up being even worse off if the SJWs won the American Culture War (or better off if SJWs lost, for that matter).

          • Prussian says:

            Actually, the argument is that “SJWs lie about, and silence, those speaking up about the terrible thing”. Important difference. Who the heck do you think is silencing Yazidi voices? Why do you think that Germany’s small Yazidi community is joining the AfD?

            ..oh, what’s the use?

          • LadyJane says:

            Well, I’m speaking from my experience with social justice advocates here in the United States. Occasionally I’ve seen someone mention the Yazidi genocide (and if they do, they always harshly condemn it, in no uncertain terms), but mostly people just aren’t aware it’s happening at all.

            I’m not familiar enough with the nuances of Germany’s politics to make any claims about what’s going on there.

          • People would stop being allowed to express racist and sexist views in public spaces?

            Do you mean “views that actually are racist, express hate or contempt for other people on account of their race, and similarly for sexist” or do you mean “views that SJW’s call racist and sexist”?

            Those are very different things. The way you put it makes it sound as though you agree with SJW’s about what fits those terms–agree, for instance, that anyone who believes the mean IQ of Afro-Americans is lower than that of Americans of European origin is a racist.

          • LadyJane says:

            The way you put it makes it sound as though you agree with SJW’s about what fits those terms–agree, for instance, that anyone who believes the mean IQ of Afro-Americans is lower than that of Americans of European origin is a racist.

            That’s simply a fact, and I don’t think anyone disputes that; it’s the cause of that discrepancy that’s up for debate. Theories range from “the tests are culturally biased” and “IQ doesn’t mean anything” to “it’s caused by environmental factors associated with poverty” to “it’s purely genetic and wholly immutable” to “African-Americans aren’t getting as much sunlight as they need.”

            At any rate, as long as someone doesn’t believe that different racial groups should be treated differently as a result of IQ differences, or using them to argue that an individual from a given race is less intelligent, or blaming differences in life outcomes solely on IQ differences while ignoring the many race-related social, cultural, and economic factors that also affect life outcomes, then I wouldn’t personally consider them to be racist. That said, many of the people I’ve seen talking about genetic racial differences are people who also support major policy changes (everything from reducing immigration all the way up to forming all-White ethno-states) on the basis of those differences.

          • albatross11 says:

            Yeah, covering up (or just ignoring) war crimes is a centrist thing in US politics, done by the Bush and Obama administrations and mostly supported by top US media outlets[1]. There are many sins you could lay upon American SJWs, but that ain’t one of them.

            [1] This doesn’t apply to disposable enlisted people from West Virginia–fine if *they* go to prison for mistreating captives. But the whole ruling class seemed to agree that nobody *important* should face any consequences for such things.

          • albatross11 says:

            LadyJane:

            If nobody disputes the black/white IQ difference, can you point to any article in (say) the Washington Post or New York Times that points that out in a clear factual way[1]? Particularly in any news story about the black/white performance gap in education, or race and magnet school placements, or racial disparities in academic fields or in different occupations, or affirmative action in education? (Those are all places where it’s directly relevant.).

            My own experience is that pointing out either the IQ difference or the racial differences in crime rates in a forum full of smart, well-educated liberals got a massive amount of pushback and opposition and claims that I was wrong/lying/evil. That’s true even though both those differences are really well-known in the relevant fields, are quite robust (they’ve stuck around for decades through many different ways of measuring things), etc.

            This reminds me a bit of the Snowden revelations. One common thread of responses to them was to say “Yeah, of course, everyone knew that sort of thing was going on, we just didn’t talk about it.” Another common thread was to say “Holy shit, we had no idea that stuff was going on, especially not at this scale!” I think there’s a lot that people “in the know” understand pretty well, but also know that it’s not acceptable to say in public. And so the uninitiated don’t learn those things. Perhaps the top education reporter for NPR knows that the IQ gap pretty-much explains the performance gap, but he also knows it’s as much as his job is worth to say so on the air, so his listeners get a distorted view of the world. And that is exactly what’s wrong with suppressing some facts and ideas.

            [1] That Vox article on Charles Murray actually *did* point it out, but that’s quite rare in mainstream media sources.

          • then I wouldn’t personally consider them to be racist.

            But when you wrote, about the consequence of an SJC victory:

            People would stop being allowed to express racist and sexist views in public spaces?

            Which meaning of “racist” were you using?

            What you consider racist is irrelevant to the consequences of an SJW victory—the relevant category is what they consider racist. Which does include anyone who thinks racial IQ differences are in part genetic and even anyone willing to consider that they might be—consider the consequences of the president of Harvard saying, in an academic presentation, that one possible explanation for the shortage of women in some academic fields was a different distribution of the relevant abilities.

    • Reasoner says:

      Sorry to hear you got banned from the Discord #CultureWar channel. I’ve seen your comments before and you seem reasonable and non-banworthy to me even when we disagree. I hope you stick around.

  41. hnau says:

    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.

    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.

  42. e_w says:

    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.

  43. Radu Floricica says:

    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.

    • reasoned argumentation says:

      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.

      • gloriousg999 says:

        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.

        • reasoned argumentation says:

          I’m referring to this article – where Scott complains that he was unjustly accused of being right wing or being associated with a right wing thread.

          Presumably if he really was associated with a right wing thread then he’d deserve the treatment being dished out.

          • Sebastian_H says:

            I’m not sure that’s his argument. He’s argued elsewhere that this type of mob action won’t restrict itself to Nazis so we shouldn’t do it at all. If you want to take offense you can maybe reach for the idea that he might think it is morally right but socially still so unsupportive of civilizational technology that we shouldn’t do it. But that would still be an argument against doing it to anybody.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Lack of charity.

          • martinw says:

            It is perfectly possible to believe simultaneously that a) behavior X should be allowed in a free society and the people who engage in it do not deserve to be harrassed, doxxed, banned from Reddit etc, and b) I personally do not do X, I believe that people who do X are generally not very nice people, and I do not appreciate being falsely accused of doing X.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            I’m not sure that’s his argument. He’s argued elsewhere that this type of mob action won’t restrict itself to Nazis so we shouldn’t do it at all.

            I am sure that that’s his stance – not that he’d come out and openly say it.

            Post 1: “Be nice at least until you can coordinate meanness”
            Post 2: “You are still crying wolf”

            2. Total minority population of US citizens will increase throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 99%]

            IOW, the left / his side should just be kinda quiet until they have overwhelming force then start doing all the stuff they’re doing now – only in a coordinated way (and not to Scott, who’s on their side, of course).

      • Scott Alexander says:

        Banned indefinitely. This would not have been banned if framed as a question or speculation, but as written clearly violates the policy. This would not have been banned if RA did not already have a history of previous reports and warnings.

        In case anyone else is unclear on this, no, I don’t want hate mobs to succeed. One can be against capital punishment and also consider it worth mentioning your innocence before you are hanged.

    • MawBTS says:

      I think Vox Day is better viewed as kind of a human zoo exhibit than someone to emulate. He’s an interesting guy and I agree with some of his views, but he often exceeds the bounds of moderation.

      For example, his plan for dealing with [probably wordfiltered term] is to proactively get them fired first, which I don’t think Scott would agree with.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        He’s also a theist that argues atheists. I tried reading some of it, mostly out of admiration for his sci-fi (which did I mention is great?). Wasn’t impressed. So he isn’t perfect, but he did write a guide for this specific subject (resisting hate mobs). Granted, his method is to embrace a conservative position, so it’s unlikely Scott would be able to use much of it, but still, it’s very much on topic.

        Hm. Writing this comment I realized we lost a great local politician (Romania) a year ago to the very same conflict – he tried to keep a conservative-progressive balance, and one side ate him alive. So yeah – I’m going to go ahead and say that any attempt to solve this problem is a step forward, even if it comes from Satan himself.

  44. eelcohoogendoorn says:

    No sympathy, but some compliments then at least, for giving it your best.

    I honestly wonder how many people are in it to ‘bring you down by intentionally twisting your words’, or ‘for the lulz’. I think the reality is even more disturbing; they are acting in good faith, in a genuine belief that they are protecting the children from evil predators; nazi, sexual, or otherwise.

    Of course that makes no logical sense; but all it takes is an innate drive for do-goodness, and a finite ability to make sense of things, to lead to the observed outcome. How many of the people retweeting your judge, jury or executioners have actually read anything you have written? And would that stop them from feeling anything but a warm happy glow of do-goodness for the heroic effort of retweeting?

    It sure is a tough question, which is most annoying phenomenon; our finite reasoning ability, or white knights with no skin in the game trying to impress their onlookers. Its a trick question though, and the real answer is ‘where both meet’.

    • Reasoner says:

      Arguably the root of the problem is our short attention spans and unwillingness to seek the best arguments against our views. I think this goes for everyone.

      • eelcohoogendoorn says:

        Yup. Or maybe I am misinformed, and there is actually a large swath of people who think ‘boy I really hate this Scott guy; lets go twist his words, or tar him by association so I can bring him down’.

        There might be a few of those, but it seems unlikely there is a critical mass of them. These malicious people may be leading the charge of a horde of retweeters; but I think it is just as plausible the mob can take a direction of its own, without any such directed malicious leadership.

        There may not be any malice in the traditional sense at work here, just ignorance. Though admittedly thats a thin line which I wouldn’t really know where to draw either. But moral theory aside, I do think the distinction is important in practice. I doubt there is a head to this snake that you could strike at and be done with it. The problem is more pernicious than that I fear.

        Scotts post does allude to a significant ‘malicious’ component as I loosely tried to define it above, but there are not enough specifics to tell if he really means malicious in the way I intend it, or if this is more the natural urge to personify or project intentions on the forces acting against us speaking.

        • albatross11 says:

          It does not take very many obsessive crazies trying to ruin your life to make things pretty damned unpleasant for you. Nor does it take very many low-information followers f–king with you for the lulz to make things pretty damned unpleasant.

          • eelcohoogendoorn says:

            Does it not take too many? I cant speak from experience but I dont know to what extent that is true. Would a petition to your employer to get somebody fired gain much traction if it was done by an individual without a mob of retweeters, and sensation-hunrgy jouralists vulturing over that brewing whipped up controversy? I kind of doubt it.

        • Reasoner says:

          Much has been written about the internet’s tendency to destroy one’s attention span. I know it has hurt mine. My attention span is especially short when I’m reading something that I disagree with or that makes me uncomfortable. Consider also that Scott is not exactly concise in his writing.

  45. Rachael says:

    This is really sad and horrible – both that this kind of outrage mob culture exists, and that it can turn on someone as insightful, wise and charitable as Scott. Scott in particular, and the SSC community in general, is exactly what we need more of, to try to defuse the culture war.

    Scott, is there anything those of us who support you can do, practically, to help?

    • whereamigoing says:

      I don’t know about Scott specifically, but you can support Reporters Without Borders or the Electronic Frontier Foundation or maybe some other non-profit (I’d like to see effective altruists evaluate these sorts of non-profits).

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Honest question: how does the EFF help with this?

        • whereamigoing says:

          In the short term it probably doesn’t help, but in the medium-to-long-term, authoritarian sentiments become dangerous if combined with ubiquitous corporate or government surveillance. So far authoritarianism has always been temporary, but without privacy it could become permanent.

      • eh says:

        Is there a version of FIRE that has more history protecting the left as well as the right?

        • educationrealist says:

          FIRE protects every side equally–the founder, Greg Lukianoff, is a noted liberal. But FIRE only focuses on college education.

          • whereamigoing says:

            I guess that would explain the perception of defending the right — college administrators lean left, so more issues are going to come up with the authoritarian left than the authoritarian right.

          • Aapje says:

            @whereamigoing

            That the perpetrators are on the left doesn’t mean that the victims are. There are more left-wing targets as well…

  46. AlesZiegler says:

    I suppose core problem is that many people simply do not like to be exposed to political opinions more than marginally different from their own. Worldwide web has made such exposure much more common and harder to avoid, but paradoxically also has made it way easier to coordinate mobs aimed at shutting down conversations or at least making revenge upon those who discomfort people by exposing them to different worldviews.

    So, how to solve or reduce this problem? It is very clear that pleading for mercy or at least civility in the face of bloodthirsty mob is not going to work.

    I noticed that in many cases of this coming from the US, job insecurity is a major part of the problem. Probably if US adopted european style legal protections against firing employees, people would be less freaked out about voicing their unpopular opinions. Of course, those protections have well known costs…

    Otherwise I am regrettably at a loss about what should be done beyond slow, grinding work of building tolerant communities with high levels of immunity to outrage culture.

    • brad says:

      Why is it a problem that people do not like to be exposed to political opinions different than their own? Why do you feel entitled to expose them despite their preferences to not be so exposed? Is it any surprise that people get angry when you deliberately violate their preferences?

      • martinw says:

        It’s not a problem if people just want to have their own “safe spaces” where only opinions they agree with are allowed. E.g. /r/latestagecapitalism has a banner stating clearly that it is an explicitly leftist space and that anti-socialism or pro-capitalism posters will be banned, while /r/the_donald makes no secret of the fact that they will not allow anti-Trump posts.

        I does become a problem when people will not tolerate opposing viewpoints to be expressed, or neutrally-moderated conversations to take place, anywhere, even in spaces where they will not be exposed to those opinions unless they voluntarily choose to go there.

        • brad says:

          I think this is a pretty reasonable position to take. However I don’t think it is universal on your side of the larger debate. I think there’s a significant number of people that at least implicitly hold to a right to audience view of free speech. That’s not to say you are responsible for other peoples’ views, but I’d hope that you’d join me in pushing back against the parts where we agree just as you’d push back against me where we disagree.

          • martinw says:

            on your side of the larger debate

            Sorry, what “side” would that be, and which larger debate?

            I mean, I’m aware of the whole culture war thing, of course. But I hope things haven’t gone so far yet that expressing the opinion “people should be allowed to have open conversations on controversial topics if they so choose, and to create on-line spaces where discussing such topics is allowed” is now a marker of alt-right extremism which means that I must be anti-abortion, pro-border-wall and eat my steaks well-done with ketchup?

            (BTW, I’m from Europe, in case that matters.)

            but I’d hope that you’d join me in pushing back against the parts where we agree just as you’d push back against me where we disagree

            Uh, maybe? That sounds a bit cryptic and I’m honestly not sure what you mean exactly.

            If you mean that whenever I see somebody express an opinion which I disagree with in an online discussion, I have a duty to jump into the fray and add my voice to the choir of people arguing against them, then my answer is no. I’ll join a discussion if I feel that I have something to contribute which hasn’t already been said just as well by others, and if I happen to have the time and the inclination at that moment.

            And sometimes I may add something to one side of a debate even if, on the broader topic, I happen to agree with the other side. E.g. Alice says C++ is better than Java because C++ is strongly typed and Java is not; Bob disagrees and says Java is better, I happen to prefer C++ myself but I add a post saying “sorry Alice but Bob is right, Java does have strong typing”. And then in my next post I say something in favor of C++ and now both sides dislike me.

            You can see how that may not always go over well in discussions about more contentious topics, which is why I mostly stay out of those except to comment on the meta-level about how freedom of speech and respecting diversity of opinion are good things. Unfortunately, that now appears to be becoming a controversial opinion in itself.. 🙁

          • brad says:

            Sorry, what “side” would that be, and which larger debate?

            The debate about what freedom of speech and respecting diversity of opinions means.

          • Deiseach says:

            a marker of alt-right extremism which means that I must be anti-abortion, pro-border-wall and eat my steaks well-done with ketchup?

            Let me take the quick “am I an alt-right extremist” quiz!

            – Anti-abortion? Yes!
            – Pro-border wall? No strong opinions one way or the other, save that as a massive public building project paid for out of the public purse it might generate some jobs and there could be worse wastes of money
            – Steak well-done and with ketchup? Indeed I do and I do!

            Well, sugarlumps. What do I do now? 🙂

          • martinw says:

            OK, in that case let me just state for the record that I do not believe in a “right to an audience”, nor do I believe that every online community must allow unfettered discussion of every possible topic. All I want is for online communities to be allowed to make that choice for themselves, without becoming the target of a harassment campaign.

            One reason why I did not bother to spell that out earlier is that, while you may think that a significant number of people on “my side” believe those things, I have not seen a single person in this thread actually state anything even vaguely like that.

            (edit: this was a response to brad, not to Deiseach who snuck in while I was typing)

          • martinw says:

            Deiseach: ah, but do you put sugar in your porridge? 😉

          • albatross11 says:

            brad:

            Can you point any of those people out?

          • brad says:

            @albatross11
            I don’t understand the puzzlement. This particular discussion is centered around a situation where external forces shut down a private space for having rules that were too permissive. I agree that has not much to do with right to an audience.

            But the larger “free speech norms” debate which you and I have been participating in for years clearly includes the idea that other private spaces have an obligation to host speech that they’d prefer not to. Private college campuses and twitter to name two examples. What is that if not “right to an audience”?

            I mean let’s be honest here, are the 12 members of the Young Republicans of Dartmouth so fascinated by Ben Shapiro’s brilliance that they just *have* to see him in person, or do they invite him on campus in order to shove him in the face of their classmates? I think it is somewhat disingenuous to pretend that “free speech norms” is entirely about making it possible for like minded individuals that deliberately seek out conversation with each other to communicate. You could do that with a listserve.

            That’s even before getting into the crazy notion that it is morally impermissible to alter your interactions with someone based on the things he’s said (at least so long as they can be characterized as “ideas).

          • hilitai says:

            or do they invite him in campus in order to shove him in the face of their classmates?

            So much for “charity”, eh?

          • brad says:

            @hilitai
            Funny, I must have missed all your posts in this comment section chiding people for lack of charity towards “the left” and “SJW”s. Since you are so interested in charity as a meta principle and all.

            This kind of netiquette reminder as an ideologically selective bludgeon is never convincing and I’d surmise is not intended to be.

            I didn’t recognize your handle when this thread started, but I’ll probably avoid it from here out.

          • martinw says:

            brad:

            When a group of students at a university want to host a certain speaker, typically all they ask of the university is to make a room available for the speech to take place in. The students may then do some promotional activities to raise interest about the speech, e.g. they may hang up posters and tell their friends about it. But the university does not typically force people to attend such speeches.

            So when you talk about shoving the speaker in the face of one’s classmates, what you mean is that students will be aware that the speaker is coming, will be walking past some posters on the walls, and will have an opportunity to attend the speech if they choose to. But they are not forced to attend the speech or to listen to it. They are just aware that it happens, just like they will be aware of lots of other activities happening on and around campus which they may or may not choose to participate in.

            That’s a rather strange and unreasonable definition of “demanding an audience”. That’s like saying that because I am not interested in soccer, I should be able to demand that no soccer games are ever broadcast on television, to spare me the anguish of being aware that soccer games exist and that other people sometimes watch them.

          • brad says:

            Why should a private university be ethically obliged to host speech it doesn’t wish to host? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to make that choice for themselves?

          • whereamigoing says:

            @brad

            It’s arguable whether a college campus is a private space.

          • martinw says:

            Actually, I do believe that a private university should be allowed to make that choice for itself. I would not demand or expect Oral Roberts Christian University to host pro-evolution or pro-choice speakers, for example. It’s just that I will think less of them if they engage in such censorship, and I would be sad if there was not a single university anywhere in my country which did not engage in censorship.

            So in the context of the current thread, I guess Scott represents the university, you and I and all the other posters are students, and, uh, Reddit represents the country which the universities are located in.

            The country has not, so far, cracked down on universities allowing students from all walks of life to host speeches they’re interested in. So far so good. Likewise, the university is very pro-free-speech and allows anybody to host speeches on any topic, as long as they do it in one particular room which uninterested students don’t need to go into.

            If you are uninterested in a particular speech and decide to skip it: great. If you are upset that the university doesn’t restrict people to arguing only for ideas which you already agree with, and you decide to move to a different university which won’t challenge your biases: not so great, but meh, your loss.

            If you try to prevent other students from inviting speakers or attending speeches where you expect they’ll hear arguments you disagree with, by e.g. blocking the door of the speech room together with a bunch of like-minded friends: that’s bad.

            If you go to all the high school students you know and try to discourage them from attending that university by telling them that it’s a hotbed of racist and transphobic ideas, when in reality the university administration and the majority of the students are overwhelmingly anti-racist and trans-friendly, and the subversive ideas are strictly limited to that one room which you don’t need to go into: that’s also bad.

            If you try to cause trouble for the university staff by contacting their friends and family and telling them that they personally are racists and transphobes: that’s really really really bad and you are an evil person.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Why should a private university be ethically obliged to host speech it doesn’t wish to host? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to make that choice for themselves?

            Well, for one thing, it’s not usually “the university” making the decision, but an angry group of protesters exercising a heckler’s veto.

            For another, most of these universities portray themselves as bastions of free enquiry, not servants of the intersectional left. If they did openly say that they were servants of the intersectional left, I don’t think it would be very problematic for them to ban speakers who disagree with the intersectional left. However, doing one thing (serving the left) whilst claiming to do another (supporting free enquiry) is dishonest.

            For a third thing, I can’t help but notice that private institutions are in fact obliged to do all sorts of things they disagree with, if they disagree with them from a conservative/traditionalist perspective. Hence, for example, cake makers getting ordered by the courts to cater for gay weddings. Personally I’d rather have a norm whereby no private institution is forced to do things it doesn’t wish to do, but since the left is very much opposed to such a norm in other contexts, I see no reason not to hold them to it just because it happens to be the left’s ox getting gored in this situation.

          • LHN says:

            Most legal controversies about speech codes at universities focus on public universities which are bound by the First Amendment. FIRE and the like do chide private universities where their stated policies commit them to free speech principles that they don’t live up to in practice.

            In some cases, those policies may be codified in contracts or policy documents that create binding obligations to faculty re academic freedom, or that students relied on as part of what they were exchanging tuition dollars for. But I’m not sure to what extent that’s been litigated, and it would be a purely contractual matter rather than a constitutional one.

            (There also might in principle be obligations that came with accepting government funds, but only I believe if that was part of the conditions of the funding. I don’t know if there are any such strings.)

          • Why should a private university be ethically obliged to host speech it doesn’t wish to host?

            They are not. But they are ethically obliged not to claim to be open to all views and then only permit speakers whose views they approve of.

            Can you point at anything in Dartmouth’s public information, anything that would be available to an applicants, saying that Dartmouth only permits speakers with views its administration considers politically acceptable, or anything similar?

            A quick google turns up, on their page:

            Many cultures, one community. At Dartmouth, differences are embraced and ideas are challenged. Our diverse community of students, faculty, and staff come together to share perspectives, learn, and grow.

            I have no objection to an explicitly Christian college that tells students that regular attendance at Chapel is required and that speakers critical of Christianity will not be hosted, although I might be reluctant to attend such a school or send my children to it. Similarly for a Muslim or Atheist or socialist or libertarian equivalent, although the last seems unlikely.

            But that isn’t how Dartmouth presents itself.

            As it happens, about sixty years ago I was a counselor in training at a YMCA summer camp. I was told that I should not make arguments against the existence of God. I probably resented that, but I don’t think my rights were being violated.

          • brad says:

            @whereamigoing

            It’s arguable whether a college campus is a private space.

            I disagree for private colleges. If you want to end the student loan system I’ll be right there with you. But it’s existence doesn’t transmogrify private into public.

            @martinw

            It’s just that I will think less of them if they engage in such censorship,

            Do think less of Scott for his censorship – https://slatestarcodex.com/comments/
            ?

            If you try to prevent other students

            If you go to all the high school students

            If you try to cause trouble for the university staff

            Agree with all of these.

            @The original Mr. X

            servants of the intersectional left … but since the left is very much opposed

            Thanks for stopping by.

            @LHN
            I’m reflecting on the debate this community has been having about “free speech norms” not lawsuits. Lawsuits are obviously going to be constrained by the state of the law.

            As for this:

            FIRE and the like do chide private universities where their stated policies commit them to free speech principles that they don’t live up to in practice.

            I’ll ask you the same thing I asked martinw. Do you chide Scott and the subreddit moderators for not living up their stated commitments to free speech principles? As I’ve made the point elsewhere in this thread I think you and others are reifying your aesthetic preferences for certain types of discussion as “free speech” and defining out of existence other types of discussions.

          • martinw says:

            No, I don’t begrudge Scott his choices in what kinds of discussions he wants to have on his blog. His house, his rules, I can accept them or go somewhere else. As I said above already, I do not believe that every on-line space needs to be a free-for-all.

            To stick to the university metaphor, this is like a maths professor saying “look students, I think it’s great if you want to talk about whether pre-op transsexuals should be able to compete in gender-segregated sports, but right now we’re here to discuss Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.”

            I would think less of Scott if he was trying to prevent people from having open discussions in places which have nothing to do with SSC.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Thanks for stopping by.

            If you have any evidence suggesting that a significant percentage of those usually considered on “the left” have expressed opposition to things like forcing bakers to cater for gay weddings, by all means share it. That’s a genuine request, by the way — I’d love to find evidence that the culture war isn’t as polarising and all-encompassing as I’d thought.

          • albatross11 says:

            brad:

            a. As I’ve said before, private universities have every right to decide not to host speakers with whom they disagree. (I think public universities are in a somewhat different position w.r.t. restricting political speech on campus, but I’ll admit I don’t understand the law very well.)

            b. Similarly, media outlets have every right to decide whom they want writing for them, including not hiring writers whose political or social views offend them.

            c. Similarly, blogs and other online fora have every right to decide whom they will allow to speak on their platforms, and what may be said, again including restrictions on political, social, religious, gender, or other issues.

            d. There is a large and visible political and social movement which is actively pushing for a norm that people with the wrong political views should be so excluded from campuses, media organizations, and online services. They make very public arguments for this position, and in fact often include people who argue against it in their list of bad people whose views should not be heard.

            e. That movement also is actively and visibly trying to narrow the range of acceptable views–your example of pretty standard Republican Ben Shapiro is a good one there.

            f. If it’s okay for that movement to campaign for a norm of more exclusion, it’s got to also be okay for me to campaign for a norm of less exclusion and more openness. I’ve made a lot of arguments here about exactly why I believe the norm of excluding ever more ideas from campus, or from intellectual publications, or online services, is bad for our society.

            g. None of this has anything at all to do with thinking anyone has a right to an audience. It’s saying that people who are interested in understanding the world and making the world a better place should be open to more ideas, not fewer, because that will help them with those goals, and will also make our society work better. In exactly the same way that I’d tell someone teaching biology at Liberty University that he’d do a better job teaching his kids if he allowed outside speakers who didn’t accept intellegent design as a theory and wanted to explain why, I’ll tell someone teaching sociology at Middlebury that he’d do a better job teaching his kids if he allowed outside speakers who didn’t accept critical race theory and wanted to explain why.

            The way this looks to me, honestly, is that no-platforming is a pretty naked display of power, with some justifying ideology glued on at the end. Being able to keep Ben Shapiro or Charles Murray from speaking on campus is about demonstrating that your side holds the power to decide who’s allowed to speak. I also think that if this somehow flipped, and the Campus Crusade for Christ, College Republicans, and ROTC kids managed to exclude liberal speakers from campus by threatening a riot, a large fraction of people expressing opinions on the rightness of this technique would swap sides. (But given the ideological slant among faculty and college administrators, such a threat would simply not be workable–*those* kids would probably find themselves in serious trouble for rioting and chasing away a speaker.).

