[Content warning: Social justice, anti-social justice, comparisons of social justice to anti-social-justice, comparisons of different groups’ experiences.]
The social justice narrative describes a political-economic elite dominated by white males persecuting anybody who doesn’t fit into their culture, like blacks, women, and gays. The anti-social-justice narrative describes an intellectual-cultural elite dominated by social justice activists persecuting anybody who doesn’t fit into their culture, like men, theists, and conservatives. Both are relatively plausible; Congress and millionaires are 80% – 90% white; journalists and the Ivy League are 80% – 90% leftist.
The narratives share a surprising number of other similarities. Both, for example, identify their enemy with the spirit of a discredited mid-twentieth century genocidal philosophy of government; fascists on the one side, communists on the other. Both believe they’re fighting a war for their very right to exist, despite the lack of any plausible path to reinstituting slavery or transitioning to a Stalinist dictatorship. Both operate through explosions of outrage at salient media examples of their out-group persecuting their in-group.
They have even converged on the same excuse for what their enemies call “politicizing” previously neutral territory – that what their enemies call “politicizing” is actually trying to restore balance to a field the other side has already successfully politicized. For example, on Vox recently a professor accused of replacing education with social justice propaganda in her classroom counterargues that:
All of my students, regardless of the identity categories they embraced, had been taught their entire lives that real literature is written by white people. Naturally, they felt they were being cheated by this strange professor’s “agenda”…It is worth asking, Who can most afford to teach in ways that are least likely to inspire controversy? Those who are not immediately hurt by dominant ideas. And what’s the most dominant idea of them all? That the white, male, heterosexual perspective is neutral, but all other perspectives are biased and must be treated with skepticism […]
Have we actually believed the lie that the only people who engage in “identity politics” are black feminists like me? Could it be that when some white men looked at more powerful white men, they could see them only as reasonable and not politically motivated, so they turned off their critical thinking skills when observing their actions? (Not everyone, of course.) Could it be that we only consider people ideologues when they don’t vow allegiance to capitalism?
Compare to the “Sad Puppies”, a group of conservatives accused of adding a conservative bent to science fiction’s Hugo Awards. They retort that “politicization is what leftists call it when you fight back against leftists politicizing something”. As per the Breitbart article:
The chief complaint from the Sad Puppies campaigners is the atmosphere of political intolerance and cliquishness that prevails in the sci-fi community. According to the libertarian sci-fi author Sarah A. Hoyt, whispering campaigns by insiders have been responsible for the de facto blacklisting of politically nonconformist writers across the sci-fi community. Authors who earn the ire of the dominant clique can expect to have a harder time getting published and be quietly passed over at award ceremonies […]
Brad R. Torgersen, who managed this year’s Sad Puppies campaign, spoke to Breitbart London about its success: “I am glad to be overturning the applecart. Numerous authors, editors, and markets have been routinely snubbed or ignored over the years because they were not popular inside WSFS or because their politics have made them radioactive.”
Torgersen cites a host of authors who have suffered de facto exclusion from the sci-fi community: David Drake, David Weber, L.E Modesitt Jr, Kevn J. Anderson, Eric Flint, and of course Orson Scott Card — the creator of the world-famous Ender’s Game, which was recently adapted into a successful movie. Despite his phenomenal success, Scott Card has been ostracized by sci-fi’s inner circle thanks to his opposition to gay marriage.
I see minimal awareness from the social justice movement and the anti-social-justice movement that their narratives are similar, and certainly no deliberate intent to copy from one another. That makes me think of this as a case of convergent evolution.
The social justice attitude evolved among minority groups living under the domination of a different culture, which at best wanted to ignore them and at worst actively loathed them for who they were and tried to bully them into submission. The closest the average white guy gets to that kind of environment is wandering into a social-justice-dominated space and getting to experience the same casual hatred and denigration for them and everyone like them, followed by the same insistence that they’re imagining things and how dare they make that accusation and actually everything is peachy.
And maybe that very specific situation breeds a very specific kind of malignant hypervigilance, sort of halfway between post-traumatic stress disorder and outright paranoia, which motivates the obvious fear and hatred felt by both groups.
Someone is going to freak out and say I am a disgusting privileged shitlord for daring to compare the experience of people concerned about social justice to the experience of genuinely oppressed people, but they really shouldn’t. That’s the explicit goal of large parts of the social justice movement. For example, on the Hacker News thread about far-rightist Curtis Yarvin being kicked out of a tech conference for his views, one commenter writes:
I’ve been involved in anti-racist/anti-fascist work, either directly or on the periphery, for about ten years at this point. This takes many forms, from street confrontations with fascists, protests at book readings and other events, and also disrupting fascist conferences and similar […]
As far as this issue and other similar issues are concerned, I’m overjoyed that, as you put it, a climate of fear exists for fascists, misogynists, racists, and similar. I hope that this continues and only worsens for these people.
I’m happy for many reasons. The first is that it has, as you’ve said, made privileged people afraid. I think this is only the beginning. Privilege creates safety, and as it is removed, I think the unsafety of the oppressed will in part come to the currently privileged classes. But if I could flip a switch and make every man feel the persistent, gnawing fear that a woman has of men, I would in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t even consider whether the consequences were strategic, I would just do it.
This not the only time I’ve heard this opinion expressed, just the most recent. I feel like if you admit that you’re trying your hardest to make privileged people feel afraid and uncomfortable and under siege in a way much like minorities traditionally do, and privileged people are in fact complaining of feeling afraid and uncomfortable and under siege in a way much like minorities traditionally do, you shouldn’t immediately doubt their experience. Give yourself some more credit than that. You’ve been working hard, and at least in a few isolated cases here and there it’s paid off.
The commenter continues:
I would not say that I set out to defeat a “discourse-stifling” monster. The monsters I set out to defeat were patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. These systems violently oppress, they don’t “stifle discourse.” In fact, they LOVE discourse! When people are discoursing, they aren’t in the streets. I’ve seen so many promising movements hobbled by reformism that I’m glad the possibility no longer exists, though that isn’t at all the fault of SJW-outrage (and is rather a consequence of the fact that the economy is in large part so perilous that nobody can afford the concessions that were previously won by reformists). So if discourse is permanently removed as a tactical and strategic option for future leftists, I’ll consider it a victory.
Needless to say, that is not this blog’s philosophy. But I think there is nevertheless something to be gained from all of the hard work this guy and his colleagues have put in making other people feel unsafe.
The mirror neuron has always been one of liberalism’s strongest weapon. A Christian doesn’t decide to tolerate Islam because she likes Islam, she decides to tolerate Islam because she can put herself in a Muslim’s shoes and realize that banning Islam would make him deeply upset in the same way that banning Christianity would make her deeply upset.
If the fear and hypervigilance that majority groups feel in social-justice-dominated spaces is the same as the fear and hypervigilance that minority groups feel in potentially discriminatory spaces, that gives us a whole lot more mirror neurons to work with and allows us to get a gut-level understanding of the other side of the dynamic. It lets us check my intuitions against their own evil twins on the other side to determine when we are proving too much.
II.
A couple of months ago the owners of a pizzeria mentioned in an interview that they wouldn’t serve pizza at gay weddings because they’re against gay marriage. Instantly the nation united in hatred of them and sent a bunch of death threats and rape threats and eventually they had to close down.
I thought this was ridiculous. I mean, obviously death threats are never acceptable, but there seemed to be something especially frivolous about this case, where there are dozens of other pizzerias gay people can go to and where no one would ever serve pizza at a wedding anyway. A pizzeria hardly holds the World Levers Of Power, so just let them have their weird opinion. All they’re doing is sending potential paying customers to their more tolerant competitors, who are laughing all the way to the bank. It’s a self-punishing offense.
This was very reasonable of me and I should be praised for my reasonableness, except that when a technology conference recently booted a speaker for having far-right views on his own time, I was one of the many people who found this really scary and thought they needed to be publicly condemned for this intolerant act.
In theory, the same considerations ought to apply. There are dozens of other technology conferences in the world. Technology conferences also do not hold the World Levers Of Power. And when they reject qualified rightist speakers, that just means they’re just making life easier for their competitors who will be happy to grab the opportunity and laugh all the way to the bank. It ought to be self-punishing, so what’s the worry.
My brain is totally not on board with this reasoning. When I ask it why, it says something like “No, you don’t understand, these people are relentless, unless they are constantly pushed against they will put pressure on more and more institutions until their enemies are starved out or limited to tiny ghettos. Then they will gradually expand the definition of ‘enemy’ until everybody who doesn’t do whatever they say is blacklisted from everywhere.”
And if you think that’s hyper-paranoid, then, well, you’re probably right, but at least I have a lot of company. Here are some other comments on the same situation from the last links thread:
I spent a semester of college in Massachusetts. That’s where I found out that there are a lot of people who’d kill me and most of my family if they were given the chance. And thought it was totally reasonable and acceptable to say as much. (The things that are associated with Tumblr these days existed long before it. And mostly came from academia.)
About the same time that sort of thing was happening in that online community, the same thing was happening in the real-world meat-space gatherings, also quite literally with shrill screams, mostly by [reacted] [reacted]s, who would overhear someone else’s private conversations, and then start streaming “I BEG YOUR PARDON!” and “HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT!”, and by [reacted] [reacted]’s who were bullying their way onto programming committees, and then making sure that various speakers, panelists, artists, authors, dealers, and GoHs known to be guilty of wrongthink were never invited in the first place. Were it not for the lucky circumstance of the rise of the web, the market takeoff of ebooks, especially a large ebook vendor (named after a river)’s ebook direct program, and the brave anchoring of a well known genre publisher that was specifically not homed in NYC, the purging of the genre and the community would have been complete.
Almost nobody wants to physically murder and maim the enemy, at least at the start. That’s, well, the Final Solution. Plan A is pretty much always for the enemy to admit their wrongness or at least weakness, surrender, and agree to live according to the conqueror’s rules. Maybe the leaders will have to go to prison for a while, but everyone else can just quietly recant and submit, nobody has to be maimed or killed. [The social justice community] almost certainly imagine they can achieve this through organized ostracism, social harassment, and democratic political activism. It’s when they find that this won’t actually make all the racists shut up and go away, that we get to see what their Plan B, and ultimately their final solution, look like.
And if you think my commenters are also hyper-paranoid, then you’re probably still right. But it seems like the same kind of paranoia that makes gay people and their allies scream bloody murder against a single pizzeria, the kind that makes them think of it as a potential existential threat even though they’ve won victory after victory after victory and the only question still in the Overton Window is the terms of their enemies’ surrender.
I mocked the hell out of the people boycotting Indiana businesses because of their right-to-discriminate law:
Can we admit it's KIND OF funny ppl are boycotting Indiana for the immoral act of allowing people to boycott those they think act immorally?
— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) March 31, 2015
But if some state were to pass a law specifically saying “It is definitely super legal to discriminate against conservatives for their political beliefs,” this would freak me out, even though I am not conservative and even though this is already totally legal so the law would change nothing. I would not want to rule out any response, up to and including salting their fields to make sure no bad ideas could ever grow there again.
Like many people, I am not very good at consistency.
III.
Author John Green writes books related to social justice. A couple of days ago, some social justice bloggers who disagreed with his perspective decided that a proportional response was to imply he was a creep who might sexually abuse children. Green was somewhat put out by this, and said on his Tumblr that he was “tired of seeing the language of social justice – important language doing important work – misused as a way to dehumanize others and treat them hatefully” and that he thought his harassers “were not treating him like a person”.
Speaking of the language of social justice, “dehumanizing” and “not treating like a person” are some pretty strong terms. They’re terms I’ve criticized before – like when feminists say they feel like women aren’t being treated as people, I’m tempted to say something like “the worst you’ve ever been able to find is a single-digit pay gap which may or may not exist, and you’re going to turn that into people not thinking you’re human?”
Here’s another strong term: “hatred”. The activist who got Mencius Moldbug banned from Strange Loop reassured us that he would never want someone banned merely for having unusual political views, but Moldbug went beyond that into “hatred”, which means his speech is “hate speech”, which is of course intolerable. This is a bit strange to anybody who’s read any of his essays, which seem to have trouble with any emotion beyond smugness. I call him a bloodless and analytical thinker; the idea of his veins suddenly bulging out when he thinks about black people is too silly to even talk about. The same is true of the idea that people should feel “unsafe” around him; his entire shtick is that no one except the state should be able to initiate violence!
Likewise, when people wanted TV star Phil Robertson fired for saying (on his own time) that homosexuality was unnatural and led to bestiality and adultery, they said it wasn’t about policing his religion, it was about how these were “hateful” comments that would make the people working with him feel unsafe. At the time I said that was poppycock and that people who wanted him fired for having a private opinion were the worst kinds of illiberal witch-hunters.
On the other hand, consider Irene Gallo. I know nothing of her except what the Alas blog post says, but apparently in science fiction’s ongoing conflict between the establishment and the anti-SJW “Sad Puppies”/”Rabid Puppies” groups, she referred to the latter as:
Two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are unrepentantly racist, sexist and homophobic.
These are some pretty strong allegations, and range from “false” to “bizarre”; Brad Torgenson, leader of the group she called “extreme right wing neo nazi unrepentant racists”, is happily married to a black woman. And the people she’s talking about are her company’s authors and customers, which hardly seems like good business practice. Some authors have said they feel uncomfortable working for a company whose employees think of them that way, and others have suggested boycotting Tor until they make her apologize or fire her.
Barry says that since she said these on her own private Facebook page, it is a private opinion that it would be pretty censorious to fire her over. Part of me agrees.
On the other hand, if I were a sci-fi author in one of the groups that she was talking about, I’m not sure I’d be able to work with her. Like, really? You want me to sit across a table and smile at the woman who thinks I’m a racist sexist homophobic extremist neo-Nazi just because I disagree with her?
Robertson’s comment is just standard having-theological-opinions. Like, “Christian thinks homosexuality is sinful, more at eleven.” Big deal. But Gallo’s comment feels more like white hot burning hatred. She’s clearly too genteel to personally kill me, but one gets the clear impression that if she could just press a button and have me die screaming, she’d do it with a smile on her face.
But this is just interpretation. Maybe Gallo doesn’t consider “neo-Nazi” a term of abuse. Maybe this was just her dispassionate way of describing a political philosophy with the most appropriate analogy she could think of.
It doesn’t seem likely to me. Then again, even though it seems obvious to me that stating “homosexuality is sinful and similar to bestiality” is a theological position totally compatible with being able to love the sinner and hate the sin, gay people have a lot of trouble believing it. And although I cannot condone firing people for their private opinions, back when people were trying to get rid of Gawker honcho Sam Biddle for saying that “nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission”, God help me it certainly crossed my head that there were even the slightest consequences for this kind of behavior, maybe other social justice writers would stop saying and acting upon statements like that all the frickin’ time?
Once again, I’m not scoring very highly in consistency here.
IV.
A little while ago I had a bad couple of days. Some people were suggesting I was a liability to a group I was part of because I’d written some posts critical of feminism, and I got in a big fight about it. Then someone sent my ex-girlfriend a Tumblr message asking if they’d broken up with me “because I was racist”. Then despite my best efforts to prevent this, my Facebook feed decided to show me a bunch of Gawker-style articles about “Are all white people to blame for [latest atrocity]? I was too exhausted to write a real blog post, so I just threw together a links post. Because among two dozen or so links there was one (1) to the Moldbug story previously mentioned above, one commenter wrote that “your links posts are becoming indistinguishable from Chaos Patch” (Chaos Patch is the links post of notable far-right blog Xenosystems).
So I decided to ban that commenter. But since I have a policy in place of waiting an hour before doing anything rash, I took a long walk, thought about it a bit, and settled for just yelling at him instead.
Is banning someone for a kind of meaningless barb excessive? Well, yes. But given everything else that had happened, I didn’t have the energy to deal with it, and since this is my blog and the one corner of the world I have at least a tiny bit of control over I could at least symbolically get rid of a small fraction of my problems.
Plus, to me the barb seemed like an obvious veiled threat. “As long as you post any links about rightist causes, I can accuse you of being far-right. And we all know what happens to far-right people, eh?”
So even though out of context it was about the most minimal hostility possible, barely rising to the level where somebody would say it was even capable of being a problem at all, in context it really bothered me and made me at least somewhat justifiably feel unsafe.
Ever since I learned the word “microaggression” I have been unironically fond of it.
Microagressions. Nanoagressions. Picoagressions. The Planck Hostility.
— Map of Territory (@MapOfTerritory) January 28, 2015
When I’m putting up with too much and I’ve used up my entire mental buffer, then somebody bothering me and hiding under the cover of “oh, this was such a tiny insult that you would seem completely crazy to call me on it” is especially infuriating, even more infuriating than someone insulting me outright and me being able to respond freely. The more you have to deal with people who hate you and want to exclude you, the more likely you are to get into this mode, not to mention people who have developed their own little secret language of insults.
Here’s an example of what I mean by “secret language of insults”: consider the term “dude”, as in “white dude”. There is nothing objectively wrong with “dude” when it is applied to surfers or something. But when a feminist says it, as in the term “white dudes”, you know it is going to be followed by some claim that as a white dude, you are exactly the same as all other white dudes and entirely to blame for something you don’t endorse. The first page of Google results is overratedwhitedudes.tumblr.com, Gawker saying Wimpy White Dudes Ruined American Idol, and Mother Jones saying glowingly that You Won’t Find Many White Dudes At This Tech Startup. Being called a “white dude” is always followed by the implication that you’re ruining something or that your very presence is cringeworthy and disgusting.
I had a feminist friend who used to use the term “dudes” for “men” all the time. I asked them to please stop. They said that was silly, because that was just the word the culture they’d grown up in used, and obviously no harm was meant by it, and if I took it as an insult then I was just being oversensitive. This is word for word the explanation I got when I asked one of my elderly patients to stop calling black people their particular ethnic slur.
The counterpart to subliminal insults is superliminal insults; ones that are hard to detect because they’re so over-the-top obvious.
I was recently reading a social justice blog where someone complained about men telling women “Make me a sandwich!” in what was obvious jest.
On the one hand, no one can possibly take this seriously.
On the other hand, there’s a common social justice meme where people post under the hashtag #killallwhitemen.
Certainly this cannot be taken seriously; most social justice activists don’t have the means to kill all white men, and probably there are several of them who wouldn’t do it even if they could. It should not be taken, literally, as a suggestion that all white men should be killed. On the other hand, for some bizarre reason this tends to make white men uncomfortable.
The obvious answer is that the people posting “Wimmen, make me a sandwich!” don’t literally believe that women exist only for making them sandwiches, but they might believe a much weaker claim along the same lines, and by making the absurd sandwich claim, they can rub it in while also claiming to be joking. At least this is how I feel about the “kill all white men” claim.
As long as you’ve got a secret language of insults that your target knows perfectly well are insulting, but which you can credibly claim are not insulting at all – maybe even believing it yourself – then you have the ability to make them feel vaguely uncomfortable and disliked everywhere you go without even trying. If they bring it up, you can just laugh about how silly it is that people believe in “microaggressions” and make some bon mot about “the Planck hostility”.
V.
I’m taking a pretty heavy Outside View line here, so let me allow my lizard brain a few words in its own defense.
“Yes,” my lizard brain says, “social justice activists and the people silenced by social justice activists use some of the same terms and have some of the same worries. But the latter group has reasonable worries, and the former group has totally unreasonable worries, which breaks the symmetry.”
Interesting. Please continue, lizard brain.
“Black people might be very worried about being discriminated against. But the chance that someone would say ‘Let’s ban all black people from our technology conference, because they are gross’, and everyone would say ‘Yes, that is a splendid idea’, and the government and media would say ‘Oh, wonderful, we are so proud of you for banning all black people from your conference’ is zero point zero zero zero. On the other hand, this is something that conservatives worry about every day. The chance that someone would say ‘You know, there’s no reason raping women should be illegal, let’s not even bother recording it in our official statistics’ is even lower than that, but this is exactly what several countries do with male rape victims. If someone says ‘kill all white men’, then all we do is hold an interminable debate about whether that disqualifies them from the position of Diversity Officer; if someone said ‘kill all gays’, we would be much more final in pronouncing them Not Quite Diversity Officer Material.”
But don’t you –
“The reason why we don’t care about a pizzeria that won’t serve gay people is that recent years have shown an overwhelming trend in favor of more and more rights and acceptance of gay people, and the pizzeria is a tiny deviation from the pattern which is obviously going to get crushed under the weight of history even without our help. The reason we worry about a conference banning conservatives is that conservatives are an actually-at-risk group, and their exclusion could grow and grow until it reaches horrific proportions. The idea of a pizzeria banning gays and a conference banning conservatives may seem superficially similar out of context, but when you add this piece of context they’re two completely different beasts.”
Two responses come to mind.
First, this is obviously true and correct.
Second, this is exactly symmetrical to my least favorite argument, the argument from privilege.
The argument from privilege is something like “Yeah, sure, every so often the system is unfair to white people or men or whatever in some way. But this is not a problem and we should not even be talking about it, because privilege. Shows that mock women for stereotypically female failings are sexist, but shows that mock men for stereotypically male failings are hilarious, and you may not call them sexist because you can’t be sexist against privileged groups.”
My argument has always been “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander”.
But either this argument goes, or my lizard brain’s argument goes, or we have to move to the object level, or somebody has to get more subtle.
VI.
My point is, there are a lot of social justice arguments I really hate, but which I find myself unintentionally reinventing any time things go really bad for me, or I feel like myself or my friends are being persecuted.
I should stop to clarify something. “Persecuted” is a strong word. “Feel like we are being persecuted” is way weaker.
A couple weeks ago there was a Vox article, America’s Never Been Safer, So Why Do Republicans Believe It Is In Mortal Peril?. It brought up a lot of cute statistics, like that the rate of pedestrians being killed by car accidents is much higher than the rate of civilians being killed in terrorist attacks. It joked that “You’re over 100 times more likely to die by literally walking around than you are to be killed in a terrorist attack.”
On the other hand, vox has practically led the news media in 24-7 coverage of police officers shooting unarmed black people, talking about how it’s a huge threat to our values as a civilization and how white people don’t understand that all black people have to constantly live in fear for their lives.
But a quick calculation demonstrates that unarmed black people are about 10 times more likely to die by literally walking around than by getting shot by a white police officer. One gets the feeling Vox doesn’t find this one nearly as funny.
But here I would perform another quick calculation. Here’s a list of people who have been publicly shamed or fired for having politically incorrect opinions. Even if we assume the list is understating the extent of the problem by an entire order of magnitude, you’re still more likely to die by literally walking around than you are to get purged for your politically incorrect opinion.
Like a lot non-feminists, I was freaked out by the recent story about a man who was raped while unconscious being declared the rapist and expelled from college without getting to tell his side of the story. I have no evidence that this has ever happened more than just the one time mentioned in the article, let alone it being a national epidemic that might one day catch me in its clutches, but because I’ve had to deal with overly feminist colleges in other ways, my brain immediately raised it to Threat Level Red and I had to resist the urge to tell my friends in colleges to get out while they still could. If we non-feminists can get worried about this – and we can – we have less than no right to tell feminists they shouldn’t really be worried about college rape because the real statistics are 1 in X and not 1 in Y like they claim.
Hopefully some readers are lucky enough never to have felt much personal concern about terrorism, police shootings, rape, rape accusations, or political correctness. But if you’ve worried about at least one of these low-probability things, then I hope you can extend that concern to understand why other people might be worried about the others. It seems to have something to do with the chilling effect of knowing that something is intended to send a message to you, and in fact receiving that message.
(as an aside, I find it surprising that so many people, including myself, are able to accept the statistics about terrorism so calmly without feeling personally threatened. My guess is that, as per Part VIII here, we don’t primarily identify as Americans, so a threat deliberately framed as wanting to make Americans feel unsafe just bounces off us.)
In an age where the media faithfully relates and signal-boosts all threats aimed at different groups, and commentators then serve their own political needs by shouting at us that WE ARE NOT FEELING THREATENED ENOUGH and WE NEED TO FEEL MORE THREATENED, it is very easy for a group that faces even a small amount of concerted opposition, even when most of society is their nominal allies and trying hard to protect them, to get pushed into a total paranoia that a vast conspiracy is after them and they will never be safe. This is obviously the state that my commenters who I quoted in Part II are stuck in, obviously the state that those people boycotting the Indiana pizzeria are stuck in, and, I admit, a state I’m stuck in a lot of the time as well.
VII.
Getting back to the thesis, my point is there are a lot of social justice arguments I really hate, but which I find myself unintentionally reinventing any time things go really bad for me, or I feel like myself or my friends are being persecuted.
Once events provoke a certain level of hypervigilance in someone – which is very easy and requires only a couple of people being hostile, plus the implication that they there’s much more hostility hidden under the surface – then that person gets in fear for their life and livelihood and starts saying apparently bizarre things: that nobody treats them as a person, that their very right to exist is being challenged. Their increasingly strident rhetoric attracts increasingly strident and personal counter-rhetoric from the other side, making them more and more threatened until they reach the point where Israel is stealing their shoe. And because they feel like every short-term battle is the last step on the slippery slope to their total marginalization, they engage in crisis-mode short-term thinking and are understandably willing to throw longer-term values like free speech, politeness, nonviolence, et cetera, under the bus.
Although it’s very easy enter this state of hypervigilance yourself no matter how safe you are, it’s very hard to understand why anyone else could possibly be pushed into it despite by-the-numbers safety. As a result, we constantly end up with two sides both shouting “You’re making me live in fear, and also you’re making the obviously false claim that you live in fear yourself! Stop it!” and no one getting anywhere. At worst, it degenerates into people saying “These people are falsely accusing me of persecuting them, and falsely claiming to be persecuted themselves, I’ll get back at them by mocking them relentlessly, doxxing them, and trying to make them miserable!” and then you get the kind of atmosphere you find in places like SRS and Gamergate and FreeThoughtBlogs.
But I’m also slightly optimistic for the future. The conservative side seems to have been about ten years behind the progressive side in this, but they’re catching up quickly. Now everybody has to worry about being triggered, everybody has to worry about their comments being taken out of context by Gawker/Breitbart and used to get them fired and discredit their entire identity group, everybody has to worry about getting death threats, et cetera. This is bad, but also sort of good. When one side has nukes, they nuke Hiroshima and win handily. When both sides have nukes, then under the threat of mutually assured destruction they eventually come up with protocols to prevent those nukes from being used.
Now that it’s easier to offend straight white men, hopefully they’ll agree trigger warnings can be a useful concept. And now that some social justice activists are getting fired for voicing their opinions in private, hopefully they’ll agree that you shouldn’t fire people for things they say on their own time. Once everyone agrees with each other, there’s a chance of getting somewhere. Yes, all of this will run up against a wall of “how dare you compare what I’m doing to what you’re doing, I’m defending my right to exist but you’re engaging in hate speech!” but maybe as everyone gets tired of the nukes flying all the time people will become less invested in this point and willing to go to the hypothetical Platonic negotiation table.
My advice for people on the anti-social justice side – I don’t expect giving the SJ people advice would go very well – is that it’s time to stop talking about how social justice activism is necessarily a plot to get more political power, or steal resources, or silence dissenting views. Like everything else in the world it can certainly turn into that, but I think our own experience gives us a lot of reasons to believe they’re exactly as terrified as they say, and that we can’t expect them to accept “you have no provable objective right to be terrified” any more than our lizard brains would accept it of us. I think it’s time to stop believing that they censor and doxx and fire their opponents out of some innate inability to understand liberalism, and admit that they probably censor and doxx and fire their opponents because they’re as scared as we are and feel a need to strike back.
This isn’t a claim that they don’t have it in for us – many of them freely admit they do – and that they don’t need to be stopped. It’s just a claim that we can gain a good understanding of why they have it in for us, and how we might engineer stopping them in a way less confrontational than fighting an endless feud.
Yesterday, a friend on Facebook posted something about a thing men do which makes women feel uncomfortable and which she wanted men to stop. I carefully thought about whether I ever did it, couldn’t think of a time I had, but decided to make sure I didn’t do it in the future.
I realized that if I’d heard the exact same statement from Gawker, I would have interpreted it (correctly) as yet another way to paint men as constant oppressors and women as constant victims in order to discredit men’s opinions on everything, and blocked the person who mentioned it to me so I didn’t have to deal with yet another person shouting that message at me. The difference this time was that it came from an acquaintance who was no friend of feminism, who has some opinions of her own that might get her banned from tech conferences, and who I know would have been equally willing to share something women do that bothers men, if she had thought it important.
If we can get to a point where we don’t feel like requests are part of a giant conspiracy to discredit and silence us, people are sometimes willing to listen. Even me.
You’re remarkably self-aware in your writings. I don’t think I’ve seen this level of self-awareness in many other places.
the reason you dont see it is that it’s boring. i dont really want to read everybody displaying their self awareness before their audience by questioning their own mind out loud. this is a performance, but sometimes the trick is better seen than the actual evidence that should speak for itself. besides this is what you do before you write something, it’s thinking before you speak, not while you’re speaking. you can show your self awareness by just showing it instead of telling it. i think scott just did it this way to bring us into his own mind so we can see where he is uncertain or perplexed and to avoid hostile comments that misunderstood him. not everybody could see how self aware someone was unless it was spelled out. scott is probably one of the last people that needs to prove this to anyone, but sometimes you can never be too safe.
[I’m cutting part because I posted something before reading where you had it already. Sorry for doing that. Really!]
Regarding Irene Gallo,
When you tell your children not to hit one another, but only punish one of them for doing so, you raise a bully, and your children will hate each other to boot.
Therefore, I think the right is correct to start demanding scalps.
When I was hired at my previous job, it was made clear I wasn’t to talk about competition in overly inflammatory language like “smite” (I remembered that because I didn’t think anyone who didn’t write DnD manuals would use the words smite). Irene used much harsher language about clients and customers.
(I realize I’m going to be called out for pulling the “he started it!” card that and I’m ignorant of much worse behavior X. So be it.)
I agree that, given that the other side is doing it, it is correct to retaliate.
On the other hand, when there’s something complex, such that both sides are likely to perceive the other side as committing a violation whether or not they actually do, this can be very dangerous.
Consider an iterated prisoner’s dilemma. The best option is tit-for-tat. But if there’s a 5% chance each turn that you interpret one of your opponent’s acts as a defection even if they thought they were still playing within the rules, then after ~20 turns you think they defected, you play defect to retaliate against them, they play defect to retaliate against you, and you’re defect-defect for the whole rest of the game.
This is even worse when there aren’t actual “sides”, and you start defecting if you just heard of an unrelated guy who defected in a prisoner’s dilemma one time.
I’m not saying the solution is to always cooperate, but it’s a hard problem.
Made more complex by people believing that the bad things there own side is accused of doing were “false flags” or deceptively down by the other side. Made yet more complex by the fact that, actually, some threats and hate crimes are indeed hoaxes.
I don’t know how deep the rabbit hole goes. Possibly the solution is to not judge correctness of cause by tactics used… but I really do hate Communists (the particular ones who have had a chance to gain power and their defenders) for what they actually *did* is pursuit of their goals rather than goals. So, yes, I care about tactics, so I don’t know how to win Vizzeni’s game.
False flags are very common on the internet. The main misperception I see about them is that people too often attribute them to the other side, rather than to trolls, who seem to be the most common perpetrators
To someone who’s not emotionally invested in either side, and whose goal is trolling in the classical sense of “sowing discord by causing arguments and upsetting people”, false flags have a fantastic ROI – especially considering that anonymity greatly lowers the cost (which is also true of “self-inflicted” false flags, of course).
Speaking of which, people call VD a neo-nazi because he literally called a neo-nazi party preferable to the status quo in Europe – that, and he talked about Jewish tribal nepotism in a way that sounds exactly like an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
People – apparently – call Torgerson racist because he claimed non-white authors only made it onto the ballot through (insert some term meant to denigrate leftists). So, what is your claim about his wife? That Thomas Jefferson could not have been racist, and a married man can’t be sexist? (Incidentally, if we believe certain feminists, women in traditional conservative marriages are the harshest misandrists when men aren’t listening.) Or do you mean you have knowledge of his marriage in particular that rules out racism, and perhaps is so obvious that Gallo could not reasonably believe him to be racist? I know you didn’t mean to say she called him a Nazi, since that would be slander if you read your link.
If you think the word “groups” tars someone or other unfairly, I would technically agree. No doubt someone on the Internet endorsed those two men’s endeavors without saying or believing anything comparable.
How does any of this lead to you thinking Gallo wants to kill you, who have never endorsed a neo-nazi party? What am I not seeing that makes your reaction even possible?
I notice you didn’t provide a quote or link. I’m not following Sad Puppies at all closely, but the pattern is sadly familiar.
On Gallo’s statement, I think Eric Flint (anti-Puppies, by his word) put it well.
Oh, lets see here:
What is the neo-nazi party you refer to? UKIP? I notice your literally only modifies the called, but not the neo-nazi, so that probably isn’t necessarily what they self-label, am I right? (If so, then your accusation is misleading). Further, one can prefer voting for a political party and not identify with every position they hold–see every voter in any democracy, for instance.
One can believe that *Specific* authors were only given awards for affirmative action (de facto if not du jure) without believing that that is the only way that women/minorities/whatever can earn the award. His slate contained females and minorities, so I believe this is proven.
Your question confuses me, as I don’t think anyone here made any claims about Torgerson’s wife, but I am unafraid to do so. Here’s one: Rational people find the race of someone’s spouse stronger evidence against racism toward that spouse’s racial group than the race of their book award nominees is evidence either way.
A reasonable person could quite certainly conclude that “there are two extreme right wing to neo-nazi groups” is intended to imply (with perhaps some deniability, but please) some relationship between all the parties she was discussing and national socialism.
Gallo’s comments label both groups with terms that are basically the worst a progressive person can possibly use. “Die Racist” on google has 40,600,000 hits. “kill sexists” has 18,000,000. Google autocompletes “Kill hom” to homophobes; kill homosexuals isn’t on the list.
Why no, I mean the Golden Dawn. Feel free to follow those links and see who you’re defending. Literally the best thing one could say about VD is that he’s a troll (or a human being – but he would dispute that term).
Oh, and I know a dog-owner who saw Google correctly complete “is it legal” with “to have a dog in a motorcycle sidecar”. I also had a grandfather who told me we should put gays in concentration camps. But hey, maybe he was a troll too.
So, “endorsed a neo-Nazi party” was a lie. As true as saying Winston Churchill endorsed Stalinism.
On dogs and sidecars:
Yes. Yes it is.
VD is certainly trolling, and perhaps also serious.
Still, why not attack him for views he actually holds? To go further and label him as a neo-nazi… to whom, exactly, is this helpful? Those who see the (inaccurate) label and turn aside without further inquiry? Those who follow the links and then doubt your other assertions?
Why erode your credibility at the invitation of a troll?
This is what it looks like when someone trolls successfully: overreaction does more damage to the target than the troll’s provoking argument.
Reference: the link chain given above terminates there, where VD writes “This doesn’t mean Golden Dawn or the other nationalist parties are full of well-meaning angels. Make no mistake about it, they are simply the lesser evil of the two options on offer.”
suntzuanime has the right of this one.
Are we seriously doing the Google autocomplete thing here?
“Die Racist” on google has 40,600,000 hits. “kill sexists” has 18,000,000.
Google autocompletes “Kill hom”
to homophobes;
kill homosexuals isn’t on the list.”
fackchecking……..
“die racist” : 5,370 hits
“kill sexists” : 85 hits
“kill homophobes” : 1,260 hits
“kill homosexuals” : 97,000 hits
Clearly the large majority of these hits are not two word injunctions to act, and so Google can’t tell us much.
But what this does tell us is that a mercenary like Randy can’t stop with the myopic psyops. If youre gonna hold a ceasefire, put Randy in the brig, cause he;s just in it for kicks. Nothing of this essay sunk in. Why be here if you’re gonna pull that shit?
You went right into action, cooking numbers like a chef in the Pravda commissary, until you had me seeing pictures of mean girls standing beside mountains of dead boybuilders. You knew it was unlikely that anyone was going to check your work.
If I’m on the fence on whether men have anything to be scared about I’m already ready to dismount. If you had good numbers you would have used them. Ergo you don’t. The list of fired and shamed men is a parking ticket compared to the list of lives robbed and ruined by, for instance, the unarrestable supercriminals
of wall street who suffered nary a prank phone call.
I’d like to see some scale in this conversation.
I come here to because I trust Scott’s skill at rooting out manipulated stats. You shit on Scott’s brand and reactivated my skepticism about whether men have anything to fear. You’re not scared of women. No way. Your having too much fun.
Let’s keep in mind, lots of men do get a kick out of teasing, trolling and fucking with people for kicks. If we could discount those Macchiavellians and opportunists who are playing along in bad faith, I wonder if there’d even be enough authentically scared men to make a movement.
“factchecking……”
Thank you. I did not include quotes. I retract that paragraph as indicative of anything and humbly as forgiveness. The remainder stands.
Well, thanks for the fact check, anyway. As for the mercenary accusation, I wish, I could use the money. 😉
To explain myself, since I apparently made a big impact on you with one brief point, I there attempted to defend a point made by Scott with a metric I vaguely remembered seeing here out of some misguided attempt to rebut more than I should have. I didn’t think I proved anything, but thought it was interesting–forgetting the quotes shows it to be less so.
Anyhow, you are right that I am not afraid of women, mostly because I am a nobody, and as pointed out below, nobodies are not the prime targets.
Did you control for results showing “The racists” in German 🙂
Nature imitates art…
Google has a list of offensive terms that won’t appear in auto-complete (though you can still type them in yourself, of course).
You know what gives “men” reason to be fearful?
People using “men” as a corporate identity that should either fear or not fear as a singular group.
That’s a good reason for any group to be fearful, because we both know what the long-term purpose of doing that is.
“Did you control for results showing “The racists” in German?”
Well, I forgot to control for the “” marks, as pointed out, so its moot, but at least I realized searching for Die Nazis might be confounded 😛
When I see Golden Dawn, I think of Aleister Crowley and W.B. Yeats and fin-de-siècle occultism, not modern hyper-nationalist far-right political parties.
I think I prefer the inside of my head to the real world, these days 🙁
“People using “men” as a corporate identity that should either fear or not fear as a singular group. That’s a good reason for any group to be fearful, because we both know what the long-term purpose of doing that is.”
So it’s finally come to this? “Men” is a trigger word for men?
“Did you control for results showing “The racists” in German :)”
That would be “die Rassisten”, pretty unlikely for a search to confuse. :^)
I have the same problem.
Yes, Dale Carville, that’s clearly exactly what I meant.
*rolls eyes*
You know what you mean when you talk about “men” as a corporate entity. I know it too. I understand that while you proclaim to focus upon the privileged members of that group, you actually genuinely mean me, in all my sexual-minority, disabled, gender-non-conforming, non-neurotypical, lower class glory. Because of an unselected trait, specifically that of my birth gender and sex.
And I don’t have the necessary privilege to cope with you and the people you represent deciding whether I, as a representative of “men”, am allowed to have anything to worry about.
So do excuse me if I tell you to fuck right off.
No, you’re right, she didn’t call him a Nazi, just a neo-Nazi.
Phew! Well, that’s all right then!
If someone makes the claim that “I want to kill those who are members of set X” and also says “Y is in set X”, where Y is not in set X, then if you are Z also not in set X, but who this person also dislikes, it is very reasonable for you to wonder whether this person will believe and/or claim that Z is also in X, and therefore want or try to kill you.
In general, if someone or some group shows a tendency to label things they dislike as having labels that are associated with “let’s do bad things to this thing” and to expand the aggressiveness of those labels and of those bad things over time, then it is logical to believe that anyone and everyone is, eventually, at risk.
VD called the Syriza Party preferable to the status quo in Europe, therefore he must be a commie…
Scott, I assume you already know this, but for other readers who might be interested:
A great strategy for the game you described (iterated prisoners’ dilemma with a chance of seeing a defect even when the opponent cooperated) is “tit-for-tat with forgiveness”. That is, play tit-for-tat, but at any point in time, have some chance of saying “even though my opponent defected last round, I’ll forgive them and cooperate”. Playing this strategy allows the players to break these defection cycles (there will still be occasional defection exchanges, but they will eventually stop instead of continuing forever).
[Note how similar this strategy is to the “divine grace” you observed in https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ ]
+1.05
This might work if there was a single player on each side. Unfortunately, the SJWs and the anti-SJWs are so numerous that it’s very difficult for either side to coordinate a period of cooperation (especially given trolls).
(Some people have studied the IPD under noise, in case anyone else was curious. Generous Tit For Tat appears to solve the problem, where you choose not to defect a certain fraction of the time you otherwise would http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/66566/10.1177_0022002795039001008.pdf;j)
Do you know if anyone have studied a version of the game where actors randomly meet, can choose to defect or cooperate, but can also exchange information (and possibly lie) about who they’ve met in the past and what happened then? And can also announce their strategy ahead of time?
1. Of the two anecdotes Scott selected from the last comment thread, I was wondering if nydwracu or mark atwood would be willing to share police reports or campus news items covering the incidents? If there’s a strong argument in place, hearsay need be absent.
2. Is it just a coincidence that most of the men who live in fear of politically-powerless (IRL: no congressional, military or police power) non-violent (as in armed and capable of physical harm) women are heavy consumers of fantasy and science fiction entertainment and video games ?
from Gwern:
“Fiction can be unfairly persuasive, bypassing our rational faculties44; it may be that we default to believing what we’re told and disbelief is only a latecomer. Information from fiction can substitute for nonfiction (time consumption is zero-sum between fiction & nonfiction) and in sufficient volume, discredit it, which can lead to direct harm – TvTropes’s “Reality is Unrealistic”, which is about self-reinforcing unrealistic fictional depictions of reality, claims that “…Nonetheless, the public is largely convinced that cars present a serious danger of explosion after a crash, which has resulted in many, many cases of well-meaning members of the public pulling injured victims out of cars, causing further injury to them, to get them away from the car before it explodes.” (SF, in particular, is often good inversely proportional to how much scientific truth it contains.)”
http://www.gwern.net/Culture%20is%20not%20about%20Esthetics
My impression is that the most likely place to find savage, violent, vengeful. sword-wielding women is in fantasy, myth and video games.
Does all the talk of genocide and execution bear any relationship to spending days on end engaging in virtual genocide?
The Pac Man generation’s great fear seems to be weight gain.
3. If state coercion has been replaced by panoptical self-discipline where everyone is both a prisoner and a guard could this hysteria be a reaction formation to this loss of control, preserving a (socially unacceptable) frustration with our plight as agents forced to self-commodify to survive, in an infantile form that comes out as intra-nursery battle of the sexes?
Young men and shame. Disempowered young men living in a state of economic precarity made universal by the neo-liberal transformation of IRL. Young men cut off from community and tradition, replaced by weak, internet-mediated, bonds.
This all seems relevant.
A question rarely asked is, with millions of internet communities, why do anti-SJWs subject themselves to twitter and facebook politics? And if facebook is unavoidable in 2015 can you not control your feeds?
(and don’t you resent facebook’s power over your life?
Isn’t facebook a worthy enemy?)
I’m thinking of the libertarian stock response to workplace exploitation and wage theft, “no one is forcing them to work there.”
Why are libertarian anti-SJW’s feeling so hemmed in? It’s 100X more difficult to quit a job in this economy than to delete a couple of bookmarks.
To the degree that fear is spreading among Generation Y men who see no way out of social media, could we be seeing the onset of a bigger more looming problem…the onset of virtual reality, and atomized worlds that feel inescapable to people raised on the internet? It would explain why people born before 1975 aren’t feeling the terror much. Has micro-aggression spawned niche terrors sealed in by social atomization, creating an existential generation gap, stranding young men in a hell that their elders cannot recognize and doubt the reality of?
What role is obsessive-compulsion playing in this? Could there be an unhealthy payoff to participating in the clash? Jungian shadowplay, even as a metaphor for denial, relevant here? Is everyone “owning their shit”?
[My suspicion that tacit pleasure-taking is happening here seems validated by the great disinterest in finding and sharing therapeutic solutions to anti-SJW distress.]
Anyone feel like talking about how the drama may be enriching their workaday existence? How economic powerlessness in a free-enterprise worshipping society that forbids class politics might be sublimated into a safer battle between equals? This seems to correlate with the house fear at SSC, the fear of being fired. Isis used decapitation to intimidate. Is our great fear that we may be decapitalized?
Since both sides share so many qualities (fearfulness, team thinking, mental rigidity, slash and burn rhetoric) couldn’t it be theorized that a more savvy third party with something to gain from the deadlock (i.e. status quo) is in play and getting away with it?
Cui bono?
It’s not a coincidence that most of the people who’re upset about an influential social justice tendency within SF fandom are also in SF fandom.
Conversely, it’s not a coincidence that most of the people who’re upset about an influential right-wing voting bloc at the Hugos are the kind of people to whom the Hugos are important.
“Cui bono” needn’t point to a conspiracy.
As far as “someone call whine-one-one and get a whambulance” comments go, this one is at least fairly well written. Calling the guys you disagree with fat wimps through implication rather than saying it outright was a nice touch.
Obviously, worrying that yankee liberal arts students are going to organize a redneck holocaust is pretty firmly on the hysterical side. But the fact is that nonviolent social media campaigns can and do cost people their jobs, and leave a permanent black mark that future employers will take note of. It’s hardly unreasonable to fear being left out in the cold, and that should be obvious to an Old Left guy like yourself.
The only reference to obesity (pacman generation) was self-deprecating. I am a very very fat man, my lad.
Why P.F. Strawson used to use my lucent corpus as a prop to hold open the classroom door whenever he wanted to publicly resuscitate metaphysics from the graveyard of logical positivism.
And though I like to joke around I am a reliable defender of the underdog and for anyone who doubts that wealthy people are coordinated id like to share the words of a leftist older than me:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”
“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”
http://www.adamsmith.org/adam-smith-quotes/
Two crucial examples of coordinated power:
The Memos that Fucked You:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/04/bill-black-my-class-right-or-wrong-%E2%80%93-the-powell-memorandum%E2%80%99s-40th-anniversary.html
http://sociodynamics.org/archives/tag/gopac-memo
People who can call upon Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to have their victims expelled from essentially any college or university, are not “politically powerless”. Not even close. That is an act of Congress, upheld by the Judiciary, and of late explicitly implemented by the Executive in service of the demands of SJ.
If that’s not political power, what is? And in the 21st century, where post-secondary education is essentially mandatory for full participation in civic and economic life, that’s a pretty massive dose of power. We can argue about whether it is power that SJ has secured for itself or power that has been cynically delegated by the Patriarchy to distract SJ by letting the latter go after hated but non-Patriarchal victims, but it is presently SJ’s power to wield and it makes little difference to the victims.
“Calling the guys you disagree with fat wimps through implication rather than saying it outright was a nice touch.”
Actually your straw (old) man gets you part way there. Outside of the scapegoater you know (xx), is there another flying under your radar (xy)? Is there another entity on the internet that insults young men, intimidates young men, and verbally abuses young men programmatically?
Perhaps an older, wiser frenemy whom many would like to pass muster with, if it means access to their soi-disant “secrets” to excess sexcess?
Anyone read Chateau Heartiste? Any guys exposed themselves to that poison?
“Betas”, “omegas”, “manginas”, are the terms of abuse that batter away at the souls of kind-hearted young men. Nice guys are the kindling (or “faggots” as Heartiste would undoubtedly insist) that boils the oil, that PUA’s spew from the parapets of their mottes, onto the faces of bailey-occupying “amazons” below.
Now If you’d cool off and listen you might learn something non-NEGligible.
Let me start over: Is there a highly machiavellian demographic of aging predators who have something to gain from making sure young males, at the bottom of the hierarchy, are oedipally neutralized, disarmed and devitalized and thus unable to use their superior health and strength to fell the elders-who-balance-gray-birdnests-in-their-laps?
@Dale,
I think you missed there, since you’re quoting my comment above.
As to whether PUAs (I’m assuming, you were a bit oblique) are trying to sabotage younger male competition by destroying their self confidence, I’m fairly sure that isn’t the case. For one thing, PUA culture has only been around since the late 1990s and most of the bigshots are in their late twenties to mid thirties at the oldest. For another, this kind of “you’re a loser, now go out and prove me wrong” motivational style is textbook stuff: it’s almost word for word the Always Be Closing speech from Glengarry Glen Ross.
If you meant another group, like established Establishment types pulling the ladder up behind them by promoting a nation of pajama-boys, that’s at least more reasonable although still in the neighborhood of water fluoridation being a Red plot. Not that I don’t think corporate culture turns us into children, that’s too obvious to deny, but I don’t credit them with the foresight or the coordination to do so deliberately.
You might be interested in Lasch and Benoist. And possibly in Medaille — I wonder if something like his platform would make employers more willing to resist mobs. And Benedict Anderson.
I’ve been saying for years now that SJ is basically isomorphic to Reaganism — neoliberalism has pwned the Left just as well as it’s pwned the Right. (Now that I think about that SJ/Reaganism comparison… Awkward attempt at creating an artificial Gemeinschaft (I’ve got to read Hobsbawm one of these days), check. Artificial Gemeinschaft immediately becomes a marketing demographic, check. Witch hunts, check. Bizarre fixation on actors, check. Alright, that last one is a stretch, but…)
Marxism-Nixonism will win. Marxism-Nixonism will win. (^:
I like Christopher Lasch. I’ll look into the others.
You know The True Believer by Eric Hoffer?
Let me also recommend Propaganda by Jacques Ellul.
They’re equal opportunity critics of totalitarianism, left and right.
Also Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom.
All written in the wake of WWII. Two and a half of the three could have been written yesterday.
A police report covering teenage drug addicts shouting about “everyone like you should be killed”? You’re kidding, right?
If you want a campus news item, there might be one about this: freshmen had to attend some number of ‘health seminars’. There were more seminars than required slots, so you didn’t have to go to all of them. But one of the ones that I went to was… ‘one-man avant-garde theater’ or something along those lines: a one-man play about a guy who beats up some gays fucking in a park or something like that, and then gets sent to prison for it, and in prison, as the audience learns from recitals of the letters he writes to his brother (which describe this in graphic detail), he is repeatedly anally raped.
The general sense I got from it is that the audience was supposed to go “haha, serves him right, poetic justice!”
By the way, this was an early college program. Freshmen were mostly in the age range of 14 to 17.
Also, I haven’t read any science fiction or fantasy in years (except Seveneves, which I didn’t like) and I lost interest in video games around the time the Wii came out. I haven’t played any of the ‘murder simulators’ that people like Jack Thompson and Anita Sarkeesian rail against, except Doom, and I think I played Quake for five minutes once before getting bored of it.
(There are a few video games that have managed to hold my interest: Lemmings/Lix, Kid Chameleon, Seiklus, the Klonoa series, and VVVVVV, none of which are terribly violent. (Yes, you can kill things in Kid Chameleon, but it’s usually a bad idea to try.) And Doom, since some of the WADs for it are optimizing for ‘provide a challenge’ in the same way old arcade games do, but I’ve always found it kind of unpleasant to play.)
Thanks for answering. I don’t doubt you would have advised Scott not to use those two ugly but fleeting moments in an essay
about persecution.
Fuck me and my self-pity. Fuck me and my fear of failure. Fuck its hot outside.
I have two stepbrothers that were teen bootcamped after running away and living in a Fort Worth warehouse and training for race war for a year. Street soldiers. Confederate Hammerskins.
The younger of the two died last spring after a decade of steroids and coke crumpled his heart.
You know those Christian Hell Houses that go up around Halloween?
The ones that depict girls dying during the abortion or committing suicide afterwards, gay couples dying of AIDS, and teenagers suffering in terribly bloody and gruesome automobile accidents caused by drunk driving. Make sure you bring your kids young cause if they get in there after they discover their gay, after the sister commits suicide, it’s really gonna destroy them. Especially the suffering for eternity part.
Imagine growing up in a fundamentalist family and believing you’re doomed to be tortured for eternity for jerking off. Winding up on the street with the only kids who’ll take you in, as long as youre willing to dehumanize yourself and crack open homeless skulls, hippie skulls. Reformatory. Release. Boot camp. Assault after assault. And when you finally get out of town and move up north to work in a Chili’s in Tyson Corner it’s already too late. You are fucked. And you tell everyone, I made these choices. They taught me right from wrong. I did this to myself.
I just can’t let the idea that, maybe one day one in a thousand of you might lose a job for shittalking on the internet and let that take up so much space, give off some much noise that the real suffering of others, going on, right now, this minute, all around you gets buried under all….this. PROPORTION won’t let me. I’m not trying to shut anyone up. Im trying to suggest we all try to be a little less cynical, and self-serving. Also dont read so much shitty genre fiction.
Thomas Bernhard?
Robert Walser?
Knut Hamsum?
I’ll keep it white and european till i win your trust. :]
Shouldn’t you be busy earning more money to send mosquito nets to Africa, instead of wasting your time here?
I had the wi-fi turned off at home for the last year hoping i would waste less time but found I was wasting even driving into town twice a day to check my email. Since turning it back on last week, I think I’ve discovered that free time on the internet makes me a little too manic and leaves me feeling drained.
Sometimes when I order a large plate of food I find myself unable to stop eating long after my satiation point in order to “get my money’s worth.”
If I can grab hold of my drink and dump it on my plate, the spell is broken and I am released from the obligation the miser inside of me is under.
Likewise, If I can get someone on a site I’m compelled to bicker on angry enough to ask me to leave, the spell is broken and I am released from a similar toxic obligation.
If I’m honest with myself, I have to own that I despise young conservatives and dread time spent with elderly liberals. I need to find a better way.
By “politically powerless” you mean, “can get your fired from your job with little hope of getting a new one, oh, and you lose most of your friends”?
Brandon Eich is still unemployed.
Why would someone with that much money need to “be employed”?
Maybe because I am old and career-burnt-out, I can’t imagine why “a job” is that important if one does not need the money. And no, working in tech is not a missionary calling, self delusion of the techies aside.
This has come up before, but Eich isn’t some millionaire, or whatever “that much money” means, from Netscape stock. He needs a job like the rest of us schlubs.
I can’t imagine why “a job” is that important if one does not need the money.
So they really did him a favor by getting him fired? Noted.
“Like everything else in the world it can certainly turn into that, but I think our own experience gives us a lot of reasons to believe they’re exactly as terrified as they say, and that we can’t expect them to accept “you have no provable objective right to be terrified” any more than our lizard brains would accept it of us.”
Here’s my issue with that–why does progressivism seem to be getting more spiteful and strident the more it is winning? I’ll grant we don’t have perfect equality if they’ll grant that women and blacks were worse (by the metrics they tend to use) 20, 50, 100 years ago. And yet, social justice is not easing off the acceleration, but putting the pedal to the metal.
Whereas, if you look at that list at Handle’s site, there seems to be an exponential increase in the personalization of politics.
I suspect this is due to the added inertia of more people siding with the apparent strong horse.
Or am I simply missing greater perspective and falling victim to outrage culture?
I’ll grant we don’t have perfect equality if they’ll grant that women and blacks were worse (by the metrics they tend to use) 20, 50, 100 years ago.
Weirdly enough, Fredrik deBoer seems to argue that black people are worse off today than they were 30 years ago. However, I imagine that at least some of this is a Simpson’s paradox issue, where the gap between rich and poor has grown more than the gap between poor black and poor white (or rich black and rich white) has shrunk.
Looking at his graphs, it certainly looks like things haven’t gotten much better for blacks, although I think it would be kind of cherry-picking and magnifying small differences to say they’d gotten worse.
If I’m misinterpreting this and things are getting worse, I’d guess the explanation is growing income inequality. If the gap between the rich and the poor is growing, and most rich people are white and most poor people are black, then the gap between blacks and whites is necessarily also growing in a way that says nothing about race relations.
>> If the gap between the rich and the poor is growing, and most rich people are white and most poor people are black, then the gap between blacks and whites is necessarily also growing in a way that says nothing about race relations.
Well, two points. First, one might hypothesize that the presence of so many blacks among the poor is part of the explanation for the growing gap between rich and poor. That is, because the well-off look at the poor and see The Other, they are less inclined to help the poor than they would be if the archetypal poor person were white rather than black.
Second, one might conclude that if we really want to improve racial justice issues in a country like the US, we need to get more serious about a social safety net, and not doing so shows a reckless disregard for racial justice issues even if it’s not motivated by explicit racism.
Things haven’t gotten particularly better for African-Americans in, say, 30 or 40 years. Discrimination was largely gone by 1975 and certainly by 1985. So, not much has happened since then.
In general, young people have a hard time these days understanding the past. They’re taught that … until very recently … the past was a nightmare of discrimination. But in reality it’s been a long time since the fairly easy triumphs of the 1960s.
I read that and went “wait, are most poor people black in the US”?
According to half a minute with Wikipedia, no, they’re not:
…which doesn’t affect Scott’s point, of course.
Right, it’s more accurate to say that “rich people” (i.e. the folks at the very top to whom wealth has accrued over the past couple decades) are disproportionately white, and “poor people” — for whatever reasonable definition of the term — are disproportionately black. Which would still be enough to generate these patterns.
Is it plausible that things haven’t gotten better for black people because that’s about when the war on drugs and mass incarceration (and it becoming much more difficult for people who’d been imprisoned to get work) ramped up?
It depends on what you mean by “worse for blacks”.
If you mean “Laws passed saying “no no, blackie no, bad blackie”, things are aces as tits.
If you mean “actual measures of quality of life”: No.
I like to use murder stats because even in 1950’s Mississippi, it’s hard to brush murders under the run (although it undoubtedly happened, it’s harder)
The black male murder rate is higher today than under Jim Crow. Marriage, poverty, home ownership, business ownership, capital, employment…..all getting worse.
The interesting part, for me, about the ditsoons is that they were doing so well- all these things were getting BETTER…..
Until the late 1960’s. Also add in that a lot of 1950’s murders are people that would survive today, with ambulances and surgical techniques and whatnot which I think outweighs the “racist coroners call it an accidental shooting 12 times in the face” factor.
In an honest, genuine assessment of whether or not a black male age 21 is better off in 1955 or 2015, there is a strong argument to be made for “1955”.
The Afrocentrism movement probably did more to damage black understanding of the past than any Orwellian shit whites ever pulled. Portland public schools still host the African American Baseline Essays, which were distributed to teachers to ostensibly improve their ability to educate African Americans in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Of interest to Scott might be that one of the areas it was distributed is Detroit.
A lot of the content is… wrong? And I don’t mean wrong like Feynman’s experience with the textbook process wrong. I’m talking fucking whalers on the moon wrong. A person could probably make a career out of deconstructing how much damage these tracts did to race relations and participation of blacks in science, but no one ever addresses this monumental fuckup. I’ll see how many people I can horrify to death in three excerpts from “African and African American Contributions to Science,” written by Hunter Adam, who billed himself as a “research scientist” but was actually just a technician.
From the section “Human Beginnings”:
From the section “Moral, Ethical, and Spiritual Values the Prerequisite for Science Education”:
From the section “Psychoenergetics”:
Again, this is a guide to teaching African American children about science, and this shit is rampant in hip hop culture. They justify this curriculum (to this very day!) by asserting it will improve minority students’ self-esteem. Every time I try to unpack that line of reasoning I feel like I’m about to stroke out. The essays in general basically describe a world where the white man, intrinsically inferior to dark-skinned peoples due to reduced melanin, have always actively attacked all darker people, and is responsible for the suppression of black’s magical abilities. That’s the origin of the term “people of color”, it serves as a dog whistle for melanin theorists.
This is where the symmetry breaks down. Moldbug might be a motherfucker, but he’s not actively trying to miseducate people in service of his goals. In a sane world, this Afrocentrist experiment would be considered borderline criminal, and it’s content the punchline of a joke. But now we’re in 2015 and the same consequentialist philosophy has become mainstream! Blacks complain about discrimination based upon their non
-anglicized names, but that entire paradigm stemmed from Afrocentrism, and I’d bet the house you can correlate these names with anti-white racism and scientific illiteracy.
This is a tragic travesty, but no one is learning from it; as near as I can tell, none of the perpetrators suffered any negative consequences, and the beliefs are still widespread. Hunter Adam’s essay isn’t even a secular text, the primary difference listed between black and white science is “1. Acknowledgement of a Supreme Conciousness or Creative Force”. They created a motherfucking religion and spread it through public schools.
And this is the reason social justice is so terrifying, and I don’t think the symmetry works as well as Scott Alexander thinks. By rejecting objectivity, they can assert myths as historical facts and religion as science. So when a crazy cult actively spreads propaganda about a demographic’s (meta?)biological inferiority and calls for its destruction, that seems a little concerning. When it tirelessly toils to stifle the demographic’s members from participating in (even private!) discourse, especially discussions regarding their own inferiority, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to be disconcerted. When the cult’s beliefs go so mainstream that violating one of their rules can cost out-members their employment, well, at what point do you press the panic button?
This is a new one to me. I don’t recall any of my SJW friends or black friends ever telling me that magic or psi powers or real, or that they were taught in schools that there’s such a thing as melanin-fueled psi power.
FWIW I went to a liberal college, and I have heard this melanin psi power stuff, but it was far from mainstream, and treated somewhat as a joke.
That link does indeed lead to the Portland k-12 Public School system. The Baseline studies are listed in the Archive – perhaps they’re no longer in use? One hopes so.
Still, they were apparently commissioning expansions as recently as 2001, when the Asian-American series of essays was released (the Asian-American essay on Science is not available, ‘pending response by the authors to Asian Reviewers’. 14 years is a rather long hold: one wonders what was in that that it shouldn’t see the light of day when the others do).
None of the other series are as obviously crazy as this; nothing further can be determined from a cursory scan.
It’s interesting to note that this continued to be taught into the 21st century (if it is in not continuing today); interesting also would be the story of how it stopped (if it has).
I’m surprised the psi stuff stuck around that long. It was respectable for a while — Turing wrote about it in that one AI paper, and the spooks were very interested.
…Wait, the Stargate Project wasn’t terminated until 1995? Huh. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
Are they actually putting the petal to the metal? Or, rather, does it merely *seem* that they are because there are more of them, and they have become more moderate?
Consider, in the 1960s and 1970s, there were large portions civil rights movement for African Americans that were engaging in riots, intimidation, and theorizing about black separatism (see the Black Panthers, Malcom X, etc.).
In the 1970s and 1980s, feminists were encouraging women to “choose” to be lesbians and form separatist communes (and some actually did) and advocating anarchism or communism. There were feminist writers saying things like “all heterosexual sex is rape” or that the population of men should be culled significantly and women given all the political power. There was a feminist protest of a military base in Britain where Nukes were being held where the women camped around the base and disrupted military operations, including literally breaking into the base multiple times. There was a feminist in Europe literally saying that E=MC^2 is a sexist equation.
Keep in mind that these were very much mainstream subsets of the civil rights and feminist movements, respectively, and the people advocating these views were well-respected even by their more moderate cohort. Now, proportionately, such extremism is a much smaller proportion of these movements even if their absolute numbers are larger, and their voice are magnified by the internet, and they have more political power because of their size to, for example, get CEOs fired.
Good pints, thanks.
Such positions are not dead.
Like this.
I must point out that when she talks about “serial rapists”, she means “men who have had sexual intercourse more than once.”
article on the topic.
Of course, nowadays, she’s not rewarded with tenure.
I don’t deny such ideas still exist and are held by some. However, I have a strong impression that they were very much in the mainstream of academic and movement feminism/SJ a generation or two ago, and even those who disagreed had to show respect to those ideas, while now such views are mostly consigned to a small band of random (and mostly young and naive) internet bloggers with small followings in the grand scheme of things, and older academics and activists who are stuck in the 60s/70s/80s.
This isn’t to say that contemporary mainstream feminism or SJ is now all-around moderate and non-problematic. In fact, as their numbers and influence have grown, their flaws could be more dangerous in practice even as those flaws have moderated some.
Wow, that sure is… that certainly exists.
Listen to while reading: https://youtu.be/IUzhISwCC-I
Then afterwards, this: https://youtu.be/wJCbjohuwUI?t=50s
No, but the TERF wars have rather firmly excluded them from the mainstream of feminism.
But a generation or two ago, the movement had more actual causes to focus their energy on. If you believe that all heterosexual sex is rape, but you’re also facing blatant discrimination, you’re going to work on the discrimination and hold off on changing the evidentary rules for rape cases until you’ve dealt with the discrimination.
Also, back then there was no Internet. Which doesn’t just mean you heard of them less, it also means they could do less.
We know that young leftists were once represented by hippie terrorists like Charles Manson, Baader Meinhof and Weather Underground, MOVE, SLA, etc. and law and order prevailed.
Who should be be keeping an eye on today? If danger is out there it’s got to be named. If “SJW is a cancer” [1,630 google hits] then its discovery is an achievement. But if the science stops there, if we just talk about cancer amorphously, as tumors, then we doom those who contract leukemia, eosinophilia or thrombocytosis to preventable deaths.
Not to detract from your main point, but the ‘all heterosexual sex is rape’ stuff is alive and well, in the guise of ‘PIV sex is rape’
“why does progressivism seem to be getting more spiteful and strident the more it is winning?”
That’s easy–because they can get away with it. 60 years ago, conservatives (or at least what we would now call conservatives) had virtually complete political and social dominance, and they weren’t the least bit hesitant to use it to persecute various groups they hated. Now the tables have turned, and the politically and socially dominant coalition is once again taking it to its enemies with a vengeance.
Power, as they say, corrupts. If we don’t agree on a common set of restraining rules for everyone, to allow space for disagreement, we will forever be oscillating between positions on either end of the whip.
That list has to be tongue-in-cheek. Any claim that Enoch “Rivers of Blood” Powell was baselessly persecuted by PC types is not quite being completely serious. From his 1968 speech which brought all the trouble down on his head:
Was he wrong?
Stats seem to show that mixed communities are much more violent, and muslim immigrants in particular are immensely more violent and rape-y than the indigenous population of the UK.
Given that the people he was complaining about were fellow-subjects of the British Empire (still clinging on to a few remnants at the time), and that the whole thing had started with Britain going overseas to other nations, annexing them, and telling the natives “You’re part of us now”, I think that it was less than helpful.
I think there was a leaning over backwards the other way to avoid helping people integrate, but the attitude that the peoples of the Empire were perfectly welcome – as long as they stayed over there and didn’t imitate us by leaving their native lands for better opportunities – did not help anyone. It encouraged divisiveness, it gave fodder for both extremists on the ‘nativist’ side and the immigrant side to point and say “Look, see, there’s no common ground”.
@Deiseach,
that seems like a complicated way of avoiding answering the question. Basically, it seems weird to blame Powell for Rotherham, which is what it sounds like you are saying–probably I’m just misreading you, but I honestly don’t see much logic to your comment otherwise.
I won’t say a person from my home town was the youngest suicide bomber Britain has ever produced, but he was from very nearby. I suppose there are a lot more to come.
Rotherham and Rochdale are not far away.
I think Powell exaggerated. But – just how convinced should I be that Powell was so utterly wrong that he should be denounced for all time?
Let’s do some Rumsfeldian analysis. Ideas can fall into 4 categories, obviously true or false, or not clearly true or false.
Obviously false ideas are of little concern because most people will notice and not believe it. False ideas that seem true are dangerous because without correction they can get out of hand. True ideas which kind of seem false are less dangerous because many will mistake them for obviously false. Obviously true ideas are the worst, though, because it takes the kind of response to Powell’s speech to stop folks from believing them.
I imagine this is what it’s like when any society slowly converts to a new religion. The more and more prevalent it becomes, the more over-the-top the rules and enforcement of them becomes. If the Muslims think you’re a Kafir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafir) it’s not a big deal if there aren’t many Muslims. Once they become the dominant social group it’s going to be a problem, and you’ll notice notice that the consequences of being a Kafir get worse the more Muslims there are around.
This is one of Yarvin’s post on the Hacker News thread about him being uninvited:
“The word “racist” and its conjugations does not appear in the English language until the 1920s – see Peter Frost’s cultural history [0]. If you asked Shakespeare if he was a “racist,” he would not know what you meant.
“Racist” is essentially a term of abuse which no group or party has ever applied to itself. Like most such epithets, it has two meanings – a clear objective one, describing a person who fails to believe in the anthropological theories of human equality which became first popular, then universal in the mid-20th century; and a caricature of the vices, personal or political, typically engaged in by such a foul unbeliever.”
http://www.unz.com/pfrost/age-of-reason/
Another interesting issue to me is the following:
Kafir is to Racist as Muslim is to __________?
Really impressive that “they” have managed to not have a name. Perhaps the Neverending Story was the deep and philosophically insightful film my 5 year old self thought it to be.
I sure hope not. I enjoyed the book a great deal (and, like you, I re-read it from time to time), so I’d hate to see all the life sucked out of it by endless deconstruction and standardized testing…
Here’s my issue with that–why does progressivism seem to be getting more spiteful and strident the more it is winning?
One part: frustration and despair from basically losing all influence on socioeconomic policy. I.e. activists would desire to have a say in public policy at a more fundamental level, so they thrash about fitfully and act like irrational control freaks at a more shallow level, to compensate for their sensations of humiliation and powerlessness in the neoliberal world.
I get the impression that most (not all, but most) of SJ is basically on board with neoliberalism as a socioeconomic policy, though. Stronger affirmative action laws, tax-the-rich, different presumption of guilt, reparations of various kinds, more safety nets, and socialized medicine, sure, but aside from the rare anarchists or old-school commies, the strongest challenge to the foundations of liberal economics that I’ve heard from those quarters is the ritual invocation of “late capitalism”.
These people needn’t understand the problem to feel like they are unfree to demand and talk about something big, though. Stuff beyond post-war social democracy is, to most activists, cognitively unavailable – in ways that it didn’t use to be, I think.
Given that y’all are doing your best to lose what ought to be your core constituency and guarantee the victory of what ought to be your enemy…
(Benedict Anderson: every revolution after WW2 was nationalist. Also the correlation between the ‘Nordic model’ and phyletic homogeneity. Also Putnam. A diverse population is an atomized population, and an atomized population is a population that can’t stand and fight.)
SJ loves its kind of… queer nationalism, though.
First, I wish people would stop flinging “Fascist” about so easily. It has become diluted down to nothing more than “person to the right of my views with whom I do not agree”.
And as for Mr Social Justice Warrior and his “street confrontations with fascists, protests at book readings and other events, and also disrupting fascist conferences and similar”, good luck with that, but his expectation of imminent victory makes me think of the Occupy movement. Yeah! Gonna smash capitalism at the source! Da People is with us! And we all saw how that fizzled out, even where their quondam supporters “on the inside” were involved.
As for “I think the unsafety of the oppressed will in part come to the currently privileged classes”, does he not understand that if the people who have power feel threatened and unsafe, they will react with demands to limit freedom? And that they have the status and influence to have those demands met? That controls on freedom of assembly (because that’s a mob!) and increase in police powers (even here in Ireland, the police are constantly calling for more and more permission to use wiretapping, surveillance, and use of force) are the likely reaction?
And if he wants that because he’s hoping for an uprising of the masses and revolution and the driving out of the redcoats once again, then he’s deluded because there will be blood but no overthrowing the establishment, and that blood will be on his hands for working for that very end.
Secondly, I don’t think Irene Gallo should be claimed as a scalp. I think her remarks were ignorant, and if she really felt so tainted by designing covers and sourcing artwork for writers who were neo-Nazis etc. then nobody would force her to do so and nobody was stopping her from handing in her resignation. But I think that although it’s appropriate for her employer to reprimand her, it should be done in private. I don’t think this is a sackable offence (if she wants to quit because she no longer wants to design covers for certain authors, that’s her own business).
I don’t like the demand by either side that the heretic recantation should be carried out publicly. And of course, I’ve already seen the narrative where she’s being hailed as a martyr to the cause because of TOR letting her go.
And I think that a lot of useful and important work is being damaged because a bunch of twenty-somethings with little to no knowledge or experience of the real world demand ever finer and finer distinctions about oppression in order to prove their credentials as right-thinking people (for instance, I’m asexual but I’m not one straw concerned about being included under the umbrella “queer”. People who work themselves up into paroxysms about “asexuals are not het, don’t misappropriate their orientation!” – thank you for your concern, but really, it’s not necessary).
Asexual by choice or neglect?
Tolerance testing.
Let’s all become unoffendable.
If, by “neglect”, you mean “can’t get anyone to even look at me”, I’ll answer you in the words of the song:
“If I can’t get a man/I will surely get a parrot!”
No. By nature and by choice; even if anyone was interested, I wouldn’t have them. Aromantic as well, or even more, you see; the idea of sharing my space, time and resources (both psychic and material) in an intimate relationship with another person brings me out in a rash 🙂
If there was an way to upvote, I would. Plus MANY for “Maid in the Garret” reference.
> “Fascist” has become diluted down
Very true- in fact Orwell said as much 70 years ago in his essay “Politics and the English Language.” Sadly, he didn’t get people to stop using the term.
I may be channelling The Last Psychiatrist here , but I got the feeling that when he said “the unsafety of the oppressed will in part come to the currently privileged classes” he didn’t actually mean the genuinely privileged members of those classes.
He means the poor person with the haircut who sneered at him on the bus this morning. He means the large angry man with the facial hair who threatened him in the bar that one time. He means the nerd he looks down on and all the poor people that so inconveniently refuse to agree with his ideology.
And they are the only people who will be threatened. The truly privileged will remain privileged, regardless of their gender, race or sexuality. That status is defined by its ability to ignore the likes of that SJW commentor.
And that is why I consider myself a genuine Leftist and consider the likes of that commentor to be avatars of the Problem.
Relevant.
Well channeled.
Hear hear!!! Same with ~women’s anger~ and similar ostensibly feminist/queer/etc shibboleths.
I have great respect (some kinds of) anger. I have only contempt for today’s wretched *politics* of anger.
This doesn’t seem like a reasonable characterization of the motivation of most people who were at OWS, or of the “fizzling out” process.
It seemed to me the prevailing attitude was: “Something is wrong with the way you guys are doing capitalism. We don’t have a lot of details about what you’re doing or the economic knowledge to make strong judgments about it, but something smells really off and we’d like it to stop.” Which, as far as I can tell, is a pretty reasonable attitude to have towards the US banking machinery. Unless you can find some reliable polling data to the contrary, I have to conclude you’re mischaracterizing the beliefs of the majority of OWS attendees and supporters.
As far as how it fizzled out, it seems like the banks worked out something with the major media outlets so that the banks could evict the protesters off their privately owned land without causing a PR disaster. But that’s an admittedly speculative interpretation. It’s not clear to me who the supporters “on the inside” are supposed to be, but it is clear that the banks and the city of NY were legally empowered to end the protests and did so over the course of a few days.
“Fizzling out” seems to me like a strange characterization for a mass eviction of hundreds of people over the course of a few days, but whether the phrase is apt is subjective so I’m not sure it’s worth arguing.
I don’t know if the same is true for the East Coast OWS protests, but on the West Coast the major protests occupied public land, not private, and were dismantled by the police on the pretext of public health concerns. That didn’t kill Occupy immediately, but it did remove its most visible symbols, and a protest movement like that runs on visible symbols.
Zucotti Park was privately owned, I believe, though some of the east coast protests were on public land. Occupy Boston was in a public park, and I think public health concerns were the motivation there as well.
There’s probably a lot of different essentially arbitrary points in time we could finger as the end of OWS; in the sense that there was no one obvious event that ended it, “fizzling” might be a fair descriptor after all.
It fizzled out because people stopped caring. There was no conspiracy with the media and the banks, there didn’t need to be. Malicious outside forces did not disempower OWS and use their control of the media to shape public opinion; the public’s opinion shifted to “I don’t give a shit about OWS” after OWS turned from “identifiable expression of populist anger and discontent with the financial system” to “the same fucking people who show up to every vaguely leftist protest blathering on and on and on about their pet issue horseshit”. The populace doesn’t really care about that same old group of full-time protestors jacking off in each other’s mouths about how progressive and enlightened they are.
The progressive left is so spectacularly bad at being able to relate to anyone outside their clique, you don’t ever need to introduce any external agent to explain “why did people stop liking this progressive leftist movement?”
I never claimed anything about “malicious outside forces”.
I’m hesitant to engage you at all because you seem almost a little unhinged on the topic and haven’t given any reason why I should adopt your perspective on OWS rather than my own. But I’ll at least explain what I meant by the statement that so obviously confused you.
Zucotti Park was privately owned. Any time they wanted, the banks could have asked the police to evict the protestors. So I ask myself: why didn’t they? The only answer that makes sense to me is that it would be bad PR.
So they took a couple weeks, made sure they had the risk of bad PR handled, and then proceeded to evict the protestors as per their legal rights.