            ETA: The movement I described in (d) has, among at least some of its fringe elements, adopted the tactics that were described in Scott’s OP. Those tactics are destructive independent of the goal they’re intended to accomplish, but I also believe the goal they’re intended to accomplish (to shut down an ongoing forum whose conversation the activists found offensive or distasteful because of the range of allowed opinions) is itself destructive. Accomplishing that goal makes the world a worse place, and makes our society work less well. And again, trying to shut down discussions you don’t have to take part of or hear, because you think the opinions expressed offensive, has *nothing at all* to do with claiming the right to an audience.

          • brad says:

            @albatross11
            I don’t (didn’t?) think that you (and you all) thought it was okay to campaign for a norm of more exclusion. I think that’s the meta level question here: is this a question on which reasonable people can disagree?

            As for the actual object level question, I acknowledge you (but not so much you all) have extensively elaborated your views and I think some of those conversations were quite interesting and valuable to me (along with our affirmative action discussions when I’ve had the equanimity for it). I appreciated the engagement. But for reasons I wrote at the time, and which remain true, I am unconvinced. I acknowledge that the benefits you claim do exist, but I disagree as to their importance as well the magnitude of the costs.

            I don’t mind people disagreeing with me. I wouldn’t be here if I did. What annoys and frustrates me are posts that implicitly or explicitly say that my position either doesn’t exist or is so totally unreasonable it can’t possibly be held in good faith.

            As for the last part, and getting back to the purported right to be heard, I don’t see what’s so wrong with the naked display of power from a private group. No one goes into a church and complains that they aren’t giving equal time to atheists. I don’t buy the demands for a plain statement rule either. I am genuinely sorry that there are people that can’t understand subtext. I wish we could cure that disability. But it’s a fundamental and useful part of human societies and I won’t give it up just because it, unfortunately, hurts some people with disabilities. (FWIW I feel the same way about physical disabilities. I strongly oppose the idea that we should redirect extremely limited funds for desperately needed subway maintenance and expansion to the enormously expensive task of making hundreds of subway stations accessible.)

            Postscript:

            (I think public universities are in a somewhat different position w.r.t. restricting political speech on campus, but I’ll admit I don’t understand the law very well.)

            Public universities are more or less bound by the same rules that bind other arms of the government–at least outside of the classroom. Around campus, or when dealing with student groups and the like they can impose content neutral time, place, and manner restrictions only and absolutely forbidden from treating speakers differently based on their viewpoints. In the classroom is a little more nuanced, but that relatively rarely comes up.

          • Plumber says:

            @The original Mr. X

            "If you have any evidence suggesting that a significant percentage of those usually considered on “the left” have expressed opposition to things like forcing bakers to cater for gay weddings, by all means share it. That’s a genuine request, by the way — I’d love to find evidence that the culture war isn’t as polarising and all-encompassing as I’d thought"

            Since I fall into that group I thought I’d give it a try:

            Defining “The Left” and “The Right” is tricky as polling shows the majority of voters “lean Left” on ‘economic issues’ and “lean Right” on ‘social issues’, so which “issues axis” count more as “Left” or “Right”?

            Helpfully polls show that about 50 percent of the electorate almost only vote for Democratic Party candidates when they vote and about 42 percent only vote for Republicans when they vote (those registered with either party are a fraction of that), with the remainder voting for third-party or actual ‘swing voters, to have a working definition of “The Left” I’m going with ‘votes for Democrats’ (though I’ve encountered self-described “Leftists” who regard Democrats as a great evil along with Republicans, I’m doubtful that they’re many of them outside of Punk Rock gigs in the 1980’s).

            With about 44.6 percent of the 2016 electorate being “liberal on both economic and identity issues”, I’ll infer that about 5.4 percent are “social conservatives” who vote Democratic Party, so a good guess that they wouldn’t advocate forced baking, I also found a small poll, with about 38% saying yes to “Should bakeries be required to make wedding cakes for gay couples?” 52% saying no, and the rest equivalating.

            So based on that I’d guess maybe somewhere between 2% and 22% of voters for Democrats don’t advocate forced baking.

            Maybe a small percentage but still millions of people.

            As to whether Democrats and ‘Democrat-leaning’ voters is a fitting definition of “Left”, you tell me, other definitions would have the only bakeries be worker syndicates or state owned, and I’m not sure how that would go for your query.

          • PeterDonis says:

            Why should a private university be ethically obliged to host speech it doesn’t wish to host?

            If a university is getting funds from government grants, it’s not quite a “private” university. And any university that provides financial aid (which is pretty much any university) is getting at least some of that financial aid from the government.

            If a university truly accepted no funds whatever from public sources, and subsisted entirely on tuition from individual students and donations from alumni, then I would agree that it has the right to refuse to host speech it doesn’t want to host.

          • PeterDonis says:

            If you want to end the student loan system I’ll be right there with you. But it’s existence doesn’t transmogrify private into public.

            It doesn’t make the universities into public, governmental entities. But it does mean that they are, at least in my view, ethically questionable if they accept public money and then restrict free speech.

          • LadyJane says:

            @PeterDonis: The problem is, this would effectively mean that all universities in the current system had to act as government entities. Alternatives simply wouldn’t exist. That seems like a bad thing to me, for a number of reasons.

          • brad says:

            @PeterDonis
            Does the $1 rule apply to all other private entities too and does it apply to government obligations beyond free speech?

            Does, for example, a church that gets a government grant to repair a playground have an ethical obligation not endorse a particular religion or religion in general over non-religion?

          • albatross11 says:

            This kind of logic (if you take a dollar of federal money we can regulate you) was used to impose some civil rights laws on private universities. But I don’t think that was a good idea even then, and definitely don’t think it would be a good idea to impose first amendment obligations on every entity that takes government money.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            A university hosting speech it doesn’t like isn’t quite an ethical obligation. It’s a logical consequence of the idea of a university as a place for open inquiry. If the university shows by its actions that it doesn’t actually have that as an internal goal, I don’t stop seeing it as good and start seeing it as evil; I stop seeing it as a university and start seeing it as a think tank.

          • albatross11 says:

            brad:

            The usual pattern with campus no-platforming seems to be:

            a. Someone is invited to speak using the normal process used within the university, and they get approval the normal way for the invitation.

            b. People opposed to that speaker’s ideas start protesting and campaigning to have that person disinvited.

            c. The college administration cancels the talk, perhaps because they really don’t like that person’s ideas, or because they fear a lot of unpleasant disruption and chaos, or maybe even because they fear a riot. (Most likely, they fear an embarrassing PR fiasco like happened at Middlebury.)

            Now, if the college simply refused to invite someone at step (a), that would look a lot more like what you’re describing–a private college has every right to decide they’re not inviting Bozo the Clown to give a talk on foreign policy.

            But when they uninvite someone at step (c), it looks a lot more like an exercise of power by the activist group–they’re demonstrating that they control who’s allowed to speak on campus. That’s not about the college administration deciding they don’t want to hear Ben Shapiro own the libs, that’s about the activists on campus making sure nobody else on campus is allowed to hear Ben Shapiro own the libs.

          • albatross11 says:

            brad:

            Just to be clear: I recognize that the limits of public discourse is a legitimate topic of debate, and also that it’s not clear (for example) what limits a private actor ought to put on speech that involves them–speakers invited by a college, discussions hosted on a blog, etc.

            I’ve tried to make the best argument I can for why I think having a wider range of acceptable views is generally better in those cases, and in particular for why I think the social/political movement we usually label as SJWs is trying to narrow the range of acceptable views (either anywhere or on campus/online/etc.) in ways that will make the world a much worse place. I’m sorry if I’ve left you with the impression I don’t think you believe what you say you believe, or that your position isn’t legitimate. I think you’re wrong, but I don’t doubt your honesty or your intelligence, just your conclusions.

            I also recognize this isn’t a simple matter. I like freewheeling intellectual discussions more than most people, but I’m not going to spend a lot of time reading a lot of pedophilia-apology or holocaust-denial discussion either. Finding how to have a wide range of views available without driving people away either in disgust or just in disinterest[1] is tricky. Keeping a multicultural society working in ways that allow the fundamentalist Christians and married gay couples and retreat hippies living in a commune to remain at peace and interact productively is damned hard. Exposing college kids to a wide range of ideas without wasting their time or rewarding people who just want to stir up sh-t for the lulz isn’t always easy. And so on.

            [1] I have zero interest in trying to relitigate whether or not life evolved, for example–life’s too short.

          • PeterDonis says:

            @LadyJane:
            The problem is, this would effectively mean that all universities in the current system had to act as government entities.

            Yes, that’s right. That is just one of the many bad side effects of our current system of funding education.

            @brad:
            Does, for example, a church that gets a government grant to repair a playground have an ethical obligation not endorse a particular religion or religion in general over non-religion?

            My personal opinion? Yes. Which of course would mean that no church could accept government grants without ceasing to be a church.

            In practice this in itself might not be a big issue; my sense is that churches getting government grant money is rare, much rarer than universities accepting government money. (But I could be wrong; I would love to see data on this if there is any.)

            However, this does raise another point, which is that pretty much all churches are tax-exempt institutions, which is a government benefit and could also be argued to impose free speech obligations.

            To me what all this says is that our current system of the government giving out grants and special privileges has a lot of ethical issues that people don’t want to confront.

            @albatross11:
            This kind of logic (if you take a dollar of federal money we can regulate you)

            That’s not what I’m arguing. I’m arguing that an institution that takes government money but then does not uphold free speech is ethically questionable. I’m not arguing that this gives the government the right to impose free speech obligations on that institution. My preferred outcome would be that the government stops giving money and benefits to private institutions. Even apart from the ethical issues this raises for the institutions themselves, this amounts to the government playing favorites, which I think is wrong.

          • This kind of logic (if you take a dollar of federal money we can regulate you)

            What does “take a dollar of federal money” mean in this context? Suppose a university has students some of whom are paying tuition with federal loans. Is the university taking federal money, or is it merely selling its services to customers who are taking federal money?

            What if a government employee enrolls in the university, paying tuition from his salary?

            There is a fuzzy line between “gets a subsidy from the government” and “sells services some of which the government buys,” and it gets even fuzzier if you include “sells services to people buying them with money they got from the government.”

          • PeterDonis says:

            @DavidFriedman:
            Suppose a university has students some of whom are paying tuition with federal loans. Is the university taking federal money, or is it merely selling its services to customers who are taking federal money?

            If the university’s tuition was independent of the amount of federal loans and grants available, I might be willing to say it was the latter. But I think it’s pretty clear that tuition rises with the amount of federal loans and grants available, which means the universities are just taking advantage of an indirect method of getting themselves funded by the government.

            What if a government employee enrolls in the university, paying tuition from his salary?

            This I would say does not count as “taking money from the government” in the sense I was using the term.

          • brad says:

            @albatross11

            I guess it comes down to a question of what tactics the students use. If I had persuaded Scott solely through the force of my arguments that the culture war thread in its prior form ought not to exist, it would still have been Scott deciding to shut it down. On the far side of the spectrum is what actually happened with targeted harassment which means that this action is clearly against Scott’s wishes. In between are more gray areas.

            The point is that you can’t say that Harvard’s true opinion is a particular assistant dean’s first instinct. It’s legitimate for their to be some interplay between the various interest groups that make up Harvard in deciding what that “true opinion” is. Where exactly the line between legitimate lobbying and illegitimate pressure tactics is a tough fact bound question.

            In case I wasn’t clear in my last post I do appreciate your engagement on this both in the sense that has been sustained and in that I think you’ve been respectful of my position.

        • Deiseach says:

          martinw: sugar on my porridge – yes! (I know stirabout should be consumed with salt and water alone, but I like milk and sugar with mine).

          Well, I suppose I’m just a dyed-in-the-wool no hope for me at all deplorable, then! 😀

      • whereamigoing says:

        To some extent it’s a reasonable preference, but those of us who live in democratic countries want voters to be at least somewhat informed, and that’s unlikely to happen if they aren’t exposed to different political views.

        • brad says:

          I don’t think people need to be exposed to pedophile manifesto man’s views in order to be educated voters. As I elaborate on in the top level post below, I think there’s some significant conflation of aesthetic preferences (i.e. the enjoyment of free wheeling and sometimes transgressive playing with ideas) with normative and now positive claims.

          • whereamigoing says:

            Fair point. I agree that not everything is equally necessary for being an educated voter, but, to add to Scott’s reply below, (1) often it’s easier to allow speech than to decide what speech to ban, and (2) even if it doesn’t immediately impact voting, for the wider goal of societal progress (which includes selecting what candidates to vote on in the first place) and hedging the risk of incorrect mainstream views, it’s beneficial to have people exposed to views at a rate proportional to how close the view is to the center of the Overton window. And (3) more arguably, learning to constructively disagree with others is an important part of psychological development, and lacking it would lead to worse communities and relationships on average.

            None of those arguments support being exposed to all views all the time, which is indeed an aesthetic preference. But they do oppose avoiding political differences entirely.

            Incidentally, this is why I’m a bit skeptical of Scott’s Archipelago, though I don’t know what would be a better alternative.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            @ brad

            By this logic, gay men would still be forbidden to speak their views in public. I’m not even stretching to include a completely different topic – there were many who conflated homosexuality with pedophilia (even beyond the NAMBLA connection).

            That’s one of the core dangers of an anti-speech approach. If you can get your opponent’s speech labeled as “hate speech” or “pedophilia” then you can safely shut them down.

            I don’t personally want to be exposed to pedophile man’s opinions, but I would prefer that than a situation where his opinions are banned from public discourse entirely.

          • brad says:

            @Mr. Doolittle

            What *exactly* do you mean by “banned from public discourse”?

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            Elsewhere in the thread you are involved in discussions that more clearly delineate between allowing Public Speech (street corners and government common areas) and Private Speech. I think that’s pretty well covered elsewhere from a legal perspective.

            What I’m trying to do is convince you (and people who agree with you) that tolerance is better than intolerance. By your metric of “pedophile man should not speak here” we could just as easily come to the conclusion that “gay man should not speak here” with the same logic and even the same goals. (I’m thinking 80s and 90s conversations about gay men, as a real example. I’m not trying to make this about homosexuality, just that seems a relevant-to-recent-history example). Again, not from a legal perspective, but from a social perspective. If I win this argument, I don’t get free speech in all private conversations. Instead, I get you (and other readers) to be a little more open to conversations that make you uncomfortable.

            If enough people are in favor of freer speech, then outlets like Facebook and Twitter get less pressure to censor, and therefore do less of it. If that happens, then more information and ideas get exchanged, and more people feel welcome in the public (small p) sphere.

            I know some people are going to draw a line at pedophile man. My hope would be that they quietly avoid that conversation space. Maybe they let someone know that they prefer more of [X conversations] and less of pedophile conversations, but they don’t make an effort to chase people out of town or start a boycott or other collective action. Sure, if enough people make the same choice the end result is the same, but then we’re dealing with individual preferences instead of a top-town forced approach.

          • brad says:

            @Mr. Doolittle

            Instead, I get you (and other readers) to be a little more open to conversations that make you uncomfortable.

            You haven’t come close to convincing me of that. I am not even convinced that your argument is rooted in anything other than your personal aesthetics. *You* like a particular kind of conservation therefore it must be Good. While at the same time the costs to other people, their discomfort, are not only treated as irrelevant but outright considered a positive.

            If you are trying to make a cost benefit type claim, a) don’t arbitrarily decide that the costs don’t matter because you aren’t impacted and b) let’s see some solid evidence rather than just handwaiving in the direction of gay rights.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            @ brad

            You haven’t come close to convincing me of that. I am not even convinced that your argument is rooted in anything other than your personal aesthetics.

            That may certainly be true. I’m not delusional enough to think that one post is enough to change your mind, even if my post was an argument intended to do so. Instead, my post was a statement of ideals in response to your question. “Banned from public discourse” (still small p) is what I am worried about, and I am expressing my interest in not doing that.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            I get the impression here that Mr. Doolittle is implicitly offering to trade his own discomfort in return for yours. And insofar as Mr. Doolittle is speaking for other conservatives, I must point out that he’s probably offering conservatives’ discomfort in general, in return for liberals’ discomfort in general. (Maybe he intends a concerted effort at an individual trade only, but somehow I get the more general interpretation.)

            Point being: there’s the usual lament conservatives have at having to be made uncomfortable at numerous turns. Not just about homosexuality, but also sex out of marriage, sex in general, foul language, depictions of violence (including non-physical), drug use, and so on. It hurts Beulah and Marvin when they have to spend copious time explaining to their children that much of what they saw on television or YouTube or heard on Spotify isn’t considered appropriate in many contexts. (We can stipulate that I’m not referring to a solid bloc that opposes all these things. I think it doesn’t materially weaken the point.)

            In other words, this isn’t a case of costs not mattering. Quite the contrary; it’s a case of costs to both sides mattering. If Beulah has to take an hour every so often to explain to little Hazel why professionals might behave the way they do on Law & Order (and why was Hazel watching TV past 9pm in the first place?), then it’s only fair for Caitlin to have to explain to Shay that people who don’t trust background check systems for gun sales aren’t necessarily p-zombies.

            In some sense, this isn’t fair to the left. The right is trying to bill the left for the status quo. Nevertheless, I think that’s how the right sees it. And in this one limited case, the asking price doesn’t seem too onerous. I think the right isn’t asking the left to share the right’s values on sex, violence, etc.; merely that they permit talking about those values. And in the same way the left requests the right address the left’s values.

          • brad says:

            @Paul Brinkley

            I don’t have the impression that the “tolerance” side of this debate is being driven primarily or even much at all but cultural conservatism. Rather it seems a so-called grey tribe effort. If that’s the case there’s a strong and suspicious overlap between novelty seeking as an aesthetic preference and these positive and normative claims about the value of norms that increase the availability of novel stimuli.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            I must point out that he’s probably offering conservatives’ discomfort in general, in return for liberals’ discomfort in general. (Maybe he intends a concerted effort at an individual trade only, but somehow I get the more general interpretation.)

            This is pretty close to my thoughts. Not that I represent or speak for conservatives, generally or locally. I know that there are many other conservatives who have similar feelings. I am old enough to recall the social dominance that the right had in the 1980s in many fields, especially in regards to gay rights and religion. I remember the feeling of court cases won by atheists about their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) being impinged by Christian organizations. I was originally upset and wanted to overwhelm them at the ballot box and make them be quiet. Then I realized that in previous eras, conservatives were the cultural minority, and I was glad of the Bill of Rights and similar protections. Those protections must necessarily go both directions in order to be meaningful, and result in buy-in from all sides.

            I don’t want to control private speech, but I want all sides to remember that they are not always going to be in control. The norms that we can agree to at any given point will also be in effect when the cultural winds shift. They may get worse, but they will not get better. Those clamoring for public (small p) free speech now, are those that realize such an approach is the better one for all sides in society. I remember when Ellen got in hot water for being openly gay and still on TV. “This realm of speech is damaging and should not be allowed” can easily be applied to either side of the culture war. I prefer a world in which no one’s speech is disallowed, because the alternative is unworkable and results in both sides (eventually) being really upset when they get told to be quiet.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            I don’t have the impression that the “tolerance” side of this debate is being driven primarily or even much at all but cultural conservatism. Rather it seems a so-called grey tribe effort. If that’s the case there’s a strong and suspicious overlap between novelty seeking as an aesthetic preference and these positive and normative claims about the value of norms that increase the availability of novel stimuli.

            Speaking as someone with a relatively “gray tribe” personality, there is plenty being said in the public discourse that causes me emotional discomfort and distress. The notion that the importance of someone’s opinion is settled in part by their race/gender; the notion that intellectual merit is meaningless, or should be compromised in favor of affirmative action; the notion that the burden of proof in cases of sexual misconduct should lie with the accused rather than the accuser. But I am glad to be part of a discourse that tolerates these toxic opinions.

          • brad says:

            Speaking as someone with a relatively “gray tribe” personality, there is plenty being said in the public discourse that causes me emotional discomfort and distress. The notion that the importance of someone’s opinion is settled in part by their race/gender; the notion that intellectual merit is meaningless, or should be compromised in favor of affirmative action; the notion that the burden of proof in cases of sexual misconduct should lie with the accused rather than the accuser. But I am glad to be part of a discourse that tolerates these toxic opinions.

            I can’t speak to your feelings of course, but by observation there and lots and lots of people that oppose these notions but relish the chance to engage with people that hold these viewpoints. I don’t have any survey data, so it’s possible I’m suffering from availability bias, but the gray tribe / intellectual novelty seeking correlation seems pretty strong.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            I don’t have the impression that the “tolerance” side of this debate is being driven primarily or even much at all but cultural conservatism. Rather it seems a so-called grey tribe effort.

            I’m guessing from the wording here that you meant “by” instead of “but”.

            If that’s the case there’s a strong and suspicious overlap between novelty seeking as an aesthetic preference and these positive and normative claims about the value of norms that increase the availability of novel stimuli.

            I’m afraid you got away from me here – I’m having genuine trouble trying to grok your point.

            First off: I think there is both grey tribe affinity for novel ideas at work here, and also cultural conservatism. Especially here on SSC. In the national discourse, I think it’s mostly the latter, but I agree there’s still some grey tribe action, and it probably looks to most people like the GOP’s libertarian wing.

            As best I can tell, you’re saying that a lot of the grey tribe are trying to put a good face on certain cultural conservative positions, just to get more exposure to them? And vice versa? If so, then what? Is the problem that you believe these positions are too harmful to warrant that good face? Or are you saying that the grey tribe don’t really believe these positions are that good, and are just pretending they are in order to explore, and consequently tolerance of these positions is just a waste of resources to satisfy some academic grey tribe wanderlust? Or something else?

          • brad says:

            @Paul Brinkley
            Sorry if I was being obscure and for typos.

            To put my point plainly: there are people that like reading, debating, thinking about off the wall ideas even, or maybe especially, those ideas that many other people find offensive. I think the people that happen to enjoy these things often, either intentionally or unconsciously, conflate their personal enjoyment with normative and positive claims about how airing such ideas are good for society.

          • albatross11 says:

            brad:

            Fair enough. I guess the other side of that is that I strongly suspect that many of the folks arguing to suppress some topics of discussion or questions of fact are convincing themselves of the bad social effects those discussions will have, when really, they’re just offended by the ideas.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            To put my point plainly: there are people that like reading, debating, thinking about off the wall ideas even, or maybe especially, those ideas that many other people find offensive. I think the people that happen to enjoy these things often, either intentionally or unconsciously, conflate their personal enjoyment with normative and positive claims about how airing such ideas are good for society.

            Fair enough. I guess the other side of that is that I strongly suspect that many of the folks arguing to suppress some topics of discussion or questions of fact are convincing themselves of the bad social effects those discussions will have, when really, they’re just offended by the ideas.

            It’s entirely likely that both are true. Does it really matter?

            The only way to decide the important question is to examine the merit of the arguments for and against allowing these ideas into the discourse. Who cares what the unconscious motives of the proponents/opponents might be? (Unless you’re one of the proponents/opponents and are trying to diagnose your own biases, in which case these are certainly useful points to bring up.)

          • Plumber says:

            @Humbert McHumbert 
            "...as someone with a relatively “gray tribe” personality, there is plenty being said in the public discourse that causes me emotional discomfort and distress. The notion that the importance of someone’s opinion is settled in part by their race/gender; the notion that intellectual merit is meaningless..." 

            Well judging by my school experience, “intellectual merit” is very much meaningless, or rather it’s meaning is all too clear, and it’s not the dictionary definition. 

            “IQ” is an all-to-convenient excuse to mostly only bother to educate the children of the educated, and every sinew in my body recoils at the injustice of it.

            I saw for myself during high school the difference between the “Advanced” track and the “Intermediate” track and it was most definitely not in dubious claims of student “aptitude”, instead it was which class was given books and which wasn’t, so please don’t insult my intelligence with bold claims of “merit”.

            I haven’t forgotten and I haven’t forgiven, and I well remember who were deemed “worthy” of books as well as who of us weren’t. 

            Plain as day it was who were privileged and who weren’t, and you’ll have to make-up a much better story than “intellectual merit” to convince me that we weren’t “worthy”, and that I wasn’t worthy. 

            I’m seething with anger and I have tears right now as I relect on my schooling, and am very bitter about those years, seperate was very unequal, and it wasn’t the students doing as to which class they were in, and how educational resources were divided. 

            Teach some and warehouse others, and then have the audacity to call that earned?

            There is no merit to this talk of “merit”, I knew unequal rationing when I saw it.

          • brad says:

            @Humbert McHumbert

            The only way to decide the important question is to examine the merit of the arguments for and against allowing these ideas into the discourse.

            I guess I’d reply that it depends on what you mean by examining the merits. I enjoy as much as the rest of you the back and forth discussion, but I don’t delude myself that coming up with plausible mechanisms, reasoning from tiny N historical predicates that are so messy they can be read any which way, arguing from “pure logic”, and so on is good enough.

            The entire rationalist project can be boiled down to the notion that those aren’t good enough. They are too prone to cognitive biases. So what kind of data is available or might be available in the future to rest these arguments on a more solid footing?

            Until and unless we can answer that I don’t see how we are going to make much progress.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            @brad

            I don’t delude myself that coming up with plausible mechanisms, reasoning from tiny N historical predicates that are so messy they can be read any which way, arguing from “pure logic”, and so on is good enough.

            I could not agree more. The evidence we have about the effects of unrestricted discourse is very poor-quality evidence that tells us very little. For all we know, unrestricted discourse could be pretty beneficial to society as a whole, or it could be pretty destructive to the fabric of society.

            That means that given what we know now (not much) the question boils down to which side of the debate deserves the benefit of the doubt. If we don’t know whether X is harmful or beneficial, should we default to restricting X or to permitting X?

            What do you think? My inclination is that the benefit of the doubt must rest with permitting things rather than restricting them. Think about same sex marriage. We don’t have great data about whether that is destructive to the fabric of society either! But the benefit of the doubt should count against those who want to control other people’s lives and tell them who they can and can’t form partnerships with.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            @Plumber

            I’m very sorry for the experience you had in school. I have an experience of my own to share, along opposite lines.

            I saw for myself during high school the difference between the “Advanced” track and the “Intermediate” track and it was most definitely not in dubious claims of student “aptitude”, instead it was which class was given books and which wasn’t, so please don’t insult my intelligence with bold claims of “merit”.

            I haven’t forgotten and I haven’t forgiven, and I well remember who were deemed “worthy” of books as well as who of us weren’t.

            I believe you that this was how things went at your school. At my middle school, I saw a difference of a very different sort between the intermediate and advanced-level classes. In seventh grade I was placed into courses with disruptive students who were not interested in learning. Many were quite clever, especially at thinking up creative taunts, so I wouldn’t call them all unintelligent, but they did not seem to have a high aptitude for book learning.