None of this is really at odds with your interpretation of events, but I’m guessing you only replied to vent your spleen about those horrible leftists in the first place. I’m really not interested in arguing with you at that level.
This sounds to me like blaming malicious outside forces. This was not a natural thing that happened, not a consequence of people’s views; it was the media and the banks, working in concert, to manipulate it such that they could do their dirty deeds without getting seen as bad. Even reading your explanation, it’s hard to get away from the conclusion that you are blaming malicious outside action. If you weren’t, “the media” wouldn’t need to be mentioned at all.
And yes, I am mad about OWS. I don’t hate leftists, but I sure fucking hate THESE leftists. We had a surge of genuine populist anger, will and incentive to change the financial system, and what happened? These stumblefucks pissed it all away by turning it into another pro-feminism anti-globalization anti-GMO white-guilt free-Mumia protestor day camp.
Fuck those guys.
@wysinwyg
He made good points, though, despite the way he chose to put it.
On a smaller scale, I’ve seen a number of causes that initially managed to mobilize a large number of the people concerned, but then got derailed by a small group of people trying to put it “in the context” of the greater fight against capitalism, etc., and the people who were only interested in the original issue just stop bothering.
A different but somewhat similar dynamic happens when different groups drawn together by a specific issue try to push the mobilization towards their respective larger causes, only to realize that they want incompatible things.
I consider both the media and banks to be participants in the events in question, not “outside forces” at all. I also never said anything to imply they were “malicious” in any way.
You’re characterizing my argument in a pejorative way to more easily dismiss it.
Your characterizations, not mine. If you need a leftist strawman to beat on, please find it elsewhere.
If you take the pejoratives out, then you get something more like: “Banks used their existing business relationships with major media outlets to help manage the PR backlash against the OWS evictions.” Which is not only not an objectionable characterization of the banks’ actions (assuming they happened), but also obviously the best move for the banks to make given the circumstances. I’ve argued nothing but that the principle actors in the affair acted according to their incentives.
It is somewhat astounding to me that you give the OWS protestors credit for more ability to influence public opinion than the muti-trillion dollar media-and-advertising apparatus. I remember the events of those few years pretty well, and I think it’s a bit of a stretch to argue that OWS was the main or even a significant obstacle to the financial reforms in question.
Even if you wanted to take the OWS protests as the ultimate cause (which for a great many reasons I think is absurd), you’re still left with the proximate cause of: people who would have been interested in reforming the financial system giving up on that idea just to stick it to those awful OWS protesters. In other words, giving up on something important just to spite another group.
Now, I don’t think that’s a reasonable or realistic description of how the will for financial reform dissipated, but even if it was…fuck those guys even more than the OWS protesters they’re spiting. The cause is just even if its cheerleaders are bunch of ninnies. OWS couldn’t “piss away” enthusiasm that didn’t belong to them in the first place — only your anonymous, silent anti-OWS folks could do that.
I’m only interested in carrying on the discussion further if you stop the creative interpretation of my arguments.
OWS got a lot of bad press for lacking focus, but it was definitely aimed at the financial industry, and its core was populated by people (i.e the professional protesters DrBeat doesn’t like) that had a lot of experience stirring shit up on the cheap. These are not trivial advantages.
Meanwhile, the financial industry probably has more money to play with than any other entity of comparable size in the world, but I doubt it felt seriously threatened until well into the protests, if then, and it doesn’t have any particular PR expertise. There was no multi-trillion-dollar media-and-advertising apparatus set against Occupy; the advertising industry couldn’t care less about some hippies camped across town when they had potato chips to sell, and media outlets at the time mostly cared about justifying the existing opinions of their traditional audiences, most of which were broadly ambivalent toward Occupy. (Note that this has changed; by now, those traditional audiences have shrunk to the point where they can’t support the old business model, and the media center of gravity has moved toward clickbait.)
Yeah, this looks a bit on the conspiracy theory side for me too…
A better way to compatibilize both points would be that banks sought the evictions when they saw that public opinion of OWS wasn’t so hot (perhaps because “oh, it’s those people again”). Though I wonder how long it takes to get an eviction, and if the delay wasn’t just that.
No you aren’t. You aren’t left with anything close. If this is how the professional-protestor left sees people, it’s no wonder they can’t convince anyone of anything.
You would think, since these people are professional activists and claim that their jobs and their expertise are in convincing people to change things, they would know that the biggest obstacle to change is apathy. Apathy is the default state of the public on anything. You need to push people past apathy, and when they have gone past it, capitalize on their non-apathetic state before apathy returns.
The financial system imploded, and people stopped being apathetic. They thought they needed change. A bunch of people came together saying “We are the 99%, we want change, and we won’t stop until we get it!” The public believed both taht change was necessary and possible. A break in public apathy like this is an enormous fucking deal.
And OWS pissed it ALL away, circlejerking about the same fucking things that they always do, not noticing how intensely apathetic this always makes everyone listening to them. The time passed. People resigned themselves to the new normal, rationalized it was always this bad, figured that obviously we couldn’t really get anything done. OWS was handed the resource every activist needs to get things done, and threw it all into a bottom less pit of drum circles and “consensus building” and progressive stacks. With the once in a lifetime opportunity to do something, they elected to do the thing that has never worked and will never work, and doomed anyone who was trying to use OWS to do what it actually had a chance to do.
So, again, fuck those people.
And stop blaming the media for things. The media do not have the power you place in them, because the media are panicky, fearful, and gobsmackingly incompetent. A “successful media narrative” is not one where the media controls what people believe, it’s one where the media successfully repeated exactly the thing its listeners already wanted to believe. And even then, half the country gets outraged at it anyway.
I’m not sure how this fits in to either narrative, but personally I was rather disappointed that OWS didn’t turn into a credible left-wing political party. I can’t help feeling that the US needs one.
@DrBeat: That, and worse. OWS was, briefly, the focus of media attention, of public attention, and even of political attention, all of it asking the critical two questions: “What do these people actually want us to do, and should we maybe go ahead and do that? Because what we’ve been doing all along clearly isn’t working, and none of us have any better ideas”. People were listening, and not the way you listen to a crackpot.
And during that entire period, whenever anyone managed to pin down an OWSer and ask them what, specifically, they wanted us to do, the answer was always, “I dunno. But the bad stuff is all the banksters’ fault.”
Look; Rick Perry’s last presidential campaign imploded when he briefly forgot one of the three government agencies he planned to shut down. And that still left him with about twice infinity more of an agenda than OWS could articulate at a time and place of their own choosing.
“Zucotti Park was privately owned. Any time they wanted, the banks could have asked the police to evict the protestors.”
Are we absolutely certain of this?
I’m MORE than willing to entertain a scenario where the banks immediately demanded the eviction of the protesters, and the local police refused.
Keep in mind that local police take their marching orders from local politicians, who are EXTREMELY sensitive to popular opinion. I can absolutely imagine the local NYC political class giving the cops clearly specific orders to hang back and let things play out for a few days while they stick their finger in the air to see which way the wind is going to blow…
“Something smells really off, and we’d like it to stop” is an unreasonable attitude toward anything on God’s occasionally green earth and excusable only among children. If you do not know what the “problem” is, or what the consequences are of changing it, you have nothing to say and should not say it.
I disagree.
Suppose you notice your neighbor’s attic window is venting a tremendous amount of black soot for several hours every day. Your neighbor is very tight-lipped about the cause. You have no idea what’s causing it, but it smells noxious and is staining the siding of your house.
I think most reasonable people would worry about the possible consequences for themselves in such a situation. I think it would be very reasonable for anyone in this situation to voice their concern to the neighbor, and even to the local authorities if the neighbor is not willing to accommodate the person’s reasonable concerns.
Sometimes the outward signs of a problem are very clear, even while the causes remain mysterious. The idea that we should only worry about problems if we understand their causes strikes me as…
…look, I’m trying to be measured, but this is completely bugfuck insane. To the extent that this:
constitutes an argument at all, it proves way too much. Like proves that we should all lay down in ditches and die proves too much.
False analogy. You know what the problem is there: your neighbor is polluting the air.
Maybe just my completely wrong impression, but that seemed like a whole bunch of recent college grads who couldn’t find jobs. It’s been four years since the movement started. They probably found jobs. When an economic protest takes place near the low point of a recession, and then stops when the economy improves, that doesn’t seem like it cries out for explanation. We still see a lot of grumbling about debt loads, but a $400 a month bill really sucks when you’re unemployed. It’s not such a big deal when you’re making $50K, don’t have any kids yet, and it’s your only debt.
I look at the evictions from the encampments as the end of OWS. My point is argued from that perspective.
If you want to say that, instead, we should say OWS ended when a bunch of its participants found jobs, then that is certainly your prerogative. I think it’s a pretty reasonable perspective, and I don’t think it really contradicts mine so I don’t have much more to say about it.
I do think it’s a bit of an oversimplification to say OWS consisted of a bunch of jobless recent graduates.
That’s fair. It’s definitely an oversimplification. The evictions were just in the one place, weren’t they? I’d have sworn I still saw protesters in Austin just last year, but there were like 16 of them and I don’t think anyone was paying attention any more.
@Adam:
Occupy protesters were evicted in a lot of places, but it wouldn’t suprise me if Austin wasn’t one of them.
Have you read any of Philip Sandifer’s blog? He’s deeply invested in both social justice and science fiction, and he genuinely believes the Sad/Rabid Puppies movements to be fascist in nature. He’s intelligent and well-spoken, so I read him fairly often even though I’m so misaligned with him (politically speaking) that he’d probably think I’m fascist (or at least evil in some way) as well. There have been several recent posts about the issue that have been pretty interesting, including an interview with the leader of the Rabid Puppies campaign.
Okay. One of the writers involved with the Sad/Rabid Puppies is John C. Wright. I very much like his fiction, even where I disagree with his politics and opinions (to a lesser or greater extent, depending).
Now, I don’t know what Mr Sandifer means by “Fascist”. If there’s significance in small “f” “fascism/fascist” being the term used, and if it signifies – as I have said – nothing more than “person to the right of me with whose views I disagree”, then I think it’s useless.
I don’t think Mr Wright is a Fascist. If Mr Sandifer thinks that he and his fellows in this grouping are Fascists, or Neo-Nazis, or want to institute a right-wing theocratic white supremacist dictatorship, I think he’s mistaken.
If Mr Sandifer means “socially conservative, free market capitalists, variant views on what counts as racism, sexism, homophobia from those I hold”, then he’s correct – but “fascist” is not a helpful term here. It is just signalling “These people are Evil, and so evil that I don’t even have to explain how they’re evil, the mere descriptor used for them tells you all you need to know”.
By “not helpful” im guessing your mean “inappropriate”?
Come on, Deiseach. Show us that gaelic character armor.Teach us.
Model unoffendability for the rest of us.
I mean it’s not helpful. Does it tell us anything about the real opinions, politics or inclinations of the man’s opponents, or is it only a shibboleth?
Were I to call you a Blueshirt, Dale, would it have any meaning for you or others not familiar with the minutiae of Irish politics?
More precisely-
“Fascist” doesn’t really have any more INHERENT moral weight than “Democracy” or “communism” or “oilgarchy.”
The thing is, the only really famous fascist is Hitler, so everyone goes “Hitler, Fascist”. but since you aren’t LITERALLY calling someone a nazi, they can’t go “No, I’m not in favor of the expansion of the German Reich, you clot”
Fascism just means, essentially, businesses running government with a strong, typically right wing populace supporting them.
ROME was technically a fascist republic.
Nonsense.
Fascism just means, essentially, government running businesses with a strong, typically left wing populace supporting them.
The meme that fascism is right-wing is Stalin’s, who smeared all his opponents with it. He’s dead now. We can admit that it’s left-wing.
I wonder how many people using “fascism” as such a term of art also have been annoyed by people calling Obama a “socialist”. My evidence-free bias says greater than 10%.
To fill in a little on the history of fascism:
The term was invented by Mussolini, who was a prominent Italian socialist until he broke with his party over his support for Italian involvement in WWI.
As best I can tell, he concluded that socialist ends could not be achieved by a bottom up revolution, so should be imposed from the top down. But I’m not an expert on his writing, so may be misinterpreting the position.
I thought he broke with socialism and started looking for ways to bring about collaboration of the classes, ending up with Charter of Carnaro-style corporatism (a candidate for ‘most unintuitive technical term in the world’) and lots of war.
There’s obviously a lot of different definitions of fascism, but some of the commonalities between different instances of fascism include near-religious reverence for the military, disdain for intellectualism and the arts, extreme nationalism, and a preference for traditional family structures and gender roles. I’m not sure how things are in Ireland, but in the US these are not typically considered left-wing ideals.
I guess you could argue that it’s left wing because the government controls business, but I think that’s actually not a great characterization either. Fascism is populism with the support of blue collar workers. If you can appease the blue collar workers by nationalizing their factory and giving them raises, then a fascist demagogue might do that. But I doubt it would be motivated by any allegiance to some leftist ideology; it’s more likely purely opportunistic.
@wsinwyg (like the name, btw), I have literally never heard anyone argue that facscism is associated with a preference for traditional family structures and gender roles.
Wikipedia’s page is pretty good; I especially like the Orwell quote at the end. (I would pretty much always defer to Orwell on the idea of fascism).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism
@Jos:
Many sections of that wikipedia article argue explicitly that fascism is anti-feminist, anti-intellectual, and pro-tradition. If you’ve never heard that fascism has those qualities, then you’ve never read the wikipedia article you recommended as “pretty good.” I started to go through and get examples but there were too many.
This was my starting point for understanding fascism:
http://cursor.org/stories/fascismii.php
It relies heavily on Umberto Eco’s definition, which is included in the wikipedia article. In particular, Eco’s notions of a “Cult of Tradition” and “Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class” apply to this. (The appeal to a frustrated middle class includes an appeal to their values, which will usually include values regarding traditional family structure.)
I like Payne’s and Griffin’s approaches (quoted in section 3 of that essay) better than Eco’s, with all due respect to Eco. The emphasis on national rebirth or self-recreation, in particular, seems like an important piece of the puzzle to me, and one that’s often elided.
@wsinwyg: Ouch, you go for blood quickly. I’m just interested in the idea, if that helps you place me.
I had read the article – my takeaway was that the Marxist section did include this quality as a minority tage of “fascism”, and my operating assumption was that in that case, fascist is more like “gusano” – it mostly has come to mean counterrevolutionary or obstructionist.
Taking Eco’s definition to is a stretch, IMHO, but it would be a long stretch father to say that “preference for traditional family structures and gender roles” is a commonality of fascists. I’d me more inclined to establish that by showing several fascist organizations and establishing that they preferred traditional family structures and gender roles more than their non-fascist contemporaries.
Just to be clear, you probably mean this: http://www.philipsandifer.com/2015/04/guided-by-beauty-of-their-weapons.html
I think it’s a pretty great essay, but in fact I wish he had not put so much stake into the word “neofascist.” Which, if someone wants to use that work for far-to-the-right folks, I guess I’m okay with it. Ours is a living language. Meaning changes. Tons of people now days use fascist that way and I think we understand its boundaries.
(I’ll admit to ironically calling things “fascist,” but in a way I’m sure no one will believe I mean to literally compare to Italian fascism. But anyway.)
But it is a controversial label these days — and with good reason given its history — and I think Sandifer’s critique was quite powerful regardless of what word he used, and thus his essay might have been more effective without “neofascist” — insofar as it will prove to be a distraction.
I don’t know about anyone else, but as far as I can tell, “fascist” means anyone to the right of Mao Zedong. So I don’t find it particularly informative.
And I suspect I’d miss any intended irony.
I think the ideas that grew into fascism originally came from France, though they weren’t called fascism at the time. The central tenets are nationalism, individual subservience to the state, social darwinism, non-democratic but also non-aristocratic totalitarian rule. These things don’t really map well to a contemporary left-right spectrum and are largely agnostic to how industry profits are distributed between labor and ownership, though tend to at least involve state control so that business operations are directed toward national goals rather than the equilibrium of private markets.
Georges Sorel comes up a lot.
I tried to read that one book of his, but most of it was about his massive hateboner for Jaures, and I ran up against the library’s due date right when I got to the part about myth.
Oh, sweet holy divine.
I read the essay about the Hugo nominees and THAT BLOODY DINOSAUR STORY (or TBDS, as I will heretofore refer to it).
Out of the stories he’s turning his nose up at, the only one I’ve read is “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds”. I agree, there’s a heap of religion in it. But the Uplift stories of David Brin run on the same principle: animals becoming equally sentient and sapient to humans, and I don’t see him making any sniffy references to those.
This part also caused my eyelid to twitch, about another tale rapped over the knuckles for being theological:
Mmmmm – lemmee see, where did I encounter the idea before of ghosts wanting to end in dissolution? And one of the main characters having her own view of an afterlife?
But fair enough, if you don’t want theology of any stripe, whether thick or thin, in your fiction that’s a legitimate preference. What makes me stomp my foot and tear my hair is that continued insistence that TBDS is “poetic” and all the rest of it:
Well, what he finds well-written, I find mawkish and NOT BLOODY SF/FANTASY AT ALL. I really can’t understand the praise this story is getting, because it’s a not particularly stand-out mainstream literary fiction piece of work, I grant that it is written in a workmanlike professional manner, but has nothing to make the heart soar (the “turning into a flower” language is pedestrian, not poetic).
If that is considered poetry, they need to read some proper poetry. Also, this is an extract from a story he considers real proper SF:
To which my reaction is OH, CHRIST ALMIGHTY. Now maybe the hit-you-over-the-head good intentions of Marisol are meant to be all part of the ironic, tongue-in-cheek tone; how this is more of Marisol being over-dramatic and taking herself way too seriously. Or maybe Charlie Jane really does want to establish that Marisol is The Right Kind Of Person by this kind of signalling (Marisol isn’t becoming a doctor to tend to rich white professional people, but poor women of colour). And of course Marisol comes from Taos. Of course.
(Can you see why the accusations of “more interested in box-ticking points on the Inclusivity List fiction” could be made about these recent Hugo nominees and winners?) The description of Marisol’s god-awful plays are just a touch too on the nose (did Charlie Jane Anders dig out from the bottom of a drawer some old plays she wrote once upon a time?)
Look, lads, I get it: genre envy. You still wish you were writing and reviewing proper literature, like your college professors drilled into you. But you can’t make a living from today’s little magazines, so this is the next best gig.
But please, I’m begging you: consider a better career option. Like hitperson for the Mob, or Putin’s personal PR adviser (“Mr President, perhaps you should wrestle moose for next photoshoot!”).
If this is the future of SF, count me out as a reader. (And they wonder why we read fanfiction instead).
Perhaps we can look forward to Hugo awards for fanfiction?
Surely there’s no way that can go wrong.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in the future, but probably not the near future. The old-school SF fandom that the Hugos represent doesn’t have much representation in the fanfic scene, and vice versa.
I’ve speculated about why this is before. I’m still not really happy with any of the answers I’ve come up with, but I think it’s partly because status in literary SF circles comes largely from creating interesting settings and ideas, which tend to be more or less fully mined out in their originating works; the rich characters and worldbuilding that fanfic thrives on are somewhat secondary. It’s also a somewhat older scene, and enjoyment of fanfic (with respect to Deiseach above as an exception) tends to break along generational lines.
(Fantasy, meanwhile, has a long tradition of Tolkien fanfic. It is called “fantasy”.)
Oh, there’s definitely overlap.
Return with me to the days of yore, when it was possible for an editor at Tor (and wife to the seniormost) to recommend some Tolkien fanfic she liked on fanfiction.net.
Still, as you say… that is fantasy.
Oh god. Fucking Seveneves. I came away from that with the impression that Stephenson scribbled out a list of things he thought sounded cool on a bar napkin one night and then tried to shoehorn a plot to fit it all in, with no regard to the blemmye-fucking implausibility or lack of literary value of it.
“The old-school SF fandom that the Hugos represent doesn’t have much representation in the fanfic scene, and vice versa.”
The fandom that the Hugos represent is that which consists of people who care enough to pony up a supporting membership. And know they can do so — half the Sad Puppies outrage is that they publicized this, and so grew the group.
They already have Best Fan Writer.
Perhaps we can look forward to Hugo awards for fanfiction?
Cassandra Claire (or rather, “Clare” as her current nom-de-plume is) turned her Harry Potter fanfiction into “serial numbers filed off” professionally published even got a movie and everything fiction (City of Bones).
I only tangentially knew of her during LOTR fandom for “The Really Secret Diaries Of…” series (which was genuinely funny and spawned a lot of imitators), and was very surprised to learn about the war that blew up around her later fandom activities.
That makes the Hugos spat look like a vicarage tea party 🙂
I’ve never been able to read Neal Stephenson. I’ve tried, but just…. no.
There’s an awful lot of CLASSICS OF THE GENRE I haven’t read, even in Real Proper Literature.
Neal Stephenson was better before he became famous and earned his license to self-edit. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are classics, and Cryptonomicon may be the single book with the most influence on my writing style. But Anathem has too much concept for its own good, REAMDE is basically a Tom Clancy novel (albeit a good one), and The Baroque Cycle needs a psychotic editor with an axe.
I haven’t read Seveneyes yet, though I probably will at some point.
@nydwracu
If you want fiction with cast-iron plot that’s been thought out to the smallest details in regards to plausibility.. hmm.. there’s very few offerings for you.
Most sf is just fantasy BS or WWII retreads. Try R. Scott Bakker or Peter Watts. Watts is a better writer, pithy, and likes dark, depressing ideas. Also is his own psychotic editor, as of late. Polishes his work till it’s bleeding and the bones are showing.
_________________
Stephenson admitted that the creation process was basically that, except no napkin was involved.
I liked the book, despite the obvious flaws, plot omissions and implausibilities. Still better than the vast majority of stuff published, and somewhat original too.
I think you came to a similar conclusion as ESR:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6085
Quote:
“Literary status envy is the condition of people who think that all genre fiction would be improved by adopting the devices and priorities of late 19th- and then 20th-century literary fiction. Such people prize the “novel of character” and stylistic sophistication above all else. They have almost no interest in ideas outside of esthetic theory and a very narrow range of socio-political criticism. They think competent characters and happy endings are jejune, unsophisticated, artistically uninteresting. They love them some angst.
People like this are toxic to SF, because the lit-fic agenda clashes badly with the deep norms of SF.”
Tracking down what Vox Day or Irene Gallo said or didn’t say or meant or didn’t mean isn’t worth my time, but I can read stories. I did, and discovered that Wright’s fiction is beautiful and moving and deep (not so much his essays in my opinion) and the stuff his detractors hold up as good writing is boring. Advantage, team puppy.
Hmm.
Regarding your lizard brain’s argument vs. the Argument from Privilege, I think there are two different standards in play here.
Reading about the Argument from Privilege, it seems to be talking about what is morally correct. That is, sexism against women is wrong because women are disprivileged, but sexism against men is meaningless and in fact definitionally impossible, because men are privileged. I agree that this is bunk, and I would also agree that it was bunk if things were switched around. If someone who had deplored Yarvin being disinvited from Strangeloop went on to say that it would be perfectly fine and admirable to campaign to exclude SJWs from some similar non-political venue on only that basis, I would be rolling my eyes quite sincerely.
On the other hand, it strikes me the lizard brain argument here is not talking about what’s morally right, but about what we should be worried about right now. That’s a problem of threat analysis, and unavoidably subordinated to the actual conditions in the actual world. And for a person who doesn’t want either gay people or conservatives to be endlessly harassed and excluded from polite society due simply to that category, it takes a fair bit of doing not to notice that the prospects of this happening to gay people right now are minuscule and microscopic compared to the prospects of it happening to conservatives.
If I take cases which are actually symmetrical, I find that I am more or less consistent across those cases. For instance, I would be quite annoyed to hear of someone being disinvited from a technical conference because they were gay. Meanwhile, if a restaurant somewhere said that they would refuse to cater a National Policy Institute conference, or similar, my reaction would be a resounding shrug. I think there’s something to the idea that the SJWs and the anti-SJWs have a certain psychological symmetry to them. However, discerning which faction is actually right is an object-level question, and pointing out psychological symmetry is unlikely to be helpful in this case.
I think this is pretty insightful. If you’re being chased by a jaguar, it does no good to ponder whether, in general, you’re more likely to be killed by a bear, lion, or staph infection. The jaguar problem is the pressing one, which is why that’s what the lizard brain cares about.
This is true, but as Kahneman has spent his career demonstrating, our lizard brains tend to think “jaguar” more often than there is an actual jaguar. Our threat sensors are hypersensitive, so anything that looks like a threat is assessed as one. This gets worse when you add in tribalism.
Probably a good thing, because the consequences of being wrong are wildly asymmetric. Thinking there’s a jaguar when there’s no jaguar costs little. Thinking there isn’t a jaguar when there is can cost everything. Same goes for a potential attempt to turn your tribe against you.
It’s an adaptive thing, especially when we’re talking about literal jaguars. Whether or not it’s “good” depends on the context, plus of course a lot of moral background. It’s not at all clear that it’s good in the context of tribal politics.
The media doesn’t help here, and I do wonder if that’s the major cause. Jezebel.com runs an article with a headline like “SEE THIS RACIST SHITLORD CALL FOR LEGALIZING RAPE” about once a day, and if that’s a major source of news for you, then you’re likely to live in continual fear of racists coming along and raping you, even if the actual frequency of the thing they’re talking about is very low. Conversely, if you reading mostly anti-SJW media, you’re going to have an exaggerated view of how common and how powerful the SJW shaming tactics are. Journalism is terrible and makes everything worse.
That was the thing I started to notice after the initial surge of “Reading conservative blogs and seeing whole new side of the world” wore off.
Yes, sure, there was a big flap over the American flag at “Some Hippy fucking college in Oregon”
But when I see the story pop on on my FB news feed reposted by Breitbart, and by Glenn Beck*, and by Allen west and “Being Conservative” and so on, it takes on a bigger import.
Very, very few people are raped on college campuses. Very very few people have problems with flags on campus. Very, very few people die in airplane crashes.
In general, i think RATE, more than occurance, should be considered. One false rape accusation is an event. Virtually every high-profile media rape case being effortlessly discredited by basic journalism? That’s a change in rate.
Some guy’s flag gets a complaint? That’s a bit of a hassle.
Flags all over the place suddenly start getting lots of complaints? An issue.
Highest rate is where we should focus our efforts, but the change in rate deserves attention too. (I was going to try to look smart by using the calculus term, but I don’t remember if that is derivative or integral. )
Derivative in rate, a.k.a. the second derivate in the total occurrences.
I agree with this – while there is some similarity between the two sides, there isn’t true symmetry.
There’s still a meta-level argument that both sides are actually reinforcing each other; that, at the meta-level, they are somehow on the same side, because they agree on the rules of the game. See this (surprisingly) insightful on Cracked: 6 Ways to Keep Terrorists From Ruining the World.
The YouTube video on memes “This Video Will Make You Angry” makes the same argument – that “opposing” memes are actually in a symbiotic relationship promoting some mutual culture war or threat. “This issues is important, the other side is doing horrible things” helps both memes to gain mindshare.
The difference between “ideas beneficial to humanity / ideas that are correct”, and “ideas selected by memetic evolution in human brains in the current environment” is unfortunately quite wide; and many of these “culture wars” seem to be just specific cases of that general issue. (As many health problems are simply specific manifestations of our different diet & lifestyle now vs. pre-industrial revolution).
Seems like we need a way to address the entire issue, not just one little corner. But I have no idea how, except a totalitarian state that regulates all ideas for memetic hygiene. And that seems unlikely to go well.
Modernity is a serious, growing problem, and we don’t have a solution.
“Modernity is a serious, growing problem, and we don’t have a solution.”
What if there is no solution? That some level of “memetic hygiene” is absolutely necessary for survival, and that such hygiene becomes incredibly difficult, if not impossible, once global telecommunications is invented, is one of the three legs of my proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox. (The other two are the unrepeatable, once-per-planetary history nature of an industrial revolution, and that the risk of hazardous memetic contaigion does not decrease, and likely increases, with increasing intelligence.)
No, that’s not the way I heard it.
Yes, but that’s not the “other hand”. It’s the same hand.
I agree with your interpretation of the argument from privilege. Nonetheless, something about Tom’s reversed examples resonates with me, I find myself indifferent to his pizza scenario as well as to the above pizza scenario. Similarly, I am angered by both the examples of excluding a speaker.
I think perhaps the difference is simply that I think finding a different tasty restaurant is easy and unimportant but finding a new competent speaker is hard and relatively more important. If I learned that the tech conference had somebody essentially as good as Moldbug waiting in the wings, who was less controversial, I would basically stop caring about the tech conference. In this case though, the SJ activists don’t seem to have been advocating anyone else in particular replace Moldbug, they only seem to have wanted him gone. Using politics as a tiebreaker is acceptable to me, it’s using them as an overriding concern that bothers me.
Then again, maybe not. Because when I imagine using someone’s gayness as a similar “tiebreaker” for whether or not they should speak at a conference, I feel anger again.
Ultimately, my carefully and tentatively considered reaction to that anger is that it is not justified, it is more important to have a good conference than to make a political point about the acceptability of gay people, just as it’s more important to have a good conference than to make a political point about the acceptability of reactionaries. This does resolve consistency, but it also stretches my moral intuitions further than I’d like. I think that means it’s the right choice.
I blogged about it when it first came to my attention, and used screenshots to make sure I captured accurately the Irene Gallo comments. I haven’t been calling for her firing or a boycott, but Tor is, at the moment, a sterling example of a company in need of a social media policy. You’ll note that the date/time stamp on her comments make it clear that although this was a personal page, it was done on a Monday afternoon, when most people are working. http://cedarwrites.com/fear-and-loathing-at-tor/
I was referred to your site by a friend, and while this is an interesting essay and a well-balanced one, I’m interested in your work on feminism and will be looking at those. It’s a topic I touch on frequently, myself.
Ms. Gallo’s remarks were uttered in a post in which she was promoting her company’s product while also tagging how it would make Puppies sadder, which makes the “personal page” argument somewhat weak. All else aside, it was entirely unprofessional.
Tor should, among other things, have a stricter division between promotion and its employees’ personal social media.
Further reports on Tor
Man, it must be tough working in a job where your customers choose whether or not to associate with you voluntarily based on whether they like you or not, rather than being brought by the police and locked in with you.
I read this like five times before going “oh, right! psychiatrist”.
Well, she didn’t help her case by “These are all horrible evil people! Some of whom… are authors published by my employer and for whose books I have provided cover art.”
I mean, if I call Dale Carville a far-right neo-Nazi, it would not be unreasonable for people to ask me “The fuck you know that, bitch?”
For Ms Gallo, it’s too easy for people to go “Some of these guys are TOR authors. She works for TOR. She’s done work for them, so she probably met them in real life. Aha! Real inside scoop on what these guys really are like, not the public image they put out!” Putting two and two together and getting forty-eight.
Scott, at least the crazy people have to be dragged to you by the cops.
We get ’em turning up of their own accord demanding to see us 🙂
Actually, the crazy people are not the worst, not by a long chalk. There are some right operators out there whom – well. Confidentiality. And Principle of Charity.
Let’s just say soap operas (including quasi-incest love triangle plots) are more like documentaries than you’d think.
Why was Brendon Eich forced out?
Because he donated to an anti-gay marriage political fund, and someone found out.
So the cases don’t seem quite the same – Gallo made a public (at least to Facebook) highly provocative statement that mixed her personal opinion with a business announcement, so the line between “this is what I think” and “this is what Tor promotes” was fuzzy.
Eich made a private donation and as far as I’ve heard was otherwise pretty quiet on the subject. I don’t know how you allow the Eich firing consistently without literally banning any political activity by employees. He was only “outed” by a deliberate effort.
It’s the difference between a flasher in the park and someone you see naked because you took a shortcut through their backyard at night. Both might be gross, but I’m less sympathetic if you complain about the latter.
People who donated a thousand times as much as Eich were found out, and as far as I know nobody even tried to get them fired.
So your simple causality here, needs work.
Eich worked in tech, which (despite the constant howling of how nerds are the worst oppressors of all), was converted to SJW-ism as the dominant religion many years ago.
It’s the difference between living in New York and knowing that somewhere in the backwoods of Alabama there are racists getting together and hatching evil plots and living in New York and suddenly discovering that a racist is standing in the corner at your own dinner party.
You have no power to get rid of the guy in Alabama, but you can make a huge scene and throw the guy at your party out of your house and make sure your neighbors understand that they will be treated the same way if they cross you ideologically.
What else did he do to get fired then? Are you saying that unless everyone who donated got fired, then nobody who donated got fired for it?
The person listed as the top individual donor at that site was the Chairwoman of a Biotech firm at the time and now owns a real estate firm that builds commercial properties for tech clients.
Eich donated money while not powerful. Claire Reiss is very powerful and can fight back at anyone that tries to make trouble for her, while Eich can’t and/or won’t.
Maybe. The most relevant factor to me seems that OkCupid could detect when a user was browsing from Firefox and thought it’d be cute to interject the little message there, social media found out, and signal boosted it. They didn’t choose to single out Eich because they feared Claire Reiss.
It wasn’t just that he donated to a fund; he donated to a perfectly legal campaign (just like the perfectly legal donations to the opposite side campaign) supporting the passing of Proposition 8.
Now, the matter has been thrashed out again and again about was this a fair law or not; I have no opinion and I’m not going to stick my oar into an American internal matter.
But I do think there was more going on than the surface casus belli; I think OKCupid didn’t suddenly realise that Brendan Eich was an evil bigot who should be publicly shamed into doing the decent thing. I think they were trying to get publicity for themselves and even, possibly, get some positive opinion back after their own – or rather, the group that owns them, InterActiveCorp- little moment of badness: the Justine Sacco incident, where IAC’s Head of Corporate Communications tweeted a very unfunny ‘joke’ and it all blew up.
Point of minor clarification – Prop 8 wasn’t really a “law,” rather it was a constitutional amendment. Which is significant from the point of view of arguments about federalism, but is out of scope for this particular discussion.
A state constitutional amendment, which in California can be passed by a simple majority at referendum. It might also be worth mentioning that California’s constitution is huge, more than eight times longer than the federal constitution, and defines a substantial body of law; California doesn’t really have a functioning hierarchy of laws like the federal government does.
Getting amendments to referendum is supposed to be the hard part — the original legislative process for it is extremely difficult. But you can also do it by gathering enough signatures, and that’s what everyone who wants to amend it does nowadays, because getting a 75% supermajority of both houses on any substantial issue is about as likely as waking up to find that a freak tornado has picked up a pond full of live frogs and assembled them into a perfect scale model of the Capitol Building in your living room.
“But I do think there was more going on than the surface casus belli”
You’re probably right, just as there’s more to the Gallo incident. But Eich’s donation was definitely the precipitating event held up as his “crime” – just as Gallo’s Facebook post. So if we’re going to debate whether the reactions were justified, it’s worth comparing those events rather than the motivations of the people who reacted to it.
“I don’t know how you allow the Eich firing consistently without literally banning any political activity by employees. ”
Does “allow” mean “not have a law against it” or “approve of?” I don’t think there should be a law against the Eich firing, but I disapprove of it.
I was mostly referring at a company policy level. If you accept that you will fire an employee for their personal political donation on the grounds that it offended someone, you probably need to explicitly ban all political activity. Or be inconsistent and discriminate based on political beliefs.
I don’t think any of this should be illegal, but I would prefer a societal standard that allows a corporate employee to hold whatever beliefs they choose on their own time. Barring that, I’d at least like any social norm that considers private political speech a corporate issue to be applied consistently to all beliefs (keep in mind that Eich’s belief wasn’t even fringe – Prop 8 passed, after all).
I think that’s framing it the wrong way, though. The problem is a social problem, not a corporate governance problem. The company policy is just fire the guy if enough of an external stink is raised to impact our market share. They don’t care about the politics or the larger impact their actions have on discourse, and they shouldn’t. You can’t expect businesses to take these heroic free speech stances when all that’ll happen is they’ll go out of business. The problem lies at the level of a society that think it’s okay as a matter of normative social behavior to boycott companies because of their leaders’ private politics (when as you say, it wasn’t exactly a fringe position).
The funny thing is it wasn’t even activists that started it. It was another Internet company!
Though I am not generally in favour of holding people accountable for opinions on their own personal blogs, and think everyone has the right to grouse about work, their bosses, colleagues, etc., the Irene Gallo case is complicated because she works for TOR, has done work for some of the authors in the Sad/Rabid Puppies groups, and therefore there is a real possibility people will think “Yes, here’s proof that so-and-so is a racist Fascist; she interacts with these people professionally, she must have seen and heard what they’re really like, so if she says they’re far-right neo-Nazis then they must be saying and doing far-right neo-Nazi things!”
She wasn’t using her personal blog. If she was, she’d already posted about work matters on it immediately before making the unprofessional slurs. That permeability is something most corporations increasingly try to shut down so that they can avoid this very situation of someone posting about work stuff on their personal blog (if it is, it may not be, which would just further dig her into the professional misbehavior pit) in their work capacity, for good or ill.
I don’t see the asymmetry. You think the restaurant should not be homophobic; you think the conference shouldn’t bar Yarvin. You don’t want to close the restaurant down for homophobia, and you don’t want to close the conference down for barring Yarvin.
I too was going a little nuts trying to see the inconsistency on Scott’s part there. He clearly disagrees with both acts of social justice pressure, and rightfully so in my opinion.
I suppose the conflict is only in the *scale* of his reactions: he shrugged at one for being silly & unnecessary, but he was genuinely alarmed at the other.
I think it’s silly to worry about the pizzeria, but correct to worry about Yarvin. In fact, I mocked the pizzeria people, but I very deliberately signal-boosted the thing about the conference.
What’s more threatening – someone saying they don’t like you, and they won’t follow your blog anymore, or someone saying they don’t like you, and they’re gonna get their buddies and make sure your employer knows how horrible you are? There is a fundamental difference between deciding that someone is a shit, and deciding that everyone else needs to think that someone is a shit.
On a related note, you should put up a freakin’ Patreon. You’re exposed to significant risk as a public political commentator with an interest in the most controversial of subjects. The responsible thing is to accept income to offset that risk. Of the people I have followed on the internet, two so far have felt forced to destroy their public internet presence/body of work when the wrong person found their doxx. Neither made their internet presence into a significant source of income, though with their not inconsiderable audiences they could have. If your internet presence does nothing to support you, it becomes a house of cards that can be pushed over with the slightest effort. I think more resilience would serve everyone well.
On the other hand, Scott works for a Catholic hospital. “He said bad things about feminism” is unlikely to faze them.
Nathan, you have little knowledge of the state of modern Catholicism, modern “in the Catholic tradition” universities and hospitals and charities, and exactly how much trouble saying naughty things about feminism might get him into.
It’s like you think we’re all one big monolithic religion marching in lockstep in perfect obedience to the Pope or something 🙂
Speaking of which, I am anticipating the forthcoming encyclical from Pope Francis on the environment and climate change (Laudato Si) in about two days or so; the yelling and shouting should be very entertaining. Already the Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy for Sciences (Archbishop Marcel Sanchez Sorondo, “S.S.” below) has had the gloves off in an interview:
Hi Deiseach,
I freely admit to not knowing everything, and if anti feminist viewpoints are genuinely a problem for an institution that bars women from the priesthood, I stand corrected.
(note: I am related to many Very Serious Catholics and have a lot of respect for the church despite being Protestant myself).
Here we go. “Women can’t be priests” = “Catholics hate women.”
Yep. Completely right, Nathan. Got us there. I should probably quote my handy list of What Catholics Hate that I stuck in a comment on another post, but you probably know it all anyway.
If the priesthood was a job, then yes, it would be inequality. The attitude you allude to is also called clericalism, i.e. the only real power and importance is the clerical state and therefore lay people are nothing. By that logic, everyone should be ordained, else they are not ‘real’ members of whatever denomination. Never mind Luther’s “Every man has a pope in his belly”, every man woman and child must have a mitre on their head or else they’re second-class citizens!
Ordination of women does not do anything to overcome clericalism; indeed, it only exacerbates it. If a woman is a second-class citizen if she’s not a priest, then she’s a second-class citizen if she’s a priest but not a bishop (as the Church of England recently found out, and as a lot of people forecast when they first permitted women’s ordination).
That ends up with the attitude of WATCH where if you only refer to God by masculine pronouns, then you are claiming only men are made in his image, or something.
This has very little to do with the orthodox teaching that God is spirit and therefore neither male or female; if we really do need to refer to “Goddess” in order to fully incorporate women as equal members of any religion, then the Jews (for one) are horrible bigoted sexists, right?
You’re completely misinterpreting me. Like, really really badly. I don’t regard the Catholic Church as a woman-hating institution and I don’t view anti-feminism as a woman hating worldview.
The Patreon thing has been suggested before, and Scott is not comfortable with the ethical implications of it. He would prefer that you donate any money you would have given to him for his posts to a charity instead.
He doesn’t give 100% of the money he makes beyond the bare necessities for survival to charity. Why should he have ethical problems if other people don’t either? Yeah, they could have given the money to charity instead of to him, but every time he watches a movie he could have given the money to charity.
Remember when Donahue lost his job? He had the highest rated show on MSNBC:
Soon after the show’s cancellation, an internal MSNBC memo was leaked to the press stating that Donahue should be fired because he opposed the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq and that he would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.”[19] Donahue commented in 2007 that the management of MSNBC, owned by General Electric and Microsoft, required that “we have two conservative (guests) for every liberal. I was counted as two liberals.”
Lets scale this against Eich’s firing.
Do you have a source for this? All I could find was Wikipedia, whose sources appear to have succumbed to link rot.
Here’s a better source for the leaked internal memo (not paywalled):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/24/AR2007042402444.html
I was hoping to see the actual memo; I don’t trust the popular press not to distort quotes and take things out of context.
I think that the original leak was here, if you know how to get past the robot block on archive.org.
It’s two sides of the same problem.
The US needs far stronger protection from political intimidation by employers; instead you can legally fire anyone for any reason except supporting a labor union (and labor organizers get fired anyway).
Under capitalism, the first amendment only protects the well-off and those with nothing to lose.
Well, there is this:
Phil Donahue was still on tv during the Iraq war? Isn’t he like 80 years old?
Also, MSNBC is conservative? Really?
Something here does not compute.
Well, he did claim that, but this was in 2003 and he wasn’t 80 then. I don’t think he’s still on television now.
MSNBC didn’t become a liberal channel until 2008.
If a pizzeria banned Yarvin would it be correct to worry about it? If a conference disinvited a speaker because he was gay, would it be correct not to worry?
It seems to me that there is an asymmetry because there are many more pizzerias than tech conferences, therefore being banned from a specific pizzeria is a minor annoyance, while being banned from a major tech conference is a significant professional setback.
And let’s try to be precise – the pizzeria didn’t ban anybody, just said they wouldn’t participate (cater) in a gay wedding.
That seems an important distinction, whether you go out of your way to NOT accommodate someone, vs choosing not to go out of your way to serve them. I’m not really sure where “disinviting from a conference” falls on that spectrum.
Therefore the proper analogy would be a pizzeria refusing to cater a neoreaction meetup vs. a tech conference disinviting a speaker who happens to be a LGBT activist after pressures from fundamentalist Christians.
If they manage to provide a swimming pool with an inflatable Cthulhu 😀
Not quite a symmetric comparison, though — a left wing bookstore sells left wing literature, but a pizzeria run by conservatives does not sell right wing pizzas.
So… you’re saying I should sue the left-wing bookstore and force them to carry right-wing books?
The simplest role reversal would be boycotting a bakery that refused to cater weddings for churches that prohibit gay weddings. Or a pizza shop that refused to deliver pizzas to a Tea Party rally.
Wasn’t there a recent case where some Christian advocacy group attempted to sue a gay baker for refusing to bake them a “Down with gay marriage” cake?
IIRC their case got thrown out because they couldn’t prove they were discriminated against because of who they were, rather that it was about the specific message (which apparently you’re allowed to refuse)
Don’t the different responses go back to how deeply embedded you are in the blue world (even if you are more gray than blue)? Outright anti-gay bigotry seems like a trivial concern because to you it looks like a rare, idiosyncratic outlier. That’s true at a tech conference or food co-op, but not at a rodeo or a civil war reenactment. If you were a slightly left of median denizen of the red world, you’d probably roll your eyes at people at church ranting about the one hippie coffee shop in town that had a sign up about homophobes not being welcome there.
I think your essay acknowledges this in several places but also pulls back from it in several places. It’s a bit like how blues when pressed acknowledge that it is terrible how Iran treats women but somehow it doesn’t seem as real to them as Southern Baptists being much milder sexists.
It seems to me that Blues (in the US, at least) consider the sexism in the middle-east much worse, but something they have very little leverage to affect, while they have a better chance to actually change something here at home.
It seems to *me* that Blues have conflicted views on whether Middle Easterners should count as oppressors or oppressed. They are obviously doing a lot of bad things to other people, but they’re also anti-West, anti-Israel, former subjects of colonialism, and targets of Islamophobia, and that leads to the Blues going easy on Middle-Easterners.
Being wronged in some completely unrelated way doesn’t make the bad things you do to someone else any better. Especially if that bad thing you are doing was in place long before the bad things that happened to you.
Source: I’m kinda blue, and know a bunch of bluey-blues.
I think it’s true that they (we) acknowledge it is worse, but they don’t really feel it in their bones the same way.
That’s what I was getting at with excluding gays versus excluding neoreactionaries. While certainly many would acknowledge that gays ought not to be excluded, it doesn’t feel as real since it is happening off in parallel red land, whereas the tech conference scenario feels much more tangible, since it’s closer to your own people.
As mentioned I think the blog post acknowledges this and starts to come to grips with it, but reading through the comments it is clear that many don’t. There are lots of posts that boil down to “You are completely wrong, SJW are the worst thing ever. How can you even compare anyone to them?!?”
brad: As others have pointed out, there’s another difference: the pizza parlor doesn’t want to exclude gays, it wants to exclude gay weddings–that is, events which explicitly celebrate homosexuality. They are perfectly willing to serve gays otherwise. The tech conference wants to exclude neoreactionaries regardless of whether the neoreactionary’s political beliefs even come up.
Brad, the folks I know are really seriously feeling-it-in-their-bones kind of bent out of shape about it: thinking about it makes some feel PHYSICALLY ILL, while thinking about the milder problems closer to home doesn’t.
The asymmetry is that his gut feeling is that the uproar against the pizza place is “silly,” while the conference deciding to bar Yarvin is “scary.” There are, however, two further asymmetries: first, there was no uproar (to my knowledge) about the tech conference’s decision, or a concerted effort to get the conference closed down. Second, tech conferences may not hold the “World Levers Of Power”, but they are intended as speaking platforms, so barring speakers is a pretty strong use of message-regulating authority.
Let’s try flipping the sides while keeping the setting the same. Here’s a thought experiment, and I’m going to post this even if it turns out unconvincing, because negative results are people too.
Hypothetical scenario 1: a tech conference revokes an invitation to one of their speakers once they find out that she’s active in the social justice community and wants to replace democracy with some sort of matriarchy thing that she explains in very long, meandering blog posts. Their explanation is that they wanted to avoid politicizing the conference.
Hypothetical scenario 2: a gay pizzeria — such a thing must exist somewhere, right? — refuses to cater to any church that opposes gay marriage. The large fraction of America’s population that is conservative Christian gets offended by this and it turns into a loud shitstorm.
How would you react to these situations? The political sides are flipped, and if I mucked up the relative severity a bit then mea culpa, controlling for confounding variables is hard.
This is an interesting experiment, Peter, and a very good one, for what I found it revealed; it allowed me to separate more clearly my moral feelings from ones of being personally threatened.
Like Scott, I found Yarvin’s exclusion both wrong and threatening and worthy of worry, but reacted to the pizzeria hullabaloo with a shrug.
In your example, I feel that it’s as wrong to rescind the invitation to the SJ activist as it was to rescind Yarvin’s, but I don’t feel threatened by it; I don’t think that it’s the first step in a slippery slope which will eventually result in dire consequences for me. And I’d react to the hypothetical gay pizzeria hullabaloo with the same shrug with which I reacted to the first one. (In both cases, the death threats and forced closure of the pizzeria are of course completely wrong, presuming that in your hypothetical, conservative Christians send the pizzeria death threats, and force it to close.) In both cases, I find what the pizzeria is doing slightly discomfiting, but no more than that, whereas I find an ideological conference far more ‘wrong’.
So my morality is consistent (rescinding invitations to the conference for political beliefs is wrong no matter who does it, and to whom), it’s just that in once case, I expect to be the target, and in the other, I don’t; so the feeling of ‘wrongness’ remains the same, but the feelings of being threatened differ. Whereas with pizzerias, I don’t care; if I can’t get a pizza from one, I can get it from another. (This may not be the case in small towns with only one or two good pizza places, which is a potential factor.)
You left out part of the conference invitation condition: the person was invited to speak about a topic unrelated to their peculiar politics. I strongly agree with you that it’s clearly wrong.
But let’s say a conference invited a neo-Nazi to discuss (advocate for) the neo-Nazi point of view [or substitute any other unpopular perspective], and then later, under pressure, reconsiders and withdraws the invitation. Of course the invitee will say he/she was disinvited for political reasons, silenced by powerful forces, etc., and that will all be true.
Would the conference management be in the wrong or not?
@ Larry:
In that case, it’d depend on the purpose of the conference. If the conference was about fringe/outside-the-Overton-window political views, and its purpose was to give people a chance to see/hear those, then it’d be wrong. If it was a conference about the modern descendants and adherents of 20th-century ideologies which are no longer in vogue, it’d be wrong.
If it was a libertarian conference, or a SJ conference, or a leftist conference, or something else, then it’d be based on why the speaker was invited in the first place. For instance, if it was an SJ conference, and in addition to the normal speakers, it had also invited a number of people from the ‘other’ camps – libertarians, leftists, centrists, rightists, neoreactionaries, and this guy – specifically because they wanted to be able to interact with such people, then un-inviting him wouldn’t be wrong morally, but practically. If he was invited because he was famous for his analysis of how intersectionality works from “the other side” (the ways in which black Neo-Nazis are excluded from normal society, for instance), then the case becomes more complicated; here, I think it was foolish to invite him, given the inherent ideological clash, and recsinding the invitation was merely correcting the error.
If, OTOH, this person was invited to a libertarian conference to speak about an ideological topic, and the invitation rescinded because his views were later found to be utterly anti-libertarian, then it’s fine, as it would be in the case of an SJ conference where something like this happened.
In sum: how wrong it is depends on how on-topic the speaker’s controversial opinions are.
Pragmatically, giving in to people who demand that someone be excluded is a phenomenally ill-advised idea, because it opens you up to the same sort of pressure from everyone if they can credibly threaten to cause controversy.
I had the same result: I found the conference disinvitations to both be equivalently wrong and the choosing-not-to-sell-pizza cases to be equivalently insignificant.
This was an interesting result for me, because before I had thought that one of the main reasons why the conference disinvitation was wrong and the pizza non-selling was unimportant was because of the fact that it could plausibly be the case that Curtis Yarvin (or whatever similar right winger) would find widely barred from such professional conferences, whereas there is essentially no chance at all that gay people will find themselves widely excluded from accessing pizza services.
But it seems that’s not the most important distinction, since I’d also oppose with roughly equal strength a feminist being excluded from a mainstream tech conference (which is exceedingly unlikely).
Excluding Requires Hate might be a good example of excluding an OTT SJW – in that people actually are excluding her.
Though in Requires Hate’s case it’s as much to do with a long and very well-documented history of harassing behaviour rather than extremist ideology on its own.
Closer parellels in some ways to James Frenkel rather than with Curtis Yarvin.
Your first scenario doesn’t work. There are two differences: Moldbug explicitly argues against all forms of political activity, whereas “active in the social justice community” implies “politically active” and probably “pushing for ideological purges”; and insofar as Moldbug is continuing any political tradition, it’s the tradition of Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Hoppe, a tiny and obscure back-room of libertarianism, whereas social justice is so powerful that it’s frequently (and effectively!) used by large corporations as a marketing tactic.
My first reaction is that the pizzeria doesn’t matter and the SJ speaker shouldn’t be purged, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to tolerate people who support movements that are actively seeking the power to destroy their enemies by any means necessary.
Moldbug advocates for a particular political viewpoint. That viewpoint argues against the participation of ordinary citizens in political activities (as far as I can tell), but advocating for such a view is itself a form of “political activity” by any reasonable definition of “political activity.”
From my perspective, if I try to remain neutral to the premises underlying both philosophies, both Moldbug and our hypothetical SJ activist are both saying: “These people shouldn’t be allowed to participate in the political process because they’re evil.” Evil for the SJ activist is “has the wrong politics” and evil for Moldbug is “will keep demanding concessions for themselves to the detriment of the rest of society”.
The comparison is actually pretty good, IMO.
@wysiwyg,
I don’t think it’s “these people shouldn’t be allowed to participate in the political process because they [will keep demanding concessions for themselves to the detriment of the rest of society]” so much as “nobody should be involved in the political process except the owner of that particular polity and his employees.”
In the Formalist framing, a citizen saying ‘I’m involved in the political process’ makes as much sense as a shopper saying ‘I’m involved in the garment business.’ In that framework governance is a good supplied by governors, and like other goods it’s quality (and often supply) suffers when it doesn’t respond to market forces. Not metaphorical “democracy is a marketplace of ideas” forces, he means a literal share price.
You can certainly argue those points, even most NRx folks don’t like the idea of state-as-firm, but in the context of his philosophy it is absolutely the case that he is opposed to all political activity on the part of non-shareholders.
@Ever An Anon:
I appreciate the clarification, though I’m not sure it impacts my conclusion appreciably. My purpose was not to argue for or against Moldbug’s views, but simply note that they are every bit as much a political viewpoint as any other political viewpoint. The fact that the content of that political view includes the premise “most people should not hold or act on political viewpoints” is immaterial to the status of that political viewpoint as a political viewpoint.
I think if you re-read my comment you’ll have trouble finding anything that argues otherwise. In fact, one of the premises of my argument is that Moldbug is opposed to all political activity on the part of group X, which as you clarify simply denotes the set of “non-stockholders”. He has reasons for wanting to exclude these people from the political process. They may or may not be good ones. Similar with hypthetical SJ guy.
Moldbug wants ‘political activity’ to work by the business model; people flock to well-governed countries and thus incentivize good governance.
Moldbug doesn’t want everybody to be trapped in an authoritarian hell-hole. In his vision, there are a vast number of countries or city states competing to attract productive citizens, and in his mind this produces better results than what we have today.
This might of course be naive, but there’s hardly anything evil about it.
@Unique Identifier:
That’s great. I didn’t say otherwise. As I mentioned at least once, my point was not to argue for or against Moldbug’s views, but to simply point out that regardless of their contents, they do constitute political views.
If you think I was calling them “evil” then you need to go back and read my comment a lot more slowly.
Kind of reinventing the wheel a bit there. That’s the basic model of Tiebout equilibrium first proposed in the 1950s. Once we had a formalism proving general equilibria were possible for functions mapping convex sets to themselves, this was effectively proven it could work theoretically in extremely small cities with virtually no barriers to movement between them, which roughly aligns with empirical observations, say places like South Orange County or North Dallas where a lot of development pops up real quickly and there are a lot of niche places and gated communities where people tend to be pretty happy with the local government. Get as big as even Denton or Anaheim and it doesn’t work quite as well.
Greg Mankiw has been all over this idea recently.
wysinwyg:
I was trying to add some nuance, pertaining to your claim that Moldbug “argues against the participation of ordinary citizens in political activities”.
Rather than insist that voting with your feet counts as political activity, I chose to give a brief description of his model such that people can make up their own minds.
@Unique Identifier:
Oops! Sorry about that. I took this:
as chiding me for accusing Moldbug or his views of being “evil”.
At a considerable tangent having to do with the Tibout model … .
Ronald Coase’s final book, coauthored with Ning Wang, is a discussion of how China made the transition from communism to capitalism. He argues that in the later stages, what was happening was a sort of Tiebout model, although I don’t think he uses the term. Government was largely decentralized, political positions were allocated from the top, and the people at the top were in favor of economic development. So the local authorities were competing with each other to do things, such as attracting businesses and jobs, that would lead to economic development in their area. Lots of different approaches, what worked got copied, what didn’t work abandoned.
There’s another book by Sun Yan on corruption in China which points out some of the imperfections in the system, ways in which a local authority could benefit his polity at the expense of others, or himself at the expense of his polity.
On the other hand, the net effect of the reforms was to increase real GNP per capita about twenty fold from Mao’s death to 2010. I’m in Shanghai at the moment, and it doesn’t feel strikingly poorer than the U.S. or western Europe, although the statistics show China as a whole still well behind the richer countries.
There’s an even bigger difference, the restaurant didn’t say they wouldn’t serve gay patrons, they said they wouldn’t cater gay weddings.
Whereas with the conference, Yarvin wasn’t there to talk about his political views but to give a technical talk.
“23. At least one SSC post in the second half of 2015 will get > 100,000 hits: 70%”
Immediately following this with a return of Social Justice blogging (historically a very popular thing on SSC) seems like a good play to get the prediction right, if nothing else. This post is (to a single read-through) even-handed and thoughtful, though, so maybe not.
I’ll use this to raise a question – how come, within an hour of posting about social justice, my blog traffic shoots up?
Wouldn’t people have to be reading my blog to know I’d posted about social justice? It doesn’t seem to be a link effect – aside from one or two posts on Facebook no one has linked to this yet. And the title of the post doesn’t reveal it’s about social justice either. It’s like you people have a sixth sense or something.
How many extra hits do you see, and are you counting pure hits or only hits lasting for more than a couple seconds? And is the effect only observed for SJ posts in particular?
I don’t know about RSS feeds, but I suspect it is something along those lines. People see a new post title that isn’t a link thread or open thread (more interesting to regulars, probably) and then click it. After reading through, they can pass it on to either incite outrage or bolster support among non-readers that care about the issue, rather than about your writings specifically.
RSS crew represent. There are literally doze–… several of us.
On the broader internet anyway. Feed users are probably over-represented here.
Over-represented in more than one way, I’d wager.
One; the crowd in here skews towards “techie”, the sort of person more likely to use RSS.
Two; People who comment, and comment early are more likely to be invested. More invested people slowly become power users. Power users are more likely to use RSS.
Three; The people who comment the earliest are more likely to use RSS, because people coming through from sharing on facebook, even immediately after the article is posted are going in behind the people who got the link instantly.
Any way I can find out how many people RSS my blog?
Uhh, wordpress used to give the number of visits you got from the feed, I’m pretty sure that only counts the ones that click through rather than view the post in the feed reader.
Feedburner used to be one option, but I’m not sure google even supports it any more.
I use an RSS reader, but I almost always come look at the comments.
Feedly displays (approximate) subscriber counts. SSC is here:
http://feedly.com/i/subscription/feed/https://slatestarcodex.com/feed/
Currently “3k”.
I use RSS (feedly) to read your blog, but often come over to read the comments, especially if it seems they’ll have interesting discussions (for example, if the post is about Social Justice).
Scott, you have 287 RSS subscribers on NewsBlur.
208 subscribers on Inoreader.
I would imagine some of it is the effect of RSS feeds. I always click through from my RSS feed to read what you say in the comments, but most people won’t click through unless they want to comment about it or read what people are saying, so that will have a big effect on actual on-site traffic.
My RSS didn’t alert me to this one actually. I saw one of those two people on Facebook share it.
I’m on an RSS feed. I don’t always read the comments, but social justice seems likely to incur the wrath of some mutual friends, so I check out the blog proper.
Maybe immediate reactions on Tumblr are a contributing factor. I can’t really judge how much of a factor it can be, because I follow relatively few people on Tumblr, but I did see one post on my dash referencing this latest SSC post. Needless to say, I’m pretty sure your SJ-related essays tend to generate a lot of immediate Tumblr reaction amongst members of the rationalist crowd. (Although I initially found this post through my habit of checking SSC every evening, rather than noticing anything on Tumblr.)
I use Feedly, which shows me the title and first paragraph of each post. It also has a thing where people (presumably only Feedly users) can “like” something. “Beware Summary Statistics” has ~50 likes in the past 2 months, this piece has 78 in the past 5 hours (most of your others get up to the hundreds after a day or two).
I don’t know how many other people use Feedly (or similar) but if enough do this will have the same effect as a post being shared a lot on social media, except you may not be tracking it.
While there are probably other factors involved, I think you might be underestimating the extent to which your social-justice-related posts are recognizable by title. On my end, guessing the subject of this one seemed like a simple act of pattern recognition.
You’re on reddit now.
I’ve seen occasional links to your blog on reddit’s kotakuinaction (and in other gamergate communities) Rarely the most upvoted post – the most recent had 15, and was on the third page despite being recently posted. Was actually how I found this blog, but I stayed for the other stuff and am by now a regular reader.
But with a community that has 42k subscribers that’s a lot of people who might see it.
What if it’s merely that everyone loads the page multiple times to be kept up with the comments?
I’m a traddy conservative, and the lesson I’ve taken from all this is very different: I’m perfectly fine with people enforcing social norms this way. I am certainly annoyed at SJW petty harrassment “to encourage the others”, but if this is what women, minorities, gay people have had to face, well, meh. If you really believe in what you believe in, you simply adjust to the new reality. Procedural liberalism born out of some balance of power holds little interest: it lives and dies by particular circumstances.
It is also important to note that SJWs have quite a bit of power in certain segments of society, but are utterly powerless in other areas. The lower down the SES spectrum you go, the less political correctness counts for. Lower class males, for example, are often still quite hostile to gays.
Not sure how accurate that is; for as you go down you interact with the more dangerous arms of the state more often. A lower class household where there are domestic disturbances with each party 50% to blame will feel the effects of the policies of the social services, police, courts, etc., even if they don’t chafe at the diversity initiative of the employer they don’t have.
The tools of the state are extremely crude. A lower class male who is being chased for child support, for example, can just drop off the grid way more easily than a middle or upper middle class person.
Also, when the problems are often actual macroaggressions, you tend not to worry that much about microaggressions.
I saw someone (on the right) say that “microagression” was actually a pretty accurate term, as they’re about one-millionth as bad as a punch in the face.
This unfortunately invites discussion of 3^^^^3 specks of dust.
“The lower down the SES spectrum you go, the less political correctness counts for.”
So the further up the SES spectrum you go, the more scientists and scholars are silenced by political correctness.
This is the reason why I don’t understand it at all. Political leftism used to be about people on the bottom against people on the top. Sans-culottes vs. aristocrats, proletarians vs. capitalists.
Since the arrival of feminism, LGBT rights etc. it is really difficult to make sense of, it sounds like one part of people on top against other people on the top but actually more like people on the bottom yet they are the oppressed ones or something.
Leftism today is sometimes literally about higher class people getting oppressed by lower class people. And this when I don’t understand it. Did class just become not too important while I was not looking?
I would suggest most of the SJ people and groups reject SES as the way to truly measure power. Their belief is that being gay, female, etc. automatically by default makes you less powerful than a “white dude” even if you’re a Harvard professor and he’s a currently unemployed construction worker.
The way that they would express it is that power has multiple orthogonal dimensions and that you can be advantaged in some and disadvantaged in others simultaneously.
I’d add that the big internal disputes in SJW are when two groups are arguing over which dimension is relevant in a particular case.
Intersectionality (which says that these aren’t completely orthogonal, because the oppression that a black woman faces is not just the oppression that all black people face plus the oppression that all women face) makes this even more complicated. Add the usual American blindness to class (as distinct from wealth/income) and they miss a lot even in their own terms.
That’s a silly strawman. I have never seen an actual social justice advocate say or imply that; on the contrary, all the social justice people I’ve read talk about how people who are advantaged in some ways (by e.g. being white and male) can also be disadvantaged in other ways (by e.g. being poor, low-class, uneducated, etc.) all the time. It’s one of the most common social justice 101 topics.
But in practice they never spend any time championing the cause of poor, white, heterosexual men.
Richard is correct and I should have clarified that.
I suppose what I mean to say is that, from what I’ve noticed, the dimension of power is an afterthought used to justify scorched-earth tactics against whoever the target may be.
If you’re going after Herman Cain, his race is irrelevant – he has power (and therefore deserves the worst you can do to him) because he is rich and politically well connected.
If you’re going after that woman who made the AIDS joke on the flight to South Africa, her gender and relatively low SES is irrelevant – she has power (and therefore deserves the worst you can do to her) because she’s white.
And so on and so forth. As long as you can be identified as having ANY sort of attribute that might suggest some power, whatever they want to do to you will be justified based on that solitary attribute, and all others will be ignored.
Re. Hermain Cain: by the same principle, it’s also interesting how feminists never have a good word to say about Ayn Rand or Margaret Thatcher. Makes me think that all that really matters is the “tribe,” the real makeup of which is always ideological.
The woman on that flight does not have power.
This is the problem with this kind of bullshit theory.
She is poor and completely lacking in any kind of ability to construct or affect her situation. Everything in her life is defined for her. She doesn’t even get the right of reply when slandered across the entire damn planet.
Her being white does not give her power. It doesn’t even function to explain her comments – they are cultural, not artefacts of her skin colour. It serves solely to make her a target.
Every single media source which mentioned her name has more power than she does on every axis of power which actually affects people’s lives.
This is why SJ identity politics is bullshit in a nutshell: It constructs the means by which the rich can pretend to be oppressed by the poor when the mechanics of real life make that as close to impossible as to be absurd to contemplate.
This is true only if you don’t look across time. the bleeding edge of SWJs don’t have power today, but they do have the power to define what will be conventional wisdom in 20-30 years. Positions that were radical in 1960 were mainstream by 1980, 1970 by 90, and so on.
People at the lower end of SES have views that are really un-PC.
I guess to clarify my objections to PC from a traddy conservative position:
1. PC is exclusive and intolerant in practice, but gets a lot of its cache from its claims to be inclusive and intolerant. There is something particularly intolerable about being forced to eat shit and being told how it’s cake. Social conservatives, on the other hand, tend to be fairly up front about the fact that they are excluding people from certain things.
2. PC has substantive views that are wrong.
PC is more than one thing. It is not the case that everyone to the left of traditional conservatism is SJW. A lot of people are moderates without knowing it, particularly in places that don’t have parties if the centre.
I agree with this 100%. Even for a non-believer, there’s an elegant simplicity to an argument that begins and ends with “homosexuality is wrong because the bible says so” that the PC side of things just can’t possibly reproduce.
Don’t give me an hour long speech ostensibly about tolerance and brotherhood that inevitably ends with “and that’s why we should kill all the fascists.” That’s just a waste of my time.
“I’m not expecting people on the social justice side to have read this far, so I’ll reserve my advice for the other side ”
Suggest rephrasing this or removing it completely since it basically makes anyone on that end who gets that far as being essentially turned off from your post. (Also note that you have at least one somewhat counterexample here because while I don’t identify as on the “social justice side” I have much more sympathy with them than the other “side”.)
Seconded.
Removed.
It made a good test to see if any did, though, didn’t it?
I do identify more on the social justice side, but I don’t have this sort of hypervigilance either way, so I suspect that I’m not typically representative.
I suppose the point is that I have very few triggers, so I don’t get stuck in an emotional fear reaction. I suspect that a lot of SJWs would get stuck in a fear reaction after pattern-matching you to a sexist or a homophobe or whatever.
For what it’s worth, I would identify as on the social justice side, and I read the entire post. I also generally enjoy this blog including the posts on social justice, and think Scott is a thoughtful, intelligent and interesting person whose thoughts are illuminating even when I disagree with them. His tendency to drop the principle of charity suddenly when discussing social justice advocates is indeed rather offputting, but I assume it comes from a place of personal frustration rather than malice, so I just sort of ignore it.
I freely admit a lot of people in the social justice movement are extremely hostile to opposing views, so it’s probably true a lot of them wouldn’t read that far. But it seems a smidge ironic to me to make comments like “I don’t expect anyone on the social justice side will read this far”, when I don’t doubt Scott would be pretty irritated by an otherwise level-headed and reasonable pro-SJ blog peppering its posts with comments like “I don’t expect white dudes to read this far”.
As a psychiatrist, do you have any suggestions on what individual people can do to manage this sort of semi-irrational paranoia?
Having had a GAD-induced breakdown with suicidal depression before this kind of free-floating anxiety sounds very familiar, even though it’s probably not as crippling for most. And obviously prescribing SJ and libertarian folks large amounts of bupropion and CBT isn’t terribly practical, if nothing else because invoking imagery of forced institutionalization is unlikely to calm anyone’s fears of persecution.
So how about it, is there anything normal people can do to deal with subclinical anxiety?
I manage politics-related anxiety by:
*reading less of the stuff I hate
*reading more stuff I like, including material that encourages me to “stick to my guns”, “stand by my principles,” “pursue happiness”, etc
*conventional mental health stuff (meds, meditation, correcting negative thoughts)
“Read less stuff you hate” is actually an important skill. We nerds/rationalists consider that it is epistemically virtuous to read things that we disagree with, and sometimes it is. But very often you’re just tormenting yourself to no good effect.
Reading less stuff I agree with, too.
I may nod in grim appreciation as RadishMag goes on about how feminists are ripping our nation apart, and how society is slowing creeping towards a grim and joyless future run by Big Red.
And then, I, you know.
Go outside. And I say hi to a Muslim woman walking down the street, or a black dude that lives in the apartment across from me, and it puts things in perspective very sharply.
Stuff you like can be as bad for you as too many potato chips.
When it comes to reading things I disagree with there is on occasion some self-deception going on. When you consciously or unconsciously pick the most extreme and shrill representation of some view you oppose (instead of something more moderate) you can both laud yourself for your open mindedness and get new reasons to hate the outgroup.
Honestly, reading SSC has helped me manage my own political anxiety as well as shortening time on facebook. I may even be relasping as of late because of facebook. (Due to my friends who are ON MY POLITICAL SIDE) I have one friend on there who kept posting things about “It’s dangerous to have a uterus in America!” or friends who tell me about transphobic violence. These concerns are real, but at the same time I’m a gender non conforming person with a uterus who needs to be able to walk down the damn street without having a damn panic attack.
I also used to belong to marginalized communities and they did everything they damn could to convince people they couldn’t leave. Being told or heavily implied at “You are broken in this way and you can never fit in/change” (in regards to disability) was common once one got past all of the empowerment rtherotic. Or constant hyping of how scary and terrifying other communities are, which has the lovely side effect of making people essentially oppress themselves. Reading things from my supposed “in-group” almost always seems to upset me or make me feel more oppressed than I am. Reading far right stuff is also upsetting but in a different way.
For managing/not totally hijacking your thread. I would say, make friends in social groups you’d likely not go to if you followed the fears of your in-group to help humanize people. (Like, a knitting, derby or drum circle group to meet more left leaning people, and country music, housewife type groups, older knitting circles for more right leaning people) Limit social media. Burn your tumblr and facebook in a firey bonfire blaze (I don’t care if it’s a webpage, print out some of your posts, delete it, and then get a fire going of your former posts) Think about all the times one has been vulnerable and it turned out well. (I’ve gone to spas as an openly gender non conforming person and received very professional service. I’ve gone out in public many times as someone who appeared non passing and had good experiences. I’ve expressed that I lean libertarian and wasn’t shunned totally.) If a person has a history of trauma related to this topic, then this might not be so helpful… Depoliticalize your identity if you are leftist. The sooner a person gets out of the “My existence itself is a radical act” mindset, the better. (Sometimes this mindset is what people honestly do need to function, but other times it can easily get out of hand) Reading about solutions helps. Standard mindfulness recommendation.
Oh yes, this. One thing that’s been very noticeable from spending 5 or so years involved in various trans* things, on and offline, is that there’s often a difference between activist and support groups, in that activist groups often tend to talk up the problems one is likely to encounter, and support groups are often likely to talk the problems down. Of course none of this is absolute (and there isn’t a 100% clean separation between activist, support and social groups/spaces etc.) but the difference in atmosphere is quite striking.
I get that you’re looking for some consistent theory of meta ethics where people can disagree while talking reasonably because talking reasonably with people you disagree with is a thing you value.
But suppose at the end of everything, the conclusion is that shaming, and microagressions, and exaggerated outrage are all legitimate and morally permissible, and the group that does it harder wins the culture they want.
I feel like that’s a place a lot of people have reached already.
I find it hard to believe that everyone shaming and microaggressing each other is the situation that satisfies the most people’s preferences.
If nothing else, there’s a solution where everyone retreats into their little safe spaces and never talks to each other. In that case, the engineering solution is to figure out how to maintain those barriers and allow economically productive trade.
But a better example here is freedom of religion. Religion was the idea that held the same place three hundred years ago as these social justice ideas do now, but we were eventually able to defuse them and have religiously plural societies with most people being pretty okay. I expect we will find a way to do that here as well.
I’m particularly interested in which debates were this important throughout history. Currently, it’s Social Justice; back ‘then’ it was, as you say, religion. What else was there that made everyone go absolutely loopy with outrage? Is there some overlap with the idea of mass hysteria, a la MacKay’s ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’?
I have this sneaking suspicion that, despite my left-leaning sympathies, politics in e.g. the former USSR was basically like current SJ debates, but x1000, and the losers all got executed. But perhaps all historical regimes were like that to some extent.
I don’t think that social justice versus anti-sj rises seriously anywhere close to the level of social division that religious sectarianism has caused. Hell, the moldbug dustup barely registers next to extant religious strife like the conflict in Iraq, much less the apocalyptic catastrophe of the Thirty Years War.
I’m very much in the anti-news media faction on this blog. Most of the the panic is a amplification of the current media environment and the peculiarities of academic politics. If you get rid of twitter and get a little distance away from the academy you actually have space to really think about issues above a sophomore’s level or in more depth 140 characters, or at most blog post.
With a little perspective, you can see that the arc is bending unimaginably away from persecution. Compare moldbug to Alan Turing. Society used to be so riven with the punishing of deviation that we essentially murdered the closest thing to a modern Prometheus. And I’m supposed to get worked up about a, arguably, even more extreme deviant getting a speaking engagement canceled? If that example is too sjw for you, replace moldbug with Deirdre McCloskey. A transgender economist is a relished voice among conservative/pro-market partisans these days.
The culture war is a massive marketing ploy perpetrated by the publishing and TV news industries.
Dr. McCloskey organized a sizable campaign to silence a professor of psychology at Northwestern U.:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/health/psychology/21gender.html?pagewanted=all
And what if constantly throwing anyone who deviates from the correct “arc” under the bus is how you keep the arc on track?
@ anonymous
If you get rid of twitter and get a little distance away from the academy you actually have space to really think about issues above a sophomore’s level or in more depth 140 characters, or at most blog post.
I expect that the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook. Youtube, etc, watch very carefully whether the SJWs or any such movement is likely to grow to threaten their own incomes, and they tweak their services accordingly.
You’re probably right that it’s not optimal, but it most likely *is* a Nash equilibrium.
In general I think these subcultures *are* pretty walled off from each other. These flare ups are essentially border disputes. To use gamergate as an example, there’s one culture among the mainstream media and another culture among gamers. But whose culture prevails in the *gaming media*?
I imagine that the once you reach a point where you keep pushing on the borders and they don’t move anymore people kind of stop having those fights and everyone recognises that we can have pork chops in the butcher shop but not the synagogue and anyone picking a fight with either of those equilibriums is going to lose.
So what I guess I’m saying is the stable-ish future scenario isn’t one where we all decide to get along despite differences, it’s one the places where certain cultures prevail become relatively unchanging.
To add to this, an example of what I mean. I’m a conservative Christian (I.e. anti gay marriage, anti abortion). SSC has a culture that allows me to come and say that and people won’t yell at me (unlike some places). On the other hand I also can’t come in and start acting like I own the place. I’m an immigrant- and since I understand that and that I have to respect the local customs during my stay everything is fine.
I think the advance of SJ causes (especially gay marriage) in recent times has led to some confusion over where the new boundaries are. Feminism isn’t a new thing but perhaps they feel they can make gains where they couldn’t ten years ago, so they pick fights they wouldn’t have before.
Maybe ten years in the future, it will actually be accepted that tech conferences belong to White men and that there is no point trying to civilise the barbarian wasteland of Christian pizzerias.
Lots of things are Nash equilibria until you’re smart enough to negotiate a change to them. Both sides nuking each other is a Nash equilibrium, but you can still decide to not do that.
The difference there is that we never had a situation where two groups were literally throwing nukes at each other. If we *were* in that situation I’d be equally sceptical about the prognosis for a “hey, how about we stop throwing nukes” movement.
Of course you could counter that nuclear war is just regular war writ large and wars do end, and you would be right. But the way they end doesn’t give much cause for optimism. If you don’t get total victory for one side you get Iraq or Israel/Palestine or North/South Korea.
You don’t need intelligence to break out of a Nash equilibrium, you need trust. If you can find a way to build that between hostile groups, you’re a far better man than me.
Methinks you’re taking the “nuke” analogy to the point where it loses its usefulness as a reflector of actual events in the current conflicts.
On the other hand, you get Canada/USA, or France/Britain or Ireland/Britain or USA/Japan or Germany/everyone. Those strike me as reasonably optimistic endings.
…I’ve got to stop reading Tumblr. My first impulse was to interpret that as a shipping chart.
I haven’t seen it, but I am aware of it.
There’s apparently some sort of fandom phenomenon floating around now that’s about cute anime girls personifying ships (har) of the IJN during WWII, too.
The neoreactionary argument would probably be that SJW-ism is just the modern evolution of religion, in the old, provokes-bloody-civil-wars sense, and what we today call “religion” is a toothless remnant. Or: the reason we now don’t have religious conflict on the same level as historically (in sheltered, first-world areas, in the Christian world; the same divisions are still very much active elsewhere) is that that vitriol, and those power struggles, have now been invested in social justice/culture war disputes, which are essentially the same conflict under a different name. If the SJWs ever calmed down, you’d just see the same energy inhabit some other issue and start causing strife.
I have 100% come around to the position that SJW is a modern incarnation of religion, not in the sense that it draws on any religious memes in particular, but in the sense that religion is what you call it when people build their identity/ingroup around an idea rather than ethnicity or something, and social justice does that more than anything else I know and ends up with all the same pathologies religion did for the exact same reason.
I’m not specifically picking on social justice here – the most organized anti-social-justice (RedPill and Gamergate) do something similar. So does LW rationality.
Expect a post on this eventually, though it may be obvious to most people.
To me the most important parallel is the “moral weight to factual beliefs” thing.
—
Curious what you’re going to do with gamergate in this future post. I’m not quite seeing the idea their identity is built around.
Didn’t you already write a post on this? I don’t have the link at hand but I definitely recall reading an exposition by you that almost any group can be characterised as a religion in detail.
I went to an art college and was required to take several art history classes, which for obvious reasons mostly consisted of religious, especially Christian, and most especially Catholic artwork. So I think I’m qualified to say that there are uncanny resemblances between the various pieces of Vivian James artwork produced by GamerGaters and the uncountable Virgin Mary paintings commissioned by the Catholic Church. Mary was (and still frequently is) basically a mascot for “Mother Church,” so the parallels are obvious.
As to the question of what, specifically, GamerGate’s identity is built around, I think this speech written by a GGer and spoken by professional meseman Tyrone does a good job of summing it up. Especially the part at the end, “We are not divided by the identities we did not choose. Instead we are united by the one identity that we did choose.”
I didn’t know enough about religion to have this occur to me, so I’d enjoy this hypothetical post.
That actually is the neoreactionary argument; Moldbug claims that modern progressivism is the descendant of radical Protestantism.
I think there are two versions of this claim floating about. One holds that identity-based-on-ideology is something that keeps getting reinvented in varying forms, the other, the NRx claim, is that .SJ is a descendant of Protestantism, and wouldn’t exist if Protestantism hadn’t.
“If nothing else, there’s a solution where everyone retreats into their little safe spaces and never talks to each other. In that case, the engineering solution is to figure out how to maintain those barriers and allow economically productive trade.”
Scott, I love your blog unironically, and many of your posts have touched me deeply on both personal and intellectual levels. But you just made the happiest-possible case for segregation, and the problem with segregation is that “economically productive trade” just doesn’t happen. When you have two warring tribes that each view each other as not-quite-human (“sperglords” “darkies” “crackers” “Christ-killers” “omega cucks”) trade becomes the equivalent of treason. You’re just locking in place whatever status quo happens to obtain at the moment.
There’s a difference between segregation (which is legally enforced) and voluntary self-sorting – for example, in the latter, different kinds of who want to live with one another can, and no doubt will.
I would prefer the analogy of different US states – Massachussetts implements different policies from Alabama, and this is probably a good thing – citizens of either state would be upset with the other state’s policies.
Or the example of Slate Star Codex versus 4Chan. Both groups have different discussion norms, and both would be upset if they had to follow those of the other group.
First: OMG SENPAI NOTICED ME!!!!11!! *swoon*
Second: The thing is that law is almost always a trailing indicator of social demands. Legal segregation wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell if there wasn’t quite a lot of self-sorting going on in at least one of the camps. Yes, legal segregation does lend quite a lot of backup to norms that otherwise only bear social costs, but we’re witnessing right now how much coercive force “social costs” can bring to bear, and it’s not inconsequential.
We trade with China, and there’s not a lot of love there.
The United States is deeply racially and economically segregated, even today. (Largely for the very good reason that most people want to be around people like them.) And yet there’s productive trade between races and classes.
But trade brings money, which is a big incentive to trade. White families in South Africa and the Southern USA hired black maids. Jews, Protestants and Catholics dealt on the Royal Exchange. French smugglers breached the Napoleonic blockade.
“If nothing else, there’s a solution where everyone retreats into their little safe spaces and never talks to each other. ”
Bryan Caplan’s “bubble” seems relevant here: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/03/my_beautiful_bu.html
I used to believe that a better world was possible, but your writing has come very close to convincing me that it is not. Sure, I would like to live in a society where people saw each other as human beings, and not as tokens in a cosmic chess game, or as monsters to be vanquished. I would also like to live in a world where doxxing, public shaming, and censorship were seen as barbaric, regardless of who is wielding such tools and for what purpose.
But, at this point, I don’t see any way of implementing such a world (at least, not until the Singularity hits). I think you’re right, and the best we can hope for is a sort of cold war, where the specter of mutually assured destruction looms large, and people from different socio-political groups only interact with each other via a few heavily scripted official state visits every year.
There’s a known way of implementing it: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1409
The problem is that America is a large, centralized empire containing multiple different phyles that have never liked each other very much. Welcome to post-Tito Yugoslavia. Welcome to the Middle East.
Up until some religious person says they don’t support gay marriage. Then they may lose their job.
The difference is that religious schisms are more arbitrary than political schisms. For example, religious groups at odds with each other often share remarkably similar views of morality and only differ on issues that are of little consequence to the way societies are run (i.e., “Is our place in Heaven predetermined, or must we work for it?”).
Not so with political schisms. When the battle is over something as concrete as the rules governing society, coexistence is impossible. Communism and fascism and pro-slavery haven’t learned to coexist with their rivals—the only way for societies to hold together has been their utter eradication.
I am not so sure. There is a neat solution for religion – “I do my thing, you do yours”. As long as the core part of your religion does not involve persecuting or killing non-believers, you are going to be fine (and this is also one reason why the religion issues have not been settled with radical islam). Now, mostly the religions did involve that bit, but it gradually shifted from being the central point, to something less important, to mostly drifting away.
But what is left of “social justice” if you go with the “live and let live” line? Nothing really. It seems to me that the SJWs don’t want to practice their “philosophical freedom” of how to live their lives, they want to make the society adjust to their norms.
I think you can get this resolved only if people abandon the SJW ideas (and the anti-SJW ideas of the sort “the state should persecute gays”…but those are nearly extinct today anyway) ideas entirely for the libertarian “live and let live” ideal. I do not like radical atheists who would like to get rid of religion entirely, because first I see some positives aspects of religion even if (as I believe) it turns out to be mostly-to-entirely bogus and second I believe that it can in some form (although not all forms) peacefully coexist with a free secular society. However I cannot see SJW to be compatible and hopefully it will eventually reach the same obscurity as the ideas like “homosexuality has to be cured”.
“But a better example here is freedom of religion. Religion was the idea that held the same place three hundred years ago as these social justice ideas do now, but we were eventually able to defuse them and have religiously plural societies with most people being pretty okay. I expect we will find a way to do that here as well.”
This only really works if you accept the broad American view (derived from Protestantism) that religion is primarily defined by theological beliefs. However, if you accept the broader view of religious scholars like Stephen Prothero that allows for the recognition of nontheistic religions as religions, then the view changes. As you note, the SJ ideology holds the same place as (theistic) religion did three hundred years ago; that’s because it’s a nontheistic religion, and the conflicts weren’t “defused”, merely shifted out of the domain of theology and into our modern conflicts. We have theologically plural societies (as nontheistic religions allow of their members), but that we have truly religiously plural societies, rather than societies where the Official Religion tolerates Dissenters while barring them from any position of power or influence, I dispute. Accession to major powerful institutions of our society require at least some degree of assent to core dogmas of the religion, and that blasphemy, heresy, and apostasy against these sacred values are still punishable (albeit with more mild punishments than those of past eras, but in what area have punishments not become less severe compared to several centuries ago?); see also this Quora answer on why Alex Miller did the right thing disinviting Moldbug.
Recall, as Jaskologist notes below, that in the early days of the United States, the first amendment religious clauses only applied to the Federal governments; the states had their own established churches (the Quakers had Pennsylvania, and so on) in a democratic version of cuius regio eius religio. Only later did in spread to the lower levels. And what happened then, was that via the “religion=theological orthodoxy” view, a nontheistic religion was thus able to pass itself off as therefore not a religion, and thus sieze the institutions. Ultimately, every society has an “official religion” to whose doctrine one must assent to belong to the elite and be allowed near the levers of power; the only difference is that some official religions openly admit that they’re official, and others do not. “Freedom of religion” is thus a phantasm, that does not exist, and cannot exist; it has “succeeded” only by causing the official religion to: (a) deny that it is official, and (b) by being nontheistic, deny that it is a religion. Ultimately, the religious conflicts of past centuries didn’t go away, they just changed into a different form so as to pretend that they went away. In the end, cuius regio eius religio, with a frontier for dissenters to emigrate to, is the best humanity has ever done, and almost certainly the best it can ever do.
In addition, as someone in the links thread noted about Baltimore, when official law enforcement fails to sufficiently punish fundamental crimes like murder and theft, the people form gangs and mafias to do it themselves. And, of course, mob “justice” is notoriously imprecise, excessive in punishment, and insufficiently protective of the rights of the accused. I would argue that the crime of speaking against the sacred values of the official religion is also such a crime; if the state will not punish Moldbug for his
apostasy“hate speech”, the SJW Twitter mob will do it instead.Scott, my position is very similar to yours, and I’ve also been living a similar fight between Outside View and Lizard Brain. I think everything here is basically right.
Once similar perceptions are in place, sure, the social dynamics develop similarly. But that’s only part of it.
It doesn’t touch what I find most important (and I think you do as well), which is disagreements on factual matters and different attitudes toward epistemology and truth. I get that the post is large enough already without being about everything, but this shows up in the examples in what I see as a break of the symmetry: one side is saying “no, you’re wrong about our attitudes and intentions, we’re not actually out to get you”, which is disputing facts, and the other is saying “yes, we are out to get you, but that’s entirely justified”, which, facts assumed, disputes morals.
(what gets under my skin is when beliefs about facts are assigned moral value, which is what I think is driving the whole discussion down the drain).
Once again, I’m not scoring very highly in consistency here.
Is this a tacit admission that what you said about feminists in Untitled mirrors what Gallo said about the Sad Puppies crowd?
As long as you’ve got a secret language of insults that your target knows perfectly well are insulting, but which you can credibly claim are not insulting at all – maybe even believing it yourself – then you have the ability to make them feel vaguely uncomfortable and disliked everywhere you go without even trying. If they bring it up, you can just laugh about how silly it is that people believe in “microaggressions” and make some bon mot about “the Planck hostility”.
Does the same point apply if you aren’t using a secret language, but are still hurling insults. For example, does the below sentence meet the threshold for “Planck hostility”?
I’m not expecting people on the social justice side to have read this far, so I’ll reserve my advice for the other side
In the comments of a post where Scott openly says he’s attempting to work on his own double standards, it seems a little redundant to point them out.
You’re right. My post was unnecessary and out of line. I apologize for making it.
What precisely in Untitled did you think was simply inaccurate as a description of particular individuals based on making stuff up, in the same way that Gallo’s comments were?
I’m deeply interested in hearing an answer to this, because I commonly see people refer to the “vitriol” or “extremism” of Scott’s writings about feminism and yet *never* see any reference to actual substantive points of disagreement, let alone reasons for disagreement with Scott’s substantive points.
At the risk of making myself look like an ass:
Generally, Scott is very charitable to people he disagrees with and is even-handed in most of his writings. This is especially notable because bloggers tend to be less charitable and even-handed than most people. Having said that, my comment was saying that it is hypocritical to criticize Gallo for calling the Sad Puppy crowd neo-nazis when he compared feminist internet memes with neo-nazi propaganda in Untitled. I feel that the neo-nazi comparison in Untitled was bad because it made an unfair comparison between neo-nazis and the tumblr feminist crowd and drawing a comparison between internet memes and neo-nazi propaganda implies that the author isn’t that fond of the people he’s criticizing. Now, there are problems with what I said, beyond what Sylocat pointed out. First, being a hypocrite doesn’t mean you are wrong. What Gallo said was out of line. Second, no one is perfect and expecting people to never say anything rude or mean is a ridiculous standard that can never be met. This is especially important since Scott has admitted that he wrote that piece because he was so angry at the reaction to Scott Aaronson’s original post. Sometimes people just say things they don’t mean.
FWIW, I don’t think Scott is an extremist. Hell, I’m not even sure he’s anti-feminist. I just think he is a moderate who strongly dislikes the tactics that tumblr feminism uses. It’s just that, in one post that distaste got the better of him.
OK thanks for offering an explanation.
“my comment was saying that it is hypocritical to criticize Gallo for calling the Sad Puppy crowd neo-nazis when he compared feminist internet memes with neo-nazi propaganda in Untitled.”
These two cases seem very disanalogous.
Gallo unambiguously said:
“There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies respectively” [claim: the two groups *are* extreme right-wingers and neo-nazis respectively]
I don’t know what cognitive content/truth-claim should be atttributed to Scott’s juxtaposition of the ‘fat, ugly, beardy, disgusting jews/nerd’ cartoons, (if any, I would guess: the anti-nerd cartoons are also centrally based on simply depicting an outgroup as fat, ugly, disgusting- and that this is potentially problematic) but it clearly isn’t saying “Feminists are neo-nazis.”
Great essay, and I’ve passed it along for the edification of everyone involved.
One additional aspect is the targeting of one or two symbolic outliers who are most easily demonized, followed by demands that the “reasonable people” of the other side condemn them and cut off all ties. Irene Gallo was defended by many because they believe a single person — Vox Day, leader of one Puppy faction — is a neo-nazi, or just as awful. This is based on what others have told them, bolstered by cherry-picked quotes. So “she’s absolutely right, how could anyone disagree?” was a standard response from those inside the bubble.
Calling Vox Day a neo-Nazi is excusable; he likes to make himself out as more horrible than he is (he calls it laying rhetorical traps, which in this case is just a fancy name for trolling), and he’s horrible enough. If you try to get people to believe you’re a neo-Nazi, don’t be so surprised it sticks. But it wasn’t just Day; witness that above we have Daniel Keys supporting the claims of Brad Torgersen’s racism. Plenty of those opposed to the Puppies (including Moshe Fedor) have registered their support for Gallo’s statement in all its overbroad (at best) glory.
Further, I saw on one comment section someone suggesting part of the reason for the Sad Puppies was the Portuguese temperament of some of the leaders. A remark that I am sure would not be accepted coming from the Sad Puppy side; can you imagine the outcry if the Sad Puppies made an issue of the Neilsen-Hayden’s ethnicities?
I don’t think there’s as much similarity between the Social Justice side and the anti-Social Justice side as this post tries to make out. Yes, both claim there’s oppression going on. But the Social Justice side claims it’s oppression by essentially all white males taking routine actions in their everyday lives (they call them microaggressions; I like a term I’ve seen: homeopathic oppression), while the other claims it’s targeted action against dissenters which are rather easy to point to and which the Social Justice side is typically proud of.
While the term “cultural Marxist” is popular among one group among the anti-Social Justice crowd, a “cultural Marxist” is not a communist. Further, a lot of anti-Social Justice groups compare their opponent to fascists and neo-Nazis (e.g. see reddit’s “StormfrontOrSJW”). Or even to radical religious conservatives. So that’s another symmetry breaker.
One parallel which does hold is that some of the tactics are the same. But that’s just a common source, Saul Alinsky. The anti-SJ group from the left is already familiar with them, and the right borrows them because they work.
You’re right about Vox just being one person. However he really is that awful. I used to subject myself to his blog on a regular basis–and I’ve seen these recent “cherry-picked” quotes in context. The context doesn’t help.
Citations, please. You aren’t an authority.
I’m not expecting people on the social justice side to have read this far, so I’ll reserve my advice for the other side – I think it’s time to stop talking about how social justice activism is necessarily a plot to get more political power, or steal resources, or silence dissenting views. Like everything else in the world it can certainly turn into that, but I think our own experience gives us a lot of reasons to believe they’re exactly as terrified as they say, and that we can’t expect them to accept “you have no provable objective right to be terrified” any more than our lizard brains would accept it of us. I think it’s time to stop believing that they censor and doxx and fire their opponents out of some innate inability to understand liberalism, and admit that they probably censor and doxx and fire their opponents because they’re as scared as we are and feel a need to strike back.
As someone on the social justice side who did read this far, I think it’s a very reasonable suggestion, and I think it would be for the best if everyone tried to adopt it. My side, and your side, and all the other sides.
I mean, just as a general rule, I believe one should try to act as though those who disagree with you are sincere in their opinions, as long as it’s even theoretically possible that some person could sincerely hold those opinions. Because I think most people really are sincere, on some level or other. It’s also important – and I think your piece does a good job of pointing this out – to keep in mind how deeply entwined personal attributes and social upbringing and things like that are with political outlook. It often gives me pause to consider that, although of course I would like to think that I have very good reasons for my beliefs, those beliefs are also broadly shared by most of my friends, acquaintances, relations, etc. And given that, I think it can be legitimately difficult for people to escape this kind of fear and these kinds of conclusions – it’s something that I actively try to do and it’s still difficult, and requires living with a lot more uncertainty than just trying to treat people as enemies.
And I know that reading this blog and comments (among other things) has made me a lot less likely to ascribe malice to right-wing policies, and gotten me into a lot of arguments in left spaces about whether or not it’s right to preemptively assume malice, or to ban conservative speakers, or what have you.
So, I guess what I’m saying is, good stuff.
(apologies for any weird phrasing or incomprehensible arguments; running on very little sleep)
The problem is that people keep trying to have a civilized debate and ideological warfare at the same time. People want to equate their causes and values with those generally shared by the rest of society rather then form useful categories. I’m in favor of getting rid of more words/definitions that try to sneak in assumptions of moral value. One set in particular I think is over laden is “oppressed”, marginalized, ect. To is illustrate think of the question “Are pedophiles an oppressed group?” As I like to say most of “morality” is just tricks with words and categorization to make people do what you want.
I do find it very instructive to think about what people (myself included) would do, if they could do so anonymously, safely, and without getting their hands dirty, as mentioned in a recent thread about Death Note (Ring of Gyges for weeaboos). It gets pretty scary, pretty fast, which is why I like the Libertarian slogan: “libertarianism: plotting to take over the world and leave you alone” (though that could be very threatening to some, I admit).
Also, I love the point near the end about being willing to listen to an individual friend’s request when the same opinion coming from Gawker would just piss you off. This is exactly how I react to almost all of SJ. Reading one honest story from a transgender person telling what it’s like to be transgender in a way which does not imply #diecisscum is better than a million articles aimed at shaming me into having the orthodox position (it’s even better to actually know the person irl, of course). Having one good friend of another race who tells you about some of the struggles he/she has dealt with does more to eliminate racism than all the tracts about “historical, structural oppression” in the world.
This is why I really liked an article I read a while back to the effect of “want to help eliminate poverty? Make friends with a poor person.”
“libertarianism: plotting to take over the world and leave you alone”
If you’ve ever read anything by Vernor Vinge, his “The Ungoverned” is popular with libertarians but he also wrote a rather good story “Conquest by Default” which takes the opposite view and plays with the idea of what might happen if a rigorously anarchist/libertarian society encountered a less powerful, less technologically capable society and was able to impose it’s own beliefs about monopolies.
After all, not running a monopoly yourself doesn’t work very well if your neighbours are allowed to form a monolithic organisation capable of becoming the de-facto government and potentially taking away your libertarian lifestyle in the future.
Maintaining or creating a situation where nobody else can have too large a power base that they might use against you itself requires forcing others to live like you want to: without those monolithic organisations.
One of the greatest things CS Lewis ever said was to the effect that the goal of satan (or Cthulu, if you wish) was to keep people’s altruism focused on the far target and their hatred, rudeness and meanness focused on the near target. Allow people to think highly of people they will never meet, so long as they are assholes to the people they do. The internet encourages this, but I like to think real life is better.
I once met someone I had previously had a raging Facebook debate with that ended with her calling me a Nazi and blocking me. She was perfectly nice at a party however! And quite discomfited to find out who I was, and apologetic. A lot of this fight is people with no skin in the game piling on. Real face to face consequences help.
A student at my university who I am pretty sure had no idea I was a professor at said university, recently called me a “fucking idiot” in a thread on a libertarian facebook group I was a part of. And he was also a libertarian! I left the group.
Lewis may have been inspired by GKC:
…where we learned with little labor
The way to love your fellow man and hate your next door neighbor
I think about irrational fears quite a lot, whether I consider them irrational when I think about them or not. It’s generally a good idea to consider threats to yourself as small or you go crazy, a conclusion you yourself seemed to have come to. Personally, I often don’t think of issues I’m arguing about affecting me at all, even though being male should be risk factor concerning one of my biggest talking points online.
One should consider that we’re kind of in an equilibrium between different states and we should be careful to not fall into extremes which can result in unexpected and unwelcome changes. For instance, I often lament the lack of real political support for men’s issues but one worry I have aren’t the leftists or moderates basically all agreeing to some extent, it’s the extreme right-wingers gathering support by proposing an alternative.
And this is what it feels like to begin to criticise your in-group.
“My guess is that, as per Part VIII here, we don’t primarily identify as Americans, so a threat deliberately framed as wanting to make Americans feel unsafe just bounces off us.”
I realized a few years back that I don’t primarily identify as a woman–not in a gender identity sense, but in an identity-politics sense. So for example, when I hear that scientist saying he doesn’t like women in his lab because they cry (to paraphrase) I can perfectly and totally understand why someone might be offended by that, but I am not offended *at all* even though I’m a woman getting a PhD in a scientific field. Indeed, I feel he should keep running his lab, which thing he has proven good at.
I used to feel differently about this. I remember when I was a girl I *loved* reading novels where the protagonist is persecuted for being a girl–not allowed to be a knight or a mage or a writer or what-have-you–because it gave me a little thrill of righteous outrage. As I got older, though, something flipped and now girl-not-allowed-to-be-whatever storylines are more likely to annoy me than anything.
I honestly wonder what changed there. Is it that I grew to identify with libertarian-conservative types, nerds, etc. and those groups have pushed out the “woman” group in my self-identification? Or is it that I grew to disagree with much of modern feminism (that started earlier as well, when I found a book titled something like “A Teen Girl’s Introduction to Feminism” in my high school library and found I disagreed with most of it) and so ended up rejecting “woman” as my political identity in reaction?
” As I got older, though, something flipped and now girl-not-allowed-to-be-whatever storylines are more likely to annoy me than anything.”
Was this marriage or children, by any chance?
I think it’s likely to be a more general phenomenon. I know I’ve developed a dislike for narrative devices that try to get emotional reactions by pushing the easiest, obvious buttons.
No, I’m still single. But I can imagine that might be it for a lot of people given that married women with children tend to have politics more like men.
It might also be the preaching to the choir thing.
I’m an atheist, I don’t feel strongly about it but I’m familiar with the philosophical arguments. When I was a young teen I liked books that made fun of creationists etc but at some point it flipped. I got tired of the same old arguments, especially the ones I knew to be especially weak and take more joy from seeing a really novel and interesting theist argument than another atheist one.
I find the people being dicks to creationists more annoying than creationists being dicks to atheists by a wide margin.
I’m still just as atheist as before but the things I liked before are just another pep rally now.
The only Pratchett book I was never able to finish was The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch because it just kept beating a dead horse and preaching to not just the choir but also the other priests and the bishops.
I think mainly I’ve got sick of people doing the long winded equivalents of posts saying “I know I’m going to get down-voted to hell for this but [insert really common and popular opinion]”
Zach Weiner reference at the end?
The thing that ultimately turned me off of spending time and energy on anti-creationism was that I realized that it was making me unhappy to no good end. If I wanted to effectively advocate against creationism, I’d send some money to the AAAS, and maybe have some copies of Mark Isaak’s Counter-Creationism Handbook delivered to some needy schools. But it’s of no use to anyone for me to personally get agitated about the issue.
That said, the existence of the antivax movement outrages me; and I am often tempted to print out some puke-green stickers saying “THIS IS NOT MEDICINE” and go through a drugstore tagging every box of oscillococcinum and so on. So I do not see much point in pretending to be better than anyone who is outraged by creationism.
I think people like us have a strong insight-porn module, so we get easily turned off cliched arguments that we’ve been exposed to before.
People have different aspects of their identity that are important to them. I identify as an intellectual more strongly than I identify as pretty much anything else, and so predictably I am much more easily offended by slights at intellectuals than at slights at whites, or men, or any other group I’m part of (though since I like to think of myself as thick-skinned, I try to appear equally unoffended in all cases, with varying success). Which includes liberals, I suppose, which may be why I’m less bothered by Scott’s anti-SJ posts than some people who are otherwise similar to me in the leftishness of their views.
I think being libertarian-minded makes you care less about this kind of thing. On an abstract level, I understand why people freak out over these issues but I can’t even pretend to care. All I hear is “Oh no, not everyone has the same opinions as me” which isn’t fair but that’s how I feel.
Definitely share that experience.
I’m comfortable identifying as female (as opposed to trans); but if “femininity” is framed as “the opposite of masculinity” I don’t like it much. I’ve been in majority-male environments all my life, so when someone says “guys are awful, they *play video games* and *have arguments*” I do not empathize.
@ Stella:
This post describes me pretty well too. And I am childfree and unmarried, it’s just kind of something that happened to me as I got older. I no longer get a high out of that particular brand of righteous outrage the way I used to. In fact, it really annoys me when I feel like someone is trying to push those buttons.
It’s perfectly natural to get bored by the conventional wisdom.
To me, it just sounds like you developed into a mature person whose self-esteem isn’t based on obsessing a single deeply-felt identity, because you’ve got much more important things in your life.
There’s probably a reason most of the worst warriors in the Identity Wars are young, rootless, socially atomized, and obsessed with being “special” simply because of what they are, not what they accomplish.
*sigh* “obsessing over”
A question that I’d love to hear an answer to, if you don’t mind: are you happier now than you were then? By this I actually mean two questions: are you happier in general now? are you happier specifically with respect to the parts of your identity you mentioned?
That’s the attitude most men have to their gender, too: Most men aren’t particularly bothered by “men are scum”, “teach men not to rape”, “kill all men” etc. because they do not identify with men as a group. This has both positive and negative sides, I think.
I would suggest that it is because when you grew up you realized that the narrative isn’t meaningful. You can do whatever you want and nobody cares that your a woman.
… I was going to expound on the matter, but I really need to go to bed.
That’s interesting to me, because that particular scientist was somebody with a lot of clout so if he decided he preferred men-only labs, or preferentially helped his male students over his female students, there would have been a lot of inertia about making waves (what university wants to get rid of its Nobel Prize winner unless it’s absolutely forced to do so?)
I don’t think he should necessarily have had to resign, but Stella, what I’m curious about here is that here is someone in a position of authority who – if he were in a supervisory position over you – has both got the power to retard or adversely affect your career, and has voiced an opinion demonstrating that at the least, he thinks women in the lab are more trouble than they’re worth.
Do you not feel some level of concern about “Who else is a respected person in authority who shares these views about my abilities?” or do you feel that your work is good enough on its own?
I’m not asking “Do you feel personally threatened?” but rather “Do you not think such an attitude is capable of producing real harm where the person holding it can act in ways to help or hinder?”
Ordinarily I tend to roll my eyes at the “This makes me feel uncomfortable” level of protest, but I can imagine women students and those working in his labs feeling uncomfortable, feeling unfairly treated and not feeling they had much power against him if he demonstrated such attitudes.
Then again, I suppose it depends if it can be shown he did or didn’t discriminate against his female students/lab staff. Actually, it’s something along the lines of Brendan Eich, now I come to think of it: does holding such beliefs, if you do nothing to act unfairly, on its own warrant dismissal or forced resignation?
The significant piece of information which is often not mentioned in discussions of Tim Hunt is that he is married to one of the UK’s most eminent immunologists- and it looks like they did meet in a lab.
Did you possibly just get bored?
As someone who is definitely on the side of social justice, and has not had a problem arguing with you about it before, I do want to say that I personally feel you are treating social justice in these posts much more fairly in the past half-year. I actually saw that comment on the links post the other day and thought that it was really unfair. I didn’t say anything because I figured you’d have enough defenders and I don’t really like taking part in your comment threads, but I agreed with you that the other person was being ridiculous. I don’t think they meant anything threatening, but they were definitely wrong.
Before this, your posts on this subject almost always made me really angry, because I felt like they started from the assumption that social justice activists just wanted to hurt people, and because it seemed like you had no problem using the exact same tactics you were denigrating the other side for using, often in the exact same post. At one point, even though I found a lot of enjoyment in your other posts, I was thinking about leaving just for my own mental health, because your posts made me angry and I would dwell on them for days afterwards. This has changed, and I wanted to let you know that this social justice person (I’m not comfortable calling myself an activist because I don’t do more than argue in comment threads about it once every couple of months) has noticed it, and felt quite grateful.
You’re still not perfect, though 🙂 Why doubt that social justice advocates would make it through the whole article? It’s not any less likely than a conservative would make it through some article disagreeing with them. Both sides will have people willing to read stuff they might not agree with.
EDIT: I just noticed that the post on the website doesn’t have the comment about social justice people not reading to the end. That must be only in the original post in my RSS feed. I don’t feel comfortable about using the edit button to get rid of something people might have already read, so I’ll just add this note in case anyone is wondering what I was talking about. A great example of what I was talking about with Scott being fairer to social justice folks, though, noticing that and getting rid of it early on!
It’s kind of funny, in that the person who made the comment comparing SSC and Xenosystems has been commenting from the start, I think.
Thank you.
“You’re still not perfect, though 🙂 Why doubt that social justice advocates would make it through the whole article? It’s not any less likely than a conservative would make it through some article disagreeing with them. Both sides will have people willing to read stuff they might not agree with.”
I imagine them getting a quarter of the way through before summing it up as “White guy thinks he is the REAL oppressed group, compares black people getting murdered to him being called on his bigotry” and leaving in disgust. But as Josh mentioned above, not productive to mention this, so I took it out.
I think it is less that I have become a better person, and more that a whole lot of other people seem to have caught up with where I was five years ago so I no longer feel like a desperate voice crying in the wilderness who needs to warn everybody. I am a big fan of Mencken’s quote that “it’s not worth an intelligent person’s time to be in the majority because by definition there are already enough people doing that”, and although intelligent anti-SJ is not quite the majority it is definitely less of a minority these days. I am hoping it will one day settle down to the point where everyone else is so on top of it that I can ignore it completely like other things I have strong opinions on (eg pro-gay marriage).
Is it really that “a whole lot of other people seem to have caught up with where I was five years ago so I no longer feel like a desperate voice crying in the wilderness”? Conservatives have been ranting about the excesses of political correctness since 20 or 30 years ago.
A more plausible explanation is that the shift you describe happened among the people that you read, are read by, comment on your posts, and generally represent what you see as your community. Partly because your posts have persuaded some, no doubt, but also, perhaps to a larger degree, because of a demographic shift in which people read you and comment. You used to be immersed in a Blue culture and wrote Grayish attacks on it; now the culture you are immersed in has become more Gray/Redish, so your natural metacontrarianism (as described in your old LW article on it, and on “Right is the New Left” here) starts swinging the other way.
“Why doubt that social justice advocates would make it through the whole article?”
It is really hard to carefully and thoroughly read a long-ish argument the conclusions of which you expect to disagree with. At least, for me it is.
Expect to disagree with? I expected his conclusion would be that he should be more charitable to social justice activists, which I agree with; and in fact it was.
Could I ask, why did you feel Scott was “perfectly ok using the same tactics”? I mean, yes, he is admitting here to a certain inconsistency, he never resorted to doxxing, name-calling, etc. He did some pointed fisking, and probably some overbroad generalizing, and I can see why that might sting. But he never asserted “you’re a terrible horrible human just for believing in Social Justice!” Whereas in SJ circles I definitely feel my white maleness is itself consider sufficient evidence of horribleness.
Maybe you didn’t participate in those types of SJ forums. But honestly despite usually agreeing with Scott I wouldn’t be here if he engaged in that sort of behavior. Despite being fairly rightist, I’m no Limbaugh or O’Reilly fan, for example.
Anyway I don’t want to defend Scott overly much here, I just am honestly curious why Scott came off as so hostile to you, when to me he seemed pretty honest and measured, and when he was raw he pointed to specific examples of what was making him raw.
I’m curious: where have you actually seen social justice advocates stating that being a white man makes you a horrible person? I see a lot of social justice advocates making off-hand generalizing comments like “What white dudes don’t get is that…” or “White dudes think that…”, to be sure, but that is always said with the tacit understanding that there are lots of white dudes who do pretty much get it and don’t think that, but they’re not talking about them. Scott makes lots of off-hand generalizations about social justice advocates that I assume are intended the same way: it’s not a literal “ALL OF THEM”, and everybody reading these sorts of comments with a modest degree of charity should be able to understand that. You can certainly argue it’s hostile and insulting and offputting, but you seem to be explicitly insisting they think you personally are horrible simply because you are white and male, and I’ve spent a lot of time in SJ spaces and have never, ever actually seen that happen. (The closest I’ve seen is people mocking somebody’s white male status after concluding he’s horrible, but it’s always pretty clear, at least to me, that they think he’s horrible because he said something they think is racist or sexist or whatever, and from there start reproachfully talking about what a white man he is.)
In my experience, it’s uncommon for people to explicitly say “all white men suck” (though “white men are responsible for all the evil in history” is significantly more common).
What I do experience, as a white man, is a vague sense on the part of SJers that I should feel constantly apologetic and doubtful of the validity of my experience because, by virtue of being a white man, I grew up in some sort of privilege bubble which has warped my thinking.
It’s not “the only good white man is a dead white man,” it’s “the only good white man is a white man whose self esteem has been crushed, and who therefore defers to women and minorities in any marginal case.”
I’ve never been told by an SJW that I should be killed because I’m white, but I HAVE been told, multiple times, as a matter of course, that my being white means I am not entitled to speak or have an opinion on matters relating to race.
It’s not a *short* jump from “you aren’t allowed to have an opinion on race” to “you aren’t allowed to have an opinion on whether or not we execute you,” but it’s shorter now than it was back when we believed that everyone is entitled to have an opinion on everything.
I’ve had a social justice advocate tell me I’m harmful because I’m a white male.
It’s partially the “white dudes” stuff, the #YesAllMen stuff (“ALL men are responsible for rape culture”), general “you’re speaking from privilege” if I disagree at all, as if my point isn’t even worth engaging because of what I am.
A lot of it is “safe spaces”. The idea that you need a space to be safe from me, because of my gender and skin color – how else am I supposed to take that? If there’s a more explicit way to say “who you are is more important than what you say, and you can never be anything but the out-group” I’m not sure what it is.
[EDIT] I don’t think you really responded my core point – CaptainBooshi seemed to be reacting to Scott’s previous posts exactly how you think I SHOULDN’T react to SJ spaces assuming I approach them with a “modest degree of charity”. So I’m still genuinely curious why CaptainBooshi felt that way, specifically because Scott DIDN’T resort to the type of behavior (doxxing and name calling – see any of the things Scott Aaronson was called in pretty major forums) that Scott was lamenting in those posts. And yet CaptainBooshi was turned off and thought Scott was resorting to exactly the tactics he criticized.
I think this is a good point about “safe spaces”: the implication is that white men’s very existence is somehow threatening.
I sort of come at this a little differently, because I actually do know people like this, specifically through one friend I met as part of a Facebook group and I didn’t really know she or her other friends had opinions this extreme until she friend-requested me and I started seeing her wall. Before, I’m not sure I’d have believed people like her actually existed, but even now that I know one, and through her, get exposed to many others, I’m still not convinced of her general dangerousness. I mean, she does all the male tears, kill all men, yes all men hashtag shit and every other post is the terribleness of white men, but I don’t comment on people’s wall posts in general and mostly ignore her except when she messages me and we just talk, but then we just talk, and it’s about normal shit two people would talk about, without ever going into politics or telling me I’m terrible. It’s a strange dichotomy between public displays and private behavior.
In fairness, I’m mostly Mexican, but still pretty damn white and definitely qualify by the standards of the kind of Internet company she keeps.
I have seen them ridicule people and ignore their arguments completely solely for being while male.
You complain about something while being male? You are man baby. Not in general sense you talk about, but that concrete men is man baby cause he voiced some emotional or practical issue he had.
Gbdub, I’ll do my best to explain. Sorry I didn’t respond earlier, but I only just checked back in now to see what responses I got.
First, I’d like to emphasize that he has been much fairer and consistent this year, but I would straight-up disagree with your assertions in the past. He did resort to name-calling in his posts. I remember one post specifically where he called social justice people two different kinds of soulless evil monsters at different points in the post. It certainly felt like he was saying like I was a horrible human just for believing in social justice. I remember several occasions where he would point out someone and say they were one of the few exceptions from how awful SJ people were, which of course meant that he considered the rest of us to be awful human beings, especially since he would emphasize how few exceptions there actually were. I’m guessing that the constant mentions of how terrible the other group is might just be something you don’t notice if you’re not part of that group? I’d like to point out that I was definitely not the only person who felt this way. If you looked at the comments to any of the social justice posts, it was a very common refrain that pro-social justice readers thought Scott was calling them horrible people.
I would completely agree that he never did anything like doxxing, but that’s not the type of tactics I was talking about. I mean the more rhetorical type of tactics you might use in an argument, where he would complain about SJ activists doing something completely unfair to win arguments online, but then turn around and do the exact same thing against them in that very post. Stuff like overgeneralizing, or holding different groups to completely different standards. Scott himself mentions in this post that “…there are a lot of social justice arguments I really hate, but which I find myself unintentionally reinventing…” This is the sort of thing I was talking about. Sometimes he would complain about an argument, but then use the exact same argument in that very post. It would frustrate me so much that he wouldn’t even notice it, and make me angry that he was being so unfair.
To close out this comment, I want to reiterate that I don’t think this is true any longer. Scott clearly still has huge problems with social justice, but his posts seem much more even-handed, and don’t provoke the kind of helpless anger I used to feel at them. I just wanted to clarify for Gbdub what I meant in my previous comment.
If it’s not too unlpleasant, would it be possible for you to dig up a specific example post from the archives? I’m relatively new here so while I think I’ve made it through at least a year of the archives it’s possible I’ve missed something. Really I’m just trying to calibrate my personal meter, so it would really help to have a specific example post rather than a paraphrase to compare my reaction to yours.
One thing that I have noticed from Scott is that, when he does go off the rational rails, he tends to acknowledge it if not outright apologize for it, sort of “I’m ranting here and I know it” which would hopefully be a signal to acknowledge the emotion but not take the content TOO seriously. Even the tag “things I will regret writing” suggests a guy who just needs to let stuff out sometimes.
One thing I think it would behoove Scott and the rest of us to remember is that the sort of SJ advocate who would hang out at this blog is probably more scrupulous and vulnerable to feeling horrible than your average SJer who hangs out in SJ echo chambers and produces the sort of stuff Scott complains about – the latter type probably just writes off Scott as the enemy and ignores him. (To be clear, echo chambers that produce horrible stuff are not unique to any “side”). So we should be nice to each other – after all, people who visit here are more likely to be persuaded by decent arguments, and yelling at a potential ally is hardly sound strategy.
Be excellent to each other.
Gbdub, I would honestly prefer not to go back and read through the old posts trying to find a good example. Sorry about that, but I do remember them putting me in just an awful mental state, and would prefer to just avoid that as much as possible. I admit that it’s entirely possible I’m remembering them as worse than they really were, but I know for sure that my emotional response to his current posts is night and day different than to his older posts.
Captainbooshi, I went back and re-read “Untitled” and your comments to it, and to be honest I’m struggling to find your reaction reasonable/charitable.
Context – Untitled was a post in which Scott was reacting to Scott Aaronson being openly mocked and shamed by mainstream feminist blogs for admitting he was driven to suicidal thoughts and sought chemical castration because his study of feminism led him to believe that the very existence of his sexuality was traumatic to women. Amanda Marcotte determined that he felt entitled to fuck any woman he wanted, and that was the only cause of his distress.
In the post, Scott:
1) opened with a trigger warning that included “not meant as a criticism of feminism so much as a way of operationalizing feminism”
2) engaged in a bit of mild name calling: labelled Amanda Marcotte a “Vogon in a skin suit” for having the exact opposite of a compassionite response to Aaronson’s described pain. Also referred to people who mock and deny the suffering of others as “horrible people”. In both cases the reference to a specific person or set of actions (rather than a broad class of people) was pretty explicit. Did imply that Marcotte was a “representative sample” of the response (but later linked to multiple “entitled nerd” articles supporting this implication)
3) criticized Laurie Penny’s response, but also called her an “extremely decent person”. Was critical but never nasty to Penny throughout.
4)links to examples of nasty anti-male-nerd cartoons self-described feminists have made. Notes (obvious) similarities to some anti-Semitic caricatures. Notes that anti-nerdism has some similarities with anti-Semitism in the specific sense that both are often excused because the targets are “successful”. Specifically disavows comparison of feminists to Nazis.
5) provides several links to examples of feminists being nasty to trangenders, lesbians, sex workers, kinks, and male domestic violence victims. Specifically noted that feminists exist on both sides of these issues.
From this , you conclude in the comments:
1) Scott is directly accusing anyone identifying as feminist of being more focused on nerd baiting than feminism
2) Scott thinks anyone identifying as feminist is “directly comparable” to an anti-Semite
3) Scott is calling feminists and other assorted social justice people (as a group, and every member of the group) “evil” and “soulless monsters”.
4) Because Scott doesn’t explicitly call out totally unrelated people who harassed Penny, he “only gets mad when it happens to his side” and even “frankly thinks they got their just desserts”.
5) these tactics of Scott’s are exactly equivalent to things he criticizes (targeted shaming campaigns, online admonishments to troll particular targets, rape threats, ideological life-ruining boycotts/firing campaigns)
(This was all in response to another commenter very angrily and possibly trollingly attacking Scott for calling him evil just because he was a feminist, a comment you apparently agreed with in spirit of not tone).
I mean, I just don’t see how even a mildly charitable reading of Scott gets you there.
He has NEVER condoned or participated in anything even fractionally as nasty as the anti-nerd cartoons he criticized, or harassment, or anything like that. He has never approached Marcotte’s level of vitriol. Has he been illogical, unfair, and flat out wrong at times? Sure, and I bet he’d be first to admit it. But we’re talking BB guns to nukes here. If you disallow what Scott said in Untitled , you’re basically disallowing any but the most mild and unemotional criticism, lest someone equate “here are some things people in your group do that I find very awful, here are some examples of why I feel that way” with “YOU are a horrible person, and I hope you are offended!”
What concerns me is that you seem to be dangerously close to saying “back when Scott only criticized people on my side, I was angry with him and got offended. Now that he’s criticizing himself and people not on my side more often, I like him much more”. Which, while understandable, is not precisely good for the quality of debate going forward.
Apologies if I’m getting a bit worked up, but I really, really dislike the argument “you cannot criticize my side unless you spend equal time criticizing yourself/your side/other issue I care about and expect you to care about equally”. Are people not allowed to advocate for themselves or their chosen causes? I highly doubt you apply this standard of rigor to other social justice advocates.
I really am not trying to offend or make you feel too bad here. I am doing my best to “be excellent”. But I do think you should be a bit more charitable to Scott’s older work, and not just the newer stuff that is more self-critical. And if you really do think that Scott’s older stuff is too unreasonable for you to engage with, I hope you will stick around to help develop more appropriate rules of engagement – but if you do that you do need to be willing to accept the same rules of engagement. (Not that you have to spend half your time being critical of social justice, just that you should look for the same sort of unreason and avoid signal boosting it – which I think Scott certainly does now and did before to a greater degree than you give him credit for. Even on his worst day, Scott was never even on the same rhetorical continent as the RedPills and Jezebels of the world).
Gbdub, leaving aside the question of the merits of Untitled for a minute, I don’t think the best place to bring it up is in response to CaptainBooshi’s claim that posts like that put them in an “awful mental state”. I don’t mean to speak for CB, just against that kind of thing as a general policy.
If you can’t support a factual claim without putting yourself in a bad mental state and don’t wish to put yourself in that bad mental state, you shouldn’t make such a factual claim.
What about my mental state? I find Scott’s writing enlightening, and it bothers me when people attack it for reasons I can’t comprehend. It nags at me – it probably shouldn’t, but it does, because I identify with a lot of what Scott says. And while I appreciate the self questioning he does here I also appreciated the stronger stance he took in Untitled. So when someone comes in and says “this is good but that other stuff is bad and hurt my feelings”, well, that bothers me. I don’t want to hurt people, so I want to know why that hurt!
Captainbooshi said “I was offended”. I asked them to elaborate/be more specific. They responded “no, I will not do that, it was awful and you’ll have to take my word for it”. Which is fine, totally valid feelings.
But when I go back and find the same poster having made what I think are unreasonable and unfair conclusions regarding Scott in the past, I feel cheated. Here’s someone who I wanted to learn from! But now I don’t know if they were genuine and rational, genuine and unreasonable, or disingenuous. So that hurts and nags.
Maybe this is a bad, unreasonable mental state on my part – but why is my mental state less valid than Captainbooshi’s? Is it really fair to let someone come in, throw a barb (well intentioned, but still sharp) then leave, using a claim of offense to guarantee themselves the last word?
I honestly and truthfully was approaching this conversation wanting to learn a bit from someone I disagree with. If Captainbooshi’s mental state does not allow it, then so be it. I feel like I missed an opportunity, but so it goes. i apologize if my critique of Captainbooshi’s response to Untitled offended them, please know it came from a place of “help me understand why you see this this way”.
FWIW, I read Urstoff as arguing against Montfort, saying that if someone in CaptainBooshi’s position is not emotionally able to back their claims, then they shouldn’t make the claims in the first place.
Indeed, but I think Gbdub was replying to Montfort’s post too.
Horrible threading attacks again.
Gdub, I don’t believe you were anything less than earnest and genuine in your curiosity and intentions. I hope my earlier post didn’t sound like I was casting aspersions on your motives or calling you a bad person, and I am sorry if it did.
In this particular instance I read CaptainBooshi’s post as a sort-of white flag: “I might be wrong, and I would rather leave it at that than review the evidence”. In that light, it is very understandable that you’d feel unsatisfied, but your post also seemed like it was bringing up the stuff they didn’t want to see. The end effect of the post looked like it would (1) possibly distress CaptainBooshi more and (2) not get a reasonable response from them, leaving you just as unsatisfied.
I very well might be wrong in this particular case or in general, but in my experience this analysis extends fairly well to the case of “the person I am talking to has cited the possibility of emotional distress and attempted to leave the conversation.”
Urstoff: I personally find it very frustrating, and generally agree.
@ Gbdub
A few things jumped out at me even in this post, but I ignored them because Scott was genuinely trying to be reconciliatory. However, since you asked, here’s an example:
…implying that most SJ activists would commit mass murder if only they had the means — um, not very charitable?
Sure, Scott probably wasn’t being 100% serious (I hope), but as far as jokes go, this one isn’t much better than “I bathe in male tears”.
The AIDS epidemic of the ’80s is a further piece of the puzzle that one must bear in mind. I have a number of friends who lived through that, and the stories they tell are horrific; there’s nothing—I must imagine—like watching friend after friend die and hearing mainstream voices in the larger culture say they deserve it to put you on a hair-trigger towards such voices. This is without mentioning people spending a night in jail—if you’re lucky—for being at the wrong party. (“Watching the Defectives”, on Pride parades, is not irrelevant here, and it’s apropos now in Pride month.)
Now this is not a careful consequentialist argument; also, the younger folks don’t seem to have lived through quite that level of horror. Nonetheless, this seems to be a substantial narrative in the culture, and people generally speaking operate not at the level of argument or experience but of narrative. (I wasn’t bullied myself but I was and am a nerd, so I’ve ended up quite by accident taking the “bullied nerd” narrative as my own in cases like the Scott Aaronson deal. It’s the story of my people.)
When you realize that the stories with which someone came of age more or less run “thirty years ago these people were rejoicing at our deaths”—and this story has a substantial grain of truth—you may not agree with them, but it’s hard not to sympathize with them.
ETA: honestly, I’m surprised SJWs aren’t in general more warlike.
I, on the other hand, was yelled at by a landlord, who claimed that my feminine appearance (he also assumed that I’m gay because of that) wards off potential roommates, and therefore he’s losing money. I was eventually forced to “voluntary” move out ASAP.
Regarding: “I see minimal awareness from the social justice movement and the anti-social-justice movement that their narratives are similar, …”, I think both are quite aware of structural similarity, it’s even a cliche, “The REAL [Racists|Sexists]”. That’s used both ironically and seriously. Rather, the movement participants generally aren’t geeks who are fascinated by that parallelism _per se_. Instead, they’re focused on why their side is *right* and the other is *wrong*.
Isn’t that “the real racists…” thing used as a joke/mockery by people who don’t think it’s true at all?
It’s used by the “SJW” side as mockery, but it’s mocking a view held quite sincerely by the “anti-SJW” side. Both sides are well aware of what the other thinks, and the cliche is passed back and forth these days in a kind of cultural signal (i.e. using the phrase ironically or seriously) of which side the speaker is on, in full knowledge of the perspective of the other side. Here’s an example where that’s discussed quite clearly:
mediaite.com/tv/rush-limbaugh-compares-himself-to-ellen-degeneres/
Key sentence:
“I basically just agreed with Ellen DeGeneres!” Limbaugh exclaimed. “The real racists are in Hollywood. …”
Limbaugh built his audience in part by very openly copying the “SJW” narrative and applying it to “anti-SJW” listeners, and he wasn’t shy at all that he was doing it. It was arguably a talking-point of his (not phrased in those words, of course, but the general idea was evident).
Andrew Bolt (think Australian Bill O’Reilly) does it a LOT and means it in a very literal sense.
The only part of the “anti-SJW” side I’m at all familiar with is GamerGate, and in those circles “those guys are the real sexists/racists” is an extremely common talking point, and while it’s often presented in a mocking tone of voice people really do seem to believe it.
It is in fact used to mock those who think the real racists are the ones arguing for intersectionality and solidarity, and is often at least half-serious from this angle – can those who will not even grapple with their own unconscious racism be anything other than real racists?
On the other side, it’s a fairly standard rhetorical move to juxtapose MLK’s ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character’ quote with basically any affirmative action program anywhere, and then go to the ‘real racists’ as a punchline.
The implication there is both mocking and literal: playing the old idea of color-blindness against the newer of racially targeted compensatory action.
Arguing over who is the real racist in this situation is just a failure to drill down to the actual question being asked. Both sides would agree that affirmative action policies favor one race over another, and both sides would agree that affirmative action policies do not favor whites over blacks, so arguing about whether or not they’re “racist” is empty of content.
I don’t argue that these invocations are productive; I do cite them in answer to our host’s question as to whether anyone actually means it outside mockery.
I do concur that the question of ‘what is racism’ is a hotly debated topic, and will almost certainly remain one while its potency as a shibboleth remains.
@suntzuanime
It could be argued that affirmative action actually favors rich white people by working as a “peacock tail” handicap. It may incidentally also favor rich black people, but certainly it doesn’t favor working class black people.
Why do you think there is more support for affirmative action than education subsides for poor people?
@suntzuanime:
As we say in the programming world “that’s a feature, not a bug.”
I say it and I believe it.
I don’t say it because I want to just take the form “You said X about me? X is really true about you!” but because the positions of feminists, anti-GGers, and prominent SJ advocates only make sense if you think women and minorities are weak and contemptible. When my side says women can do whatever they want, and your side says women are so weak and so fragile that every man around them has the responsibility to craft the environment to be suited to women specifically and to take away any negative emotion they might feel because they cannot do it themselves, I am going to say that you are the sexists, even though you claim your position is motivated by anti-sexism.
You do realize your argument only works if the environment both men and women are in are completely equal, right? Otherwise, it’s like forcing an extra hundred pounds onto someone competing in a race and then saying that since both people can run however they want, it’s totally a completely fair race.
You can argue that there isn’t any difference in the environment, or that there’s a difference but there’s nothing we can do about it, or there’s a difference but we shouldn’t do anything about it, but that’s what the whole argument is about. You can’t just pretend it isn’t there and declare victory, which is pretty much what you’re doing in this post.
There is no environment that exists or could possibly exist that would justify “It’s men’s responsibility to take away women’s negative emotions”, “Women are threatened by men’s knees being spread too wide”, “We cannot use the word ‘bossy’ because if a girl hears it she won’t grow up to be a leader”, or similar shovelfuls of horseshit as anything other than sexist and founded in women’s complete lack of agency.
If you believe that women are being barred from pursuing degrees in STEM because they are afraid they will see a man wearing a shirt with sexually attractive women on it, you believe women are so astonishingly weak that they cannot be adults. Your beliefs are sexist. There are no two ways about it.
CaptainBooshi, what’s your opinion on women doctors? Doctors have a very important job; they need to do a whole bunch of things right, or people will die.
If women are handicapped by their environment comparably to someone running a race with 100 pounds of deadweight, then women, as a category, should not be allowed in any situation where incompetence can kill and there is an unburdened man available to take her position. Indeed, it’s probably better this way from a position of reducing sexism; allowing women doctors to practice medicine so handicapped would surely create huge numbers of fatalities, that could be directly attributed to women practicing medicine while handicapped, further worsening the environment against them.
Is that really what you believe? Because blind auditions in a lot of things don’t show that 100-lb weight you mention.
————
Plus, I’m Jewish, so the argument of historical discrimination and pogroms being directly responsible for diminished educational and economic outcomes as a class is not particularly sympathetic to me.
Mutually assured destruction is probably better than one-sided destruction. I even see some conservatives mutually assuring destruction on purpose–for example, when Bernie Sanders’ old rape fantasy essay came to light I don’t recall reading any conservatives who seemed actually offended, just a lot making a stink explicitly to make a point.
That being said, I hopelessly long for mutual disarmament in many areas, especially when it comes to humor and entertainment. I find some examples of both ironic misandry and ironic misogyny funny–“Boys are stupid. We should throw rocks at them” and make-me-a-sandwich jokes. I don’t see the humor in #killallmen, but that may be be because I’ve only seen it used by explicitly political people and so I’m primed to see it as an attack.
Compromising with social justice activists doesn’t seem to be optimal for those that disagree with them— there’s no evidence that they currently have power to the point where compromise is necessary to coexist with them. If anything, compromising could backfire: it provides them an appearance of legitimacy, which is incredibly dangerous when applied to a movement that relies on cultural influence more than economic influence. From the perspective of those that social justice activists are targeting, Rand’s “sanction of the victim” might apply: social justice activists only have power if their targets accept their legitimacy and accept being punished for “privilege” instead of building an intellectual and moral case for why their opposition is illegitimate.
How would the sanction of the victim apply? And if the victim, as Rand might argue, stop sanctioning their own slavery, would it look anything like a highly privileged group stubbornly denying they have any reason to consider their privilege, power and position a result of arbitrary benign social forces and declaring that, no, you are the evil ones for even daring to bring it up because you are merely a jealous parasite lacking their genius creator talent, you unwashed grey mass-person lacking in vision, you?
( I realize that’s at least partially glib, so perhaps to make my point clearer I should point out that while Rand might have many philosophical tools that serve many uses, a discussion wherein the central thesis of one entire side is that “privilege” is a moral and intellectual problem that causes issues is maybe the single last place in the world where someone wants to talk about the sanction of the victim)
Perhaps they could be less wild in their demands, and so distinguish themselves.
Remember that people have publicly declared that Holocaust survivors have white privilege.
The sanction of the victim applies in the sense that, for instance, social justice activists critique techno-libertarians (or “Grey Tribers”; not necessarily political libertarians) using the tools created by that cluster of people. If the techno-libertarians (or whatever name assigned to that cluster is best) decided to say “don’t use things we made if you call us evil; build your own company/platform”, that would be rescinding the sanction. LGBT people who don’t shop at businesses they perceive as bigoted (without issuing death threats to the owners) are operating on a similar (albeit probably distinct in terms of terminology) principle. (Edit: worth noting that SSC itself operates along these lines; Scott’s under no obligation to allow a comment on his blog that insults him even if the author claims they’re exercising their freedom of speech.)
Compromise with such activists is not actually possible. If anything, attempting to compromise makes things worse, because whatever you actually do attracts attention, and makes it clear you respond to pressure, at which point they just attack you more, often for the very thing you did that you thought was helping. If someone is looking for Outrage Of The Day, the wisest plan by far is to do nothing at all, because that’s likely to get someone else chosen as today’s outrage. Try to address something in a (to the other side) half-ass way is the worst thing you can do.
In addition, instead of calling on you to do the thing you just did (whatever it is), they now use all their you-related energies to call on you to do other things. If every time you want to do the thing (or the thing is cheap to do), you do it, eventually the things they want will be more and more toxic to you.
You can, of course, do something that such people like because it happens to be the right thing to do! But unless you want everything they want, there is no deal to be struck, and appeasement simply will not work, even if you do not believe a large part of the goal is to make you suffer for the crime of not yet suffering enough.
Good start but I think this is far from enough to put the fires out. We need to think much harder about what features of the memetic landscape give rise to these ideologies and where to focus our efforts on fixing this.
For example, one fundamental issue is that the internet gives everyone a voice and modern social movements don’t have leaders; they’re very decentralized. So you can’t exactly broker a peace agreement where one leader agrees to tell their people to reign it in and the other leader tells their people to reign it in. Well maybe you sorta could if the “leaders” you chose were people with lots of Twitter followers. But modern social movements largely select their leaders for maximal outrage so I think you’d be fighting an uphill battle.
Keep in mind that a lot of these people are just *trolls* who like watching the world burn, and clickbait journalists looking for views, so whatever new equilibrium we get to needs to be robust against that. There are always going to be sociopaths.
The birth of “outragism” and “clickbait” as widely-used terms are a good start to progress, but I think we will probably need at least 100x as much memetic force as that before the problem has a good chance of being solved.
A sneak attack might be to try to promote movements like stoicism, mindfulness, etc. which grow at a much slower rate than outragist memes but render some immunity to them, and also don’t encounter much resistance (there’s no anti-stoic or anti-mindfulness crowd).
Another idea would be to try to create a movement of sane compassionate people that go around trying to defuse conflicts and also convince more people to join them. But this would require mustering quite a bit of force. Currently sane compassionate people don’t seem to think shitty internet discourse is that much of a problem and most of them just avoid it and try to get on with their lives. Also they are kind of rare.
Another idea is to try to spread the idea that extreme talk mostly has the effect of discrediting your side, not bringing people around to it. (That’s why false flag attacks are a thing.) Extreme talk hurts you more than it helps you because it gets trumpeted by the other side as proof of how insane you are. For example, Scott Alexander has converted many more SJ people to the anti-SJ side than, say, Roissy has. (If anything Roissy has probably *created* SJ people.) So if you actually want to expand the size of your movement, being thoughtful and reasonable is the way to go. The goal is to paint your side as the thoughtful reasonable ones and then hold up the worst of the other side.
The anti-SJ side is actually going to benefit from Twitter/reddit banning of anti-SJers, I think, for example. Because the anti-SJers that are actually getting censored are the very worst of the anti-SJers, the people that were just discrediting the anti-SJers. And meanwhile the anti-SJers get to complain about censorship in a pretty reasonable-sounding way.
The anti-SJ side should consider themselves very lucky to have Scott. Normally reasonable voices have a harder time gaining much of a substantial audience, but Scott is such a talented writer that he gets a big audience even though he’s not nearly as polemical as Roissy.
Also it would require a lot of restraint on part of the sane, compassionate people. As in, they would have to deliberately stay out of the fray.
I was online in a discussion once where a certain woman would try to pose as an elder statesman to bring peace. The problem was that she would single out the side that disagreed with her as rude, and we had no trouble working that out.
Yep, you have to make a deliberate effort to be balanced in your distribution of negative/positive affect statements (or just not make any). (I’m attempting to phrase my comments in this thread so that it’s difficult to tell which side I’m on… tell me if I’m succeeding.)
I had a similar experience when I went to the /r/Egalitarianism subreddit. I was nodding along with everything until I went to the top-voted stories of all time and many had to do with male victimization, with zero stories about female victimization. A priori, I’d expect men and women to be victimized at approximately similar rates, so this does seem like some kind of evidence of bias. Maybe people are just more motivated to upvote stories that have to do with victimization of people like them and that subreddit, like reddit on the whole, is majority male.
The problem with being even-handed is often the blame is not justly distributed. I have seen people, attempting to be even-handed or something, fudging up something to blame the innocent for.
Egalitarianism as a social movement pretty much demands of its adherents that they do not think feminism is the needed social movement for addressing gender issues. Since there’s already a much larger and more visible social movement which preferentially addresses women’s issues, there’s a strong selection effect for people who predominantly identify with women’s issues to end up in the feminist movement rather than moving on the to the less-visible egalitarian movement.
“For example, Scott Alexander has converted many more SJ people to the anti-SJ side than, say, Roissy has.”
How many more?
I would not be surprised if the net conversions of Roissy are negative. He is not (obviously) the Actual Worst Person In The World but when the label can be suggested with a straight face, it tends to drive people to consider the possibility that you are on the wrong side. “You agree with Roissy” is likely to be an argument against, not for.
I’m highly uncertain whether Scott is convincing that many people one way or another, but I am confident in the sign of the effect.
The problem with promoting stoicism and mindfulness as the answer (even though I personally am completely on board with both) is that there *are* anti-stoic and anti-mindfulness movements; they just don’t bear those labels. The anti-stoic movement is romanticism (in the “Sorrows of Young Werther” sense, not the Valentine’s Day sense), and the anti-mindfulness movement is Punk, or less politely, Trolling. Nihilism would be a good catchall, but no-one wants to admit being a nihilist so it’s of limited utility.
Writing an anti-social-justice screed has the effect of inspiring social justice people to even greater fervor, and writing a pro-social-justice screed has the same effect on anti-sj folks. But I don’t think romantics/trolls get actively fired up by thoughtful advocacy of stoicism/mindfulness.
Probably not at the moment, but I strongly suspect that has more to do with the marginalization of the romantic/stoic and punk/mindful spectra as things central to people’s identities or political stances and thus worth fighting over than it does with the strength of the disagreement between the positions. If stoic or mindful movements were to become large and/or influential in the U.S., I suspect we’d see a reaction.
Don’t forget, Seneca gave us Nero.
Is that fair? It’s not like Seneca took a perfectly serviceable virtuous young Nero and turned him into a loon, right?
And Marcus Arelius gave us Commodus. Seems to be a pattern.
And Socrates produced Alcibiades, while Aristotle produced Alexander.
The pattern grows more complex!
I love Seneca, honest, but I actually do think he deserves a lot of blame here. He was Nero’s major tutor and influence growing up, and he was also one of his main advisers during his reign. Importantly, he pretty much went along with Nero’s actions, and he was heavily involved in court intrigue, pursuit of power and wealth, and all those things which he wrote against.
He’s not directly responsible for Nero, but his hands aren’t clean either, and he stands as a clear example of Stoicism failing to help against crazy politics.
so is the pattern: stoics beget terrible hedonists, while socrates’s students create excellent strategic leaders?
@Jaskologist I suspect attempting to wield political power at all in ancient rome necessitated one to engage in court intrigue and chase power and money just to keep one’s head. Molochian pressures and all.
Though Marcus Arelius did seem to do a fine job while in power. It was his son that he screwed up.
Nero is a very underrated ruler. He gets associated with Caligula as some mad emperor, but that’s grossly unfair. He was hated by the senatorial class, and it’s their histories we read, but it’s worthwhile pointing out that Otho took the name “Nero” as an honorific and set up statues to Nero in order to gain popular legitimacy, Vitellius gave Nero huge funerary honours for the same reason, several rebellions were led by people claiming to be Nero, and there was a popular legend that one day the great Nero will return, much like Arthur or Barbarossa.
None of this is the legacy of a ruler that Seneca has anything to apologise for.
A couple additional notes:
Another side effect of e.g. Twitter censorship of right-wing trolls is that it has the effect of assuaging the fears of SJ people that the right-wing trolls will actually gain significant mindshare. Clearly if they have no voice they aren’t in a good position to form a serious movement right?
I can’t help but think that free speech is looking like less and less of a good doctrine on the internet where the pageviews go to the extremists. Obviously censorship is a tricky slippery slope, but it feels ideological to say that total freedom of speech is always the thing to do for all cultures and circumstances. Censorship seems like much more of a slippery slope when governments do it; I guess I’m not super worried about private companies like reddit or twitter. (BTW, it’s weird that I feel this twinge of doubt when speaking out against free speech… it’s within my free speech rights to say that free speech is a bad idea isn’t it? :P)
Also, I said: “The goal is to paint your side as the thoughtful reasonable ones and then hold up the worst of the other side.” I didn’t mean to endorse this as a prosocial strategy, it just seems to be the winning strategy according to the way the game is currently configured. Please don’t reward the extremists on the side you oppose with the attention they crave without thinking carefully.
The asymmetric warfare between the pro-SJ/anti-SJ people would be interesting if it weren’t so dystopian. Maybe someday people will make video games about it the same way we make video games about World War II. (If someone wants to make a game in the near term, I registered socialjusticewars.com recently… put your email in this thread if you have a project in mind for the domain.)
There’s already a game called “Social Justice Warriors” on Steam, about “fighting internet trolls” or something. It came out some months ago. It doesn’t look especially interesting or smart, but I only looked into it very superficially.
Free speech is always a good idea in the sense that it allows ideas to compete on their own merits rather than being carried by power/popularity contests. In this sense the difference between the censorship coming from the state or the private companies controlling the medium of discourse is one of scale, not kind. But sure, there are costs.
On their own merits, huh?
Another example of someone shooting themselves in the foot: As far as I can tell, the move to ban Moldbug from Strange Loop buys leftists almost nothing and hurts them a lot. By banning him they directed a ton of attention on him, which means more people will discover his writings (don’t underestimate the lure of the forbidden). And they also make themselves seem like censorious thought police. Sure, Moldbug won’t be allowed to present his software… but that wouldn’t have hurt the SJ cause anyway. At best they’ve intimidated people from writing anti-SJ stuff under their real names, but that’s not much of a gain on the margin; people are already terrified of writing anti-SJ stuff under their real names & that’s why all the anti-SJ people use pseudonyms. Heck, even reasonable anti-SJ people like Scott Alexander and that professor in Vox do.
They aren’t trolls, or at least most of them aren’t. They’re committed, 100% sincere religious fanatics, just like the people who burned witches across protestant Europe.
Serious question, because I’ve seen this mistake more often than not: do spellcheckers not have the word ‘rein’ these days?
Spellcheckers and 99 cents will get you a cup of coffee when the other word is also legitimate.
Nah, it’s just an eggcorn that’s rapidly approaching fixation.
This may be motivated reasoning, but I think a principled distinction can be made between the pizza shop and Strange Loop.
First, it must be stressed that the pizzeria took pains to insist that they would not refuse service to gay people. It was only catering a (hypothetical) gay wedding where they drew the line. I see this difference often elided, even in your own post (“a pizzeria that won’t serve gay people”), but it’s an important one.
The line is between making people tolerate those who do offensive things/hold offensive views/are offensive, and making people participate themselves in the offensive thing. The equivalent Strange Loop case would be them either refusing to have Moldbug give a speech on NRX, or refusing to sponsor some NRX group, and I’d bet neither of those would get your dander up. Instead, Strange Loop dumped Moldbug’s wholly technical talk for other, unrelated views of his. This is morally equivalent to a pizzeria putting up a “NO HOMOS” sign, which is notably not what the real pizzeria did.
Yes, and you didn’t have to tell the hypothetical pizzeria it was catering a gay wedding. You could just say “a wedding” and leave it at that. Hell, you could just say “I need 20 pizzas for an event.”
Similarly, Moldbug wouldn’t need to ever mention his NRX views in his presentation, and presumably wasn’t planning to.
The other big distinction is using the coercive arm of the law versus a snarky e-mail campaign. I don’t think anyone is arguing that it should have been *illegal* for the conference to exclude Moldbug for his political views, just that it was the wrong thing to do.
Wedding catering usually isn’t just delivering the food. It’s usually also serving it, and at the very least making a presentation out of it.
I bet the journalist who asked the pizza place people knew that, and chose it for maximum confusion/controversy (sorry if I’m being cynical about clickbait these days).
Same with the floral decorator who would happily sell flower arrangement, but not make a custom one. Flower arrangers may be silly people, but they see what they do as art, and making art especially for an event you disapprove of is different from letting an event you disapprove of use art that you made for generic purposes.
I don’t think they picked the pizza place that way. My understanding is that they went from place to place asking the hypothetical until they got someone to give the “wrong answer” which would generate the outrage bait headline they wanted.
Worth noting as well that it wasn’t as if the pizzeria went out of their way to broadcast their stance. A reporter trolled through forty or fifty small, rural businesses asking ever-more elaborate questions until finally, at long last, she got a “no”. Then she went back and wrote what she always intended to: the “Backwoods hicks hate gays” story. There is a significant difference, IMO, between what you will say if grilled long enough and what you with no outside prompting post to your own social media. Not legally, of course, but in terms of judging moral intent.
I’ve been seeing this claim made a lot around here. Is there a source for it? How do we know what her motives or MO were?
One group is saying, if you are engaging in one type of activity associating in a way we disapprove of, we choose not to provide you service in the particular activity we do not approve of. But go ahead and have your activity. One does not simply serve our pizza at such a wedding.
The other group is saying, if you are engaging in a type of activity associating in a way we disapprove of, we will politicize this and pressure you until you exclude the people we dislike from the activity. Then you can go ahead and have your activity. One does not simply serve pizza at a wedding, so you’d better have a proper cake instead, or else.
Lizard brain does not see these two things as similar, as well it should not.
Also, lizard brain in one case sees someone make hypothetical statements about something that will never ever happen, and then get harassed out of business for them, and in the other, someone making hypothetical statements about political philosophies that will never be implemented, and being harassed out of doing business (at a particular conference) for that.
Parallel might actually work better when flipped.
Holy crap. The black feminist professor sounds exactly like a Young-Earth Creationist.
From that snippet out of context, yes.
Here’s the snippet right before it:
Well, the assigned reading isn’t the sum total of the class. What was the professor’s in-class demeanor like? If she kept bashing Shakespeare as a racist and extolling Chinua Achebe as superior while the class was supposed to be covering Othello, then perhaps there was a basis for the complaints.
On the other hand, people certainly have their perceptions colored by pre-existing reputations and outward presentation, so I’m also more than willing to believe that many of the professor’s students were biased against her based on her other academic work or prior activism.
I don’t know about her, but I can say with total honesty that that is pretty much precisely what mine do.
Well, admittedly, they alternate between calling the Bard racist and praising his work (not even Othello, but Midsummer Night, Tempest &c.) for being full of hidden subtext about racist microaggression and oppression. Even stating that “it is no accident that Prospero and Caliban can be rearranged to give Canibal and Opresor” (which, even with Shakespeare’s variable spelling quality, is rather a stretch.)
Uh, saying that “Caliban” is meant to sound like “Canibal” isn’t exactly a stretch; people have been pointing out the similarities in both name and archetype for a couple hundred years now.
I am fairly sure that Caliban is supposed to be Canibal (and it was sometimes spelled with one n by other authors at the time). Of course, at the time “Cannibal” meant a native of the Caribbean (who were said to eat human flesh).
I’ll give ’em the “Caliban/Canibal” bit because I think Shakespeare wouldn’t object either, but “Prospero/Op(p)res(s)or” is stretching it.
Dear Schmendrick, please don’t raise the spectre of someone wanting to bash Dead White Western Male Culture and “Othello” in the same sentence.
I certainly am not insinuating, implying, suggesting or in any way claiming this professor did so. But just imagine what a really motivated anti-privilege activist could do there; they’d probably end up ‘proving’ Shakespeare was pro-slavery 🙂
I wasn’t too happy with the non-white authors that my contemporary literature unit in high school assigned, or the classes I took for my diversity requirements in college. This wasn’t because they were non-white. It was because they were all writing the same story, and it wasn’t to my taste: magical-realism persecution narratives set at the height of one *ism or another, substituting pity and a certain flavor of dreamlike imagery for any meaningful depth. Much later, I read One Hundred Years of Solitude on my own initiative and discovered what they were all ripping off.
There are good books by non-Western authors; it’s just that Western education systems don’t like assigning them. (Solitude does get assigned a lot, though; I just got unlucky there.)
I’m probably misunderstanding, but are you saying García Márquez isn’t white, or just the guys who ape him?
Sorry, I knew my point was getting a little messy there but I didn’t bother to put in the work to fix it.
I meant the guys who ape him. I do think García Márquez would pass muster as non-Western in those circles, though, despite being a white guy living in a former European colony. Hence his inclusion in the second paragraph: non-Western is not the same thing as non-white, but it has similar effects on curricula.
Yeah, I saw something similar. All through the upper half or so of K-12, we had ‘diverse’ literature crammed down our throats — mostly Maya Angelou and Hispanic race opera. Utter garbage by any sane metric, but hey, it’s about The Experience Of A Diversity In Amerikkka, so in the curriculum it goes.
Then I went to college and had to take a class on “Philosophy Around the World”, which was mostly about Aztec mythology and various forms of shamanism. (I spent my spare time reading the Analects and the Daodejing. The entirety of China had a week or two of coverage. I don’t think India was mentioned, but for all I know, there could’ve been a few minutes on Buddhism or Krishna or something.)
They could’ve had Borges and Mishima instead of Maya Angelou and whichever use-as-many-italicized-Spanish-words-as-possible YA garbage author, and they could’ve had the Confucians and Taoists instead of “memorize the Nahuatl name of the Aztec spiral god” or whatever it was… but they didn’t.
It’s like they’re trying to give people the impression that no one but white Westerners has ever done anything interesting.
Borges is amazing and everyone should read more of him. But he tends to write about abstruse introspective stuff and gauchos getting into knife fights, and neither one sells well in curricula, sadly.
I did read the Analects, some Hesiod, and some selections from the Koran as part of one of the college courses I mentioned, which I suppose is to its credit. Also the Bhagavad Gita, but sadly they picked the most boring translation imaginable.
I think this is mainly about “matching the demographics,” and may be specific to the location of my friend (and your) schools.
In our area, there were a ton of hispanic students but very few indians or chinese. So people went out of their way to teach aztec philosophy so that the hispanic students would “feel included” or “have role models” or whatever.
I can also theorize that at the college level, Asians are already regarded as having huge advantages and are over-represented, so nobody feels particularly compelled to cater to them or encourage them or anything, which is why a course with “global” in its name typically means “latin america, middle east, africa”
It sounds like it was just a stupid local failure. I’m Hispanic and grew up in a very largely Hispanic place and we never learned anything at all about the Aztecs. Non-western philosophy almost always meant India or China just because that’s where the dominant ideas that still proliferate came from. I took the AP Lit class in high school, though, so I think the curriculum was largely dictated by the test and not a local decision.
This college was one of the whitest places I’ve ever been. The problem was that the professor was really into shamanism — and I would guess that she would not like Confucianism or Legalism very much.
But still, there’s Laozi and Zhuangzi and so on, right? And a survey course should at least try to be something other than the rest of the courses from that professor, right?
As for Borges, I don’t like the idea of designing curricula under the assumption that the students are all drooling morons who will never be able to understand anything more complex than two hundred pages of the word abuelita. My English classes in high school were honors, so they were mostly white. (Not that ‘honors’ goes very far. In tenth grade, one of the two or so Hispanics in the class could barely read. But still, they were at least half white.)
And if there’s resistance to taking out race opera, just swap out A Separate Peace for some Mishima. The parents’ organizations would never let that happen, but, good lord, why are they even teaching that book? Do they want people to hate reading?