            I was treated like a pariah for being interested in and apt at book learning. My mood and my grades suffered badly. Then I tested into the advanced-level course of study. There was still plenty of adolescent posturing, but the way to impress these kids was to show them you were smart. Actual learning took place in these classrooms. The difference wasn’t that we had books, it was that the students were smart and willing to learn. It didn’t seem like an accident that these were the kids who passed the aptitude tests to get into the class.

            Which of our experiences is more representative of broader reality about scholastic aptitude among children? The only way to answer that question is with systematic empirical data.

          • brad says:

            @Humbert McHumbert

            That means that given what we know now (not much) the question boils down to which side of the debate deserves the benefit of the doubt. If we don’t know whether X is harmful or beneficial, should we default to restricting X or to permitting X?

            What do you think? My inclination is that the benefit of the doubt must rest with permitting things rather than restricting them. Think about same sex marriage. We don’t have great data about whether that is destructive to the fabric of society either! But the benefit of the doubt should count against those who want to control other people’s lives and tell them who they can and can’t form partnerships with.

            With all due respect this is a very poor framing. Mr. Doolittle is suggesting that I personally ought to participate in conversations that make me uncomfortable. The government licensing same sex marriages is a completely inapt analogy.

            Frankly I find your position to be fairly presumptuous. In a real sense you’ve already won. The public square is open to literally anyone. Now you are insisting that I open my living room, my workplace, my private clubs too and the best you can come up with is permissiveness ought to get the benefit of the doubt? Sorry, no sale.

            If you can’t come up with a strong argument the baseline should be that people are free to self organize into groups that have rules that seem good to them.

            Your aesthetic preferences seem to be pretty rare. That’s perhaps unfortunate but I don’t think your attempt to cook the rules of the game to overrule everyone else without providing evidence is at all legitimate. And frankly that fact that everyone on the permissiveness side of this argument continually goes back to the LGBT well is pretty tiresome.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            @brad

            Fair point, my argument doesn’t get you all the way to Mr. Doolittle’s conclusion. I think it does get you fairly far, though. For example, I think it’s pretty clearly bad for the mainstream culture to treat something as nasty or verboten until someone discovers good evidence that it’s harmful. This goes for same sex relationships and it goes for open discussion of edgy topics too.

            And frankly that fact that everyone on the permissiveness side of this argument continually goes back to the LGBT well is pretty tiresome.

            Whether you’re tired of it or not, I think it’s a pretty good argument. But if you like I could draw the same analogy using interracial marriage, BDSM, transgenderism, Islam or divorce instead.

          • brad says:

            For example, I think it’s pretty clearly bad for the mainstream culture to treat something as nasty or verboten until someone discovers good evidence that it’s harmful.

            Where’s your “pretty clear” evidence for this? You are nakedly asserting that we should accept your preferences as a default until and unless I meet some burden of proof. Again, no sale.

            And I don’t find argument “you wouldn’t want to be like one of those people that hate gays, right?!?” compelling at all. That’s not an argument it’s attempted emotional blackmail.

            Would you say I should eat food I don’t like the taste of until and unless I come up with proof that they are unhealthy?

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            @brad

            Perhaps you could point out what you think is wrong with the analogy I drew between tolerating offensive views and tolerating other sexual orientations, religions, etc. If you think these things are importantly different, tell me why.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            On this:

            Where’s your “pretty clear” evidence for this? You are nakedly asserting that we should accept your preferences as a default until and unless I meet some burden of proof.

            Replace “my preferences” with “not punishing people for doing things” and you’re right, I do think that should be the default unless some burden of proof is met.

            In this case, what I am saying is that society shouldn’t look down on things that have not been established to be harmful on the basis of plausible reasons or evidence.

          • brad says:

            It’s not punishment for me to not have a conversation with someone. Where does my obligation to talk to people I don’t enjoy talking to come from?

            Again, would you have me eat food I find repulsive, sleep with people I’m not attracted to, read books I think are boring?

            How presumptuous of you to claim that I must live my life by your preferences instead of my own.

          • Aapje says:

            @Plumber

            More formalized testing that is used for tracking generally seems to more often suggest a higher track for the children of the less educated than more ‘holistic’ placement. I believe that this is true for the SAT and it is true for the Dutch tests.

            Abandoning tracking/filtering altogether leads to the issue that low effort and high disruptive students will harm those who want to learn, as has been noted above.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            @brad

            Mr. Doolittle is suggesting that I personally ought to participate in conversations that make me uncomfortable.

            I’ll add some clarity here. I would like a world where more people were willing to participate in more conversations. I am not suggesting that you actually should or especially must do so, even in my ideal world.

            What I’m actually requesting, on the individual level, is that you don’t attempt to reduce the conversations of third parties. That being, if you dislike a conversation topic (whether for personal reasons or because you dislike the politics thereof) you quietly move on. This would necessarily preclude starting campaigns to shut down another person’s speech, whether formally or informally. (ETA: This is distinctly different from debating the merits of the topic. If you disagree with the person’s opinions, I think that’s worth discussing. I am against a meta-level “This shall not be talked about by others”-type shutdown, especially from non-participants.)

            In practice this may be impossible, at least for moderators and other authorities in charge of a conversation space (like Scott in regards to SSC). In that case, I prefer places and policies where moderators err on the side of more open speech. There are, of course, always going to be limits on how open speech can be in any medium. I like that Scott moderates civility, for instance. I also like that he removes disruptive posts and posters, even when civil (I’m thinking of that guy who posts gibberish rants).

            Sorry I didn’t look at this thread for a while, I had assumed a post this old was just about dead.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            Exactly. What would be wrong IMO is to interfere in other people’s attempts to have a conversation.

          • brad says:

            . I like that Scott moderates civility, for instance. I also like that he removes disruptive posts and posters, even when civil (I’m thinking of that guy who posts gibberish rants).

            I fail to see the principled distinction between this and liking that Scott bans H B D. You are elevating your aesthetics to a normative principle.

          • 10240 says:

            I fail to see the principled distinction between this and liking that Scott bans H B D.

            Every argument can be said in a civil way. Not every argument can be said free of a certain topic.

          • brad says:

            That’s an entirely circular argument.

          • 10240 says:

            That’s an entirely circular argument.

            I don’t get why. My point is that rules that ban certain subjects or arguments bring with themselves problems that aesthetic rules don’t.

          • brad says:

            You’ve created an artificial and unjustified (at least here) category of speech called “arguments” which is somehow distinct from “incivility” and you claim, again without real argument, that banning the former is problematic while the latter is not.

          • 10240 says:

            If I have an idea, a factual claim, an argument in my mind, and I want to get someone who reads my comments understand what idea I have in my mind, a civility restriction doesn’t prevent me from doing so. (At least if my idea in question is about the world rather than the specific persons involved, and/or if I have some justification for my idea. E.g. “you are stupid” may be hard to convey in a civil way, especially without evidence.) A topic or viewpoint restriction may prevent me from doing so. As such, topic or viewpoint restrictions may prevent us from understanding each other’s ideas and trying to convince each other in a way civility restrictions don’t.

            This is not an artificial or unjustified distinction. I can’t do much more to explain what I mean, but I think it should be clear enough. And I suspect that you are the one who doesn’t want to understand because you don’t see much value in forums with no viewpoint-based restrictions, and you want to accuse those of us who do of hypocrisy.

            Note that I think that both viewpoint-based and civility restrictions on speech by government would be wrong. (Though even then, the consequences of viewpoint restrictions would be worse; a reason to fight civility restrictions just as hard as viewpoint-based ones is that otherwise they’ll try to pass off viewpoint restrictions as civility-based ones.) And I think that a private blog may have whatever rules it wants, I just say there is a distinction between the two kinds of rules, and that there is value in forums that have civility rules but not viewpoint ones.

          • brad says:

            This is not an artificial or unjustified distinction.

            It is. You are reifying your personal preferences.

            There’s no fundamental distinction between “black people are stupid” and “you are stupid”. One just strikes you as fun and edgy to talk about while the other reminds you of bullies in middle school and makes you mad. But other people aren’t you and your preferences aren’t logical rules of the universe.

          • 10240 says:

            I’ve given reasons why such a ruleset has some objective benefits. That said, I’ve never said that it was the only right ruleset (and neither did Mr. Doolittle, as far as I understand). It is a preference, but that doesn’t mean that the distinction itself can’t be defined in an objective and principled way.

            “Black people are stupid” would run afoul of the civility rule on my books: it’s unnecessarily loaded language on a sensitive topic, it’s too unspecific to stand for a well-defined claim, and whatever actual claim (if any) the speaker has in mind could and should be phrased in a less offensive way (preferably with evidence or justification).

          • Aapje says:

            @Brad

            You seem to be arguing that pro-social expectations are valid. For example, it may be a fact that I think that Bob is ugly, but it is usually considered very rude if I tell him, even if I make it clear that it is just my opinion. If I present Bob with a poll of his friends, showing that my opinion is a shared one, it would still be very rude.

            You are of course correct that statements like “black people are stupid” logically imply: “you are stupid” if the other person is black. Those are thus equally anti-social.

            However, H.B.D. advocates don’t actually tend to argue this, but that black people more often have a low IQ. This doesn’t logically imply that any black person is stupid.

            Imagine saying “one black person is stupid.” Would it be reasonable for a black person to believe that this implied: “you are stupid?” I don’t think so. A person who feels personally offended by such a statement seems oversensitive to me, demanding unreasonable amounts of pro-social behavior.

            If we cannot make statements about attributes of (averages of) groups, then we effectively cannot debate negative behavior that is specific to a group (for reasons of biology, culture, etc). If that actually gets taken seriously as a rule, you can’t just not say negative things about black people and women, but also about white people, men, religious people, etc.

            So you can’t even address sexual abuse by priests. That seems utterly unreasonable and harmful.

            In reality, I have never seen anyone who doesn’t want claims to be made about some groups to actually be consistent to extend that to all groups. If there is a double standard, it’s actually a weaponized rule for discourse, not one that results in a level playing ground.

          • albatross11 says:

            Compare: “black people are stupid” and “white people are racist.”

            There are ways of expressing either one that are just trying to start a fight, and others (more carefully phrased, talking about overlapping probability distributions or unconscious assumptions, etc.) that are trying to express a genuine claim about the world which some listeners will find offensive, and others will prefer to rule out of bounds for strategic reasons.

          • brad says:

            It’s ironic that I feel I can’t say what I’d like to say here because I don’t know that it would be considered kind or necessary. So I just allude to it vaguely.

            The strongly held belief that a particular kind of supposedly coldly logical discourse is not only the only valuable kind of discourse but obviously the only valuable kind of discourse is not randomly distributed among the population.

          • 10240 says:

            Based on what sort of claim I guess you are alluding to, I don’t think you couldn’t say it.

            I think that whether a belief is randomly distributed among the population gives relatively little information about whether it’s valid or not. But the statement coldly logical discourse is the only valuable discourse is not a really objective statement, so this is not that relevant.

            More importantly, I don’t think coldly logical discourse is the only valuable discourse, and I don’t think any of us said or implied that. A weaker belief some of us subscribe to is that cold logical discourse is especially valuable for certain purposes (such as truth-seeking and debate about factual questions), and that discourse that is valuable for such purposes can be rephrased in a cold, logical way. Moreover, I don’t see how the belief that only cold, logical discourse is valuable would be relevant to the discussion about forum rules.
            — The statement that more emotional, or otherwise not cold, logical discourse is valuable, that’s clearly not a reason to ban certain topics or viewpoints, as this statement only extends, rather rather than narrows the range of valuable discourse.
            — You may be arguing that it means that the fact that emotional or not-so-cold-and-logical discourse is valuable implies that civility-based rules are no less restrictive than viewpoint-based ones. However, civility rules typically don’t ban most emotional or not-so-logical discourse, only insults, excess snark and such. I think most people would agree that it’s not that hard to phrase ideas free of these.

          • albatross11 says:

            brad:

            Are there any people here claiming that this kind of discourse is the only worthwhile kind? It seems to me that we have:

            a. A group of people who find this kind of discourse interesting and worthwhile and want to take part in it.

            b. Another group who don’t find it worthwhile and vote with their feet.

            c. Still another group that finds the existence of this kind of discourse offensive and demands that it be shut down.

            As far as I can tell, nobody here is arguing against (b). I’m not spending any time on the reddit CW thread, for example, and wouldn’t expect anyone else to, either. The world is full of things I don’t want to participate in–no skin off my nose.

            This whole discussion centers around (c)–people who found the existence of that kind of discussion offensive and applied whatever pressure they could to try to make sure that nobody could take part in it.

            It seems like you keep mixing up (b) and (c), but they’re really quite distinct.

            A few minutes’ Google searching will let you find weird porn catering to kinks you’ll wish you didn’t know about, oddball religions you can’t really believe anyone could take seriously, vaguely creepy obsessive hobbies that some people devote their lives to, etc. There’s a huge difference between responding to that stuff by deciding you don’t want to be a part of it, and responding to it by deciding that nobody should be allowed to be a part of it and trying to stamp it out.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        Good questions, I am going to tackle them in reverse order.

        Is it any surprise that people get angry when you deliberately violate their preferences?

        No.

        Why do you feel entitled to expose them despite their preferences to not be so exposed?

        I don´t.

        Why is it a problem that people do not like to be exposed to political opinions different than their own?

        It is a problem only if we want to preserve this thing called the internet, which I very much do, on the grounds of, you know, freedom. Lots of people seem to be getting lot of value from internet, and it seems wrong to me to ban it, even if a fact that it is nearly impossible to isolate themselves from different political worldviews here causes other (or for that matter sometimes very same) people non-trivial distress.

        • brad says:

          I don’t think the internet-as-we-know-it is going to stick around. I’m not sure it should. Those parts of it called social media, in particular, seem to be forces for unhappiness and discord on net. I’ve heard instagram is terrible for kids’ self esteem, and I’ve certainly seen families and friendships torn apart on facebook, but at least in my circles twitter seems to be the worst–unadulterated, unremitting toxoplasma.

          • BBA says:

            It may be how these particular platforms function, and certainly when more outrage means more clicks and more money, they’re incentivized to maximize the amount of outrage. But there was certainly no shortage of drama in the ’00s on LiveJournal and good old-fashioned blogs like this one.

            I think it may just be that bringing everyone in the world together for a free-for-all discussion is a mistake. Turns out, a lot of people just hate each other, and a few are willing to dox and harass and do other evil shit. An uncontrolled, uncensored internet is unworkable. But if there will be censorship, the operative question becomes “who, whom?”

          • PeterDonis says:

            An uncontrolled, uncensored internet is unworkable.

            What do you mean by “an uncontrolled, uncensored internet”? Any computer on the internet can connect to any other computer on the internet (modulo some anomalies like China’s Great Firewall, but let’s limit discussion to computers in countries that don’t have one, which is virtually all countries). That’s certainly not “unworkable”, since it’s been working for several decades now.

            If you mean that every computer on the internet must accept whatever traffic comes its way, regardless of content, yes, of course that’s unworkable, but it’s also irrelevant since the internet has never worked that way since it went global. Individual hosts have always filtered incoming data in various ways, from firewalls dropped malicious packets to moderators of discussion forums banning posts that violate the rules.

            But if there will be censorship, the operative question becomes “who, whom?”

            This is easy: whoever owns the host computer makes the rules. Anyone who doesn’t like a given host’s rules can go somewhere else. Anyone who can’t find any host with rules they like can set up their own. Nowadays basic hosting is cheap.

            The problem of social media, which I certainly agree is a problem, is not a problem with “the internet”. It’s a problem with particular hosts. And it needs to be dealt with with that in mind. Similarly for the problem Scott describes in his post.

          • John Schilling says:

            That’s certainly not “unworkable”, since it’s been working for several decades now.

            Right, like the bit where war was a glorious adventure that made men of boys, was generally practiced safely out among the wogs, and had almost everyone home by Christmas, has been working for several decades of Europeans as of 1913. The people pointing out that various exploits like machine guns, quick-firing artillery, mass mobilization and trench lines, would break that model, were just alarmists trying to harsh everyone’s martial vibe.

            The internet as we know it, sans firewalls, was built around an assumption of internal good faith that no longer holds, and I do not believe it can long withstand the combination of bad faith, unrestrained pursuit of victory, and optimized tactics. What comes next, I do not know.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            I don’t think the internet-as-we-know-it is going to stick around. I’m not sure it should.

            I think that is a reasonable preference, however I do not share it, as I wrote above, on the grounds of my strong preference for freedom.

            One thing we can agree on is that Twitter is horrible.

          • theredsheep says:

            Yes, it’s not terribly surprising that a platform which strictly limits the amount people can say at once has led to people vomiting glib soundbites at each other.

          • brad says:

            @AlesZiegler
            I don’t see what freedom has to do with any of this. What kind of freedom is advanced by a twitter feature existing that allows any handle to @ any other handle and those messages to appear in the latter’s mentions vs twitter not having such a feature?

            I think trying to fit that into a freedom box is a serious category mistake.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            I think trying to fit that into a freedom box is a serious category mistake.

            Then you have quite peculiar definition of freedom. I suppose most people would agree that regulation of internet services is a form of restriction of users behaviour, i.e. by definition restriction of their freedom. Of course many, many restrictions on freedom are necessary and good.

            But if you desire to isolate people online from viewpoints they find unpleasant, this would require far more drastic restrictions on freedom than tweaking twitter rules.

          • brad says:

            @AlesZiegler

            Then you have quite peculiar definition of freedom. I suppose most people would agree that regulation of internet services is a form of restriction of users behaviour, i.e. by definition restriction of their freedom.

            I think I might understand the disconnect now. I am not suggesting, nor would I support, any kind of governmental regulation of twitter. (With the usual caveats about kiddie porn, etc.)

            I am suggesting that enough of twitter’s users, or most valuable users anyway, will eventually come to the realization that how it works is doing damage to them and their relationships and vote with their feet. That in turn will persuade twitter to modify how the platform works. Ditto with facebook et al.

            When I say that the internet-as-we-know-it will cease to exist, I mean by the same kind of process that caused the internet-as-we-knew-it in 1995 to disappear.

        • PeterDonis says:

          It is a problem only if we want to preserve this thing called the internet, which I very much do, on the grounds of, you know, freedom. Lots of people seem to be getting lot of value from internet, and it seems wrong to me to ban it

          How did “banning the internet” come into the discussion? The internet is much more than social media or a few discussion forums.

          • BBA says:

            There’s no RFC that can fix human nature.

            Hail Moloch.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            I meant internet in its current form, which very much includes open discussion forums (and “social media” are one of those).

          • PeterDonis says:

            I meant internet in its current form, which very much includes open discussion forums (and “social media” are one of those).

            Yes, but you’re talking as though that’s all “the internet in its current form” is. That’s very, very far from being the case. Perhaps I’m more aware of that because I am a computer programmer, but, for example, any time you use email, you are using a part of “the internet in its current form” that has nothing whatever to do with social media or discussion forums. And which will still be there when social media and discussion forums have mutated beyond all recognition from their current forms. (At least, that’s my prediction: email is such a simple and obvious thing that I don’t expect it to ever go away.)

      • gloriousg999 says:

        “Why is it a problem that people do not like to be exposed to political opinions different than their own?”

        So, most models of democracy (& overall group cohesion) imply that large segments of the population react in semi-rational ways to each other, and recognize the other as legitimate. If I am not aware that the opinion has a legitimate base, and that moral people can take that opinion, I am less likely to respect it, and more likely to support destructive patterns of behavior.

        “Why do you feel entitled to expose them despite their preferences to not be so exposed?”

        Hmm… I don’t think anybody stated “people must be rounded up to listen to every opinion”, but… it’s pretty normal for people to say “The world is like X, but it should be like Y, let’s find ways to make it like Y”. I think most people would support cultural changes, or at the boldest soft social engineering/game theoretic political adjustment, over FEMA death listening camps.

        “Is it any surprise that people get angry when you deliberately violate their preferences?”

        No. I am a bit confused as to why I should care? So, some people want greater harmony out of some empathetic feeling. I want risk reduction. If there was a strong case for FEMA death listening camps then I might support them. I’m very strongly skeptical of an authoritarian/totalitarian solution though.

        I cannot speak for everyone on that though, but my impression is that SSC has a significant consequentialist bias.

  47. brad says:

    I went back and forth on whether to post this. I want to make clear up front that I absolutely don’t approve of doxxing, IRL harrassement, or following someone around the internet and “warning” other people about them. I’m unhappy that terrible people did that to Scott and wish they hadn’t. That said I think it is important in this period of reflection to push back some on the principles and assumptions that underlie the post.

    At the object level, I object to the notion that writings can and should be divided into those that express ideas and those that are abusive (or similar); that free speech, open discourse, and all that’s good and right with civilization consists of unlimited space for the former and getting rid of the latter. I think is unreasonable and unfair to say that people that think pedophile rights guy is gross and ought not to be able to speak are bad, censorious people while it is just assumed that of course the guy that gets upset at pedophile rights guy and passionately denounces his posts is gross and ought not to be able to speak (at least not here). I think this frame reifies some peoples’ aesthetic preferences into a normative precept.

    At the next meta level up, I recognize that it is reasonable to disagree with my object level position. But I rather insist on reciprocity, the acknowledgement that my object level position is also a reasonable one. From this I think it follows that I’m not obliged to hold my tongue if a discussion of some space with the infinite content/ limited form rules arises somewhere else. It is permissible for people to gush about how magical and life changing a space it is because it allows people to post even pro-pedophilia manifestos so long as they do so in the correct form and it is permissible for people to condemn and warn away people from a space for the same reasons. One ought not to lie in these discussions and certainly one ought not to dox or harass anyone for being tangentially (or even non-tangentially) responsible for the maintenance of a such a space, but I don’t see anything wrong is expressing an honest and reasonable dislike for it.

    • Sebastian_H says:

      The problem with SJW is not in noticing that there really are topics where it is appropriate to just look at someone and roll your eyes. The problem is that they engage in a rapid proliferation of labeling topics as beyond the pale, and a rapid escalation in the consequences of going beyond what is newly beyond the pale. Instead of seeing the consensus of which topics is “too far” as a consensus that evolves and then becomes enforced, they see enforcement as a method of creating consensus. But you can only do that with a real consensus. If you try to use the tools of consensus you generate unnecessary pushback. Hell a lot of the time when you use the tools of consensus even when you have a large consensus it can be super nasty.

      • brad says:

        What is it your are trying to accomplish with this reply to me? You haven’t at all engaged with what I wrote. Just used it as a jumping off point for the same old hobbyhorse. Well, fine, here’s my reply to that:

        I live in a left wing city. I grew up near here and left only to go to a fairly prestigious college. I work in the tech industry. These are the spaces that so-called social justice warriors are supposed to have utterlly ruined. That’s not been my experience. Should I substitute your bare claims for a lifetime of my own observations?

        “They” do this and “they” do that and “they” believe this and can you believe how evil mutant monsters “they” are. Why don’t you tell me what you do and what you believe instead? At least is possible that might be interesting. Maybe not, you might be pedophile rights manifesto guy, but at least it is possible your own thoughts and beliefs and experiences might be interesting and enlightening. Evidence-less (and no I don’t want your anecdotes, See Chinese Cardiologists) bitching and moaning about the amorphous group of people you call “SJW”s is certainly never going to be that.

    • Humbert McHumbert says:

      If you’re saying that it’s OK for people who don’t like a particular site/forum to express their opinion of it, and urge others not to like it, as long as they don’t misrepresent the site in any way, I can’t imagine anyone would disagree with you. The same goes even if their “object level” reasons for disliking the site are not reasonable, I’d say.

    • I think is unreasonable and unfair to say that people that think pedophile rights guy is gross and ought not to be able to speak are bad, censorious people while it is just assumed that of course the guy that gets upset at pedophile rights guy and passionately denounces his posts is gross and ought not to be able to speak (at least not here).

      I don’t think anyone is saying that–could you give examples? What some people are saying is the first half but not the second.

      People that think pedophile rights guy ought not to be able to speak are censorious people–that’s what censorship means. If you think that doesn’t make them bad people, that’s presumably because you are in favor of (some) censorship.

      People who think those who get upset at his speech and denounce him should not be allowed to speak are also censorious. But I don’t think anyone is taking that position.

      • brad says:

        As I understand it that was the moderation policy at the subreddit. One could calmly and politely disagree but if a poster passionately denounced, that was “waging the culture war” or “attacking another poster” which was ban worthy.

        • Tatterdemalion says:

          I think the two of you may be talking at cross purposes.

          My impression is that you’re talking about “should not be allowed to say that here” whereas David is talking about “should not be allowed to say that anywhere”.

          Either way, I think that’s an important distinction.

          • brad says:

            I acknowledge it’s a distinction, but I’m not sure how important a distinction it ends up being. At some point you run up against the classic, government limiting version of free speech and are no longer talking about the norms version.

            While there are certainly those that disagree, I think there’s still a broad consensus across American ideological groups that the classic version ought to be preserved. And as long as you agree with that, you are always going to support the right of pedophile rights guy to stand on a literal soapbox in a literal public square and say his bit. I certainly do.

            But I think there’s several people in this thread and in this community that think that what a poster elsewhere calls “content neutral rules” are natural and desirable but content based, or worse yet viewpoint based, rules are not just aesthetic displeasing but wrong. I’m disagreeing with that, but I’m especially disagreeing that it is so obvious as to not require argument.

          • I assumed that the distinction in his post between “not be able to speak” (first half) and “not be able to speak (at least not here)” (second half) was deliberate.

          • brad says:

            @DavidFriedman

            You are of course not obligated to respond to anything you don’t wish to, but I am curious. Now that I clarified that I absolutely support the right of pedophile rights manifesto guy to stand on a literal soapbox in a literal public square and hold forth on his view, do you agree that there is symmetry between those that don’t want to participate in a private forum where pedophile rights manifesto guy is free to post and those that don’t want to participate in a private forum where other posters are allowed to passionately denounce him?

          • do you agree that there is symmetry between those that don’t want to participate in a private forum where pedophile rights manifesto guy is free to post and those that don’t want to participate in a private forum where other posters are allowed to passionately denounce him?

            I’m not sure I know what “symmetry” means here. The reasons for preferring one kind of forum are different in the two cases. If I had to choose, I suppose I would prefer the forum where he was allowed to (not passionately) hold forth and others were allowed to (not passionately) denounce him, since passion tends to get in the way of clear argument.

            I can see that some people would find his arguments upsetting and so prefer to avoid a forum where they appeared. But that part is symmetrical, since some people would find the attacks on him upsetting as well—most obviously someone who feels sexual attraction to prepubescent children and is being told that that makes him a moral monster.

            There are surely many fewer such people than there are people who would find arguments for pedophile rights upsetting, but I’m reluctant to call the situations asymmetrical on that basis.

            I apologize if this isn’t as clear an answer as you are looking for, but I find it hard to intuit reasons for not wanting to be exposed to arguments for things you think are wrong—”exposed to” in the sense of having the arguments somewhere you can if you wish read them.