I actually wouldn’t mind a bit of “memorise the Nahuatl name”, but confining everything to the Aztecs is just as ridiculous as never mentioning any of the native inhabitants.
What are the Olmecs and the Toltecs, chopped liver? 🙂
My AP English teacher went off the rails in the second semester when she assigned way too many diversity authors (and the odd guest speaker or two). She earned a reputation for having quite an agenda to shape and mold young minds, and to shout down views that were unfashionable to her. She was in the vanguard of a proto-SJW movement, some 40+ years ago.
The kids in the class found that there were weeks wasted on her pet topics, and that those diverted the focus from understanding and appreciating the Western Canon. We survived and continued to think for ourselves, and she changed schools.
I guess the curriculum isn’t standardized, then. I mostly hated that class because it was annoying as hell diagramming poetry meters for half an hour every morning, but the books we read were pretty good. I believe they were not only all white authors, but all English authors, which kind of seems to be there in the name of the class: English Literature.
It’s not, no. My high school had a Contemporary Literature unit at the junior level (mostly diversity literature, Steinbeck, and Catcher in the Rye; I was lucky enough to get a good teacher or I would have hated every moment of it) and an English Literature unit at the senior level (concentrating on the British classics from Shakespeare to the Romantics; lots of poetry). I forget what the freshman and sophomore levels did but they weren’t very memorable.
I remember reading American transcendalists my junior year. Sophomore year we watched videos while the teacher worked on grants to get the school more computers. Freshman year, I went to a Catholic school, and all I really remember is the health class where we were bombarded with propaganda pictures of the horribly mutilated genitals of people with STDs and a whole bunch of statistics to convince us that condoms don’t work.
If it makes you feel any better, the same statistics and pictures came up in my public-high-school health class, along with some spectacularly wrong “education” about drugs and alcohol. We did learn to put condoms on bananas, though, which I suppose is something. (I’m just slightly too old to have been gotten abstinence-only education in my region.)
I suspect the gross-out pictures, at least, backfired somewhat. Health was folded in with drivers’ education for us, and I remember a lot of excited student chatter about the scare video they showed us with pictures of car crash victims.
You know, they actually did the same thing to us, and I have to say, it worked in a sense. I’ll probably never drive a motorcycle. The images of half-severed testicles will never leave my mind. But sex with women I have no intention to create babies with? Sorry, Catholic church, the ratio of fun to danger there is much greater than fast cars.
It was because they were all writing the same story, and it wasn’t to my taste: magical-realism persecution narratives set at the height of one *ism or another, substituting pity and a certain flavor of dreamlike imagery for any meaningful depth.
It’s a bit like the Irish Novel; even the modern
ones, produced by people who were born in the 80s, still revolve around the same old tropes (even if there are new vices involved).
I realize that reference-class gerrymandering can make the outside view useless, but I really don’t see the case of the pizzeria as analogous to the tech conference. In the case of the pizzeria, there was no actual customer denied service; as you point out, who caters pizza to a wedding, gay or otherwise? Instead, there was a shitstirring leftist reporter asking a hypothetical, trying to get exactly the reaction they got, leading to a boycott and a symbolic victory over bigotry. In the case of the tech conference, the conference organizer wasn’t going to exclude Yarvin, until a shitstirring leftist sent an email making an implicit threat to boycott the conference unless the invitation was rescinded.
So now that I write it out, I see the two situations are pretty analogous, though not in the way you describe. They don’t shed light on a similarity between the left and the right, but rather on a difference; the right minds its own business, while the left stirs shit.
I suspect the left stirs more shit now because the balance of power is shifting in their favor and they can afford to do it and be lauded as brave for it. The right has done its share of shitstirring in the past (the classic example being Communist witch-hunts).
Not disagreeing with anything you’ve said, just saying that it has more to do with who currently has the cultural microphone, as opposed to the left being inherently more prone to shitstirring.
I agree that who stirs the shit is mostly a result of who expects to ideologically profit by stirring the shit, and that there have been times in history when you could have found people on the right engaging in this sort of bullying. I’m not at all convinced that the left isn’t more prone to it, though. There have been times when the right has seized the “cultural microphone”, but I feel like on average since the invention of the printing press it’s spent a lot more time on the left.
Problem is that the “right” of today is the left of yesterday and the extreme left of fifty years ago. Ideology is a moving target.
I think the problem, also, is that it’s really hard to define the concepts of right and left (or conservative and liberal) in concrete terms.
There’s a perception (kind of embedded in the word itself) that conservative means “whatever most people in the past believed,” and liberal/progressive means “the way things are probably headed.”
And if you look at it that way, then of course it’s going to look like Cthulu is always swimming to the left and that today’s conservative is yesterday’s liberal, and that leftism therefore is an inescapable oncoming engine that consumes everything in its path.
This same relativist view can also lead to the perception that conservative thought has ruled throughout much of history and that therefore the right has always been, and continues to be, more powerful.
The right says, “Cthulu swims to the left, and he’ll keep doing it. Just look at history!” The left says, “Cthulu has always been in charge and still is. Just look at history!”
I probably shouldn’t have used the words left and right in the first place. I’m trying to get away from framing my thoughts in those terms.
The idea of “communist witchhunting” seems to me like a projection of the very real capitalist witchhunting that preceded it.
The right suffered huge blowback at the time for those witch-hunts. It’s not really comparable. The right has always been a minority party/belief group in America during the 20th and 21st centuries. They’ve never really held the cultural microphone.
What about the Satanic panic? Minority or not, that resulted in multiple innocent people being wrongly sent to prison.
I disagree; the blowback the right suffered was akin to things like GamerGate – a reaction to the side with the strong hand overplaying it. I feel like there were definitely periods in the 50s and 80s where Cold War nationalism/anticommunism pushed the right into cultural supremacy.
You can feel that way, but the historical record is not necessarily favorable to that feeling. The press, for example, was heavily leftist and liberal even during the 1950s, and perhaps 1/3 to 1/4 “conservative” as we might define such things in the present day.
The press is an important part of the culture, but certainly not the be-all and end-all. I will admit that I was not alive in the 50s, and not very politically aware in the 80s, but studying the historical record this is how it seems to me. Eisenhower and Reagan were not hiding what they were up to.
I’m not sure which side you think had a strong hand and overplayed it in Gamergate, but it looks to me like that anti-GG forces had pretty much a complete victory. Every place it’s reported, even in Wikipedia, the reporting is always on the side of “gaming is full of misogyny and harassment”.
I thnk he’s saying that the press had a strong hand and over-played it, resulting in blowback (possibly inconsequential blowback)
This is a reply to suntzuanime about Reagan and Eisenhower. At the time, those guys were considered liberals among Republicans themselves and they also didn’t hide that fact either. Eisenhower was an OG fiscally conservative socially liberal Republican. See, this is why it’s impossible to rebut the presumption that the right-wing ever had dominance. America is very much essentially liberal in its underpinnings and conservative-ness has always, always been a rump group that never had much influence. But because we couldn’t live quite so atomizedly in the past, modern people keep believing that there was some past-time where conservative-Republicans ran stuff, when that just isn’t reflected in the historical record to any meaningful degree.
@NFG
I’ll agree with you about Eisenhower, but how do you figure that Reagan was considered a moderate in the 80’s? When he ran for the primary in 1976 he was running to the right of Ford and I don’t think there was a group on the right complaining that Reagan wasn’t conservative enough for them.
I think it’s more complex than that. Just yesterday there was a controversy when the developers of the upcoming Dues Ex game described the treatment of augmented humans as an “apartheid”.
One of the leads, who chose to use that word, had a rant about it, and he posted it directly to gamergate’s subreddit. (He’s black BTW.)
So how it’s reported is only part of the story. GG is clearly being noticed inside the industry and doing better there.
People apparently like Auerbach here, so here’s his take on the current state of support for GG in the industry: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1smmqdt
Except it was likely Hoover was feeding McCarthy information, which also explains why a lot of the allegations had some truth to them.
http://chinamatters.blogspot.com/2015/01/everybody-wants-their-own-stasi.html
>When one side has nukes, they nuke Hiroshima and win handily. When both sides have nukes, then under the threat of mutually assured destruction they eventually come up with protocols to prevent those nukes from being used.
MAD works in real life for three reasons not present in the social justice wars:
-we can guarantee second-strike capability for nukes, and everybody knows it
-control over launching nukes is centralized in the hands of around 9 people worldwide, most of whom are at least somewhat selected for responsibility and intelligence, and all of whom are able to contact each other personally at any time
– there is a very strong taboo against the use of nukes
This, exactly.
Except that, for a while, it wasn’t “about nine”, but at least nine hundred and maybe as many as nine thousand. One of the in-hindsight Really Really Dumb decisions during the cold war was to forward-deploy tactical weapons where they couldn’t really be controlled in the chaos of war, with ships and submarines and army brigades that couldn’t realistically hope to survive a major conflict without going nuclear at the outset.
Bush the Elder and Gorbachev the Only walked us back from that one in the early 1990s, and the tacnukes are only found in vaults. Though Pakistan is apparently trying to bring them back…
So, existence proof that MAD can work with hundreds of agents. For a while, in peacetime, with all but a handful of the agents being carefully selected and highly trained for the job.
But there’s rather more than a few hundred people who can start a twitterstorm of the like, and approximately none of them meet the standards expected of military officers, and the shooting has already started…
What corresponds to “second-strike capability” in the social justice wars, and how does one side have the power to preclude it?
A direct analogue would be the ability for a shamed party to generate a counter-mob and organize an equally-destructive boycott of the original shamer: ie. if Brendan Eich had managed to rally a bunch of people to boycott and troll OKCupid into serious trouble even while he was in the process of resigning from Mozilla. The problem is that, as John Schilling said, more often than not the current twitstorms are decentralized with no high-profile target to hit which would, if eliminated, take the wind out of the movement’s sails and cause real damage. The only approximately-analogous tactic I can think of is mass doxxing of twitstorm participants and hoping that those individuals would suffer retribution at the hands of employers, friends, family, community organizations, etc. I don’t think this is a good idea, though.
A direct analogue would be the ability for a shamed party to generate a counter-mob and organize an equally-destructive boycott of the original shamer
This is pretty much GamerGate’s MO. One of the most vivid memories I have of the Great Social Media War of 2014 was Adobe pulling ads from Gawker* in response to a GG email campaign after Sam Biddle’s “bring back bullying” statement, resulting in Adobe’s Twitter mentions being flooded for the next several hours by both denunciations of them for supporting terrorists and expressions of gratitude for standing up to bullies, in roughly equal measure. Multiple people on both sides claim to have called Adobe’s office to personally deliver condemnation/thanks.
I can’t imagine how horrifying the experience must have been for Adobe’s social media manager. It’s one thing to be yelled at by a bunch of angry people on the internet, and quite another to be yelled at by two groups of angry people making opposite demands.
Of course, GG does have high-profile targets in the form of Kotaku, Polygon, Gawker, and so on, so its applicability to other twitstorms may be limited.
* Technically, Adobe didn’t pull ads. Their ad campaign on Gawker had ended a while ago and they just asked Gawker take their logo off of the sponsors page. But this quickly ceased to matter, as details usually do in twitstorms.
The most obvious analogy is getting participants in the mobbing fired/excluded in turn
Right, but if it takes a mob to get one person fired, that’s mathematically unsustainable. If any one person can get any other person fired, that’s going to get really ugly.
if it takes a mob to get one person fired, that’s mathematically unsustainable.
No, because you can keep using the same mob over and over. Especially if you can get them worked up over the other side’s retaliation.
In this case, “Getting really ugly” is exactly what we want. That’s the point of MAD.
If any one person can get any other person fired, that’s going to be very bad for labor and pretty crappy for capital too. It would generally suck as a matter of economics, increasing unemployment massively and causing huge retraining costs for business.
For “second-strike” capability in social justice wars, I’d point to the classic DongleGate. Richards outed a joker and got him fired using her mob, and a counter-mob formed and got her fired.
“On the other hand, vox has practically led the news media in 24-7 coverage of police officers…”
Vox should be capitalized.
Pointing out spelling/style errors is an acceptable thing to do here, right?
Also, if the whole Hugo/Sad Puppies thing is part of the debate, we need a way to distinguish Vox the website from Vox Day the troublemaker. It’s more than a little jarring when my brain picks the wrong definition and tries to interpret the text around it.
Vox Day has a fairly public birth name which you could use to disambiguate him.
In his case, I’m probably above-averagely resistant to going by his chosen name because, regardless of his politics, picking a nom-de-plume that implies that you speak with the voice of God is the kind of chutzpah that rubs me the wrong way…
I thought he might be punning on “vox populi, vox Dei”?
Though I tend mostly to roll my eyes at puns and ignore them afterwards.
He’s punning on his own given name.
I thought Theodore meant ‘gift of God’ rather than ‘voice of God’, but my Greek is even rustier than my Latin.
Sometime reader, first time commentator.
1. I think that you are not making enough of a distinction between liberals and leftists. Most journalists and professors are on the left in some way but most are garden-variety liberals and not raging revolutionaries. Plus people have inconsistent politics. A lot of my friends who are academics are further to my left in many ways but they are deeply concerned with the whole trigger warning and campus stuff.
2. I find it interesting that being liberal gets me seen as an extremist revolutionary by some and a milquetoast traitor by others.
3. There are obviously times when this does spill into the real world but if we are being honest people like Vox Day, Yarvin, and their left-wing equivalents will never have much of a say or influence on actual policy and politics because they are really way out of the mainstream. All of these stories seem like a lot of anecdotes coming in at once but I have yet to see it really become a thing. There are stories of high-profile shammings and punishments because of ill-advised tweets but there is a constant onslaught of stuff on-line. How much stuff is just going unnoticed? How many people (even in fandom) could tell you who Vox Day is? What percentage of computer industry people know who Yarvin is and how extreme his politics are? I feel like there is a strange amplification effect going on and I can’t place my finger on what it is exactly beyond “Maybe some people (myself included) spend way too much time on the Internet….”
Watch what happens to Jonathan Chait over the next few years. If he doesn’t end up purged for trying to defend mainstream liberalism against the left, I owe you a beer.
The worry is that the people on the fringe are just target practice, and obscure tech conferences are just superweapon test ranges.
Similarly, the police don’t have a drone looking through your window right now, but people see a danger in efforts to normalize their use for surveillance.
I think Chait writes for a very different market than the Twitter-Tumblr sphere.
Online activism strikes me as a hyper-version of university politics. Things are so nasty because the stakes are so small.
The far left has never been a serious contender in American politics. This is a not too inaccurate description of the far-left in the United States:
http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/flakes-alive/
“At its worst, however, Left Forum is Comic Con for Marxists—Commie Con, if you will—and an absolute shitshow of nerds and social rejects. There are bitter old codgers that will harangue you about a thirty-some-years-old internecine grudge, and there are politically unsophisticated kids with Che Guevara t-shirts and Adbusters subscriptions. There are sanctimonious Trotskyists, ridiculous Maoist Third-Worldists, condescending horizontalist anarchists, smug social democrats and a glut of ardent adherents to similarly esoteric ideological traditions, all competing for the title of Most Insufferable Anti-Capitalist. Left Forum is notorious for grueling Q&A sessions, often with nary a “Q” to be found. People like to demonstrate how many books they’ve read (or worse, have written and self-published) in embarrassing displays of pretension and/or machismo, and cynicism is frequently substituted for insight.”
The Weather Underground and Symbonise Liberation Army were probably really scary in the 1960s but they were ultimately ineffectual and are now just small pieces of history. I suspect the current twitter activists will be the same.
Oh that was a lovely read–thank you 🙂
+1
Overton Window, man, Overton Window.
@Eggo:
Well, I suppose we would need to agree on a definition of purged. When it comes to the commentariat, I think the best you can arrive at is self purging. So, folks like David Frum and Andrew Sullivan really did self purge from the right-wing in America (while maintaining their self-defined stances as conservatives).
Chait has definitely not self-purged from the left, and I would bet a 6-pack or even case of beer that he will not (the good stuff that you can’t actually buy in cases). But I am sure you could look out there right now and find someone on Twitter who has declared Chait to be persona non grata.
@HeelBearClub
You can find someone on twitter who believes or has done almost anything. Are there people who declared Chait persona non grata? Yes.
There are plenty of people on the left who disagreed with Chait’s essay but also still include him as a member of the left because he is very good at taunting and criticizing Republicans. Chait did not end his essay with an announcement that he is switching sides. He still believes in the tenants of social welfare.
@Saul Degraw:
I’m not sure what you mean, as you appear to be in vehement agreement with me.
There is definitely an amplification effect going on. It’s not even too much time spent on the Internet. It’s an extremely specific part of the Internet. I’m on the Internet all the damn time and have been for 15 years, am at least somewhat of a sci-fi fan (though largely stopped reading fiction altogether about seven years ago), work in computing, and I’d never heard of any of these people until I started coming to this specific website. I’d never even heard the term “social justice warrior” until a few months ago and only used Tumblr to find porn, blissfully unaware it had this whole other side to it.
Difference between pizza nonsense and conference expulsion is obvious and profound. It’s the difference between exercising free association, and putting pressure – in a cooperative, premeditated manner – on people to only associate with those who are “approved.” If a group was going around telling people not to sell to gay people, and implying that if they didn’t comply they would kick up a stink about it, that would be an analogous situation. And whether it’s a fundamentalist church doing it to gays or a bunch of SJWs doing it to conservatives, this sort of shit needs to be punished. As harshly and swiftly as fucking possible.
I wouldn’t find the Strange Loop situation especially different if the conference organizer had just personally hated right-wingers and decided to ban them without anyone pressuring him to do so.
I think there’s a large difference between the two cases.
If only people who personally disagreed with Yarvin (or hated right-wingers) recsinded invitations to a conference they organised, or didn’t invite people they disagreed with, then Yarvin could conceivably have been invited to another conference.
If, on the other hand, the reason he decided not to invite Yarvin was because of outside pressure – or even worse, the fear of it – then that outside pressure and the fear of it can force even those who do not hate right-wingers to not invite them, thus making it impossible for Yarvin to speak at any conferences at all.
An analogous situation – if only fundamentalist Christians refused to cater to gay weddings, that’s probably be fine. If fundamentalist Christians put pressure on everyone who catered gay weddings so that it became difficult to impossible for a gay couple to find a wedding caterer, that’s a very different (and much bigger) problem.
The difference between “I insist on my living my life as my conscience dictates” and “I insist on your living your life as my conscience dictates.”
Except that argument invariably turns into, “What you want against the law is your conscience; what I want against the law is just common sense.”
I insist on your living your life as my conscience dictates in some arenas — for instance, murder, robbery, and arson.
Frankly, after looking at their site, I think Alex Miller is lying if he’s saying it’s only because of external pressure. They adapted their damn policy from Geek Feminism Wiki and give diversity scholarships to LGBT attendees. This is obviously not a politically neutral place. They just had no idea who they were inviting and probably shat their pants at the idea when they found out.
You might be right that this is a major and salient difference. It’s certainly true that the present-day Anglosphere left uses mob pressure in a way that the right doesn’t. But… this feels way too much like motivated reasoning to me. (At least in my case, I’m not saying you’re doing it.) Better to assume the least convenient possible world and see what falls out of that.
This might be a manifestation of the implicit power vs. explicit power distinction that Scott talked about in the Meditations, way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. tl;dr is that SJ causes tend to be upset about what they see as tacit bias inherent in society, most of which is too subtle to really call out (“microaggressions”) but which adds up to an oppressive atmosphere. Hence why when someone says something overtly stupid, they tear into him like a velociraptor lunging head-first into a trough full of goat legs: if most people are *ist but express that in vague and ambiguous ways, then someone who isn’t vague or ambiguous must be the second coming of Hitler or something.
Meanwhile, anti-SJ causes tend to be upset about overt pressure tactics and double standards, most of which were originally created to counter that tacit bias.
Social justice activism is necessarily a plot to get more political power because activism is necessarily a plot to get more political power — or, at least, to point more political power in the direction you want it pointed, which seems equivalent to me. That’s, like, the definition of activism.
I wouldn’t call it a plot to steal resources, but that’s because we as a society have agreed that the resources in question are to be allocated to the people that scream the loudest, which occasionally has unpleasant consequences but which we can’t really change without burning the whole system down. As to silencing dissenting views, that’s a tactical choice rather than a strategic objective.
“A plot to gain more political power” implies to me that obtaining the political power was the objective.
As for: “a plot to get more political power — or, at least, to point more political power in the direction you want it pointed, which seems equivalent to me.”
Those are moral opposites. Using a cause to obtain political power for oneself is the ultimate corruption of politics; obtaining political power by proclaiming a cause, and then using that power to achieve that cause is the way politics is supposed to work.
One cares mostly about who wields the power, the other about the cause in which the power is wielded.
That moral distinction is so inconsequential in practice that I sometimes forget it exists. But, of course, both sides of it are tightly correlated; most activists dream of having the power to change the course of history (and of escaping whatever frustrations led them to activism, of being feted for their goodness, &c), and most activists do sincerely want history to flow in a certain direction. I expect the strength of all these desires to be far more strongly predicted by how generally serious a given activist is about activism, than by their ethics.
I actually think the rare ones that care purely about the cause are the more dangerous; you can expect the others, at least, to care about what other people think.
I don’t think it would be even slightly excessive to have banned me. You should ban whoever you find unpleasant to deal with; this is your hobby that you’re doing because it’s (presumably) fun.
“When one side has nukes, they nuke Hiroshima and win handily.”
-Nukes were totally inconsequential to Japanese surrender. The Japanese leadership had zero regard for civilian casualties, and cared much more about Stalin’s brain (and armies). This was an inevitable result of Japan’s leadership being too stupid to attack Kamchatka instead of Hawaii while it still could. If they had done this, they might have won the war handily.
“then under the threat of mutually assured destruction they eventually come up with protocols to prevent those nukes from being used.”
-Or, in this scenario, the Nash equilibrium may well be to use the nukes any time they could be used. Counter perpetual Social Leftist (Media) War with perpetual Social-Economic Rightist (Media) War. Expect the rifts to deepen to the Earth’s core. And Vietnam, Afghanistan, Chile, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Cuba, Zaire and Korea were pretty bloody, as well.
”
-Nukes were totally inconsequential to Japanese surrender. The Japanese leadership had zero regard for civilian casualties, and cared much more about Stalin’s brain (and armies). This was an inevitable result of Japan’s leadership being too stupid to attack Kamchatka instead of Hawaii while it still could. If they had done this, they might have won the war handily.”
Nukes were important. The Japanese were banking on a grand battle to bleed the US. The ability to simply annihilate them at will made the Emperor realize that was unworkable.
As for Stalin… attacking the Russians at any point in WW2 would be crazy. The Japanese lost against the Soviets in the 1930s in their battles and fighting a four front war (Siberia, China, Malaysia/Burma/India, Indonesia/Australia) would be beyond their capabilities. Not to mention if they win they get Vladistock and then have to travel a thousands miles to get anywhere important.
It’s scary how close the Japanese came to not attacking in the South- and Mid-Pacific at all…if the Kwangtung Army hadn’t disobeyed direct orders from Tokyo and attacked the Soviets at Khalkin Gol or if they hadn’t massively bungled the subsequent battle (though to be fair the future Marshal Zhukov was the commander of the Russian forces – a bit of an advantage for the Reds) then the Imperial Navy would probably never have marshaled significant support for a resource-gathering offensive into SE Asia, especially considering Kamchatka and Siberia were, like, right there. A Japanese push in 1941, if timed in concert with Operation Barbarossa may well have broken the Soviet’s back.
As I understand it, the Soviets were better prepared for a Japanese attack than one might think, and the Japanese were not well set up for that sort of war. So the amount their efforts would have helped may not be all that great. Still, it is true that the Soviets came very close to falling in actual history when they were facing just the Germans, and the Soviets presumably also would have gotten less U.S. aid if the U.S. wasn’t in the war. So it does admittedly seem like even a small Japanese contribution could have been the difference.
IIRC the reason the Soviets were well-set to resist a Japanese push into Siberia in 1941 is because the Japanese already tried it in 1939, resulting in the disastrous battle of Khalkin Gol where they got schooled in combined arms tactics by Georgy Zhukov. That said, the troops that ultimately were used to push the Nazis back from the gates of Moscow were pulled from the Siberian front, so if the Japanese had foregone war with the British and Americans in favor of attacking Siberia again in 1941, the Soviets would have been presented with a Sophie’s Choice of allowing the Nazis to dig in for the winter within 25 miles of Moscow, or losing non-trivial amounts of Siberia to the Japanese (along with all the resources that entailed.
The Japanese should have declared war on Germany in 1940 and the USSR in 1941. Both times they should have declared their undying friendship to Britain and America and the liberal world order.
Breaking in here for a second:
It’s unlikely that Moscow would have been lost even without additional forces from Siberia. Even if Moscow does fall, the Soviets aren’t really out of the game, though, logistically, moving armies becomes more difficult without the Moscow rail hub.
Japan survives maybe 2 months against the USSR if they are lucky, and the Germans take Moscow if they are REALLY lucky, and that still doesn’t win them the war.
Zhukov was in command, but he was in command of units that were, at best, second rate. A second rate Russian unit in 1939 was not an impressive thing, but they still managed to beat the shit out of the absolute cream of the IJA. The IJA of 1939 would have had trouble with the allied armies of 1918. In 1939, with basically no tanks, no AT weapons, not nearly enough artillery, and horrendous logistics, they had no chance of making the slightest dent against Russia. Admittedly, they didn’t have any hope against the US and UK either, but that weakness wasn’t staring them quite as boldly in the face.
“As for Stalin… attacking the Russians at any point in WW2 would be crazy.”
-Not in December 1941, when Nazi forces were right next to Moscow and the siege of Leningrad had already begun. Population of Japan+Germany c. 1940>Population of modern Russia and 80% of the population of the Soviet Union c. 1940. Add a few Italian forces, subtract some Muslims, and the potential army sizes between the Axis and USSR are roughly equivalent.
“Not to mention if they win they get Vladistock and then have to travel a thousands miles to get anywhere important.”
-And…? Even if it isn’t important, it’s still territory, and it would still be bleeding the Soviet Union dry.
“Nukes were important.”
-No, they weren’t.
“The ability to simply annihilate them at will made the Emperor realize that was unworkable.”
-American ability to inflict mass civilian casualties was well-known to the Japanese leadership. The conventional Bombing of Tokyo had casualties higher than the unconventional bombing of Hiroshima. The Japanese leadership just didn’t care about civilian casualties. And the Japanese (correctly) understood America couldn’t possibly have more than a few nuclear weapons up its sleeve.
“Even if it isn’t important, it’s still territory, and it would still be bleeding the Soviet Union dry.”
And more importantly, it would be largely empty territory with massive stocks of natural resources. The Japanese were concerned about the carrying capacity of their home islands, and were short on resources. Seems like a match made in heaven, no?
The resource they need is oil. I don’t believe there are any oil wells or pipes constructed in the area they’d be conquering.
The Japanese thought Manchuria would solve some of their resource problems, but they didn’t manage to get much productivity out of the region. And in their fighting against Germany, one of the things the Soviets were good about was evacuating or destroying machinery and infrastructure. It thus seems likely that the Japanese would have had some trouble setting up any serious effort to exploit the resources of the region in any realistic time frame.
In point of fact, there’s a ton of oil in Siberia. I don’t know if this was known at the time, however. There is a lot of coal in Manchuria, Mongolia, and southern Siberia, which at the time was a dying but still feasible replacement for oil, especially in civilian applications. The Navy wanted oil for its boilers, but if the Army had remained ascendant that goal would have been secondary.
”
-Not in December 1941, when Nazi forces were right next to Moscow and the siege of Leningrad had already begun. Population of Japan+Germany c. 1940>Population of modern Russia and 80% of the population of the Soviet Union c. 1940. Add a few Italian forces, subtract some Muslims, and the potential army sizes between the Axis and USSR are roughly equivalent.”
The Japanese couldn’t conquer China after 4 years of trying. Adding the Japanese isn’t going to change the situation for the Russians.
“-And…? Even if it isn’t important, it’s still territory, and it would still be bleeding the Soviet Union dry.”
That isn’t how war works. Owning the trackless wastes of Siberia doesn’t contribute anything to victory. It is also “bleeding the USSR dry” if the troops you are killing would have been kept there anyways.
“-American ability to inflict mass civilian casualties was well-known to the Japanese leadership. The conventional Bombing of Tokyo had casualties higher than the unconventional bombing of Hiroshima. The Japanese leadership just didn’t care about civilian casualties.”
Firebombing was incredibly inefficient at causing mass civilian casualties. Despite the massive amounts of effort, the most brutal firebombing attack in the war (Tokyo, 1945) killed only 1 in 28- 1 in 67. Meanwhile a single nuke killed 1 in 3 people in the target city.
For the first time we could kill everyone in Japan and do so with impunity.
Their battle plan was “grand battle against the US to bleed them and make peace”. Having the US able to kill everyone at will makes that plan impossible.
“And the Japanese (correctly) understood America couldn’t possibly have more than a few nuclear weapons up its sleeve.””
They be wrong. The US had 6 bombs by the end of the year
http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab19.asp
I am aware that this view is popular in certain circles. What evidence is there that this is true?
See here:
http://www.silive.com/opinion/columns/index.ssf/2013/06/the_american_bomb_didnt_beat_j.html
That’s totally beside the point, though. Refusing to associate with someone because you disagree with them, or for any other reason, is totally kosher. What isn’t, is trying to force other people to follow your lead. It’s fine that the SJWs hate Moldbug, and wouldn’t want to go to one of his talks. It’s fine if the person organizing the talks happens to be an SJW and refuses Moldbug on ideological grounds. What isn’t fine is the SJWs going around to everyone and trying to enforce their standards everywhere. Let’s be clear: this is an attempt to inflict a lifetime of torture on their opponents. If you bully anyone who decides to employ the object of your ire, you are attempting to destroy their life.
If you hold an opinion that most of society thinks is stupid, you are fine. Eventually you’ll come across a group of friends and an employer who don’t care. If you’re being followed around by a bunch of people who call you scum and warn anyone who associates with you that they’ll be fair game if they continue, you’re only as fine as those people are weak or unenduring. If they’re strong, numerous, and determined, and you don’t have substantial personal wealth or popularity to draw on, you are FUCKED. I hope it is clear that someone hating everyone of a certain race or class or ideology or football fanclub is in a totally different threat class from someone who pals up with other people to make examples of the wrong sort of people. The appropriate response to the first kind of person is to try to educate them, and the consequences for not doing so are mild. The appropriate response to the second is to crush them with overwhelming force, and the consequences for not doing so is the onset of tyranny.
Where do you draw the line between forcing someone to follow you in a boycott, and convincing them to do so through reasoned argument? The distinction seems a bit blurry in the Moldbug case.
Not blurry at all; if you read the conference organizer’s statement on disinviting Yarvin, it’s clear that reasoned argument is not what has persuaded him. His concern is that “[Yarvin’s] mere inclusion and/or presence would overshadow the content of his talk and become the focus”; he specifically states that he has not read any of the writings that the SJWs find offensive. This is not him being persuaded, this is him giving in to threats.
Maybe part of the problem is that people want to appear objective and not engage personally, so it’s easier to say you’re problem is that inviting someone would overshadow the event than to express a personal opinion on their writings? You see this sort of rationale a lot on all sides, not sure it’s always fear or intimidation.
I find this insightful. I find it parallels an argument I had been making (in an unrelated discussion) that not being attracted to someone on account of them being transsexual was okay, but however, mocking others for being in a relationship with a transsexual was not (or other ways of discouraging it).
To put this down more formally, we should have increasing levels of tolerance for various flavors of “censhorship” :
* the government banning things
* what major organisations (the press, companies’ internal policies) condemn
* people telling each other that something is bad
* what people like or don’t like
(the lowest on the list, the more it’s okay to “dislike/condemn” things)
not being attracted to someone on account of them being transsexual was okay
Do you not know this is wrong thinking? That taking account of someone being a transsexual and then using that as your basis for not finding them attractive is transphobic? That you should examine your social conditioning as to why you would not be attracted to a transsexual woman but would be attracted to a cissexist woman (whether you’re straight or lesbian) and then work to overcome such irrational prejudices before you can then decide if you really are or are not attracted to them?
That’s the kind of arguments I’ve seen, anyway 🙂
Is almost always fine. What isn’t fine is, “If you like this, you are bad.” What’s even less fine is “If you associate with this person or hire this person, you are bad.”
I think it’s a problem that easily ties with the government banning things in significance. The government can be crushingly powerful and focused, but it usually isn’t. Especially when it comes to things that aren’t people usurping the monopoly on violence or refusing to pay tribute. For instance, the war on drugs is pretty fucked up but you can still easily get drugs, and that isn’t because crushing the drug trade is impossible.
I don’t know if my perspective is widely shared or not, but here’s how I see the Social Justice Wars. I reside pretty squarely in the Conservative/Libertarian quadrant and I do not care at all about the SJW Agenda. It is not relevant to the day-to-day life of the vast majority of people in this country who aren’t currently in college. It doesn’t offend me and it doesn’t bother me and whenever I happen to encounter it I know it can safely be ignored. It’s only actual function is to remind us of our badly screwed up family and education systems that allow it to exist. Even though it has recently gained the potential to start doing some real long-term damage, I’m convinced that this moment will not last. The grand Progressive alliance is already starting to show cracks and I don’t think it will be much longer until it all falls apart.
Despite this, as was inevitable, the Conservative side has decided to stop being an easy target and to stop giving up so much cultural ground for free. Hence the backlash, which mostly consists of pointing out the glaringly obvious contradictions that exist in the foundation of the SJ movement and highlighting the hypocrisies of it’s practitioners. It’s also happens to be a lot of fun, however, I don’t get the feeling the Conservative side is as invested in this battle as the SJ side. I think it’s because conservatives understand, on a maybe subconscious level, that the country as a whole is a lot more “conservative” than the daily grind of SJ back-and-forth makes it seem. Most of us just don’t have the time or the patience to deal with it, and real life just doesn’t have the space for it. This is a battleground reserved for those who have the time to think about it.
And so no, I don’t care about Microaggressions, on either side. I don’t care if conservative viewpoints continue to get marginalized in mainstream media and on college campuses. Both of them are dying anyway. I will not refer to Caitlin Jenner as a “She”, and I will not get offended if you call me transphobic. I will not “own my privilege” and I won’t demand you stop calling me “an enabler of of the patriarchy”. In short, I am convinced that you are ridiculous, and that in the end you won’t matter.
Your perspective is shared by at least one. I feel sympathy for the people who are sensitive enough to get worked up over this kind of stuff. The lack of resilience (or to use the term du decade, “grit”) in grown-up men and women is baffling. As you say, their family and education failed to prepare them for the world.
I don’t respect many SJWs, but it’s not because they are [insert latest marginalized group here]; it’s because they allow their feelings to be hurt by words. There is literally no combination of sounds that can come from a stranger’s mouth that would ever cause me psychological harm. Maybe that’s my privilege talking, or maybe that’s because I’m okay with who I am.
Thanks for writing this, Barry.
I have no affection for either side of the controversy. That said, I simply can’t believe Conservatives and the non-SJ majority are putting up with such nonsense.
I would characterize the issue as one between liberalism and anti liberalism. Racism and religious discrimination and homophobia are all fundamentally illiberal. But the SJ initiative is every bit as illiberal. We need to clearly point out the dangers and risks of illiberal thinking on both sides of the political spectrum and no longer encourage or support either.
I think the whole SJ issue reflects something ugly in human nature. There is a fundamental tribalistic us vs them mentality. The “thems” are getting power and abusing it the same way the “us” did yesterday. I guess they failed to grok the memo that the whole point was to proceed to a “we”.
Thank you for this post! I have a particular liking for the ones that come across primarily as self-reflection (Right Is The New Left for instance).
The issue of where exactly to draw the line between espousing one’s own political/philosophical views and saying something that makes an environment unacceptably unsafe for another party is something I’ve been pondering for a while. I mean, it seems clear enough that holding some political conservative position such as, say, “the government should cut welfare”, shouldn’t result in someone losing their job on the basis of their views allegedly creating an unsafe work environment for those of low socioeconomic background. On the other hand, there are political-issue-related views such as “such-and-such coworker only got here because of affirmative action” which I can’t help but feel should result in discipline of some sort. It would be good if we could all agree on lines that should not be crossed and appropriate reactions to crossing them, where the definitions for these lines are independent of any particular political issue or marginalized group involved. But that is a topic for another time.
“feeling unsafe” != being unsafe
The “safety” rhetoric is the worst.
But it IS kind of funny how ideologically disparate groups figured out how effective it was entirely independently.
The two most common times you’ll hear “they made me feel unsafe” are at a college activist group meeting (who says it to try and get speakers they don’t like disinvited from campus) and at a debriefing for a police officer who just shot someone (who uses it as justification for lethal force).
I certainly would fear for my job working around you. No telling *what* common, normal statement would come out of my mouth that would have you feeling I should be disciplined.
I admit the kind of policy I’m suggesting lends itself to a slippery slope and is therefore tricky. You, however, seem to have slid all the way down the slope to a place that is somewhat of a hyperbolic distortion of my suggestion.
First of all, there wouldn’t be a question of “fear[ing] for your job” except maybe in some very extreme case of relentlessly harassing someone so much they really can’t function in the workplace, or I’m not even sure what. I’m thinking more in terms of having certain direct-bullying comment reported to an ombudsman who then tells off the offender and makes them feel inhibited from continuing that kind of behavior, or, in an extreme enough case, makes the offender move offices or something.
Secondly, I’m not talking about drawing the line to rope off statements that would be considered “common” or “normal” by many people (at least I certainly hope they wouldn’t!) For instance, telling someone to her face that she’s clearly only here because of affirmative action for women is hardly innocuous — it’s a direct attack on, well, her existence in that workplace related to an aspect of her identity, and a very literally unwelcoming comment. (And yes, this actually happened in my math department.) I don’t know you, William, but I would assume this is not the kind of remark you carelessly make to someone in passing. On the other hand, say, posting an article on Facebook rebutting the notion that women are underrepresented in math due to misogynistic attitudes in academic culture, is not a direct attack on a coworker’s right to be there, and I wouldn’t consider posting the article as an action that should be disciplined in any way even while many might argue that it contributes to an unwelcoming environment. I’m not sure yet how exactly to define where the line should be, but I’m cautiously proposing that it be placed to rope off the former behavior while allowing the latter.
My main point was that this boundary between merely espousing controversial views and making statements derived from them which are sufficiently directly threatening to coworkers should be generally agreed upon all across the board, and that the rule of which kinds of speech should and shouldn’t be subject to discipline should be clearly laid out. That way, you wouldn’t have to worry about not knowing what you might say in passing that gets you disciplined.
What if that female co-worker does not produce the same quality of work as other colleges and the workplace has affirmative action policy? Or maybe she does not show same level of knowledge?
In that case, the statement is equivalent of saying “she is not doing good enough work” and it seem to me that it is what the person is trying to express. I have seen people complain about white male being lazy, producing shoddy work, getting job on soft skills and charisma instead of skill or whatever.
Is there substantial reason to discipline one of these statements? The only gendered thing there is “hired due to affirmative action” assumption which replaces “was charismatic during interview” assumption you would have for men.
I think “they were only hired because they’re related to the boss” would carry an effectively identical accusation.
But would probably be treated very differently.
Hmm. I guess that if someone were to tell their equally-ranked coworker, “You don’t do good enough work to merit even being here”, then that is still a pretty direct attack and maybe the person on the receiving end should report it to a mutual superior so they can step in. I would probably still want to consider it as crossing the line. But my strong instinct is that connecting it to a part of their identity, such as being a member of a group which is a beneficiary of affirmative action, makes the insult worse in a significant way. It’s hard for me right now to put my finger on a rational reason to feel this way, except that a “You only got here because you’re a woman!” remark suggests that the speaker might have been primed in the first place to suspect that her abilities might be inferior because of affirmative action. I have similar emotions regarding comments about a white male not doing good enough work if it’s tied in some way to his whiteness or maleness — for instance, “You only got here because of your white male privilege!” In either case, a part of the person’s identity, which they did not choose, is being used to attack them and explicitly say they are not welcome.
That is also the case in Caue’s “they were only hired because they’re related to the boss” example. I’m not sure how they would be treated differently, and don’t think they should be treated differently. (Of course, if someone feels they have good evidence that their coworker was hired solely due to nepotism, then it might make sense to go over the head of the boss and make this case — assuming that such nepotism, unlike affirmative action, is illegal.)
Why hello there, unsafe-environment-making person. Your hostility to honest expression is incompatible with the values of any successful company and you should be fired from whatever it is you do.
There are much nicer ways of making this point.
I disagree. Chilling effects are felt, not reasoned, if the counter-argument doesn’t inflict a strong impulse that he run for the nearest universally lauded ideological flag to wave it probably didn’t work.
Likewise, the correct counter-argument to any argument in favor of doxxing is an anonymous envelope containing a photo of the speaker’s children.
Wow. Trying to parse that second sentence of your comment, I understand that you think the best “counter-argument” to a dangerous proposal is to give the opponent a taste of that danger themself. Uncomfortably close to a “two wrongs make a right” mentality.
But it’s not having that much of an effect on me, because you’re attacking a very distorted version of my suggestion where I supposedly want to punish honest expression that someone else doesn’t like (which — oops! — would include my own honest suggestion that some honest expressions be punished!) I grant that my initial post may have been worded ambiguously in places — which of course doesn’t mean that the kneejerk reaction to my words should be to interpret them in the worst possible light — but I thought I clarified some points pretty well in my reply to William O. above, which I made before your comments (maybe you hadn’t refreshed in time to see it before posting your first one).
You’re missing the point that I’m suggesting agreeing on a line between expressions of political belief that may have uncomfortable consequences, and direct attacks on coworkers which merit maybe some action (which by the way could just be a verbal warning saying “don’t do this”). The line serves not only to protect people from such attacks but also to protect those who want to make controversial political statements that aren’t direct attacks from being disciplined for doing so.
Or maybe you don’t believe any verbal expression in the workplace should be disciplined at all. So before going any further, let me ask you this.
Do you think there should be consequences for sexual harassment at work? I don’t mean sexual assault or any direct threat of it, but persistent and purely verbal sexual advances that continue despite the other party’s declared lack of interest. Which are honest expressions of a feeling someone wants to convey to their coworker.
The risk of being shamed for one’s opinion scales up with career & personal success, while the risk of being killed walking around is linear.
A scalp’s value in the culture war is proportional to the former owner’s notability, so the risk of purging rises with success. With sufficient importance and fame, and with sufficiently incorrect opinions, the risk of being purged approaches 100%.
If you’re nobody, no one cares to police your opinion. The choice is to avoid voicing any controversial opinions or avoid high levels of success and fame. That’s what makes it so scary.
“If you’re nobody, no one cares to police your opinion.”
Perhaps better stated as “If you’re nobody, only other nobodies care to police your opinion.”
I’m reminded of the Donglegate thing, and the Socorro (sp?) thing.
Those are still upper-middle-class jobs they’re holding, and even then there are a lot of upper-middle-class workers to divide those cases up among, whereas there are relatively few C-level executives to make up the reference class for Pax Dickinson and Brendan Eich.
The only case I can think of where this sort of ideological purging was applied to a working-class person was Ben Kuchera trying to get somebody fired from Dick’s Sporting Goods for arguing with him about GamerGate, and he was roundly mocked for that. Just like in 1984, if you’re a prole you can get away with thinking whatever you want, because it doesn’t matter what you think.
Programmers are upper-middle class? Or were they management? And what about small business (pizza shop) owners?
(I don’t ask to be pedantic, but because it is interesting)
Programmers are definitely upper-middle-class in America, at least if they’re good at their jobs. I would agree that the owner of a pizza shop seems like an excessively petty target, and I don’t expect that sort of thing to happen often, but as a small business owner they are technically a member of the loathsome bourgeoisie.
This seems dangerously close to asserting that all members of the class “programmer” are either rich enough to be privileged, and thus do not need to be respected by the rest of us, or are incompetent, and thus ought not be respected.
If you think being a member of the upper middle class disqualifies you from respect, that’s your problem, and I’m not going to refuse to call members of the upper middle class what they are to work around your bizarre prejudices.
Perhaps the sarcasm in my use of the phrase “loathsome bourgeoisie” did not quite make it all the way across the internet?
OK, I’ll take your word for it that you respect upper-middle-class programmers.
I’m now going to insist that you define what “upper-middle-class” means to you. And then investigate the actual salary distribution of programmers (as opposed to IT professionals generally), compared to the cost of living in the places where programmers work.
Then repeat, with a straight face, your claim that all programmers who don’t meet your upper-middle-class standard, aren’t any good at their job. Seriously, what’s the level of incompetence you are ascribing to the programming community? 80% or so?
This is a stupid argument, but median pay for a software developer is upper five figures, and a software developer that’s good at their job should beat the median, because there are a lot of bad programmers out there. That’s leaving aside the issue of class as distinct from income (a good programmer might take a lower-paying job in order to work on open-source software or whatever, the key thing is the status that comes with the job).
The weather here has been awful enough that I’m not really interested in hearing people whine about how expensive it is to live in California.
@John Schilling
The upper-middle class is generally defined as people in the top 15% income bracket, which in the US starts at about $62,500 according to Wikipedia. Most programmers belong to this group.
Percentiles in the nation-wide income distribution are pretty meaningless as a measure of social class… And even if you relativise to local costs of living, income isn’t all there is to it. I really don’t see programmers being upper-middle class in terms of social status.
Unless you’re using a definition that more or less only counts doctors and lawyers, why wouldn’t programmers be considered upper-middle class?
Because the median programmer doesn’t make a six-figure salary, doesn’t have a parent with a six-figure salary, doesn’t manage any subordinates, doesn’t have an advanced degree, isn’t a member of a traditionally high-status profession, doesn’t wear a suit and tie, doesn’t have an upper-middle-class[*] wife, and is a geek who doesn’t get invited to join the local country club.
It isn’t necessary to have all of these things to be “upper middle class”. A programmer who can tick even half the other boxes would probably be accepted as “upper middle class” with even a $50K salary. But the median programmer, even if they marginally meet the income requirement, doesn’t have any of the other qualifications. Class, even in the United States, is about more than just money.
Doctors and lawyers, have traditionally had all of these things by the time they are in private practice, which makes them good benchmarks for what upper middle class looks like, but they don’t monopolize it.
[*] or very attractive middle-middle-class
Upper middle class is not tied strictly to dollars earned, otherwise many plumbers and other blue collar workers would be upper middle class. Programmers are in fact not upper middle class in status, even if some of them have high income earnings. It creates all kinds of terrible class warfare issues, as they are quite underpaid, but they are successfully coerced into believing that they are not because they make more than the median household income to write code all day.
Ideological purging is applied to low level workers all the time. Someone says something that the wrong person disgrees with, and they get papered out the door. It’s just part of the larger class of [employers/managers getting rid of employees they don’t like.] Of course the reason is not made explicit and does not have to be – see “papered out the door.” It’s not organized ideological policing, but it can’t be at that level. It’s still there.
President of Harvard
Chancellor of Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory
“If you’re nobody, no one cares to police your opinion”
I bet lots of low paid workers have been fired for saying things in the workplace that could be interpreted as racist, sexist, or homophobic. Employers almost have to fire them or risk a lawsuit. Indeed, I wonder if part of the reason for the high unemployment rate among underclass American men is that many of them regularly use language that could get an employer in trouble if said in the workplace.
I wonder if part of the reason for the high unemployment rate among underclass American men is that many of them regularly use language that could get an employer in trouble if said in the workplace.
There may be a correlation, but the causal element for both is probably low intelligence and/or low impulse control.
Also, in the sorts of jobs that “underclass” men have, an employee making *ist statements means that the employee has either created the potential for fights among the employees in general, or has seriously offended a customer or vendor in a way which will likely bring swifter retaliation than a lawsuit.
“low intelligence and/or low impulse control” makes it harder to avoid saying things that could be considered sexual harassment in the workplace.
> If you’re nobody, no one cares to police your opinion
The Pizza people and the bakery lady are both low level blue collar workers.
In Social Justice terms, those were definitely cases of “kicking downward”.
The thing is, at this point, I don’t think being a person of importance has anything at all to do with your social or economic or class status. It mostly has to do with whether you end up in the public eye, and which local story happens to go viral and catch the Internet’s attention on any particular day is more about timing and luck than any characteristic of the people involved.
Edit: Actually, at all is way too strong. Obviously, if you’re already a celebrity or someone with 200,000 Twitter followers, whatever you say is going to get noticed and matter.
Musings partially inspired by this post. Low confidence, posting them publicly to be criticized.
—-
Previously on Slate Star Codex, it is lamented that not thinking critically about rape accusations empowers abusers, but that presumption of innocence makes it very hard to punish rapists. (Recall that most rapists do so multiple times.) Building on this, it seems the worst situation is one where the Clymer camp is maximally successful and gets to the point where all rape accusations are assumed to be true becomes a norm, but people have also figured out that abusers exploit this, so making a rape accusation causes people to strongly update in the direction of “you’re an abuser.” Since abusers are, in Ozy’s words, “really charming and manipulative people”, this manages to screw over victims of abuse (since their abusers have a powerful tool to keep them subjugated, which won’t be questioned, on account of their charm and manipulation) and victims of rape (since they, not being abusers, and therefore not tending to be unusually charming and manipulative, get labelled as “potential abuser” if they take action against their rapist.)
The solution is, of course, to believe true things. There’s a fully generalizable mechanism by which believing not-true things causes Bad Stuff to happen: people want to be seen doing good things (their actual virtue is irrelevant here), so they take a Bad Stuff-minimizing action given their beliefs; given untrue beliefs, instead of picking a Bad Stuff-minimizing action, they pick essentially pick an action at random, causing, on average, Bad Stuff to occur.
The solution is, of course, to believe true things; in this case, believe an accused rapist is a rapist if and only if they’re a rapist; notice how the above microdystopia dissolves as soon as people believe someone is a rapist iff they’re a rapist. This is, as has been discussed, difficult, since there’s not so much witnesses, so it comes down to ze-said/ze-said. Putting it like this, obvious solution is obvious: threesomes.
—-
Back when I was in high school, I was part of the following conversation:
Me: Felicity’s* taking precalculus in as a freshman, right?
Friend: Yeppers
Me: That’s cool. But why? Don’t need no math to make sandwiches.
This was funny because the chance either of us seriously believing anything other than “it’s wrong that women not become engineers or whatever, given aptitude and interest, on account of gender.” In claiming that Felicity needn’t study precalculus, I was countersignalling my feminist values.
Social justice circles aren’t at a point where saying #killallmen can successfully countersignal how much they value men, much like how most instances of “wimmen, make me a sandwich” fail to successfully countersignal valuing women taking any job the free market will pay her to take. Part of this is Poe’s law: now matter how much I disagree with a statement I make, outside of a specific context/a specific circle of people who know me (i.e. basically anything posted on the internet), it’s going to be taken at face value. A good rule of thumb for everyone involved, it seems, is to assume anything that goes on the internet will be taken at face value in absence of clear indications of authorial intent, bearing in mind that Illusion of Transparency is a thing, so your clear indication of intent isn’t necessarily a clear indication of intent.
*Felicity’s currently at MIT. And also not named Felicity; that’s a standard pseudonym, so Felicity might actually be named Felicity, you can’t update based on the name choice.
How long has “make me a sandwich” been a meme? I only heard in the past few months. (And why a sandwich? That doesn’t actually require cooking or anything?)
I remember hearing it as early as the Nineties.
Don’t know why a sandwich is canonical here.
I have no idea why a sandwich, either, unless the point is that a sandwich is so quick and easy to make, the person asking for it could make it themselves, so the “Woman, go into the kitchen and make me a sandwich” has a level of laziness and entitlement and treating the other person as a servant that is extra insulting?
I think that’s reaching; after all, wouldn’t you be more offended by “Woman, go make me a Turkey Dinner!”?
Sandwhiches are simply commonly enjoyed foods that require some assembly.
According to the fount of internet wisdom — no, not that one, I mean Know Your Meme — it’s from Saturday Night Live, with “sammich” coming from The Onion.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/make-me-a-sandwich
Sammich is a lot older than that Onion article.
This was not where I expected this to go…but I like the solution.
One of the things I have been thinking of lately, that is directly relevant:
Suppose that a community exists that has very low barrier to entry, to membership, and to exit. (Anyone can join, anybody can stay, anybody can leave).
Initially, that community will probably have mostly a cross-section of people (not true, but the true case exacerbates the conclusion)
Consider that the population as a whole has both toxicity (the willingness of a person to insult, dox, issue death threats, and mock their ideological opponent) and toxicity tolerance (the willingness to be associated with toxicity) Assume that nobody’s toxicity exceeds their own toxicity tolerance.
This is sufficient for the community to develop maximum toxicity.
The average toxicity of the population is toxic enough that some people will choose to leave; these people will almost certainly be of below-average toxicity. After one iteration, the average toxicity of this community will be higher than the average of the population as a whole, and another marginal segment with the lowest toxicity tolerance will leave.
I think the easiest way to break that cycle is to break the ‘low barrier to membership’, and actively remove members from the community who are too extreme.
The weird thing is that the best communities I know of (including this one) have almost no moderation, and select almost entirely based on some characteristic which surprisingly seems to correlate with nontoxicity (in this case, liking my blog posts). The same is true of, I don’t know, let’s say meditation groups.
You may also be interested in this.
It’s not surprising that liking your blog posts seems to correlate with nontoxicity as you see it. But there are probably quite a lot of people driven away through Decius’ mechanism.
For instance, in a SCC comment thread, you can suggest that bad language, low intelligence and low impulse control is the main casual reason why people are unemployed in the US. That doesn’t warrant a deletion here, they might not even get a reply (whether out of agreement or exasperation). But many people just won’t want to engage in a place where such things are comfortably within the Overton window.
I don’t think censorship is a good solution, but I don’t think you can necessarily have it all, either.
I wonder if people who comment on, say, Yahoo News stories think the Yahoo News commentariat is as nontoxic as we think the SSC commentariat is.
I doubt it? I only read the Yahoo! sports news and not general news, but it’s usually about four comments in on average before people are talking about raping each other’s dogs.
But the commentors don’t think that is toxic!
Don’t think it’s toxic, or don’t care?
I mean, I just went again and the first article is about Jameis Winston getting kicked out of a bar for wearing shorts and, sure enough, comments are people telling each other they suck monkey nuts and are stupid hillbillies. People who think Tumblr and politics are bad should try sports fandom sometimes. I remember going to Dodgers games with my dad when I was a kid to the old dollar bleachers in centerfield and the guys would throw batteries at the opposing outfielders and jump people in the parking lot if they were caught wearing the other team’s gear.
I think that’s less sports fandom and more comment sections on mass-media news sites. I remember much the same from the SF Chronicle’s comments, back when I read it and before it went full-bore clickbait.
The difference between that and Tumblr is that Tumblr has an audience and a certain amount of autonomy, while the comments just about anywhere are widely understood to be a bottomless pit of malice that’s better, and safely, ignored.
(Hi, bottomless pit of malice!)
@haishan
I don’t know about Yahoo News, but I do know there are some online communities (like 4chan and, to a lesser degree, Fark) that seem to revel in being toxic.
We still have a decent sized progressive minority. It sure seems like we have it all when it comes to political groups. The only political ideas that don’t seem to be well represented are the communists but even there are a couple of them around here.
Minority?
Liberals + Social Democratics are two thirds of the LW community, and I’d be surprised if it was a lot different here.
Yup. But it does make for fascinating reading, sometimes.
It is an interesting viewpoint to say that something not being censored places it inside the Overton Window (unless you simply mean something different by Overton Window). As you note, censorship is quite bad, and it is very possible that such a conclusion is not seriously considered by the vast majority (thus not in the window) and yet not censored, since it is a factual claim about the world that could be true or false. Censoring factual claims is generally pretty bad, even when you’re highly confident they are false.
There are a lot of assertions about the world that are “censored”. If someone wants to start a discussion on some factual issue that most people think are settled, and they get completely free reins to do that, pretty sure that will be all the discussion is about.
Even for very reasonable people, it will seem like a waste of time to discuss minor political differences if some major political difference (like “did that genocide really happen?”) is on the table. In a discussion with hundreds of people, people’s agenda-setting power is not equal, nor does the outcome (what we end up talking about) correlate well with the things the majority probably want to talk about.
But are they offset by the people who are engaged just because such things are within the Overton window?
I am absolutely certain that there is some characteristic of this community that drives some people off, leading to its own reinforcement. I also am absolutely certain that you ban enough people to make the “low barrier to membership” invalid.
As a long-term commenter on Megan McArdle’s blogs, starting ca 2002, and one who has observed that over time she has retained a very high-quality commentariat espousing a wide variety of views, it appeara to me that the major factors are: write long pieces with very moderate language that appeal to intelligent commenters of many stripes, have a commentariat that will not feed the trolls, and quickly ban anyone who does not grasp the house rules about civility. Very few bans are actually needed. The barrier to entrance is small, and the range of viewpoints is quite large, but if you insist upon and reinforce civil discussion at all turns, you can have productive discussions involving both SJW-friendly leftists and race-realist reactionaries.
Megan’s glue is that she does food posts, where everyone can drop the politics and talk about something important instead.
Supporting examples; online video games, 4chan.
Let’s just take the “make me a sandwich” and “kill all men” memes. You are right that they are both hyperbolic, and also that they are empty as literal threats. But you also admit that what they are doing is hiding a controversial claim behind a comically exaggerated one. Now, what is the weaker claim to make me a sandwich? Bring me a beer? But literally any other atrocity directed towards men is a weaker claim than “kill all men.” The meme parses as saying that nothing is off the table, which is a very effective threat.
And this is what is concerning about online SJW activism, the moral universe they inhabit is highly inflationary. We don’t want equal pay, we want to #killallmen, straight white dudes are not just boorish, they are responsible for complex social evils a, b, and c (and also they don’t like Beyonce!).
“Make me a sandwich” implies “Women are only good for domestic roles like making sandwiches”. The weaker claim is something like “We should push women into domestic rather than non-domestic roles more.”
I was being glib, the point is that the threats are highly asymmetric which is still the case even after your correction.
(Actually, I bet this is still incorrectly parsed. My guess is it is more along the lines of “stop talking politics.” It is a more gendered way of saying you are being shrill, which is also gendered in fairness.).
Roughly comparing/contrasting “make me a sandwich” and “kill all men”:
Killing an entire gender is obviously much worse than pushing one gender toward a particular gender role.
On the other hand, pushing gender roles is something that actually happened, exists in some people’s memories, and has left a residue that is still causing problems today, whereas mass androcide has much less relation to concrete reality.
So they’re not really symmetric, but one can’t easily be rated less benign than the other.
Men are killed way, way, way more than women, and have been for literally all of human history.
Complete disregard for the lives of men because men do not have an inherent value as human beings or an inherent right to life outside of the utility they provide to women is something that absolutely happens, every single day, in every single culture, on the face of the fucking Earth.
Your willingness to wave it off as “oh well it doesn’t really matter because men aren’t vulnerable like the precious wonderful women are” is part of the very problem you deny!
Dr Beat,agreed men die earlier, but not sure what you mean on total disregard for male life in every culture every day?
Men are murdered three or four times as often as women, nobody cares. Men die on the job twenty times as often as women, nobody cares. One third of men on this Earth are subject to genital mutilation, nobody cares. The US tracks 20 types of violent crime, and when we see that men are the overwhelming majority of victims of 19 of them, people’s response is to talk about how rape, the 20th type, the type men and women are EQUALLY likely to be victimized by, is a horrible fear that defines women’s entire lives and men must do more to make women feel safe and take away their negative emotions, because nobody cares about men’s safety. Men are conscripted to fight and die in war, and nobody cares. They care so little that being conscripted to be killed in war is seen as a male privilege they must atone and apologize for. Women who expose weakness are rewarded by having their needs met, and men who expose weakness are endlessly punished, and nobody cares, because they are men.
Because it is not just “men die sooner”. Men are KILLED. Men are wounded, maimed, victimized, and nobody gives a shit, because they are men.
Come on. Where in my comment arguing that the two are different but it’s sort of like comparing apples and oranges do you infer the view that “oh well it doesn’t really matter because men aren’t vulnerable like the precious wonderful women are”?
I agree that men have always been at higher risk of being killed, while by and large disagreeing with the hyperbole in the rest of your comment (as a man, I’ve never remotely felt that my “inherent value as a human being” is rated less than a woman’s). However, there’s a difference between gender roles which put men in harm’s way more often, and a deliberate desire to see men as a group getting killed off just for being men. Compare “kill all men”, for example, to “kill all Jews”, which is an idea that has existed as an actual view.
Didn’t refresh at the right time to see DrBeat’s latest comment before I posted mine.
There’s a lot to unpack among your claims, much of which I can at least see where you’re coming from while thinking you’re stating it far too absolutely, and most of which is sort of getting into the general issue of men’s rights and away from the particular comparison we were discussing. But, for the remark I can address most quickly:
First of all, in America, men haven’t been conscripted in decades as far as I know. Joining the army is on a volunteer basis, and as soon as something is voluntary, it’s (for most means and purposes) better to have the opportunity than not to. For this reason, it seems that many feminists are in favor of more women being in the military, and in fact we seem to be moving rapidly in this direction.
>whereas mass androcide has much less relation to concrete reality
Tell that to the Russians, Chinese, or Cambodians. SJWs attempting to murder all their class enemies upon taking power has literally happened several times, and been attempted many more.
It’s not exactly that nobody cares– there are anti-war movements, after all, and they aren’t just about women and children getting killed.
However, it’s true as far as I can tell that people don’t necessarily care about things outside their personal concerns unless those things are forcefully brought to their attention, and it’s easier to get people’s attention if you can frame matters as a fight.
A great deal of the risk to men is from other men, so it can’t be framed as a gender fight, and I don’t think anyone has managed to find an effective way of framing it.
We’ve got to find a way to care about people who aren’t seen as innocent.
But a great deal of the things that hurt women are done by other women, and that’s never stopped feminism from demanding men change themselves to fix it. Women are seen as hypoagentic, meaning they are responsible for nothing that happens, not even their own actions. Men are hyperagentic, meaning they are responsible for everything that happens, even things they had no way to influence.
Because women are precious and wonderful victims, anything bad that happens to women, ever, no matter how frequent or who performs it, is All Of Our Problem. Because men are disposable and threatening agents, anything bad that happens to them is clearly proof they deserve bad things happening to them and are unworthy of sympathy.
@Nancy Lebovitz – “A great deal of the risk to men is from other men, so it can’t be framed as a gender fight, and I don’t think anyone has managed to find an effective way of framing it.”
I started writing replies, but on reflection they sounded abrasive and aggressive, and that’s not really the kind of thing I want to be contributing. Likewise, to some extent, I feel that framing things in terms of a “gender war” would be dishonest and unfair. The problem is that it would be dishonest and unfair in exactly the same way that a very, very large percentage of feminist rhetoric seems dishonest and unfair to me, so maybe it’s sauce for geese and ganders?
There’s a ton of gender gaps, but DrBeat is essentially right: somehow the only ones that matter are the ones where women come out worse. Have you ever heard a single mention of the male suicide rate being a problem? As a male who went through a rough patch where suck-starting a shotgun was an option on the table, I was still absolutely floored to learn that we dudes off ourselves somewhere between three and ten times as often as females. Before seeing the statistics, I would have thought it was entirely the reverse. Why is that? Is it a problem worth addressing? If not, why not? Does it have anything to do with how suicide in the media kinda seems to be portrayed as either heroic or justice for male characters, but tragic for female characters? Honestly, I’m spit-balling here.
Did you notice anything wrong with the recent speech at some government function about how women are and have always been the real victims of war? Or how women make a few percentage points less in wages than men, *maybe*, while men die on the job ten times as often? One of these is worth mentioning in the State of the Union, and one isn’t. Why is that?
Genital mutilation seems similar. Female genital mutilation is a horrifying evil, laws are passed, etc. The male version is…?
When female students choose not to enter STEM fields, it’s an educational crisis. When male students do worse at pretty much every level of their school career its..?
And again, a lot of this seems to me to be very unfair and even silly to attribute to some sort of sinister gender imbalance, only that doesn’t seem to stop the other side, using what is frequently much flimsier evidence, or sometimes just straight-up lies. A pattern seems to emerge.
[Edit] “gooses?” fuck. I have forgotten the face of my father.
Look, men are the expendable gender, and always have been. This is simply what evolution predicts, as seen in the work of Bateman and Trivers; as women are the sex who invest more in offspring (pregnancy + lactation), they are the limiting factor on reproduction, and thus comparatively more precious than males (see also the estimated 80% vs 40% historical reproductive success rates). Societies have never cared as much about the injury and death of males as they do about females, and never will. It’s not fair, but life isn’t fair.
@FacelessCraven
Thank you, and Well said.
The “men are uniquely powerful” and “men are uniquely expendable” narratives are both correct, but they’re not correct of the same men. Crown princes and barons of industry are powerful and not expendable; peasants and homeless guys are expendable and not powerful. “Men”, both historically and currently, are far more distributed in their fortunes, and far less apt as a reference class, than “women”. One corollary is that it’s easier politically to identify the interests of women-in-general than men-in-general, hence why feminism is a thing but masculism isn’t.
“Men”, both historically and currently, are far more distributed in their fortunes, and far less apt as a reference class, than “women”. One corollary is that it’s easier politically to identify the interests of women-in-general than men-in-general, hence why feminism is a thing but masculism isn’t.
Or rather, it’s more socially acceptable to pretend that this is the case and for individuals to make sweeping statements on “the interests of women” without actually checking to see if all women, as a group, are on board with that. In the US, 80% of women don’t identify as feminist, and 41% identify as pro-life. On any political issue poll, women show a similar variance to men, though often with small differences in the mean.
Even when you look at less important things like pop culture that you would think would be a lot easier to predict, the self-proclaimed representatives of the interests of women have frequently shown themselves to be way off the mark. See, for example, how feminists spent years bashing the Twilight movies and later Fifty Shades of Grey as the most misogynistic movies ever made, while those movies raked in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office from an overwhelmingly female audience. Or more recently, how Mad Max Fury Road, which internet feminists adored, attracted an audience that was 70% male while Pitch Perfect 2, which internet feminists hated, opened the same weekend and actually beat Mad Max for the #1 box office spot with an audience that was 75% female.
The habit of SJ activists to use the words “women” or “minorities” when they really mean “me and my friends,” or “the idealized image of women/minorities that I, a white male, assume applies to all women/minorities” is truly one of their most obnoxious behaviors. But I think it’s tapping into larger cultural biases that assume that people who aren’t part of the “default” category must all differ from the default in uniform ways. It’s a form of the Outgroup Homogeneity Bias, ironically being perpetrated by the people who claim to be fighting against the idea that these categories should be considered Outgroups.
That isn’t exactly comforting or convincing when all around us in every other area we are trying to make things as fair as possible, and the most powerful movement that claims fairness as its goal is actively, tirelessly trying to make things as unfair as possible, which they are allowed to get away with, because “oh well life isn’t fair”.
Even if we cannot get people to value men’s lives as much as women’s, which I don’t grant, we should still try to stop powerful people from lying constantly about how much danger women are in in order to hurt men more. Just because I accept that fires happen sometimes doesn’t mean I should be okay with you committing arson.
@stillnotking
And this is exactly what Bateman’s Law predicts! It’s part of being a placental mammal, and it’s not going to change.
@DrBeat
and generally failing, since it isn’t very possible
History is replete with people (such as the officials of the Soviet Union) whose claims for seeking “fairness” meant in practice making things unfair in their favor.
I’d dispute the view that hurting men is the goal and purpose for most; I’d posit that usually it’s simply the lack of caring about the harm that’s done to men by their attempts to benefit (some) women. And I’d otherwise agree about the desireability of this goal, but, for the evolutionary reasons I outlined above, I just don’t think you’ll ever get enough people to care to make complaining about the situation worthwhile.
Dr. Beat, my comment about the difficulties of putting together a movement for better treatment for men came out a little nastier than I wanted, but I wasn’t sure how to fix it.
I’m irritated because there’s a lot of talk (much of it reasonable) about how bad men have it, and remarkably little work on building solutions. Sometimes I get the impression that MRAs think feminists and/or women should be doing the work.
For example, it’s certainly true that there should be shelters for male victims of domestic violence. Men and/or mixed groups should be raising money for this. It could be private contributions or it could be lobbying for government grants. It’s possible that I haven’t heard of the work that’s being done– let me know if I’m missing something.
This doesn’t mean that the men who are very badly off have a strong obligation.
I realize there’s a prejudice against taking care of men, but are more barriers to change than there were for the early feminists? They were working in a era when women couldn’t even own property.
Dr.Beat, that’s embarassingly similar to the way I work myself into a rage about SJWs– picking the worst of what they say as though it’s one big voice of God aimed at me. Still, it can be an exaggerated version of a real attacks.
Men actually are more threatening than women. Practically all the public violence (war) is done by men. It’s still important to take everyone who’s killed in war seriously.
FacelessCraven, I have heard about the high male suicide rate, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I’m more interested in such things than a lot of people. I’ve also seen speculation about the causes, which include depressed men being more inclined to show anger rather than sadness, and more likely to turn to alcohol. I’ve even seen a suggestion that women use less effective menthods (pills vs. guns or jumping) because women are socialized out of making a mess. I can’t remember seeing an analysis suggesting that suicide is a side effect of men being less valued in general.
I mentioned the difference in suicide rates to a friend, and he mentioned a study which found that physical affection between men (a arm around the shoulders in photographs, that sort of thing) dropped a lot after the 1930s. Social isolation is really bad for people.
I do generally notice that male casualties of war get less attention than female and child casualties.
For what it’s worth, I’ve pointed out that ignoring boys doing worse than girls in school shouldn’t happen because of past sexism against girls. And I’ve noticed that girls get a sort of cheerleading that boys don’t.
This doesn’t mean I think prejudice against girls and women is gone, just that I think that people can be horrible in a number of directions.
Thoughts about whether the blurring of sex roles (more women being soldiers, more men taking care of children) will tend to change how men and women are valued?
Nancy, DrBeat gave a concrete thing that feminists should do. He didn’t say that they should build shelters. He didn’t say that they should take any positive action. It is something that MRAs cannot do for them, which is why they demand it of feminists. He said that they should stop lying.
@Kevin C. – Evopsych is a poor justification for perpetuating specific, identifiable injustices. Yes, there’s obvious reasons why men are considered expendable in the hunter-gatherer context. We aren’t in that context any more, so why would the evopsych arguments be relevant? In particular, I feel that one should have to choose between “men are expendable” and “The Patriarchy did this!”
@Nancy Lebovitz – “I realize there’s a prejudice against taking care of men, but are more barriers to change than there were for the early feminists? They were working in a era when women couldn’t even own property.”
I’ll freely admit that I know less about the history of the suffragettes than I should. I know that their campaign was met with some degree of disapproval from conservative society, that they were seen as rude and improper. I understand that there was political and social opposition to their movement.
Is that worse than being accused, loudly and publicly of being a Rape Apologist, by members of an extremely powerful political movement that have a decent chance of actually making the label stick? The fail state for a suffragette, near as I can tell, was the continuation of the status quo, plus some additional damage to reputation. The fail state for a modern Men’s Rights activist seems more along the lines of one’s name in the papers, followed closely by the words “Rape apologist”, followed by details regarding the termination of one’s employment.
I would never, ever, EVER publicly attach my real-world identity to Mens Rights, or speak about the issue in public. Not because I believe many of the arguments aren’t entirely sound, but because I am not interested in being the target, now or in the future, of a Social Justice witch hunt. Perhaps this is an exaggerated fear? It’s a very real one for me, at any rate.
“I’m irritated because there’s a lot of talk (much of it reasonable) about how bad men have it, and remarkably little work on building solutions. Sometimes I get the impression that MRAs think feminists and/or women should be doing the work.”
I don’t follow the MRA sphere much, partly because some of them seem like the worst parts of Feminism gender-swapped, and partly because the general consensus when I first encountered them was that they were horrible sexists preaching misogyny and hate for daring to claim a movement was even needed.
I’ve certainly never encountered the idea that women need to fix everything. Near as I can tell, it’s a bit difficult to start working on solutions when the movement is busy defending itself from spirited efforts to stamp it out of existence.
[EDIT] – I think I have seen it argued by certain Feminists that there’s no need for a Men’s Rights movement, as it’s Feminism’s job to fix any imbalances between the genders that exist. The implication seems to have been that men’s issues are minor and secondary, and the vast majority of society is still tilted against women. I find that argument unconvincing, but the “Patriarchy” narrative is alive and well, despite what seems to me compelling evidence to the contrary.
“For example, it’s certainly true that there should be shelters for male victims of domestic violence.”
To do this would require an acceptance that women beating their mates is actually an issue. Asserting that it is has historically resulted in significant push-back from factions within the wider circle of feminism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey
Also, primary aggressor law, which frequently results in a domestic violence call automatically resulting in the male being arrested, regardless of the facts. Those laws were lobbied for by the feminist movement, and I’m given to understand that the current movement is not interested in seeing them changed. Calling for them to be changed is a good way to get yourself labelled pro-violence-against-women, fired from your job, etc, etc.
A great many other issues follow the same pattern. The feminist perspective is the default position of society, and in many cases is enforced by law, and those trying to challenge that situation are exposing themselves to essentially unbounded risk.
I don’t want women to fix everything. I don’t think they can. I would like them to stop using their extremely powerful political movement to actively make things worse.
“Thoughts about whether the blurring of sex roles (more women being soldiers, more men taking care of children) will tend to change how men and women are valued?”
I don’t think it makes any difference at all. Soldiers aren’t expendable any more, and that’s not likely to change. Tactics, training, equipment, and political realities all trend toward greater investment in the survivability of the individual soldier.
I don’t know how familiar you are with WWI, but while women weren’t being allowed to own property, men weren’t allowed to not fight in the Somme. Blacks in the north, as I recall, clamored to fight for their freedom in the Civil War. How hard did women push to be allowed into the trenches? And then of course, you have the White Feather Society…
…And again, my point is not to argue that this is all the fault of women. My point is that there’s a narrative prevalent in Feminism that says that the ways women have it worse matter, and the ways men have it worse don’t, and that this narrative is frequently deployed to either stop men from attempting to better their situation or to actively make their situation worse to secure further improvements for women.
I don’t know how we fix the problem with women not entering STEM fields, or the problem where men do worse at every step of their educational career. I think the latter is probably a more serious problem than the former, and I’m afraid to say that in public. Do you think that fear is irrational?
“This doesn’t mean I think prejudice against girls and women is gone, just that I think that people can be horrible in a number of directions.”
I’d agree with that. It’s just, one gender has an old, well-established, well-organized system to push for having their gender-based issues addressed, and the other… doesn’t.
“I mentioned the difference in suicide rates to a friend, and he mentioned a study which found that physical affection between men (a arm around the shoulders in photographs, that sort of thing) dropped a lot after the 1930s.”
This is real, and for me at least there are not words to describe how awful it is. There is something you need, like you need air and food, but you will never, ever get it. Eventually its possible to learn to stop thinking about it, and if you can do that, life goes on. Romantic relationships let you out of the hole. When they end, you go back in, and now you have to relearn how to not think about it again, from scratch, while juggling the rest of the mental baggage. It makes it hard to hope.
The other side of it… Karen Straughn talks sometimes about the cultural norms about men and failure. I have no idea what it’s like for women or even other men, but for me her description sounds pretty accurate. Being a failure is death-in-life. It is annihilating. It’s not something that’s happened to you, it’s *what you are*. And hey look, there’s a narrative all spooled up and ready to roll for what you do in this exact situation!
“Yes, there’s obvious reasons why men are considered expendable in the hunter-gatherer context. We aren’t in that context any more, so why would the evopsych arguments be relevant?”
Not just the hunter-gatherer context; the selection forces I’m talking about applied to all mammals. And they’re relevant because I’m talking about human nature, about how our brains have been shaped by evolution. Whether or not men are expendable in comparison to women in the modern “context”, our “lizard brains” (and “mammal brains”, too) are hard-wired to believe that they are.
I’m not saying that the very clear injustices you outline are in any way right or how things should be, I’m just saying that in trying to fight them, in trying to get people to care as much about male issues as female issues, you’re also fighting human nature. This is a “great idea, wrong species” type of problem, a Sisyphean task in which only moderate, incomplete success obtained through continual effort and pushing is the best one can hope for.
That rests on the assumption that biologically determined traits are fixed and immutable while culturally determined traits can be changed as easily as flipping a switch. It’s annoying how prevalent this idea is, because there really isn’t that much evidence for it.
The most important biologically determined psychological trait is the sex drive, but countless human cultures have groups of people who are able to overcome that. Catholic priests, monks, the Shakers… Sure, that last one is pretty much dead now, but they managed to last for several generations even in spite of the obvious reproductive disadvantage.
Or consider the cultural institutions of armies and war. A man leaves his family for years and travels long distances at a great risk of death with little, if any prospect of significant material gain for the benefit of not his own family but his entire nation, the vast majority of which he is not related to. From an evolutionary perspective, this behavior makes no sense at all.
And the evidence suggests that this behavior did not evolve. If you study examples of tribal warfare in almost any hunter gatherer cultures, you find that it is conducted through raids and ambushes that are arranged as carefully as possible to minimize the risk of death to any of the participants. While war is older than humanity, armies are an invention of human civilization.
This is why every culture that ever built an empire went to great lengths to instill its people with idea that dying in a war is glorious. America has all the monuments to its war dead, Britain has the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Ancient Greeks had their epics, the Aztecs had war chants that expressed an eagerness to die on an enemy’s sacrificial altar. The examples are endless. You see this in every advanced civilization, not because it was hardwired into human brains by evolution, but because hacking the human survival instinct to give soldiers a willingness to sacrifice their own lives offered an advantage so great that any culture without such institutions was swept away by ones that did.
Obviously there are limits to how much human nature can be changed by the environment, as seen in the failures of social engineering experiments like the Soviet Union. But you can’t just assume that because something is influenced by biology, it is set in stone. The mere fact that humans went from organizing in tribes of 200 people at most to nations of hundreds of millions of people in less than 10,000 years is a testament to the malleability of human psychology.
Besides, if the MRA agenda was really doomed to failure, one wonders why the SJ crowd considers it so much of a threat. Or how so many of its tenets managed to spread to so many people, even if most of those people do not identify as MRAs, in just 20-30 years in the face of constant attempts to brand anyone expressing those ideas as a heretic.
I suggest that both “make me a sandwich” and “kill all men” are ways of saying “I’m not going to listen to anything you’re going to say”. How much is added by their connotations is left as an exercise for the student.
The problem with #killAllMen and #maleTears “jokes” is that they come from feminists, and specifically from “diversity officers” like Bahar Mustafa and writers like Jessica Valenti, that is, those who claim that feminism is about gender equality and has the monopoly over gender discussion and therefore the MRM has no legitimate place because feminism deals with men’s problems too.
#MakeMeASandwitch “jokes”, AFAIK, don’t come from high profile MRAs or anybody whose formal job is preventing discrimination.
Think of an Israel BDS group twitting #GasAllJews “jokes”.
Rightly or wrongly, feminists tend to be accused of misandry, and specifically of considering men as disposable cannon fodder whose personal struggles and safety don’t matter. By saying #KillAllMen, feminists are basically proving their critics right, as much as the MRAs would prove right accusations of misogyny by saying #MakeMeASandwich or the BDS people would prove right the accusations of antisemitism by saying #GasAllJews.
Is there a good counterexample to the rule of, if you see someone say #KillAllX, where you are a member of X, you should treat such a person as an enemy? Can we safely extend this to X where X is any group that people are born into even if you are not a member?
A similar rule regarding requests for sandwich-making seems less reliable.
12/10
I wish you wouldn’t be so nonchalant about people getting killed just walking down the street. Getting killed in the street is not just an “act of God” that “just happens.” It happens to thousands of people every year in the US due to intentional street design decisions that prioritize traffic flow efficiency over human safety. And it’s not like this is the natural order of life in a car-based world: in the US, the rate of pedestrians killed by cars per vmt is far worse than in any other developed country. We really should do better, but we freak out at the idea that a car trip might take 4 minutes longer.
Or just legalize self-driving cars already.
My job is going to be obsoleted when driverless cars hit the market, so I know a little bit about the subject. They’re not really all the way there yet, unfortunately — most dangerously, they “can’t see” temporary traffic lights and aren’t very robust against road closings. Also it’s still not clear how well they handle extreme weather. It’s coming soon, but we unfortunately still have a few years of humans having to drive. (And then probably at least a few more decades of humans still being allowed to drive, barring a Singularity or other existential catastrophe.)
The first generation of any new technology is almost always inferior to the established old technology, useful only in niche applications if that. The first cars were slower than horses; the first airplanes were slower than cars and carried less than airships.
And twenty-odd years into the drone age, “self-piloted” aircraft crash and burn at ten times the rate of their manned counterparts flying similar missions.
The first generation of “self-driving” cars will be either substantially slower than manually-driven cars, or they will be much more dangerous. Or both. In neither case are they likely to be a broadly preferred transportation solution, though niche applications can of course be found. In both cases, unfortunately, they are likely to be viewed with extreme disfavor by everyone outside of those niches for their negative externalities, whether more dead bodies of a particularly frightening type or “just” more gridlock of a particularly annoying type.
‘The first generation of “self-driving” cars will be either substantially slower than manually-driven cars, or they will be much more dangerous.’
Note that we’re already past this generation, and current self driving cars are incomparably safer than human drivers, and not that much slower.
In their present form they aren’t probably safer than human drivers.
Preferably cars that have the optional “pedestrian awareness” feature, unlike this Volvo.
Where do you get your numbers? It seems to me that Japan has a higher rate of pedestrians killed per vmt than America.
Agreed. I think it’s weird that people compare the chance of a disaster to being hit by a car, and the reaction is “oh ok it’s a lower rate so it’s ok to not worry about it”. I never worry about terrorism but I worry a lot that I might get hit by a car! But apparently most people just accept it as some sort of unavoidable natural disaster like getting struck by lightning and put very little effort into thinking of ways to make driver stop running people over.
Being hit by a car basically is a natural disaster like getting struck by lightning. There’s a base rate, and if it’s a couple orders of magnitude worse than lightning strikes it’s not enough to really hurt most people. The rate isn’t growing, and nobody is trying to make it grow. The people who are trying to make it shrink have already picked most of the low-hanging fruit, and doing anything much more at either the personal or societal level would be intolerably expensive for most people. And we’ve been dealing with this long enough that everyone is familiar with it. So just internalize the basic safety rules like “don’t stand on a hill in a thunderstorm” and “look both ways before crossing the street”, and get on with it.
Anti-American terrorism, in September 2001, suddenly became a lot worse than it had been before, and this was the result of people with unknown capabilities but the explicit goal of elevating terrorism to an existential threat. The United States hadn’t previously put a lot of thought into how to counter terrorism, so it was clear that the escalated threat called for an escalated response, but most people didn’t understand the threat well enough to know what that response was.
The magnitude of the contemporary death rate from the two causes, is arguably the least significant data point in the comparison.
The key here, and with any comparison of outlier events to everyday events, is the perception of control.
We fear terrorism because we believe it to be some random thing that either happens to us or it doesn’t, and there’s nothing we as individuals can do to stop it.
We DON’T fear getting hit by a car as a pedestrian, because we generally believe that only happens to idiots who are looking at their phones while walking through a busy intersection. Same deal with why people fear flying more than driving (we all think we’re great drivers who can avoid accidents, but in the air, your life is in the hands of the pilot who is potentially a drunken buffoon).
Now this particular example isn’t universal. If you commute on foot in a busy city every day, or if your parents were killed as pedestrians, etc. you may fear walking around more than terrorism, but for the average person, fear is inversely related with “sense of control over whether the event happens or not.” And once again, it isn’t about REAL control, it’s about whether we THINK we have control or not.
And this applies to much of the SJW debates as well. You can’t convince men to not be concerned over false rape accusations by pointing out that they don’t happen that often. The fear men have over this is not based on frequency, but on lack of control. Men have the perception that they can do EVERYTHING “right” and still potentially be accused of rape and kicked out of school if the girl decides a month later that she thinks you raped her. Short of videotaping every sexual encounter (which itself can be a crime, and some SJWs have suggested wouldn’t even matter because she may have said no off-camera before or after) or simply never engaging in sex in college, whether or not this happens to you seems to just be random chance, like the random chance of being on the wrong airplane when a terrorist decides to blow it up.
Regarding the Gallo thing: I’ve never felt like boycotting something before. Certainly never considered boycotting something I actually enjoy and buy.
Congratulations, Gallo, you’ve done something impressive for your employer.
Hooray, my attempt to help you understand angry people worked!
PS: Are you the same “Careless” who used to be on the Antica forums, sometimes under the full name “Careless Non-Sequitur”?
No, that’s not me.
I get that understanding things is good, but I can’t help but wonder if we might have found some exceptions here. “The work we did making people fearful” seems like a bad thing, not a good thing. Making people angry does as well. It’s not always best to be going around Raising Awareness all the time! People have a limited amount of awareness and I’d rather spend it where people can do more good (see: effective altruism) and/or have a better time doing it. These things are costs (temporarily increase fear/anger to later hope to decrease it), not benefits.
You too? The nazi comment made me think “I wish I hadn’t stopped reading Scifi so I could… um… stop reading Scifi you were involved in”.
I haven’t bothered “boycotting” anything, but being made by Tor or Sony Pictures knocks a substantial percentage off my odds of reading/seeing a thing. (Sony for their cowardice over the release of The Interview.)
the Protestant Reformation, the French/American Revolutions, Abolitionism, the Springtime of Nations, the Women’s Suffrage movement, Prohibitionism, the Women’s Liberation movement, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam Peace movement, the Feminist movement, the Social Justice movement, we didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world’s been turning, we didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it but we tried to fight it
EDIT: what an asshole move to demand examples and then delete your post after I put a bunch of work into listing them
What were you giving examples of?
Cases where the left has been the side in control of the “cultural microphone”.
When I asked about “times in history” I meant examples of the right holding the microphone, since that’s the context where you used the phrase. I deleted my comment when I noticed “since the invention of the printing press.”
Oh, I apologize for the misunderstanding.
Scott, my fear reaction to a lot of SJ stuff is similar to yours, but I’ve always diagnosed the source of the fear a little differently than you do here. I think I hang a lot of importance on my self-image as a conscientious person, and the idea of being seen as an oppressor by the most vulnerable members of my community is extremely painful.
During my college days in the 90s I felt very much on the same page with everyone on the left, and it made me feel like the moral hero of my life story. But increasingly, I encounter SJ positions and arguments that seem entirely wrong-headed. And when I express my views on these issues, especially online, I find myself subjected to really harsh moral judgment by those who disagree. I always thought of myself as on these people’s side. I go through cycles of being tempted by the thought that I’m wrong and it really is rape unless you have affirmative consent, or it really is a travesty for white authors to write stories about Australian aborigines (to give two examples). Then I think about the actual plausibility of the SJ ideas I’m entertaining and fall back to my earlier view. But I feel kind of scummy for it. Just the other day I said to my own feminist ex-girlfriend, “You think I’m a bigot, don’t you?” (She said no, but she’s not the most judgmental person in general.)
It’s a roller-coaster ride, and although I dread the possibility of being mobbed by SJ activists in some public place online, that’s really not what eats at me. The real discomfort is my conscience. My whole life I was supposed to be helping women and minorities, and now I can’t be honest about my politics with the majority of the most political members of that demographic because they’d consider me a monster.
Content warning: what follows contains a description of the process of psychological/emotional of abuse.
The externalisation of responsibility for your own actions and circumstances onto others without there being a sufficient causal connection between those others and their actions with your own circumstances and actions, is one step in the process of abuse (or that leads to abuse) in the cognition of many types of abusers. Another step is to attempt to make the victim take the responsibility for their abuse; the longer the abuse goes on, the more likely the victim is to internalise these incorrect notions of responsibility that the abuser wants them to believe, and become (psychologically) complicit in their own abuse, and start taking the responsibility for it.
Many movements are intrinsically abusive; I think SJ is one such, specially if you’re a member of certain groups, and certainly if you’re scrupulous. (I think scrupulosity in general makes people easier to abuse.)
What you’ve described follows in its general contours, and eerily in its specifics, the trajectory of an abusive relationship. Obviously, this isn’t going to be a perfect one-to-one mapping, as it’s how you relate to an ideology and its adherents that is the question here, and not a relationship with another person. But the effects on you are similar. I’ll describe the process; please see how well it matches your experience.
In the beginning, the ‘movement’ or political ideology you embraced formed a part of your self-image, it made you feel a moral superhero. (This is the first stage – abusers are superficially charming, and often very good at flattery, and making you feel good about yourself.) In the beginning, you fall for this – you like how it makes you feel; like a moral superhero. (Abusers often start out this way, by picking something which is a core part of your self-image, such as your belief that you want to help the most vulnerable members of your society, and feeding you large amounts of positive praise and validation about it, so that they can later use their supply of this, and the threat of denying it to you, to control you and make you fearful.)
But as time goes on, you notice that things aren’t quite that rosy – little signs that there’s a dissonance between the words and actions of your beloved (in this case, beloved ideology). Then you have a few, intermittent bad experiences, often centered around trying to have a separate life/self or establish and maintain strong boundaries (in your case, your disagreement with what many in the movement now believe) and that fear solidifies; this is called the ‘manipulative shift’, where what had started out as (at least appearing to be) something beautiful, and something you were involved with because of how positive it made you feel, is now something that’s a cause of more and more fear and anxiety. This is what you describe here – the shift from once celebrating what you were doing, to a constant, gnawing fear of being seen as terrible. (In a relationship with a human, this would be the point where the positive desire for love turns into a constant, debilitating fear of its loss.)
This also corresponds with a shutting-in, with being afraid to show your authentic self because you’re afraid. You become fearful of expressing authentic opinions, of being your authentic self, because you know it’ll result in an unpredictable backlash.
The ‘roller-coaster ride’ is another aspect of psychological abuse; this is to keep you off-balance. Another is to make the victim doubt themselves – you’re already doing that when you said you feel the dissonance between being tempted to believe the standard narrative about anything without affirmative consent being rape, versus your own opinions. I think that in this instance, the only reason you even bother considering these opinions as even potentially valid is because of your investment in this, and with the fears that you have; would you, without your SJ history and conditioning, ever consider the claim that “all sex without affirmative consent is rape” anything other than utterly laughable? It’s the same with the cognitive distortions introduced by abuse; it’s obvious to everyone else what’s going on, but the abused person’s perceptions are skewed.
In case you’re not convinced (I know I wouldn’t be, after reading just one comment by someone I don’t know on the internet), I’d request you to look up information about the progress of emotionally abusive relationships, the tactics abusers use, and specially how people are pulled into such relationships. Even though you have no literal abuser, the internal psychological processes you’re describing match the descriptions to a tee.
“My whole life I was supposed to be helping women and minorities, and now I can’t be honest about my politics with the majority of the most political members of that demographic because they’d consider me a monster.”
I think that you need better friends to hang out with. Including better female friends. If people in SJ mistreat you the way you describes, it might be good idea to socialize outside of that community more.
It does not matter how nice ideals of any given community sound to be. If you find yourself to be a subject to “harsh moral judgement” for disagreements about policy, up to point where you feel bad person despite still rationally thinking that you was right, then it is time to get out. Feeling scummy and being convinced by their arguments are two different things, one is huge red flag, other is good thing.
Besides, SJ does not represent all women, SJ feminism represents SJ women opinions. Helping women, if that is what you see as important, should not require you to be part of a specific movement nor have exactly same opinions on how to achieve that helping.
Very few of my actual friends are SJ types. I mostly come into contact with SJWs online and through my work. My friends are actually a great source of support and sanity checks when it comes to this stuff.
It is hard to find dateable women who aren’t into SJ at least a little bit, though.
Hard where? I can’t think of any woman I ever dated who had SJ leanings. Maybe one who was a little concerned about play violence, but that was a weird very individual thing where she was a primatologist and the parallels to how chimps control their women was a little too close for comfort. I’d even go so far as to say the Internet is the only place I’ve ever met these people. I even dated actual foreign humanitarian aid workers, immigration attorneys, and all kinds of liberal do-gooders, none of whom were anything like this.
I live in Portland and date on OKCupid and I can’t get away from these people. All the dateable women.
As someone who used to live in Oregon, I can confirm this.
I also wonder how old walpolo is. I live in Indiana now and things don’t seem much better…
Re: checks for symmetry, would it help if you widened your timebox in looking for comparable events? I mean, my go-to real-life example of why firing people based on them saying politically unpopular things is a bad idea is Joycelyn Elders, and her tenure as Surgeon General, which was cut short due to her commentary that masturbation was a normal part of sexuality and not particularly risk-prone.
I think that if you extend your timebox back a few decades, when ‘gay’ was literally a dirty word, you’ll find a wealth of examples to compare your thoughts to. And when I do this, I find it’s actually surprisingly easy to come out consistent.
It was still pretty common in the recent past for teachers to get fired for being gay, though it does seem those days are basically over except maybe in Catholic schools.
A remarkably measured response in the comments so far – I was rather expecting that this would already be clearly something you’d regret publishing, as was tagged.
As for the shamings and the firings… take this logic far enough, and eventually there might be an equilibrium. To be fired for an offense against one side would be to have a hiring recommendation for the other. Not a cheery prospect to anyone who is anywhere heterodox to their mob-shaming-assigned side, but one plausible result… assuming the escalation does stop somewhere.
The nuclear analogy worked for what was close to a bipolar world with very tight control over the launch codes; how well does it apply in a world where anyone can start things up?
To extend the analogy — what’s the historical frequency of wars when there are multiple peer powers competing? When there’s a hegemon?
I would not be optimistic about the ‘endless feud’ stopping in a non-confrontational manner over shared understanding of what it is to be fearful, not on any significant scale. Either one side wins, or another, or there’s some common overriding cause in which most might unite. An external enemy often works, and did recently for a few years in America.
One answer, the standard libertarian one, is to decrease the stakes. Let one side or another win any given argument, but let it end there. Do not let that victory not be enforced across the land by law.
The converse works too – make it so that ‘we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately’ and disputes about pizzas and conferences fade away. But that takes us back to the common enemy solution, which either implies a real and formidable threat (undesirable) or some sort of manipulative imaginary one (also undesirable).
Or perhaps it’s a scaling issue: for most of human history, having dozens of people loudly asserting one’s moral failings and immediate need for correction was a credible existential threat. In that case, the lizard-brain has yet to adapt to flame-wars, and given the greater availability of threatening news everyone is feeling more unsafe… and defending themselves, often in ways that offend their neighbours, and so the cycle grows.
If the cause is just that there are that too many strangers, too easily heard too widely across too many different communities, inevitably provoking disagreements that spiral ever louder and more bitter… what then? Give up the internet? That’s not something easily argued, especially here.
Retreat to enclaves of civility and reason, and stop our ears to the cacophony outside?
How?
Try to persuade people that they should not act to make other people ‘afraid and uncomfortable and under siege’, no, not even if they’re doing it first? Excellent morals; unpersuasive strategy.
My advice is learn how to write more succinctly.
Scott is such a pleasure to read – I’d vote for his being more prolix, if anything!
+1
It is a little strange that people like me (trans girlfriend, thinks people with tattoos and furries are oppressed) and Scott (polyamorous, asexual, pro-drug legalization, etc) are apparently stuck on the “Right.” I really do not like being on the Right. People politically on the right are, for example, much more likely to be rather uncool with trans people. My mom for example asked me if I want therapy.
But my experience is most of the people on the right “grin and bear it” and keeps their bigotry to themselves (Except my actual family). Where as people on the left seem to feel free to openly attack me (usually for being a “Sexist”). So I do find the “symmetry” a little hard to see.
However it is possible it is just bad luck that alot of feminists/etc have treated me poorly. I could have wound up viscously attacked by anti-LBGT people instead. And then I would have wound up hyper-sensitive to anti-LBGT views instead of SJ views. This does seem plausible!
What does “GF” mean in this context?
girlfriend
Oh! I was confused because when you said “me (trans gf)” I thought you meant you were a trans gf.
Obviously GF means girlfriend and I’m sorry for being so confused.
I suspect it is more a function of age than political views. Do you see that correlation or does it also apply to the old leftists and young conservatives?
Not knowing you all that well, I’d say both you and Scott are solidly on the left, at least when it comes to social issues. You’re just further right than the extreme-left. The worst awfulness of the social justice activists is still better than being literally beaten to death by neo-Nazis.
Data point: I’m hyper-sensitive to both of them. My entire social circle in the US consists of very liberal people, and I don’t feel feel threatened by the right here, but I do sometimes feel threatened by the left. Thus, when I see a controversy involving social justice within this social circles (i.e. where I’m pretty confident everyone believes in gender equality, but we may disagree on the interpretations), most of the time I refuse to tale positions, but when I don’t, I defend pro-equality anti-SJ position.
However, when I see such thing in Russian, I’m reasonably confident that the true rejection of the feminists isn’t that they’re acting inconsistently, but the idea that women should in fact be making sandwiches, and I should be at least ridiculed, and at most beaten up for wearing dresses. Thus, I have defended feminists, and massively steelmanned their position when I engaged into discussions on “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” and Shirtgate. And it took me a huge amount of self-control to click “hide” instead of “comment” and not defend feminists on the Tim Hunt controversy.
I would like to think that I’m acting consistently with the belief that Russia would have benefited from being way more feminist than it is, and Tumblr would have benefited from being less feminist than it is, but realistically, it’s just my prejudice against both right and left kicking in.
Also, regarding your
and Scott’s
Can we abstain from making such arguments? First, they pattern-match to “I have black friends”, which has been overused and discredited beyond any limited. Second, such arguments prove only a little. They prove that Brad is probably not a neo-nazi, or at least the kind of neo-nazi that consistently applies their beliefs, and they show that you aren’t repulsed by trans women beyond any ability to fall in love, but that’s about it. I’ve seen goddamn trans women who believe that gays should be killed, that everyone who doesn’t pass as a cute girls isn’t really a trans woman, but a male pervert, and that trans men don’t exist. And yes, I’m fairly confident that was a trans woman. So things like “I have trans/black friends/gf / I’m poly, etc.” are in fact rather weak evidence of one’s overall political beliefs.
Pet peeve of mine: I don’t like the backlash against “I have black/gay friends”. In this case, marrying someone black *is* a step forwards for diversity and tolerance, and does deserve to be praised, or at least respected. Criticizing “but I have black friends”-like arguments comes off as an attempt to blame that action for not being tolerant *enough*, which is a stupid way of trying to make people more tolerant.
If people make black/gay friends purely in order to get brownie points on the internet, then it’s a win for society, because it’s a tiny step towards a more tolerant society. It may be “hypocritical”, but it makes the world a better place, which is more important.
This is only tangentially related to your point, but I think that yes, we should be making arguments like that.
(disclaimer: I don’t have any black friends)
Right, I agree that if someone is being accused of literally having Hitler’s portrait on the bookshelf and KKK hood in the closet, this may be a solid argument. But in most other cases it’s pretty much damning with faint praise. I’m not endorsing ridiculing people making this argument, since it’s indeed a terrible strategy to discourage people from doing good things, but I endorse encouraging people to make stronger arguments in serious discussions when they can be made.
As @Richard Gadsden and @HeelBearCub pointed out, people are often willing to make exceptions from general rules for their immediate social circle. And again, yes, the very willingness to make such exceptions is a step forward from zealous bigotry, and the problem of people who aren’t willing to make such exception for their own children is much worse, but “Probably not the literal worst” isn’t the best award one may desire. And I see this pattern towards myself all the time, when my Russian friends from college post articles about the decadent West, where gay are marching on pride parades all the time, and ban the word “parent” from schools, and then go treat me with kindness and respect. Though I may well be getting Bunny-Ears Lawyer exempt for having conclusively proved my competence, and one of them, while quite drunk, claimed that people are talking behind my back. I know better than to yell at people for being kind and respectful, so I don’t (except one time, where incredibly angrily commented on the article oh how “thanks Lord, our law against the propaganda of homosexulism prohibits things like Ontario sex ed curriculum”, but even then I only directed my anger on the journalists only), but still.
Also, with marriage in particular it’s worth noting that sexism never stopped men from marrying women, even where it’s crazy strong like in Saudi Arabia. This can be used to argue that sexism has never been as strong as racism (i.e. “exterminate all women” or “exterminate all men” has never been accepted as a nice policy idea by any non-trivial number of people, while genocides and ethnic cleansings have been happening all the time), but as long as we believe that Saudi-level sexism is still somewhat problematic, we shouldn’t treat one’s having friends or spouse from a discriminated group as strong evidence of their egalitarian beliefs.
More particularly, IMO, there are lots of people who have demonstrated far greater capacity for sympathy for close personal friends, for lovers, and for relatives, than they do for similarly-situated people they don’t know personally.
For example, they are racist, but they exclude the people they know personally from the set they want to oppress.
People are making personal accusations about people like me/Scot/Brad/etc. So it seems reasonable to present personal evidence about whether these actions are true. Someone who was actually a White Nationalist/Neo-Nazi would not marry a black woman. So it is highly relevant that Brad’s wife is black.
@stargirl:
“Someone who was actually a White Nationalist/Neo-Nazi would not marry a black woman.”
That is a perfectly rational statement. As we know, people are hardly ever completely rational in their behavior.
Suppose you are both someone who believes in the inferiority of both women and blacks, and desire a mate who is subservient to you? If you select your mate based on optimal perceived outcomes for your children, you would not select a black mate.
But if you want to make sure you feel superior and dominant in your relationship, and this what is actually most important to you, you might select someone who is black.
I’m not saying this is anything like what anybody in particular has done, but I think there are enough examples of it in general for it not to serve as a generic counter to charges of racism.
Plenty of slaveholders had sex with their slaves, who would never have had sex with sheep, despite claiming the slaves to be essentially animals,
Dating an X-person is not a full proof argument against being prejudiced vs X-people. But its certainly evidence you are not prejudiced vs X-people. It seems better evidence, to me, than just saying you are not prejudiced. Of course there could be sufficient evidence that points in the other direction!
Also I do not think your argument works for “mainstream” neo-nazis/White nationalists. The vast majority of these people believe in something called “white genocide.” They are really not cool with marrying anyone who is not white. Though it might work for some other forms of racism.
An American slaveholder would hardly have *married* a black woman.
A white who marries a black person would be hated and ostracized by any white nationalist circle. It is the universal consensus among those circles that miscegenation is bad. Therefore, someone with a black wife is not a white nationalist in the ordinary sense of the word.
@me:
You are completely missing my point about slaveholders. It is an example of holding a viewpoints (Blacks are animals; Having sex with animals is a moral wrong) and behaving irrationally given these beliefs.
@stargirl:
Sure, its a piece of evidence that would contradict the narrative that one is a racist, but it is not dispositive. In this context, it is being deployed as if it is. Absence any other information, you could update in favor of “not racist” but in the context of making racist statements, I would tend to actually update the other way (i.e. those who makes racist statements when their partner would be hit by them are MORE likely to be racist). But I want to carefully qualify that in practice, as some statements that are claimed to be racist may be not be.
I am not sufficiently versed in the tenets of White Power and Neo-Nazism to know how many members of these groups will take the stance of “that person is a race traitor” given marriage to a black. But again, I will note that we are really good at rationalizing the behavior of those we regard as members of our in-group, so nothing would shock me.
Give an example of a sttement of Brad’s that makes a stronger case for him being racists than him marrying and having children witha black women makes a case for his non-racism.
@Randy M:
I’m not arguing in favor of the position “[some name] is a racist or has made racist statements”.
I am arguing against Emile’s position that knowledge of the race of spouse/partner/friend says much once you already have established evidence of racist statements.
Given the statements, their racism rises or falls on their own.
Ultimately this is really just a question of “what is racism?” While that term is so (intentionally) vaguely defined, it’s pointless to argue what proves or disproves it.
“I am arguing against Emile’s position that knowledge of the race of spouse/partner/friend says much once you already have established evidence of racist statements.”
ONCE.
One notes that it is perfectly proper and logical to point out that until you hit that point, you are SOL.
@Randy M, @Mary:
So don’t argue that “x can’t be racist because they have [y attachment] of the race in question.” Simply refute the the argument of racism by referring to the actual positions and accusations. It is perfectly legitimate to say (as Randy M does above) “point to something racist that [x] has done or said”. The burden of proof is on the person making the contention (which I’m not).
But once someone points to actual statements or actions, you can’t avoid discussing the action or statements by simply pointing to [y acquaintance].
Your arguments are non-sequiturs. It doesn’t matter whether racism is hard to define. It doesn’t matter whether or not one has established racism yet in some specific case that I am not even talking about.
Even if you have other evidence, it will never erase the black wife as evidence. It will always be something to consider.
HeelBearCub, all your comments have been non sequiturs. No one has produced the smoking gun that you claim would be evidence against him. Harping on what it would mean is therefore a non sequitur.
Isn’t it nifty how easily this was turned into a game of “guilty until proven innocent, and also no evidence is definitive proof, therefore no evidence will be allowed”? One off-hand accusation of racism outweighs the entire course of a man’s life. That’s the power of Social Justice, baby!
@Cauê:
I agree it is evidence. It provides context.
If the statement was made “Man, I hate [race of people]. They are lazy and shiftless and untrustworthy.” and someone then said “But, your wife is [race].” I’m not sure the wife lifts very much, especially in a binary is/is not racist decision.
Conversely, if someone were to say “I sometimes feel uncomfortable when I am the only [my race] in the room.” Well, that is a very, very weak statement. The context of “wife of a different race” would easily counter this.
But I don’t think that the weak statement works very well at all as evidence to determine so binary is/is not racist.
So I’m still going to fall back on, argue about the statements, not the race of those you associate with.
Did I miss something? Did someone ever point out what racist statements Brad actually made?
Nope! No racist statements were made.
Well, not by Brad. Arthur Chu abused Brad’s wife and daughter as “human shields” for existing.
One is strongly tempted to speculate about the possible motives for harping on such non-existent statements. There are no innocent ones.
@Urstoff:
As I have pointed out, but some people refuse to acknowledge, my argument in this sub-thread has nothing to do with Brad. It’s just a conversation about how much the evidence of [acquaintance of race] should update your priors.
Oh, okay. Well then I won’t worry about it since evidence of racism presumably needs to come before the mounting of a defense.
“As I have pointed out, but some people refuse to acknowledge, my argument in this sub-thread has nothing to do with Brad. ”
You posted them in a subthread about Brad. That makes them about Brad. It was unwise of you to try to conduct that conservation where the subthread casts a false light on your comment.
@Mary:
Until the comments section here obtains significantly added functionality, I think we will all have to suffer with indignity of interesting side conversations to the main point. You can get in a huff about it or try and apply the principle of charity. I have tried to indicate as specifically as possible, multiple times that my argument was hypothetical and didn’t apply to Brad.
Emile even specifically stated that the argument was tangential, and indicated it was about whether these types of arguments should be made in principle.
Are you prepared to apply the principle of charity yourself? For instance, you could admit that what you insist is a misinterpretation is nevertheless a very natural consequence of your putting your comments where you did, and not saying it didn’t apply to Brad until someone asked you to provide the statements.
@Mary:
I did say that it did not apply to Brad, right at the beginning.
From my original post: “I’m not saying this is anything like what anybody in particular has done, but I think there are enough examples of it in general for it not to serve as a generic counter to charges of racism.”
I definitely intended to make it clear at the outset that I was not talking about Brad, and/or anyone in particular. It is quite explicit. Was it not explicit enough for you?
Charitably, I would guess that you probably saw the post after that where I did not reiterate it and did not make the connection.
I’d say that having an SO of another race is probably fairly substantial evidence against being racist against that race, and having a transsexual SO is probably substantial evidence against being transphobic. But people are only liable to raise these points as evidence in situations where people are drawing on other evidence to make the inference that they actually are racist or transphobic. Having an SO from one of the above categories isn’t strong enough evidence to outweigh any possible countervailing evidence of racism or transphobia; there are certainly going to be some racist or transphobic people who can muster said evidence, and immediately letting them off the hook regardless of countervailing evidence would mean turning a blind eye to some clear cases of prejudice. But who a person chooses to associate with as an SO is not zero evidence; people who have a black SO are probably significantly less likely to be prejudiced against black people than the the population baseline, etc.
If we systematically exclude all such “circumstantial” evidence of a person not being prejudiced, but admit evidence of their being prejudiced, then we create a situation where we can’t distinguish between people for whom we have good reason to believe they are not prejudiced, but who have occasionally said or done things that could potentially be interpreted as prejudiced, and people for whom the evidence paints a clear and consistent picture of being prejudiced. The fact that a single piece of evidence is not by itself conclusive doesn’t mean that we should filter it out of our discussions.
“But people are only liable to raise these points as evidence in situations where people are drawing on other evidence to make the inference that they actually are racist or transphobic.”
Nonsense. They are raised in situations where people make up the accusations whole-cloth on no evidence whatsoever.
Then the proper counter argument is “Point to anything they have said or done that is racist. You won’t because you can’t.”
I’ve seen quite a lot of accusations of racism mounted where no defense was considered appropriate, and been the subject of a few myself, but I can’t recall any where there was literally no evidence of prejudice. It’s just that, while evidence such as “I have black friends” is considered inappropriate to offer in defense, evidence of similar magnitude is considered adequate basis to form an accusation.
Accusations are often based on misunderstandings, but a “misunderstanding” often manifests as a piece of information which appears to offer evidence one way in a localized context, but does not offer evidence that way in a broader context which was not observed.
Right.
Having no black friends is considered valid evidence to support an accusation of racism, but actually having black friends is discounting as valid evidence to counter said claim.
Then the proper counter argument is “Point to anything they have said or done that is racist. You won’t because you can’t.”
Ha. Ha. Ha.
That’s what we’ve been doing. You have been harping on how such things would be evidence.
@Matt M:
The fact that most people of the dominant race have no friends in the long subjugated minority race is evidence of the continued segregation of the society (said segregation being historically mostly due to racism).
It’s evidence for underlying structure, but not any one persons views. I would argue that anyone who says that merely not having black friends makes you a racist is simply wrong.
“I’ve seen quite a lot of accusations of racism mounted where no defense was considered appropriate, and been the subject of a few myself, but I can’t recall any where there was literally no evidence of prejudice.”
Live and learn. Things that have not happened to you personally have still happened.
Mary, can you give any examples?
I’d add though, that, as factors such as having a black SO are evidence favoring a person not being racist, behaviors such as expressing frequent worry about being misidentified as racist would be evidence of racism; the pool of people who express such worry is probably more likely than the baseline population to actually be racist (and I say this while fully acknowledging that such fear is often justified for people who’re not racist.)
This is all crap essentializing anyway. Actions are racist and one person can do both racist and non-racist things. Say I once murdered a person. Am I a murderer? Sure. But I have friends who are not dead. Good evidence that I don’t kill every single person I meet.
So does “racist” mean “every single thing you do is racist?” Just a few things? Just one thing? What’s the critical mass and why the heck does it even matter? Why do we need to fall into this convoluted trap of virtue ethics finding cutoff lines for when we can or can’t classify a person as bad? You’ve got a black wife, good for you. You own a construction site in a 40% black neighborhood and 2 of your 400 employees are black? Maybe look into your hiring practices, which may or may not be discriminatory but seem worth investigating, even though your wife is black.
Isn’t this more productive than “oh my God! Racist!” “No I’m not! I have a black wife!”
Adam-
I think there’s some sense to the “essentialist” argument as you describe it. Murder describes acts, but it’s not impractical to label people as murderers, because it’s a very rare act and we can reasonably and usefully separate out people who have and haven’t engaged in it. If “racist” acts are much more common, and we can’t separate people by whether they have or haven’t engaged in them, we can still distinguish people who have greater or lesser disposition to such acts, and while this leaves us open to threshold disputes, it also has significant conveniences over refusing to so categorize people at all.
Besides, I think that the issue of whether acts or people are racist is really an issue of semantics. We could say that only acts can be racist, but then this lets us categorize people according to propensity for racist acts. Or, we can say that acts cannot be racist, only people, with “racist” being a description of racial bias, but then we can categorize acts by how characteristic they are of racial bias.
@Desertopa @Adam:
I think you guys are getting at something.
I agree that it’s much more fruitful to describe a specific act or set of acts than attempting to decipher a relatively inscrutable eternal state of being.
But when someone says “X is a murderer”, they aren’t meaning any direct statement about the consistent state of X, not in the same way that saying “X is a violent person” would. Where is “X is racist” would always have the second connotation.
In the case of a vehicle running someone over, you will need to know much more than that mere fact of to determine that the person driving is a murderer. You will need to know context: what was happening before the event, who was driving, who was run over, do they have any relationship to each other, etc.
In that same way, you need to know much more about an actual statement than just the words to know whether it is racist. In both cases, knowing enough to infer state of mind when then action occurred will tell you a great deal.
I think you could also make the case, analogous to driving in a dangerous manner by texting while driving, which is dangerous and can lead to death without being murderous, that a statement can be a racist statement even if there is no intent. But in that case it doesn’t say very much about the individual other than that they may be careless or clueless.
Conflating the two things (making a statement that is racist vs. “being” racist) seems to happen quite a bit, on both sides, whenever it benefits them.
As far as I can tell, such arguments are considered “discredited” because the SJWs wanted to be able to continue to wield the stigma of “racism” against people who, by any objective measure, are not in fact racist.
More charitably, such arguments are discredited because the speaker’s black friends tend to be from a completely different subculture than the modal American black. A quick census of my own black friends, for instance, would find mostly first-generation immigrants with a sprinkling of second-generation, all high-SES, all well-educated, and all sharing multiple significant subcultural affiliations with me.
So they’re guilty of doublethinking around the implications of why “he has black friends, but they’re atypical category members” is relevant, but probably correct that an accusation of being prejudiced against stereotypical black people (which they gloss as racism) is in no way deflected by hanging around distinctly unstereotypical ones.
…an accusation of being prejudiced against stereotypical black people (which they gloss as racism)
On my wish list of impossible things, somewhere between the FTL drive and zero-point energy, is the terminology that lets us distinguish between racial prejudice and cultural prejudice in civil discourse. “Stereotypical black people” is a cultural designator, though I think the proper euphemism these days is “urban”. As we have recently seen, you don’t even need to be black to be a member.
But, anywhere within earshot of SJ at least, to claim a difference between cultural prejudice and racial prejudice is to denounce yourself as the worst sort of racist. I don’t see that changing any time soon.
@John Schilling:
Was the stereotypical black urban culture informed and molded by the 600 years that led up to now?
What about the stereotypical black rural culture?
And how is it that culture different than the stereotypical white, poor, southern, rural culture? and why?
@HeelBearCub
I’ve read in Thomas Sowell’s “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” that the cultural ancestry of “urban black [US] culture” consists of Scottish lower class immigrants. I’m not sure if you’d be okay with reading Sowell, though.
(Excuse my English)
@H:
Interesting. I’m not familiar with Sowell’s writings. Given the background on his wikipedia page, I would probably want to know how he was sourcing his opinion. I assume he isn’t doing his own research on the cultural fore-runners of modern black urbanity.
Your English seems to be correct here. No need to apologize.
You’re correct, but talking about the “urban black culture” of small-town Missouri (which is where I learned that it was best for my health if I avoided all black children who weren’t at my church or in my extended family) would really be straining the euphemism to its breaking point.
Yeah, well, you can’t have that, because regardless of whether the stance on culturalism was that it was acceptable or horrible, if it were delineated from racism the culture war would be over (or at least, entirely different) and progressivism would have lost. The freely culturalist society brings back de facto segregation five minutes later, the consistently anti-culturalist society has disparate impact laws between Red tribe and Blue tribe, the two societies look quite different but they both stop legally- and educationally-driven social reform attempts dead.
In my experience, not only do they not much differ, they were the same clique.
@Alraune:
Do you endorse the idea that the culture of poor, rural, southern people produces the bad outcomes (I am assuming bad outcomes, because poverty generally is a bad outcome, and is easy to link to other bad outcomes).
Or do you subscribe to the idea that poverty generally produces other bad outcomes, and the culture is product of the poverty as well as other, regional factors?
Or do you believe that both the poverty and the culture are produced by something innate in the people who inhabit the culture?
@HeelBearCub: My recollection is that Sowell presented his own original research in that essay. Not having it available ATM, I cannot verify that. (The book/essay seems not to be easily available online.)
I expect material circumstances dominate how a society ends up, culture mainly prunes people’s decision trees, and innate factors tend to determine differences in outcome within a group.
My main social engineering belief, though, is that we should stop trying to do it. In particular, I think we have several cultures in America being forced to operate under a foreign culture’s incentive structure and institutions, with the result of (even?) worse outcomes than any of the cultures involved natively result in.
A older form of “I have black friends” (IHBF) argument is and should be discredited: where the “black friend” turned out to be the doorman, milkman, country club waiter, or shoeshine boy.
So “IHBF” became a shorthand for a Bob Dobbs type claiming as “friends” black people with whom he had no actual friendship.
However, having legitimate black friends is evidence that you don’t wish for slavery to be reinstated. It’s not conclusive proof that you’re incapable of racism at all times and in all places, but it’s a point in your favor.
And having an actual black wife is really, really, really strong evidence that you view blacks as fully human and not to be enslaved, and that racist behaviors are a rare thing for you indeed.
Against the charge of, not racism, but explicit white supremacism, having a black wife is contrary evidence of roughly the same magnitude as having the alleged victim walk through the courthouse doors in a murder case.
What if he had an actual friendship with one of those people?
I’m thinking of something in Mencken’s diary. He went to visit a friend, was picked up at the railroad station by the friend’s black chauffeur. The chauffeur turned out to be uneducated but intelligent, and Mencken had an interesting conversation with him. The next time he went to visit he was looking forward to talking with the chauffeur, but there was another guest, a white woman, and the chauffeur wouldn’t talk in her company.
Which I took as evidence, contrary to the claim of the malefactor who edited the diary, that Mencken was less racially prejudiced than most of us, not more.
I seem to remember “I have black friends” being an unusable defense against accusations of racism from quite a long time ago, maybe the sixties– well before SJ was in play.
This isn’t totally unreasonable, since it’s possible to be prejudiced against a group while believing that one’s friends from that group are exceptions.
The phrase abruptly appeared in books in 1970, but it does not seem to be the modern usage. The appearance is really abrupt, which can be seen by turning off smoothing, which is rather odd for something that is not a cliche or idiom. But, of course, books lag other venues for the relevant usage.
Right: that’s because in the sixties, your black friend was the milkman. He wasn’t actually your real friend.
Having genuine black friends is not a silver bullet that proves that you’re not racist, but it does make allegations of purposeful, virulent racism less plausible.
But my experience is most of the people on the right “grin and bear it” and keeps their bigotry to themselves (Except my actual family). Where as people on the left seem to feel free to openly attack me (usually for being a “Sexist”). So I do find the “symmetry” a little hard to see.
That is my experience as well. I live in Louisiana and I have plenty of red tribe people in my social circle (even some in my extended family) and they definitely talk about politics less than my liberal/leftist friends, even when they are in what should logically be red territory. This is probably just due to a lot of (though certainly not all) the cultures contained within the red tribe placing a big emphasis on manners and politeness, especially when interacting with strangers, whereas SJ circles are infamous for saying that demands to be reasonable are a tool of oppression.
This is always going to depend on where you’re at. The only real Internet community I ever hung out in for a long time was the Rivals Mainboard, a subscription site for NCAA football fans, who are largely concentrated in the American south and mostly male, and I was there for the sports talk, but when things turned political at all, the place skewed way right and people were pretty openly bigoted and sexist.
Off the Internet and into real-life communities, and frankly I’ve never been anywhere where people openly attacked each other at all. I even went to college in the bay area and was definitely to the right of any average student there, but our discussions were more wonky than yelling at each other.
@Adam:
Maybe it comes down to this (not sure it’s true, curious if people come up with counterexamples).
Places where people yell in each others faces in real life:
Opposed political rallies
Places where opposing political rallies happen frequently:
College campuses
Is “Right” even a coherent thing? Or is it just a large basket where everyone who is not a socialist gets thrown in?
Religious fundamentalist? Right. Atheist libertarian? Right. You want a God-Emperor? Right. You prefer free market? Right. Slavery? Right. Self-ownership? Right. Totally socialist, but disagree with something one comrade said at the latest Party meeting? Not above suspicion of being right-wing.
Of course if you define “Right” this way, you get many sympathetic (who happen to not be socialist) people mixed with many unsympathetic (who happen to not be socialist) ones.
Isn’t this standard outgroup homogeneity?
For liberals, everybody different is a right-winger (and probably a fascist if they’re very different), and for conservatives, everybody different is a left-winger. And both cases see more diversity in their “side” than in the other.
Similarly, Chinese people will talk about “foreigners” as if it was some kind of unified group (though to be fair, it usually refers to Westerners and not say Indians, Japanese and Africans).
@Hellcrab et all
You will notice my original claim was it is “odd” me/Scott are apparently on the right. I gave examples of beliefs/actions that make people on the right uncomfortable and potentially hostile to me/Scott. This is quite surprising, in theory the “left” should be kinder to me/Scott than the “Right.”
I did not give those examples in the spirit of “proving” me/Scott are not sexist/racist/etc. I will note if a man was married to a black woman and still identified as a white nationalist this would be a genuine surprise. Since White nationalists hate white people who marry outside their race (they call it contributing to white genocide). If white people with black spouses even remotely commonly considered themselves White Nationalists something very strange would be going on!
Not odd when understood as tactical. Heretics are more dangerous than infidels, your worst ideological enemies are the ones whose arguments aren’t vulnerable to your thought-stopping cliches and can plausibly pull away your audience.
And heretics are more obvious to you than infidels. And there are fewer of them. And you can make an example of them to show the rest what happens to those who deviate from the party line.
And heretics actually care.
This is my impression too. I can get annoyed by some conservative views on nationality, border control or immigration (and actually, also by leftist views on the same :)), but it seems to me that the conservatives do not smear their views all over your face whether you like it or not, whereas the left are very vocal about it. Kundera, in his “Immortality” likens the left (he is otherwise mostly apolitical in his prose, this is quite an exception) to a “infinite march”. I think that is a good simile. A lot of conservatives tend to have some views, but they largely keep them to themselves. The (radical) left is fueled by the need to change the world for (from their perspective) the better and that requires a lot of activism. In fact, even literally, I think the marches of the left-wing associated causes outnumber the right-wing ones quite a lot. That could however simply be because young people tend to be more on the left than older people and young people are also more likely to generally do something as “youthful” as going to a protest march or something like that.
Up until very recently I had three main social circles in Silicon Valley: university (which has such a high number of people who’ve been to the US for less than a year that it doesn’t count), LW (I know better than to extrapolate that to the entire Bay Area), and J-fashion group. And I made the offense of extrapolating them to the whole area, since there’s a very large percentage of non-tech workers there, and even blueish collar workers like sales. This group is by and large leftist as heck – radfems, anti-ableists (fun fact: an actual wheelchair user was enthusiastic about exoskeletons, but an able-bodied member called be ableist for supporting their development, since they normalize walking), anti-racists, anti-GMO, anti-nuclear, anti-capitalism, a lot of non-ironic usage of the word “murica”, etc. That made me seriously believe that in this area Tumblr has won.
And then I started interacting more closely with the corporate and startup culture, and HOLY CRAP TUMBLR WAS RIGHT! I’ve seen people seriously defend the position that women should never do the first move in relationships, people say that homeless people in SV are such by choice, say that Putin is a badass, etc. They read the news about “female lab staff falling in love”, said “yeah, makes sense”, and no one fired a flamethrower at them! I believe that’s what they call “shitfest” of the sane and compassionate parts of the internet.
I still hold the opinion that it’s not exclusively white male shitlords who are causing the problem, since the ones who argues that women facilitate relationships, and men mush act were a Latina and Asian women. However, I have significantly updated the priors in the direction that perhaps the world isn’t that much different from the way Tumblr describes it. On one hand, that made me quite angry at them – why do you keep picking on scrupulous nerds who have read damn Dworkin, and politely disagreed, when you have this right around the corner?! But on the other hand, I have to agree that there’s much more merit to their position than I used to think, and I realized that they haven’t won, not even remotely. While whatever stuff they’re doing is in fact often scary and hateful, to encounter it, you have to actually on purpose or by a lot of luck wander into the places they dominate, which aren’t apparently that numerous.
Please oh please send me a list of these shitfest companies populated by shitlords. I would sell up and move to Cali for that kind of corporate culture.
Become a healthcare provider, especially in an acute care area like ER or OR. You can’t assault people, but none of those statements would be considered even remotely controversial in any surgery suite I’ve ever been in.
Or join the military. Something like this has been a pretty major argument against unit integration, especially after some of the 5’5″, 110 lb soldiers look in the mirrors and realize the argument from superior physical prowess only holds if they’re willing to be excluded, too. It’s no longer policy, but still a widely held view and the new policy is not popular.
I don’t think it’s the 110 pounders who can’t do their pullups…
Depends no the branch of service. Marines get tested on pull-ups, so they can do pull-ups. I had countless soldiers who could do 80 push-ups but 3 pull-ups, because the Army doesn’t test pull-ups (ironically, they spent five years and a few hundred billion dollars studying ways to improve the fitness test, one of the things was adding pull-ups, and then at the last minute yanked all the changes and kept the old test because they said equipment costs would be too high).
Well in fairness army pullup bars would probably cost $1,700,000 each
The 3 pullups that Adam mocks is the proposed standard for female marines that keeps getting postponed, presumably because it would have too high a failure rate. Which reason is presumably also why it got scrapped from the army.
Actually, now that you say it, I do seem to remember at least part of the justification being that women are inherently worse at doing pull ups, so testing that is unfair. I don’t even know what to say to that. My ex-wife was a history making first ever female in the army to qualify a firing battery and then a battalion after they opened the field artillery to women and I’m damn supportive of their right to at least be considered if they can cut it, but let’s be real. Every single one of them just failed out of Ranger school. It’s a pretty god-damned hard job. Maybe one out of every few hundred is going to make it, and good for them, but for Christ’s sake, don’t lower the standard even lower than it already is.
I can easily think of perfectly reasonable forms of the four “Tumblr was right” points you mention, as well as unreasonable forms.
Putin *is* a badass. At least in the sense of the word where it just means one is incredibly tough and capable.
Unameliorated praise or criticism, however fair, for a controversial political figure is sending a signal.
How would a perfect reasoner’s priors be updated upon hearing an individual say one of the following sentences?
“Obama smokes in secret.”
“Hitler really turned Germany’s economy around.”
“FDR was a cripple.”
“Stalin was skilled with words, and quite quotable.”
Communication isn’t just about saying things that you believe, a large part is about what things you emphasize and choose to redirect conversations to.
There is an obvious, albeit boring, answer to your dilemma whether to accept the arguments of your lizard brain and thereby be forced to accept the argument from privilege: They are both only correct insofar as they approximate Utilitarianism and so the correct thing to do is simply shut up and calculate: (number of people impacted)⨉(amount of impact)⨉(probability of affecting change).
The problem with this is that it quickly degenerates into work, and becomes even less exciting as all our political concerns evaporate when compared to world poverty or existential risk.
Utilitarianism is known to have a lot of issues – just like any other attempt at creating a formal ethical system done so far. The prior odds of any single one of them being the ultimate final answer to everything are fairly low, and I’d be rather wary of using any of them as the final tiebreaker.
This was good, very good indeed. Unfortunately i am coming to the conclusion(maybe a wrong one) that current society is doomed to idiocracy and that intellectual honestly such as displayed here will be received no better then blasphemy against the Crunch of the old.
How dare you speak against Holy Captain Crunch!
The Crunch *is* breakfast, and breakfast *is* the Crunch
There’s one fundamental asymmetry that you don’t address. The “anti-social-justice” (your words) movement, by definition, struggles against the social justice movement, and does so because of something the social justice movement does or is. Also by definition, the ASJ movement didn’t exist under that name until after the SJ movement had achieved a degree of prominence.
So who does the Social Justice movement struggle against? At the tactical level, they are obviously in conflict with the ASJs, but strategically, who did they set out against in the first place? If their overall target were roughly identical to ASJ, you’d have called it by its original name rather than coining a new one.
Crudely speaking, SJ’s strategic-level adversary is “The Patriarchy”. Their tactical operations are directed against a mostly distinct group of people that you label “ASJ”. Because ASJs are unambiguously real, easy to find, and weak enough that even SJ can hurt them badly enough to feel like they’ve won a victory. The ASJ is mostly beneath the notice of the Patriarchy, neither supporting nor opposing them.
In the area of gay marriage, SJ can run the fairly blue-ish Brendan Eich out of his silicon-valley tech job over a $1K contribution; have they even inconvenienced Claire Reiss or Alan Ashton?
SJ attacks the wrong targets, because that’s all they can do. It’s like Catholicism, in some not-too-distant alternate history, responding to the terrifying existential threat that is the Reformation by cracking down on the Jews and various local heretics. The Protestants had the support of millions, controlling rich and powerful nations with armies and panzer divisions. The Jews were weak, and local, and they fit the pattern of “White guys who don’t respect the authority of the Pope”.
So, assume enlightened Jews. They understand the Catholics, why they are offended by and genuinely terrified of the Protestants. Maybe they recognize how the tactics of the Inquisition sometimes map to the tactics of their own resistance movements. Maybe they even understand why the Catholics target them when the Protestants are too powerful to reach.
The Protestants are maybe secure enough in their powerful nations to mind their own business and start experimenting with religious freedom, even, but some of them are always going to be doing things that offend or frighten Catholics. The Catholics are going to retaliate, and they can’t touch the Protestants. How, with perfect understanding of all of this, do the Jews make peace with the Catholics?
>responding to the terrifying existential threat that is the Reformation by cracking down on the Jews and various local heretics.
Historically, it was the protestant nations that were much harder on Jews and local heretics than the Catholics, even at the height of the counter reformation.
I came here to make basically the same point. 90% male CEOs is not symmetric to 90% leftist editors. 90% patriarchal CEOs would be.
Sometimes I wonder if there are spaces like that. Maybe the Catholic church? Maybe some industries? Is it possible that some hypervigilant feminists actually spent time in those spaces?
Catholicism… responding to the terrifying existential threat that is the Reformation
Historically, the response of the Church to the “terrifying existential threat” was:
(1) A squabble of German monks*, said the Pope, more concerned by the health of his pet white elephant
(2) The Council of Trent, which was the impetus for the Counter-Reformation, leading to such things as Carmelite mystical spirituality, the founding of the Oratorians, and a resurgence in Marian devotions.
(3) The Jesuits! Who then embarked on a couple of centuries of getting themselves suppressed and inspiring the joke –
“What are the similarities between the Dominicans and the Jesuits?
Both were founded by Spaniards to address the problem of heresy – the Dominicans against the Albigensians and the Jesuits against the Protestants.
What’s the difference between the Dominicans and the Jesuits?
Well, when was the last time you met an Albigensian?”
*
Lazy and possibly wrong complaint:
“Ivy Leaguers and journalists are 80-90% leftist.”
I’ve been both. As a journalist, my weak conservatism was viewed as far right extremism. The numbers I’ve seen in the past seem to support a number at a low end of that range.
But if you’re talking Ivy League students, I think it’s lower. Dartmouth has a noisy conservative contingent and I think is relatively conservative-friendly. Penn has Wharton undergrad, and generally teaches classical economics which is not minimum wage or rent control friendly. Princeton’s not super-liberal, Cornel West notwithstanding.
Sure, the faculty in the liberal arts departments run very liberal, and the faculty in most other departments run liberal-ish. But the students in the Ivy’s – no way they are 80% liberal. And I’d be surprised if the professoriate is quite that high. Sure, high. But not that high.
I tried to look it up, but only in the standard-meaning try (as in, I pushed words into Google, hit a few links, and gave up) rather than try-try. So I might be wrong.
In principle, party affiliation is public. This found 10:1 D:R for elite university professors in the departments most likely to teach politics. That is not a representative sample of departments, but it seems a reasonable choice to me, at least in principle. It did include economics. However, this survey of non-elite professors find that 10-15% describe themselves as conservative and 25% as middle of the road. This survey claims that elite schools are more left and gives numbers by department.
Here is a lousy source that claims that Harvard students are 2/3 “liberal.”
I got that impression too, that elite schools are more lefty. I went to community college and then transferred to a 4-year. The latter was slightly less pragmatic and more high-minded. Junior colleges are often focused on vocational training, e.g. nurses.
But perhaps the most radical of lefties – those who’ve spent some time in actual prison for their beliefs – end up in the small non-prestigious schools. Like Mark Rudd formerly of the Weather Underground, who ended up at some New Mexico junior college. (And even he had access to the Megaphone: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/14/AR2011011405029.html.
Could you imagine WaPo getting Kevin MacDonald’s take on the news of the day?)
But dear lizard brain, here’s the thing: overall, the occurrence of blatant misandry on the nationwide political level is negatively correlated with the occurrence of feminism. It is out of doubt that the feminist community as whole isn’t paying nearly as much attention to the male rape victims as they should have been if they optimized for consistency. I’m also willing to believe that there have been some feminists who support the legalization of raping men – just because if a community is large enough, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find members supporting any sorts of crazy ideas. However, if you try to make a list of countries that talk about and/or recognize male rape victims, that talk about the disparity between single mothers and single fathers, that have any damn politician who believes that wearing anything a person wants, including a skirt, is a human right, and beating up men for executing this right is horrible and illegal – do you think you’ll find countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Uganda there, that are free of feminist politics? No, you won’t.
Of course, there are some Russian analogs of the manosphere, that are tightly linked with their evo psych communities, who believe that the reason Russia has conscription for men, exempts female offenders from capital punishment of life imprisonments, and women are given pension five years earlier than men is feminism. In Russia. Where over 80% of the population are Putin supporters, and the whole thing was started by the Soviets decades ago anyway. Feminism. I think we can pretty safely discard this hypothesis, especially after considering the fact that Sudan, for example, which I hope is very clearly as far from feminism as you can imagine, if Russian example wasn’t clear enough, has conscription for men too.
So although it’s definitely true that a non-trivial number of feminists have supported misandry, and probably invented their own forms of it, they totally haven’t invented it in general. And even though many of them aren’t trying to help, by and large they’re helping a lot. While modern feminism may not be the best treatment for misandry, it’s decidedly better than no treatment.
Correlation shown… where’s the argument for a causative link?
I thought that person’s argument was that negative correlation was evidence against a causal link.
Read it as arguing, explicitly, that ‘[w]hile modern feminism may not be the best treatment for misandry, it’s decidedly better than no treatment.’
This does look like an assertion of a causal link from increased feminism to decreased misandry.
As evidence, all that’s given is correlation – hence the question.
Still, I could be mistaken.
Also, I don’t think our host was arguing for a causal link going the other way: merely noting which horrors are plausible today and which aren’t. This may have biased me away from seeing a rebuttal of what I did not think asserted.
Does this correlation still show if you zoom in a little? To organizations and subcultures within a single country?
My personal experience is that it reverses, but I haven’t made a detailed study.
Wow, that statement is a serious contender for highest possible degrees of freedom in meaning vs. length.
In any case, since the effects of feminism on women are a classic example of Simpson’s Paradox (tons of individual metrics improved while overall happiness dropped) I expect the effects on men are similarly convoluted.
First, let me say that this is an excellent essay on an important topic, and that I agree with most of it.
Second, let me make an important distinction which often gets lost in these discussions: between *individual* and *official* politicization.
Much is politicized these days that really should not be politicized, and as you say, both large tribes are guilty of defining themselves as oppressed victims, and then using their self-definition to justify arbitrary anger and aggression against their opponents. But that doesn’t mean everyone needs to be sucked into the political vortex. If political fanatics of either side see fit to yell at you, or call you names, or publicly denounce you, or plaster your Facebook page or Twitter feed or blog comments with rants, then you are free to respond in kind, or not, as you please. That is the joy of living in a free society with political freedoms.
Where things go off the rails, in my opinion, is when things get *official*–in the worst case, when violence occurs, or laws or institutional rules get passed or interpreted, or even when large, dominant segments of an industry or nonprofit sector enact rules or practices that embody the hostility of one tribe to the other. These events are far scarier than a bunch of members of one tribe or the other getting up on their hind legs and shouting, because ultimately, one can stand up to shouting and even shout back, whereas threats to one’s safety or livelihood can be chillingly effective at silencing dissent.
I use this distinction to separate genuinely alarming politicization from the merely eye-rolling. Big protest against something trivial? Let them protest. Articles being written demanding that we all conform to some odious new behavioral norm? Hope they get lots of clicks. Individuals or groups accused of behaving badly by one side or the other? I’ll decide how to respond if and when I ever find myself interacting with the person or group in question–which in most cases is almost certainly never.
On the other hand, when someone gets arrested, or successfully sued, or fired, or expelled or banned from an educational institution or professional organization for nakedly political reasons, then I get very concerned, in the Niemoller sense. These things are happening with increasing frequency, and we should all be more alarmed at them–and less alarmed, by the same token, at the numerous cases of people shouting outrageous or hurtful or offensive things at each other.
In the science fiction community, Twitter and Facebook are a big part of the marketing/self-promotion side of the business. So the line between official and unofficial, in your sense, gets blurred in a lot of the SJ mobbing that happens in that community. If you get mobbed, you might lose a lot of your audience, get negative reviews written for your books, etc.
The irony here is that Twitter and Facebook are a huge improvement over their predecessors–print publications that concentrated review power in far fewer hands, allowing a small number of tastemakers/gatekeepers to dominate published opinion of authors far more completely than today’s social media mobs.
There’s a simple solution: readers who don’t care for the mobs and their prejudices can form their own communities of the like-minded, where they can freely express their own tastes. If there are enough of them, then authors and publishers will start marketing/catering to them, as well. And if there aren’t–well, nobody promised tailor-made, bespoke fiction for every reader…
(I have a similar reaction to “gamergate”–apparently a large number of gamers seem to believe that the publications that market to them treat them with contempt. So instead of shunning those publications and starting up new ones that cater to their tastes, they rail against the allegedly offending publications as if they were government-mandated reading or something. Baffling…)
Strike “instead of”, insert “additionally to.” The modal gamer gets their news off a YouTube show or forum now, and that was nearly as true this time last year. The existence of copious alternative gaming news outlets was what allowed the scandal to blow up beyond the boundaries of the Internet Drama Of The Week Club in the first place.
GG has also attempted to boost newer “traditional” websites like Niche Gamer and TechRaptor. But probably the biggest accomplishment was effectively taking over The Escapist, which by February of this year had seen all of its anti-GG content creators leave (Moviebob and Jim Sterling being the most prominent) and proceeded to hire several prominent GG supporters.
Now if there were just a ReactionaryFilmCritHulk…
What Alraune and NN said, and I’ll add that, while what you mention is not entirely absent, GG isn’t so much complaining that the publications don’t cater to them as they’re complaining that those publications are insulting and slandering them, which is different enough.
There’s also the ideological pressure on content creators, but that’s pretty similar to recent topics and many of the arguments already made probably apply.
There is actually precedent for the shoe thing, if I remember correctly: in East Germany under Soviet rule, the secret service harassed political adversaries in similar ways.
I agree with the thrust of your post, but is this strictly true:
“The social justice attitude evolved among minority groups living under the domination of a different culture, which at best wanted to ignore them and at worst actively loathed them for who they were and tried to bully them into submission. The closest the average white guy gets to that kind of environment is wandering into a social-justice-dominated space and getting to experience the same casual hatred and denigration for them and everyone like them, followed by the same insistence that they’re imagining things and how dare they make that accusation and actually everything is peachy.”
Black Americans in 1950 (and still more 1850) had very reasonable complaints about their treatment, but little political power on their own. America could have decided to just keep them like that, or even degrade them further. It didn’t because of decisions taken by people who weren’t at all threatened by those policies, not by black Americans alone. Social Justice is the fashionable elite ideology of the day, not an organic response to personal circumstances.
And that’s really the difference: Social Justice has the state and all the institutions. I’m not saying that conservatives (however that is defined) would not be dangerous if they were in the same position. They would. But they’re not, or anywhere close. So while Austria is strong, I choose to ally with Prussia, and while Prussia is strong, I choose to ally with Austria. I do not believe that people come to see that their enemies’ points are reasonable and permit them freedom; I believe that people permit others freedom after they fail to destroy them for long enough that they become exhausted.
And that’s really the difference: Social Justice has the state and all the institutions.
This is why, for example, 1 in 6 black men has spent time in prison. Social Justice controls the police. This is also why every movie passes the Bechdel test: Social Justice controls Hollywood.
Both SJWs and anti-SJWS, no let’s go further, both the American Left and the American Right seem to believe that since they don’t have unchecked power in high places it must mean that they have hardly any power and their enemies have all of it.
I would suggest that the left and the right both have significant power in most institutions. I mean, I would have to be insane to argue that there isn’t significant left-wing influence in Hollywood. But I can’t help but notice there’s still a lot of problems with representation of minorities in big movies. Gawker finds a new one every day.
It’s almost as though numerous political ideologies and money-making strategies co-exist in complicated ways in the halls of power. But that’s probably crazy-talk.
Social Justice has insane shitloads of power. If you say something that upsets someone aligned with Social Justice, you will be punished severely no matter where you are.
The fact that 1 in 6 black men (actually isn’t it 1 in 3?) will serve time in prison is not evidence that SJ is not powerful, it is evidence that SJ is using its power to punish people that hurt their feelings instead of making things better for black men.
I said that Social Justice controls the state and institutions, not all of society. The US is not a Stalinist country, so control of the state and institutions does not imply control of all of society. The police are an interesting example: we currently seem to be witnessing a civil war between locally controlled police departments and national-level elites like Obama, Holden, and de Blasio. The federal government has not fully imposed its will, although it has been able to degrade police effectiveness enough to cause a large spike in crime. In Hollywood it is clear that the personal sympathies of the people involved are with Social Justice, but they are not state funded and ultimately have to satisfy customer demand too. Is it likely that they are ignoring their customers’ preferences to promote an agenda that no one is pushing? Not really.
This is most easily explained if we see the disagreement between SJW and anti-SJW as being more about objective than normative questions. That is, SJW and anti-SJW broadly agree on values, but not on facts. The SJW believes that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than whites because the police decide to oppress them out of spite. Anti-SJW believes that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than whites because they’re much more likely to commit serious crimes. SJWs believe that Hollywood produces what it does because it has a right-wing cultural agenda (despite massive evidence to the contrary), while anti-SJW believe that Hollywood produces what it does to satisfy customer demand, and the chances are that women actually like watching films where other women talk about and to attractive men, rather than cars and guns or their careers. Have you noticed that this seems to be more, rather than less, common in films that are aimed specifically at women, compared to films aimed at a general audience?
In principle we should not have such big disagreements about questions of fact. We should simply determine what the facts are and then ask what our values tell us we should do. But Social Justice has become so powerful that it has shut down a lot of discussion about questions of fact. It is retreating into mysticism, a mysticism it is defending by suppressing critics through its control of the state and the institutions. Yarvin is one thing, but he’s neither the first nor the biggest. Social Justice already scalped the discoverer of DNA for making factual statements about biology. This is not quite Stalinism; Watson was allowed to live, and even keep his property and personal freedom. But it is, say, Honeckerism. There is no equivalent of this on the right. That is why Social Justice is so dangerous.
Hm, I have no personal experience of it, but it sounds so unlikely to me that such disagreement can exist in facts that maybe you should reconsider if it is more about values?
For example, Hollywood. An SJW can easily claim that Hollywood merely satisfies consumer demand that was created by patriarchy and by doing so strengthtens said patriarchy. They can also claim that women like those moves due to internalized sexism.
You see, unfalsifiable ideas have this certain advantage…
Do you believe that all persons have equal aptitude? Almost everyone will answer no. Everyone knows someone dumber than them and someone smarter than them, someone lazier than them and someone harder working than them.
Do you believe that all socially defined groups contain the same distribution of individual aptitude? The SJW answer is yes. If the real answer is no, then the Social Justice belief that in a true meritocracy all groups would have the same outcomes no longer follows.
Scott doesn’t like discussion of this question on his blog, so all I’ll ask is, if you think the answer is yes, why do you think that? Have you really skeptically tested that belief, or is it just an assumption?
What you are asking about whether preferences create demand or supply creates preferences is also a question of fact, not values. SJWs clearly take a position on this question of fact, a position that is popular, indeed a position that is dangerous to challenge publicly. But can they prove it?
If social justice controlled the federal government, Citizens United wouldn’t have turned out the way it did, to say nothing of Holden v. DC.
(Lest anyone think I’m grinding my own axe here, I’m supportive of the latter and skeptical of the former.)
They’re a bloc, and an increasingly influential and dangerous one, but they don’t run the world.
Please excuse my cynicism, but it is distinctly possible that 1 in 6 black men will have spent time in prison on their own “merits” regardless of whether “fine tuning” the prison population by whatever metric is a bona fide objective of the “SJ” ideological corpus (writ large).
I realise that my post flies in the completely opposite direction here, compared to the article and the general atmosphere of the comments so far, but I want to tie this into my general reply to the article, which is: when it comes to socially focused deliberations, I not only trust my “lizard brain” a lot more than the more sophisticated components of my cognitive apparatus, but I also think that one actually ought to do just that, because the “lizard brain” is much more adept at dealing with such situations.
Of course, this rests on another assumption that is appealing to my intuition: that the, let’s call it “degree of uniqueness” of our current society is overestimated.
In other words, it pays to be suspicious of the goals and motives of your “enemies.”
x
y?
z!
The difference between the pizza & conference comes back to people’s ability to participate in public life.
Getting banned from one venue isn’t that big of a deal. If restaurant place bans me, I can go somewhere else. If I get excluded all the restaurants, then I start having real problems.
We have protected classes to prevent situations where people, because of their membership in a commonly-targeted group, end up unable to participate in normal public life.
The pizza thing seems trivial because it won’t significantly impact anyone’s life. Having to call a second pizza shop would be more of a weird anecdote than a memorable burden.
The same would be true for a one-off exclusion from a conference. If the organizer had retracted Moldbug’s invitation based on personal dislike, I might think that the move was rude. But I wouldn’t see it as especially threatening.
The threatening bit is the idea that there are people following Moldbug around and trying to get him disinvited from any and all professional events he might want to attend.
That’s where the retracted invitation moves from a mild annoyance to the beginning of a significant burden.
Come on, this isn’t even a hard problem.
Pizzas are basically interchangeable – innovative technology from obviously extremely bright men is not.
That took me like 3 seconds to realize. It’s like you have a complete blind spot for any arguments that fatally deflate SJW-ism.
Um, no? Even if you conclusively prove that everyone who supported banning Molbug is literally Hitler, it doesn’t affect the truth value of other claims they make, as long as it doesn’t rely on this particular decision. The whole idea is very much reminiscent of this incident could become a watershed event in the 11 days before the election,” but also warned that “if the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.” – somehow one wrongdoing by particular people debunks the entire system, even though by any logical standard it shouldn’t (and before you object with proof by contradiction – not a single political ideology can live up to the standard of never being wrong).
Also:
Did you control this statements for hostile media effect? Because the prior odds of it occurring seem higher than the odds of Scott not being good enough at providing solid arguments against social justice movements.
Even if you conclusively prove that everyone who supported banning Molbug is literally Hitler, it doesn’t affect the truth value of other claims they make,
Yes, yes it does. It’s called updating one’s priors.
After Tawana Brawley, my initial skepticism of the Matthew Shepard case was pretty low. After finding out that he was a drug dealer who mixed his sex life with his dealing, my initial skepticism of the Duke Lacross wasn’t very high. After that fell apart, and seeing the lies the media spread to make Trayvon Martin look like an innocent victim, and the Rolling Stone rape hoax, and many others (including the way the SJWs ignored Eric Garner until it was convenient to make a case of him), my prior probability for “Big media-splashy object lesson about American racism/sexism/homophobia/whatever” is a hoax is now about 99%.
Contrariwise, my experience of atrocity stories from the right is that they are generally exaggerated (p>90%), but rarely outright false (p<5%).
Why are atrocity stories the issue at all? I would’ve thought the most important data points for evaluating SJ are things like implicit association studies, stereotype threat studies (which seem not to be holding up so well, I gather), data about policing and sentencing trends for black people like what Scott wrote about a few months back, etc. High-profile cases like Trayvon Martin and so on are just anecdata, although they may point to important trends.
Would you really bet 99-to-1 (or even 9-to-1 to allow an order of magnitude margin of error) that the next big left media outrage (we have to define at which point a controversy becomes large enough to count, since I don’t expect you to expect 99 out of 100 posts complaining about particular events on /r/feminism to be false) about something particular happening happening will have no real subject matter whatsoever? Like not just a subject matter you disapprove of or consider pity (e.g. Shirtgate may have happened over something that most would consider to be a non-issue, but the shirt was objectively worn; or the authors of New York Times best sellers may be predominantly white for a reason other than deliberately ignoring non-white authors, but they’re objectively predominately white), but the actual claim about a very particular event happening will be false? OK, I’m in.
I’m getting lost in the threading, but google Rachel Dolezal if that hasn’t already come up in the comments. I think you owe Anthony a refreshing beverage of his choice.
Nah, Anthony can’t get retroactive credit for that. Dolezal’s most recent fraudulent hate crime was a whole ten weeks ago.
Dolezal doesn’t support my argument. What she’s accused of doesn’t support the leftist narrative of ‘Murica as an irredeemably racist/sexist/homophobic hellhole.
Pizzas are basically interchangeable
How dare you!
I don’t have anything interesting to say about this piece, but I liked it a lot—I could feel myself pushing back against the equivalence, and pushing back, and pushing back, until I suddenly (and simultaneously) accepted the truth in it and felt better for having done so. Thanks for writing it.
Ok, more general counterargument.
The insurmountable problem Scott has here is that he never wants to look at “the object level” of any dispute.
The reason SJWs spin out of control is because they are in revolt from reality.
Men and women are different in exactly the ways that SJWs deny and the outcomes of those differences are pretty much exactly what social conservatives predict. SJWs blame it on the Occam’s butterknife of patriarchy everywhere – especially in institutions most strongly under control of people who are in accord with SJW ideas. Three quarters of college women are raped in Emma Sulkowicz’s dorm by Haven Monahan? Who runs Columbia / Duke anyway?
Black people are lower IQ and more violently impulsive and when there’s a conflict between them and the police they’re way more likely to do something catastrophically stupid – like attacking the cop. Cities were ethnically cleansed in the 1960s when progressives hamstrung law enforcement while simultaneously vigorously prosecuting anyone who defended themselves from predation. SJWs assume that the difference in arrest rates and incarceration doesn’t reflect differences in underlying criminality because that’s impossible. If you rule out that explanation then there must be a giant racist conspiracy that somehow never gets stopped no matter how much power progressives get – in fact by a host of reasonable measures things are far worse now for NAMs precisely because of progressive interventions – which only goes to show you how much power those damned racists have.
Even though gay marriage is now law, somehow when drug resistant gonorrhea appears you know exactly where it showed up. Oh well, let’s all get really angry at pizza shop owner in the middle of nowhere instead of thinking about the implications of that. Every surviving cultural tradition on Earth is hostile to homosexuality – that’s no accident. That’s cultural evolution in action.
The biggest problem is that SJWs are wrong on the object level every single time and the failure of the real world to conform to their ideology is only attributable to sinister forces – therefore they hysterically attack whomever outrages the SJW mob at the moment. The simmering anger is real and has to go somewhere. That’s why SJW-ism is so amazingly dangerous. No matter how progressive the country gets the problems that progressives claim are so important and holy to solve will never get solved so the hatred for white men has to keep getting ratcheted up – those kulaks must be preventing the worker’s paradise from showing up.
There’s no similar ratchet pressure on the right because the right’s views are simply much more in accord with reality so they don’t get hysterically angry in the face of failure. The only right-ish example of the same phenomenon was Nazi Germany which wanted to make a socialist state in Germany work and when it didn’t the pressure to do something about the wreckers grew and grew for the exact same reason. In other words, it was the same as the SJW / progressive ratchet.
I have no idea how you reconcile “cultural evolution in action” with “Cthulhu always swims left”. If you believe in cultural social Darwinism, don’t you have to agree that the progressives seem to have wound up on “the right side of history”?
https://twitter.com/fakeysaysthings/status/520775185935654912
Ever read the argument: “Cicero complained about the same thing”?
Lots of civilizations die out – often for the same reasons.
The unprecedented part is how technological advance has masked social decline allowing further leftward movement.
Yes I can certainly see how the success of leftism is not a knockdown argument against your position. What I don’t understand is why you’re making an appeal to the scoreboard when your team is trailing by dozens of points.
That there are no living traditions – and progressives desperately search for them – that embody progressive ideals is a really telling sign.
I’m honestly not sure which scoreboard you’re asking about. Western civilization is in the grips of progressivism increasingly strongly and it’s amnesiac about how long that’s been the case (because progressives have to be able to explain away the absence of utopia) so I suppose that’s could be considered progressivism being ahead on points in some way. The way I keep score progressivism is already deeply in the negative. Think Detroit, Rhodesia and South Africa for recent stark examples.