            On this very forum, after all, we have someone who has just been arguing in defense of two of the worst mass murderers of history. Defending someone who deliberately starved millions of people to death strikes me as worse than defending someone who has sex with prepubescent partners—but that doesn’t mean it’s an argument I don’t want the opportunity to read. It doesn’t even mean that the person who makes either argument is a bad person–to determine that I would have to have a much clearer idea than I do of why he makes it.

          • brad says:

            If I had to choose, I suppose I would prefer the forum where he was allowed to (not passionately) hold forth and others were allowed to (not passionately) denounce him, since passion tends to get in the way of clear argument.

            I don’t see anything wrong with your preferences. Some people prefer vanilla ice cream and some prefer chocolate. What bother me is the claim made by some–implicitly or explicitly–that your preferences are “free speech” and the other is not.

            Personally I think free speech has to do only with government power. The essay Scott linked above says gestures towards some principles that might eventually allow for a coherent set of principles around private free speech norms, but I think a fair reading would suggest is not quite there yet. And coherency is only the base minimum requirement, it’s far from a guarantee of persuasiveness.

          • cuke says:

            Brad, I agree (if I understand you) that we’d do better to limit the idea of “free speech” to the legal sense of it and refer to “speech norms” or “group norms” or the like to what unfolds in contexts where we’re not talking about legal rights.

            I think the use of “free speech” in contexts where we’re talking about conversational group norms unhelpfully imports a kind of moral authority to the user of that phrase in a way that obfuscates the fact that we’re really just talking about preferences, and in the land of preferences, there’s no higher authority to be appealed to. Though obviously Scott gets to set the norms here, we all get to talk about our preferences if we choose to, and we can even make arguments about why we think our preferences might better meet whatever goals we might agree are worthy to aim for here.

  48. JohnBuridan says:

    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.

    Why do centrists get the adjective boring? We should be called the sexy centrists!

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Stupid sexy centrists!

    • gloriousg999 says:

      I think that’s driven by how centrism is (usually by definition) in the middle point of the debate rather than the edges, also supported by the number of centrists who get to this point by focusing on moderation(a boring trait) rather than innovation or imagination. Deciding to replace the US government with a giant ML algorithm isn’t centrist, but somebody probably has that idea….

    • rachelhaywire says:

      Centrists reinforce the status quo. They only speak out on leftist mobs if someone of high status has been a target of one. The grievance is that some high status scientist or professor has been a target of (pearlclutch) unhinged leftists, while their ideas are actually quite acceptable and progressive. Maybe that is why. Also, centrists do not throw good parties. They do not make good music and their clothing is ugly. Their writing can usually be replaced by AI too, since it is so banal and funtional. Centrists do not serve a use in the new economy because AI can do exactly what they do without the added baggage of socially conforming to their boring model of world. By all means though, argue without emotion or humanity about how you’re not boring in a world of rapidly developing AI. Use machine logic to prove you aren’t an older version of a machine.

      • LadyJane says:

        Also, centrists do not throw good parties. They do not make good music and their clothing is ugly.

        Nah, I love the business lesbian aesthetic and totally rock the look. And you haven’t lived until you’ve been to a kink party with some queer tech and finance gals. We’re the ones enjoying our lives while the far-right and the far-left are complaining that society is falling apart!

        Neoliberal cosmopolitan centrism offers the promise of a world of endless plenty, a gleaming urban techno-utopia of bright lights and colorful people, with luxuries and pleasures and entertainments available to all, with countless options for where to go and what to do and what to eat and what to wear and how to look, where radical creative and artistic and aesthetic expressions of personal individualism are visible all around – a world everyone can finally be free to decide their own purpose, to pursue their own goals, to strive for greatness in whatever way works best for them.

        • Radical creative/artistic aesthetic expression exists on the very edge that you paint as “complainers.” Reallocating culture from the edge to the center (gentrification) ends in a million Fyre Festivals that all look identical. It is only when the edge replaces the center (insurrection) that you can understand the potential of the new aesthetic you are hinting at, and that cannot be done by whining about radicals 24/7. Whining about radicals is what the center does in order to maintain its position in society. “Look at those unstable radicals and how unhinged they are.” That is the center. There is nothing creative about that, and I suggest you engage with something more vitalistic. That might require you gaining experiences that you consider to be too much of a risk.

        • Plumber says:

          @LadyJane

          “…where radical creative and artistic and aesthetic expressions of personal individualism are visible all around – a world everyone can finally be free to decide their own purpose, to pursue their own goals, to strive for greatness in whatever way works best for them….”

          Bereft of family, community, craft solidarity, any history or traditions, just individuals and their appetites and relative net worth.

          An endless “Studio 54”.

          Sounds like a Heaven for wealthy teenagers, a Hellscape for the rest of humanity.

          • CatCube says:

            Amen.

          • albatross11 says:

            Sounds kinda like the Culture to me….

          • theredsheep says:

            Also, won’t work over the long term. Such an individualistic culture won’t reproduce in a stable fashion, because children require sacrifice and centering your life at least partially around something other than yourself. One way or another, that utopia is doomed.

          • a world everyone can finally be free to decide their own purpose, to pursue their own goals, to strive for greatness in whatever way works best for them.

            Such an individualistic culture won’t reproduce in a stable fashion, because children require sacrifice and centering your life at least partially around something other than yourself.

            I don’t think what Lady Jane describes is very far from the life I have had the good fortune to live. And I have three children, two grandchildren so far, a third arriving imminently, and more planned in the future.

            One of the purposes people may, and many do, choose for themselves is raising a family.

          • Plumber says:

            @DavidFriedman,
            Devoting yourself to family doesn’t seem very “individualistic” to me, nor the kind SSC hosting you do, or the SCA community you’re a part of.

          • @Plumber:
            Depends on your definition of “individualistic.” There is no inconsistency between believing that each person should control his own life and believing that many of the things one should choose to do with one’s life involve other people.

            Speaking of which, I hope to see you at the March 2nd meetup. Perhaps you can kidnap Scott and bring him too. Wife and children also welcome.

  49. LHN says:

    Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are.

    As the Usenet-era Neumeier’s Law put it, “For any belief, no matter how palpably absurd you find it, there is or has been a proponent who is smarter than you.”

    (Stigler’s Law in turn suggests that the observation will turn out to be older still.)

  50. Dave Baker says:

    This is somewhat separate from the actual subject of your post, Scott (and I don’t have the background knowledge to comment on what sounds like a long and complicated saga). But it seems like an opportune juncture to urge you not to stop doing the great work you’ve been doing on this blog.

    I know (both from reading what they have to say and occasionally from talking with them) that thought leaders and policy makers read this blog and learn from it. You have a real, positive influence on the world, and that matters far more than whatever internet trash decides to take a swing at you. It would not be a good thing if the world lost your voice.

  51. 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.

    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.

    It’s further complicated by half of it being reason or rational empiricism and the other half being terminal values or other preferences and group interests. Conflict theorists far outnumber mistake theorists, and with conflict theory, the side that is on top now has a vested interest in preventing a controversial debate from taking place, and the side that is being subdued for now will occupy any space that tries to discuss its favored non-mainstream topic, leading to further typecasting and attack. Talk about [CONTROVERSIAL TOPIC] in the most neutral, data focused way possible, and ban everyone who tries to draw [UNFORTUNATE CONCLUSIONS], and you’ll still become associated with [UNFORTUNATE CONCLUSIONS] and become an enemy of those trying to prevent [UNFORTUNATE CONCLUSIONS] from manifesting. I don’t think there’s a way of preventing the attacks to begin with, as they are launched by what you would call conflict theorists, who can’t separate [CONTROVERSIAL TOPIC] from [UNFORTUNATE CONCLUSIONS]. Their worldview doesn’t allow for that risk.

    Unfortunately, I think the only people who can go the whole hog are those few who are untouchable financially and socially; people who have plenty at the bank and big bars of gold at home, and no family or friends to speak of.

    • Unfortunately, I think the only people who can go the whole hog are those few who are untouchable financially and socially; people who have plenty at the bank and big bars of gold at home, and no family or friends to speak of.

      Or family and friends who will not break them on the grounds of someone labeling their views as evil.

    • @DavidFriedman

      The family and friends could be loyal but then the accused has to worry about them being attacked too, and even if they believe him, they could still tell him to back down for the sake of peace. The man with nothing to lose is stronger still. Makes me wonder what the eccentric idle rich are doing? Where is our champion? It seems like the kind of personality that allows you to gather the money needed to weather attacks on your income isn’t the same kind of personality to care about this stuff to begin with.

      • Makes me wonder what the eccentric idle rich are doing? Where is our champion?

        Peter Thiel? Paying people not to go to college seems to qualify.
        The Koch brothers?
        George Soros?

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          Donald Trump?

        • albatross11 says:

          Ron Unz has been supporting an alt-right (I guess) blog platform for some years now, which includes Steve Sailer’s blog. I gather Unz himself has gotten into holocaust denial lately, which is somewhere close to as taboo by modern American views as you can get.

          Steve Bannon is another instance of someone who made a pile of money in finance and then used it to finance ideological messaging.

          Interestingly, it doesn’t really take very much money to fund an ideological publication, even a top-notch one. It’s not like you need reporters or bureaus across the globe–you just need smart ideologues who like to write, and there are a lot of those available on the job market.

        • Wait a minute. Aren’t the Weinstein brothers funding an academic publication now? (IDW hub Quillette) Not sure how the chain works here, but clearly funding an academic publication does not line up with Peter’s previous mission. I’m not sure if it’s Peter’s money itself that is going to Quillette though. Maybe someone can help me figure this out.

          • albatross11 says:

            I sure haven’t heard of any such thing going on. Bret Weinstein isn’t wealthy; Eric probably is (given his job), and maybe he’s donated money to Quillette, but I haven’t ever seen/heard him mention it. Quillette was founded independently of them, by Claire Lehman. It’s not an academic publication, it’s an intellectual publication–like The Atlantic or The New Yorker, but with an intellectual slant that’s a little more to the right and a whole lot more opposed to the SJW side of the left than either of those magazines.

  52. manavortex says:

    Hey,
    this is, as required, not an expression as sympathy. Instead, let me say that I think you handled this as well as it could be handled.
    I respect you for being so open about everything. If it was up to me, this blog post would be mandatory reading matter in middle school. If it was up to me, the world would be a culture wars thread where we could agree to disagree and get along. I know it’s not up to me.
    I’ll be out on the ramparts, defending reason and civility against the troll hordes.

    You don’t know me, I don’t know you, I am autistic and European (I’m saying so you know I’m not part of the mob, but that’s probably what part of the mob would say). If I can be of use, don’t hesitate to reach out.

    I’ll be chanting “fuck you” at whomever it might concern now. Keep kicking.

    • Reasoner says:

      I’ll be out on the ramparts, defending reason and civility against the troll hordes.

      I’ll be chanting “fuck you” at whomever it might concern now.

      Do what Scott says, not what he does.

  53. educationrealist says:

    I’ve gone back and forth about commenting on this, but it kind of amused me that someone substituted “Voldemort” for the unspeakable on a post, so here goes. Nothing I say is intended to be in any way critical of Scott. I’m sorry he feels bad about this.

    As someone who actually, no shit, has a risk of being fired for opinions expressed in a blog–the real opinions, not made up pro-Nazi bullshit opinions like Scott was accused of–I’m unsurprised that people tried to get him fired. But while I never read the thread, much less posted it, I’m not sure he’s going to find any relief in having stopped it. The people who will fire Scott on account of learning about this era will not be less likely to fire him because he ended the thread. This post makes it worse, because Scott is clearly not righteously disassociating from the views, but rather encouraging it to exist without his direct involvement.

    Next, I think people should refrain from generalizing about Scott’s experience. As someone who spends a lot of time reading blogs and twitter, and finds all sorts of unpleasant folks everywhere, I am nonetheless put off by many (not all) of the commenters of SSC and lesswrong, etc. They are a whack group. I’m unsurprised that their conversations, untethered from Scott, would attract more whack folks, and that these people would be unhinged and do the stuff he describes. It’s not inevitable that a moderator/publisher would be so threatened.

    For example, Steve Sailer’s comments thread has attracted a lot of open racists. Steve allows anything to go on. He doesn’t have any of the troubles Scott does. Now, Steve (unlike me) has already paid the price for having expressed difficult opinions, so no one can call up and demand he be fired. But he doesn’t get plagued by people endlessly, deal with threats, and so on–and he has about 75% of the followers Scott does on Twitter, and a hefty blog following of his own.

    I have moderated sites in that past as well and never had anything–literally, anything–bad happen until I became a teacher and had to worry about my views. Now, in my case, I was quite unlike Steve and Scott–as in school, I hold that management is best achieved when everyone’s worried that the manager is better at being mean than they are.

    I would attribute a decent chunk of this to the interaction between Scott’s personal attributes and those of his commenting community. Similarly, the horror stories you hear about usually involve “nice” people who tried to be “nice” and “rational” and “evenhanded” about things. They are generally people who value being described as a wonderful person.

    Internet moderation is perhaps best left to people who, nice or not, are untroubled by what others think of them.

    I do indeed worry about the left’s pursuit of economic obliteration. That’s a real concern. But it’s a concern that strikes at any time, and isn’t at all correlated with social media or online discourse. The risk comes from what the crowd does. The victim doesn’t even have to know the crowd, or even play in that space, to be destroyed.

    • shinyclip says:

      Mr. Realist,
      I’m a fan of yours, and have followed you in various blogs commenting over the years. When I think about the subject of this thread, it reminds me of Kling’s pointers to Gurri’s Revolt of the Public.

      In his book, Gurri makes the point that in this new age of information, the mob can form instantly and often mysteriously. Mobs often come to tear down hierarchies, but they almost never come together to do some good work, or build a new hierarchy. Gurri believes that interaction between bottom-up flash mobs and the “industrial age” institutions is going to be one of the main themes of history for the next few decades.

  54. HeelBearCub says:

    First off, doxxing, harassing, threats … that shit sucks. No one should have to go through that, and it sucks that Scott is being affected that way. Fuck those people.

    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.

    What has always rubbed me the wrong way about Scott is his inability to apply this thought process to those whom he says he agrees with. His inability to acknowledge the bad actors across the spectrum and how they lead inevitably to, and even necessitate, certain behaviors.

    And then the utter naivety in “trusting the marketplace of ideas” when the very thing he decries is born right from the marketplace of ideas, along with an infinite number of other horrible ideas. Yes, it’s depressing when you realize that the world isn’t IDEAL. Welcome to the real world, where you things are not the unicorn of the purity of rational thought. It’s messy and unclear and weird.

    Scott keeps coming to this realization over and over when it affects him personally, claims weakness in not living up to his ideals, but fails to realize that it his ideals aren’t reality. He isn’t failing them, they are failing him. He himself is chasing purity ponies, whether he knows it or not.

    • Humbert McHumbert says:

      This would be more constructive if you suggested some better alternative ideals for Scott (and others) to aspire to.

      I’ll add that I’m skeptical that the problem is Scott’s ideals. I share the same ideals, but I’ve been able to avoid provoking shitty internet people, and thus I’ve never had to collect the emotional scars he describes.

      My own take: the best approach is to stay anonymous–truly anonymous and safe–on the internet, and in contexts when you aren’t anonymous, avoid discussing the culture war except in person or with trusted friends. That is the key to maintaining faith in the marketplace of ideas.

      (Nice to see you here, by the way. Your comments here are always worth reading.)

    • Humbert McHumbert says:

      Thinking a bit more about what you said, I’m actually not sure that the ideals of Scott’s that you’re attacking are ones that I actually hold. I don’t actually “trust” the marketplace of ideas, in the sense that I’m not confident that free expression will lead to more widespread acceptance of the truth or to the best overall outcomes. But I’m also not a utilitarian like Scott. I believe in freedom of thought, expression and inquiry as a basic right. I think it’s wrong to control other people’s opportunities to say, read and hear what they want, even when controlling them would bring about the best consequences.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Is the freedom of expression absolute?

        Are ANY rights absolute? What other freedoms can freedom of expression be in tension with?

        Is the freedom of expression in tension with itself? Does your freedom of expression require that I not express myself? Am I required to listen?

        Can all arguments about rights and freedoms be decided at the object level? Or does the subject level matter?

        • Humbert McHumbert says:

          Good questions…

          Is the freedom of expression absolute?

          Are ANY rights absolute?

          No and no. If the greater good at stake is very significant, then it’s OK to violate rights. How much needs to be at stake seems to depend on the right. For it to be OK to murder someone, it has to be a situation where you’re saving a large number of other lives by doing so (maybe 20?). The right we have against murder is very robust IMO.

          The rights we have against paternalism (against other people controlling the details of our lives) are not quite as robust. But they are still fairly robust. If I know that your ill-considered marriage will cause you, your fiance and your eventual children great unhappiness, that doesn’t give me the moral right to rally your neighbors to pressure you into breaking off your engagement, or to threaten to fire you if you get married. There has to be a large amount of imminent harm at stake before it’s permissible to invade someone else’s life and control their personal choices.

          The same goes for controlling what they get to say or listen to, which is another sort of paternalism.

          What other freedoms can freedom of expression be in tension with?

          Certainly it comes into conflict with freedom of association, since it can be paternalistic to cut ties with someone in retaliation for their speech. Firing for speech is the most well-known example, but the phenomenon is more general than that. I’m sure there are other freedoms that can conflict with freedom of expression as well.

          Is the freedom of expression in tension with itself? Does your freedom of expression require that I not express myself?

          Usually no, but sometimes yes. Blackmail is the classic example here. If I know something unseemly about you, normally I have the free speech right to reveal it. But if I reveal it in retaliation for you speaking your mind, I have infringed your right to free speech. Just as I would infringe your right to an abortion if I revealed the unflattering information in retaliation for you getting an abortion.

          Am I required to listen?

          I can’t think of a case in which I would say someone is morally required to listen. I’m actually more concerned about listeners’ rights than speakers’ rights, if anything. That’s what pisses me off about people shouting down Milo. I don’t care as much about his right to speak as I do about his fans’ right to hear him speak if that is their desire.

          Can all arguments about rights and freedoms be decided at the object level?

          I’m inclined to say yes, but I’d be interested to hear an argument to the contrary.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            For it to be OK to murder someone, it has to be a situation where you’re saving a large number of other lives by doing so (maybe 20?).

            I’m inclined to say yes [all arguments about rights and freedoms be decided at the object level]

            Note the self-refutation. The specific details of why you chose to violate the sanction against murder matter to you. As should be obvious, I think rights and freedoms are in tension with each other, and I think these rights and freedoms are in fact poorly described, inadequate to the complexities of life. They are, more than anything, guideposts defining a middle way. Hewing too close to one pulls you from the safe channel.

            As to some of your other points, I will simply say if you have the right to express the thought that you encourage others not associate with me because I am, say, gay, I have the right to encourage others not to associate with you.

            The battles for civil rights are won on the subject level, not the object level. I encourage you to ponder that for a while. There is an engine that exists between the acceptability of speech, and the acceptability of the behavior encouraged by the speech. As humans, and as society, it is simply not true that we can divorce the two.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            @HeelBearCub

            Perhaps you could say more about how you’re demarcating between “object level” and “subject level.” I would have said “you should violate someone’s right to free speech if doing so saves 20 lives from imminent murder” is an object-level description of a decision someone has to make, but we must be using the words in different ways.

            As to some of your other points, I will simply say if you have the right to express the thought that you encourage others not associate with me because I am, say, gay, I have the right to encourage others not to associate with you.

            I don’t believe someone has the (moral) right to encourage people not to associate with you for being gay. You have the right to privacy/lifestyle choice in your sexual orientation, which means it’s wrong for other people to engage in speech that (in addition to its content) de facto punishes you for your sexual orientation. To be clear, this applies in the case where someone is saying “Let’s shun HeelBearCub for being gay,” not in the case where someone argues for the general norm that gay people should be shunned without mentioning your name or drawing people’s attention to you specifically.

            Since, in your example, I’ve violated your rights by waging a campaign of shunning against you for being gay, I would be open to the idea that I deserve some punishment for violating your rights, perhaps including being shunned myself.

            Treating free speech and other personal choices as moral rights, not just legal rights, means they will come into conflict with each other and certain sorts of punishing speech will have to count as wrong because de facto they violate others’ rights. I accept this consequence of my view.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            The battles for civil rights are won on the subject level, not the object level. I encourage you to ponder that for a while. There is an engine that exists between the acceptability of speech, and the acceptability of the behavior encouraged by the speech. As humans, and as society, it is simply not true that we can divorce the two.

            Having pondered this at least for a minute…

            I agree with you that everything that can be done for civil rights needs to be done, as long as it doesn’t involve invading people’s lives and controlling them in ways that matter. I’m not Rand Paul (nor am I any stripe of libertarian), I don’t think the Civil Rights Act is a violation of rights, at least not in any way that should count against it.

            But to your point about speech and action: there is a similar engine between people’s diets and their health. Do you think that makes it alright for others to control what you eat?

            I think it’s OK to use nudges (in the Sunstein sense) to influence what people eat and what they say, but I don’t think we have the right to control those things.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            not in the case where someone argues for the general norm that gay people should be shunned without mentioning your name or drawing people’s attention to you specifically

            I’m not saying Humbert McHumbert should be shunned in particular, just everyone who shares their views, of which class they are a member.

            This is a distinction without a difference. It’s nonsense.

            If I say I favor banning Nazis from YouTube, or Culture Warriors from SSC, I think you will moan just the same about the imposition.

            Do you think that makes it alright for others to control what you eat?

            Compare: If you value your health, I recommend not eating sweets to excess. Portion control is important and I encourage you to avoid all-you-can-eat restaurants. If a restaurant you frequent is increasing their portion sizes or converting to buffet style serving, I encourage you to voice your displeasure or quit going there.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            I’m not saying Humbert McHumbert should be shunned in particular, just everyone who shares their views, of which class they are a member.

            This is a distinction without a difference. It’s nonsense.

            Not at all. It’s the distinction between advocating doing something wrong and actually doing something wrong. When Singer claims it’s good to commit infanticide against disabled babies, that isn’t the same as killing disabled babies (nor is it the same as telling you that you should kill your disabled baby right now). When someone claims it’s good to Twitter mob IDWers, that isn’t the same as Twitter mobbing Sam Harris, nor the same as telling others “You should mob Sam Harris right now.”

            In First Amendment cases, SCOTUS draws essentially the same distinction between incitement to imminent lawlessness and advocating lawlessness in the abstract. You may think it’s a bullshit distinction in some sense, but it certainly isn’t a distinction without any difference.

            (To be clear, there will be some contexts in which the abstract claim “Nazis deserve to be punched” will count as incitement to imminent lawlessness. For example, if you say it pointedly in front of an angry mob that has Joe Nazi surrounded. I’d say the same thing about shunning. Writing the words “gay people should be shunned” on George Takei’s Facebook wall is “inciting” people to violate George’s rights.)

            If I say I favor banning Nazis from YouTube, or Culture Warriors from SSC, I think you will moan just the same about the imposition.

            I will moan that you are advocating an imposition, which makes you mistaken about what is the right thing to do, but I won’t accuse you of actually imposing against anyone. You wouldn’t be doing something wrong, you’d be advocating doing something wrong.

            (I don’t think banning culture warriors from SSC would really be doing something wrong, btw, because SSC is very far from being a de facto public forum or private government in the way that YouTube is.)

            Compare: If you value your health, I recommend not eating sweets to excess. Portion control is important and I encourage you to avoid all-you-can-eat restaurants. If a restaurant you frequent is increasing their portion sizes or converting to buffet style serving, I encourage you to voice your displeasure or quit going there.

            IMO, this sort of thing is completely ethical if asserted in the abstract, or to a handful of people around a dinner table, but it’s unethical if it extends to publicly organizing a boycott of a specific restaurant for these reasons.

            Although if the harm being done by the restaurant were more severe and imminent (if they were putting arsenic in the food or something) then the harm done by the restaurant could justify paternalistic impositions like organizing a boycott.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            It’s the distinction between advocating doing something wrong and actually doing something wrong.

            Look, at some point the rubber has to hit the road, and you need to admit?, perhaps, what the word “advocate” means. It is recommendation of specific actions or policies. If I advocate that coal fired power plants cease operating, I really mean that I want all the coal fired power plants cease operating. This doesn’t mean I have anything against the people working in the coal industry, but it does mean I do not want them to employed in the coal industry at some point in the future.

            Or conversely, when I say that I advocate that twitter should, say, ban pro-white-supremacist accounts … it has no meaning. Pro white supremacist accounts can only exist the abstract, but not in reality.

            This is what I mean when I say these things tend to be decided at the subject level, and not object. It is all well and good to say that NAMBLA members should have the right to advocate for the possession of child porn on twitter, but in order for that right to truly exist, you are going to have to win on the question of how acceptable the behavior is. This is not an immediate all at once thing, but a slow ratchet effect. I think this is actually useful and correct. (ETA: I should perhaps expand on this idea)

            Bring the issue of government into this is, in my mind, a useful red herring. Certainly the specter of official government censorship looms over discussions of free speech, but what the government may do and what the private citizen may do are necessarily distinct.

          • If I advocate that coal fired power plants cease operating, I really mean that I want all the coal fired power plants cease operating.

            “Want” covers quite a lot of different things. There is a considerable range between wanting someone to die and being willing, if convenient, to kill him.

            There is a similar range between believing that it would be a good thing if there were fewer coal powered power plants and believing that nobody should be permitted to operate one.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            Look, at some point the rubber has to hit the road, and you need to admit?, perhaps, what the word “advocate” means. It is recommendation of specific actions or policies. If I advocate that coal fired power plants cease operating, I really mean that I want all the coal fired power plants cease operating. This doesn’t mean I have anything against the people working in the coal industry, but it does mean I do not want them to employed in the coal industry at some point in the future.

            I don’t know if I said anything to indicate I would disagree with any of this, but I certainly don’t disagree with it.

            This is what I mean when I say these things tend to be decided at the subject level, and not object. It is all well and good to say that NAMBLA members should have the right to advocate for the possession of child porn on twitter, but in order for that right to truly exist, you are going to have to win on the question of how acceptable the behavior is.

            “That right” = the right to possess child porn? Or the right to advocate for the possession of child porn?

            If you mean the former, we don’t disagree at all. For the right to possess child porn to exist, it has to be OK to possess child porn. That doesn’t have any implications for our disagreement about free speech, though, so I suspect you mean the latter thing.

            If you do mean the latter thing, that sounds like you’re saying that in order to have the right to advocate X, X must be a good policy (or is it that X must be widely accepted as a good policy?). But surely that’s not true. We clearly have the right to advocate something like a 30 mph national speed limit, even though everyone knows it would be a bad idea.

            This is not an immediate all at once thing, but a slow ratchet effect. I think this is actually useful and correct. (ETA: I should perhaps expand on this idea)

            I think perhaps you should. I don’t think I’m getting what you’re saying here. I’m not sure what “this” is referring to in either of the two sentences before the parentheses.

            Bring the issue of government into this is, in my mind, a useful red herring.