Because this is wholly new ground. They didn’t have industrial society until 200 years ago. Having enough wealth that you can have massive democracies, large scale urbanism, literacy- these are all new.
Cthulhu doesn’t swim left, people just like to feel as if it’s them against the world. If Cthulhu swum left then the whole world would have planned economies with most production and innovation directly owned and conducted by the state. The SJWs of 1870-1950 (they were called communists back then) were object-level wrong about economics and their changes were stopped and then reversed on a global scale, with varying levels of intermediate devastation in different countries. The only place that didn’t give in is North Korea and no one wants that wreck as their standard-bearer. The left has abandoned its old economic ideas and broadly succeeded in persuading most people that they never held them, on account of how they no longer do. Read the founder of the ACLU explain that his ultimate purpose in promoting free speech was to speed communist economic reform and most peoples’ brains will just overheat. Left and right.
The left has failed before and will fail again. Sometimes this brings down empires. The Russian Empire for instance is now the smallest it has been since the 17th century, and may never recover. China, on the other hand, has dug itself out in decent shape.
Will Social Justice continue to overheat and eventually blow up the US? It’s certainly possible, and even clear to imagine how it might happen, but it’s far from certain. One difference is that this time the US is the locus of the storm whereas in the 20th century economic wars the US was one of the most economically conservative countries, able to cling to its 19th and 18th century market institutions much better than Western Europe, let alone Eastern Europe which never had them and transitioned direct to communism from feudalism. On the other hand, bad social ideas may be less harmful than bad economic ideas. South Africa may not be a nice place to live, but it is still the richest and most powerful country south of the Sahara, a democracy of sorts, and in no apparent danger of fragmenting.
Broadly speaking, “liberalism” or leftism suggests new ideas and “conservatives” or right-wingers oppose new ideas. Over history what you see is that some ideas that were new worked, and are thus now considered “right” because they are the status quo. The things that fail are usually unambiguously “left”. Hence it is that the left can feel they are fighting a losing battle against the evil racist nationalistic patriarchy while the right thinks Cthulu swims left.
Examples: DOMA, DADT etc.
Fascism and Nazism are and were considered right-wing, they proposed new ideas and they failed.
“Fascism and Nazism are and were considered right-wing,”
By Uncle Joe and his fellow travelers. Along with anyone else who opposed him.
Stalin’s dead. Let’s stop shilling his ideas.
The things that fail are usually unambiguously “left”.
Involuntary eugenic sterilization?
Prohibition?
Segregation?
Bring up any of these, and people go into denial about how utterly Progressive all three were.
Oh absolutely, Mary, but the fact remains they are and were unambiguously leftist ideas. Historical revisionism and partisan blindness aside, anyone with any sense of historical fact and basic honesty knows these things.
As to vV_Vv’s criticism, it is fair, though as I argue elsewhere, Fascism and Nazism are moderate systems of the center-left, which attempted to split the difference between liberal republics and communism. This all gets tangled up with racism, which wasn’t a basic function of fascism, and which is unfairly associated exclusively with the right.
You can make a much better case that racism is basal to Nazism than to fascism as implemented outside Germany. Nazism was weird, even by the weird standards of 20th-century political ideologies, and some historians don’t like lumping it in with e.g. Mussolini’s, Franco’s, or Tojo’s systems.
Fascisim and Nazism were considered right-wing by their own members.
They were heterogeneous movements which originated in part from Socialist elements: Mussolini was once a prominent member of the Italian Socialist Party before being kicked out over the issue of intervention in WWI, the NSDAP had “Socialist” and “Workers’ Party” in the name.
I think it’s fair to say that the far-left and far-right are much more similar to each other than any of them is to classical liberalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
Fascism/Naziism (the Germans call it ‘National Socialism’, and I’m not sure we why we go to such lengths to hide the full name) described themselves as and were syncretic movements. They sought to combine the left’s new and fashionable ideas about social organisation, which they didn’t originate, with the cultural content of old Europe, which they also didn’t originate. They took two existing ideas and created a new synthesis. They are best regarded as a socialist movement that rejected cultural revolution.
Neoreaction reminds me of fascism/naziism in the sense that they both want to tear down the existing political and social structure in order to preserve the results of that structure, but the results they want to preserve are quite different.
People like Moldbug ultimately want to live in Gilded Age America but regard Gilded Age American institutions as unstable, so they propose institutions that look totally different. Fascists and Nazis wanted to live in old Christendom but were willing to compromise with socialism and managerialism to do so in a way that could preserve itself militarily and would be more internally stable. Gilded Age America and old Christendom are pretty much as far from one another as it gets within the Western cultural framework, but the logic is similar: fascism is a pragmatist socialist heresy and neoreaction is a pragmatist libertarian heresy.
I’m not an NRX, but I’ve generally assumed that “Cthulhu always swims left” implied “until he devours his followers, and we start back over from scratch.”
That’s more or less how I understand it, with the corollary that each time that happens, it starts over from a point further leftwards from the last time.
Scott has on occasion discussed research on what you describe as the object level, and both in the cases Scott has discussed and in general it appears that your points are, to be painfully generous because I don’t want to encourage even more race/gender debate around here since I think Scott is right to want to discourage it, oversimplified.
Funny, I too find he has a bit of a tendency towards certain forms of “oversimplification”.
Can the Nazis be called quite socialist? If I remember correctly, they wanted big buisness to continue existing and having a role in the economy making them more like the modern corporate pseudo-socialism than actual socialists.
It depends on how you define ‘socialist’. And, for that matter, ‘Nazi’. (The policies the Nazis initially advocated weren’t the policies that they ended up enacting, among other things.)
Really, it’s probably best to dissolve ‘socialist’ and talk about their policies directly; doing anything to compare people to Nazis, no matter how obliquely, tends to get hackles up.
As an economic system, fascism is quite popular today. There is a problem in that the racism of part of the political movement anda world war for tribalism taints the discussion in honest terms.
Capitalism: Private citizens own the means of production
Communism: The state owns the means of production (violently achieved)
Socialism: The state owns the means of production (peacefully achieved)
Fascism: Private citizens own the means of production, but the state controls through regulation.
Fascism was invented as a “split the difference” moderate movement between capitalism and communism. As such, its economic system has been widely adopted, and much of the rest of its political program is largely unobjectionable today. But if you ask people if they support it, they deny quite vociferously, because the word “fascim” or “nazism” just means racist now, divorced from a large and detailed policy bundle.
I’ve seen this formulation a bunch of times and it’s somewhat unclear where it comes from. Fascist thinkers generally did not see it as part of their doctrine – those who thought explicitly and in detail about economics generally came from Catholic and/or syndicalist perspectives that have no popular equivalent today – and fascist practice of this was basically just ordinary wartime planning. Mussolini consciously implemented laissez-fair policies for a significant part of his rule and justified it (and later turns) on the basis that fascism is non-dogmatic on economics and willing to implement whatever policies are to the benefit of the nation.
I mean, it’s certainly the case that, during WWII, Speer was managing the economy and major business owners were collecting profits/rents. But this seems no more the essence of fascism than, say, blitzkreig tactics.
Indeed, we have very little evidence as to what the fascists thought a peacetime economy should look like. Possibly because the fascists kept getting into wars as soon as they got into power…
Franco’s Spain being the conspicuous exception, and Spain from roughly 1945 to 1960 is I think our best example of a peacetime economy run the way a bunch of fascists wanted it to be run.
And Tarrou sort of gets it right, and the people who say that Fascists are really Socialists sort of get it right. The Vertical Syndicate was the chief mechanism of economic control in Spain; structured to allow the capitalists to continue imagining that they owned and controlled everything so long as they did as they were told, and to allow the workers to imagine that they owned and controlled everything so long as they did as they were told.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism
Money quote: “An inherent aspect of fascist economies was economic dirigisme,[4] meaning an economy where the government exerts strong directive influence over investment, as opposed to having a merely regulatory role.”
My earlier formulation would appear to have been poorly worded re: “regulation”, but the thesis unscathed.
Wikipedia fight!
From the Wikipedia article on dirigisme:
>”Economic dirigisme has been described as an inherent aspect of fascist economies by one author, Ivan T. Berend in his book An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe.[4] However, the Fascist systems created by Benito Mussolini (Italy), Francisco Franco (Spain) and Adolf Hitler (Germany) are a varied mix of elements from numerous philosophies, including: nationalism, authoritarianism, militarism, corporatism, collectivism, totalitarianism, and anti-communism.[5]”
Tarrou seems to have won the wikipedia fight, as his quote is about economic policy.
If one includes South America we have more examples of socially conservative and explicitly anti-communist regimes that had heavily statist economic policies. Whether to call them “fascist” is a pointless argument, as far as I can tell.
Oh, I can see a point to it. Just not one that anyone here cares about.
Most South American countries economic policies aren’t modern enough to be considered fascist, but proto-fascist at most. (Argentina and Mexico possibly excepted.) Their policies, when not allegedly socialist, are more neo-feudal – the government is there to keep the incumbent economic powers in their economic power, while fascism tends to have explicit “progressive” goals like industrializing, or providing some minimum for the working class.
@oligopson
Read Mussolini’s doctrine of fascism. He never uses the words “third way” but he explicitly envisions fascism as an alternative to both capitalism (i.e. the victory of capital over labor) and socialism (i.e. the victory of labor over capital) that supposedly gets the best and avoids the worst of both worlds. Which is not to say that he was right, of course.
http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm
@John Schilling
>Indeed, we have very little evidence as to what the fascists thought a peacetime economy should look like. Possibly because the fascists kept getting into wars as soon as they got into power…
This is just silly. Mussolini ran Italy for almost 20 years without anything more than minor colonial wars, and with nothing like a war economy. On top of him you have Franco, Peron, Salazar, all explicit fascist, and a variety of Latin american or post colonial countries that adopted similar economic policies without the label. Hitler got into wars right away (though even for him, it took most of a decade), not all fascists.
Anthony, I was talking mostly about the past, 30’s to 80’s. (the current wave does have pretty similar economic ideas, but they’re labeled “left” now)
This was and is very much present.
>>Even though gay marriage is now law, somehow when drug resistant gonorrhea appears you know exactly where it showed up. Oh well, let’s all get really angry at pizza shop owner in the middle of nowhere instead of thinking about the implications of that.
Tell me, what are the implications of that? (I guess “that” means drug resistant gonorrhea?)
Drug-resistant gonorrhea, and its roughly order of magnitude greater prevalence in the MSM homosexual population.
The obvious implication is that, a generation after the AIDS epidemic and its real and alleged effects on the gay community’s behaviors, STDs propagate far more efficiently through MSM-homosexual communities than any other. So either,
A: MSM homosexuality really does, for objective biological reasons, involve a substantially greater risk of propagating homosexual diseases, or
B: MSM homosexuals won’t change the cultural behaviors associated with STD propagation even with the recent memory of an existential threat (that hasn’t really been vanquished quite yet), or
C: The Religious Right’s campaign to exterminate the gays through germ warfare, continues unabated.
Pick the one that best suits your prejudices, or if you want to be boring about it, your assessment of the relevant facts.
So why should A, B, or C be of any importance to someone interested in the important political issues of our time? Except for the public health implications, I don’t see what any of this is supposed to imply about gay people.
B implies that the gay community is dangerously reckless in its practices.
C implies that the religious right is downright evil
A implies that prior accusations of C may have been a tad exaggerated, and that negative life outcomes for gay people cannot be blindly attributed to discrimination.
Again, pick one.
The public health implications are a seriously big deal, contamination of the blood supply being averted by keeping them out of it being a Good Thing instead of Oppression. As just one example of how public health is kind of relevant to discriminatory practices (I am using that phrase neutrally.)
I’m confused. Why is it anyone else’s business if the gay community is reckless?
I’m pretty sure they’re talking about advocacy organizations calling for an end on blanket bans to male homosexual blood donors, which, if we’re generous, are a perfectly legitimate response to concerns about false positives in the test process and high underlying rates in the target population. If we’re going to be ungenerous, they’re using far too broad of a heuristic that stigmatizes all gays when what they want to stigmatize is unprotected anal sex with multiple partners. In either case, I don’t think it’s fair to call it explicitly bigoted, but the claim is made.
It is a puzzler: why would anyone else care that a subculture’s unsanitary habits were breeding deadly infectious diseases? Well obviously there’s no good reason to worry, after all it’s not like there were any STDs spread by unsafe sex and drug use which have killed millions of people before, obviously it’s just homophobia. /sarcasm
Seriously though, this is a particularly one-sided case because it’s a case of people hurting themselves directly and the rest of society indirectly by not using a condom or a clean needle that (at least for the former) costs a dollar or less. That level of irresponsibility is actually kind of breathtaking.
It was Isaac Asimov’s business.
@walpolo
People seem to think it is their business whether others get vaccinated. AIDS is kind of like an anti-vaccine for every disease.
Whether *children* get vaccinated is someone else’s business no matter what, because it’s not the kind of decision kids are equipped to make for themselves at the age when vaccination needs to happen. The only question is whether it’s their parents’ business alone, or other people’s.
It would be great if there were a way to force people to use condoms, but I don’t know of one, so I don’t see the point of harping on this issue (except to inform people of how important it is to use protection).
But how is that an argument against gay marriage?
If anything, I would expect married MSMs to be more likely to be monogamous, and therefore less likely to spread STDs.
Less likely than unmarried MSMs, but perhaps more likely than married heterosexuals.
I don’t place much weight on the “defend the sanctity of monogamous lifetime marriage” argument, mostly because I think that battle is utterly lost on other fronts. But for people who do think that line is worth holding, MSM married couples exhibiting insanely high rates of STDs compared to straight couples, would make it appear that they aren’t taking this whole “monogamy” thing seriously.
Perhaps a better line to defend, for those so inclined, would be any post-matrimonial STD as automatic grounds for divorce. But that would still have a disproportionate impact on MSM couples even if the actual rate of infidelity were the same as for the straights.
But MSMs don’t become straight if gay marriage is not available, therefore the policy choice is between having no married MSMs at all and having some married and some unmarried MSMs.
It seems to me that from a public health perspective gay marriage is advantageous.
You can’t realistically ban homosexuality, even if you make it illegal, assuming that you could muster the political support to do so, you would just end up driving it underground, which is probably even less advantageous from a public health perspective (e.g. people would delay or avoid getting tests or treatment for STDs due to the fear of being outed).
If large numbers of “married” MSM openly disregard monogamy and instead go cruising together for pickups as wingmen, the effect is to dissociate the connection between the institution of marriage and the expectation of monogamy, which makes it easier for the marginal monogamous married couple to become swingers (or, God forbid, cuckold fetishists).
Marginal cases again. The rate of homosexuality is not fixed; criminalizing sodomy makes it harder to be a homosexual, which prevents the marginal man who suffers from same-sex attraction from taking the fateful step into becoming a man who has sex with men.
No man is an island, and norms do not survive in isolation. Remember, infidelity is contagious.
That depends on how you define monogamy.
I certainly don’t think every gay man is like Dan Savage (thank whichever deity or deities you wish), but I’ve seen a few “so me and my husband picked up this cute trick after the Pride Parade” stories, including one comic strip about a partnered guy who saw no problem in dropping in, in the middle of a run of very funny online comic about the sexual (mis)adventures of him and his partner, one strip about wanting the chance to have a big church wedding just like anyone else.
There was apparently no cognitive dissonance about wanting to get married “just the same as everyone else” and being in an open relationship where you and your partner both agree you can cruise other guys. Seems like a redefinition of what “monogamy” and “committed relationship” means.
I think, for various reasons (including 70s radical queer politicisation just like 70s radical feminism), gay male culture skews more towards polyamory, or a version thereof, and there are a few (I’m assuming) straight progressives who welcome same-sex marriage on the grounds that it’ll teach straights to loosen up and not consider affairs as “adultery”, to be open about having sexual partners outside your main relationships, to not put all your sexual eggs in one relationship basket.
I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the “contagious infidelity” above will turn out to largely or entirely be a demographic or geographic artifact — I wouldn’t be surprised to find a small effect, but 75% doesn’t pass the giggle test.
The Mail in typical form doesn’t post a link to the study or give its year, but it seems to be pointing to “Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample” (McDermott, Fowler, and Christakis 2009). Chrome doesn’t seem to want to render it on my machine, but if someone else feels like digging into it, they’re welcome to.
Renders fine here. They studied two generations of people from Framingham, MA, starting in 1948 and 1971, ending in 2003, and tested whether divorce clustering in the social network was different from a random graph, using a lagged model to tease out the difference between people becoming divorced after their friends do rather than divorcees becoming friends after the fact. The 95% confidence interval for effect size is 58% to 96% more likely to be divorced if your friends are divorced. It doesn’t mention infidelity at all. No same-sex unions were observed and all study participants were white and upper-middle class.
Deiseach, I don’t see a way to interpret your comment that doesn’t rely on assuming that marriage and commitment imply monogamy. If you believe that non-monogamous marriage is a coherent concept, can you rephrase the argument? If you believe marriage-level commitment implies monogamy, have you, like, met any people in open marriages?
Okay, so they aren’t doing anything egregiously stupid. That’s something. But there’s still religiosity as a big confounder, and it sounds like there’s enough longitude there that they could be picking up other effects as well: I’d need to sit down and generate a model in R to be really comfortable with saying this, but it sounds like you’d have to be careful about generational effects in a model like that or you’d create a false signal.
It’s also a pretty wide confidence interval, but that’s less of an issue.
Nornagest, the headline’s 75% does not match the body’s RR=1.75. But if the baseline is 50%, is moving to 75% implausible?
It depends on the definition of “egregious.” Is a practice attacked by an extensive literature egregious? Of course not: it wouldn’t be attacked if it weren’t popular, and thus not egregious.
It’s not just religiousity, but there are lots of confounders that might cause people with similar propensities to divorce to be friends.
vV_Vv says:
So as a reminder to the participants in this argument about whether or not the social “science” showing that infidelity is contagious and that degrading social norms has harmful effects on the virtue of people living in societies with degraded norms this argument started with the oh-so-scientific typically progressive phrase “I would expect” – when the expectation is that some progressive project (gay marriage) would reduce the harm caused by an earlier progressive project (gay liberation / sodomy legalization into gay lionization).
Every single modern society evolved in such a way that marital fidelity is socially encouraged and infidelity punished while at the same time homosexuality is stigmatized but the only form of evidence you’ll accept is some kind of longitudinal study showing that a breakdown of social norms leads to people behaving badly. Here’s your actual evidence – gay men haven’t slowed down dangerous sexual practices in the face of a giant plague that infects about a third of them – a wedding ceremony is supposed to be a bigger deal than that? Your standards for what kind of evidence is needed to back which claims is seriously out of whack.
Yeah, unfortunately, they didn’t provide any data, or I probably would have done that myself. To be clear, it’s not like this means anything to me. I kind of feel like I can’t consistently hold the position that the contagion of divorce is a social ill when I’m twice divorced myself, plus I’m in an open marriage with my current wife, we have a lot of anal sex, and I’m voluntarily sterile with no kids, so if these normative prescription social harmony folks are going to be consistent, I’m much worse than any average gay person.
Steve, I can’t understand your argument at all, because your comment fills my head with a very loud voice shouting “DIE FAGGOTS DIE”, which I can’t hear anything over. This is bad; there’s an actual argument underneath, and I would like to evaluate it.
I understand that this competes with your need to show disapproval. I also think the bad things you endorse happening to faggots don’t include death, though I don’t know your position that well.
Leo:
“We still don’t know the scientific cause of this terrible and ongoing tragedy,” the Surgeon General said, “but one thing has become clear. Until this epidemic of lung cancer deaths among smokers is cured, the American tobacco farmers need our aid!”
Leo says:
Leo,
Far be it from me to step on the proprietor’s toes but the place for you to have an argument with the voices in your head isn’t a blog comment section.
Perhaps a street corner where you can shout at those voices?
If you choose to not go that route in the future you’ll want to note that the argumentative form requires you to make some connection between the random voices you hear in your head and the statement that you’re alleging induced them.
Oh, come on. Leo was clearly fighting his revulsion there, and he did better than most would.
Anyway, I think I understand your points, but I also don’t know what kind of “ought” you get from this “is”.
@adam — Oh, I’m perfectly willing to believe that divorce is a social ill, at least in its present implementation and at its present level of difficulty, for reasons too complicated and personal to get into right now. But I’m also willing to believe that many people are happy to perjure themselves in the eyes of social science if it means more justification for their political views, and when the Daily Mail starts reporting statistics like that, I’m more willing than usual.
Gay marriage is an entirely separate question, as far as I’m concerned.
@Steve Johnson
I think you are being excessively hostile in your answer. My “I would expect” was a way of making an inference in the face of limited evidence.
Your claim that every modern society was hostile to homosexuality until recently is certainly false: China and Japan for instance largely tolerated homosexual behavior. Japan only banned sodomy for a few years in the late 19th century while it was Westernizing, China banned it under Communism (a Western ideology with strong parallels to Christianity) until the 90s.
Hostility to homosexuality seems to be a historically Western-Abrahamic thing. Possibly it originated as an attempt to contain infectious diseases (STDs or anything that spreads though close contact such as plague or smallpox). This doesn’t mean that in a developed society an all out war to homosexuality is ideal from a public health perspective.
Just like the war on drugs failed to substantially solve drug addiction and fostered crime, and previously the alcohol prohibition failed to solve alcoholism and fostered crime, a war on homosexuality would probably fail to prevent men from having sex with other men and foster gay prostitution and shady establishments for casual sex run by criminals, quite possibly even increasing the spread of STDs (which would then spread to heterosexuals even more as MSMs would also date and marry women to maintain a facade).
In fact, the early AIDS outbreak in the West occurred while homosexuality was still socially unacceptable and more or less illegal.
It seems to me that support for these policies stems from the same kind of disgust-based moral intuitions: faggots/junkies/drunkards are yucky therefore we should ban them. Arguments from public health or public safety seem to be post-hoc rationalizations as empirically they don’t work.
Hrm… I think this is overall good, but not sure the symmetry re the pizza and the conference is accurate. I think they’d be closer to equivalent if the owner of the pizza place said he’d kick out any gay customers.
As is, I think it would be more analogous to… um.. hrm.. I’m not fully sure what the flipside would be… the tech conference organizers refusing to hold it at conference center owned by people with the Wrong Views? Hrm, that doesn’t fit either.
Overall, I take the point and agree, just that I’m not sure those specific cases were fully symmetric. Though at the moment, I don’t have any objection to boycotting both the pizza place and the tech conference. (Death threats/etc, on the other hand, are clearly unacceptable, but that need not be said. Yet I said it anyways.)
(Okay, I’m babbling. It’s clearly late and I clearly need sleep. :))
Whereas Moldbug would press the button and write another 10000 word wall of smugness trying to justify it.
There are some prerequisites to having a discussion. You can’t really have a meaningful discussion with someone who think they have the right to kill you or otherwise shut you up with force. If people straight up admit they consider you inherently less valuable and deserving of respect, then boycott/disassociation is justified.
The problem of talking with neoreactionaries/anti-egalitarians is that you never know if they consider you one of the lesser beings which they can freely lie to and use in the name of a greater cause. Even other anti-egalitarians would have that problem (which I suppose is why openly anti-egalitarians rarely get anywhere).
But what about the smart anti-egalitarians? As I’ve argued, if you’re a smart anti-egalitarian, the prudent thing to do would be to shut up about your views except when among trusted friends. The only ones who run their mouths are the ones who have too poor social antennas to realise why it’s a bad idea, or are so arrogant that they think they can get their way anyway. But they’re probably the minority.
This is a blog that goes quite far in proposing IQ as the explanation/solution to all the world’s problems. Most people who post here probably are capable of getting a high score. So let me ask you: did you ever get approached by someone who assumed you, because of this, would be friendly to anti-egalitarian policies? Mensa meetings where someone suggested only those and those should be allowed to vote/have kids?
Then you see what the SJWs fear. They fear that there are a ton of covert racists and other antiegalitarians. They think that you would shut them up with force. The more paranoid of them think that all cis/white/men are more or less in on the conspiracy (or at least complacent pawns of it). And if they believe that, you can’t blame them for boycotting you/ disassocating themselves with you.
That’s a weird thing to define as the problem, as lying, cheating and using people in the name of a greater cause are things that many social justice activists (among other groups) have openly defended.
Sure, in the same sense I can’t blame religious parents for doing all they can to save their children’s souls (like by trying to prevent them from being gay).
Anti-egalitarians, by definition, assert that people are not morally equivalent – that there are some people it is a priori more acceptable to lie to/cheat/use than others.
SJWs don’t usually say that, though. They may be indifferent to the truth (odds of false accusations, anyone?), but if so, it’s equally acceptable to lie to everyone. Yeah, better to believe the lie yourself if it’s useful.
“Anti-egalitarians, by definition, assert that people are not morally equivalent – that there are some people it is a priori more acceptable to lie to/cheat/use than others.”
That doesn’t follow. A doctor is more valuable than a plumber- does that mean it is acceptable to lie to a plumber but not a doctor?
You can value different people different amounts while simultaneously rejecting the idea that you are justified in oppressing, lying to and exploiting the lower orders.
No he isn’t. Not in terms of moral worth, which is what we’re talking about here.
If a doctor should have more than a plumber, of privileges or material things or whatever, all that must be justified not by desert. It must be justified pragmatically, on terms that the plumber can accept. As a moral end, the plumber’s life and happiness is just as valuable as the doctor’s.
If you do good to lots of people, sure you have more indirect value, but that presupposes the people you do good to have inherent, direct value – that their happiness and wellbeing matters. You can’t just base everything circularly on indirect value, sooner or later it has to bottom out in things we call valuable in themselves.
I explain this every time I talk to people who profess anti-egalitarianism.
“As a moral end, the plumber’s life and happiness is just as valuable as the doctor’s.”
No.
A doctor’s life is more valuable because his skills are more useful. If you have to choose to save the lives of one person, you save the doctor because all things being equal they can save the lives of more individuals in the future.
You can of course reject utilitarian consequentialism, but at that point you are asserting all lives are equal valuable because your premise is all lives are equally valuable.
Dons her pedant hat
The plumber is more valuable, in terms of lives saved, than the doctors. Plumbers have saved more lives in the last two centuries than doctors have saved throughout history.
Doffs hat
“You can of course reject utilitarian consequentialism, but at that point you are asserting all lives are equal valuable because your premise is all lives are equally valuable.”
Except that you are asserting that all lives are unequally valuable because your premise is that all lives are unequally valuable.
“The plumber is more valuable, in terms of lives saved, than the doctors. Plumbers have saved more lives in the last two centuries than doctors have saved throughout history.”
But that isn’t the metric. The metric is “if this person dies, how many others also die”. You can replace the people who dig out the ground to put in pipes pretty easily.
“Except that you are asserting that all lives are unequally valuable because your premise is that all lives are unequally valuable.”
No, my premise is that different people who different abilities to help others and if you believe “keeping people alive” is valuable, than the more one has in that category, the more important it is to keep them alive (because it affects more than just themselves). The corollary is that the young are more valuable than the old because they have more time to live their own lives.
You can replace the people who dig out the ground to put in pipes pretty easily.
Plumbing requires more than merely digging out the ground, or are you really going to say that the pipes then put themselves in and join themselves up by themselves? 🙂
I’ve recently needed the services of both a doctor and a plumber. The plumber did a lot more for my general health and well-being.
Skinner, I explained already why that sort of thinking is inconsistent. So the doctor will save more lives. Why does that matter, who says those lives he saves are valuable? What if all the people he saves are non-doctors, in fact are lazy slobs who wouldn’t save anyone?
Or what if they’re productive members of society, but they only produce for lazy slobs who will do no good?
See how that infinite descent doesn’t work? Sooner or later you have to say, this man has value in himself, not for anything he might do or have done. Otherwise no one’s worth anything, no matter how many lives they save or other ways they’re being productive. And that value is what I’m speaking of, what I call inherent moral value. You think you’re arguing here, but I don’t see an argument, I just see a failure to understand this simple concept.
A man’s “use value” may matter, or it may not, but it’s not even coherent without some measure of “useful for“. Utilitarians can’t avoid making judgements about what things are ultimately valuable in themselves.
“Why does that matter, who says those lives he saves are valuable?”
Because I like human beings to be alive, not dead.
“What if all the people he saves are non-doctors, in fact are lazy slobs who wouldn’t save anyone?”
Then he is less valuable than the doctor who saves the lives of people who would have further effects.
“Sooner or later you have to say, this man has value in himself, not for anything he might do or have done. ”
That leads exactly to my position (unless you don’t think saving lives is additive).
“Otherwise no one’s worth anything, no matter how many lives they save or other ways they’re being productive.”
I think human lives have value. I just don’t think it is inherent- I hold its a function of how much longer they have to live, so saving a child is worth more than saving the elderly, all else being equal.
Probably veering off on a tangent here, but I think the ‘doctor/plumber who-saves-more-lives’ dilemma could turn out something like:
The existence of the plumbing profession has led to more lives saved over x period of time than the existence of the medical profession over that same period, but any individual doctor will, on average be able to save more lives than any individual plumber because of the larger pool of people who can be trained as competent plumbers than competent doctors in the event that your community loses one.
I don’t know if that’s actually true, but from the outside, medicine certainly looks a great deal harder to learn than plumbing*, so it seems plausible that, if you had to choose between saving a doctor and a plumber, you’d save more lives down the line by choosing the doctor.
Of course, with real humans, I’d still be wary of any system that institutionally valued the lives of doctors over plumbers, because of the risk of the system being gamed by those who had the power to get their caste valued over others, with results that come uncoupled from who actually is the most valuable – official neutrality looks like a safer bet.
*Our host likes to research things thoroughly – I wonder if he would be interested in taking on a plumbing apprenticeship so that he can report back to us his own impressions of the relative challenge 🙂
My dad’s a plumber. It’s not complicated to the point of requiring a super genius to do it, but it’s a several-year apprenticeship. You can’t just find a random substitute on the street and train him up in a week, but it’s hard to compare the level of training and selection pressure faced by medical doctors with almost any other profession.
Also, obviously it varies with the specific task. If you need to replace your sink or fix a toilet or something, most people can figure that out with a few YouTube videos. Installing a complete piping system in a 70-story high rise not so much. Same thing with medicine. The vast majority of routine treatment can be accomplished by a medic. If you need open-heart surgery, it’s tougher.
That kind of screws up the value calculation, though. A combat medic that does nothing but run around wrapping wounds and giving IVs to prevent people from bleeding out saves more lives than a guy who does open-heart surgeries, and saves way more lives than a guy who only does cosmetic surgery.
@Mary
Dons his economist hat
When determining the value of an object, we are not interested in the total value of all the objects in a particular class (e.g. all plumbers, or all doctors), but in the marginal value of that object, i.e. the value of one additional unit. So to determine the value of plumbers and doctors, we need to ask whether the additional services provided by one plumber or one doctor are more valuable.
Doffs hat
This is absolutely not true. And I have never seen the assertion that it is more acceptable to lie/cheat/steal from people on the “anti-egalitarian” side. I do see it from SJWs, and from various religious groups (Jews, Muslims, etc.).
Take my personal stance. I believe all humans have intrinsic moral worth, and that worth is identical to all other humans, modified only by their actions. However, all humans do not have equivalent practical abilities. If you want to have a baby, you need a woman. If I am picking for a basketball team, my racial and gender makeup will be vastly different from a gymnastics squad, and that will be different from a chess team.
I can be realistic about the basic differences in average abilities across a range of behavior without denigrating the moral worth of anyone. Those who call themselves “egalitarians” are investing capability with moral worth and criticizing those who notice differences in the former as believing in differences in teh latter.
Intelligence is not morality, any more than height is morality. They are both genetically-based and environment-modified. So-called “egalitarians” would do well to make the argument for how you realistically deal with the differences in attribute and ability in a way that conforms both to physical reality and the ideals of moral equality.
If one is a strict materialist, it will be harder to point to human value apart from capabilities, and the most relevant capability in modern society is intellectual, hence why progressives hear “some races tend towards less intelligence on average” and interpret it as “group x is subhuman.”
But western tradition, coming from Christianity, holds that moral worth is not tantamount to a persons usefulness, and it is possible to be less generally or specifically useful but not less worthy, no less deserving of moral treatment.
Whether this view is possible without the Christian foundation remains to be seen, but if the group differences are observable reality–which is plausible and may potentially be proven on the genetic level–lets hope that the porgressives are wrong that less intelligent–or even less kind or honest–must be viewed as less human (by the average person if not by them), any more than less tall is.
Randy, you don’t have to wait on group differences to be proven to get to that point. We (non-creationists, anyway) already know humans vary by intelligence individually.
I’m not trying to prove human moral worth, I am asserting it, ex nihilo. I could troll you through Rawls for six hours, but what is the point?
Humans have value, moral worth, because I say they do.
And I’m really, really smart! 😛
Yeah, I don’t really get that. I’m perfectly willing to judge different humans as having different moral worth, like Einstein is worth more than Charles Manson, but on the basis of individual differences, not on the basis of people with roughly their skin tone descended from roughly the same part of the world average 6 fewer IQ points than some other broad grouping of people. Even if you want to ignore the relative good and harm done by people and judge them solely on IQ, you can test a person’s IQ and don’t need to guess it from their appearance.
Who says it’s disagreement anti-egalitarians want to discriminate against? No, it’s usually those of the wrong race, or (in here) those with the low IQ scores who are deemed second class and permissible to use for their own good. They rarely go out and call it lying, cheating and stealing of course.
Then you’re an egalitarian – or at least you’re professing an egalitarian creed – so what’s the big deal? I don’t know what you think is realistically needed to deal with differences, or what differences need to be dealt it in the first place, but you can answer that as an egalitarian yourself.
You seem to be conflating “First Step: Gain control of the political structure” and “Last Step: Gain control of the political structure.” Which may not be unwarranted, but I seem to recall you complaining about the same argument being applied vs. social justice causes earlier?
Harald,
You misunderstand, my statement was poorly worded.
I have never seen it asserted by the sorts of people you call “anti-egalitarians” and who I know as “HBD” aficionados, or even Spearhead types, that it is morally permissible to lie to, cheat or steal from “lesser” peoples. Even the people who straight up claim the title of racist do not say this sort of thing. It’s possible there’s one or two, it’s a big internet, but I’ve been through the depths of it many times, for decades and never seen it even suggested.
You are failing an ideological Turing test. Even the people who hate X group, think they are less intelligent, more criminal and should be expelled from society do not make the argument that because of these supposed characteristics, it isn’t immoral to do things that would be immoral against other people.
Have you read Moldbug? If you have, could you point me to anything implying that he’d press the button?
The thing that came to mind was the Fnargl thing, where he posits a being with the ability to cause people to die instantly – and goes on to say that despite Fnargl being selfishly interested in only gold and lacking in conscience this would still have beneficial consequences. It’s a little bit of a stretch though.
So I can totally imagine the 10000 word wall of smugness. As to whether Yarvin would actually do it, rather than admiring some imaginary antihero for doing it, that’s another question.
You have a compelling argument, I recant my previous support for pluralism and now agree with you that we should ban privilege theorists from public speech.
People who assert that you’re an inherently worse person/less valuable/deserving of respect for being white, male or cis etc? Go ahead and boycott them. Do you think I like that lot? Do you think I consider them “pluralistic”? On the contrary. A judgment about ultimate moral value isn’t a rational judgment, if they decide you have less of it, you’re not going to be able to reason them out of it anyway. You’ll get some version of “Oh look, the subhuman thinks it’s unfair that he’s subhuman!”.
Now to “ban them from public speech”, you know I never said that.
Who you “like” is irrelevant, the question is who you’re willing to endorse the social streamrolling of.
The Moldbug and pizzeria incidents are both clearly attempts to exile their targets from public life, not personal-scale dissociation. If you didn’t mean to encompass these incidents with your original statement, then you’re addressing a completely different sort of action than the ones that are providing our discussion context.
Ah, I’m giving aid and comfort to the enemy with my statements, am I?
I never endorsed the “social steamrolling” of anyone. I’m just saying if someone explicitly thinks you’re not deserving of respect or ordinary human considerations, then no one can fault you for not wanting to associate with them.
This goes whether it’s
* someone who doesn’t respect your right to not participate in a ceremony
* someone who considers your interest or opinion worthless because of your inborn characteristics
* someone who wants to prevent you from seeing your loved ones at the hospital
* someone who reserves the right to kill you if you stand in way of the revolution/give aid and comfort to the muslim invaders with your speech acts
etc. In short, as long as it’s passive in nature, as long as it’s something you don’t do rather than something you do, then disassociate away, and don’t mind if people call it steamrolling.
No, you’re just off-topic in a manner that smacks of deliberate subject conflation.
What you don’t do in the market is no more my business than what you do do in your own house. But this wasn’t a post about inactions, which your response pretends very hard not to notice.
Getting back to the thesis, my point is there are a lot of social justice arguments I really hate, but which I find myself unintentionally reinventing any time things go really bad for me, or I feel like myself or my friends are being persecuted.
I have trouble understanding why SJ people don’t consider their viewpoint to be winning out when even their enemies are now consistently adopting their ideas and rhetorical frameworks.
When I’m putting up with too much and I’ve used up my entire mental buffer, then somebody bothering me and hiding under the cover of “oh, this was such a tiny insult that you would seem completely crazy to call me on it” is especially infuriating, even more infuriating than someone insulting me outright and me being able to respond freely. The more you have to deal with people who hate you and want to exclude you, the more likely you are to get into this mode, not to mention people who have developed their own little secret language of insults.
This, I believe, is why people can’t stand Moldbug, and is definitely one of the big reasons they can’t stand Vox Day.
Vox does this cutesy coquettish flirting with white supremacy precisely so he can say “Why are you getting mad? I didn’t say neo-nazis were good I just said they might not be so bad, why are you getting all upset when I’m just trying to have a calm conversation?”
It really impresses his fans but all I see is a little kid waving his arms in front of his sister’s face and going “I’m not touching you! You can’t get mad because I’m not touching you!”
Moldbug, to the extent that I can even decipher what he’s talking about, seems to do the same thing. He’s written stuff that I read as him saying, “Now, I’m just saying certain cultures have been more successful than others, we can all draw our own conclusions, right?” and when you’re sick of taking shit from people some smirking nerd pretending you can’t get mad because he’s not actually touching you doesn’t fucking help.
Anyway I didn’t support banning him from that conference because the person doing it totally didn’t know what Moldbug’s views were; he just heard a complaint and assumed it must be genuine, which is something I can’t see leading anywhere good.
Totally not clear on how or why this would be considered an anti-SJ blog. People get slotted into the pro-SJ and anti-SJ categories really easily for reasons I rarely understand.
When you invent gunpowder or rifling, you aren’t happy when your enemies start using them too.
Pingback: Lord Foul’s Baying 6/14 | File 770
One thought comes to mind about the police-officer vs rape-victim-declared-rapist comparison. What worries me, at least, is that the latter is a completely cold situation, with months of consideration, obvious evidence, sufficient time to investigate, verify, and deliberate a verdict, and it still ends up so completely off that something has to be /wrong/
The system broke down. A process that could have avoided an insane verdict by just one person standing up and saying: “This is ridiculous, you’re all ridiculous, the empress has no clothes (because she was the one that took them off) and you’re ruining a /victim’s/ life. How can you look at yourselves? What would your friends and family say? Why should I not tell them you’re about to condemn the life of a victim for your batshit insane ideological impulses?
There is a highly redundant system that still somehow broke down. Meaning that many /many/ important fail-safes in the machine are rotted and broken.
Compare that with the police officer shootings. The overwhelming majority are heat-of-the-moment instances where the victim is making aggressive moves, and if those moves are intentionally aggressive, then a failure for the officer to react would result in harm or death of the officer. It’s a much /less/ redundant system. It has very few fail-safes. Which is unfortunate because being shot while innocent is certainly much, much worse than being branded a sex-offender by a college committee.
But at least we can understand why the person was shot, and can even see a justification of it. The bad event that happens here is not an indication that an incredibly redundant system has failed.
One at worse indicates a single, racist, trigger-happy cop was put in a stressful and muddy situation and took advantage of it. The other indicates not one sexist ideological zealot, but an entire committee was put in a cool, open, transparent situation, and after months of deliberation, could justify to themselves, and feel safe enough justifying to their bosses, a horrible, obvious, zealous verdict handed down in contravention of first-hand evidence (texts from the accuser herself).
Both are very rare events, but one indicates only an individual failure. The other indicates a systemic failure. In the former case, for 1% of shootings to be deliberate and unjustified, only 1% of cops have to be bad. For the latter case, for 1% of verdicts to be deliberate and unjustified, ALL of the committee members, and the people they’re accountable to, have to be bad.
Sometimes the lizard brain has the right of it.
Pretty much this. In a broader sense, the Bad Things that SJWs become upset about are not only perpetuated by individuals but are actions that we have systems in place to either prevent or rectify. The Bad Things that SJWs support are things wherein they are doing everything in their power to obliterate the system that prevents or rectifies it.
Being raped is Bad. Being falsely accused of rape is Bad. If a woman is in danger of being raped, there are things she can do and places she can turn to to ensure her safety; should she be raped anyway, people will console her, reassure her, provide support, and attempt to punish the rapist. If a man is in danger of being falsely accused of rape, there is nothing he can do to ensure his safety. If he is falsely accused of rape, even if later exonerated, all of his interpersonal relationships will be destroyed and every interaction he has with the system from then on will be trying to get him to kill himself.
I am less upset by “the holes in our various layers of defense lined up and an unwanted outcome occurred” than I am “every layer of defense is being actively destroyed and creating terrible outcomes that are nonetheless the exact thing the system now desires”.
“no one would ever serve pizza at a wedding anyway.”
Let me stop you right there…
Obviously not as the wedding breakfast, but I’ve been to a couple of weddings where pizza turned up at about midnight after the ceilidh and was devoured as by hordes of delighted locusts; wedding receptions are long, the guests have to be fed more than once.
“All Things Scottish, and pizza!”
No one ever asked that pizza parlor to cater a wedding. Not once.
I addressed this argument regarding a right-winger once – she was part of anti-gay church and had signed an anti-gay marriage petition, and people were arguing that she should be fired because her job included working with all sorts of students, including lgbt students, and people wondered if she could do her job.
What I said at the time, and what I say now regarding Gallo, is that it’s unfair to per-emptively fire someone because of speculation that they will be unable to do their job. If it turns out that Gallo is unable to do her job, the appropriate time to handle that is once it actually happens.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, when people say “so and so must be fired because they said X,” it’s nothing but politics by other means. It’s bullshit when it’s done by lefties, and it’s bullshit when it’s done by righties. Trying to attack people’s livelihoods should not be a legitimate form of political debate.
No, enforcement of social harmony is important in workplaces (along with all the rest of society), so it totally should remain on the table as a quiver in the bow of approaches to supporting and enforcing social harmony.
Why is it that social harmony always seems to involve starving or outright killing the disharmonious?
I thoroughly agree!
If Scott Alexander’s commitment to reasonableness prevents him from committing to labeling the asymmetry between anti-SJWs vs SJW behavior, he wont ever figure it out until its too late. One explicitly endorses entering organizations they did not create, taking over leadership, and then using the levers of power to crush dissent. It worked in academia, it worked in large corporations (HR), its currently working in tech (racism! sexism! harassment!), it wont stop until every successful and interesting field has perfect representation of all favored minorities. And trust me, overturning the diversity of human interests and abilities is going to take alot of activism.
He wont man-up (ha- triggered?) and clearly identify which group is carrying the big bloody stick looking for more victims to make example of. Which group forced anyone who disagrees with them to arm themselves in turn. Oh he’ll insinuate, but that stand taking, thats for the lizard brain.
All he can bring himself to do is adopt the exact same, corrosive SJW concepts and apply them to traditional non-leftist groups (nerds are oppressed! microagressions against xians!). HE DOESNT GET IT. These concepts are ideas designed for war. They are memetic payloads that justify the use of force to overturn existing, unpoliticized social arrangements in favor of one’s own group. Not enough non-white people in gaming? Time to take over all these white people’s gaming websites and big companies and politicize everything in gaming in order to make it “more friendly” to minorities. How weird these minorities dont just…you know…make their own games and sell them to the minorities that are dying to buying them? (i mean, this is literally a hobby that take nothing but programming skill you can learn from a book to enter. Wasn’t this exactly how the gaming industry even came about?). Oh yeah, cause then you wouldnt get to destroy this unpoliticized and uncontrolled valuable industry yourself while getting attention and accolades for your progressive activism.
I think force is a great way to ensure ideological compliance. So does the left. “Reasonable” people like Scott wont ever have to choose a side…they can just wait for 20 years while “truth” is sorted and then suddenly…you cant make pizza if you dont believe in gay marriage or make a living if you blog about biological differences between groups of humans….oh cause….truth. right. has nothing to do with poor brandon eich over there.
I’ll go on record: there is a war for US culture right now. In a different, more liberal society it wouldnt matter, you could just leave and start your own thing and hang out with your own people and make your own little society off in a corner. Like in utah or something for example. These days though, if you ever do anything successful, they’ll come find you and purge you. There is no exit. That’s where the horror is. There’s no where to go. 1865 made sure you cant go anywhere else in the US,1945 made sure you cant go anywhere outside the US, 1965 made sure you cant retreat into private organization, and 201Xs made sure you cant even go talk about it with interested readers.
I used to be a nice reasonable, politicized center-left liberal with libertarian leanings. Then i went to college. Then law school. Then got a job in a big corporation. Then married someone working for the education system…and….i realized that if you disagree you shut up or you get in trouble. i got radicalized.
i hope elon musk figure out mars for my kids.
Don’t forget 1917!
“If not for the US military, you’d be speaking German right now!” — There’s a good chance I would. My grandmother did. Language barriers are useful sometimes: they impede the flow of memes.
I do wonder how effective language barriers actually are at firewalling virulent memes. It appears to me that the universities are quite adept at taking conservatish spanish speaking latinos with catholic mores and producing progressive activists, and then using these activists to further progressive-ize spanish speaking population (social workers, teachers, etc). Especially as this is a highly rewarding effort on an electoral level.
The french do seem to have a somewhat distinctive literary culture, but there certainly is leakage in literature and philosophy.
From a more macro view, western civilization’s “ideas discourse” seems quite tied together, despite the germanic/romantic barrier.
Blind gamers are wondering the same thing.
Really, if mainstream games were made more blind friendly, we’d actually have games. If left to our own devices, we get quite the mess, because apparently knowing how to program is insufficient in the west (but more than enough in Japan).
That, and the ROI is tiny. You have to do it because you want to, not because you want the money. This might work out better for the sexier minorities, just because there are more of them, so the market isn’t supported on the backs of the Danes, the Germans, and British Wellfare (the American wellfare doesn’t last 5 minutes and therefore cannot contribute to innovation.).
*Mumbles something about comorbid disorders and culture*
@CAE_Jones – “Really, if mainstream games were made more blind friendly, we’d actually have games.”
I make games for a living, usually as an artist, and design my own in my free time. Making them more blind-friendly seems at first blush like a very, very hard problem. Like, a whole lot of genres seem like they might be flat-out impossible… but I wonder how much of that is just my lack of knowledge of how sight workarounds work.
I’m assuming you know about Deep Sea and Blindside?
http://wraughk.com/deepsea/
http://www.blindsidegame.com/
Deep Sea no, Blindside yes.
I’m pretty sure everyone, myself included, has been overestimating the difficulty of adding blind accessibility to most games. The hardest would be fast-paced, high information-density games.
The question of difficulty came up recently with the game industry’s exemption from the CVAA coming up for review, so I tried to code a basic cane-style “radar” system, assuming a 3D geometry system with raycasting. It took me 16 minutes, so I conceded the point (I was arguing in favor of the exemption getting extended).
This doesn’t apply anywhere near as well to certain genres, but generally speaking, “add a screen reader, optional noisy objects, and a cane equivalent” goes very far.
A catch being that adding accessibility from popular engines like Unity is harder than adding it from a more code-heavy base like Pygame or Javascript (Or something lower level, if the performance/platform-targeting are important enough).
From a marketing standpoint, there are two issues: most gamers who can see seem to be annoyed when their plainly readable menus start talking to them, and advertising accessibility publicly labels something as not really for normal people (and thus, good luck with that Kickstarter campaign). The solutions are not to make things you’d expect disabled players to use almost exclusively on by default, and to only mention the accessibility to the potential disabled players directly, rather than to your general audience.
(Making something like Minecraft available to the blind, though, might as well be a pipe dream. Making the interface accessible is one thing, but the entire aesthetic experience would be lost. I say this as a maker of many map editors. I don’t see why the likes of Civilization / Elder Scrolls / Call of Duty / Super Mario Bros / Tetris can’t be made accessible, though. Indeed, two superstar-ish developers among blind gamers have covered most of these to some extent, one of them being a Japanese student who isn’t even 18 yet, and the other being a sighted Engineer from Michigan.)
Are you only thinking of audio games, or also of other kinds? I assume too few people own braille displays for there to be a market, but the rise of smartphones with accelerometers and GPS make it possible to develop games played in the real world (like Ingress, although I think that one relies on visuals), where the output is just text.
Are ports for bling people good? Is it just porting textual novel style games?
I suspect new genre’s designed by blind people optimized for nonvisual gameplay would probably be the best way to make a game that is actually engaging – if one did it well it might just be engaging for everyone. How that would be applied to AAA gaming is hard to see…
@The_Dancing_Judge – “I suspect new genre’s designed by blind people optimized for nonvisual gameplay would probably be the best way to make a game that is actually engaging…”
…Thinking about it more, it seems like there might be a surprising amount you could do by abstracting existing systems and converting the abstraction to a workable medium. Deep Sea is essentially a first-person-shooter that uses only audio. I can think of a couple ways you could do the same with, say, platforming, or even bullet-hell-style schmups.
Making a platformer or shooter for the blind would be a lot harder than it would seem at first blush, because video games are already using video to compensate for lacking another sense — sense of touch. You can easily say, oh, you can use 3d positional audio to locate objects… how are you going to know when you’re sliding into a wall?
Controllers have had tactical feedback for a long time now…
The idea has a lot more potential than it’s apparent at first.
The tactile feedback on controllers is generally “shaking” to various degrees of severity, not something capable of giving you a direction or solidity or giving two surfaces at once. You could probably make a specialized piece of gear for it, but it would be very complicated.
And Craven, you could use that to MAKE a danmaku shooter for the blind, probably, but it would have to be one with slow, large bullets so that you can feel them coming, and get tactile feedback in time to react. Too many bullets involved for auditory feedback from bullets to provide any useful information, and there’s just no way anyone is going to be able to get through Four Devas Arcanum “Knock Out In Three Steps” or Atomic Fire “Uncontainable Nuclear Reaction” without being able to see the bullets.
Ew, ugly typo, sorry, too late to change.
Force feedback is a cruder version of what I was thinking: tones and Doppler. Imagine a “positional hum” composed of an X-tone and Y-tone, with a similar system for entities in the environment. yeah, you can’t get anything close to the number of entities as you have in a normal bullet hell. The point is more that they can give you a starting point into a similar design paradigm.
That would probably require another new technology that isn’t invented yet, but one people are really, really wanting. We used to have to draw every image we wanted a computer to display individually; for every entity in the game, we had to draw it from every angle, at every stage of its actions. Then, we became able to render things as 3D models, and just tell the computer “This is what the object is” and it can draw the object for us from a specified angle.
We still can’t “render” sounds in this way — computers can’t create sounds on the fly the way they can create pictures, and every sound a program plays was prerecorded specifically for that purpose. For something with that degree of sensitivity, recording every possible combination of pitch and tone would be incredibly cumbersome; we’d need to be able to have a computer “render” sounds the way it can render images.
@DrBeat:
Ahem:
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/sound/
http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/g.w.m.rauterberg/publications/EDMEDIA94paper.pdf
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-a-dragons-mating-scream-sounds-like
True, fully automated sound rendering is not commonplace yet, but we’re actually pretty close.
@DrBeat – “We still can’t “render” sounds in this way — computers can’t create sounds on the fly the way they can create pictures, and every sound a program plays was prerecorded specifically for that purpose.”
…Wut?
I mean, I’m an artist, not an audio engineer, but software to do what you’re saying has existed for decades. Early games used programmatic sound exclusively, I thought. Hence “chiptunes”. Even synth-style blending or autotune type effects would be more than sufficient for what I’m talking about. Maybe you’re thinking something much more elaborate?
[EDIT] – …After checking Bugmaster’s links, yeah, I’m definitely not talking about physics-based sound. Imagine two instruments, violin and upright bass, say, for the X axis and Y axis respectively. lower notes are left/down, higher notes are up/right. That’s your character’s “position”. We already have 3d sound; ie, sound sources check physical distance to the listener and alter themselves accordingly in volume, etc. Other instrument combos/note patterns denote various types of things in the environment. If it helps, use simulated Doppler to emphasize movement relative to the player. You navigate based on the music.
Keeping it from getting discordant, cacophonous mess would be a design challenge, but not, I think, an insurmountable one. With some skill and effort, it could even be quite beautiful.
Sometimes. Audio Quake was apparently not especially impressive. Attempts at making accessible Pokemon seem to be coming along swimmingly. I have a hard time judging how my attempts at accessifying Mario and Sonic have been received (and I never really finished Sonic, so it’s mostly just Mario), but I get the impression that it influenced an unambiguously successful Japanese audio game, so there’s that.
No, but for obvious reasons these are quite popular.
At DrBeat:
My experience has been the opposite–it seems hard at first, then suddenly someone stumbles upon something else and realizes “Oh, duh. Let’s try that.”
this guy more or less got pressured into accepting donations after he did something we’ve all failed to emulate and more or less pumped out innovative games every other month for a whole year. The reason that consistency stopped is because, after that first year, he solved the First Person Shooter problem well enough that the game Swamp has demanded his attention ever since. The only accessibility features are those you’d expect from real life: text is rendered via text-to-speech, there is a cane-like radar that can be aimed, and marked locations on the map can be identified and tracked in a GPS-like manner. The only item-related noise that breaks the realism is that quest items make a distinct pinging sound (other items are presumed to be lying in the hands of fly-ridden corpses).
Platformers still have a ways to go, but have apparently settled on footsteps echoing off upcoming dropoffs, the ability to “feel” around nearby areas, and sometimes a passive “sonar” that indicates the presence of walls or elevated areas. (I have put much of my available effort into experimenting with other ways of doing this, but none have really taken off.)
Since the community consisting of blind gamers is so tiny, language barriers are a real obstacle–one for which someone decided to just build a direct pipeline to Google Translate into a screen reader to solve. Most developers don’t have the resources to translate their games, so they make it possible to send text to the clipboard, then the player just presses a single keystroke to translate and speak it in their native language. Swamp is an exception, in that it comes with a language file that players have used to make their own translations.
@CAE_Jones – “I have a hard time judging how my attempts at accessifying Mario and Sonic have been received (and I never really finished Sonic, so it’s mostly just Mario)”
What’s the method for Mario? How’s it work? And any links to your projects or anything available online?
At FacelessCraven:
My take on Mario uses a few things, including something I regret calling the “accessible camera” since it’s nothing like a camera yet the term caught on anyway.
Blocks ahead, blocks above, and dropoffs ahead make sound when you take a step; each of these can be toggled if it gets too noisy. Glowing bricks, coins, pipes, and enemies always make sound.
The thing-I-really-should-not-have-called-a-camera is more or less a cursor that can be moved around block-by-block, playing a sound to indicate what’s there. For convenience, I added a command for it to play a whole column in sequence.
There’s also a command to speak all the on-screen objects (things like enemies and mushrooms; it doesn’t mention individual blocks). I was lazy with this feature because it’s the sort of feature I rather wish we could get away from–most games with such a feature would pause the game and open a list for the player to browse.
I’ve been hosting my games primarily on Dropbox (I am not a server wizard, I don’t have much money, and I am terrible with people, which restricts my alternatives). So, naturally, the links are currently disabled. I posted a load of sendspace mirrors in this forum thread. I’ve looked into Google Drive as an alternative, but Google’s web apps have terrible reputations due to accessibility being a nightmare until very recently, so motivation hasn’t been especially strong.
Games using braille displays have been tried. There are problems in addition to the even smaller market (that’s a whole hand you can’t use for controls, after all, never mind that a braille display with more than a single line is going to cost around $10,000).
(When I say “have been tried”, I mean by me and like one other guy who made a braille version of Tetris. You can fit enough information to play Mario into ~90bits, apparently, at least.)
If there were more efficient braille i/o devices (like the braille mouse that occasionally pops up at conventions but never gets sold), or some alternative tactile display of value (For example, if Senseg’s eSense had come out circa 2009 so it could actually penetrate the market), that would open up many more opportunities, and if I was agenty enough I’d go buy parts and try to build one right now (ur, or in a few hours, since it’s 2:26AM). But mostly the current state of haptics just makes me periodically scream in frustration.
Smart phones, on the other hand, are slowly but surely growing as a more disability-friendly platform. (*Mumbles something about wanting a smartphone with better haptics*)
Agreed! With most of what you say, anyway.
Profoundly insightful. (I went online this morning hoping for an interesting new SSC post, and was delighted by this.)
I was recently struck by this quote:
“It is common for people who feel entitled to look for unjust reasons for exclusion from something they feel they are owed. Afraid to look within, they will search for any confirmations they can find that someone, somewhere has unjust views of them, and then work long and hard to build a case that these views somehow formed the basis of discrimination. The logical leaps and sifting for scant evidence that make up this process are the roots of paranoid beliefs and are pretty common among lots of people, not just people who have diagnoses.”
It reads like a typical anti-SJW pro-meritocracy article, criticising people who think they’re being held back in STEM because they’re female or whatever. But it’s actually from an article by a self-described SJW, criticising the Sad Puppies and their belief in a liberal bias in sci-fi.
While I appreciate the desire to be consistent in one’s views, I think that sometimes, one has to accept that the lizard brain may have a bit of a point.
Over my course (English literature) I have watched teachers mould a great deal of the students into people who do things like apply “author-is-dead” criticism to real-world history specifically to support the view that all problems in the world are the fault of the white man. They have repeatedly and barefacedly lied to us about authors and the historical context of their work, again, in order to push everyone into agreeing with an SJ narrative of history and literature.
Given that this is regarded as one of the best colleges in my country, and this seems to be the pattern across the arts subjects, (and is trying more and more to push its way into the sciences) I can fully understand why the right is concerned. The largely left-leaning world of academia is raising a generation of academics (at least in my country) who are deliberately primed to unquestioningly accept the SJ narrative, even when it is shown to lie.
I appreciate this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I am sad to say that I have watched as, day by day, even the people I respected, people who were critical of all ideas which were presented to them, who researched and made up their own minds, have been worn down until they no longer have the will to resist when the same demonstrable lie is trotted out in front of them for the fourth or fifth time, and it is only then, when all resistance has been squashed, that they stop repeating it, satisfied that the wrong-think had been beaten out.
“They have repeatedly and barefacedly lied to us about authors and the historical context of their work, again, in order to push everyone into agreeing with an SJ narrative of history and literature.”
Do you have concrete examples? I have heard similar complain before, but since no one ever gave concrete example of a lie being told, I am not sure what should I imagine that happened.
I once had a professor claim that all the main characters of Shakespeare’s work were “white men”, so I raised my hand and said “Othello”. I guess I really didn’t need that class after all.
Portia in “The Merchant of Venice” and Lady MacBeth aren’t men. Cleopatra in “Antony and Cleopatra”? Depending on how great a proportion of her ancestry you consider Egyptian, and whether or not you consider North Africans ‘white’, I don’t think she was a white man either 🙂
She was almost certainly overwhelmingly Greek. The Ptolemaic dynasty was pretty damn heavily in-bred. Definitely not a man, though.
I suspect I’m a bit to the right of most readers of this blog, so I used this post as an occasion to see how my instincts line up with the rest of the commentariat:
The three cases of suppressed speech that are most often brought up in this conversation are 1. the Brandon Eich firing 2. the pizzeria closure and 3. the Moldbug disinvitation.
Case #1 is most disturbing to me by a significant margin because a man was deprived of his position on the basis of his lawful and rightful participation in the democratic process of his country. This, too me, was unforgivable and will have a much greater effect on the suppression of speech in the future because it effectively disenfranchises persons with unpopular views. This is actually frightening.
Case#2. Had the pizzeria merely been affected by a local boycott, I would have to shrug, but the fact that the entire Arsenal of Fake Internet Democracy was emptied in their direction is very troubling. Disproportionate responses against unprepared small targets is a great way to incrementally apply prior restraint against entire categories of speech. Additionally, from what I understand, the pizzeria owner was baited into discussing a ridiculous hypothetical scenario of catering a gay wedding by one of the outrage-seeking missiles in the media. This highlights how cultural elites are leveraging the organs in which they are entrenched to advance their position.
I have a more ambiguous response to Case#3. I have a passing familiarity with Moldbug. Perhaps unfortunately for him, he’s become a bit like the Palaeo diet, except that his lesser imitators are fixated on subjugating ‘inferior’/’unproductive’ people rather than bacon. If I understand correctly, he is not uncomfortable describing his writings as ‘seditious’. I am not certain how to treat speech that aims to change the meta-level terms of the debate. If Moldbug wishes to replace democracy/free speech with a system that removes these rights from the peons (or replaces them with the right of exit), this makes me wonder if I should apply a weighting factor to his current claim to free speech [affecting only these views]. This is probably inconsistent, but it is an inconsistency that has troubled designers of democratic systems for some time. If the organizers of the conference had disinvited him on free association grounds, I would not object. But he was disinvited on the basis of complaints by Communists! Who have a symmetrical meta-level problem with speech!
I think that there should be no restriction on speech that does not advocate the (violent!) overthrow of a democratic government. So this makes me sympathetic to Moldbug. But I do not think that all segments of society are similarly situated with respect to the consequences of many kinds of speech – particularly historically disenfranchised minorities – and if they wish to respond to speech they fear will rob them of their freedoms or individuality with torrents of opposing speech, even including certain shaming tactics, I do not object on moral grounds.
The only part of your description of Moldbug we can agree on is that subjugating bacon would be a horrible atrocity.
Some observations, if I may. (a) provided that “speech” in non-politicised, “democracy” and “free speech” are orthogonal to each other, so you conflating the two seems odd* in my eyes; an “unregulated marketplace” for ideas had existed before “democracy,” and it still exists now in spite of it because (b) to the extent that “speech” is indeed currently politicised (and once virtually anything is up to a vote, the “personal is political” is a lot more than a slogan or tactical principle), it follows that “free speech” may very well be nothing but a political weapon, which of course makes me a petty “orateur” who merely argues semantics and (* -) a “liar,” although I’d prefer the term “lawyer.”
Now, if I may continue with my sophistry—if we were to allow that “free” is indeed synonymous with “unregulated,” then one could (purely as a theoretic exercise, mind you) make the case that insofar as it does not pertain to non-political “speech,” the reinstating of the principle of laesa maiestas is a scaling back in the “regulation of the marketplace” of ideas however abusive it may prove as a curbing of “free speech.”
But this line of thought is obviously wrong, because taken to its full conclusion, one immediately realises that the argument assumes a situation where, what one would be defending and what one would be receiving could vary, in a way, independent of each other, stemming from the same kind of language failure (leading into object level disasters) as that caused by trickster genies trapped in bottles, which perfectly illustrates why the argument is abject nonsense: genies don’t exist!
Therefore, free speech does.
And all it took was to make a white guy feel the existential threat women and minorities feel to receive a rational understanding of what is actually going on. SJ-tactics worked, although in a rather unexpected way. Now what´s left is to help people with existential fear. And to understand thinking from a threatened position for what it is.
I don’t think it’s possible to “help people with existential fear” by deliberately creating more existential fear, unless you expand the term “people” to mean, “only a specific subgroup of people”.
Are you really sure about that? For me it seems like what actually happened. There were groups that felt oppressed and scared. From their perspective the world seemed to be ruled by a privileged group. They thought that the situation they found themselves in was a deliberate creation by the privileged people. So they reacted by using the means they thought were used against them, such as ostracism, ridiculing, etc. Of course their methods eventually got implemented against a group that is both rational and empathetic. This group though didn´t react with typical SJ-tactics, but with reasoning and empathy. And thus in the light of reason the whole problem shows itself as a matter of fear.
I’m not sure who this “group that is both rational and empathetic” is. Other than that, just going by your summary of events, it seems like at the end of the day the total amount of fear in the world had increased, but the amount of feat that one specific group is experiencing had decreased by a small amount.
As I said above, this outcome is suboptimal, unless you only care about one specific group — in which case, the outcome is great, and may even be optimal.
The thing is, I am adult women and did not felt existential threat for being a women before. The biggest existential threat to me being treated as equality capable person I see right now is radical feminism or alternatively radical backslash. I see both as similarly dangerous, can not decide which one is more dangerous.
I do not fear walking around city. I do not fear when I sit and man stands above me while talking. Nobody cared about what I wear on the job until radical feminists articles mocked the way I wear while pretending to “fight for women in programming”. See, I am not stylish enough and according to them, it must be because I am oppressed and scared. I am women, feminism think I have to be as fashion obsessed as them. It just can not be that some women, maybe not strong majority but we still exist, do not care about fashion all that much.
I do not need female only safe space, I am fine talking with my male colleagues. I never needed special “women talk first” rule in class or on the job. I do not faint when bad guy in video-game says “bitch” nor feel unwelcome just because that bad guy said that.
Does that mean there is no sexism anymore ever? Nope it does not. But, radical feminists running around talking how women need special rules because we are literally incapable to function without being helped constantly is not helping.
The whole “existential threat women universally feel” is radical feminist concept – but they do not talk for women in general. They talk only for small subset of women. Feminism as a whole had 20% approval rates last time I checked and that includes whole range of people who consider SJWs style feminism radical fringe – approving only moderate non-hateful subset.
In my opinion, SJW radical feminism and old school sexists hold the same ideas about what women are capable of. SJWs think that us, weak incapable women, need constant help and nudging towards making right decisions. Meanwhile, old school sexists think that we are weak and incapable too, so he will take it upon him to help me make correct choices.
And anyway, what is exact difference between safe space and gender segregated lab? They are literally the same thing.
True, but you must admit there are women with different experiences of the world than you. A woman how has been raped, by a man she trusted or who lives in a community where cat-calling is normal, or who had her intelligence and competence denigrated by male colleagues just for being a woman, will have a different perspective on the relative threat of feminist excesses vs. sexism.
Beware the typical-mind fallacy or, for that matter, assuming your experiences or those of your friends are the norm for most.
Yes, but none of those women is helped by all women being painted as if we were in her situation. In particular, raped women is not helped at all by definition of rape changing to cover being seduced or all kinds of messy drunken sex. Those experiences are not nearly the same.
I did met openly sexist men and women (women did “wow I would be unable to” comment on me being in tech). And I can tell you that men telling inappropriate joke and sexist men are two different animals. They are not helping equality when they treat them the same. Sexist men learn watch their language faster then jokes telling men. Only former are dangerous, latter are not funny at worst. Worst of all, once you prevented sexist from talking, you can not oppose their points anymore.
And anyway, women say as many inappropriate jokes as men – there is only difference in style.
Overwhelming majority of men did treated me equally. By huge large margin. I have seen men coming to my side in some encounters with sexist in a way I was happy about (e.g. not in white knight style).
You are not helping equality when you ignore positive experiences. You are not helping equality when you prevent men defending themselves. You are not helping equality when you accuse men of sexism when they merely told joke or had wrong shirt.
Remember comet guy? Not sexist. No puritan either probably, but women are not puritans in nature. Only some of us, just as some of men.
Oh another thing about comet scandal – he had a boss – a women. She did scientific work, she did organizational work, she was his senior. She could have been great example of women in science, if only all those outraged about shirt would cared more about science and tech then about shirts.
Oh another thing about comet scandal – the lady who did shirt once said in interview she seeked to protect him, because she seen herself strong and able to handle it. She seen him as gentle and sensitive.
She is someone to be respected. Hey, did you noted? She is no damsel in distress. Such women exist, lets talk about them too. Want girls grow capable and strong? Celebrate such real life role models more then shirt oppressed ones.
I have no experience with cat calling. However, it is not at all clear who is privileged when homeless or low paid construction worker cat calls upper middle class women. Some women living in that environment just say “fuck off dude” and do not feel oppressed at all. Others do, and I believe it is important to hear both kinds of women.
Overall, I think that males do not deserve to be smacked just for being males all the time. There is nothing wrong with being man.
While it is true that there are women that have different experiences than Andy here, that does not diminish her statement’s impact as an argument against internet feminism’s rhetoric. The rhetoric you see from feminist sources online (and those who agree with them) is not merely “there exist women who experience this”, it is “all women experience this”. Sometimes that is implicit, but quite often it’s explicit (for example, that asinine #YesAllWomen nonsense a while back). Because the rhetoric overreaches so far as to claim “all women”, even one counterexample is good enough to disprove the claims.
It is obvious (or so one would hope) to any reasonable person that not all women, even in western societies, are fortunate enough to live lives free of discrimination or mistreatment. But neither is it true (despite the claims of internet feminism) that all women are oppressed. What we need, and I have yet to see, is a good handle on exactly how many women are actually out there living in fear of men, being mistreated, etc. That’s the useful thing to know (after all, the middle ground between 0% and 100% oppression is vast and knowing where the truth falls is significant), but nobody seems to be interested in figuring that out.
Yeah, this exactly. My problem with a lot of feminists is not that they say that sexism exists (it does) and that some women feel threatened (also true). The problem is that they speak in sweeping generalities about the female experience as if they have the unique authority to decide what it means to be female.
The YesAllWomen thing is a perfect example. Another one is the Margaret Atwood quote: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them; woman are afraid men will kill them.” Maybe that is true for some women. I really don’t think it’s true for the majority.
And women who object and say, “that may be your experience, but it’s not mine, please stop claiming to speak for me” tend to be shamed and silenced in the feminist community, told that they’re invalidating others’ experiences (and, ironically, having their own experiences invalidated). As a result, you get an echo chamber which magnifies grievances and creates a distorted picture of reality.
And because I’m using some generalities of my own, I should add that #NotAllFeminists are like this, of course. But there are enough of them to make feminist spaces feel hostile to women who don’t support the narrative.
That “men are afraid women will laugh at them, woman are afraid men will kill them” quote has always struck me as essentially saying “men are much more in touch with reality than women are”. That the SJW crew uses it to mean “men are really dangerous” says a lot about their ability to distinguish feelings from facts.
There is evidence that at least some of the women who live in communities where cat-calling is normal do not consider it oppressive. For example, I’ve read plenty of stories of female immigrants from Latin American countries complaining that they don’t get as many compliments from men as they did in their home country.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of the complaints about cat-calling come from women outside cultures where the practice is typical who have the misfortune to wander into spaces dominated by those cultures, IE the archetypical example of an upper-middle class businesswoman walking past a construction site.
It was amazing how quickly last year’s catcalling video disappeared down the memory hole once people noticed the inconvenient demographics of the catcallers.
If somebody feels existential fear for themselves, they will be less likely to empathize with the fear of others, especially those who are attacking them, and in fact they are more likely to consider their attackers as enemies to be subjugated or destroyed.
Just look at how terrorists seem to achieve exactly the opposite of their stated political goals: when Hamas fires a rocket at Israel, do the Israeli become more empathic to the plight of Palestinians? Nope, they actually become more bloodthirsty.
My sense is that the mirrored neurons/ reciprocation approach doesn’t work if fear is active in the brain. And trying to establish whose fault it is or who is worse than who doesn’t establish anything useful much either. I’d also briefly note the US seems to be similar to Australia but there’s no question you’re quite a bit more polarized than here.
This sort of excalation makes it fairly tempting to think we really need a Hobbesian but minimalist leader to stomp on people trying to spread fear in either direction. Unfortunately for any sort of strong but netural/minimal authority you’re going to need some prinicples to work on. The old liberalism is still sort of functional but I think there’s a need for a more sophisticated set of ideas to prevent the polarization getting worse. I think the Archipeligo is a good example of that sort of sophisticated new idea. I’ll take the chance to plug my own ideas of comprehensive morality and investigative politics as a contribution. Anyone else got good theoretical ideas around this?
If we don’t manage to slow this poison soon, its hard to see anything but a dark future for western politics.
There’s no evidence it happened even the one time.
What Doe (or, rather, Doe’s lawyers) actually claim is that Doe “experienced a total blackout and had no memory of his interactions with Sandra Jones at all. His defense was that, despite his lack of memory, he would never force a woman to have sex.”
“Blackout,” in this context, was referring to not being able to recall what happened. Doe isn’t claiming that he was unconscious while the sex happened. But it’s okay to falsely accuse someone of rape, as long as the person being accused is a woman, apparently.
Sandra Jones claims that Doe was conscious. Specifically, she claims that he held her head and forced her to give him head while she was saying things like “no” and “please don’t” and was trying to push him away. That sure the fuck sounds like rape to me. The panel found Jones’ account credible.
I don’t know if Jones was telling the truth or not. But as far as I can tell – and I’ve read both Doe’s complaint and the panel’s findings – there’s no basis for your claim that Jones raped an unconscious Doe.
Sorry about that. Please consider this once sentence withdrawn. Thanks.
I think it would be fairer to say that Doe was allegedly raped while incompetent – I believe that Amherst considers having sex with someone too drunk to meaninfully consent to be rape. (I guess you could conclude that Doe was blackout drunk but appeared sober to the accuser).
Barry, your account is contradicted by item 74 of the complaint: “In particular, it was undisputed − even on Sandra Jones’s own account − and the hearing board found, that at the outset Sandra Jones willingly engaged in sex with John Doe while he was “blacked out,” that is, while he was incapacitated and thus incapable of giving consent. Under the College’s Student Handbook, on these facts Sandra Jones—and not John Doe—was guilty of sexual misconduct.” Item 83 further goes into what the complaint means by “blacked out”, and it claims that the college’s own policies support that interpretation.
“Incapacitated” is an even better word than my suggestion of “incompetent.”
I think Barry’s right that “unconscious” isn’t fair, unless there’s some technical meaning that I don’t know.
Item 83 of the complaint cites an Amherst policy document that defines “a blackout state” using words like “do[es] not actually have conscious awareness.”
The board originally found John Doe’s claim of having been blacked out “credible”. It follows, according to the logic of the complaint, that the board agreed it was credible that John Doe had actually been unconscious, but since it had been due to his own drunkenness and that’s “never an excuse”, they condemned him anyway.
So no, I disagree that “unconscious” is unfair; the complaint DOES allege that John Doe had been in the blackout state in the sense of “not having conscious awareness”. It is not a stretch or a distortion to portray the complaint as claiming so. It may well be that this claim isn’t as substantiated and agreed-to by the board’s decision as the complaint likes to state, but the claim is there.
Anatoly, do you think that a person capable of speaking (not necessarily coherently) and walking is “unconscious”? Do you think that is a typical usage of the term and the usage that people expected Scott to be using?
Difference between “blackout” [will not remember what happened] and “blacked out” [unconscious] that is confusing a lot of people
It seems to me that there is widespread confusion as to how blackouts work. My understanding is that the sequence is:
1. Subject has a lot of alcohol.
2. Subject does stuff.
3. Subject forgets doing stuff.
However, the popular conception seems to be:
1. Subject has a lot of alcohol.
2. Subject enters into some mental state of unclear nature, in which they are capable of doing stuff, but it’s not really them doing them doing it, or something, I’m not really clear on this.
The thing about blackouts is no one is aware of them happening at the time, and even if they were, they wouldn’t remember that experience. And as a result, they perceive the blackout as happening before the other stuff happens. So, for instance, Doe perceives the order of events as:
1. I drank a lot of alcohol.
2. I blacked out.
3. I then received oral sex.
But that is not in fact the correct order; the blackout, that is, the erasure of memories, took place after the oral sex. There was no point at which the student was “blacked out” or “in a blackout”. It’s like if you record the events in a room from 1:00 to 2:00, but then you erase the recording from 1:15 to 1:45. It would be misleading to say “At 1:15, the video blacked out”, or to talk of the events from 1:15 to 1:45 as taking place during a blackout, and even more misleading to suggest that the people in the room from 1:15 to 1:45 were in some state intrinsically different from the state they were in from 1:00 to 1:15, or to suggest that they should have known that they should act differently because they were “in a blackout”.
Now, certainly, later having a blackout is correlated with being mentally incapacitated at the time, but they are different concepts, and there is no way, as far as I know (which, admittedly, isn’t all that far) to tell at the time that someone is in a period of time that they will later black out, and even if there were, it would be irrelevant to whether there is consent. Consider the movie “50 First Dates”. When Adam Sandler’s character has sex with Drew Barrymore’s character, that’s not rape, even though she won’t remember it the next day.