            I completely agree. My only mention of the government was to bring in a distinction (between advocating wrongful action and inciting imminent wrongful action) that has been useful in 1st Amendment law, which I also think is useful in understanding the rights we have against non-government censorship. I didn’t mean to imply that individual or cultural principles against censorship should follow the same model as principles against government censorship. Indeed, it’s impossible for them to follow the same model for reasons you’ve already pointed out. On the government censorship level, legal rights can’t conflict. On the individual/cultural censorship level, on the other hand, there is a sense in which moral rights can conflict.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Humbert McHumbert:

            the right to advocate for the possession of child porn?

            The “right” to advocate for the possession of child porn … in private spaces and without the loss of association. Again, there is consistent conflation of your rights in relation to the government, and your “rights” in relation to other individuals.

            But, of course, the way the world actually works the practical effect is also that you are far more likely to be punished for any criminal behavior if you advocate for this kind of criminal behavior. This is an “is”, regardless of whether it is an “ought”.

            This is not an immediate all at once thing, but a slow ratchet effect. I think this is actually useful and correct.

            So, to expand on this … whether we look at the rights of gays, the rights of blacks, the rights of women, even, say, doctors … the rights of any traditionally disenfranchised community or group, there is a progression.

            First they are essentially disenfranchised, and they are disenfranchised because their existence or actions are seen as inferior or even evil. In order to change this state of affairs, it is useless to simply assert a principle of rights, you have to also make the positive case that you or your actions are not harmful or evil. Successfully making this case has been essential to the civil right of women, gays, minorities such as black persons in the US, etc.

            As you make this case, the lowest hanging fruit is naturally picked first. “Blacks are not inhuman chattel, but humans, even though they are inferior” is the first step in a very long process. You may say that the US should have made this journey faster, and I would agree, but it was a failure to make the positive argument, to convince others that, in fact, blacks are not inferior humans, that led to this slow progress.

            Compare this to the rights of horses or dogs. The prevention of animal cruelty has come a long way, but I still don’t want my dog driving a car. You would need to make the positive case that they can do this well, not an argument based on rights. There is a trade off argument on a harm/benefit scale.

            If we compare this to the rights of pedophiles, we can see this play out on a micro level around the issues of exclusion zones for those convicted of sex crimes where some towns have only a few hundred square feet under a highway bypass where they can reside “legally”. This argument, that these people are being harmed without benefit or reason, is key.

            Another easy example is the rights of gays. In micro, the most recently completed step on the scale, which established the right to marriage, was an argument that depended on establishing that gays marrying was not bad, harmful, evil. Before that was established, people weren’t going to grant it as a right.

            We can see this in the negative as well. The right of men to hit their wives. The right’s of parents to hit their children. The rights of new parents to allow their children to die of exposure.

            This is probably overlong, and yet not complete, so I will stop here and hope that I have given you a sense of what I am talking about.

          • 10240 says:

            As to some of your other points, I will simply say if you have the right to express the thought that you encourage others not associate with me because I am, say, gay, I have the right to encourage others not to associate with you.

            @HeelBearCub There is a difference that makes it a particularly good idea to have a norm against shunning people for speech. Let’s say that a society wrongly shuns people who do a certain thing X (such as being gay, or saying a certain thing etc.). If X is not an act of speech, then those who think it’s wrong to shun people for X can still try to convince people that it’s wrong, and they succeed, it won’t be shunned anymore (or at least less than before).

            However, let’s say that X, the thing people wrongly get shunned for, is “arguing for proposition Y”. Then it’s really hard for you to argue that it’s wrong to shun people for arguing for Y, because you can’t make a strong case without making at least some weak arguments for Y (especially since in a society which shuns arguing for Y, people know a lot of arguments against Y, and the dangers of Y). But if you make arguments for Y, you get shunned yourself. This problem is unique to societal rules against speech, specifically against making certain arguments (banning profanity or insults is not a problem). The societal rule becomes self-preserving, preventing arguing for its own lifting.

            Except if we have a general norm that people shouldn’t get shunned for speech. Then you can argue against shunning people for arguing for Y by referring to the general rule, without making any arguments for Y.

            Another general norm could be that it’s wrong to shun people for making arguing something, except if they are encouraging shunning some people. Under this norm, it would be OK to shun people who encourage ostracizing gay people. With this rule, we only have a problem if it would be right to ostracize people for doing a particular thing Z, but society currently wrongly shuns people who argue that people who do Z should be ostracized. If you think that ostracism is a bad way to fight anything except encouragement of ostracism, you may support this variant.

            Of course it’s possible that Y is actually wrong and dangerous, and you may worry that if we don’t shun people who argue for Y, they might successfully convince others to support Y. However, as Scott wrote, open debate is the only asymmetric weapon in an ideological debate, the only weapon that gives an inherent advantage to those who are right over those who are wrong.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            @HeelBearCub

            The “right” to advocate for the possession of child porn … in private spaces and without the loss of association

            The right to do something = the right to do it without being punished for doing it.

            Certain ways of refusing to associate with other people can (de facto) function as punishments for this purpose. That’s what the people who drafted the civil rights act understood, and that’s why you’re not allowed to fire someone because of their religion. They have the right to their religious beliefs, which means they have the right not to be punished for their religious beliefs, which means they have the right not to be fired for their beliefs.

            If society casts you out because of your religious beliefs, your freedom of religion has been infringed. If society casts you out because you had an abortion, your right to an abortion has been infringed. If society casts you out because of something you said, your right to free expression has been infringed.

            (Now if a particular small community casts you out because of your abortion or your speech, that doesn’t usually do much to violate your rights. So if you’re only talking about small private spaces, then we basically agree. If you’re considering YouTube a private space, on the other hand, then we disagree.)

            Again, there is consistent conflation of your rights in relation to the government, and your “rights” in relation to other individuals.

            I’m not conflating these things! I acknowledge that these are two separate rights–the first one is a legal right, the second is a moral right. I’m saying we have both rights. (And as with most legal rights, the reason we ought to enshrine it in the law is to protect the moral right.)

            First they are essentially disenfranchised, and they are disenfranchised because their existence or actions are seen as inferior or even evil. In order to change this state of affairs, it is useless to simply assert a principle of rights, you have to also make the positive case that you or your actions are not harmful or evil. Successfully making this case has been essential to the civil right of women, gays, minorities such as black persons in the US, etc.

            Ah, I see what you’re saying now. I essentially agree with all of it. I don’t think it’s completely useless to assert from the position of an untermensch that you have rights, but it isn’t a great way in practice to persuade people to recognize your rights.

            I would just say that in the case of gay marriage or women’s suffrage, it’s only because people weren’t thinking straight that gay people had to prove to anyone that they were harmless in order to gain the right to marry, or that women had to prove to anyone that they were capable in order to gain the right to vote. An enlightened populace would have understood that even if gay people are harmful, they have the right to choose their lifestyle, and even if women are less competent, they have the right to representation. Same goes for black people and voting (or lunch counters for that matter).

          • HeelBearCub says:

            An enlightened populace

            As I said at the very beginning,

            Yes, it’s depressing when you realize that the world isn’t IDEAL. Welcome to the real world, where … things are not the unicorn of the purity of rational thought.

            This is not how the world works. The populace is not and cannot be “enlightened”. People die. People are born. There is a constant struggle to re-enlighten people.

            It is all very well and good to think that the populace will not actually act on the exhortations of the demagogues. History shows us that the demagogues are quite successful at turning the “enlightened” into the oppressor. If it is not considered unacceptable to say the parasites of society should be purged, well very soon people begin to think that it is acceptable to actually do so.

            As to the conflation of government action and non-government action, you managed to do it again, arguing for just that, forced association by the government because of protected status. Unless you are arguing that speech, any speech, should somehow make you a member of a protected class, I fail to see why you are bringing this in.

            If you have the right to speak, and I have the right to associate, those rights may very well be in tension with each other. You want me to cede my right to associate in service of your preferred right of speech. In other words you think I am not allowed to pay attention to your words when I choose whether or not to associate with you.

            Now, I do think there are some potentially actionable wrinkles when the public square essentially ceases to exist. You get at this when you start talking about YouTube, and I do think we can make a case that the modern internet is essentially the modern public square, and that starts to have implications about the right to be able engage in discourse and commerce over the internet.

            I don’t think this means that YouTube is required to host any and all speech, however. This would be akin to saying that a local theater house must accept the production of any play, by any playwright.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            @HeelBearCub

            It is all very well and good to think that the populace will not actually act on the exhortations of the demagogues. History shows us that the demagogues are quite successful at turning the “enlightened” into the oppressor. If it is not considered unacceptable to say the parasites of society should be purged, well very soon people begin to think that it is acceptable to actually do so.

            I don’t consider myself terribly optimistic about human nature, but I am optimistic enough to be only about 20% confident that your prediction here is correct, starting from where we’re at today. I also doubt the ability of censors (both public and private) to keep the demagogues in check. So I am not willing to violate the demagogues’ right to free expression (moral right, not legal right, I’m not conflating the two) in an attempt to avert the purge.

            If I shared your degree of pessimism about the public and your evident confidence in censors, I might ultimately agree with your view, since I do think it can be OK to violate rights to avert great disaster.

            As to the conflation of government action and non-government action, you managed to do it again, arguing for just that, forced association by the government because of protected status.

            No, I didn’t conflate them. I mentioned the legal right to freedom of religion because freedom of thought is a moral right, and the legal right to freedom of religion (including the enshrining of religion as a protected class) exists to protect the moral right to freedom of thought. I’m sorry that wasn’t clear, but there is no conflation happening.

            Sometimes legal rights exist because we have moral rights. Murder is a crime because you have a moral right not to be murdered. The same goes for free expression and free exercise of religion, on my view. Religious discrimination is a crime because it’s morally wrong to punish people for their beliefs. Censorship is a crime because it’s morally wrong to punish people for their thoughts. (Whether this was the original justification for these laws is certainly debatable, but I maintain it is the reason to keep these rights on the law books.)

            If you have the right to speak, and I have the right to associate, those rights may very well be in tension with each other. You want me to cede my right to associate in service of your preferred right of speech. In other words you think I am not allowed to pay attention to your words when I choose whether or not to associate with you.

            For certain forms of association–the kind where cutting someone off is harmful enough to be a punishment, or disables someone’s ability to communicate in public–that’s exactly what I’m saying. I think the right to freedom of thought is a more central and important right than the right to freedom of association, so when the two conflict, I prefer to see the former win out.

            Does this seem wrong to you? If it were legal to fire someone for their religious beliefs, would you say it was moral to do so? If not, what’s the big difference between their religious beliefs and their political beliefs?

            I don’t think this means that YouTube is required to host any and all speech, however. This would be akin to saying that a local theater house must accept the production of any play, by any playwright.

            If it weren’t for limitations of time and space in the theater, that’s exactly what I would say, assuming it’s the only theater in town, or the only one that attracts an audience. Maybe they shouldn’t be legally required to host everyone, but they are morally required to do it. Since YouTube has no such limitations, I think it should be a completely open forum. Except for threats/slander/etc

          • 10240 says:

            You want me to cede my right to associate in service of your preferred right of speech.

            I’m not Humbert, and I phrase this differently. I wouldn’t say you don’t have a right not to associate with someone, I’m trying to convince you that it’s a bad idea on your part to do so, at least if the purpose is to punish him for his speech/thought.

            Similarly, I don’t say that Youtube doesn’t have a right to decide what content to host, I say that if you are currently putting pressure on Youtube not to host certain content, it would be better on the long term if you stopped doing so, and perhaps instead put pressure on them to be content-neutral.

          • albatross11 says:

            +1

            I don’t think there’s any way to make a law or rule that says you must never stop associating with someone because of their beliefs, and I don’t even think such a law/rule would be a good thing. I’m saying that from where we as a culture are right now, I think we would benefit from less of that sort of thing, not more. (Specifically, I think the movement pushing the idea that people should stop associating with others for having fairly small political differences is both destructive and also is likely to backfire in ways they and I really won’t like.)

            This is true in the same way that I’m more-or-less libertarian and pacifist in the current US, but don’t want to abolish either the state or the military–I’d just like fewer victimless crime laws and fewer dumb voluntary wars.

          • and even if women are less competent, they have the right to representation.

            Do eight-year olds have the right to vote? That’s what the argument appears to imply.

          • Aapje says:

            Interestingly, one of the arguments of the National Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage was actually that women would lose female privileges if they would vote. This even includes the privilege of not having to bother to vote (without losing out).

            It was also argued that men’s interests were generally the same as women’s, so female suffrage was superfluous. Interestingly, the suffragettes had wildly varying ideas about what would happen, where most of those expectations didn’t come about. For example, one prominent suffragette thought that there would be no more war.

            I also think that we need to keep in mind that our individualist outlook on life is not universal. In the past, people would live in a (small) group much more often than now (including marriage) & married people were much more considered to be one. For example, under coverture, the head of the household would answer for all civil lawsuits, also when the wife violated the law.

            EDIT: Also see this very interesting article

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            Do eight-year olds have the right to vote? That’s what the argument appears to imply.

            I was assuming it was self-evident that typical women exceed any bar of competence that doesn’t rule out below-average men.

          • Aapje says:

            @Humbert McHumbert

            There are also adults who are less competent than most children over a certain age. Yet the former may vote while the children may not.

            Your argument presumes that we can or want to use IQ tests to restrict or allow certain rights, but in practice our laws actually simply look at age. Competency tests are somewhat problematic (Jim Crow).

            If it is OK to disenfranchise children who are smarter than some or even many adults, because collectively, we don’t consider children smart enough; then why would it be wrong to disenfranchise women who are smarter than some or even many men, because collectively, we don’t consider women smart enough?

            PS. Note that I’m not arguing that women actually are less smart or should be disenfranchised, but rather, I think your objection is not correct.

    • I believe in freedom of thought, expression and inquiry as a basic right. I think it’s wrong to control other people’s opportunities to say, read and hear what they want, even when controlling them would bring about the best consequences.

      I wonder how many people who believe in the same thing can come up with totally different justifications for it. You could believe strongly that the marketplace of ideas produces the best ideas through intellectual competition, and/or you could believe that the marketplace of ideas is good because it’s a basic human right to have such freedoms. Personally, I support it partly because I subjectively value other’s autonomy, but also because it represents a truce between warring factions; if you don’t try and erase me from the public space, I won’t try and erase you from it.

      The alternative is that somebody wins and imposes their version of a censorship regime that may not be to my liking. From this cynical perspective, an obligation to mutual freedom is the best not because it produces the best consequences (for whom?), but because the potential outcomes for both parties aren’t so dire so long as we maintain that obligation. Perhaps, given total unassailable power, both parties would be better off utterly crushing the enemy and having their values completely unhindered in their expression, but absent that, if they stepped forward to do so, the enemy would step forward at the same time with the same intent. So if you want to get really cynical, classical liberal freedom is mostly MAD doctrine, and not the beautiful flowering of the human soul.

      • Humbert McHumbert says:

        Right, these are the utilitarian reasons that make more sense to me: if it comes down to a fight over who gets to censor, the wrong side might win or else the war might stretch on with endless collateral damage. That seems a lot more plausible than “truth always wins in a free market of ideas.”

        • I don’t think anyone believes that truth always wins in a the marketplace of ideas–that’s a straw man. The claim is that the marketplace of ideas is a better way of getting to truth than any available alternative.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            Correction accepted. It still seems like this could easily turn out false depending on cultural, technological and biological factors.

          • I am claiming that it’s true ex-ante, not necessarily ex-post.

            On some particular issue you might end up with a particularly wise censor pushing views closer to truth than they would otherwise be. But I don’t think that’s the way to bet.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            Surely there are some cases where we can know ex ante that censorship is beneficial. Formulas for making nerve gas and such. (I realize that’s not a case of “the truth losing out in the marketplace of ideas,” but one could imagine similar situations where a false meme is known to be particularly virulent or something.)

          • Surely there are some cases where we can know ex ante that censorship is beneficial. Formulas for making nerve gas and such.

            The question I’m trying to answer isn’t whether a particular act of censorship can be beneficial. It’s whether one can establish institutions with the power to censor that will, on average, do more good than harm.

          • Murphy says:

            @Humbert McHumbert

            Here’s the biggest secret of them all: Most things like that aren’t even kept secret. Not really.

            If you want a formula for nerve gas there’s big, incredibly boring chemistry reference books that will tell you all the information you need to know to brew it. It won’t be under the title “how to brew nerve gas”, it’s under a section with a much more boring and technical name. I remember the day I realized this during a postgrad degree…

            if you want to know how to construct a custom virus from fragments of DNA or breed a super-deadly strain of a virus…. there’s big, incredibly boring reference books, likely available at any university library that will give you all the info you need.

            The great barrier standing between civilization and nutters who want to watch the world burn is built from tedium.

            There is censorship… but it focuses on taking those things hidden behind a wall of tedium and stopping people from providing simple how-to guides that any moron could follow.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            It’s whether one can establish institutions with the power to censor that will, on average, do more good than harm.

            Unless you are now referring to Scott as an “institution”, this is rhetorical trickery.

          • albatross11 says:

            Murphy:

            Also, I think there’s a fair bit of practical knowledge you’d need to (say) take the sequence for smallpox and bring back smallpox and start spreading it (even though the sequence has been published). Acquiring that practical knowledge takes several years of hard work, and hardly any of the people who go through that work are working toward the goal of bringing back smallpox.

            Interestingly, we’ve seen a biological weapons terror attack in the US. Assuming the feds got the right guy[1], it was someone with the right background (a PhD in microbiology) and with access to anthrax spores (he worked at USAMRID–the US’ bioweapons research facility). He could have killed more people by nodding off on the beltway during rush hour.

            There was also a Japanese cult who tried various biological and chemical attacks on Japanese society for like a decade, with members with all the requisite knowledge–most of their attemtped attacks just made a few people sick, who went to the hospital and either got better or died mysteriously. Only when they released nerve gas on a subway (in a really unsophisticated way) did they get noticed and stamped out.

            I take the lesson here to be that the technical knowledge about how to do these things is out there, but also that successful attacks require a lot more knowledge than is found in textbooks.

            [1] He committed suicide and then the feds announced he was the attacker, so it’s quite possible they just saw a quick and easy way to close an open case using someone who couldn’t contest their claims anymore.

        • martinw says:

          The truth does not always win. Sometimes an entire society adopts some crazy idea or ideology which, a few years or decades later, everybody agrees was wrong and caused a lot of damage.

          But that’s exactly why you want to have a very strong ethos that suppressing ideas is always bad, even for ideas which everybody agrees are stupid. And that whenever someone is trying to attack freedom of speech itself, they’re probably the bad guys.

          Because even if you are correct that all of the ideas which are currently being suppressed for being stupid, are indeed stupid, you never know when your society is going to need that safety valve again.

          Also, this.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @Forward Synthesis:

        I can’t recall where you fall on the AnCap scale, so to speak, but if we want to talk about the marketplace of ideas as a marketplace, most generally accept that markets function best with regulations.

        Of course the more salient point here is that what you are referring to as “censorship” isn’t even that. It itself is market action. It’s far more like offering the opinion that someone’s milk product contains melamine, will sicken and may kill you, and people should not buy the product.

        • I can’t recall where you fall on the AnCap scale, so to speak, but if we want to talk about the marketplace of ideas as a marketplace, most generally accept that markets function best with regulations.

          I’m really a moderate libertarian (too statist for libertarians, too libertarian for normals). Let me clarify a little (or a lot).

          I don’t think we can aim for “functioning best” when it comes to the ideaspace because the disagreement about what that means is fundamental to politics. You’ve kind of reached the lowest level at that point. I don’t want the government to make any combinations of words in of themselves illegal or subject to penalty, because I don’t trust any political power to enact a censorship regime I could personally tolerate. With something so fundamental I would be trusting the specific government with too much at that point. I need to preserve avenues for my factional interests to be able to fight back against tyranny and therefore speech and arms are schelling fences to me.

          Nothing is absolute, of course; free speech is totally and utterly ephemeral outside of the power of the state. The only absolutism exists within a context. When we call things “absolute” – if we aren’t deluding ourselves – then we are doing so in the context of a logically contrived scenario. In my ideal state no combination of words would be illegal in of itself, and so I could go as far as to combine the words “kill”, with the words “the”, and the words “President” in any order I chose to, and this might get me a visit from some government agents to ask me what my intention was, and/or it might get me put on the list, and any number of actions to determine whether I have the credible means to do so, all short of actually making the combination of words worth prison time and or a fine in of themselves. I’m not sure if your First Amendment allows for exactly that much freedom, but based off FBI behavior, some kind of credible threat criteria seems to get applied.

          This itself could be considered a form of regulation on speech. The question is what the parameters are. Terms like “free speech absolutism” have a sensical meaning only if you allow for absolutism to be contained in something, and allow for it to be contextually absolute, rather than for it be absolute in some grand, inalienable sense (the great mistake of our liberal predecessors was to frame rights in exactly the latter sense).

          I accept marketplace regulations in line with a principle of proximate physical harm and invasion of others property. For example, we can have regulations against externalities like pollution because they both proximately harm people on an objective physical level by invading their lungs with particulates, and because they invade others property. Since property rights themselves are enforced by the state I don’t see a problem with the state regulating certain emissions. If something exits your property it necessarily enters other property, whether those of individuals or something defined to be collective.

          Where it gets dicey is when something is no longer the proximate cause, and we have to start getting into elaborate competing theories, and trade-off matrices about what caused what, and who should pay for it, and how we should solve it. I don’t want the government to legislate on these grounds. Wide disagreement and pre-existing competition of ideas shouldn’t be grounds to settle it with democratic force, but grounds not to. You could argue philosophically what counts as proximate, but it’s only where there is next to total agreement that the state should lay down the line on regulation. Eventually you run out of principles, because total consistency is absolutely impossible, and at the lowest level we reach terminal values when we have to start delineating things like “next to total”, and I’m happy to ignore and crush the less than 1% of people who think raw sewage is harmless to the human body.

          Where it gets insane and not just dicey would be when you extend the harm principle out to cover emotional harm, because then you are in the realms of total subjectivity; a knife cuts me the same as you, but words that wound one person will glance off another. Feasibly we could come up with some objective measure of emotional reaction by measuring brainwaves or something, but in which case you’d have to apply a different system of laws to different emotional tolerance castes, and then we’re getting into wacky never gonna happen’ sci-fi dystopia territory.

          Of course the more salient point here is that what you are referring to as “censorship” isn’t even that. It itself is market action. It’s far more like offering the opinion that someone’s milk product contains melamine, will sicken and may kill you, and people should not buy the product.

          I agree with this. I wasn’t really arguing against the idea that Scott is being hurt by the marketplace of ideas. What’s happening here is a consequence of that marketplace. I was interested in what Humbert said about the justification for the marketplace of ideas per se, and why we have a marketplace of ideas free from government censorship at all. What private actions count as censorship is the issue that you brought up that ultimately started the thread when you questioned why Scott doesn’t realize the nature of the beast.

          If you say something and then a load of people say that it’s evil, then that is still part of the marketplace of ideas, and they haven’t censored you in any substantial sense. You could react to what they are saying and refuse to continue your rhetoric, and we sometimes call that self-censoring, but there’s only so much room for manuevering before literally every interaction that alters what you would have said is some form of micro-censorship. But that would be silly.

          People can recognize a targetted campaign to try and get someone to shut up though. It’s still part of the marketplace of ideas, but then so is telling the people calling Scott evil that they are evil, and so on ad finitum. If you close physical conflict by having a marketplace of ideas and making it illegal to attack others to shut them up, they will still necessarily war in other ways. War eternal! Combatants all!

          That’s why I say the marketplace of ideas is not most useful for achieving some kind of “best function” but for preventing what is under dispute in that very market from being settled. No one wants morality to be settled unless it accords to their values to begin with.

          To paraphrase memetic Churchill: freedom is the worst condition of all, except for everything else that has been tried.

  55. Vorkon says:

    I’ve been subscribed to the subreddit for some time, but rarely actually read it and tend to prefer the conversation here, (even if I haven’t been able to participate as much as I’d like recently, due to limited connectivity on a deployment) largely because I feel that reddit-style up/down-voting discourages the kind of conversation I’m interested in, and has other negative consequences that go along with it, (among which, incidentally, is the ability of bad actors to point directly to a comment and hold how many upvotes it has as evidence of the moderators being Nazis, despite a lack of context for why those upvotes may have been made, but that is beside the point) so I’m not necessarilly the best person to eulogize the CW thread.

    That said, even with those restrictions I know I’ve seen several very interesting conversations arise from that space, and I know that if I followed it more closely I’d have been a party to many more, so I’m definitely sad to see it go.

    I don’t think that closing down the thread was a good move, but Scott already laid out my reasoning for why this is so in the post above (i.e. “don’t negotiate with terrorists”) and I can totally accept and understand his reasoning that, although he knows this, he had to do it anyway for his own mental health and well-being, so I won’t go into any more detail than that. I just felt that I should say something, for the record.

    Also, I know that Scott doesn’t want expressions of sympathy, so in lieu of that, please allow me to offer some unsolicited and possibly ill-informed observations and advice: I don’t think the move back to San Francisco was good for you. I obviously don’t know you personally, but you can definitely see it in the content you’ve been producing. It’s still great, mind you, but it’s also been filled with a constant air of paranoia and concern about what your friends will think about it, which it didn’t have to nearly the same extent before the move. I obviously have no idea how much of that is from increased online criticism (which I assume was already there to some extent, but may have become more pronounced recently) and how much is from meatspace interactions, and I’m sure I’m unaware of plenty of other factors, but even if I’m 100% mistaken on the causation, the correlation between the timing of the move and the change in content is definitely there. If I knew you well enough to offer good life advice, I would either suggest that you move out, or that you cut back on blogging and online interaction in general to focus on your personal life and career. I apologize for playing armchair psychologist (to an actual psychologist, no less!) and offering unsolicited advice to someone I don’t know personally, because I generally think it’s dumb when other people do that, but based on what you’ve been writing I am somewhat concerned, so I felt I would be remiss not to at least say something.

  56. rachelhaywire says:

    Unfortunately, this kind of thing has the market effect of bringing everyone to the dull “new center” in which the chief complaint is that leftists are mentally ill. We all deserve better as members of the neurodiverse class, and yet…

  57. Radical creative/artistic aesthetic expression exist on the very edge that you paint as “complainers.” Reallocating culture from the edge to the center ends in a million Fyre Festivals that all look identical. It is only when the edge becomes the center that you can understand the potential of the new aesthetic you are hinting at, and that cannot be done by whining about radicals 24/7. Whining about radicals is what the center does in order to maintain its position in society. “Look at those unstable radicals and how unhinged they are.” That is the center. There is nothing creative about that, and I suggest you engage with something more vitalistic. That might require going to places that you consider too much of a risk.

  58. Miles says:

    In the interests of respecting your desire for no sympathy, I’ll offer praise and gratitude instead.

    You are an insightful and prolific writer and routinely produce fascinating insights which help coalesce my disparate thoughts into novel understanding.

    Thanks for your writing, I hope you will continue.

  59. tayfie says:

    @Scott

    This may validate your own worst impression of these actions, but I think it true and necessary to do that. I say this from a position of care.

    You have been a coward by bending to the whims of weak people. What kinds of people have time to harass you but losers? I tell you this because I think your writing and the community you have built are valuable. Giving in to pressure is a betrayal of Niceness, Community, and Civilization. If you want these things, you need to defend them. You need to sacrifice for them. You are one of the few in a position to do so, and you did not do that today. Whatever threats people made, you shut down this space. You abandoned members of your community for personal convenience.

    Do you really believe your ideals? If so, what are you willing to sacrifice for them? Actions like this give the impression “not much”. Have a backup plan, because these people doing this to you won’t stop. It will get worse, and reacting this way emboldens your enemies and weakens your friends. It’s blood in the water. If you don’t stand against this kind of nonsense, you may as well just go dark and quit writing.

    Are people threatening you physically? Learn to defend yourself..
    Are people threatening you economically? Find other means to live.
    Are people threatening you socially? Make better friends.

    Frankly, I hope something bad will happen to you, not enough to do lasting harm, but enough to inspire you to fight. Please fight.

    • Murphy says:

      This is 100% internet tough guy bollox.

      I’m taking the true and necessary defenses on this one.

      It’s easy to demand bravery and self-sacrifice from others when it costs you exactly nothing.

      Are people threatening you physically? Learn to defend yourself..

      There’s no defense from some nutter walking up behind you one day and putting a bullet in the back of your head.

      Are people threatening you economically? Find other means to live.

      How much of your income do you personally volunteer to support Scott long term if someone convinces his boss he needs to be fired to avoid ‘controversy’ or thinks that the cause would be served by throwing a firebomb through a window of the clinic.

      You don’t get to volunteer other people to fight battles you’d like to see fought.

      Try sticking your own neck out.

      You’re acting little better than women who used to hand out white feathers.

    • cuke says:

      This view makes me really uncomfortable as a response to Scott sharing the harm that’s come to him.

      You are entitled to your view.

      I strongly support and encourage people taking steps to take care of themselves, however they do that best. And I strongly support the idea that we are the best people to determine how to best take care of ourselves, not other people.

      I’m struck by the flavor of responses to Scott’s post that essentially have called him cowardly, naive, or offer up a whole host of unsolicited judgment and advice about what he “should” do. This one goes so far as to wish him MORE harm. I know people do this all the time in the face of someone else’s pain, but it’s not a good look and I’d love to see this space encourage a norm away from this kind of thing.

    • The Nybbler says:

      If you’re going to play Internet Tough Guy, I want to know your credentials. Have you ever gone up against these people, or another group with similar tactics? Have they ever credibly threatened you and/or taken actions against you, economically, physically, or socially? Or has this ever happened to someone really close to you?

      If not, I don’t think you’re really in a position to make that post. It’s easy to be courageous when you’re not facing the threat.

      • albatross11 says:

        +1

        Everyone’s got a plan ’till they get punched in the face.

      • Aapje says:

        Exactly, either he proves that he is taught in an ancient Indian fighting tradition and has achieved enlightenment or GTFO.

        😛

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          If you spoke to me in person this way, I would break your arm. I’m from a warrior culture. We have extracted respect from our enemies at the point of a sword for a thousand years, and are feared the world over by those who have had the misfortune to cross us. Go on. Purge the rest of your disgusting filth here, where we can all see it. And hope you are never stupid enough to say this to my face, because I will not be amused.

          Back off, back down, and show some fucking respect — or, in time, that respect will be extracted, as with all things, at the point of a sword. And for the people saying “internet tough guy”, no, I’m pretty fucking tough in person — 20 years of martial arts starting at 8, and I can casually bounce around Krav Maga instructors 20 years my junior, and have done in the last year or so. I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents, and backed down one such group who tried to harass me on the street last year.

          • Plumber says:

            Oh wow, I’m from a warrior culture too!

            It manifests by once a year we have a parade and we give out green shirts that are worn mostly by guys of Chinese descent who join us in the parade in solidarity and because it’s San Francisco, and we dye beer green on that day for some reason.

            Oh! We also eat corned beef…

            ….which was introduced to our ancestors by immigrants from eastern European countries when they came to the U.S.A. but we claim it as ours because it’s tasty and who wants mutton anyway, and we have it with potatoes…

            …which originally came from the Americas but we claim them as ours too!

            Okay, I chased off a mugger once with pepper spray.

            Does that count?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Plumber:

            FYI the above is what is known as “copypasta“.

            I didn’t know that particular one, but it looked very much like it, and googling the first few sentences shows other examples.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @HBC, that’s not only copypasta, it’s copypasta that originated in this very forum.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Ah. Live and learn.

            Was the OP serious?

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            @HeelBearCub: As a heart attack.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Oh, the original is not one continuous string, so … real copypasta, I guess.

  60. Murphy says:

    Now I kinda worry that an email I sent to scott a few years back may have been taken the wrong way.

    I laid out some of the breadcrumbs that existed leading back to his real ID and suggested ways he could cut at least some of the threads (though now that there’s dedicated hate-groups specifically targeting Scott and posting his details I doubt there’s any real chance to cut the remaining ones) because I strongly support people’s right to anonymity online and love scott’s work.

    I just hope it wasn’t misinterpreted as some kind of obtuse threat rather than wanting to support scott’s attempt to remain somewhat Anon.

  61. Tibor says:

    I completely understand Scott’s reasons but it is still very disheartening to read this (a bit enlightening too in regards to the “end of comments” in many media outlets).

    What I find strange is that this sort of an aggressive internet crowd seems to be pretty much always on the left, though I should haste to add that it is always the radical, extremist fringe left. But somehow they seem to either be more active on the interwebs or else simply better at this sort of thing than the extreme right. Once I had the misfortune of opening a stormfront article by mistake (and I read about 2 paragraphs out of curiousity after which I could not tolerate the drivel any more) and I am sure the neonazis would also like to silence a lot of people. Yet somehow this does not happen.

    Why is that so? Any suggestions? My tentative answer is that the extremist left is simply much more tolerated by the mainstream society than the extremist right, at least in most European and American countries (not sure how the situation is say in India, although I read about some extremely conservative and traditionalist public outcries that happen there every now and then…but that’s the western interpretation coming from the BBC and other media I read so I am not sure how accurate a picture of reality that really is). It also seems they are better at pretending to be “regular concerned citizens”, nobody will take neonazi calls to fire people or ruin their lives seriously but if the same sort of fascist attitude is applied by the leftwing extremists many people seem to understand it as a genuine “will of the public”.

    Also, this seems to be at least partly specific to some countries. The US is really bad at this as far as I can say, the list of public taboos seems to be both the longest and the fastest growing and the sensitivity towards them the highest. If I compare it to the Czech republic, you can more or less say anything you want here in public, including really idiotic things (left-wing, right-wing or just plain strange), some people will call you an idiot and stop listening to you but that’s pretty much it. Nobody loses their jobs over this sort of thing, nobody makes forced public apologies, nobody gets doxxed AFAIK. I heard about a case when some antifa extremists burned down a car of a restraurant owner who supposedly delayed payments to his employees…which turned out to be a slander…but that is the only similar incident I can think of. It seems even the regular people are much more sensitive in the US to what you say. What would be considered an inappropriate or lame joke at worst (and sometimes the inappropriateness is a part of the humour…for instance Rickey Gervais’ comedy is mostly about that sort of thing) in the Czech republic gets you branded as an Officially Horrible Person in the US.

    • DinoNerd says:

      Not always on the left. E.g. the phenomenon of attacking people basically for having opinions while female. Or concerted efforts to shut down climate scientists, though that’s less of an internet phenomenon.

      • Plumber says:

        @DinoNerd,

        I remember two from the Obama administration who were chased out of their jobs by internet orchestrated campaigns:

        Shirley Sherrod

        and

        Van Jones

        So I don’t think the tactic is used only by “SJW’s”

        • albatross11 says:

          Yeah, and as I recall, the accusations against Shirley Sherrod were bullshit created by excerpting a longer quote to remove all the context and find something incriminating, but by the time that all came out she’d resigned and didn’t want to go back or wasn’t able to. And of course, the people who pushed that narrative and/or went along with it continued to be respectable in journalistic circles, since the press has no memory.

        • Tibor says:

          The “case” against Sherrod seems to have come from the left though (accusations of racism), so I don’t think it qualifies as an example.

          I could not easily find the controversy in the Van Jones article.

          • 10240 says:

            The Sherrod one was by the right, accusing her of racism against whites as (in a video excerpt) she had said that (I don’t know in what position) she hadn’t wanted to help poor some white farmers because they were white. Then it turned out that (in the full video) she continued that she then changed her mind and helped them, deciding that it’s poverty that matters, and her actual speech was against prejudice.

          • albatross11 says:

            I think I care a lot more about the trustworthy/liar axis than I do the left/right axis. The people who produced the accusation of racism against Sherrod were liars, and the people who pushed it along were either complicit in their lies or too lazy and careless to check before going along with a smear.

          • Tibor says:

            @10240: I see, my bad, I guess I should have read the article more thoroughly.

          • cuke says:

            I think I care a lot more about the trustworthy/liar axis than I do the left/right axis.

            This one goes for me a thousand times over.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        attacking people basically for having opinions while female

        Has this happened this century? Asking for a friend.

        concerted efforts to shut down climate scientists

        Wow. What form have you seen those efforts take?

      • Tibor says:

        @DinoNerd: Could you give concrete examples? I am also talking mostly about cases where people are forced to resignate/do a humiliating public apology they don’t seem to really mean or shut down a particular activity entirely the way Scott did because of threats. I am not aware of any recent (last 30 years or so) examples of that.

        David Friedman mentions the “lists of communists” in the US in the 50s, so that is a good example but not a very recent one.

        • And my impression is that the Hollywood blacklist wasn’t all that effective, that it turned out that at least some of the people had continued to work in Hollywood, but not under their own names. There was a famous case of that, but I’ve forgotten the name of the person involved, I think a screenwriter.

    • Baeraad says:

      Why is that so? Any suggestions?

      Because harrassing people with words and poisoning their social standing is far too girly and faggy for a far-right manly-man. If a far-right guy wants to destroy someone, he picks up a gun and shoots them. And I can’t help it notice that whenever there’s a mass shooting, the motive always seems to turn out to have ben anti-immigration, or anti-gay, or anti-feminist, or some other right-wing motivation. Whereas feminists may constantly scream about how 99% of all men are objectively pro-rape, but not one of them ever seems to pick up a gun and shoot some of those objectively pro-rape men.

      Seriously, the whole thing makes so much more sense when you realise that the worst sort of leftists are essentially mean girls turned up to eleven (not content to just ostrasise you, they get you fired from your job!) and the worst sort of rightists are jerk jocks turned up to eleven (not content to just beat you up, they shoot you!). They’re both despicable, but they’re despicable in very different ways.

      • albatross11 says:

        Baeraad:

        I don’t think your model tracks very closely to reality–perhaps to what appears in media, but not to reality. Most mass shootings aren’t ideological at all, they’re a violent crazy person snapping and murdering someone against whom they have a recognizable beef (usually an ex or an ex-employer). Many others are just violent crazies who murder people for crazy reasons that make sense only from inside their messed-up heads. (I’m excluding gang shootings and armed robberies gone bad, which have their own motivations that aren’t left or right wing.)

        Misleading smear campaigns and social media mobbing and trying to get people fired are all things that come from the right fairly often as well. I think they’re usually less successful, due to lack of sympathy from people at the top of media and academia, but they definitely exist. Probably the biggest instance of this right now is various levels of pushback against people advocating BDS (a boycott of Israel, more or less). Another example: the big scandal created against Planned Parenthood awhile back was a right-wing smear job, complete with painstakingly-edited videos that created evidence of misbehavior to justify defunding them.

        It’s like terrorism–it’s not an ideology, it’s a tactic.

      • The Nybbler says:

        And I can’t help it notice that whenever there’s a mass shooting, the motive always seems to turn out to have ben anti-immigration, or anti-gay, or anti-feminist

        The Congressional Baseball Shooting

        Most mass shootings probably aren’t political. A quick perusal of the top of the Mother Jones list shows a number of disgruntled ex-employee shootings, a ‘sovereign citizen’, plus the anti-immigration (but also anti-Trump; mass shooters tend to have somewhat disordered thinking) Tree of Life synagogue shooting, and some other non-political ones.

      • Jaskologist says:

        The Sutherland Springs church shooting, not even a year and a half ago, was the deadliest church shooting in modern times. It was perpetrated by a radical evangelical atheist.

        What you’re noticing is a property of your news filters much more than it is of events themselves. Your news filter prefers to focus on violent acts when they can be attributed to the right. This certainly has implications, but not the ones you’re going for.

        • Tatterdemalion says:

          The Sutherland Springs church shooting, not even a year and a half ago, was the deadliest church shooting in modern times. It was perpetrated by a radical evangelical atheist.

          The investigation concluded that neither race nor religion was anything to do with his motivation.

          This is pure Chinese robber fallacy.

      • John Schilling says:

        And I can’t help it notice that whenever there’s a mass shooting, the motive always seems to turn out to have ben anti-immigration, or anti-gay, or anti-feminist, or some other right-wing motivation.

        Actually, you can “help noticing” this, by simply paying attention even to facts that don’t fit your preconceived notions. You just don’t want to. From Wikipedia’s list of the twenty-five US mass shootings with ten or more fatalities, I count a grand total of three with plausibly right-wing motivations, plus one that may have been generic misogyny. One with a plausibly left-wing secular motive, and three Islamist terror attacks. The remaining seventeen appear to have been completely apolitical; a mix of personal grudges, mental illness, and glory-seeking. And I don’t think those numbers are going to change much if you look at smaller or more distant shootings.

        You can, if you chose, respond to the few mass shootings that genuinely are or which are initially misreported as being driven by right-wing political motives with “Aha! Another right-wing mass shooter; I knew it!”, and all the rest with “Another mass shooter, meh, probably right-wing because they all are”. If you live in the right bubble and pick the right news sources, you’ll find a great deal of assistance for this strategy. But you don’t have to, and you shouldn’t expect to be treated with respect here if you chose to. You can instead chose to notice true things rather than comfortable things.

      • Randy M says:

        And I can’t help it notice that whenever there’s a mass shooting, the motive always seems to turn out to have ben anti-immigration, or anti-gay, or anti-feminist, or some other right-wing motivation

        Not quite always.
        edited to avoid snark level brevity: Recall for one contrary instance the family research council shooting, which wasn’t a mass shooting mostly because it was stopped in time by security.

      • Baeraad says:

        … aaaand cue the barrage of protests that conservatives are the finest people in the world and the only reason why it might seem otherwise is because of the deceitful liberal media and here, I will prove it by throwing links at you.

        Yeah, let me just say: whatever, dudes. If I’d said the exact same thing on a left-wing forum, I’d have been bombarded with links that proved conclusively that 99.9999% of all online harrasment was totally done by misogynist conservative trolls and cases like Scott’s couldn’t possibly exist because the wonderful, perfect leftists would never ever behave in such a way.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Conservatives are so insufferable. When accused of all mass shootings, they object.

        • The Nybbler says:

          In general, if you wish to poison the well, it is best to do it BEFORE it has been drunk from.

          If I’d said the exact same thing on a left-wing forum, I’d have been bombarded with links that proved conclusively that 99.9999% of all online harrasment was totally done by misogynist conservative trolls

          Yes, and it would have been a Gish gallop of broken links, links which didn’t say what the poster claimed they said, links which led to unsourced claims by other biased parties, and the like. Been there and done that. The only links you’ve gotten here are to counterexamples.

        • albatross11 says:

          Baeraad:

          Yeah, it’s funny, a racist relative of mine makes exactly the same argument w.r.t. all terrorism being done by Muslims and all street crime being done by blacks. Equally convincing, too.

        • Randy M says:

          aaaand cue the barrage of protests that conservatives are the finest people in the world and the only reason why it might seem otherwise is because of the deceitful liberal media and here, I will prove it by throwing links at you.

          I do not believe this is a fair characterization of any of the responses to you.

          If you do not want to face immediate contradiction, try to avoid absolute statements like “whenever” or “always.”

    • whereamigoing says:

      Nanjing massacre deniers tend to be hostile online and they are on the Japanese right (though that’s rather different from the Western right).

      I wonder if there is a correlation here: The two most atheistic countries in Europe are the Czech Republic and Estonia. And Estonia is also relatively relaxed — e.g. there is pretty dark humor on state-sponsored television.

  62. n8chz says:

    I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat.

    Cool, but would it kill you to spell it “Democratic?”

    • Plumber says:

      @n8chz,

      I’m not a grammar expert, but I’m confident that “Straight Democrat” is fine and is better than “Straight Democratic”, It’s only when ” Democrat Party” is used instead of “Democratic Party” that it’s off.

  63. nameless1 says:

    There is a certain line of thought out there saying extreme polarization is the normal mode of a democracy and when it is not, it is mostly because elites are repressing extreme views in ways that are not very democratic. For example have you heard about this guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGeorge_Bundy TL;DR Cold Warrior, hawkish on Vietnam and Cuba, yet as a president of the Ford Foundation he was the first one to give serious funding to the Civil Rights Movement leaders, King for example. His reasoning? A better deal for blacks will likely reduce their support for Communism. So basically you can see him (and for example Nelson Rockefeller) building a centrist “neither Communism nor racism” consensus. From above. Look at his career. Basically he did everything except asking voters what they want, one elite position to the other. What he did could not possible come from the voters.

    So either you have a moderate democracy that is not very democratic, or a very democratic but extremist democracy.

    I mean the interesting thing is, the extremists, racists, communists who get suppressed by the elites know and complain about it. But moderates tend to dismiss it as conspiracy theory because they find it normal that unreasonable viewpoints lose to reasonable ones. The problem with the theory of the moderates is that if they are right, the extremists will never come back.

    Well, we have them all back now, the racists, the communists, and more. And why? I think because this elite suppression is failing. Elite power is failing. People don’t trust the “best and brightest” anymore.

    • albatross11 says:

      The internet has made it a lot easier to do an end-run around the old publishing/media outlets. You can get a large following for your podcast or Youtube channel without any large media companies having to green-light you. You can still get kicked off those alternative outlets, but that’s a very different matter–it’s not that you had to get approval to discuss what you wanted to discuss, it’s that you can p-ss off the wrong people and they can cancel or demonetize your Youtube channel. That automatically means that a much wider range of views gets a hearing.

      I think there’s also a loss in faith in elites. In the US, part of this is fallout from the Iraq war and the financial meltdown, but a lot more is fallout from the long-running decline in manufacturing jobs and declining economic prospects (especially for people on the left half of the bell curve), and the corresponding increases in becoming welfare-dependent via disability, living off your parents housing equity because you can’t make ends meet on your own, becoming addicted to opiods, etc.

      Probably a lot of the loss of faith in elites came from the greater freedom to communicate–the establishment press tends to re-enforce faith in elite decisionmaking and suppress questioning of its wisdom.

      • Plumber says:

        @albatross11,

        Everything in your post seems to fit, a very explanatory narrative.

        I hope to see more in this line,.

    • Clutzy says:

      I think it waxes and wanes based on the conditions on the ground. Elites have always suppressed certain threats they think they see. And I don’t even think the idea that the internet is reducing their power is true. We have seen anti-establishment elections going back to the First Clinton election, and moreover if the internet’s freedom was so important it would have been more important 2000-2006ish when it was much more free and much more decentralized than before.

      Rather, I think what is causing the current problem is a confluence of errors, actual and perceived, by “the credentialed” who think of themselves as elite, but probably aren’t really. First on any list is journalists, who are highly overrepresented in the land of functioning alcoholics without executive thinking (self control), for example. The other one that sticks out is the foreign policy and immigration ideas that have been against the majority opinions in most countries for quite a while, while also not achieving good results.

      I think if we had Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan (and Kosovo etc etc) as rousing successes we would not be where we are. They are all meek defeats, yet the people in charge still can’t articulate how we can change so as to win next time.

      If we had high immigration and no 2008-2014 economic shit show, no spiking housing costs, and an education system that worked, its plausible people would still be on board with low skill immigration. Now, I think that is kind of like saying, “I think people would appreciate Barry Bonds home run record more if he hadn’t used steroids.” Yea, duh, but they are linked pretty closely. But, well, there it is.

    • 10240 says:

      Coming up with a compromise that the various extremists find acceptable and decide to support, but for some reason couldn’t come up with on their own, is not repression of the extremists.

  64. Urthman says:

    The problem with the Culture War thread is that it thinks it can be neutral on a core disagreement between conservatives and liberals.

    Liberals believe (as a liberal, I would say “recognize”) that our society is stacked against some people, not because of their unpopular opinions, but because of who they are. In an unmoderated discussion, those people are at a disadvantage, again, not because they are defending a minority opinion but because they are having to defend their existence as people who deserve to be treated as equals. A comment section that doesn’t take this dynamic into account is unfairly biased against them.

    Conservatives believe that the above is not true.

    You can’t have a comment section with a neutral stance between conservatives and liberals on this issue.

    • Plumber says:

      @Urthman

      “Liberals believe (as a liberal, I would say “recognize”) that our society is stacked against some people, not because of their unpopular opinions, but because of who they are.”

      Okay, I’m following you

      “..In an unmoderated discussion, those people are at a disadvantage, again, not because they are defending a minority opinion but because they are having to defend their existence as people who deserve to be treated as equals. A comment section that doesn’t take this dynamic into account is unfairly biased against them….”

      and you lost me.

      What bias?

      Care to elaborate?

      • Urthman says:

        Well for instance if you were to try to have a debate about whether gay marriage should be legal, for some people that discussion would be speculation about they they think the long-term effects of gay marriage might be on society. But to other people, that discussion would be about, “Will I be allowed to live with the partner I love building a family and sharing our lives the way married couples do?”

        Those are not the same sort of discussion. Some would say it is unjust to demand that some participants in a discussion be required to continually defend and justify their own lives in ways that other participants never have to. And much more so when those people are also frequently attacked on that same basis in other contexts as well.

        • Urthman says:

          Conservatives and liberals are pretty deeply divided on this notion that some groups in our society are regularly treated worse than others and that correcting this injustice should be, among other things, a guiding principle in how we conduct ourselves in online discussion forums. There is a fundamental difference in what is considered a fair and open playing field. If you are wanting to host some big discussion between conservatives and liberals, you’ve got to decide whose ground rules you’re going to use.

          • The Nybbler says:

            If you are wanting to host some big discussion between conservatives and liberals, you’ve got to decide whose ground rules you’re going to use.

            And once you’ve decided the shape of the table, you’ve decided the outcome of the discussion, so you might as well not have it.

          • albatross11 says:

            I don’t agree–I think you can find ground rules that a large chunk of liberals and conservatives can accept. I also think one thing pushing against the ability to do that is the attempt to coordinate meanness against anyone who joins such a conversation. (“How dare you engage with those people/in that forum.”). That kind of coordinating of meanness seems like it’s a force for evil in the world, to me.

          • Urthman says:

            And once you’ve decided the shape of the table, you’ve decided the outcome of the discussion, so you might as well not have it.

            Exactly. r/SSC decided the outcome of the Culture War thread when they chose the ground rules.

        • lvlln says:

          But any discussion over some substantive culture war issue will have someone who feels that they’re defending and justifying their own lives. It wouldn’t be a truly substantive culture war issue if it didn’t. The whole point of a culture war discussion thread is for the participants to agree to continually defend and justify their own lives in the particular issues where they feel that they’re being required to do so.

          And obviously there’s a spectrum, and we can make judgment calls on whose claims are more valid. I would judge a gay person asserting their right to marry as more valid in this respect than, say, a gun owner asserting their right to own guns. But the point of a neutral culture war space is that my judgment call on that doesn’t count for anything, because that’s my judgment call based on my biases, and other people on other sides of the culture war could disagree with me.

          And this isn’t a liberal/conservative dichotomy, but rather a liberal/authoritarian dichotomy. Liberalism means letting people freely argue their points of view, while authoritarianism in this case means claiming the truth of one’s judgment on which side’s claim that they’re defending and justifying their own lives is more valid and putting one’s thumb on the scale on that basis.

          • Urthman says:

            Right, the Culture War Thread, unavoidably, took a side in one of the primary divisions in the Culture War. You are describing a principle of debate that the other side thinks is Very Wrong.

            You are just fooling yourself if you think you can have a debate about whether a particular topic should be open for debate. Maybe you can have a debate about the principle of whether any topics should not be open for debate, but I think that debate would hinge on specifics that run into the same problem.

          • 10240 says:

            Maybe you can have a debate about the principle of whether any topics should not be open for debate

            We are doing that right now.

          • cuke says:

            Nicely said.

          • 10240 says:

            the Culture War Thread, unavoidably, took a side in one of the primary divisions in the Culture War.

            @Urthman On the meta level, yes, if we assume that whether an unrestricted forum is considered neutral is one of the primary divisions in the Culture War. On the object level, no, in the sense that you are free to argue here or in the CW thread (or now /r/TheMotte) that an unrestricted forum is not neutral, as you are doing now. So those who think that an unrestricted forum can be neutral still have a good reason to think that the CW thread was neutral.

          • Urthman says:

            Maybe you can have a debate about the principle of whether any topics should not be open for debate

            We are doing that right now.

            Not really. I’m not a member of any group of people who are sick of having to defend themselves against right-wing attacks, and I’m not sure I’m accurately representing their point of view. Pretty much by definition, those people aren’t here.

          • albatross11 says:

            I think you can’t have a debate about whether X is an acceptable topic for debate in any venue in which X is not currently an acceptable topic for debate. You could temporarily widen the range of acceptable debate in that venue for this one debate, but that only works when that’s agreeable to the decisionmakers running the venue, who may in practice be Mastercard or Patreon deciding anyone who debates X can’t receive money, or Twitter deciding they’re banned, or a bunch of jackasses deciding to harass anyone associated with the venue until X is once again forbidden as a topic of debate.

            This is entirely value neutral. It may be that X = racial IQ differences, but it may equally be whether Taiwan is an independent nation or a rogue province, or whether Jesus was all man, all God, or both man and God at the same time. Applying pressure to shut down conversations is a tactic, and the more workable that tactic is, the more it will be used by people who probably don’t share your values or mine.

          • Urthman says:

            This is entirely value neutral. It may be that X = racial IQ differences, but it may equally be whether Taiwan is an independent nation or a rogue province, or whether Jesus was all man, all God, or both man and God at the same time. Applying pressure to shut down conversations is a tactic, and the more workable that tactic is, the more it will be used by people who probably don’t share your values or mine.

            I am arguing that what you just said is the conservative (or classical liberal or whatever you want to call it) side. The other (liberal, SJW, or whatever) side is that it isn’t value neutral. That there is a qualitative difference between debating about whether Taiwan is independent and debating about whether some races are genetically inferior.

          • lvlln says:

            I am arguing that what you just said is the conservative (or classical liberal or whatever you want to call it) side. The other (liberal, SJW, or whatever) side is that it isn’t value neutral. That there is a qualitative difference between debating about whether Taiwan is independent and debating about whether some races are genetically inferior.