According to wikipedia:
(source)
Rather than a later event erasing memories, the drinker achieves “blackout conditions” and simply fails to form memories, sometimes retaining some fragments. Apparently they can recall about the last two minutes at any given time (as well as other scattered events, depending on how complete the blackout is).
This is connected to other forms of alcohol impairment, so the location of the gap in their memory is meaningful and helps to determine their mental state. I can’t speak to how meaningful it is in terms of capacity to give consent, but it is definitely different from a sober brain-state and different from other drinking brain-states.
Apparently they can recall about the last two minutes at any given time (as well as other scattered events, depending on how complete the blackout is).
The movie Memento depicts a character who has this condition, medically known as Anterograde Amnesia, permanently due to brain damage and serves as a pretty good illustration of how this works. Though obviously with alcohol you add drunkenness on top of that, coupled with the fact that a person who is black out drunk is unlikely to realize that their memory is impaired until after they recover.
People who aren’t drunk who have the condition are also generally not likely to realize that their memory is impaired, at least if Oliver Sacks’ description of such patients is to be believed.
Yeah its very confusing terminology. I wouldn’t usually fault someone for not understanding “blackout”, but a psychiatrist should know the difference! The fact that Scott is misunderstanding this while signal boosting the plight of false rape accusations is quite frustrating (I don’t think I’ve ever seen him mention the reverse scenario – a rape victim whose case was dismissed).
Well, he is asserting that this is such a case: according to his presentation, the man was raped, and that rape was dismissed.
And he is correct. The standard for raping an unresisting drunk person is not literal unconsciousness. Initiating sex with a person one knows to be “blackout drunk” is rape, legally and morally, and the woman in the Amherst case specifically indicated in one of her texts that she knew the man was too drunk to remember what had happened.
Yes, there’s a grey area. This was in the region with the albedo of a lump of coal.
I meant a female rape victim.
Hi! I’m a recent follower and fan, and today this post was linked from File770 for the reference to Irene Gallo and the Hugo/Puppy mess.
Could I ask that you correct the quote from Gallo for accuracy? You struck out a clause in the middle that did offer some differentiation between the Sad and Rabid Puppies:
That “respectively” has become very important to some, and while I don’t feel it does much to soften Gallo’s comment, I think it’s very problematic to present her quote with an edit that readers aren’t aware of (and, of course, anybody else who might copy this version of the quote).
Thanks!
I think it very specifically means that she didn’t call the Sad Puppies neo-nazis. She just called them “unrepentantly racist, sexist and homophobic” – which is still an overstatement.
There is a colourable case for Vox Day being a neo-nazi; I don’t think it holds up, but I can see that reasonable people disagree with me. I do think that he adopts a fascistic æsthetic (but then so does e.g. Alan Moore so that proves nothing about his politics) and that has led people into seeing his politics as more fascistic than they really are.
Personally, I incline to seeing him as a much more old-fashioned sort of reactionary, rather more in sympathy with Metternich than Hitler, but angrier than the old reactionaries because his ilk are no longer in power. That, IMO, makes him more æsthetically fascistic than his political programme.
Oh, she didn’t call her company’s employees and customers neo-nazis, she just called them extreme right-wing unrepentant racist, sexist, homophobes. Well! That makes it all better.
There is a rhetorical strategy of making an extreme misrepresentation, and then, when that misrepresentation is denied, to mock the correction. For instance, “What do you know what about relationships? You’ve been divorced five times.” “I’ve been divorced three times.” “Ohhhh, you’ve only been divorced three times.”
I don’t know if this has a name, but I think it should, as it’s a rather dishonest tactic.
I agree that this is something that happens, but is there really a meaningful distinction such that a point being invalidated by someone being divorced 5 times wouldn’t be similarly invalidated by being divorced thrice?
Similarly, if someone is called most of the things that make up our commonly held perception of what he consitutes a Nazi (I know it’s bad form to asume she didn’t literally mean Neo-Nazi, but is seems pretty obvious to me that that’d be a silly claim to make), does it make a meaningful difference that they didn’t use the N-Word to refer to them specifically? I mean, there are plenty of situations where it would, for one, if one were concerned about antisemitism, but I’m not sure this is such a case.
The problem is that it’s argumentative rope-a-dope; you tell lies about someone that make them look bad, and then they’re left either correcting the lies and letting you twist that to make you look like they’re damning themselves with faint praise, or they let you exaggerate how bad they are and they look exaggeratedly bad. It’s not a matter of how much it obscures relevant truths. We shouldn’t stand for it because it’s a really scummy status play.
I agree that the quote should be given correctly but, contrary to some commenters, I don’t think the “respectively” implies that sad puppies are extreme right and rabid puppies neo-nazi. She puts it as “right wing to neo-nazi,” which describes a range, not a pair of alternatives.
As I read it, she saying that some members of one or both groups are extreme right wing, some are neo-nazi, and most or all of the members are in a range between and including those positions.
Given Evidence A that supports Claim X, and Evidence B that opposes Claim X, it doesn’t make sense to say “Evidence A doesn’t support Claim X, because Evidence B also exists”.
I don’t think the “respectively” implies that sad puppies are extreme right and rabid puppies neo-nazi. She puts it as “right wing to neo-nazi,” which describes a range, not a pair of alternatives.
What would you make of ‘respectively’, then?
Lots of comments, didn’t have time for them all, so sorry if I’m repeating stuff.
First of all, this comic seems to say a lot IMO.
The problem seems to occur when the draft dodgers get power to effect changes beyond the blogosphere.
I also have a problem with the seemingly strange american use of the word ‘justice’. It seems to me that in America, the word ‘Justice’ can more or less always be replaced with the word ‘Revenge’, as in:
Justice System == System for enacting revenge on criminals
‘bringing the terrorists to justice’ == enacting revenge on the terrorists
Social Justice == getting revenge for past wrongs, primarily by harming current innocents.
The last bit mostly applies to draft dodgers I think, but is still puzzling from my perspective.
Let a dumb foreigner ask a question: how is it possible that in America activists can actually win things through simply complaining and/or cussing? I mean how can you _fight_ succesfully for a goal with so weak weapons?
Imagine being a playground bully fight at 11 years old. And when they try to kick your ass scream about being oppressed. What would happen? They would laugh, enjoy your screams, derive a sadistic pleasure, and kick you harder. This is not supposed to work as a weapon, right? You must kick them in the nuts or run away.
Yet, how comes in American politics or social life it actually works? How can you turn your weakness or hurtness or the injustice committed against you into a weapon, how comes people actually listen?
If you are really oppressed, it is very easy to ignore your complaints, and be amused by your cussing.
Doesn’t the fact that complaining and cussing works, suggests that Americans already have a huge compassion with these oppressed groups?
I mean in Hungary or Romania or Slovakia, if a gypsy would cuss like SJWs do, white folks would concur he is being aggressive so let’s just kick his ass, easy. If he would complain, that would sound like the whining of the weak, and who cares about the weak? Or, alternatively, they would think well, we all have our problems.
Complaining as a weapon is designed specifically for a society where really a lot of people feel comfortable about having so much surplus themselves that they can afford to listen to people who look or sound weak?
I already posted below… but exactly, this is what I meant by weak Galt hypothesis asymmetry.
Because in reality these people are backed by the government. The claim of oppression is the political equivalent of shouting “He’s comin’ right for us!” a moment before you pull the trigger.
One weirdest thing about America for me that somehow the government sounds like almost a separate, alien body on society… over here we tend to identify the government strongly with the people and the nation: it is seen as our self-organization for defense from invasions. But Americans sometimes talk about government as it was basically just tackled on the society, not an integral part of it.
For example Reagan’s famous joke “I am from the government and I am here to help” (being dangerous words) evokes the idea of a man who came from FAR AWAY. FROM the government. Some far away place with different rules, not the local society. Am I getting it right? For me government is pretty much down the street, my neighbor or my drinking buddy could as well be working in a ministry or something.
You are correct. This is especially true in the rural US, where government tends to be both literally and figuratively far away, and I think is a big part of why rural areas are “redder.”
Ironically, however, I’ve found that actual interactions with the government are much more pleasant in the country than in the city. I recently moved from urban parts of New England to rural Tennessee, and interactions with the DMV, police, post office, etc. are a positive delight here in comparison to CT and RI, where I lived.
As a libertarian, I find it creepy to think of the government as “us,” so I am glad of the existence of this strain in US political thought.
Bryan Caplan also notes that more diverse populations are less likely to think of the government as “us” and, correspondingly, less likely to support social welfare programs. That may be a big factor at work as well.
Rhode Island is just nightmarish for bureaucracy, and I’m not sure why. It’s not an urban/rural thing; I’ve always lived in urban areas, but I’ve had much less bad experiences with bureaucracy in Minnesota and California than in Rhode Island (I’ve never lived in Tennessee).
This is actually a highly contentious political debate.
Those on the the left regularly use phrases such as “we are the government” and work very hard to try and associate it with the average citizen.
Those on the right usually mock such phrases and attempt to frame the government as an alien body that shows up and gets in the way of things.
Given that Europe is generally considered to be left of America, the fact that the association is stronger there should be of little surprise.
>Given that Europe is generally considered to be left of America
This is highly untrue. A true version of it is that Europe tends to be more collective-minded than America, but that is not necessarily left. There are lots of collectivisms that are considered right-wing: nationalism, racism, war-mongery, throne and altar type of theocracy, and so on.
In fact the European definition of right-wing largely means a closed and hierarchical type of collectivism while the definition of the left means an open/international and egalitarian type of collectivism.
The fact that in the US the concept of right-wing was associated with individualism is something sort of a historical exception.
I think the kind of individualist right-wing of the US should be redefined as moderatism or centrism, for libertarians are clearly in between in the left-wing type of collectivism and the right-wing type of collectivism. For example, left wing collectivists usually want to stamp out religion, right-wing collectivists usually want to enforce it, individualists or libertarians usually just want to have a live and let live approach.
If you control for th rare historical exception of American individualism, the general story of the whole history of humankind is that various, left and right wing kinds of collectivisms fight each other.
Shenpen – I’ve encountered this objection plenty of times while arguing the issue.
I would suggest that this might be the one case where the American system is better and the rest of the world should adopt it 🙂
After all, if the historical/european/whatever definition of left/right wing only distinguishes between different types of collectivists, how useful is it as a definition really?
The most relevant spectrum is probably one that measures a continuum with absolute individualism on one end and absolute collectivism on the other – and this is, in large part, how Americans view left vs right.
Or just acknowledge multiple spectra. It seems equally useless if you can’t distinguish between the Aryan nation and a hippie commune. I mean, even if you find them equally repellent, there’s still a distinction.
For the purposes of talking about political structure, the distinction seems to be nearly irrelevant.
@Matt M the reasons are twofold. If left is anti-oppression, then of course a right-collectivism can oppress people far harder than individualism. The other reason is that if the right largely implements masculine values like aggressivity, competition, tribalism and hierarchy, then some kind of militant nationalism gives a far more T laden trip at that than individualism.
Shenpen – Help me out here. Under your understanding of left/right, would we say that Nazi Germany was right and Soviet Russia was left? Under my proposal, both would be considered left, because they were both collectivist.
If that is how you would proceed, then are you alleging that Stalin was “anti oppression”? Or that even hippy communes were? I would easily dispute both of those things.
I think that your distinction is nice in theory, but in reality, we don’t actually observe any highly collectivist societies that stay true to stated values of peace and tolerance and brotherhood. Some are more violent about it (nazis) than others (the amish), but there’s always a certain sense of “conform or you have no place here.”
And we don’t need to use left/right to distinguish between Nazis and the Amish, we already have terms like “militant” and “pacifist” for that.
Matt, that just seems like an extremely narrow view of what matters politically. You can answer the question of whether we should set up collective law-making bodies that control land and set boundaries and still be left with a whole lot of interesting and hotly-contested questions that most people care deeply about.
Heck, even libertarians still have meaningful political differences, or at least priorities. I, for instance, got into it mostly from following Radley Balko and Glenn Greenwald and my overriding concerns have been the War on Drugs, Global War on Terror, police militarization, and the exploding prison population. My greatest fear of the government is the fact that it has the ability to set up shop all over the world and kidnap and murder whoever the hell it wants to further political goals, business goals, whatever the hell reason, left or right, doesn’t matter, they all do it. And this certainly feels to me like a meaningful difference when I try to inhabit spaces where people also identify as libertarians, but then I get there, and find people defending police who murder people, saying it’s okay for a local department in a city of 50,000 to have tanks and wear camouflage, the worst thing about the TSA is they’re not allowed to racially profile and not that they exist at all, and apparently the greatest injustice in the world is the Civil Rights Act. I don’t know, we’re all anti-state, but it seems to me like those people are anti-state with much different motivation.
Edit: Just gonna add before it’s too late that I’m not at all trying to say this is you, or even anyone here. I actually have a few very specific people in mind who don’t comment here that I’m very disenchanted with, so I’m sorry if I’m ranting.
As a guess-
you don’t come from a very large nation, do you?
Within living memory, the government WAS the thing from far away that had no impact on your life. There’s still some places like that. If you’re a poor Montana farmer, “The government” is very much “those people I don’t know and never liked.”
More precisely, our historical narrative is one of people getting the hell away from the rest of society. Largely, there’s a lot of support for the idea that “national defense” is “Someone attacks us, everyone joins the army, kicks their ass, goes home and buys a Buick.”
It’s very unlikely you’ll know anyone even in state government- heck, in a good sized town, add “local government.”
And subtract from those numbers people who get paychecks from the government but aren’t really involved with the governing/implementation/regulatory part of things. The Administrative assistant at the local parks and rec is going to, and should be, considered in a very different way from even a parks and rec coordinator, let alone a state senator, let alone an actual senator.
Ultimately, Americans have a long tradition of doing peachy keen without any sort of federal help and being highly effective at local, community organization out of necessity and inclination.
Also, the US is a very diverse society compared to many foreign countries. If you live in a small homogeneous country like Sweden, for instance, where a large majority of the population shares your values and lifestyle, broadly speaking–and thus there is no culture war–it’s a lot easier to see the government as “yours” than in the US.
But, in fact, the culture war is more vicious in Sweden.
Well, my impression is that in Sweden the extremes are further apart, but the (relative to the country) middle is much much larger than in the US. While the extremes are extremist, if you are a mainstream Swede there’s no real danger of people with radically different values than you will have significant power in the government. Not so in the US.
I am not Swedish, though, so maybe my impression is incorrect.
I’m really not sure that’s even true of the U.S. Most people don’t even vote and are probably more concerned with paying the rent and getting their kids into decent schools than with forming and defending overtly partisan policy stances. I honestly couldn’t even tell you the politics of a single person in my entire extended family, because if they have opinions, they’ve never expressed them to me. I don’t vote, I don’t think my sisters vote. My dad votes for who the unions says to vote for. My mom votes for who the church says to vote for. These are often different people, but neither seems to care much or fight about it or anything.
There’s a lot more political street violence in Sweden.
I’m not American, so I don’t know.
I don’t know where you’re from, but I strongly suspect that people there have far less historical reason to trust, much less identify with their government than Americans do.
For sheer geographical context, the Federal Government “lives” several times further from me than Hadrian’s Wall was from Rome. And culturally, DC is a nation unto itself. If the US government was ever the people, that time is centuries past.
Keep in mind that, in a good bit of the US, the federal government is… not exactly an occupying foreign power, but, ah…
*lightbulb*
No, it’s about power inversion. In the case of SJWs, it is derived by calling the less-powerful “privileged” which justifies using the overt discrimination of the powerful group against the less powerful.
It wouldn’t work against a truly powerful opponent, for the reasons you note. Brendan Eich was a relatively powerful and rich man. But he was far less powerful and rich than all the people calling for his head. The owner of a pizza parlor may be a member in good standing of the petit bourgeoisie, but when the CEO of Apple and the President of the US are calling for your head, you see which way the power actually lies.
Consider the standard left explanation for why it is ok for blacks to call each other by a well known racial slur, but not for whites to use it, that there is a power imbalance between white and black that creates disproportionate damage. But the most powerful man in the world is black right now. In what way would a crude racial slur be an “oppression” of him? He can have anyone in the world killed on his word alone. Is a buck-toothed git from Appalachia really oppressing the most powerful man on earth from the lofty throne of the back porch of his trailer?
SJW leftism is the mechanism by which the powerful in society co-opt the victimization of distant others to defeat their slightly less-powerful opponents. The debates over “rape on campus” are not about rape, really. They are about using the victimization of rape survivors to ideologically cleanse academia. It only works because it isn’t rape survivors against evil rapists, it is presidents of universities and the US Dept. of Education against a few remaining professors who might not toe the party line on sexual politics.
You can tell who is more powerful by who won. This seems a truism, but we are all in seeming denial about it.
Exactly this. It’s like some magical thinking:
“Someone else on this planet, completely unrelated to me except for one trait we share (e.g. gender) is suffering. Now let’s magically atone for their suffering by letting me crush my opponents!”
The other people’s suffering is only used as a pretext for my “justice by proxy”. (Or should I say: “social justice”?)
But wait! There is more… If you are a true master of this game, you can even use suffering of someone with a trait you don’t have to crush someone who does. It doesn’t make sense at all, but if you do it properly, people won’t notice what you did.
For example, you could start by saying that women are oppressed by men, so now justice demands a powerful blow in the opposite direction. And you will deliver it! Except that you actually are a man… but that is okay, because you fight on the side of women. And your target is actually a woman… but that is also okay, because she had internalized misogyny. (Analogically for race, etc.) If you do it like a pro, most people will be confused into thinking that it actually made some sense.
You can be a rich white cis het able whatever guy (i.e. the Devil incarnate); as long as you are a SJW and play your cards well, you will be allowed to punch “up” anyone you dislike, in the name of… uhm… justice. Actually, I suspect that many SJWs are like this. (And the second place probably goes to rich white cis het whatever women.)
>Actually, I suspect that many SJWs are like this.
From my limited interaction with the SJ community, I’ve seen that there seems to be a repeated problem where a “leader” of sorts (usually a guy, usually white) end up revealing themselves as an abuser. An actual abuser, by non SJ standards.
I don’t know how common it is, and I don’t know how right am I getting it (multiheaded, pls help), but it seems like something that happens.
It’s more the middle ranks that are the problem tbqh. Their oppression point totals vary, but they are usually American and middle-class. The high-profile cases like RequiresHate are just the logical culmination of being *too* good at some SJ things. Like silencing. SJ culture is, ironically, great at silencing people being hurt by it.
(Observe #NotYourShield, the one point where I’m unreservedly on the side of gamergators even when I think their object-level opinions are very silly or misguided. Many SJ people have smugly pointed out how omg, all these coloreds and queers ARE serving as a “shield” from dismissing GG as just an outpouring of specifically white male lower class resentment. The horror! But in doing so, SJ reveals that it doesn’t subscribe to its own proclamations about consent. It’s like an over-the-top misogynist insisting that “sluts” are hypocritical whenever they don’t consent to sex. It misses the entire idea that conventionally ~oppressed~ people deserve free will and basic political freedom.
And yes, Villain has a point, cis-het men specifically have been eagerly pulling this bullshit on #NotYourShield participants.)
No one wants to be the bad guy in their own life’s story.
In Catholic European mythology, the good guy isn’t strong: he’s vulnerable, abnegating, looking out for the weak and the helpless. These are the qualities we associate with virtue. The outwardly strong is typically shown as a bully, as foolish, insecure, cowardly.
Nietzsche explored this in On the Genealogy of Morality, opposing noble morality and slave morality.
And you think Protestantism changed that?
Hold on… this COULD explain some things if it was true. But is it?
Was there a certain worshipping of strength introduced by e.g. Calvin?
No, I don’t really. Protestantism for the most part shares the same mythology.
I singled out Catholicism because it’s the one that spread this mentality in Western Europe, and because I don’t know enough about Orthodox Christianity to tell if it has a different concept of morality.
Not so much Calvin, but old-fashioned Calvinism (modern Calvinism, except for some hold-out Truly Reformed Five-Point types, is a lot softer on double predestination and who is elect and who is reprobrate) did attach a lot of value to worldly success as a visible sign of God’s blessing.
If nobody can know with any certainty who is saved and who is damned (because even some who think they’re saved are really damned), and if you cannot ‘earn’ salvation by any virtue or good deeds of your own (works salvation: they said Catholics believed that you could ‘buy’ your way into Heaven and we said no we didn’t, big dust-up for decades and even centuries ensues), then how can you be sure you are saved? Really saved? Are you really sure? Are you sure you’re sure?
So looking for signs of God’s approval meant that the virtues of thrift and hard work, which resulted in worldly success, were approved and put forward as a model. There is a reason, after all, it’s called the Protestant work ethic 🙂
And moralising/improving 19th century writers and opinion-formers liked to contrast the lazy, backwards, poor Southern European nations which were mostly Catholic with the hard-working, scientifically forward-looking, rich and prosperous Northern European nations, mostly Protestant of various varieties, and say that Catholicism’s other-worldliness and emphasis on the life to come and the vanity of worldly success and riches meant that people had no incentive to make something of themselves or pull themselves up by their bootstraps; instead, they preferred to pray to saints to provide them with miracles.
While they emphasised the parts of “slave morality” that led to better outcomes, as you mention thrift and hard work, these are still opposed to the ostentatious demonstrations of wealth and leisure that were common in the “noble morality” cultures of antiquity. Noble morality emphasise natural ability rather than hard work. Hard work is how the “winners” in slave morality cultures explain their success to avoid having a mob kill them for daring to believe that they are better than them. In noble morality cultures, people with better outcomes were so because they were better, usually by birth, not because they worked harder or sacrificed more.
The Southern European nations were criticised under the same moral framework as they would have under catholicism; they were seen as decadent and lazy due to the windfall of their exploitation of the southern american colonies. They were the strong back then. Their fall from grace fits perfectly within the historical framework that slave morality cultures would use: the big and powerful was full of hubris eventually got what was coming to him. A noble morality explantion would rather sound like: the big and powerful met someone bigger, more powerful and even better than him; all hail the new king!
>And what’s the most dominant idea of them all? That the white, male, heterosexual perspective is neutral, but all other perspectives are biased and must be treated with skepticism
If you look at the history of it all, not all literature written by cis white men was considered classics worthy, just those that was considered character building.
A lot of post-1900 cis white male literature is not really character building. Usually it is about social critique, so basically complaining. Example: The Catcher In The Rye.
Now of course when it is just about complaining then there is no reason to have all the complaining done by cis white men. Complaining is really universal.
But perhaps literature should not be about complaining. Meaning: not social critique. Maybe it would worth having heroic literature again.
There’s also just the simple fact that literature was a bigger deal in European culture than in other ones. One of my best friends growing up was a huge huge social justice guy. Ended up becoming a middle school teacher. He was so excited to correct all the evil, terrible things that our school system did to us. Swore he would make it different for all the disadvantaged minority kids out there. He would find authors of all races and colors and assign readings on an equal basis.
Only problem? It turns out that our school system (which was a university town in an overwhelmingly blue state) wasn’t “holding back” all of the classical literature of black, asian, and latin authors as part of some sort of racist conspiracy. There just isn’t that much of it, as those cultures valued other means of artwork and communication and so on. As hard as the guy has tried, he has struggled to find quality works of classical literature that truly capture the perspective of the Mayan civilization…
I can easily find some cultures with good literature, from the the top of my mind are China, Japan and India. Musashi’s The Book Of Five Rings is probably on par with the best heroic / character-building type of literature the West can offer.
The problem is that your teacher friend tried to mimic the racial setup of American society AND the usual kind of who-is-oppressed instead of just simply picking quality stuff from non-European cultures. Probably he figured there are not a lot of Japanese kids in the US and if they are then they are not very disadvantaged.
The funny thing is, if you just go for quality stuff, you will end up picking from the very same cultures that are reasonably succesful in the US: Chinese, Japanese, Indian, White Hispanic (writers like Borges), Jewish, Russian and so on. I think this is not exactly a coincidence.
In the contemporary United States, (East) Asians and Jews are now considered “white” for most discrimination / social justice purposes. Indians and White Hispanics are a borderline case. “Race” is increasingly becoming a binary classification; White Dudes vs. People Of Color.
I do not believe that actual skin pigmentation is particularly relevant for this purpose, save that the classification coincidentally matching the pigmentation greatly eases the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise ensue.
RE: Are Jews white?
What do we mean by white? Racial/ethnic classification or access to the power in society?
If racial, of course Jews are white. They’re a Semitic people who are part of the Caucasian branch. I’ve seen someone on Tumblr of Jewish descent who is as white in complexion and colouring as I am (they post selfies frequently) arguing that they are not, because Jewish, white (even though their branch of the diaspora is all Eastern European).
If, by white, you mean White as in WASP, that’s different. Jews being the traditionally persecuted minority are not White in that sense.
But American racial classifications don’t map well onto the rest of the world and how other societies code ethnicities. From an interview with a Chilean-British actor:
Right. And I should clarify, it’s not that he couldn’t find any non-white literature, it’s that his attempt to pick literature that mirrored the demographics of the local population (which was still overwhelmingly majority white, but let’s put that aside for the moment) resulted in very little selection.
If you’re looking to assign a “white” novel you have hundreds of selections to pick from and can pick based on other criteria (such as your ability to teach the theme of the work, etc.) If you’re looking for an Indian novel, it isn’t that there aren’t any, it’s just that there are a lot fewer. And they’re all translations so the themes don’t necessarily cross, and they have cultural references that will be irrelevant to MOST of the student body, etc.
Basically, it’s a complicated thing to do, and it turns out after experiencing it first-hand, my friend concluded that the reason you mostly get assigned “white” novels isn’t because the teachers are all a bunch of racists (either direct or implicit), but because assigning diverse novels is really hard work for some rather questionable benefits.
If he were truly SJW, would he not have concluded that the entire concept of a novel is culturally biased?
Oh I’m sure he did, but I think the school required him to assign X amount of novels per semester as part of the class or something.
Now that it’s been mentioned: can someone explain to me why the hell The Catcher in the Rye is such a big thing? I don’t get it.
Liberals at twenty read a banned book, then at forty they put it on Required Reading lists?
Maybe Holden’s being from the upper class appealed to upper class tastemakers more than similar but superior books like The Adventures of Augie March.
Catcher is the socially acceptable, non-threatening Disaffected Teenager(tm) novel. Everybody knows that DTs are a Thing, and that we need to understand them, and really isn’t it fun to imagine for a moment that we’re the iconoclastic loner standing against society? I mean, just for a while, before we go have lunch with all the cool kids.
But you can’t exactly have high school librarians recommending a biography of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, or any such thing. Holden Caulfield, as far as I recall, doesn’t engage in any plausibly imitatable misbehavior, and is a fairly witty social critic. The fact that he is in no way representative of any actual Disaffected Teenager(tm) is hardly relevant to people who never were or will be DTs, but a big turnoff to people who actually were and are subsequently told, “Hey, there’s this book about a guy just like you, so I totally get it!”
They should assign Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s got just as much critical clout, but way funnier.
It captures the self-centeredness of adolescence remarkably well. Fans are mostly those who encountered it at a time when they too felt similarly, and the attachment remains through nostalgia.
I feel like everyone should read Catcher in the Rye three times. Once as a teenager for the “he gets me!” feeling. Once slightly after puberty so you can go “man, I was a right tosser.” And then once a few years after that, so you can bring together what it felt like to be a teen with what it looked like from the outside.
I think it’s a damn fine novel for those attributes.
Isn’t another asymmetry the weak Galt hypothesis? Moloch let’s us forget how much we owe and how much we make necessary for people to plunder for us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Y888wVY5hzw#t=2650
It seems to me like a lot of the ideas here provide a grounding to what “offensive” means, and a solid defence of “political correctness”.
Going with the religious metaphor, we didn’t get peace by saying “everyone from every religion gets to exclude people from other religions from their businesses and social circles, everyone gets to say whatever they like about members of other religions, make whatever attempts to deride the other religions they like, and try to enforce whatever norms they want, and if it doesn’t work out then everyone can retreat into their separate side by side societies with no mutual comprehension”.
I’m fairly sure that people following incentives and basic human nature towards the different and alien would make that sort of approach end horribly and bloodily. And of course, societies changing over time would necessitate doing it again next time there’s disagreement on direction, and based on how countries have gone, convergent evolution will probably destroy diversity quickly enough that people are unsatisfied by it.
The way I see it, what we did was that we agreed to not say certain things which were considered to be status moves against/offensive towards other groups, and to adhere to certain standards of service towards people we don’t agree with, to not try to enforce norms which aren’t actually consensus, to not push for things which imposed large costs on other people for tiny gains to my people, and to make a case for why there’s no better way to achieve those policies objectives when you do need to impose burdens on people who obviously aren’t “your people”. An allegation of being “offensive” is an allegation of defection against this agreement. This relates to ideas of reconciliation, etc.
My impression is that this has all pretty much gone to hell in the US as of late, because of drastic power shifts changing where the agreed lines need to be to be in any kind of approximation of equilibria, the whole “liberty or death” thing working out in practice to “I will act like the rules are like I want them be and I’ll die before I follow rules I don’t like”, and the political setup that enables a single holdout at any level of government to fight things creating incentives for making sure that none of your enemies persist anywhere. There’s a little of it here in the UK, but good god nothing like what this post describes that I’ve encountered.
I think it’s still what we want to get back to once everything has shaken itself out, people have stopped insisting that their principles are always and tautologically more important than any effect on anyone else, no matter how small the breach of principle or how large the effect, and actually come to the negotiating table, and the bulk of the “my rules or death” people eventually accept the direction the majority has chosen. It is just looking like it’ll take a while.
I think economic advancement and increased living standards might have something to do with it too.
The economic incentive vastly discourages discrimination. Consider that European princes didn’t trade with Jewish merchants in order to promote religious tolerance and equality – they did it because that’s who had the money and if they didn’t trade with them, they couldn’t pay their soldiers and a bunch of angry dudes would chop off their head.
Today, more and more of the global population is becoming sufficiently well off that starvation is virtually zero threat. As the economic incentive becomes less and less relevant, that gives room for the political/ideological incentive to grow. Now, the King has a ton of money in the treasury, so he doesn’t have to borrow money from the filthy heathens. Discrimination is a cost that more and more of us can now easily afford.
I don’t think this is historically accurate. We got peace with “whose realm, his religion,” ie: the prince picked the religion and anyone who didn’t like it got the boot. It took a long time for this evolve into what you describe, and even the initial US solution was very much along those lines, with each individual state establishing the church it wanted it.
I was going to come in and say something similar to this but a lot longer, but I’m with Jaskologist:
“everyone from every religion gets to exclude people from other religions from their businesses and social circles, everyone gets to say whatever they like about members of other religions, make whatever attempts to deride the other religions they like, and try to enforce whatever norms they want, and if it doesn’t work out then everyone can retreat into their separate side by side societies with no mutual comprehension”.
Seems like a perfect description of “cuius regio, eius religio”. Religious separation is a fifteenth-century solution; religious toleration is an eighteenth-century development. And it took a long time for it to break down: the Netherlands was religiously separated until depillarisation in the 1960s.
I think I agree but was thinking of a different definition of “peace” in my post; by “when we got peace” I was thinking of the time when the attacks on whichever of the Christian denominations wasn’t the current monarch’s stopped.
I find it entirely plausible that before the rulers had effective control it was even worse, though.
The closest the average white guy gets to that kind of environment is wandering into a social-justice-dominated space and getting to experience the same casual hatred and denigration
I’d argue this is not totally true. I believe, most of anxiety and insecurity nowadays is not due to explicit hatred or exclusion or, on the contrary, activism, but is inherent to our lives. For example, I don’t think it is disturbing by itself that some people are promoting gender quotas for employment. What is disturbing is lack of workplaces. For example, in that part of academia where I’m from, people do struggle to find a short-term post-PhD position, often having to move to another country for that and then struggle even more to find long-term employment that would allow them to settle down, get a mortgage, have normal family, and etc. Or, for another example, I do not think that, say, immigrants in Europe (I’m the one myself) suffer that much from explicit hatred. But it sucks to be an immigrant: they are not free people (e.g., often, one cannot just quit a job), visas and bureaucracy is annoying, besides not knowing the language and culture well does not help with social interactions.
I see that not as a general problem, but as specifically a problem with Academia: there’s an oversupply of PhD candidates (and PhDs, etc.) compared to the demand, especially in domains where there isn’t a big demand for PhDs outside academia.
Obviously, I cannot know how exactly things are in other fields and countries, but at least in Europe, it seems that economic situation is not brilliant, and there’s high unemployment rate among young adults. And it is not just in academia, where people aren’t happy with their careers. Some people would also argue that in academia, there is oversupply of 1-2 year fixed term positions which do not provide enough job security.
Two points, my exposure to the gamergate thing is mainly through kazerad’s blog
http://kazerad.tumblr.com who repeatedly makes the point that the sjw don’t acually protect or represent who they claim to protect, kind of like your point about various tribes within technically politically homogeneous groups are good at othering each other.
And, that the whole codify and systematize approach works extremely poorly with human relationships, a good example is the red pill contingent, outraged to find that sometimes acting like a caveman does indeed get you laid and feeling betrayed that they’ve been lied to, unfortunately there’s no way to teach that kind of innate behaviour (The good kind of body language mix that we define as charismatic)
Scott.
You’ll be fine.
But seriously, if it all starts to get a bit much, there are other activities apart from going for a walk, and that might take more than only an hour, which might be helpful sometimes to take your mind from obsessing over some of these pretty darn difficult conundrums. It won’t necessarily hurt to take a break from thinking – the conundrums will still be there when you get back. There is no rush. (But learning the ability to switch off mentally every now and then might take a bit of practice.)
If you do ever crack the solution to the problem “What is the fair and ethical way to fight political enemies under the constraints of structural power imbalances and the very real fallibility of real humans?” you can not only write a Nobel Peace prize winning thesis on it, but you’ve probably just invented the purple leadership/politician pill missing from your June 2 repost from Tumblr, (of which the pink pill was probably the closest.) Funny it was missing. Perhaps social co-ordination and consensus development skills are not recognised as “genuine” technologies by science fiction writers.
I imagined that Ghandi might have had a few ideas on overcoming enemies by voluntary conversion rather than resentful submission. I can even throw a nice little bit of jargon into the mix: “satyagraha” which is apparently linked to the notion of non-violent resistance. It seems that it might be relevant to your quest, I write, giving the misleading impression that I might know more about what I’m talking about than I actually do. “Under what circumstances is satyagraha a persistently self-maintenant meme?” I hear you ask. I have no idea. I’d have to know a lot more about the details. It’s probably left as a exercise for the interested reader.
You don’t have to fix everything that’s wrong on the internet, of course. It’s plenty fine that you are developing and maintaining a nice little contribution to human intellectual culture in a tiny corner of it. In fact, after hours and days of reading outrage and counter-outrage in newspaper comments, I’m very grateful that there exists at least your part of the world, which is so dedicated to thoughtfulness, critical examination, and intellectual consistency that it provides a welcome respite for me personally, as well as making progress that goes well beyond the “You should check your privilege”, “No, privilege is a meaningless concept, and anyway if it isn’t then you should be checking YOUR privilege” rallies that go nowhere.
Why worry so much about the social justice and the anti-social justice movements picking their own ridiculous spats, metaphorically belting each other over the head with pebbles and small sticks in the valley, when you’re here building an intellectual cathedral? You know the secret that the prize at the end of an argument isn’t “winning” it, but learning something new so that you can see further.
Enough rambling.
I’m also vaguely aware of possibly sounding patronising, so apologies in advance if so. I’m a bit too lazy to re-edit, and besides aren’t comments on blogs “allowed” to be a bit raw?
You’ll be fine.
“You’ll be fine.”
Will he though?
I don’t think the worry is about him feeling a compelling need to bring about world peace. I think it’s much more direct and personal. As someone who blogs using his real name on a site that explicitly sometimes deals with sensitive and controversial topics, he is at very real risk of running afoul of these people and having his livelihood destroyed.
People who have said less have had worse happen to them. Say something that rubs the wrong person (basic requirements: overly sensitive and has a ton of like-minded twitter followers including at least one buzzfeed writer) the wrong way and bam – your life is altered forever.
The fact that all of us here in the comments section can vouch for him being a smart and reasonable and morally decent person is irrelevant. Our opinions won’t matter in the face of crushing public opposition and organized boycott tactics that his employer would be threatened with. If anything, we’d all just be painted with the same brush, and all of a sudden you’d be “Thomas, frequent commentator on shitlord libertarian hate-site.”
Scott Alexander isn’t his real name. He’s not that anonymous, but he’s also not that public.
This has happened to me three times ever, which doesn’t seem much given how long I’ve been commenting on the internet. Most recently I was reported to /r/gulag for saying something nice about centrism. It was kind of funny.
I’m not sure if he realizes, but his real name is still on Live Journal.
Pingback: Bookmarks for June 14th from 19:11 to 19:27 : Extenuating Circumstances
“The social justice narrative describes a political-economic elite dominated by white males persecuting anybody who doesn’t fit into their culture, like blacks, women, and gays. The anti-social-justice narrative describes an intellectual-cultural elite dominated by social justice activists persecuting anybody who doesn’t fit into their culture, like men, theists, and conservatives. Both are relatively plausible; Congress and millionaires are 80% – 90% white; journalists and the Ivy League are 80% – 90% leftist. ”
I forgot about this by the time I got to the end of the article, but that is rather grasping. Congress and millionaires certainly aren’t only 10-20% leftist. There are a lot of leftist whites in both Congress and the Forbes 500, as there are in journalism and the Ivy League. The fact someone is white doesn’t mean they’re a racist, or even not a SJW. Probably most SJW, numerically, are white. The fact someone is leftist pretty much does mean they’re anti-rightist.
American liberals are NOT “leftist”. (European liberals aren’t accused of “leftism” in the first place.) 20th century liberalism – let’s say, in the vicinity of Rawls, Rorty and Galbright – has, as an intellectual and political movement, emerged to preserve and fix the existing socioeconomic structure, not build one that functions in an entirely different way, as leftists want to.
(An illustration for Americans: no actualy leftist would ever, say, characterize Malcolm X as a “dangerous” “extremist”, even when disagreeing with his politics. That’s just not part of our frame of reference at all. “Extremism” is not a meaningful charge to us; leftists disagreeing with something because it’s “too leftist” in some way… works differently and in more specific detail.)
P.S.: Just for fun, look up what Lord Keynes had to say about the ideals of socialism, and working-class people generally.
Um, what is called “liberalism” in the US usually translates to “social democracy” in Europe and what is called “liberalism” in Europe usually means “classical liberalism” or in some cases “libertarianism” in the US. That said, some European liberals also call themselves libertarian or classical liberals because some European left-wing parties (Greens most notably) call themselves liberal as well (even though except for this one green/libertarian party in Switzerland, most Green parties are closer to Social Democrats than anything else).
I think the terms “right” and “left” are pretty arbitrary and they change in time as well (libertarians, resp. classical liberals used to be considered as a part of the left, now are mostly considered as a part of the right, Nazis are mostly considered “extreme right” while they were actually very communitarian and very revolutionary, quite unlike conservatives). It is sometimes useful to use the simple categories of left and right as a shorthand for describing some views precisely, but it can also lead to a lot of confusion and obfuscate the differences within those categories.
Reminds me of http://terminallance.com/2015/05/19/terminal-lance-offended/
The author calls “Angry Facebook Veterans” the equivalent of Social justic Warriors.
Oooohhh, Terminal Lance!
Pingback: On Boycotts and Disinvites | Ordinary Times
There are a few important asymmetries you don’t address.
First, the male rape victim being prosecuted for rape isn’t the only case that happened. It’s the only case we know about. How many “rapists” have been expelled from school, who were in fact victims?
Further, it is entirely reasonable to get up in arms about black people being shot by police and not about traffic fatalities if there’s something you can do about police shootings. Just about everything that can reasonably be done about traffic fatalities is being done.
Likewise being a woman who is raped in college versus being a man who is falsely accused of rape in college. In the former case, there’s a small army’s worth of support for you. In the latter, that same army will be trying to make your life worse every chance it gets.
And while I’m at it, another common asymmetry between things SJWs complain about, and things the right complains about. If ten people are hit with wiffleball bats each year, and in every case they received medical attention where applicable, and the assailant is prosecuted, and one person is hit with a plastic lightsaber each year, and when that person complains, they are told that they should ashamed for taking attention away from wiffleball bat victims, and prosecutions for plastic lightsaber victims are so rare that no one can seem to recall a case when it happened, you’d start to wonder if maybe the lightsaber beating victims don’t have a point when they claim the system is treating them unfairly.
When was the last time you heard someone say to a woman “make me a sandwich” even ironically, in person? Was that person in a position of authority? Were they punished?
Because Bahar Mustafa wasn’t punished at all. She wasn’t even forced to resign as diversity officer.
The reason the argument from privilege doesn’t hold the same weight is because white/cis/straight/male/whatever privilege isn’t preventing men from being prosecuted for their own rape, but the political privilege feminists hold is preventing them from being punished for the hateful things they actually and remorselessly do.
Given the enormous difference between traffic fatality rates between the US and Western European countries (notably the UK), I don’t think that’s true. Unless you hold that the UK is doing unreasonable things about traffic fatalities.
Reducing car weight is one thing that could be done (which could mean something as simple as bringing SUVs and pick-ups into normal car safety/emissions regulations, which would push their prices way up), another is that the US doesn’t have pedestrian-impact as part of safety testing.
Others include lots of road-design changes, like abolishing four-way stops (turn them into roundabouts: roundabouts reduce fatalities dramatically at the expense of increased side-swipes, which are almost never fatal). Pedestrian road-crossings can be greatly improved too, and the provision of sidewalks could be greatly extended.
Increasing the difficulty of driving tests – US driving tests are so notoriously low-quality that DVLA (our DMV-equivalent) keeps talking about simply banning tourists from certain states from driving in the UK without taking a more comprehensive tests. They won’t actually do it because the political will isn’t there to piss the US off.
Comprehensive safety testing of vehicles on a regular basis (e.g. annual) to ensure mechanical safety.
Remember, many parts of the US have little or no public transportation, and the distances often aren’t amenable to walking or cycling. In many parts of the country, taking away someone’s driving license is tantamount to putting them under house arrest. This is why driving standards in the US remain lower than in most of Europe.
What percentage of car crashes in the US are caused by mechanical failure rather than human error? I’m betting it’s quite low.
You’re looking at it the wrong way. In terms of deaths per mile driven, the US is smack in the middle, better than Japan, worse than Britain.
But I don’t think that’s the result of good policy on the part of the Brits. I think that’s result of good public transit being feasible. The contiguous US is literally 30 times the size of the UK. Connecting even just the top ten biggest cities by high speed rail would be a multi-billion, maybe trillion dollar endeavor. And it would get at most a few million drivers off the road.
Ok, I’ve been replying but here’s my two cents:
One, SJW reactions are, in part, literally reactions. It’s not great times to be SJWs. The numbers I’ve seen indicate that less than 20% of everyone, and less than 25% of women, will willingly identify as feminists, even when prompted with the dictionary definition.
In the 70’s, it was almost HALF of women. I found somewhere, and will find again if there’s interest, a website breaking down feminism year by year- big laws, conferences, stats and the like, and the ATTITUDES expressed by women were fundamentally different- particularly those who wanted “Career” as an end goal and those who wanted “family” as an end goal.
Feminism is losing quite badly atm. Simply put, in 1970, you had the “ALL PENISES ARE RAPE” feminists. But like Andrea Dworkin, they tended to look like the ugly side of a hammer, be not super sharp in the brain, and in general be suffering social ostracism for a variety of reasons, leading to their radicalism. Dworkin was always a fringe figure.
The problem is as “woman working” became less of a deal,a nd eventually no deal at all, as strong female role models became common, as the idea of raising your daughter like your son became commonplace, the mainstream started to drop away. Increasingly, the issues that mattered to….well, call them “useful” or “middle class” or “privileged” people were functionally fixed.
There’s no “tony white collar job scheduling meetings to discuss company issues” gap. There’s relatively little interesting in even attempting gender equity at the obviously un-gender-equitable jobs (“Hold this jackhammer in this spot for the next eight hours.”)
The blacks that were going to succeed largely got pulled into the black success movement.
Essentially, all the people that were actually GOOD at running things, had leadership skills, organizational capacity, drive…..
They’re all climbing the corporate ladder, or traveling, or doing other things where their skills can make them money. Men realize this, and find the complainers increasingly silly. So do other women, who are notably not being raped or oppressed.
So increasingly, you’re left with a core that is less “all the women” and more “all the other women that couldn’t hack it but if they admit they couldn’t hack it it’d be THEIR OWN FAULT.”
Academia has always tended to attract a certain amount of….”couldn’t cut it”-er’s. This was true even before society produced enough food to feed the world a bajillion times over.
So feminism now consists of- about 40% of the middle aged population, who is still feminst from the 70’s. And a smaller fraction of the millennial generation, who mostly doesn’t give a crap about feminism.
And so you have a bunch of “FINOs” who say “I’m a feminist” in the same way they’re “pro equality”- Inside their head only, never does anything about it. And an increasingly desperate and marginalized group of people who, either because they’re damaged people or because they drank the kool aid or whatever, get drawn into an increasingly insular world. The internet allows them a certain amount of power- but that’s only because it takes very, very few complaints to affect companies. It used to be the FCC would make huge rulings based on less than 10 complaints. A very little bit of organizing can have huge results. I suspect as people get perspective on the actual size + ease of social media (“@virginmedia” is much easier than “Track down contact info, write letter, send letter”) this will be mitigated somewhat and the response theshold will be raised.
Witness the degree to which massive feminist victories are being challenged. Like it or not, abortion is being restricted in a way unthinkable during the 90’s, and it’s provoked very, very little response. Women are the fastest growing group of gun owners (contra feminist arguments that women only got guns used on them).
And as women get more and more economic power, they like taxation less and less. As women own more small businesses, they like minimum wage hikes less and less. As women face real challenges, college microagressions seem sillier.
In other words, as actually oppression ceases, the people who can leave, do leave. The rest can’t. And because the only script their aware of for “woman utterly fails at everything” is sexism, they blame sexism.
Are you sure this isn’t feminism succeeding? People don’t identify as abolitionists because slavery is over. People don’t identify as civil rights activists because Jim Crow is (at least, officially) over. What were the things that the second wave of feminism fought for? Being able to own property, work outside the home, and ending official discrimination, right? Plus, later on, being able to live openly as lesbians and abortion on demand.
These are all fights that have been won. Why would people continue to fight for them? The only reason abortion access is falling is because it’s falling for poor people, and they’re largely invisible in politics anyway. Middle-class women can still access abortion if they really want to, and feminism has been a middle-class movement, historically.
>Are you sure this isn’t feminism succeeding?
Feminism as in “the radical notion that women are people”, sure.
I think CJB is talking about academic/media feminism.
This is a bit strange to anybody who’s read any of his essays, which seem to have trouble with any emotion beyond smugness
FYI, I read “his essays” as “the activist’s essays,” which I was wondering if I should have been perusing. Took a few reads to realize that we were talking about Moldbug.
Foundation and context is important in this topic.
We have been an affluent nation for more than half a century now and the epidemic of inane controversies is an artifact of the excess of leisure and a deficit of real hardship. Cultural evolution may actually be leading us toward survival ineptitude and robustness decline. Both groups mentioned in this thread share a common pathology. They reward parasitic behavior. For SJWs, its collective welfare entitlement mentality. For anti-SJWs, its spoiled offspring with inherited wealth elitism entitlement mentality. In our current dysfunctional society, whining loudly is a success strategy.
I’m pretty sure that social justice warriors are explicitly copying the tactics that they feel oppressed by, resolving to turn them upon oppressors, then chickening out and turning them on people who they can pretend to mistake for their oppressors but who they don’t feel afraid of instead. Anti-social-justice makes complaints identical with SJ because they are intentionally being persecuted in the same manner.
Convergence with their actual oppressors is due to ‘fight monsters, become monsters’ dynamic.
The key fiction is that there are two groups, not three involved in the dynamic. Actually, counting bureaucrats and the non-radicalised, majority white oppressed class, there are five.
Your lizard brain is right regarding the extreme asymmetry between the pizzeria and the tech conference. The argument from privilege is not isomorphic to what you’re doing. It seems like an almost disingenuously distant stretch. I hate to criticise a person for hypocritically pretending to engage in hypocrisy, and I’m pretty sure that there are further tangles of meta in there so I’d be mischaracterising it if I were to do so, but if I was smart enough, I’d be doing something along those lines.
Talking to the lizard brain: one wonders if there are ways of taking the psychological or even psychiatric aspects further. How to calm and sooth the lizard brain? It’s response looks a lot like the catastrophizing thing that various therapists etc. have explained to me, could the techniques for counteracting that be applied here?
Some of the threads leave me… well, my first response is to want to shout “too many houses, not enough pox” immediately followed by a feeling that that sort of thing is Unkind and Unproductive and Not On. So how to promote calm and moderation?
This is a bit tangential, but I think it’s relevant enough to ask it here. For people think anti-gay discrimination by businesses should be legal: should anti-black discrimination also be legal? If not, what’s the difference?
Yes it should. Freedom of association is absolute and everyone should be free to do business (or not do business) with whoever they like for any reason whatsoever.
So anti-reactionary discrimination should be legal, correct?
Is anti-gay and anti-black discrimination scary and/or objectionable?
Scary and objectionable yes.
Should be illegal? No.
This is where it gets tricky for me as a libertarian. As much as I strongly disagree with everything the SJW brigade says, does, and stands for… on the other hand, they ARE championing a social ostracism-based model which is the exact sort of thing anarchists have argued could be used in lieu of a government police force to ensure “law and order” in a stateless society.
It’s also why I get less upset at the SJWs themselves who try to rally the shaming as opposed to say, employers and conference organizers who so readily and effortlessly cave towards any even *slight* threat that comes from the left.
The way to ensure that shaming works against murderers but not against those with slightly bizarre political beliefs isn’t to make it illegal to shame those with bizarre political beliefs, but rather for the public at large to simply *refuse to go along with shaming people for bizarre political beliefs*
The SJW shaming brigade has no power aside from what polite society voluntarily cedes to it.
What is a “slightly bizarre” political belief?
Do you mean ANY belief, at all? Or does something happen when it becomes less mainstream?
Is there a difference between an out-and-out racist today, and one in 1890s or 1950s Alabama?
Doesn’t really matter to my point.
The problem that (most) people want some form of system that will ensure things that (most) people agree on are terrible (like murder) will be prevented/investigated/punished, while things that may be socially unpopular but that (most) people think should be protected (like praying to the sun god) won’t be.
I feel like when I argue for a social shaming/refusing to trade-based model of justice in a libertarian society, I get an equal amount of “so you’re saying murderers would walk free!” and “you’re saying gay people would be routinely starved to death by homophobic merchants!” objections.
@Matt M:
But, what if most people agree that racism and homophobia are terrible and shouldn’t be protected?
Conversely, what if most people don’t think slavery and/or murder of black people is terrible and shouldn’t be protected?
Absent some means of discriminating between actually terrible and merely unpopular, your argument sort of becomes “whatever Matt M thinks”.
All I would say to that is that if most people think black people should be slaves, then they probably will be, but that’s already what happens in a system of government dependent upon constitutional rights protections and legislation against foul deeds. The moral quality of your society is dependent upon cultural factors impacting its relative level of social permissiveness, tolerance, and good sense for the boundaries of acceptable behavior, not on the exact process by which those are normalized and enforced.
How is that different from a representative democracy, where 51% selects policies to be enforced on the other 49%.
If “most people” decided that something was terrible, the worst they could do is refuse to transact with them.
Of course, refusing to transact with 49% of the population is probably bad for business and you’d be routinely out-competed by the more tolerant.
I’m not saying “instant anarchy” is a flawless solution to be immediately implemented everywhere, but I do feel that in many developed/enlightened societies, it would probably be a pretty big improvement, once you got people to really consider the potential advantages and how things would work in practice.
@Matt M:
You appear to have gone from “this is very concerning and scary” to “this is mostly good and should be increased”. That is confusing to me and I’m not sure what your point really is in the context of “is it bad that people can signal their dislike of a persons private position to an organization that is not the government”
Directly addressing what you said, representative democracy is not direct democracy and ameliorates some of the worst failure modes of direct democracy. Checks and balances are a real thing that do work in a representative system. In addition, the enshrining of individual rights in the establishing documents of the democracy also helps.
Well that’s why I said the issue was “tricky for me.”
I don’t like how the SJWs are using the method of social shunning to alienate and destroy those with differing viewpoints, because I don’t believe having differing viewpoints merits destruction.
However, I do like the method of using social shunning to settle disputes generally, and consider it vastly superior to using a bunch of goons with handguns to enforce social norms onto those who may not agree with them.
Basically, I’m in favor of using social shunning to punish thieves and murderers, but I’m not in favor of using it to punish those whose religious beliefs differ from mine. But that being said, if we ARE going to punish heretics, better to do it with shunning than with the force of government.
Regarding checks and balances, I think they’re mostly smoke and mirrors, and that the difference between a representative democracy and a direct democracy is just that the representative part makes things take a little bit longer than they otherwise would have (which is a net positive, but not by much)
Having guarantees in the constitution means nothing if it can be changed at will, either by direct democracy or by the court just deciding that something that used to mean X now means Y (gay marriage being the perfect example of this).
Not to mention that the constitution itself was ratified by the state legislatures (in an unlawful manner not prescribed by the AOC) who themselves were elected, as far as I know, via direct democracy. And that many of the pro-ratification arguments and assurances of how things would be interpreted were immediately abandoned.
And don’t even get me started on the civil war and the 14th amendment and the “incorporation doctrine”
I think if you examine the historical record, you’d be hard pressed to find any particular time when a very large majority of the American public wanted something and didn’t get it due to “checks and balances”
@Matt M:
I guess that is fair enough. I think I understand why you are saying it’s tricky. You like speech to be free, but you don’t want it to impede the free speech of others.
But I think you would also say that a person should be treated as an individual, not as a member of a group or class. They should be judged on their own merits. Feel free to challenge this, as I am putting words on your keyboard, so to speak.
If person A can advocate for discriminating against [some category of] people, it just strikes me as really odd that when person B through Z advocate for discrimination against only that individual, it’s more scary to a libertarian.
A is being judged by his own conduct, not simply as a member of a class, whereas A is advocating for violating this principle.
Is it the fact A is in the minority that makes it scary? Is it the a right to privacy that says speech on my own time should not be considered by my employer? Is it that the speech of B-Z is specifically targeted against A?
Or is the speech of A and the speech of B-Z equally scary, but the speech of B-Z is scarier because there is more of it?
Or is it really just that the B-Z speech advocates violating the principle that allows the speech in the first place?
I think you’re overanalyzing this. It’s not even about speech specifically, it’s more general than that. It’s more like “I want social shunning/ostracism/boycotting to replace a gang of thugs locking you in a cage as the primary enforcement mechanism of law/order/social mores/”commonsense morality/etc.”
It’s just that, in this particular case, I don’t think the thing they are shunning/ostracizing/boycotting is deserving of such a punishment.
Basically, the SJWs are providing a compelling use case for how justice could function in a libertarian system… except that they’re wielding it in a way that I find inherently unjust.
@Matt M:
So you DON’T think they are wrong in principle, just that their choice of thing they think should be shunned doesn’t match the choice you would make?
How is that INHERENTLY unjust? There doesn’t seem to be anything inherent about it (as it is currently framed). You don’t have any principles from which it could be inherent.
Basically, in your system, that is inherently JUST, not injust.
Sorry, we are probably just spinning wheels at this point. I’ll let you reply and have the last word unless you really want to go forward.
You’re technically right that, in the end, my issue here boils down to “some people believe things that I don’t believe and that makes me angry.”
Of course there’s the added dimension of me feeling a little bit like Dr. Frankenstein, given that I’ve spent years of my life trying to convince people of the moral superiority of social-ostracism based systems, and yet, the one that ended up being created is an abomination that is not even remotely representative of the type of thing I envisioned.
In other words: IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A THING OF BEAUTY!!!
Isn’t it already legal?
In most places political affiliation is not a protected class, yes.
IMO, private anti-black, anti-gay, and anti-reactionary discrimination are all scary and objectionable and ought nonetheless be legal. Coercing other people to engage in any brand of discrimination is more scary, more objectionable, and depending on the degree of coercion, ought to be illegal.
And the standard needs to be the same across the board. If you’re going to make private discrimination illegal, make it illegal for everyone.
I’m curious what you mean by the statement “freedom of association is absolute”. It’s a norm, so the two relevant things I can see are a, well, normative statement that it should be a norm, and an empirical statement that it currently is a norm.
The latter is clearly false and the former would require an argument as to why.
I suppose I could have said “in my opinion, the freedom of association is absolute” but I generally consider the IMO statement to be a useless waste of space because on the Internet, everything should be assumed to be an opinion unless they cite sources.
To clarify: Under the non-aggression principle (which I wholly support and which I suspect most people support at least in part), freedom of association MUST be absolute, because the only alternative involves the initiation of force against otherwise peaceful parties.
The homophobic pizza parlor owner is initiating force against me as a homosexual by preventing me from entering his premises.
That is not *initiating* force.
Am I initiating force against you by preventing you from coming into my home uninvited?
@Mark
Yes, this comes down to the governmental grant of private property over land, which is messy and waaaaaaaaaaay off topic. If @Matt M wants to continue the discussion elseweb then point me at an appropriate forum. If not, then I’ll let him have the last word in response to this.
I think that most libertarian thinking about land is very intellectually shallow, but land law and the underlying morality and history is scarily complicated and I can see how you get to a place where you think that land works like ordinary property – after all, for most people in modern society, you earn money and then buy stuff; you earn money and buy land, so why is it different?
Answer: let’s go somewhere else, but the usual libertarian argument for the initial creation of property rights in stuff is that people made it; that clearly ain’t true for land. You can therefore argue that land isn’t capable of being owned, or that land-property is different in nature from stuff-property. There are good libertarian arguments for it being similar, but there are good libertarian arguments that it isn’t; geolibertarians (Georgists) are very different on this one question and seem quite leftist to most libertarians because they hold that land-property is a government-granted monopoly privilege, not a property right, comparable to a taxi medallion.
@Mark,
Well firstly the actual pizza owner didn’t ever prevent gay people from buying his pizzas much less entering his shop (how would he even know that you’re gay?): the objection was to catering a gay wedding.
Secondly and more importantly, there is no reasonable definition of force where being compelled to serve someone isn’t force or where not being able to compel others to serve you is force. You don’t have a right to anyone else’s property or labor, that’s why we have to trade for it. The whole point of the NAP is supposed to be upholding that idea.
Onyomi,
You would be the one initiating *physical contact* – if you want to define force as “doing something contrary to the legal regulations of my society”, then surely the “non-aggression” principle = nothing more than “obey the law”.
As such, I don’t see why we couldn’t have a law preventing discrimination and define any who break it as initiating force.
@onyomi yes.
If you take away the magical idea of the NAP that says that the initiation of force is always wrong, then the answer is obvious. Force against a person is legitimately initiated by a property-owner who prevents them from entering their property uninvited.
The problem is that a bunch of people (a particular variety of libertarian) have defined initiation-of-force as always bad, and therefore have to redefine cases where force is legitimately initiated as retaliatory.
It’s not. How is it initiation of force to walk in through an open door? It clearly isn’t. How is it initiation of force not to leave when asked? It clearly isn’t. It’s the bouncer who throws you out who initiates the force.
So what? It’s a perfectly legitimate initiation of force.
You don’t have to assert the NAP to be a libertarian.
“there is no reasonable definition of force where being compelled to serve someone isn’t force or where not being able to compel others to serve you is force.”
I personally don’t think that the definition of force that allows picking up a piece of paper to be “force” but shooting someone in the head not to be, is particularly reasonable – but there we have it.
The more interesting question is whether there is a good reason to compel people to do certain types of work. The answer is of course, yes.
That’s not what “force” is. If he owns the premises he has the right to exclude anyone. Are you “initiating force” against the local homeless population by preventing them from sleeping in your bed?
Having said I’d give other people the last word, I then kept replying. My intention was not to respond on libertarian-land-ownership, not on NAP.
Still, I’ve said my piece on NAP also now, and will not respond on this subthread unless an entirely new topic arises.
@Richard
Thank you, I found your comments to be most pertinent.
@Matt M
Does initiation of force mean “breaking the law”?
Presumably if we live in a society in which the right to own land for the purpose of business (determined by law/government) is dependent on the businesses following equality of service regulations, the business owner would be “initiating force” (breaking the law) by refusing service to me.
Or is the definition of “force” just the old “doing stuff I don’t like”.
@Richard and Mark
What Matt said.
I’m not wedded to the NAP, so if you want to call kicking a homeless person out of your house when he has entered without your permission “the initiation of force” because, technically, you are the first person to use physical force (assuming he won’t go when asked verbally), then fine.
But I’m pretty sure most who do cite the NAP don’t mean it that way. The ability to use the minimum amount of force necessary to enforce one’s own property rights is not generally considered “initiation” of force, because first someone had to violate your property rights.
To cite an extreme example: everyone has property rights in their own body. If someone puts their hand on your thigh and you ask them to remove it and they don’t, if you then grab their hand and forcibly remove it, would you consider that “initiation of force”?
And if so, I obviously have no problem with that sort of initiation of force–that is, the minimum level of force necessary to enforce a property right.
Not in general, but if you happen to leave your door open accidentally, come home to find a homeless person in your bed, and kick them out, you’re initiating force. But it’s a perfectly well-justified initiation of force.
Or if that’s too easy, what about you keep a bed in your backyard, have no fence, maybe a sign saying it’s yours, but you come home and find a blind homeless man sleeping in it. Surely, you’re still justified in kicking him out, no? Justification for all of these things rests upon the right to control the use of your property, not on the non-aggression principle.
I also don’t think this is an appropriate place to hash out all libertarian political theory.
But I’ll simply state that for me, “the law” is entirely irrelevant to moral and ethical discussions (and therefore this debate).
If “force” isn’t about physical contact, and isn’t about the law – then couldn’t we just simplify this:
“freedom of association MUST be absolute, because the only alternative involves the initiation of force against otherwise peaceful parties.”
to:
“I like freedom of association.”
It IS about physical contact, but it includes physical contact against one’s property as well as one’s person.
So the homeless guy who wanders into your house and sleeps in your bed IS in fact initiating force against you by unjustly depriving you of your property. If you pick him up and throw him out of your house, you have not *initiated* force against him, you are merely defending your property against an aggressor.
I think that when picking up a piece of paper is force, but shooting someone in the head isn’t, the term has ceased to be useful.
If you ask me, there is something a little bit dishonest about the non-aggression principle.
The word doing most of the work there is “initiation”, not “force”.
Now, it’s true that you need to do some gynmastics to get the non-aggression principle to cover property rights as traditionally understood, which is part of the reason I’m not totally on board with it, but “dishonest” is pushing it.
Not a lot of gymnastics.
You own your body. Therefore, you own what you produce with your body. Therefore, your property is protected to the same extent your body is.
If one does NOT have the right to protect their property, then they do not have a right to the fruits of their labor, which is the same thing as slavery (ie, not owning your own self at all).
I think that when picking up a piece of paper is force, but shooting someone in the head isn’t, the term has ceased to be useful.
Oh, it gets worse than that. Consider reckless driving, which isn’t intended to and hasn’t yet injured anyone, with the police cruiser whose flashing lights explicitly signal “stop what you’re doing or we’ll stop you by force”. If this drama proceeds the way it usually does, or if it proceeds the way it might if the driver simply ignores the cop, who is “initiating force”?
So, yeah, useless. Either it’s obvious who is initiating force, in which case it is also obvious who is the bad guy, or you need to immediately follow “initiation of force” with an explanation of what those three words mean and who did the initiating in this context, in which case what did those three words accomplished.
I’m a literal card-carrying Libertarian, but this is sophistry. A way of dividing all political action into three categories: Robbery, rape, and murder; all the stuff I want to stop you from doing which I will now show is morally equivalent to robbery/rape/murder; and all the stuff I want to do over your opposition, which I will now show is morally equivalent to defending myself against robbery or worse at your hands. But by the Three Magic Words, I make it a coherent moral principle that just coincidentally always rules in favor of what I want.
I guess they give those cards out to anyone these days! 🙂
Say what you will about the communists, but presumably they wouldn’t have issued a membership to someone who was like “yeah yeah, im with you on everything else, but im a HUGE fan of private property!”
And just so people don’t get all excited here – the reckless driving question is easily answered.
The policies of the road can and should be enforced by the owner of the road – with the exception that they cannot jail you or kill you for violating their policies, only deny you use of the road (but they may use force if you refuse to leave their property after being told you are not welcome).
And no, the government is not a legitimate owner of the current roads. The government is not the legitimate owner of anything, because everything it has was purchased with stolen money.
If the government, state, people collectively, cannot own or administer the roads, then you run into the patchwork-quilt problem where anyone who offends four of their neighbors (or one big land-management company) can be isolated, imprisoned, left to starve, and be shot if they try to escape.
I’m a libertarian, not an anarcho-capitalist.
That’s true, that could possibly happen.
Of course, under the state, all you have to do is offend any one of the legion of bureaucrats with enough power to mess things up for you.
Or to attempt to do something (like say, smoke marijuana) that 51% of the population has determined you shouldn’t be allowed to do.
The problems of too many jurisdictions are FAR preferable to the problems of too few.
Matt M,
What proportion of production is due to the individual’s work, and what proportion is due to the social structure?
Impossible to know and will vary wildly on a case by case basis.
Ergo, we should error on the side of caution and not murder, assault, and steal from people because they MIGHT have gotten more than their own fair share.
I just find it so… I don’t know… infuriating? that libertarians can literally advocate killing people who touch their things, and yet accuse their opponents of advocating “murder” when they favor (generally peaceable) taxation.
This position just makes no sense to me.
Because under the state, everyone who shoots an intruder in their home is always prosecuted for murder?
Or because all libertarians are heartless psychos who have no sense of proportionality and would continue to trade with someone who was known to have killed someone for a very minor property crime?
Libertarianism is nothing more than crowd-sourcing most of the same political features you have now, only instead of “winner takes all” you now have six billion competing jurisdictions.
If you have a *true* non-aggression principle – nobody initiating physical force (of any kind) – it is actually impossible to enforce property law.
If, by “non-aggression principle” you mean “don’t touch my justly owned property or I can shoot you, and even if it isn’t justly owned, well, don’t touch it anyway, because it is better to shoot someone who touches my stuff that may not be justly owned than for someone to touch something that is justly owned”, I think we have strayed quite a long way from anything any normal person could recognize as an ethical principle.
“…Libertarianism is nothing more than crowd-sourcing most of the same political features you have now, only instead of “winner takes all” you now have six billion competing jurisdictions.”
But what you have given there isn’t an ethical argument, Matt. It is an argument about how effective the competing political systems are.
I just find it so… I don’t know… infuriating? that libertarians can literally advocate killing people who touch their things, and yet accuse their opponents of advocating “murder” when they favor (generally peaceable) taxation.
Libertarians “advocate” shooting petty thieves in roughly the same way that their opponents do in fact advocate shooting people for tax evasion – as Plan D or Plan E after a series of escalatory steps so far beyond the pale that in polite society we like to think nobody would ever ever push it that far over such a minor issue.
When someone is shot for tax evasion (or petty theft or whatnot), the whole story will be something like “…was shot by police when he endangered bystanders while resisting arrest with a shotgun, when he wouldn’t go peacefully when the Sheriff tried to evict him from his house, which was foreclosed when he couldn’t pay the mortgage, because his wages were garnished when he refused to meet with the IRS after repeated entreaties to discuss his unpaid taxes”. And usually only the first clause will make it into the headline.
Most libertarians, who are not anarchists, believe that anyone who skips straight to Plan E over petty theft should be arrested by the police and sent to jail for murder. The minority of libertarians who are anarcho-capitalists and don’t think there should be police at all, believe in a web of private security companies that will ensure about the same outcome unless both parties are hard-core ultra-individualist lone wolfs.
And the insistence of some libertarians on framing everything in no-initiation-of-force terms, among its many other problems, tend to steer the debate towards the exceedingly rare extreme cases and not the dispute resolution mechanisms that will be employed in 99.99+% of actual cases.
Yeah. I think all I’m looking for is the recognition that in extreme cases all societies require some degree of force to compel people to do (or not do) certain things.
Libertarians like the societies they advocate and therefore feel that using force to defend the principles of that society is justified. (Though given how iniquitous our society is from an anarcho-capitalist perspective , I’m a bit puzzled as to how they think we have a right to defend property as it exists.)
But they can’t then argue that their society is *justified* because it only requires acceptable use of force – that’s completely circular argumentation.
@John Schilling
“Most libertarians, who are not anarchists”
That should be “Most libertarians who are not anarchists”
My phrasing was deliberate, specifically including the location of the commas. Anarchists are a vocal minority of libertarians. The majority of libertarians, who are not anarchists, are annoyed by the persistent misunderstanding on this point. I mean, we have an actual political party, and its platform is not “disband the government”.
I think it was actually here that I saw serious defense of anarchy for the first time.
I now get somewhat less exasperated when I see people going “oh yeah? then why don’t you move to Somalia?”, because it now feels a little bit less like a strawman.
Still not quite used to it, though.
There is a justification for libertarianism entirely unrelated to the non-aggression principle: that libertarianism makes people happy and is good for society.
That is a good utilitarian argument for libertarianism if one agrees with the empirical premises, which many, strangely, do not.
In my opinion, the best ethical justification for libertarianism, better than just asserting the NAP (though I am broadly in agreement with what we might call “the spirit of the NAP”) is described in Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority.
The basic idea is that, right now, we have something called political authority which is an idea that certain people (agents of the state) can do things which would be wrong if a private citizen did them. Moreover, private citizens have a duty to obey government agents, even when doing so requires acting against their own consciences.
This authority requires some sort of justification; otherwise it’s just special pleading. And all of the justifications fall flat.
Thus, a better standard than NAP is simply: act according to commonsense morality (don’t lie, cheat, steal, or murder–but basic self defense is okay) and expect others (government agents included) to do the same. If you think government (which in a democracy we tend to call our “representatives”) can do things you would be wrong to do, ask “how did I delegate to a representative rights I myself didn’t have?”
Want to know if it’s okay for the government to do it? Just ask: “would it be okay for me to do it?” Most people think it’s okay to use a reasonable level of force to get a trespasser off one’s property, for example, but most people think it’s not okay to shoot someone whose dog pooped on your lawn.
“Thus, a better standard than NAP is simply: act according to commonsense morality (don’t lie, cheat, steal, or murder–but basic self defense is okay) and expect others (government agents included) to do the same.”
I agree with that. Am I a libertarian now?
You cannot expect government agents not to steal. They are literally required to steal as part of their job. Without theft they don’t get paid.
@onyomi: “This authority requires some sort of justification; otherwise it’s just special pleading. And all of the justifications fall flat.”
I think that’s a key point – to me, there are justifications for most of the powers that liberal democracies grant to government (including many that libertarians traditionally oppose) that *don’t* fall flat. Indeed, libertarian arguments tend to fall flat to my ears – though I should admit that I’m thoroughly out of date on the subject.
I suspect in many cases the disagreement could be tracked down to beliefs about ownership [as witness Matt M’s comment] and especially ownership of rights to natural resources such as land. Libertarian axioms have always seemed awfully naive and overly simplistic to me.
[Not wanting to argue or attempting to persuade, just making an observation.]
@Harry
“…justifications for most of the powers that liberal democracies grant to government (including many that libertarians traditionally oppose) that *don’t* fall flat.”
Such as?
@Mark
“…I agree with that. Am I a libertarian now?”
I would say so, yes.
To me, this is *the* key component of libertarianism, more than any particular economic or social view.
Also “commonsense morality” is completely and entirely subjective and is practically indistinguishable from mob rule.
After all, it’s becoming “commonsense morality” that people who privately donate to groups who oppose gay marriage should be fired from their jobs.
You’re thinking of commonsense politics.
There is extremely widespread agreement on basic ethical principles like “don’t lie, cheat, steal, rape, or murder” and “happiness and life are better than suffering and death.” There are a few high profile, marginal cases like abortion, but they tend to amount to factual disagreements, like when life begins.
Commonsense morality works extremely well for the vast majority of everyday interactions and personal decisions. It’s when you start trying to make decisions for millions of others (i. e. politics) that it gets very controversial and confusing.
@onyomi: the simplest and most obvious case would be taxation, which can be considered to be a form of rent.
@Matt M: an interesting example; while I’m not at all keen on religious supremacists, that particular issue has always struck me as a demonstration of the problem with “employment at will”.
(Here in New Zealand, by way of comparison, it would be illegal for an employer to fire someone because activists objected to their politics.)
@Harry
Taxation is in need of justification. It isn’t a justification. Taxation would be called stealing or extortion if you did it to your neighbor, not rent.
Unless you think that the state actually owns all land in the country and we just rent from it. But that itself would require a justification, since, what makes agents of the state so special that they get to claim “true” ownership of all the land, whereas regular people can only buy and sell the right to lease?
And let’s not forget – once you concede that the state owns all the land and we merely rent from it – you are openly admitting that we live under a socialist form of government. Not even mixed, given that land is a primary and necessary means of any and all types of production.
Even within a libertarian system, there must be some means by which we decide who land belongs to. If there is the possibility for legitimate disagreement on an issue, there must be some form of decision-making institution that exists on a higher plane of decision-making power than other actors in society.
The only way around this is to claim you have devised an objectively true ethical system that brooks no disagreement.
Justification for taxation:
Increased social coordination.
“…there must be some form of decision-making institution that exists on a higher plane of decision-making power than other actors in society…”
I don’t see why.
Negotiation, third-party arbitration, etc. are all means by which parties on the same level come to agreement over disputes. David Friedman, who often comments here, has written a lot about this in history and in theory. I think his view of property is that it is a commitment strategy whereby there is a certain level of protecting your person and that which you claim as your property by being willing to defend it to a degree greater than is worth most peoples’ while to deprive you of it–a schelling point idea.
I’m not sure I 100% agree based on what I’ve read before, but maybe he’ll chime in and flesh it out, or you can find him talking about it on Youtube.
Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of history and theory about resolving disputes about property, contract, etc. without appeal to some “higher” authority (private courts and the like may be “higher” in the sense that they control more resources than you and can make your life difficult, but not higher in some ethical sense, where different rules apply). In such a society one could imagine that, instead of being forced by a “higher authority” to pay a debt owed, compensate a victim, or make good on a contract, failure to do so might instead merely ruin the equivalent of some sort of “credit rating” or “contract reliability rating,” thereby strongly incentivizing you to go along with the decision of an agreed-upon arbitrator, etc.
“Justification for taxation:
Increased social coordination.”
Does the goal of “increased social coordination” justify stealing/extortion?
If you said to your neighbors, “yes, I’m forcing you to donate to my community safety and neighborhood beautification program, but think how much better our neighborhood will function as a unit! It will really bring us together as a community!” would that make it okay? I’m not talking about soliciting voluntary donations, but demanding money of your neighbors to increase the social coordination of the neighborhood.
@onyomi
「財産自体が盗みだ」と思う人もいるでしょう？
「財産が盗みなのに。。。なんで私産が正当と思っている？君、泥棒じゃない？」
上記の言葉、と「税金が盗みだ」は基本的に同じような主張じゃないですか？
どちらもただの感情論じゃないですか？
私産権を認めない人間社会は前列がほとんどありません（アメリカ先住民を含めて）。動物だって縄張りを守ろうとします。ただの抽象的な概念ではありますが、ごく自然で、効果的で、誰でも簡単に理解できるシステムですので、主観的というより、”自然権に近い”といったほうが正確じゃありませんか？その一方、そんな自然法を転覆させようとした政治家が必ず災難をもたらします（ソ連など）。
(For those who don’t speak Japanese, though I enjoy the practice, the question was about the Bakunin-type view that “property is theft.” I just said that property is a natural conflict avoidance mechanism which exists in pretty much every society ever, and which approaches the level of a “natural right,” or at least seems more than subjective in the way that “genocide is bad” is not just subjective. Attempting to do away with private property never succeeds and always causes a disaster, etc., so if for no other reason, it would be wrong on purely utilitarian grounds).
I would also again point people to David Friedman’s writing on the origins of private property as commitment strategy, etc. Though I’m not sure I agree 100%, it seems to have more explanatory power than “mixing one’s labor,” “first user,” etc. Yes, private property is a kind of social convention, but it’s basically an essential one which even animals have to some extent. To reductio the alternative: if you can’t have private control over a house, say, why do you get to exercise control over your own body, even? Shouldn’t other people have equal right to use it?