            Again, you’re conflating authoritarian “liberals” with the “liberal” side and liberal conservatives with the conservative side. There are also discussions where authoritarian conservatives would assert are qualitatively different from others, such as, say, the divinity of Jesus Christ or whether there is no god but Allah and Muhammed is his prophet. To certain authoritarian conservatives, there is no such thing as a neutral discussion and investigation of those issues, just as much as to certain authoritarian “liberals” there is no such thing as a neutral discussion and investigation of the issue of gay marriage.

            An ostensible “neutral” discussion space doesn’t claim to be neutral with respect to that authoritarian-liberal dichotomy – you have to have liberalism to actually have discussion, and authoritarianism shuts down discussion. This isn’t a “liberal” (as in progressive or left) versus conservative issue, it’s an authoritarian – liberal (as in “classical liberal”) issue.

          • albatross11 says:

            Urthman:

            My claim isn’t that the topics are value neutral. What I’m saying is that the tactics used to shut down discussions are value-neutral. Social media mobbing, doxxing people, trying to get them fired, sending them chilling personal death threats, leaning on payment processors to make them unable to make a living, etc., will work just as well when done to suppress a discussion of racial IQ differences as to suppress a discussion of whether Taiwan is an independent nation.

            Suppose you and I disagree on whether some topic (say, whether or not Taiwan is an independent nation) should be allowed to be discussed in public. How do you think we should resolve that disagreement?

            I mean, maybe this is one of those value-difference things that just can’t be resolved short of seeing who brings the bigger angry mob to the showdown. But as a society, we’ve actually managed to move a lot of formerly-forbidden-in-polite-company topics into the mainstream, mostly without having angry-mob-showdowns, so it seems like there’s some better approach possible.

          • Urthman says:

            My claim isn’t that the topics are value neutral. What I’m saying is that the tactics used to shut down discussions are value-neutral.

            Then you’re just changing the subject. I’m not arguing with Scott’s claim that people upset about the Culture War thread did bad things. I’m arguing with his claim that it was some sort of neutral space for discussing the Culture War.

        • 10240 says:

          @Urthman If it’s obvious that gay marriage is right, then it shouldn’t be hard to argue for it.

          It’s true that, under a neutral rule, how much one has to defend a particular position still depends on the currently prevalent opinions in society. However, it’s possible to try to convince others of the correct position, even if perhaps it sometimes requires more arguing than it “should” (whatever that means). On the other hand, if some views were banned, it would create the risk that one can’t argue for a true proposition because it, or some of the necessary arguments for it, are banned. Different people consider different things obvious (perhaps so obvious that it’s not necessary to allow arguments against them), and some of them are wrong.
          Another problem with accepting the idea of banning certain object-level views is that people will try to “win” debates by asking the moderator to ban their opponents.

          Scott could decree that, say, arguing against gay marriage is not allowed. However, that wouldn’t cause everyone to suddenly agree to support gay marriage. It would mean that the forum (or at least those who participate in this particular argument) would be restricted to those who already agree with the proposition. Those who disagree with it would remain unconvinced.

          Ideally, the point of debate is to determine the truth, to determine who is right. In order to do so, it’s necessary that those who are right argue for their position, even if they may consider it unfair that they have to argue for it. If Scott decided that arguing against gay marriage is not allowed, that would ensure that no one who opposes gay marriage will ever get convinced to support it on the forum. Opponents of gay marriage have already heard something like your argument in favor; your only hope to convince them is that they raise their objections, and someone presents convincing counter-arguments against their objections. Even if many gay people are unwilling to participate in the debate, it’s still likely that there will be people who will be willing to argue in favor of gay marriage (either gay people or straight supporters).

          So did e.g. black people in the civil rights movement; they surely didn’t get equal rights by sitting on their asses refusing to argue for getting equal rights in a hostile climate. It’s undeniable that there was much more racism or opposition to homosexuality a few decades ago. Black people and gay people still argued, convinced people and achieved many of their goals. That shows that, as long as there is free speech, widespread opposition doesn’t prevent the underdogs from speaking, and having their voices heard.

          An object-level argument against your point is that it’s possible to live with the partner you life building a family and share your lives almost exactly the way married couples do without getting married. Also, which groups of people deserve to be treated as equals is necessarily subject to debate, as is what constitutes equal treatment. That you want to ban certain positions on the basis of such imprecise and emotional arguments perfectly shows the problem where people would try to “win” debates by getting their opponents banned. Conversely, some of us argue that affirmative action constitutes not treating white men as equals; I’m sure you wouldn’t want moderators to terminate debate on that basis.

          Certainly some people will decide to avoid a forum that allows any view (particularly since there are many forums where their views are unchallenged), though I don’t think that makes the forum non-neutral, as it’s their choice. Even if we accept your premises, there are only forums that conservatives consider neutral and liberals consider right-biased, and ones that liberals consider neutral and conservatives consider left-biasesd, it surely doesn’t hurt to have forums of the former kind. There are plenty of forums of the latter kind for those who prefer that. The former kind allows some debates we otherwise couldn’t have, and it may still allows those who are right (whichever side that is, by whatever metric) to convince some people who are wrong.

          • Urthman says:

            black people in the civil rights movement; they surely didn’t get equal rights by sitting on their asses refusing to argue for getting equal rights in a hostile climate.

            They did that, but I imagine many would say they shouldn’t have had to. And that they definitely shouldn’t have to keep doing it today.

            Even if we accept your premises, there are only forums that conservatives consider neutral and liberals consider right-biased, and ones that liberals consider neutral and conservatives consider left-biasesd, it surely doesn’t hurt to have forums of the former kind. There are plenty of forums of the latter kind for those who prefer that.

            Sure. My only point here is that participants shouldn’t deceive themselves that their forum isn’t actually taking a side on that issue. And I think it’s a central issue in the whole controversy over “SJWs.”

          • 10240 says:

            On the one hand, yes, if some people are arguing for active moderation that affects the debate in some way, the moderator necessarily has to make a choice, whether it’s to accept the demand or to refuse. On the other hand, anyone can ask for putting restrictions on their opponents. Can we never say that the demand is unjustified, and the forum remains neutral if no such restrictions are enacted? I’m not sure.

          • uau says:

            Sure. My only point here is that participants shouldn’t deceive themselves that their forum isn’t actually taking a side on that issue.

            And if you say that anyone who disagrees with you must immediately be shot, is a forum taking sides in favor of one viewpoint by refusing to shoot discussion participants? IMO obviously not.

            The forum does disagree with you about the meta-level question of how discussion is to be held, and whether it’s OK to shoot those who disagree. But that does not equal taking sides in whatever non-meta issue the forum is trying to discuss.

            You need separate concepts for whether
            1) a forum allows discussing a topic without moderation taking sides
            2) whether a forum agrees on the meta-level topic of whether it’s OK to hold a critical discussion of that topic

            That you disagree about a decision in meaning 2 does not justify accusing the forum of taking sides in meaning 1. And in case of disagreement over 2, saying that the opinions of both sides are equally valid collapses into no meaningful discussion being possible. If you allow “this discussion is hurtful and it’s not OK to have it”, and the even more blatant “people who disagree with me need to be shot”, as valid stances then the result can be nothing much beyond “they didn’t agree”.

          • albatross11 says:

            If Alice says “X must be taken on faith and must never be allowed to be questioned,” and Bob disagrees, how should they resolve their dispute? If the answer isn’t discussion, then what’s left? Finding out who’s more powerful?

            Of course, the side who has most effectively wielded this sort of power so far assumes that it will always do so. IMO, this is a really terrible mistake.

          • Urthman says:

            If Alice says “X must be taken on faith and must never be allowed to be questioned,” and Bob disagrees, how should they resolve their dispute? If the answer isn’t discussion, then what’s left? Finding out who’s more powerful?

            Of course, the side who has most effectively wielded this sort of power so far assumes that it will always do so. IMO, this is a really terrible mistake.

            Some would say this level of abstraction is a ploy to get us to ignore the actual facts of the situation which was that very recently in our history, the argument that African-Americans were genetically inferior was used as an excuse to justify denying them civil rights. So it is not unreasonable to suspect that people continuing to make that argument are attempting to deny people civil rights. And it is not unreasonable for the people targeted by these attempts to respond with more than just words.

          • lvlln says:

            Some would say this level of abstraction is a ploy to get us to ignore the actual facts of the situation which was that very recently in our history, the argument that African-Americans were genetically inferior was used as an excuse to justify denying them civil rights. So it is not unreasonable to suspect that people continuing to make that argument are attempting to deny people civil rights. And it is not unreasonable for the people targeted by these attempts to respond with more than just words.

            Suspicion doesn’t imply guilt. Of course it’s reasonable to be suspicious. So be suspicious. Be skeptical. Analyze and judge. That’s what I did, and I judged that those suspicions are largely unfounded. Maybe my judgment is wrong or inaccurate or biased. I’m open to being convinced of that. But it’s most certainly unreasonable to jump from suspicion to “responding with more than just words.” There’s a huge, absolutely critical step missing in between, which is investigation.

          • Urthman says:

            Suspicion doesn’t imply guilt. Of course it’s reasonable to be suspicious. So be suspicious. Be skeptical. Analyze and judge. That’s what I did, and I judged that those suspicions are largely unfounded. Maybe my judgment is wrong or inaccurate or biased. I’m open to being convinced of that. But it’s most certainly unreasonable to jump from suspicion to “responding with more than just words.” There’s a huge, absolutely critical step missing in between, which is investigation.

            How many times is a black person obliged to analyze and judge words that sound racist in much the same way as the words that sounded racist and turned out to be in fact racist the last 20 times they went through this?

            How many times do malicious words have to lead to actual harm done before a reasonable person acts to prevent that harm?

          • Aapje says:

            @Urthman

            You have to keep in mind that these debates are in part a reaction against a narrative that claims that the poor performance of black people in American society is due to white people having an large amount of internal racism which keeps the black man down (even scientists seem unable to uncover the level of racism that could explain the gap) & to argue that their achievements are not earned, but given (and can thus fairly be taken away).

            So this means that these arguments can be used defensively, to protect their own group against attacks. They are not necessarily used to argue for unfair rules to be used against other groups. This can be seen in how these arguments are commonly used to oppose racist policies like affirmative action, but without demanding that the policies are explicitly made racist against the groups they now advantage. Instead, the common argument is to demand ability-based rules.

            Note that these debates happen in the context of surveys showing decades of lessening racism and the data showing improved incomes for blacks, especially black women. Surveys show that Democrats have become far more upset over racism fairly recently, even though it seems to be lower than ever.

            How many times do malicious words have to lead to actual harm done before a reasonable person acts to prevent that harm?

            Those who have been unfairly treated by racism against white people and/or in favor of non-white people (which is pretty much the same thing) may wonder the same.

            It’s very dangerous to only watch out for abuses in one direction and be blind to abuses in the other.

          • lvlln says:

            How many times is a black person obliged to analyze and judge words that sound racist in much the same way as the words that sounded racist and turned out to be in fact racist the last 20 times they went through this?

            How many times do malicious words have to lead to actual harm done before a reasonable person acts to prevent that harm?

            I don’t know. I guess the only range I’d have is >=1 for both questions, I guess?

          • uau says:

            How many times is a black person obliged to analyze and judge words that sound racist in much the same way as the words that sounded racist and turned out to be in fact racist the last 20 times they went through this?

            I think this is quite closely analogous with “How many times is a white person obliged to give the benefit of the doubt to black guys hanging around the neighborhood, when the last 20 times they turned out to be there to steal and rob?”

            Both of those may be understandable reactions. But you seem to imply that in one case being understandable would make it correct and something everyone should accept, while I suspect you would strongly disagree in the analogous case.

          • Urthman says:

            I think this is quite closely analogous with “How many times is a white person obliged to give the benefit of the doubt to black guys

            Actually what I’m arguing is there is a qualitative difference between stereotyping and rejecting ideas vs. stereotyping and rejecting people. There’s a difference between some of your ideas being excluded vs. you as a person being excluded.

          • Urthman says:

            Maybe a better way to explain my point is this:

            You don’t have a neutral forum if the nature of the discussion is such that some people can just make their arguments but other people are required to simultaneously make their arguments and simultaneously be making a case for why they as people should be treated as equal participants in the discussion.

          • 10240 says:

            but other people are required to simultaneously make their arguments and simultaneously be making a case for why they as people should be treated as equal participants in the discussion.

            I don’t think anyone has to make the case for that. I doubt anyone on the subreddit wrote things like “you’re black, and black people are less intelligent than whites, so your comment is probably wrong”. One can also make a viewpoint-neutral rule that comments are supposed to be taken on the basis of the merits of the arguments in the comment itself, and ad hominems are not allowed.

          • albatross11 says:

            10240:

            I have read a fair number of comment threads on alt-right or human-b–diversity sites, and I don’t believe I have ever seen anyone make an argument of the form “you are black, therefore we can discount your ideas.” The participants may well have believed such a thing, but I don’t ever remember seeing them make the argument. On the other hand, I have seen exactly that argument made by people talking about how men, whites, straights, etc., had no right to comment on some issue because they weren’t the ones being most strongly affected.

          • albatross11 says:

            Urthman :

            I think you’re dodging the question. You say that a particular claim must be taken on faith and never questioned, I say that it should be up for debate. How do you suggest we decide who is right?

            One possible answer is that we have an honest discussion about whether that claim is in fact something that should be open for debate. Another possible answer is that we have some kind of power struggle, and the strongest side gets to decide which ideas are allowed to be debated and which ones must be taken on faith. I’m not really seeing another alternative.

            Having an open debate about the matter isn’t guaranteed to get to the right answer–humans are falable and groups have all kinds of dynamics that can lead them off a cliff. But it sure seems like open debate is more likely to lead to the right answers than a power struggle–there’s at least some kind of positive correlation between being right and making the most convincing arguments in an open discussion, whereas there’s probably not any correlation between might and right.

          • albatross11 says:

            Urthman:

            Some would say this level of abstraction is a ploy to get us to ignore the actual facts of the situation which was that very recently in our history, the argument that African-Americans were genetically inferior was used as an excuse to justify denying them civil rights. So it is not unreasonable to suspect that people continuing to make that argument are attempting to deny people civil rights. And it is not unreasonable for the people targeted by these attempts to respond with more than just words.

            Why doesn’t this same argument hold for complaining about wealth inequality? Such complaints were used, in living memory, to justify revolutions that led to tens of millions of people being murdered, and whole countries being wrecked. Surely it’s not unreasonable to suspect that people continuing to make that argument are attempting to bring back gulags and re-education camps. And surely it is not unreasonable for the people targeted to respond with more than words. Can we expect you to join in the calls for one-way helicopter rides for avowed socialists? Maybe help in the no-platforming of Bernie Sanders and AOC and David Graeber?

          • 10240 says:

            @albatross11 Another alternative, which Urthman seems to want, is that we don’t decide what rules a forum is supposed to have (in a generally accepted way). We have forums with different rules, we retain our opinions about which ruleset is right, and we don’t call any of the rulesets neutral as not everyone supports them. I don’t think this makes sense, and it leads to a more divided society as people are isolated from the other side’s arguments, but I suppose it’s an alternative to your two options.

          • albatross11 says:

            Isn’t the whole point of this discussion that there’s a large chunk of people who believe that the *existence* of fora that don’t impose the right restrictions on content are themselves a threat and need to be shut down?

            I mean, if the issue is that I don’t want to participate in fora where some ideas are up for question (whether the holocaust happened, whether humans evolved, whether 9/11 was an inside job), well, the Internet is full of such fora, and voting with your feet works just fine–plenty of folks want to discuss 9/11 trutherism or creationism or holocaust denial, but I don’t have to care because I can just spend my time elsewhere.

            Scott got a bunch of hassling from people who apparently wanted to shut down the CW thread because it allowed discussions they did not want to have happening. And that seems like the basic question here, right? Are there some claims of fact or morality which, just by raising them, I’m harming you and you’re allowed to respond to me with more than just words?

          • albatross11 says:

            One other way we might try to resolve a dispute about what topics are acceptable for discussion would be to have a discussion, not about those topics, but about some meta-rule for allowable topics for dispute. So maybe we could argue about whether negative statements about identifiable groups are permissible. (Can you say that men are violent or that women are emotional.) Or we could argue about whether truth is an absolute defense, or whether some true statements must not be argued for. I’m not sure whether Urthman would consider that kind of discussion acceptable, or would just assume that anyone arguing to allow negative statements about groups was just trying to slip in some justification for racism.

          • 10240 says:

            Isn’t the whole point of this discussion that there’s a large chunk of people who believe that the *existence* of fora that don’t impose the right restrictions on content are themselves a threat and need to be shut down?

            It is the topic of Scott’s post, but Urthman didn’t demand that, he just demanded that such a forum doesn’t refer to itself as neutral.

          • LadyJane says:

            Why doesn’t this same argument hold for complaining about wealth inequality? Such complaints were used, in living memory, to justify revolutions that led to tens of millions of people being murdered, and whole countries being wrecked.

            I’m not a fan of socialism by any means, but this just seems like a false equivalency. Maybe the most extreme “kill the rich” forms of vulgar socialist rhetoric are morally equivalent to spreading racialist propaganda (and I’d agree that such forms of rhetoric should be considered equally condemnable), but I don’t think it’s fair to say the same for socialist ideas as a whole, most of which are likely incorrect but not inherently dehumanizing. It’s definitely not fair to say the same for all criticisms of wealth inequality, especially since it’s far from just socialists who make those criticisms.

            I mean, if the issue is that I don’t want to participate in fora where some ideas are up for question (whether the holocaust happened, whether humans evolved, whether 9/11 was an inside job), well, the Internet is full of such fora, and voting with your feet works just fine–plenty of folks want to discuss 9/11 trutherism or creationism or holocaust denial, but I don’t have to care because I can just spend my time elsewhere.

            I think the difference is that those are all seen as fringe theories, outside the window of mainstream discourse. You don’t see them being seriously discussed in respectable “neutral” forums, they’re confined to the intellectual ghetto of conspiracy theory websites and poorly moderated comments sections. In fact, I’m fairly sure that anyone who tried to seriously advocate for creationism or flat-earth theory would’ve been summarily dismissed on the Culture War thread. They would’ve been either ignored or laughed at, despite the thread’s claim of neutrality and openness to all ideas.

            The problem isn’t that people are upset about racialist ideas being discussed somewhere. There may be some people who are upset by the fact that those ideas exist at all, even in a purely abstract sense, but obviously it doesn’t bother them too much, since no one ever makes a fuss over the fact that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are being discussed on Stormfront and other neo-Nazi websites. On some level there’s a begrudging acceptance that “racists gonna racist” and not much can effectively be done about that, so as long as it’s only happening in some far-off disreputable fringe corner of the internet, there’s not much point in caring.

            It’s the attempt to push Horrible Banned Discourse and similarly offensive ideas back into the intellectual mainstream that bothers people. That’s why the Intellectual Dark Web is so reviled, and that’s why there’s so much outrage when respectable platforms like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube host offensive content. When the gray tribe entertains these ideas and treats them as valid possibilities that are worthy of consideration, it’s seen as apathetic self-centered novelty-seeking at best (the memetic equivalent of allowing potentially harmful chemicals to be dumped into the city’s water supply just to see what happens), and a paper-thin facade for actual bigotry at worst. And again, as much as people might claim it’s really just about upholding neutrality, it’s noteworthy that they almost never feel any need to give creationism or flat-earth theory the sort of “fair shake” they often feel compelled to give Horrible Banned Discourse.

            It’s the very pretense of neutrality that upsets people, especially since it seems to be quite selectively applied in practice. When a mildly famous and semi-respectable establishment like Slate Star Codex starts to become associated with these unfavorable ideas (whether they’re offensive ideas like Horrible Banned Discourse, crackpot ideas like flat-earth theory, or an Alex Jones-style mix of both), it’s going to provoke one of two reactions: either people will start complaining that such ideas shouldn’t be discussed in such a respectable establishment, or people will start viewing the establishment itself as no longer being respectable, relegating it to the fringes with all the neo-Nazi sites and flat-earth groups. And clearly Scott didn’t want the latter happening.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            And again, as much as people might claim it’s really just about upholding neutrality, it’s noteworthy that they almost never feel any need to give creationism or flat-earth theory the sort of “fair shake” they often feel compelled to give Horrible Banned Discourse.

            I think this is just a difference in the objective intellectual merit of the views in question. I am not into Horrible Banned Discourse, but I have relevant anecdote to share. A friend of mine teaches at a major medical school, and for a while he was talking about bringing in Steve Sailer to debate a local biologist about the Discourse. He later abandoned the idea because he was worried the progressive side of the debate might lose.

            You’d never hear a story like that about intelligent design theory or the flat earth.

            When a mildly famous and semi-respectable establishment like Slate Star Codex starts to become associated with these unfavorable ideas (whether they’re offensive ideas like Horrible Banned Discourse, crackpot ideas like flat-earth theory, or an Alex Jones-style mix of both), it’s going to provoke one of two reactions: either people will start complaining that such ideas shouldn’t be discussed in such a respectable establishment, or people will start viewing the establishment itself as no longer being respectable, relegating it to the fringes with all the neo-Nazi sites and flat-earth groups. And clearly Scott didn’t want the latter happening.

            What about Marginal Revolution? That blog’s comments section is a cesspool of genuine racism and other nastiness, yet Tyler Cowen has not met with any trouble as a result of it and his reputation as a public intellectual continues to grow.

          • uau says:

            Maybe the most extreme “kill the rich” forms of vulgar socialist rhetoric are morally equivalent to spreading racialist propaganda (and I’d agree that such forms of rhetoric should be considered equally condemnable), but I don’t think it’s fair to say the same for socialist ideas as a whole, most of which are likely incorrect but not inherently dehumanizing.

            Criticizing wealth inequality == Saying that average IQ can correlate with race

            Saying Kulaks need to be sent to “reeducation” camps == Saying that some races are strictly less than human

            You’re falsely lumping anything that you consider at all associated with “evil racism” as part of that evil. If you used that argumentation consistently, criticizing wealth inequality is very much associated with communist massacres in the same way, and should be condemned equally strongly.

            it’s noteworthy that they almost never feel any need to give creationism or flat-earth theory the sort of “fair shake” they often feel compelled to give Horrible Banned Discourse.

            No, that’s not noteworthy in the sense you mean it. Flat-earthism is mostly ignored because there are no good arguments for it. People have photos of the round Earth and so on. What would a “fair shake” even look like? It’s not like there are arguments for a flat earth that people are refusing to consider.

            Whereas in the case of IQ differences the pressure against it is not based on people having strong evidence against it, but people preferring to live in a world where it weren’t true. Your own post didn’t try to argue that the ideas are incorrect, it tried to argue that they were evil.

            people will start viewing the establishment itself as no longer being respectable, relegating it to the fringes with all the neo-Nazi sites and flat-earth groups

            People will try to lump ideas they don’t like together with ideas that are known to be false. It’s common behavior, but that doesn’t mean you should consider it acceptable behavior.

          • 10240 says:

            @LadyJane The unusual thing about Horrible Banned Discourse (compared to Holocaust denial or flat earthism) is that respectable people think its negation is true not as a result of overwhelming evidence, but because they have been brought up to think that its negation is true, and that to think otherwise is beyond the pale. To them this distinction is not apparent of course. At least this is my own experience, which I think is typical.

            respectable platforms like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube

            I don’t think being hosted on these platforms has ever been considered a mark of respectability.

          • Clutzy says:

            Ladyjane im just going to highlight one important thing:

            It’s the attempt to push Horrible Banned Discourse and similarly offensive ideas back into the intellectual mainstream that bothers people.

            I don’t think that is is. It is the fact that the mainstream keeps losing whenever they don’t have 100% control over the debate (like in a highly edited 60 minutes piece), which increasingly is the way things like youtube and podcasts go.

            And I’m not even commenting on the ideas being “more right”, I’m mostly commentating on the intellectual softness of the mainstream in these cases. They grow dull with decades of lack of use (you can pull up old “Firing Line” debates from the 70s over similar issues and the progressive professors/personalities come out much better), and now they have no coherent defenses against such allegations.

            The key, IMO, is to go back to first principles, because only when you argue from there can you actually spar with ideas that also spring from a commentary on that. Intersectionality, as currently practiced, doesn’t typically do that, instead it argues from a framework placed on top of a lattice that shrouds the first principles, so most of the proponents of those ideas don’t even know its roots. They can’t bring up individual sovereignty and the idea that “the individual is the ultimate minority” even though those ideas originally backstopped some of the intersectional works. And that is because it is shrouded, and became so shrouded that much of intersectionality now rejects the first principles.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            (you can pull up old “Firing Line” debates from the 70s over similar issues and the progressive professors/personalities come out much better)

            Any links you could recommend? I’m curious to see this, and I love watching old news shows.

          • Clutzy says:

            https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9lqW3pQDcUuugXLIpzcUdA

            Thats the channel I stumbled upon.

            Specific recommendations would be anything with Galbraith, “Why are our intellectuals so dumb”, and on topic here, “The Rhodesian Dilemma”, “Shockley’s Thesis”, “Heredity, IQ, and Social Issues” and “The Equal Rights Amendment”

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            Many thanks!

          • LadyJane says:

            You’re falsely lumping anything that you consider at all associated with “evil racism” as part of that evil. If you used that argumentation consistently, criticizing wealth inequality is very much associated with communist massacres in the same way, and should be condemned equally strongly.

            Communists and socialists condemn wealth inequality. So do liberals, centrists, moderates, independents, populists, even some conservatives and libertarians. And within each of those groups, there are dozens of different solutions being offered to the problem in question. So it’s not fair or reasonable or accurate to assume that anyone who talks about wealth inequality must be a violent communist revolutionary seeking to kill the rich.

            Whereas with Horrible Banned Discourse, the only people who seem to ever bring it up are actual racist troglodytes who use it to justify harmful and discriminatory racist policies (whether they’re as extreme as genocide or as relatively “tame” as White separatism), and occasionally gray tribe intellectuals who are purely concerned with it from an academic perspective. So “if someone is talking about Horrible Banned Discourse in anything more than a purely abstract way, and supports actual policy changes based on it, they’re probably a racist” doesn’t seem like an unfair or inaccurate assumption to make.

            Flat-earthism is mostly ignored because there are no good arguments for it. People have photos of the round Earth and so on. What would a “fair shake” even look like? It’s not like there are arguments for a flat earth that people are refusing to consider.

            You could argue that the photos were faked. You could say that the world is a flat ring that loops around from east to west (since it’s harder to deny that going east or west long enough will eventually take you back to where you started), but not a globe that also loops around from north to south (very few people travel over the North Pole or South Pole by land or sea, and when it comes to planes, you can argue that the pilots are part of the conspiracy). You could make the point that when you see a ship disappearing over the horizon, it’s actually just an optical illusion created by distance.

            I’m not saying these are good arguments by any means. I’m saying that, short of going into space or traveling over the poles yourself, it’s hard to find direct first-hand proof that the Earth isn’t flat. You have to rely on photographs (which can be edited), expert statements and witness accounts (which could be lies), and so forth. Yet strangely, you never hear the “let’s hear out every side” crowd talking about these particular fringe ideas. Somehow it’s only the fringe theories that have to do with racial IQ differences or sex-based preference differences or the gender binary that keep getting brought up.

          • Humbert McHumbert says:

            To believe the earth is flat would require saying no to a huge amount of what is taught in physics 101 and astro 101 at every accredited university.

            There are faculty at major universities, including Harvard, who accept the theory that there arebiological differences in interests between the sexes.

            One of these theories is much more fringe than the other.

          • LadyJane says:

            Actually what I’m arguing is there is a qualitative difference between stereotyping and rejecting ideas vs. stereotyping and rejecting people. There’s a difference between some of your ideas being excluded vs. you as a person being excluded.

            You don’t have a neutral forum if the nature of the discussion is such that some people can just make their arguments but other people are required to simultaneously make their arguments and simultaneously be making a case for why they as people should be treated as equal participants in the discussion.

            Yes. This. Exactly.

            I doubt anyone on the subreddit wrote things like “you’re black, and black people are less intelligent than whites, so your comment is probably wrong”.

            I have read a fair number of comment threads on alt-right or human-b–diversity sites, and I don’t believe I have ever seen anyone make an argument of the form “you are black, therefore we can discount your ideas.”

            If someone makes the argument “Black people are genetically inferior and innately unintelligent, therefore all of their ideas are worthless and none of them are ever worth listening to,” I can see how that would be implicitly dismissive of any arguments made by any poster who happens to be Black.

            And yes, I’ve seen cases where people were talking about genetic race differences on forums, and a Black poster would argue against the idea, and they’d respond with something like “of course you’d say that, you’re Black.” I’ve had people automatically dismiss anything I had to say about the biological basis for trans identities on the grounds that I’m trans, and therefore can’t be trusted to be impartial. Granted, in those cases it’s more “you should be ignored because you’re biased in favor of your identity group” than “you should be ignored because you’re inferior as a result of your identity group,” but it has a similarly chilling effect.

            I’ve also heard people suddenly bring up racial IQ differences in arguments in response to Black posters making comments or Black intellectuals being quoted, even when the original discussion had nothing to do with race or intelligence. I remember someone on /pol/ making a comment like “who cares what Thomas Sowell has to say, Blacks can’t do economics” when someone referenced the economist in question (weirdly, I think the person who made that comment more or less agreed with Sowell’s views too, which shows that it wasn’t just sniping to win an argument). I remember a discussion on a libertarian Facebook group about why Somalia wasn’t an anarcho-capitalist paradise, and one person responding “clearly it’s just because the country is inhabited by Blacks and they’re less intelligent, more impulsive, worse at planning and logistics and infrastructure, etc., if the government collapsed like that in a White country it would be different.”

          • 10240 says:

            Whereas with Horrible Banned Discourse, the only people who seem to ever bring it up are actual racist troglodytes who use it to justify harmful and discriminatory racist policies (whether they’re as extreme as genocide or as relatively “tame” as White separatism), and occasionally gray tribe intellectuals who are purely concerned with it from an academic perspective.

            Around here the possibility that the discourse is true is pretty often brought up in order to argue against the assumption that differences between average outcomes must be the result of discrimination, or at least some societal differences, and to argue against policies that may rely on that assumption (such as affirmative action). The same applies to sex differences. The same people often clearly reject policies of discrimination against black people or women.

            ——

            To create all the false evidence that the Earth is round (if it was actually flat) would require an implausibly large conspiracy. To have many people believe that the Horrible Banned Discourse is false (if it’s actually true or uncertain) wouldn’t take any conspiracy. At the time when I was convinced that it was false, I didn’t even actually think that it has been studied and scientists had found it was false; I thought it was so obvious that only racists would think there was a need to study it. I think this may be typical, on the basis of how rarely any actual evidence (in either direction) is discussed. (Think about whether it applies to you.)

          • 10240 says:

            @LadyJane I’ve just recalled that we’ve already discussed this once.

            Some say it proves we should get rid of affirmative action, but most Americans support getting rid of affirmative action anyway, so that’s hardly a big deal.

            Then why does it stick around? My explanation is that its supporters support it stronger than its opponents oppose it. (Many supporters consider opponents racist, which they consider an instant disqualification from decision-making positions, while many opponents just consider it one bad policy.) As a consequence, decision-makers calculate they would lose more votes than they would gain if they scrapped it. That would change as support would become weaker and opposition would become stronger.

          • albatross11 says:

            LadyJane:

            Whereas with Horrible Banned Discourse, the only people who seem to ever bring it up are actual racist troglodytes who use it to justify harmful and discriminatory racist policies (whether they’re as extreme as genocide or as relatively “tame” as White separatism), and occasionally gray tribe intellectuals who are purely concerned with it from an academic perspective. So “if someone is talking about Horrible Banned Discourse in anything more than a purely abstract way, and supports actual policy changes based on it, they’re probably a racist” doesn’t seem like an unfair or inaccurate assumption to make.

            I’ve read a lot of blog posts on Steve Sailer’s blog and Greg Cochran’s blog, some articles/papers from each, and a lot of books and other discussions from Charles Murray–three pretty prominent human b–diversity thinkers. I’ve never seen any of those three propose white nationalism, racial genocide, or anything anywhere remotely close to those things. Nor have I seen them supporting any kind of policy of racial discrimination. I’ve also seen a fair number of people here discussing human b–diversity ideas, me included, and I don’t recall seeing a lot of support for genocide or white nationalism or policies of racial discrimination.

            I think it’s easy to conclude that everyone who brings up topic X is evil and terrible, if you automatically just assume all kinds of evil and terrible beliefs in anyone who brings up topic X. Indeed, it’s going to be hard for you to find a counterexample.

            FWIW, my reason for bringing up these topics isn’t just abstract intellectual interest, it’s because I think they’re practically important in understanding how the world works, and why some policy ideas fail and others succeed. I think it’s important to discuss them openly in part because lots of people have half-baked versions of those ideas in their heads which they don’t want to discuss openly for fear of being Watsoned, and I think those people (and the world as a whole) would be better off if their half-baked versions were replaced by more-sensible, hammered out and carefully thought through versions.

        • 10240 says:

          Note: I think your definition of liberal is pretty narrow. There are plenty of liberals (including Scott) who think that an unrestricted forum is neutral.

          • Urthman says:

            You can call them whatever you want, but I trust you can see that there are two sides on this issue. The labels you choose to put on them are not neutral, of course.

          • lvlln says:

            Obviously a claimed “neutral” discussion space isn’t neutral with respect to whether or not discussion is useful or desirable. But it’s not trying to be, nor is it claiming to be. It’s trying to be neutral in the space of people who actually believe discussion is useful.

            Now obviously it’s true that one side of the culture war has a particularly vocal and influential subset that is against discussion of certain issues, but, as I wrote in a different comment, that’s not a “liberal” (progressive) vs. conservative dichotomy, that’s an authoritarian vs. actual liberal dichotomy. There are authoritarian conservatives as well who want to shut down discussion because discussion is useless or offensive in the face of the obvious truth of their own (often religiously derived) values.

            Being an authoritarian who wants to shut down debate around certain issues based on the notion that certain people who are socially disadvantaged can’t have an equal footing in an ostensibly “neutral” discussion space isn’t central to being a “liberal,” progressive, leftist, blue tribe, or whatever. Heck, as a liberal progressive leftist blue tribe member, I don’t think it’s even that common within my tribe. It’s just that the subset who do want to shut down debate are both very loud and very effective at wielding their power.

          • I would have thought that one of the differences between people who identify as “liberal” and people who identify as “progressive” was that the former group were generally in favor of free speech norms.

    • albatross11 says:

      I’d agree that many people are disadvantaged relative to others, but I don’t see how that determines what topics should be permitted in an open discussion online.

    • eigenmoon says:

      Suppose that some group X is initially disadvantaged, but because of progressives rigging most public spaces, X becomes a privileged group instead. How do you plan to detect such a situation?

      What do you plan to do if this does happen but you can no longer easily argue that the support for X should be taken down a notch because somebody has rigged most public spaces in favor of X?

  65. MrApophenia says:

    I get the impression that a lot of people here never actually read the thing they are talking about, including Scott. But as a result, I think there is some major misreading of why so many people were so bothered by the thread.

    I am sure some people were using its existence as a rhetorical weapon just because they were awful. But there were also a lot of people who actually went and participated and were frankly just having an honest reaction to what they saw.

    And to be honest, it is insane that both the original post here and a thread of comments this deep has gone on and nobody has talked about the giant elephant in the room, which is that the primary topic that both colored the whole thread and was the reason for people reacting as strongly against it as they did wasn’t a broad right-left divide, or even “Anti-SJW” posting.

    It was “race realism” or the other banned acronym. That topic was discussed so frequently, positively, enthusiastically, that everything else was colored by it. And it’s not like this was never acknowledged as an issue by the moderators – it got so out of hand that they tried banning the topic for a while there as well.

    And the posters lost their goddamn minds over it being banned! They were there to talk about how black people were genetically inferior to white people (yes, often in literally those exact words), and taking away their ability to do that was a beyond the pale stifling of their free speech!

    I am sure some people were being awful and misreading things out of context and what have you. But the accurate, in-context reading was that the SSC community ran an actively pro-racism subreddit for at least the past year. Apparently by accident and unaware it was doing so, but that doesn’t change the fact.

    • ManyCookies says:

      In the thread’s mild defense the Voldy spam got significantly better after the temp ban, or at least stopped “coloring” every plausibly adjacent topic (seriously it was to the point where even some supporters were like “Alright let’s cool it down a notch”).

      • MrApophenia says:

        I wouldn’t know – that is about the time I peaced the hell out of the forum myself (no big meltdown post first in my case, I just stopped going there.)

    • The Nybbler says:

      It was “race realism” or the other banned acronym.

      And so what? That topic underlies much of the Culture War.

      And the posters lost their goddamn minds over it being banned!

      The moderators held a survey about a 1-week ban, then when the survey failed to support even that, implemented a one month ban. I think there are reasons other than everyone being an evil Hitler wannabe for being upset over that.

      • MrApophenia says:

        And so what? That topic underlies much of the Culture War.

        Scott spends much of the original post attempting to argue that the thread wasn’t alt-right inflected, and so all the people saying SSC was running such a thing must have been acting in bad faith.

        What I am saying is that for at least the past year, the board became so deeply Banned Acronym-focused that it had its own little internal schism on the topic of whether the board should be talking solely about that single topic so much it crowded out everything else, or not. I am suggesting that, perhaps, the impression people had was actually reasonably accurate, even if some random poll indicates otherwise.

        More bluntly: If you want to have a forum whose chief and recurring topic of discussion is enthusiastically endorsing scientific racism, neat! Have fun! Strike that blow for free speech! But then it’s a bit disingenuous to consider it a pernicious smear campaign when people start referring to it as a forum whose chief and recurring topic of discussion is enthusiastically endorsing scientific racism.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Believe in horrible banned discourse is not by any means limited to the “alt right”. And merely discussing it is not an indication of something being “alt right”. Referring to it as “scientific racism” is basically playing word games; if horrible banned discourse is accurate, and “scientific racism” is a fair term for it, then having a true belief about the world is “racism”. At that point you must either abandon rationality or abandon a negative connotation for “racism”.

          But then it’s a bit disingenuous to consider it a pernicious smear campaign when people start referring to it as a forum whose chief and recurring topic of discussion is enthusiastically endorsing scientific racism.

          This, too, is a mischaracterization. Just prior to the ban there was considerable additional discussion of it. This was because it came up as part of the high-profile (for this community) Sam Harris – Ezra Klein debate. And certainly the discussions were not “endorsement”; they’d have been awfully unusual Culture War discussions if everyone was sitting around agreeing.

          • Clutzy says:

            Lets also point out that the major theme of what Klein’s position was in that debate: That even if we someday found out for sure that IQ was heritable, a good measure of important things, and there were race differences that were inherited, we should still suppress it, because it leads to bad policy.

        • If you want to have a forum whose chief and recurring topic of discussion is enthusiastically endorsing scientific racism

          At a slight tangent, does “scientific racism,” as you use the term, cover any argument for the existence of heritable differences in the distribution of IQ by race, or only false arguments or true arguments used to support policy conclusions that do not follow from them?

          If the former, you are in the uncomfortable position of using a pejorative term to describe, among other things, the propagation of truth.

          I should say that, since I didn’t read the forum in question, I have no idea how much of what appeared in it fit the one description or the other.

          • MrApophenia says:

            Usually, on this forum, when the topic comes up at all, people are pretty careful about what claims they make.

            The subreddit tended much more toward the Stormfront side of the discussion – not just “there might be heritable differences based on population” but more “we must stop all immigration from countries populated by the lesser races because they are inherently inferior.”

            And I want to be clear that I’m not engaging in hyperbole with that latter quote – that is the actual terminology that would be used (and generally be upvoted/agreed with). That one stands out in my mind because a post saying almost exactly that, in those specific terms – and passing largely unremarked-upon as part of the discussion – was the point where I realized “oh crap these guys are hardcore racists” and stopped going there.

          • Zorgon says:

            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.

            I mean, it’s right there in the post. Rightful Caliph even references Murray as one of the examples.

          • MrApophenia says:

            My point is that it wasn’t one weirdo who kept posting racist rants. It was a primary discussion topic, with the bulk of the discussion slanted a very specific way.

            Scott’s position seems to be “I never read it, but I am sure it can’t be as bad as people say. Maybe there were a few oddballs, that’s all!”

            I don’t think that is an accurate description.

          • The Nybbler says:

            My point is that it wasn’t one weirdo who kept posting racist rants.

            Doesn’t matter how many times you try to sneak the assumption in that anti-human-biouniformity discussion is “racist rants”, you’re not going to get it through.

          • Zorgon says:

            Given that virtually all of said discussion was driven by a small number of posters, and frequently challenged, I strongly disagree with your characterisation of it.

          • MrApophenia says:

            @Nybbler

            Once again, I think there is a substantive difference between discussing the possibility of/evidence for or against genetic variation in populations, and what the SSC Subreddit generally did, which was say, “The science is in! Turns out every racist stereotype from the 50s is 100% accurate, we knew it all along, now let’s base every discussion of any policy from here on out on the settled genetic superiority of white people! Now, about that ethno-state…”

          • lvlln says:

            Once again, I think there is a substantive difference between discussing the possibility of/evidence for or against genetic variation in populations, and what the SSC Subreddit generally did, which was say, “The science is in! Turns out every racist stereotype from the 50s is 100% accurate, we knew it all along, now let’s base every discussion of any policy from here on out on the settled genetic superiority of white people! Now, about that ethno-state…”

            Having spent a bunch of time in the subreddit over the past year or so, I too strongly dispute your characterization of it. There are two points in particular that stand out to me as just obviously and severely inaccurate. One being the implication of the “superiority” or “inferiority” of certain races being widely accepted or approved; those were rarely implied, and the few people who did tended to get called out on it and pushed back on it almost immediately and by many people. Two being this sort of excited gung-ho attitude about Horrible Banned Discourse not only being true but it being good that it was true. Again, some outliers did express such excitement, but those people tended to be pushed back on very vigorously, and the vast majority of the discussion was very dry and science-y in that Scott Alexander Much More Than You Need To Know sort of way.

          • CatCube says:

            @MrApophenia

            For those of us who didn’t participate in the CW threads, can you link us an example so we can evaluate it ourselves instead of listening to people argue over what they totally remember that somebody else said?

          • And I think it needs a link to a thread, not just a single comment.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Feel like I have to give my 2 cents here, just for the sake of common sense. I’ve blocked reddit since about december for productivity reasons, but before that I was actively reading and participating in the CW thread. Any my reaction reading your comment was “wait wat?!”. I’m calling a huuge Baader-Meinhof here.

  66. onyomi says:

    I know that, according to Haidt, conservatives’ disgust moral foundations are supposed to be stronger (and I believe disgust is a reaction evolved to avoid contagion), but when I see the almost-always-too-quick reaction of institutions (Covington Catholic school diocese, etc.) to this kind of scandal, it strikes me very much as an “avoid contagion” sort of reaction, like amputating a necrotic or cancerous piece of flesh before it can compromise the integrity of the organism. For the individuals under attack I think the motivation for apologies, etc. (besides genuine shock, dismay, regret) is a fear of loss of status and/or financial resources, but not a “disgust” reaction. Arguably disgust also powers the accusers on some level, as revealed in “we have no place for x in our community”-type rhetoric.

    Of course, “conservative” and “liberal” can mean different things, and whether SJ is fundamentally “liberal” or merely “progressive” is also debatable. Also, institutions, even “liberal” institutions tend to be “conservative” when it comes to preserving the institution.

    Overall, it’s the behavior of the big, seemingly more robust institutions like the NYT (which could seemingly afford to take a more measured, careful approach than we seem to see) that I find hardest to explain here, but “avoid contagion” impulse seems the likeliest candidate to me.

  67. JRM says:

    I visited the Culture War thread for the first time in response to this post. Just an FYI.

  68. nobody.really says:

    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….

    How do you know that this person was single?

    And is this person seeing anyone right now? Come on, be a pal, Scott….

    • Randy M says:

      Marital/relationship status was covered in the survey. I’m sure he cross referenced by political preferences to check for patterns. Probably with pre-registered predictions.

      • nobody.really says:

        Ok, that’s promising. Did the survey also check for who subscribes to AryianSingles.com…?

        • Randy M says:

          No, but perhaps next year the second married Nazi will list it as the referral site where they first saw SSC.

          [required disclaimer: I am not a Nazi, nor even single]

  69. llamagirl says:

    I appreciate you posting this, because to a smaller extent I experience the same thing. What particularly devastates me is that when members of my own community – people I know IRL, sometimes friends but usually friends-of-friends – attack my positions as evil. This is because I am vocally pro-GMO (GM techniques could help feed the world!), anti-Marxism (because of its historical tendency to produce autocracy), and most of all, against the notion that Person X is inhuman and evil (Person X being whomever the mob is crucifying at the moment). For this, I am periodically accused of being alt-Right and/or fascist. It bends my stomach into an anxious knot. Often, I can’t stop thinking about it for 1-2 days. Clearly I have some mindfulness work to do here, but I appreciate that you’ve created a “safe space” (heh) in which I feel comfortable admitting how fucking painful it can be to take a controversial stance.

    There. Sorry for the self-indulgence 🙂

    • cuke says:

      When you say “friends of friends” do you mean that in a Facebook sense?

      I ask partly because it’s hard for me to picture having an interesting political conversation with a friend of a friend and have them call my views evil. I would walk away from that person and avoid talking to them again, unless they apologized for their rudeness and showed that they were capable of normal conversation.

      It’s striking to me how much abuse and name-calling people will tolerate in their online spaces that they would never tolerate in person. I know we all know this. But I still sit with clients every week who are processing some slight or criticism or rudeness from a person they haven’t really had any kind of real conversation with and certainly have no real relationship with. There’s more research all the time that more time on social media is correlated with more depressive symptoms.

      In this comment space, at least there’s some basic moderation and consequences for rudeness and name-calling. Facebook and Twitter are mob rule and they’re making us sick.

      None of your views is evil. But more, none of us can learn from each other if we act as if it’s acceptable behavior to move through the world labeling this or that person’s view as “evil” as a result of whatever kind of casual social encounter. I think we all do well to avoid folks who behave that way for our own well-being.

      • llamagirl says:

        Thanks for the nice reply!

        Re: friends-of-friends: For example, people who were in my social group back when I was a teenager. I wasn’t good friends with them, but we went to the same gatherings (lots of LARPing and sword-fighting!) and knew more than a little about one another. But yes, the interactions are on FB and no, I can’t imagine this unpleasantness occurring IRL.

        I specifically try to dissuade my community from the abuse you describe, but this too is controversial. A common belief is this: fascism is rising in this country and to tolerate fascists is to be complicit. The problem is that the label “fascist” is used rather liberally, often to describe views that are merely non-conforming, not fascist at all (e.g. pro-GMO, anti-Marxism).

        Lately, I’ve just stopped reading FB replies. It has helped my sanity. But I wish there was more that I could do.

  70. Brian Young says:

    Hi Scott,

    I hope that this message isn’t taken the same as one of sympathy, because it’s not. It’s one of gratitude.

    I just want to let you know that your writing and efforts have, in their own small but non-negligible way, made both me and the life I’ve lived better. And in spite of the fact that what you see and hear from the trolls and haters is inevitably is louder than me and those like me, I’m fairly certain that I’m not alone in that.

    So thanks.

  71. willshetterly says:

    I will not offer sympathy or cast you as a martyr, but I will point out that depression is a very common symptom of mobbing, and in extreme cases, the result is suicide. Humans are social animals–even those of us who think of ourselves as loners. I cannot say Mark Fisher killed himself because he was mobbed, but I can say that mobbing contributed to his suicide. People who haven’t gone through online mobbing cannot understand how awful it is. What’s most sad is that the people who use these tactics think their cause validates them and fail to see that every time they use vicious tactics, they make their cause look like nothing more than an excuse for viciousness.

  72. armenia4ever says:

    After a while, I’ve noticed that the internet age has created and fueled already existing distinct bad actors on every conceivable part of the spectrum. I wouldn’t even call them trolls, as much as a kind of modern non-religious crusader who stumbles upon something you do, write, or something someone has written about you. (Or are directed your way.)

    They make a one time permanent decision then about your character, your intentions, and even who you “really” are in your real life. This is deliberate on their part. Everything they do from there is subjected to a kind of confirmation bias in which they search for anything possible to confirm their judgement of you. Anyone “questionable” you encounter or talk with is now guilt by association and you are assumed to stand for everything they stand for.

    Assuming the worst about you and making sure others to is their ultimate goal. Conflating you with a Nazi – regardless of being someone the Nazis would have exterminated – or another really terrible label with all those juicy connotations becomes acceptable to them. The incredible amounts of abuse they dish out is suddenly acceptable because you’re a Nazi. (Ironically, I suppose dehumanizing someone is the best way to excuse treating them in the worst possible way.)

    They even start to believe it to be an accurate description. That’s why labeling the Culture War thread as “right wing” became acceptable as well as the worsening labels that came with it – regardless of the truth.

    Their dialogue with you isn’t meant to be sincere, but rather to try to embarrass you, get a reaction, or get you to say something that can be taken as “extreme” or deliberately taken out of context easily.

    In their eyes, you are either a villain or a hero. There’s no nuance or in-between. Essentially, you’re a statue from an evil past that needs to be torn down by any means necessary. For these people, it becomes their very identity – who they are. It’s why they actually bothered to try to wreck your personal and daily life.

    It’s almost impossible to talk to people like that until they end up dealing with someone just like them that results in a life changing experience. (A social media lynch mob for instance.)

    You either ignore them, “censor” them, or call out their deliberate malfeasance – but that usually just adds fuel to their fire. Sure you’ve got to set the record straight, but the damage is always already done. I’m not sure if this is simply the cost of living in the internet age, but there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it.

    • albatross11 says:

      As best I can tell, there’s a fair fraction of the human race who really enjoys finding acceptable targets and hurting them. Social movements that need footsoldiers who will send the other side blood-curdling threats or spread vile lies about them without suffering a twinge of conscience can always find them.

  73. Plumber says:

    There’s been some posts in this thread arguing if “The Right” or “The Left” does more politically motivated maliciousness of either physical violence or internet slandering, I can think of some instances of both, and I’m just old enough to remember when both the “radical right” (the Klan) and the “radical left” (the S.L.A.) were killing “Liberals”.

    I don’t know how to determine “Who’s more at fault”, other than the individual who is acting maliciously in a given instance.

    If you read “right-leaning” publications instances of “left” and “liberal” bad acting will be reported. 

    If you read “left-leaning” publications you’ll read of “right” (and sometimes “liberal” in far-left screeds) bad acting. 

    I don’t know of a scoreboard of victimization (and I really don’t want to learn there is one), but as the U.S.A. becomes more politically polarized I’m just glad that polirically motivated physical violence is less popular now than when I was young, even as I’m saddened by how slander is more popular. 

    • albatross11 says:

      I think trying to decide whose side is worse or whose side did it first is very seldom productive, and also that it’s almost never about anything but trying to come up with a way to slag on the other side.

  74. ClarisseThorn says:

    Hi Scott — Thanks for writing this. Back when I spent a lot of time blogging, I did everything I could to create a space where all kinds of people could participate despite frequently being on “opposite sides” of the culture war. I felt that it was important work, and sometimes even interesting/fun — but it cost me a lot at the time, and I ultimately had a catastrophic experience similar to yours.

    I appreciate how you have chosen to articulate what happened and I hope your post helps readers make sense of what a terrible, stressful, challenging experience this can be. I never felt able to document what happened to me in any sort of level-headed or helpful way (as I think most people who go through these things don’t). Also, if you ever want to decompress with someone who’s been there, feel free to reach out. (That offer also goes for anyone else reading this thread who’s had a similar experience to the one documented in the OP.)

    P.S. edit: I hope this isn’t too much of an “expression of sympathy,” since Scott asked us specifically not to send those :p My main intent here is to offer (a) corroboration that this is a real experience for real people who try to set up and moderate these environments, and (b) support to anyone who’s gone through something similar.

  75. dan20791 says:

    Scott, what you’ve written is a fascinating account of *what* happened, but I’d love to see a follow-up post suggesting *why* this has happened. You started with an even left and right area and had the left insist it was a far right echo chamber, and I’ve had something very similar. For the last few years, I’ve been the unofficial pollster of the UKpolitics subreddit. Every single one of the polls I’ve done has consistently found that the left wing users outnumber the right wingers. If you’re curious, there are years of results here. The sub went from 60/40 ish left right a few years ago to roughly 80/20 now. Yet it is exactly what you described: all the left wing users insisted that it was a right wing echo chamber, that the mods were disgusting in their attitudes, and since the attack in NZ, people are blaming the mods for allowing nazi-ism to flourish on the sub, and that the mods were therefore nazi enablers. Any time someone linked to the fact that all the evidence showed they were wrong, the left wing users would simply say ‘that’s the users, but many don’t count, it’s the posters and comments that are right-dominant’. When further research showed that to be wrong too, it was just denied further.

    This is such bizarre and extreme behaviour, but apparently it is not unique. Even in a left-filled echo chamber, there is insistence that it is right wing.

    What do you think makes this happen?

    • 10240 says:

      A 80% majority is enough to be able to act like the remainder are beyond the pale. A 60% majority isn’t.

  76. Phil Goetz says:

    Intelligence is largely information compression. Information which agrees with your beliefs is redundant, and often discarded. Information from someone who has different life-experiences than you will be degraded by compression, because your compression of it into, say, its principal components, will discard a lot of information. Hence sampling your own memory of user comments may give you a remembered sample which is biased to under-represent statements which agree with you, and to reconstruct statements from someone operating under a different paradigm (set of principal components) in an error-prone way biased towards reconstructing them as “typical people who disagree with you”.