For people curious about my views on property, they come in two different contexts. One is what I think of as a positive theory of rights, an explanation of why people behave in certain ways, based on commitment strategies and Schelling points. You can find it in “A Positive Account of Property Rights,” linked to my blog and my web page. The other is my not very successful attempt at solving the problem of how to justify property in land, which is a special case because it is not something created by human action. That’s a chapter in the new material in the third edition of Machinery, which also contains chapters on the positive account. Drafts of the chapters are webbed but no longer linked to my page, and I’m currently in Shanghai with somewhat limited internet access so can’t easily find the URL.
@onyomi
I don’t know. The problem with libertarians is you just have a load of people saying “I don’t want any social coordination”, or “taxation is theft” etc. etc. but when it comes down to it, they don’t actually object to physical violence, they don’t object to killing people to establish a social order (as long as it is the social order they are in favor of), they don’t have any knock-out ethical arguments for the particular brand of property rights they favor (but they are certain you are evil if you don’t share them) – and you just come away with this sense of… “what the hell is it that they are actually saying?” Best guess: “I don’t like the *word* government.”
I mean… here is the thing… we *don’t* have control over our bodies in the sense of having an absolute moral right to do whatever we like with them. Of course we don’t. Has there ever been a society where *that* rule has existed? Could it exist?
To the extent that interactions with inanimate objects are rivalrous and important (they are very important), even the “no touch” rule tells us absolutely nothing important about how we should behave.
So libertarianism tells us nothing, ethically, about how society should work. Nothing. It is literally saying nothing, except that taxation is evil. Government is evil.
Taxation is theft. You have the right to your property because you worked to make it. Well, I disagree with you. As Obama said, “You didn’t build that”. You *DIDN’T* build that – a Stone Age man doesn’t produce at 1% of the level of a modern factory worker because he lacks Joe Six-Pack’s personal qualities – it is because he doesn’t have access to capital and existing knowledge, and because of the social structure he lives in. We owe everything we have to the society we live in, to the social structure. Society owns *everything* you make.
And here is the key point – the very fact that I can legitimately disagree with you means that you are wrong and I am right. Why? Because we aren’t going to solve this discussion by debate. It is going to be solved by force, threat of force, and compromise. And when humans get into force, it isn’t done on an individual level – it is done on a social level. You get all your friends together to protect your apple tree, I get all my friends together to protect the same apple tree that I *think* is mine, and pretty soon we either have a war or we make a compromise and something like a government/ legal system is born. Guess what the compromise is. You get to use the tree, but you have to pay tax.
“…you just have a load of people saying “I don’t want any social coordination””
I don’t know any libertarians who say that. In fact, we tend to say the opposite: we want more *voluntary* social coordination of the sort which arises out of billions of people making mutually agreeable deals with billions of other individuals. As Hayek so eloquently put it in his rap battle with Keynes:
“I don’t want to do nothing, there’s plenty to do. / The question I ponder is who plans for whom? / Do I plan for myself or leave it to you? / I want plans by the many, not by the few.”
I think my ethical arguments are good: everyone, be they utilitarian, virtue ethicist, natural rights theorist, or just guy on the street agrees it would be wrong if you tried to “tax” your neighbor. Therefore, the proponents of taxation must justify the special rule applying to government. So far, the only justification you’ve offered is “social coordination,” which, even if true, does not seem to justify stealing by *any* ethical standard, as per my neighborhood organization example.
So far as I can tell, the only ethical standard you’ve offered so far which justifies government is “my ethics say government is okay,” which is begging the question. Political authority needs a justification, otherwise it’s special pleading.
Also, you mistake me if you think I’m saying everyone needs to be a pacifist. A few people think ethics demands pacifism, but almost everyone else thinks proportional force/violence is justified in extreme circumstances (though notably, no one takes the opposite of the pacifist view, which is “violence is always okay”).
So everyone agrees violence is either never justified, or only justified if proportional and needed to prevent dire consequences. I am simply saying that government agents should only be able to use violence/force under the same circumstances it would be permissible for anyone else to do so. Thus, if taxation is truly necessary to prevent a great disaster, then it is justifiable, but only to the extent necessary to prevent that disaster. Therefore, ethics can, at most, justify only a minimal state–and that’s assuming the empirical claim that having no state would be disastrous, which I don’t think is true.
I’m not a pacifist, I’m just holding everyone to the same standards.
As for the idea that, in the end, everything is decided by superior force, I don’t think that’s actually true. If the idea were to become very widespread that the US government were illegitimate, for example, the US government, even with the biggest military in the world, could not stop the people from overthrowing them, or, more likely, ignoring their rules. This is true even in the most oppressive regimes, such as North Korea.
The government always relies on political authority–the idea that different standards apply to government agents than to everybody else. Thus, the ideological battle *is* the real battle. What matters is not who has more guns, but whose ideas are generally accepted. Tribalism strongly predisposes people to believing in political authority, but careful consideration reveals that it is not ethically justifiable.
As for the idea that: “well, you want no government and I want government, so it’s a wash.” This is incorrect because my wanting no government imposes no demands on you. It merely asks that you not force me to participate in a venture I don’t support. If you and your friends still wish to be governed in an anarcho-capitalist world, however, there is no one stopping you from voting for some guys to boss you around.
@onyomi: “Unless you think that the state actually owns all land in the country” … put simplistically, yes. I see sovereignty as the most fundamental form of ownership. What we commonly call land ownership is really just the ownership of certain rights, most notably the right to use the land.
(As it happens, my wife and I bought our first house a fortnight ago, and in our case the fact that we don’t own the land is explicit – the title deed grants us ownership of a 999-year lease, not of the land itself. Even when it isn’t explicit, though, the legal precedents make it clear that landowners don’t really “own” the land, not in the sense of holding sovereignty over it.)
In particular, when a government sells land, it does not usually sell the taxation rights – and if it did, it would charge more.
“what makes agents of the state so special that they get to claim “true” ownership” …
in a liberal democracy, surely it’s the state itself that owns the sovereignty, not agents of the state? My own position is that the state is only really entitled to sovereignty insofar as it represents the true owners, i.e., everybody.
… so, going back to your earlier statement: “Want to know if it’s okay for the government to do it? Just ask: “would it be okay for me to do it?”
In this case (“owning the sovereignty”) I say that the answer is yes – because you’re one of the people who *is* doing it – via your elected representatives, and their employees, of course.
(You can also compare collective sovereignty to other forms of collective ownership, e.g., corporations. The management have ownership-like rights because they represent the people who, collectively, own the business.)
@Matt M: “you are openly admitting that we live under a socialist form of government” … that’s just playing with words, though; socialism has never been defined that way in practice.
In particular, the difference between capitalism and communism has never been whether the government asserts sovereignty, and in particular, taxation rights, over its territory; it has always been whether people are allowed to own businesses (in particular, factories) or not.
The way I see it, sovereignty has been owned collectively, rather than by individual landowners, for as long as the US has existed. Under these circumstances, I can’t agree to the claim (as the result of what amounts to a linguistic confusion) that the people of the US are not entitled to collective sovereignty and should hand it over (free of charge!) to landowners.
Now, *that* sounds like theft. 🙂
“owned collectively by the people” is not nearly as impressive a concept when you start to consider what this actually means, how it works in a system with moving parts, rather than as a mental abstraction.
“…the state is only really entitled to sovereignty insofar as it represents the true owners, i.e., everybody.”
If the state is just “everybody,” then why do different ethical standards apply to it than apply to each individual or group of individuals? How can you delegate a power you don’t have?
The reality is that the state isn’t “everybody”; it’s a ruling class. It wields the same powers kings and despots of old wielded; it’s only the method of selecting the kings and lords which has changed. That’s why it’s still called “sovereignty.”
Also, I don’t know of a single state in the world which is willing to sell “taxation rights” (i. e. national sovereignty) to anyone at any price. Can you imagine how much the Bill Gateses of the world would be willing to pay if they could *truly* own land–that is, if, by residing there, they would not be subject to taxation?
“Everybody” is the cruelest master: no matter how much you pay him, he will never free you. In this world, the best you can hope for is to switch from being ruled by one “everybody” to being ruled by another “everybody.”
@Caue: that sounds like a different objection altogether; certainly collective sovereignty is a mental abstraction, but so is “taxation is theft”.
My view is that modern liberal democracy can work reasonably well in practice; better than libertarianism is likely to work, at any rate.
@onyomi: “If the state is just “everybody,” then why do different ethical standards apply to it than apply to each individual or group of individuals? How can you delegate a power you don’t have?”
For the same reason that a CEO can fire an employee, but a shareholder can’t; the fact that I own one share of the sovereignty of my country does not entitle me to act unilaterally in ways that affect everybody else’s sovereign rights. Collective sovereignty, like collective ownership, means collective decision-making – in one form or another.
Re your other points:
* I really can’t see Parliament as a “ruling class”. That probably boils down to a difference in our emotional makeups, though of course the fact that we live in different nations may also be a factor. Nor can I view my fellow citizens as “the cruellest master”.
* There is precedent for the sale and purchase of sovereignty; Alaska, for example. I’m not sure whether I think the sale of sovereignty to wealthy individuals should be permissible; in principle, certainly, but my instincts tell me it would set a precedent that would inevitably be misused.
While CEOs may have more practical authority and responsibility, the same *ethical* standards apply to CEOs as to entry-level employees.
As for emotional differences in the origins of our views, you live in NZ, right? The smaller the population and territory, the easier it is for people to identify with the state. And though I don’t think it’s correct or good for people to identify with the state, I do think smaller states are better than bigger states, and city states are even better than small states. Look at Singapore or Ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy. I just take that all the way to its logical conclusion–individual sovereignty.
I doubt you’d expect the quality of governance or your sense of participation in it to go up were NZ to become part of Australia, for example?
Yeah, I don’t like “taxation is theft” either. It’s the same kind of intuitive-button-pushing that’s so annoying in politics (and I get that these are required to play the game, but this one doesn’t even seem to work).
I like “taxation is theft.” Because taxation is theft. Is orderly theft not theft? Sometimes intuitive buttons need pushing to make people see past double standards.
This is one area I disagree strongly with Scott. Yes, *intellectually dishonest* scare words and emotional button pushing is bad, but there’s nothing intellectually dishonest about calling taxation “theft” in my book because the distinctions between them are immaterial.
Yes, conflation is bad, but it cuts both ways: making unjustified distinctions with the effect of blinding people to immorality is also bad.
What if it were common in our society to call “sending political dissidents to a gulag to die” “reeducation”? If I were then to say “reeducation is murder!” would you say, “stop all that emotional button pushing. Yes, in a very technical sense we are causing the deaths of people who have dangerous political views, but it’s misleading and sensationalist to put it that way”?
I find rhetoric interesting as something to analyze and think about, but I don’t really like to practice it (well, knowingly, anyway).
Yes, it is theft, and it’s not theft, depending on one’s understanding of “taxation” and “theft”. It’s a matter of framing. But what you mean isn’t intuitive for most people.
It’s too blunt an opening. If you’re going to pump somebody’s intuition you have to build it from the ground up, so that when you say “taxation is theft” they already understand what you’re talking about. If you don’t, people’s brains will check their own central examples of “taxation” and “theft”, and decide that “nah, no match, this is weird”.
I don’t think this is any worse than what other political groups do, but some of them do seem to be more effective at it.
Yeah, I don’t actually lead with that generally, because, like you say, people will balk.
Quite the opposite, in fact–I tend to instead just state my ethical reasoning, and let people draw their own conclusions about what that implies. Anarchy, like theft, is a scary word.
But if many people are not okay with taxation so long as I don’t call it “taxation,” and are okay with anarchy so long as I don’t call it “anarchy,” what does that say about taxation and anarchy… ?Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could reshuffle all the words and their referents every decade or so, thereby shaking out all the accrued positive and negative vibes?
@onyomi
I like “taxation is theft.” Because taxation is theft. Is orderly theft not theft?
Excellently clear, as is “Property is theft.” I hope those two speakers got together for some cage matches.
@onyomi: “While CEOs may have more practical authority and responsibility, the same *ethical* standards apply to CEOs as to entry-level employees.”
Yes, and in a democracy the same ethical standards apply to politicians as to everyone else. I’m not sure what your point is here.
OK so is it unethical for me to tax my neighbors? As you have agreed, it isn’t the fact that such an act may on some level involve violence that makes it unethical (though I would say the degree of violence involved probably is an ethical as well as practical question) – it is the purpose of the taxation.
OK some good reasons to “tax” my neighbors –
We live next to a river and need to build flood defenses. One person doesn’t want to pay.
A blight destroys all of my crops and my neighbors don’t want to share.
Several people claim the most fertile land in the area which enables you to produce more food for less work. There is no way to determine who has the better claim.
(these problems become more likely to occur, the greater the scale of the society)
Now the next question is why *I* should have the authority to decide.
The word authority itself doesn’t imply to me that the people in authority are on some higher ethical dimension. It implies to me that they have more power. Saddam Hussein had a position of authority – that doesn’t imply that he was ethically superior to the people he had tortured.
My authority may derive from the fact that I am considered to be the wisest person in the village, or it may derive from the fact that I am the nastiest.
There are three separate facts – the existence of authority, how authority is determined, and the ethical use of that authority.
In the libertarian society you described, there was a ratings agency with a degree of power to make your life miserable – this is authority. What you are describing is simply (from your perspective) a *better way to determine who should have authority* perhaps a *way to prevent unethical use of authority* not an absence of authority, or a society which has a fundamental ethical bedrock of voluntarism.
(It doesn’t have a fundamental ethical bedrock of voluntarism because I don’t agree with your view of property.)
So, we can have a discussion about who should have authority, how this can be determined, the degree to which the person in authority should have authority – but to start the conversation from the position that authority=unethical, is akin to viewing parental authority as unethical because of the existence of child abusers. Any alternative means you develop to bring up children is also going to require something very similar to parental authority, just located somewhere else and called something different.
Actually, I take that back – it isn’t akin to thinking parental authority is unethical because some parents are child abusers – it is akin to thinking parental authority is unethical because parental authority is unethical – then using the example of child abusers to try and give some shadow of substance to the claim.
Taxation is theft, sure, but the thing that bothers me quite a bit more is that imprisonment is kidnapping and capital punishment and war are murder. And, sure, private organizations can certainly wage war, but it seems like they’d have much less ability if they can’t just print money and claim sovereignty over all the mineral resources in a place to set up shop everywhere in the world, create a global communications interception dragnet, and place drone bases from which they can assassinate dissenters. That actual governments do that is a lot more terrifying to me than the fact that I have to open my paycheck every couple weeks and 40% of it is gone, after which I go buy a bunch of shit I don’t need just because I can and take a few tropical vacations a year. I can at least live with it, which isn’t a thing said by all the dead people the FBI just admitted they invented a fake science to be able to fabricate evidence against.
@Harry
“Yes, and in a democracy the same ethical standards apply to politicians as to everyone else.”
No, they do not. Agents of the IRS can tax me. I can’t tax agents of the IRS. The police can detain and fine me for unsafe driving. I cannot detain and fine the police for unsafe driving. Congressmen can pass laws saying whom I’m allowed to work for, and under what terms. I can’t tell my neighbors whom they are allowed to work for, or under what terms. Nor could any large group of me and my neighbors do any of these things which government agents are allowed to do.
Different ethical standards are applied to government agents than to private citizens. You could say that they’ve earned the right to be above common morality by being democratically selected, but I don’t see how that works, ethically. If all my neighbors vote to rob me that doesn’t make it okay.
@Mark, I’m not against all forms of authority, just *political* authority. Political authority is a type of authority with specific characteristics.
See pp. 13-14 (17-18 of pdf) of http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/Contents.pdf for a description of political authority.
@Adam,
Though it is harder to keep it in mind when there is no draft and it happens overseas, I would agree that war is by far the worst thing most states do.
This is why I sometimes feel obligated to support someone who is antiwar but otherwise terrible on domestic issues against the reverse. Obama>McCain, for example, and Sanders>Clinton>Santorum.
@onyomi
“The police can detain and fine me for unsafe driving. I cannot detain and fine the police for unsafe driving.”
What would you think of a police force that operated under the Peelian principle that,
“the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”
Question: in a sufficiently small community, could an individual be a government?
Yeah, and theoretically I would support those people if I believed they were actually anti-war. Give Obama a peace prize, but as far as I can tell, the main distinction is Bush liked to send Delta Force around to arrest people and send them to Cuba. Obama likes to send either Seal Team Six or a sleek flying robot to just shoot them or blow up their kid’s birthday parties instead. Better press, I guess. We get the same enforcement of global power balance without having to see dead U.S. soldiers on the news and no one can complain you mistreat prisoners when you just stop taking prisoners.
@Adam: I thought Obama got the peace prize for work on nuclear disarmament?
@Onyomi
Dismantling the government has consequences, namely non reppression of te enerprise violence. IoW , kt ksit it is for Lbertarians to show that people would voluntarily follow the NoIF principles.
Government and taxation can be and are justified consequentially. Your claims that political authority isnt justified by everyday moral reasoning only amount to it not being justified deontologically.
But the deontologist has there choices…to accept rules and rule makers, as a given; to justify rules consequentially; or mysticism.
@Mark
The “Peelian Principle” of policing sounds good to me.
@TheAncientGeek
As mentioned, a *minimal* state (a state with the minimum level of coercive power necessary to avert horrific consequences) may be justified on consequentialist grounds, assuming one thinks having no state would lead to disastrous consequences.
We can debate whether or not privatizing the police, courts, and army would lead to disastrous consequences, but I’m pretty sure we would all survive if the government stopped mandating licensing for hairbraiders, or which particular healthcare benefits must be offered as terms of employment.
As far as I can tell, it was awarded mostly for what he promised to do while campaigning, which included nuclear disarmament.
I like what Chomsky said about it: “In defense of the committee, we might say that the achievement of doing nothing to advance peace places Obama on a considerably higher moral plane than some of the earlier recipients.”
@onyomi: ” Agents of the IRS can tax me. I can’t tax agents of the IRS.”
You do realize that the people working at the IRS don’t actually get to keep the money themselves, right? 🙂
But seriously, to draw the same distinction you made earlier, that’s about authority, not ethics. You might as well complain that the CEO can fire you but you can’t fire the CEO.
“If all my neighbors vote to rob me that doesn’t make it okay.” … in New Zealand, if you own a unit title apartment, management of the apartment building will be handled by a body corporate, whose membership consists of you and your neighbours; the body corporate has the right to “rob” you, e.g., for repairs to the apartment building. I believe the US has a similar concept, though used much more broadly, called a “homeowner association”.
It’s my understanding that this would probably still be permitted under a libertarian government. Am I mistaken?
The IRS point is equivalent to “the thug didn’t keep your money, he gave it to his boss”.
The other situations arise from voluntary contracts. This difference is not small.
@Caue: if you’re buying a house, and the only houses available belong to homeowners associations, then belonging to a homeowners association isn’t really voluntary in any practical sense. (I have actually seen people make this exact complaint.)
Government is no different in principle. They’re just *really big* homeowner associations, already set up almost everywhere you might want to live. You may not like it, but that doesn’t make it inherently unethical.
PS – it’s more like “the salesperson didn’t keep the money, he gave it to his boss” – in reply to “why can the salesperson charge me for my purchase when I can’t charge him?”
I’m interested to hear how the libertarian society can be fundamentally voluntary if two people can have completely different (and contradictory) conceptions of property rights.
Haha, yes. Governments are just like massive homeowner associations set up generations before you were born and which exist everywhere and which you have no choice but to participate in and participants in which view selling pieces of the neighborhood outright as an attack on national and/or ethnic dignity. Oh, by the way, the rules, established before you were born, say the homeowner’s council can change the rules whenever they want! And they do–pretty much constantly! No problems there!
A difference in degree can make a difference in what is or is not ethical. It need not always be a difference in kind. A very private rich guy buys a piece of land and surrounds it with tall fences and armed guards to prevent anyone crossing his land. No problem. Billionaire buys all the land around a town and erects tall fences to prevent anyone entering or leaving: ethical problem.
@onyomi: an interesting example, because the last time I debated with a libertarian I introduced a similar scenario. The response was (paraphrased) that the townsfolk were too stupid to live and it serves them right. 🙂
Someone more powerful than you than erects a wall around your city to starve you out is a legitimate failure mode of a stateless society, but it’s not really an argument against it because it’s a failure mode of every other kind of society we’ve ever tried, too.
I can’t help but wonder if we’d get further pitching libertarianism as “sure, it isn’t utopia, but we’re coming out of a century in which entities with the power to claim sovereignty over all the land in a region, extract taxes, and print money murdered a couple hundred million people and maybe we can do better.” Businesses can definitely do shady things, too, but I’m not sure banana plantations could effectively colonize South American countries if they didn’t have the backing of the CIA and Delta Force.
I think some of us get spoiled a bit by the relative stability we enjoy because we’re lucky enough to live in states that function pretty well for us and we’re left with the chief complaint being they take money from rich people and give it to welfare queens, and then we just attract the racists and wealth hoarders that aren’t really libertarians in any broader sense and don’t give a shit about broad well-being, but we forgot how much of that stability is predicated upon our ability to brutalize a whole bunch of other people we’re never going to meet or know about.
Adam, not to claim that it does or does not undermine your argument, but your history is off. The banana republics predate the Spanish-American War, let alone CIA and Delta Force. The first coup mentioned on wikipedia precedes WWI. Of course, they were supported by the Monroe Doctrine. See also filibusters before the Civil War.
Harry, whatever side you’re on, I guarantee I’ve also had a discussion with someone on your side that would embarrass you.
Anyway. I’m not sure I’ve identified your point. Yes, if you squint, the bad things we’re complaining about are kinda similar to other bad things we’re not currently complaining about, but surely that doesn’t turn any of them into good things.
Sorry if I’m being uncharitable, it’s late.
(also, my initial reaction to your example was “all available housing? how does that even happen without some law or other intervention?”)
Yeah, I know. I didn’t feel like looking up who actually owned resources in Latin America during the red scare era, so I fell back to bananas.
It was still bananas during the red scare. But so what? You were not making a claim about what was done, but what was possible. The fact that the banana companies did it before the CIA shows that you were wrong about their capabilities. And did their capabilities change during the depression? No, I think it was USG that wanted more direct oversight.
This is the problem isn’t it – since you aren’t providing a particularly precise definition of “government” you can’t really make strong moral claims about it.
onyomi seems to be saying that there isn’t some categorical, cut-and-dried definition of what constitutes an unethical form of social organisation (this equals “government” in libertarian speak). It isn’t a matter of whether that organization is backed by force.
You *can* have an ethical police force if that police force is established with the principles that… well served as the original basis for the police forces of the commonwealth countries.
With government too, for libertarians, there is obviously a point at which a social organisation is sufficiently limited, or there is sufficient plurality of power, or a sufficient degree of choice that the organization is no longer “a government”. Presumably, any money that people are obliged to pay this organization isn’t “a tax”.
Tax is evil. I don’t think this is very useful language. It would be better to say something like – the degree to which people are obliged to do things by social organisations is an ethical question – almost everyone’s conception of taxation already contains the idea that this is a payment made for some purpose (good reasons to oblige people to make payments are given above, they are obvious) and that only where the imposition of the taxation is unnecessary or immoral would it become theft.
The same thing holds for government – most people recognize the need for a separation of powers (a plurality of power), for there to be principles that are set *above* government, perhaps even for people to have a degree of choice in the area they live in and the policies they are affected by.
So what exactly are libertarians saying except, “I don’t like the word government”?
Honestly, any world is going to have collective decision-making bodies, and they’re going to have to be funded somehow, and I don’t care if they get called government, and taxation is extremely low on my list of priorities. I think you gave some decent examples a ways back, but if four guys all hunt in the same forest, decide they don’t want to deplete the deer population so they can continue doing so, three guys chip in, and the fourth doesn’t, I don’t imagine very many realistic scenarios where they don’t forcibly exclude the fourth guy or force him to pay, and that isn’t evil. It’s unfortunate, but resource-wanters in the face of scarcity are going to have conflict. Given our great-ape ancestry, testosterone, whatever it is, we’re probably going to have conflict even without scarcity.
Maybe on a more immediately-relevant level, take something like disaster insurance. I doubt that it’s realistically possible for a profit-making entity to survive something like a Hurricane Katrina, and sure, a voluntary-in-name-only fund you have to pay into if you want to live below sea level in a place that experiences hurricanes is not functionally much different from what we already have (for some things, anyway – I’m pretty sure the U.S. flood insurance program is national, not restricted to the specific people affected).
To me anyway, the overwhelmingly most important thing is scale.
It’s pretty simple for me: just eliminate ethical double standards. If it would be okay for you or a group of your friends to do x for purpose y, then it’s okay for someone calling himself a “policeman” to do x for purpose y, on his own, or in your stead.
To some extent, it’s impossible to predict exactly what would be the consequences of widespread adoption of such a principle, but I think certain things would look similar in practice, and others very different. There would still be people whose job it was to protect people from violence, using proportional violence if necessary. There would be people whose job it was to track down criminals and detain them. There would be people whose job it was to render decisions about who was right and who was wrong in a disagreement, and there would be mechanisms of making sure those decisions were, largely, respected. Maybe there would be agencies like credit rating agencies which would give you a terrible rating if you agreed to arbitration and then refused to abide by the decision, thereby making it difficult for you to make future deals.
If all of that still sounds like government to you–even without putting these arbiters and enforcers on a different ethical plane from you and me–then call it a government. To me it sounds less like “governing” and more like “personal protection,” “conflict and contract arbitration,” “criminal conduct investigation,” etc. etc. You wouldn’t say that mall security guards were part of the “government” of the mall?
But again, I’m not attached to abolishing the word “government” just to abolishing the double standard.
@Caue: no side, no point. Just an observation that seemed amusing at the time.
Re your last question: so far as I can see, in the absence of an organized effort to prevent it, all that homeowner’s assocations need in order to become universal (in the US) is time. But I don’t know that I want to push the analogy that far anyway.
But consider: in England the royal family once explicitly owned all the land (perhaps still do, technically?) so comparing their creation of a democratic government to a property developer’s creation of a homeowner’s association really doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.
From that perspective, I suppose Thomas Jefferson and company stole the US from King George III, and you could perhaps argue that the homeowners association they set up should be replaced with one set up by Queen Elizabeth II. But given that the differences would be relatively minor – and certainly wouldn’t result in a libertarian system – I don’t think that’s relevant.
@onyomi: As I see it, the problem is that deciding what constitutes a double standard isn’t as simple or obvious as you are making it out to be.
If you and a group of your friends collect money from someone living on a property you own, I assume you would think that’s OK. But then why isn’t it OK for the government to collect money on our behalf from someone living on the land we all own? Yes, I’m using the word “own” in two different ways – but *in my opinion* the difference isn’t relevant to the ethical question.
I think the whole thing boils down to how you define and assign ownership. The libertarian definitions I’ve seen don’t make sense to me. My definitions do.
Harry, feudal land tenure ended in England in 1660. And in Scotland in 2000. I do not think that the Crown claims any kind of “ownership” over modern fee simple land, just sovereignty, whatever that means.
It’s extremely relevant to the ethical question; it very nearly is the ethical question. The reasons why, however, are complicated and want some background.
Models of land ownership (“tenure”) have historically differed substantially from models of personal property, and were usually more restrictive; many social classes, for example, have been barred from owning real property at various points. Western systems of tenure ultimately descend from feudal models; nation-states now hold ultimate title in place of feudal monarchs, and subinfeudation is greatly limited, but grants of tenure rights function similarly aside from some refinements and minor formal differences.
This, particularly since the transition from feudalism, brings up issues of legitimacy of land claims that are closely tied to those of sovereignty, and different ways of resolving them have different implications on tenure. Social contract theory is probably the most influential; under it, the government and therefore its land claims derive their authority from a sort of implicit corporate body made up of the people.
Libertarians and their relatives tend to be skeptical of social contract theory, but concepts of individual sovereignty do not lead straightforwardly to models of ownership in real property. There’s a great deal of variation in their proposed replacements, but a common thread is the Lockean concept that ownership rights to land derive ultimately from improvements to it.
@Nornagest, whether the difference is relevant depends on your beliefs about property, though you are of course right in classifying that as an ethical question in its own right. (Just not the one I was directly addressing.)
I’m not up with the theory, so thanks for filling in the blanks. Social contract theory sounds very much like what I’ve been struggling to explain. The Lockean thing matches up with my understanding of libertarian belief, and I think it’s silly. I can’t accept “bagsies” as an ethically sound philosophy of ownership.
It’s not quite “bagsies” (which, by the way, isn’t in my dialect; Urban Dictionary informs me it’s roughly equivalent to “yoink”?). Locke put a number of caveats around the basic concept, the most important being that you’re entitled to land only in proportion to your effective use of its resources; you could not for example build a little lodge on Clouds Rest and declare yourself sovereign over Yosemite Valley on the grounds that you’re making use of the view. Later thinkers have approached the concept in different ways, but they generally share some sophistication.
It’s definitely a thorny problem — but IMO it doesn’t get much less thorny if you cede sovereignty to the Ghost of Christmas Past.
According to Wikipedia, the US equivalent is “dibs”. 🙂
I can’t see it as a particularly thorny problem, at least not in principle. To me, it is obvious that the Earth properly belongs to humanity as a whole, so the question of how we divide the rights up isn’t so much a problem in ethics as a problem in consensus building.
There are tricky issues around national borders, which I personally skirt around by asserting necessity and by hoping that eventually we can get rid of the damn things.
The trouble with declaring intuitive ethical axioms obvious and going from there is that they usually turn out to have horrifying non-obvious consequences. But I’ll leave it to the real libertarians to give their opinions of what those are in this case.
(It might also be worth mentioning that the “common heritage of humanity” thing is reconcilable with Locke’s “mixing of labor” thing; Georgism and its relatives accept both.)
What does this even mean, though? How’s this framing useful? You can grant this and still have exactly all of the practical problems of people wanting different uses for the same resources. We’ll still need rules to say who gets to decide what to do with each resource, backed by voluntary agreements and/or naked strength. Maybe we’ll call this “schmownership” and argue about the ethics of various ways of allocating it. I don’t see how the “belongs to humanity” idea buys us anything.
I also don’t see what’s special about these rights in this sense. It looks like this sentence could be the start of a long discussion about any ethical question.
@Caue: I’m not sure in what way the meaning is unclear. Sorry to harp on with the same old analogy, but if you understand collective ownership of a business I don’t see what the conceptual problem with collective ownership of the Earth is.
One thing it buys us – or buys me, at any rate – is the right to form a democratic government, and to implement taxation. In other words, it distinguishes taxation from theft, and for my part that’s all I needed to justify the mental effort involved in thinking about it.
(We could alternatively justify democracy and taxation on purely utilitarian grounds, if I’m using the word rightly: that is, they are necessary, so we’re going to do them whether they are ethical or not. But I find it helpful to be able to acknowledge that they *are* in fact ethical.)
What you’re describing doesn’t have a standard name that I’m aware of, although you could describe it in terms of pragmatism or amoralism. Utilitarianism is rather different: it states, first, that for everyone it’s possible to quantify their quality of life (usually in some simple way, like maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering); and second, that actions are preferable to the extent to which they improve everyone’s quality of life. In different versions of utilitarianism this can be either in sum, or on average, or in some other way, but a common thread is that everyone counts equally.
In line with what I alluded to above, this train of thought turns out to have surprisingly horrifying consequences when you start looking at edge cases. Though for any such case you find, you can usually find someone that disputes its validity.
The most important part of collective ownership of a building is saying who owns the building and who doesn’t, who are the people who get to decide what to do with the building, and who’s the rest of humanity, who don’t.
My impression is that you’re arguing for some kind of epiphenomenal ownership, distinct from the “bundle of rights” that constitute it. Ok, let’s say all of humanity “owns” this apple, but only I can choose to eat it, discard it, gift it, sell it, burn it, lend it, or do whatever I feel like with it. Sure, you can dispute my exclusive right to these things, but how is this not disputing my ownership? How is a world “owned by humanity” different from one that isn’t?
@Caue: I suppose I’m talking about the “right to determine how to assign the other rights, and subject to what conditions”.
If a particular plot of land is to be used (in a capitalist system) the usage rights first need to be assigned. Someone needs to decide how to make that assignment, and what conditions to place on it: should usage rights be auctioned off? If so, what happens to the money? Should mineral rights be reserved? Airspace? A cut of the profits?
By asserting that the Earth “belongs to everyone” I’m simply saying that those decisions can only ethically be made by consensus.
Moving on to after the initial sale:
A capitalist non-libertarian government that has sold off the bare usage rights for a plot of land would usually only have done so subject to conditions that ensure they retain what I’ve been calling sovereignty: the purchaser still has to pay taxes, follow zoning, environmental, and other regulations meant to protect your neighbours (such regulations subject to change) and so on and so forth. Usually you can even be required to sell the land back to the government if they want it, at a price set by the courts.
Under those conditions, it seems to me that the government “owns” the land in a more fundamental way than the landowner does. The landowner does not have nearly the freedom of action in regards to his property that is typical of someone who owns, to use your example, an apple.
Property can only ever be a means to an ethical end – the fundamental ethical principle is that we should treat others with kindness (or some variation of this) – the ethical way for people to interact with inanimate objects is determined by how people *feel* about those objects – not some fundamental property of the object itself.
Property and government are simply a means of getting the best possible compromise between these different feelings.
” I do not think that the Crown claims any kind of “ownership” over modern fee simple land, just sovereignty, whatever that means.”
It means the same thing as it means in America. The government gets to exclusively control the land and can unilaterally overrule the wishes of the “owner,” but has zero responsibility for the upkeep and consequences of how the land is used (i.e., the government can declare that land you own is a protected wetland, and that means that YOU have to take costly and expensive steps x, y, z to preserve it, because after all, you’re the owner, not them!)
Why?
I strongly object to the comparison of Gamergate to groups like ShitRedditSays and FreeThoughtBlogs.
In part because I’m biased towards the former, but also because I’ve seen a good faith effort from many of Gamergate’s leading figures (and the rank and file) to stem any actions of harassment done in its name or towards its enemies, such as forming an anti-harassment patrol on twitter, banning people who leak personal information, and flooding the /gamergate/ board to push said information off the front page when the moderators of said board were asleep.
This sentiment isn’t universal – I know there are people supportive of Gamergate contributing to Encyclopedia Dramatica articles, I know Ethan Ralph and Milo Yiannopoulos have published some nasty hit pieces and still receive support within the GG community, although even they get fewer links than they used to because of that. And I know it doesn’t take many people to cause damage.
But I’ve seen a lot more sincere efforts from within our ranks to condemn and stop death threats, doxxing, and harassment in the name of Gamergate, and if I saw similar efforts from SJWs to stem their dangerous fringe I wouldn’t have a fraction of the antipathy towards them I do now.
As a person at ground-zero during the precipitating events of GamerGate, the threads I was in all seemed to have very anti-harassment sentiments. Usually in all-caps, in the first post. With anyone suggesting harassment getting shouted down as an idiot and/or a saboteur.
As a person who doesn’t play video games and paid absolutely no attention whatsoever to any of this, it still seems like an issue practically begging to get hijacked by trolls, and disingenuous at best for any opposing faction to draw conclusions about a broad group of people based on it.
I’m not particularly central to the Fempire, and I don’t comment there very often (when I do, it ranges from distant to outright critical), but I remember people (mainly CotRA) being pretty decent about it in SRSGaming; I remember being upvoted for what I thought was a pretty decent summary of what was going on in ShitRedditSays itself.
Of course, you can also see one of the protagonists getting hugboxed on GamerGhazi, which sets my teeth on edge. theunitofcaring has written up her position on all this, and it’s pretty much mine.) Telling someone who’s done something awful that they’re SJ Jesus and don’t need to change a damned thing isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous.
In conclusion, avoiding a David Brooksian “well, Both Sides mnurr mnurr” may be impossible here.
It may, but I still think it’s important to highlight the efforts groups and leaders do to stem (or not stem) harassment. Then again I’m not sure how to turn arguments over harassment into both sides actually increasing their efforts to stem harassment in the hopes of winning them.
That is pretty decent, yes (I guess it was also written before the party lines solidified, as it’s now sitting at -4).
If you allow me to try to improve it… Second paragraph: 1) “for some reason” is actually a few reasons, but in this case mostly from her previous interaction with chan culture 2) spacetime still linear, don’t worry: what happened was a little game of telephone, starting here, and ending not as far as the other side made it look like.
Oh, that’s their ironic custom CSS; if you turn it off, it’s positive.
Thanks for the context!
Oh. I don’t know about SRS (as demonstrated), but that seems like good news.
/u/CoTRA was exiled forever for that exact thing, though, and then a mod made a cute little speech about how empathy and tolerance are better than judgment. (And therefore, everyone should hugbox poor little Quinn.)
Wait, seriously? Where? God damn it. Link me. I’m going to go read this speech of which you speak, then go look at pictures of power plant construction and rocket launches until I calm down.
I too would like a link to this.
I think you’re omitting something really, really, really, really important to why people latched onto the Zoe Quinn thing.
It’s not about cheating, and it’s not about hating women. (Almost nobody hates women. 4chan believes making any human being upset is a worthwhile goal into itself, feminists have made it crystal clear how to make them very upset, so 4chan keeps doing that thing to make them upset. 4chan is too nihilistic to have an opinion on women or on men. They treat everyone exactly the same, as potential lulz-dispensers.)
People started posting about it because haha drama, the standard internet mess. It blew up when people on multiple discussion sites were actively censored from talking about it, and game journalists started posting very similar articles about how terrible and awful gamers were and how much they hate women. This smelled of conspiracy. And it was. It was a conspiracy. These game journalists were all on the GameJournoPros mailing list, talking to each other, and when the story about Zoe’s abuse broke, they actively came togetehr and said “This is bad, how shoulde we protect Zoe?” and then they did that. When a story about Zoe Quinn being a horrible abuser came out, because Zoe was their friend or generally in their tribe, they immediately said “We have to stop this and attack the people who bring it up. How can we most effectively suppress this story?”
That’s kind of an enormous fucking deal.
The most widespread version of the story being censored was not “ZQ is abusive”, it was “sex for reviews” which was both more lurid and false. I would imagine most of the GJP folks were unaware of the underlying story, just that nasty false rumors were being spread about a cherished member of the indie game community. It’s much easier to justify those kinds of actions if you think you have the truth on your side.
Yes, exactly. I read a lot of discussion of the story, and only at Ozy’s place was ZQ’s abuse getting serious discussion. Otherwise, sex for reviews is what both sides were talking about early on (which made me sympathetic with ZQ’s side, since those stories pretty obviously were false, until I did finally hear the abuse stories), and then later on all either side would talk about is how awful the other side was being.
The abuse angle was first picked up for real by a few people on the SJ world, I believe. The thing with that is most people would look at it and be against Gjoni for “washing dirty laundry in public” (it’s not hard to find people inside GG who used to dislike Gjoni for that reason, and a lot of the opposition refuses to read his post). “Call-out culture” is not something people are familiar with.
[ETA after FacelessCraven’s post below: I mean “abuse” here in the richer, “technical” SJ usage of the word. People were generally mad at how she treated Gjoni from the start, yes]
The “sex for reviews” thing began very early, when people noticed that one of the guys was a journalist who had promoted her game and featured her prominently in a story before. After a few steps of a game of telephone and a few careless assumptions this became “sex for reviews”. Still, there was enough meat in there that I don’t think “false” is a good description.
(as I briefly mentioned to grendelkhan above, what most people don’t know is that at first 4chan was like “why should I care about th- waitaminute is this the person from that wizardchan thing?”, which is what initially caught their interest)
BBA and Protagoras are right about the perception that drove people to initially censor discussion, but DrBeat is right about what turned garden-variety internet drama into a big deal.
@BBA – “The most widespread version of the story being censored was not “ZQ is abusive”, it was “sex for reviews”…”
I heard about the story within two or three days of the start, and the abuse angle is what I heard first and loudest. Attention shifted toward the nepotism angle as people started digging into the story looking for more dirt. The response seemed to be to treat the “sex for coverage” allegations as outrageous, and then use that outrage to reject the abuse allegations outright as the machinations of a jilted ex. That set the narrative, and from that point on it didn’t actually matter what GG did or said; misogynistic campaign to drive women out of video games, etc, etc. It seemed very neatly done.
The Nepotism story didn’t seem obviously false to me, at least to the degree that Quinn thanked Grayson in a personal message in the game’s acknowledgements, he made her game the centerpiece of an article about 50-some Indy games, and their relationship was cozy enough that they were romantically involved within a day or two of that article being posted. Also, the widespread instances of similar special-coverage-for-friends-without-disclosure that have come out since, and of course the GameJournoPros plans to protect Quinn in an organized fashion. It doesn’t have to be a quid-pro-quo to be objectionable.
But hey, at least an abuser got to publicly destroy her victim for daring to call her out, got lauded as a hero for it by her entire community and a good chunk of the real-world media, and now enjoys four figures a month in donations as reward for her actions.
“Sex for reviews” was more lurid and false, though similar statements were not false and were being conflated together with “sex for reviews” and dismissed on those grounds.
But no matter what the story or its interpretation, it was being censored, by an actual, literal and not figurative conspiracy to censor things that made Zoe Quinn look bad. When someone says “Holy fuck, Zoe Quinn slept with a guy to get positive reviews” and the response of the actual literal conspiracy is to censor that person and accuse them of being a horrible person who hates women and should never be listened to, what conclusion do you expect people to draw? That behavior is utterly identical to the behavior of a conspiracy that is trying to cover up an actual sex-for-reviews scandal.
And considering all of this started with “The Zoe Post”, a long and exhaustive account of Zoe’s abuse… no, no they were not unaware of the underlying story. They ignored it. This is why SJ spaces are fucking paradise for abusers.
Big difference between the chance of being shot by police while black and the chance of being 9-11ed (apart from former being 10x bigger): US society agrees that 9/11 was bad and spends vast amounts of money to stop it, whereas it seems like a lot of US society tends to blame victims of wrongful police killings even in blatant cases.
Also, while police killings may be relatively rare, the racist attitudes which cause them also result in a very common experience of police harassment, fines for dubious charges etc. all of which is probably a bit more upsetting than someone criticising you on the Internet.
There was an awful lot of post-9/11 victim blaming as well. And “why do they hate us?” navel gazing. And protests against spending money on the response (war). And just as outspoken patriots wrote off / memory-holed inconvenient facts about 9/11 (e.g. a lot of the Taliban used to be US supplied mujahadeen), a lot of outspoken anti-racists try write off / memory-hole evidence that the victims might actually be blameworthy (e.g. video of Michael Brown robbing a store, forensic evidence that favors the cops story, etc.)
It’s all toxoplasma.
I doubt there are enough Americans willing to defend unjustified police killings to fill a Legion hall. That’s kind of what “unjustified” means. Only those at the farthest extremes of right-authoritarianism would even attempt to make a case for the death of innocents. (In fact — and I’m not making any claims about the nature of mainstream liberalism or conservatism — it’s easier to find such people on the far left.)
Most of the recent high-profile killings of young black men have had actually controversial elements: discrepancies in witness accounts, etc. That was one of Scott’s points re: toxoplasma of rage.
They don’t put it that way. They merely believe that all police killings are justified no matter how much rationalization they have to do to provide a “justification” in any particular case. (e.g. “if he didn’t want to get dogpiled by cops, he shouldn’t have been illegally selling single cigarettes)
That’s exactly my point: they attempt to justify the killing, rather than shrugging their shoulders and writing it off as an inevitable cost of police authority or whatever. Of course, people disagree as to what constitutes a justification. There are cases even more clearly unjust than Garner’s, but they don’t make the news — precisely because no one is willing to justify them!
There is one and only one person in my Facebook feed that never fails to defend the cop every single time a cop kills someone, and tries her damndest to signal boost every single story of a cop getting hurt or killed or worrying about getting hurt or killed, and I couldn’t tell you if she’s left, right, or doesn’t give a fuck. It’s the only politically charged thing she ever posts about. I doubt she’s a racist. She was originally an illegal South American immigrant who only recently became a citizen. She just reflexively defends cops because she’s a police dispatcher and they’re part of her tribe. Not all tribes are defined by common ideology.
As is too common, some things that everybody “knows” don’t rest on especially solid evidence (I worry that questioning them is on the borders of the Overton Window).
Scott made a heroic effort trying to get a better picture of this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
The pizzeria is being punished for expressing their views, and so is Moldbug – if a bunch of conservatives got together and shut down a pizzeria that only wanted to serve gay people, that’d be objectionable too, regardless of who currently holds social power or is likely to gain it. It’s scary that people are being punished for their views regardless of whether it’s done by rightists or leftists, because if either group attains hegemonic dominance, the rest will have to keep quiet, and even people whose views are currently considered acceptable by the group that would become dominant would have to be careful.
Also relevant is the fact that free speech/open discourse is, except among a few cultural libertarians who like it for its own sake, popular primarily among the faction that sees itself as losing power or being out of power altogether. If they manage to secure free speech, then someday they may be able to come back, and for now at least they’ll be able to perpetuate themselves. A dominant or soon-to-be dominant group dislikes freedom of expression for the same reasons. So when you see someone being anti-discourse, they probably see themselves as close to power and so it’s more reasonable to be afraid of them.
Simple test:
Am I ok with the Hollywood blacklist?
I am not. I think it should be LEGAL, just as I think marching down the street in swastikas and peaked white caps should be legal. I’m very much Not Ok with it.
Am I ok with bake sales where they sell things at different prices to men and women?
Well, again- I think it’s silly, but sure, whatev’s. Do your dirt, paco.
Am I opposed to what the tech conference did? Yes. I think it should be legal, but it’s wrong.
Do I care about the bakery? I think it’s silly, but sure, whatev’s. Do your dirt, paco.
My emotional response, without reference to actual impacts, is identical.
If I’m not mistaken the Hollywood blacklist was meant to head off harassment and intrusion from the McCarthyist government. Far from being illegal, it was practically required.
So, tell us Scott – did you not check your sources or did you deliberately lie about what Gallo said?
Here’s your “quote”
Two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are unrepentantly racist, sexist and homophobic.
Here’s what Gallo ACTUALLY said (emphasis added):
There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies RESPECTIVELY, that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are unrepentantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic. A noisy few but they’ve been able to gather some Gamergate folks around them and elect a slate of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year’s Hugo ballot.
Strange how you seem to have dropped out the middle clause, which separates out the SPs from the RPs, and refers only to the latter – toadies of a certain anti-semitic preaching fascism – as “neo-nazis”.
Would you care to explain?
So in context the Sads are extreme right-wing, and the Rabids are neo-nazis, and they’re both racist, misogynistic, and homophobic? I’m not seeing how this differs from Scott’s take enough to justify a callout.
It’s worth noting that Scott specifically addressed the claim as it pertained to Torgerson, saying that Torgerson is not a neo-nazi because he’s married to a black woman.
Torgerson is a sad puppy. Torgerson was not called a neo-nazi. If Scott wants to make the parallel argument wrt to the rabid puppies, he needs to make the argument about Theodore Beale/Vox Day.
In fact, conflating the different criticism levelled at the two groups is terrible form. The sad puppies are more moderate, and were described as such (as right wing rather than neo-nazis). Conflating the two allows Scott to paint the criticism as indiscriminate, when in fact it was fairly precise.
I’m not really convinced. It’s true that Torgerson wasn’t explicitly called a neo-Nazi by my reading, but on the other hand if I went out and said that Alice and Bob hate Jews and Commies and love little toothbrush moustaches and want to invade Poland, and also that Bob is literally Hitler, it’s not too much of a stretch to conclude that some of the eau de Hitler is meant to rub off on Alice too.
Nothing in the quote provided is about anything specific to neo-nazis, other than the one explicit reference to neo-nazis. The right wing encompasses more than Nazism, neo or otherwise.
Brad was included in the “unrepentant racist [etc.]” bit, though .
Also, you are eliding relevant bits of the quote there. Sad puppies are “extreme right wing.” What is extreme right wing, if no nazi (at least in progressive categorization)? And in what ways are Torgerson et al right wing, let alone extreme?
And as mentioned elsewhere, the “to” in between “right-wing” and “neo-nazi” adds enough ambiguity to assume they are smeared as “at least extreme right wing, if not worse.”
I don’t think this is remotely reasonable. You don’t get to presume that they really meant [horribly mean insult] when they said [moderate insult]* after they’ve gone out of their way to almost explicitly separate the two.
*I am presuming “extremely right wing” is meant to be an insult.
The Sad Puppies were not described as “right-wing” (hell, I’m right-wing) but as “extreme right-wing” and included in the characterisation as “unrepentantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic”, accused of scrounging up GamerGate support (and I’ve deliberately avoided learning anything about that mess, so I literally know nothing more than the name, not even who’s involved, what it’s about or anything at all) and picking “bad to reprehensible” works for the Hugos.
Suppose I were to describe the previous Hugo nominees, awards committee, voters, etc. as ranging from “extreme left-wing to Pol-Pot apologists”*, would anyone be so careful to parse out “Oh, she didn’t call all of them genocide-dreamers, you shouldn’t be so prickly and looking for insult where none was intended!”
*PLEASE NOTE – NOT MY REAL OPINION. I may think the sample of recent Hugo winners/nominees I read was god-awful crap writing, but I do not attribute any political views good, bad or indifferent to the authors. I may think the writing is bad, but I wouldn’t call it reprehensible (unless we’re going to talk about crimes against language and/or writing, a different kettle of fish: for instance, I think Charlie Jane Anders’ story, the one so admired by Mr Sandifer, would have greatly benefitted by being edited with a chainsaw).
Jacob, do you really, sincerely believe this sort of logic-chopping is meaningful? Do you think Gallo was doing anything other than just heaping random abuse on people she hates without putting too much thought into it — that she was instead calibrating her adjectives and dependent clauses with micrometer precision as she dashed off a three-sentence Facebook reply? And if she was, why does that entitle her to more consideration from the people she was abusing, as opposed to less? Being insulted carelessly by someone who’s angry, snarky, and uninterested in the facts feels far less serious than being insulted with great forethought and planning, after all.
Would you care to explain?
Oh, that’s easy. “Scott Alexander” (not his real name, obviously) is a stooge in the pay of the Koch Brothers (that’s the correct reference for Scary Right-Wing Billionaires Funding Secret Causes, yes?) who is deliberately twisting the narrative so that the martyred heroine Irene Gallo, who did naught but speak truth to power, will be tarred with the brush of calling two sets of people neo-nazis instead of only calling one set of people neo-nazis and the others merely extreme right wingers (fascists? not quite fascists? not quite up to the big leagues of neo-Nazism yet? old fashioned Nazis, not the neo ones? who knows?)
Oh, the horror!
Sacred Heart of Jesus, can we please at least on here skip the conspiracy “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” crap? I went on Tumblr for my usual fandom fix and got hit with a scare story about anti-Semitism in Brazilian schools which – given that the very blurry image of a letter produced as evidence of this was in untranslated Portuguese – I have no fucking clue as to what it’s about or if it is so.
Do I really need to wade through the same “Have you stopped beating your wife?” questions on here, as well?
EDIT: It may or may not amuse you to know that my lower-case “Nazi” was auto-corrected to “initial capital Nazi”. Obviously yet more nefarious interference by right-wing forces to push their point of view and hypnotise us all into thinking there’s no difference between small ‘n’ nazis and capital ‘N’ Nazis, so that we’ll think Ms Gallo was calling people neo-Nazis when she was only calling them neo-nazis.
The phrasing “right-wing to neo-nazi” is a singular adjective, it is saying that the noun stretches from the category right-wing into the category neo-nazi.
The word “respectively” later on implies the opposite.
I have no idea what was intended; I doubt that rant was written with care to grammatical precision. Maybe she intended to call the Sad Puppies neo-nazi’s. Maybe she didn’t. There is literally no way to know.
However she did unambiguously call both groups of puppies “They are unrepentantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic”.
I think that’s more than enough to qualify for Scott’s point; or to justify the Sad Puppies being uncomfortable.
“Strange how you seem to have dropped out the middle clause, which separates out the SPs from the RPs, and refers only to the latter – toadies of a certain anti-semitic preaching fascism – as “neo-nazis”.”
And refers to the former as “extreme right-wing” as well as “unrepentantly racist, sexist and homophobic.” Do you really, seriously think that sort of logic-chopping makes any difference?
“Would you care to explain?”
I’m sorry, but who appointed you commissar again? You don’t have any authority to demand anything from anyone.
I can’t help but think that at least some of the symmetry is broken by drawing a parallel to the Lucas Critique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique
Specifically, there’s a difference between the policy we had in the past (or have now) and proposing a policy for the future. Yes, the one guy who was considered the rapist after being raped while blacked out might be the only example, under current policy. And there might be very few false accusations of rape made by women against men, under current policy. But it is as absurd to dismiss any change in policy based on data under another policy as it is to say we can stop guarding Fort Knox because it has never been robbed. We oppose proposed policies in which rape is judged at a “preponderance of evidence” standard in part because we expect the number of false accusations to go up under such a policy. We oppose ousting anyone from academia because of “hatred” or charges of racism because the terms are nebulous and vague, because they make it easier to exclude certain political views, because difference of opinion is good and necessary, etc. and so we expect it to increase if not stopped now. First they came etc.
This point seems similar to a point you made here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/27/why-i-am-not-rene-descartes/
You sort of touched on this when you mentioned that we are moving in the direction of the pizzeria being left behind by history but conservatives being thrown out of conferences, but didn’t seem to quite get there.
Also, I think there’s an object level difference between Academia or other areas which are almost wholly focused on ideas, and areas that are not. It is exceedingly important that schools, technology or professional conferences, writing organizations, etc. support free speech internally. A conservative being thrown out of a technology conference is scarier than a pizzeria not wanting to cater a gay wedding because academic-related fields rely completely on the free flow of ideas while a pizzeria does not. I think private organizations should be allowed to do what they want, legally, and I also think they should be inclusive and tolerant, but the latter is more important for some organizations than for others.
edited–for clarity
+
My version was shorter, yours is better.
So people can’t live in peace together. What else is new?
Godspeed Clippy.
Pingback: 1 – Fearful Symmetry | Offer Your
Pingback: 1 – Fearful Symmetry | Exploding Ads
Hi Scott: long time reader, first – er, maybe third – time poster. Love the blog.
I was re-reading your anti-Reactionary FAQ today instead of working, and I came across this bit on SJWs:
(Sorry for the lengthy quote)
You wrote this back in October 2013. I THINK I’ve noticed your concern about the Social Justice movement ratcheting up since that time (mine has too). This article I’m posting to, for example, seems much more concerned about the issue than this FAQ. Does that sound right? Do you think you underestimated the public’s interest in pc-ness when you wrote this FAQ?
I think he underestimated the extent to which his bubble and their bubble overlaps.
He says here that he is less concerned than 5 years ago.
He admitted that a lot of his fears regarding this topic are less than rational; he has previously said that SJ topics can be triggering for him. Presumably when he wrote that FAQ he as in a more detached headspace because of the format. I expect his treatment of the topic to vary in its tenor based on how much it is emotionally affecting him at the time. That’s not meant to be insulting–everyone has things they struggle to be objective about. At least Scott is self-aware enough that he can self-correct some of the time.
I think I get reverse PTSD and end up with whatever the opposite of triggering is. I remember a few years ago I was in a group OkCupid chat and a girl who wouldn’t give her name to anyone so I used information from her photos to find who she was and told her (but didn’t tell anyone else or publicly out her or anything). I went to sleep and then woke up the next morning to find a long-ass ranting thread outing me and I had people from all over the place piling on as if I was some paragon of white male privilege female bullying hell-bent on tracking her down and raping her and I deserved to be shunned from the community. It was a few days of hell, but then I turned off the computer, looked around, realized I still had a pretty nice house, good job, quiet safe neighborhood, and here we are years later and most of those people are still my friends, admit they were stupid, and she disappeared into obscurity.
I mean, I guess Internet lynching gets worse than that, but has anyone asked Scott Aaronson how he’s doing? I follow his blog and he seems fine. Sure, we have a list of like 40 people from the last 15 years in a world of 7 billion who were fired for being insufficiently PC and the list still includes guys like Sterling whose consequence was he had to sell the Clippers and earn a $2 billion profit. Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton seem to have done all right. Kobe Bryant is fine these days. Jameis Winston was still drafted #1 overall.
If this is witch hunts and lynching, I don’t know, it somehow lacks the same punch it used to have when that meant getting burned alive or strung up to a tree while your scrotum was sliced off with a razor blade.
From my view, you are absolutely correct, but you fail to look ahead. The lynchings come once they’ve been successful long enough without pushback. It’s all fun and games until they find someone less incompetent than Floyd Corkins.
What I see is a society that used to have real witch hunts and lynchings, that now mostly has panelists and Internet commenters yelling at each other, and I see a progression away from physical violence toward increasingly symbolic violence, not a slippery slope back to literal death camps. I’m definitely not failing to look ahead. I just don’t see what you do.
And I look back and see that no society, ever, has progressed past violence. In fact, these things tend to be cyclical. The rich, prosperous societies lose their abilities for violence until more violent others can overpower them and set civilization back several thousand years. Or some internal division finally sparks the civil war, and everyone degenerates into anarchy and madness. I know it’s a cliche, I call it Argumentum Ad Attilla, but I haven’t seen the exception to the rule yet. Maybe we’ll be lucky!
I’m not so sure about this. Facebook’s facial recognition software has a huge built-in advantage in that it usually only has to look within the social network of the person who uploaded the picture to find anyone in the photograph. I seriously doubt that you could expand the searchable pool to “everyone in the world” or even just “everyone in a mid-size city” without ending up with a huge amount of false positives no matter how good the algorithms got.
Especially given that even humans, who have the best human facial recognition software in the world as a product of millions of years of evolution, regularly mistake strangers for acquaintances or vice verse, and tend to rely on the same sort of social context cues to help identify people. There’s a story about a reporter who met with Marilyn Monroe for an interview at a cocktail lounge, and noticed that no one else in the room was reacting to her presence. When he pointed this out to Marilyn, she asked “do you want to see her?” subtly changed the way she moved and talked, and suddenly everyone started to recognize her.
This read like a David Brooks both-sides false equivalence thing, and I got my hackles up expecting this to be a hit piece on the left. (Which I enjoy!) Then it wound up being way, way more even-handed, and the central point–maybe now that we all know how much it sucks to be dehumanized, we can all be more decent to each other–was a very kind and interesting one. I conclude that I am really poorly calibrated about this sort of thing, and very much needed to read this post.
I’m struck by this response, as it seems like one of the few on the “red-tribe” (or maybe just anti-SJ) side that draws this conclusion. It seems like most people on the blue-tribe side who are commenting on the general tone like it, and those who are more on the other side don’t like the conclusion or the tone.
Frankly, I’m a little bit surprised and more saddened that this is the reaction. Although maybe I am mis-reading it.
I still think Rodney King’s one sentence “can’t we all just get along” is one of the most humane and humanizing statements ever made. Scott’s post seem like an exhaustive inquiry to why this is a good advice in general.
I think I was vague enough that you might not be able to tell where my sympathies usually lie, and likewise, I can’t quite tell which tribe you’re usually in. Either this is a good sign, or a sign that we’ve gone a bit too meta.
If I’m reading you right, you’re saying that you’re sad that comments like grendelkhan’s, coming from an ASJ viewpoint and agreeing with Scott’s post, are rarer than the ones coming from a SJ viewpoint and agreeing with Scott’s post.
In that case, I think (maybe optimistically) that this comes from the fact that while Scott’s article is about symmetry, it isn’t itself symmetrical, because Scott identifies himself as being on a side from the start. I would predict that an explicitly pro-social-justice blogger posting a big long thing saying, “Hey maybe my fears and the things anti-social-justice people fear aren’t so different after all, let’s hug it out”* would get lots of positive responses from the anti-social-justice readership, and perhaps fewer from the pro-social-justice readership.
In other words, I suspect that Fearful Symmetry reads to ASJ folks as a request from introspection, and to SJ folks as an olive branch, and the latter is generally more warmly received than the former.
*It pains me a little to reduce Scott’s essay to that but you know what I mean.
I saw that trend too, from which I concluded that the blue tribe probably is winning. It’s the lizard brains of the ascendant that approve the message that while they may be responsible for bad things, the other side is just as bad.
I detest rhetoric like this. I especially detest it here, as it is a clear example of what’s referred to here as the worst argument in the world.
I’d say the example isn’t that clear, as I’m not seeing it even after you pointed it out.
Scott,
You’re a thoughtful, reflective, and charitable person — like most of those who comment on this site, I appreciate those attributes and believe they improve both your writing and the site itself. Thanks for writing this.
There are two salient points which come to mind in response.
First, mutually assured destruction only works if both sides have access to weapons of mass destruction. Conservatives quite simply don’t have anywhere near the same level of influence in media and the arts as the left. Therefore, those on the left who subscribe to SJW and to the tactics mentioned in this post have no reason to fear retaliation from the right. The only challenge that they have is from others on the left who fight against SJW. Frankly, this challenge has been slow in coming and certainly cannot be brought about by conservatives doing much of anything.
Second, it strikes me that the typical model of social protest (where the oppressed class protests until its needs are met, only for protest movements to atrophy once that condition is met) is subverted by social justice types in a way that it is not for conservatives: whereas conservatives are by and large protesting for themselves (and can plausibly lose interest once their conditions are met), social justice warriors are by and large not part of the class on whose behalf they are protesting — meaning that even if their conditions are met, it is plausible that they will not recognize an improvement in conditions such that the movement dies down. Indeed, discussion regarding microaggressions appears to counter precisely such atrophying by ennobling social protest against minimal harms, such that these protests may continue indefinitely.
There is an asymmetry, and it is such that it doesn’t appear resolvable without an intra-leftist fight where the anti-SJW left is triumphant. As a non-leftist, I have no means by which to encourage this result (as far as I can tell), but until this occurs it appears to me that the best thing non-leftists can do is to support the victims of SJW zeal as best they can, and to continue to point out these events when they occur.
How do you measure the amount of influence that a particular side has ? I would argue that the conservatives are not exactly powerless, seeing as they have Fox News and talk radio and, I don’t know, Mel Gibson and stuff.
http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11
The right has Mel Gibson, which is why he can’t distribute films in America.
Uh, I think there might be a little more to that story there…
There is. Mel Gibson seems to have anger issues. He might also be somewhat antisemitic, which combined with the previous point makes it hard for him and Hollywood to coexist.
Just having conservative views is probably not enough, since RDJ (who’s a personal friend of Gibson) seems to be killing it at the box office, and the “he’s actually a bad person who deserves to be exiled” doesn’t seem to cut it either because people in Hollywood seem perfectly content to work with people who are actual criminals.
Regardless of why, it doesn’t do the right any good to have a “filmmaker” who can’t distribute films.
He was wildly popular until the Jew rant. That’s probably the closest there is short of literal treason thing that no one can get away with and hope to succeed in mainstream America, regardless of your other political leanings.
I’m not sure controlling Hollywood really goes a huge way toward shaping political discourse anyway. I’ve largely stopped watching films, but I’m looking at a top 10 grossing list for this year and it’s got Avengers 2, Furious 7, Jurassic Park 4 (5?), Cinderella (how many times has this been made now?), Home, Pitch Perfect 2, Fifty Shades of Grey, The SpongeBob Movie, Mad Max 4. If there’s a message at all, it’s we hate risk and we’re gonna sell you Furious 38 if the remaining actors can stay alive long enough.
Mainstream America doesn’t care about antisemitism, only the gatekeepers in Hollywood. You know what else doesn’t care about antisemitism? Israel, one of the only countries where his last movie opened.
The fact that Hollywood is overwhelmingly Blue might have something to do with the fact that it took them 11 years to start making War on Terror movies targeted towards the Red Tribe. Before Act of Valor, all major movies set during the War on Terror were thoughtful dramas targeted at Blue Tribe sensibilities like Green Zone and other movies that no one remembers because they all bombed. Making movies to appeal to the Red Tribe on this issue was an incredibly obvious money making opportunity, and the potential was demonstrated by things like the 24 TV series. But for some reason Hollywood kept setting all of its crowd pleasing action movies as far away from the WoT as possible, and Blue Tribe dominance seems to be the most logical explanation to me.
Of course, eventually Hollywood did make one of those movies, though it happened almost by accident (Act of Valor was made as a Navy Seal recruitment video but got a feature release after Bin Laden was killed by Navy Seals). And to absolutely no one’s surprise it was wildly successful. At that point, studio executives couldn’t ignore this market anymore so we got Lone Survivor, American Sniper, and surely a whole bunch more in production right now.
That’s the reason why domination of Hollywood doesn’t influence political discourse much: Hollywood’s ultimate loyalty is always to the people who buy movie tickets.
There’s also the fact that the SJ crowd is really hard to please, and I’ve long suspected that their activities may actually serve to disincentivise female and minority representation by creating the risk of a social media backlash if a female or minority character doesn’t exactly meet their standards. If Joss Whedon can’t reliably avoid the ire of SJWs, why should studio executives trust anyone else with the job of appealing to them?
@NN:
Well, they weren’t making movies explicitly about the war on terror for a while after 9/11, but the action-blockbusters of that era got a whole new slate of villains who mapped pretty nicely as thinly veiled allegories for Al Qaeda and similar groups. They didn’t need to make the movie about specific terrorists when they could show Jack Bauer and Bruce Willis punching more generic ones.
@Sylocat:
Do you have any specific examples to back up those claims? Because as far as I can tell, it seems more like the opposite happened. Hollywood had been using Middle Eastern terrorists as stock villains for decades (prominent examples include the “Libyan nationalists” in Back to the Future and Crimson Jihad in True Lies) but after 9/11 they seemed really reluctant to go there. Even when terrorist bad guys did show up, they would be anything but Arab or Muslim. Since you brought up Bruce Willis, the fourth Die Hard movie, released in 2007, has him fighting terrorists who are all English speaking Americans. The only exception I can think of is the first Iron Man movie, and even there the terrorists are a pretty minor part of the plot.
I treat 24 as separate from the above discussion because TV and movies are different industries. But it is worth noting that 24 also sort of happened by accident. The entire first season was filmed before 9/11, and the first episode aired November 6, 2001 after being delayed a month and given some last minute edits. When the story of an all-American hero fighting terrorists turned out to be a big hit, the producers ran with it, and the rest is history.
The audience resonance earned by pitching Tony Stark as SCIENCE MAN: TERROR PUNCHER is precisely why such a relative unknown was able to succeed. Pre-release, everyone was pretty much expecting Iron Man to be a bit of filler between Batman and James Bond films, instead it was relevant.
I came in late to the whole Sad Puppies thing, surprising because I used to follow the Hugos with interest. While I found Gallo’s explanation nasty description pretty obnoxious, I was actually more interested in her original comment. Regarding TOR publishing a book called The Geek Feminist Revolution, she said
Making Sad Puppies sadder…Proud to have a tiny part in this.
As far as I’ve seen, nobody in Sad Puppies has ever even hinted that a publisher should not publish whatever it damn well pleases. The issue was whether the Hugos were getting turned into one faction’s personal fiefdom.
As with the pizza parlor, there are lots of publishers out there (and to be honest I don’t tend to notice who publishes the books I read). There is only one Hugo.
There is only one Hugo.
And having written that I am reminded of the reason why faculty infighting is so vicious: there is so little at stake.
Also, I really did vow not to comment without first re-reading the title of the original post, which I sometimes forget after reading the nine hundredth comment. My apologies.
Consider a few possible states of the world:
(a) Red Team is the overdog, brutally suppressing Blue Team
(b) Blue Team is the overdog, brutally suppressing Red Team
(c) Both are brutally suppressing each other *in areas where they can*, like Crips versus Bloods
(I think c is closer to correct, but that’s not my point here.)
The epistemic problem is that the rhetoric both sides employ looks much the same in all three cases. It seems like people just flip between overdog and underdog rhetoric whenever they sense that one is more effective. So there is not much to be learned from the Fearful Symmetry you noticed through your admirably even-handed reflection. One expects rhetorical symmetry in all 3 cases (or is that just hindsight?), so it doesn’t distinguish between possible worlds.
Regarding comparison of terrorism (and then politically motivated purges) with things like pedestrian-car collisions and falling off of ladders: I think this is a bad comparison for a few reasons, mainly this one:
Deaths of pedestrians have well-understood causes and a fairly bounded distribution, holding tech constant at least. I predict fairly confidently that ped deaths in Idaho will be close to the same in 2015 as in 2014.
But consider for a second that it’s not the end of history yet, and then look at the *tails* of the terrorism/political purge distribution!
Also, the cost of purges, even small ones, is not measured only in the lives of people actually purged, but in the buildup of a rather large preference falsification equilibrium. I.e., discourse suffers, with all the unknowable harms that entails.
In 2002, the popular Dutch politician and professor in sociology Pim Fortuyn was assassinated. Prior to this event, most of the left on TV and in the newspapers had demonized him and called him a neo-nazi (dubious because he was openly homosexual) and even “an extremely unworthy human-being” in a debate on TV. The killer has Asperger’s syndrome, so he probably took it all literally or something.
I know this is nit-picking, but the original nazis had a large homosexual contingent. That’s what the “Night of the Long Knives” was, Hitler purged his movement of all internal challenges to his power, which incidentally included most of the gays in his Brownshirts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_R%C3%B6hm
In addition to the lizard brain telling me not to trust social justice because I’m one of the “white dudes” they rail against, I have another mental narrative, let me call it my “inner Shammai”, telling me to shut up and take it. “You’re comfortable and privileged, and these anti-SJ narratives tell you that’s fine and not to worry. Too easy! Clearly you aren’t feeling miserable enough! Whenever you have a choice between the easy way and the hard way, always pick the hard way. Sure it hurts but that makes it morally superior.”
Now I remember from Hebrew school that Shammai is practically a strawman set up to be foiled by the obviously correct Hillel but for a while I thought there might be a point to it. My feelings are nothing compared to societal oppression, after all. And then I saw Aaronson get run through the wringer for voicing concerns I myself have once had (though not to the extent that he did) and I found myself being driven to the Hillel position – “If I am not for myself, who will be?”
Of course Hillel’s follow-up line is also valid – “If I am only for myself, what am I?” – so I’m not going to become reflexively anti-SJ quite yet.
And this is why I never say anything political using my real name on the Internet and my Facebook account is set so only friends can find it.
This is a very good post and (like many of your posts) directly on point for me. Just this past Saturday I was having dinner with a friend and we were talking about this. Neither of us are particularly conservative, I’m in the odd leftish libertarian (not in the anarchist sense) camp without a good name that Scott tried to write a manifesto for a while back and my friend is a pretty standard liberal technocrat. Both of us align much more closely to the modern Democratic party than the Republican party but we were talking about the Strangeloop incident (among others) and feeling deeply uneasy.
I haven’t read the other 850+ comments, I read about 200 so I don’t know if anyone else has pointed this out but if not, my theory on why this has been so effecting. The people I generally see getting most worried about this come from a vaguely left of center group, some more libertarian inclined but if you were to draw an classifier based on modern political cultures they’d be closer to the blues than the red. To be sure there are a lot of red tribe folks worried as well but they often seem less apocalyptic and more resigned about the direction.
My theory is that most of these grey-blues as I’ll call them started out as blue tribe members, in their blue bubble and political discussions were very much “safe spaces.” Yes there would be disagreements but everyone basically agreed that people within those bubbles were basically good, honest folks trying to make the world a better place. Overtime as we moved outside the area of acceptable blue tribe belief on some issues, whether due to personal belief shift, blue tribe belief shift or some combination of the two, we lost a safe space and we never really found another. Too many disagreements with hard libertarian spaces like Reason and some of the more technocratic spaces seem to have shifted as well, Vox being the prime example.
Communities like LW allowed grey-blues to carve out a space which is why social justice discussions get more heated than most others. We’ve found our new safe space, we don’t want to let it get taken over as well. Social justice is irrationally terrifying because it robbed us of a safe space and we’ve never really been able to find another. Compounding that we still exist in a blue bubble, we still see those posts shared around on facebook and without a political safe space to retreat to we feel very alone.
While I obviously identify with the story I just told, evidenced by my constant switching from 1st to 3rd person, I’m not defending the viewpoint. I’ve adopted the same safe space rhetoric as the very people I’m so worried about. I’m not sure how to solve it right now but hopefully looking at what causes this reaction can help us figure out how to handle it more logically.
This post, as good and insightful as it is, is simply going to bounce around in the echo chamber of this and other *like minded* blogs.
There’s another element of symmetry I’ve noticed. For a while now, the most frustrating aspect of ideological battle on the internet is the cowardliness of most participants. Everyone is content preaching to their own choir, spewing sermons of snark and vitriol about the bad guys to a friendly audience, always when the subject of ire “isn’t in the room” to defend themselves. Vicious screeds, insults, ad hominem and more are lobbed out into the digital either like gas grenades where they’re picked up by the opposition, huffed heavily and responded to in kind. This isn’t engagement, it’s a cheap hacking of conflict by conflict averse ninnies.
Isn’t it exceedingly rare for someone to actually confront their target directly, and leave themselves open for a direct rebuttal? Most people talk past each other, with the bulk of responses coming in the form of unsolicited trolling and abuse by anonymous proxies. It’s pathetic.
For all the talk about the need for “debate” or “conversation” over controversial subjects, there is virtually none to be had. More was illuminated when Jim Norton and Lindy West actually had to acknowledge the others’ presence on the now defunct Kamau Bell show, then if each of them had written 1000 blog posts for their home team. Sadly, those who are best equipped to be flag bearers are content avoiding the messiness of human conflict and remaining safely ensconced in echo chambers or otherwise behind the walls of their ideological fortress. This includes Scott.
The SJ perspective has far more representation in pop-culture online media (buzzfeed, gawker, huffpo, slate, atlantic, salon, etc) than any alternative view, almost to the point of ideological uniformity. Goes without saying that Academia is completely in thrall. There are some examples of left-liberals resisting the militant SJ narrative inhabiting these spaces, (Freddie Deboer, Laura Kipness, Emily Yoffee etc.) but they are supremely overpowered and routinely mocked or even attacked when accused of giving ammunition to ASJ.
The only way to stand up to such a broad cultural force is to bravely and vigorously challenge and confront it, in public, with *quality* argument. The “debate” and “conversation” of disingenuous appeal must be forced to take place so that representatives of each side can be held accountable for what they say. Accountability – quaint, right?
I want to see champions of any cause (SJ, reactionary, neolib, neocon, red, blue, grey, whatever) have the guts to hash it out with their human opponents, not an endless series of boogeymen, straw men and self-serving caricatures.
Lots of us have tried to argue with the SJ crowd in contested space. I certainly have (not under this pseudonym; sometimes under my real name). The result for me has been blocking, attempted intimidation to silence, calls for my exclusion from the various fora involved, and at least one attempt on my continued employment. On Twitter (a forum where I do not bother), it’s cliche to see someone on the SJ side post something outrageous to opponents, an opponent to respond, and *blocked*. Social Justice does not allow for opposition; if you respond impolitely you’re a harasser or a troll, if you respond politely you’re a devil’s advocate or a “sea lion”. The idea of someone who honestly disagrees but is not some sort of monster simply does not exist within the framework of Social Justice; one who disagrees is either ignorant and in need of education (which the SJW may refuse to provide under the tenet that it is not their job to educate you), a devil’s advocate who actually agrees and just needs to shut up, or evil and in need of suppression.
Sea lion? I don’t get it.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning
The sea lion cartoon which I don’t approve of for various reasons – although the sly part of me does wonder about suggesting that the cartoon could be interpreted as saying that the cartoonist things that e.g. polite gamergaters aren’t people.
The “contested space” you’re describing probably isn’t truly contested – you’re “behind enemy lines” and at the mercy of consequence-free unfair treatment. If your honest engagement is mocked and dismissed with a Sea Lion meme without any push-back, you may just be invading someone else’s echo chamber and can’t expect anything productive. Because of that context, honest inquiry or attempts at debate will be prejudiced with distrust:
“Sea-Lioning is an Internet slang term referring to intrusive attempts at engaging an unwilling debate opponent by feigning civility and incessantly requesting evidence to back up their claims.”
I’m talking about finding a genuine neutral playing field and challenging *willing* opponents to meet you there on mutually agreed upon terms. There was something called “bloggingheads” a while back that wasn’t a bad model. There must be at least a handful of people on the SJ side who feel an obligation to explain and defend their ideological premises in front of a mixed audience. right? hopefully?
I’m focusing on this because #1 it’s genuinely missing from online discourse, #2 I believe it’s a crucial aspect of keeping self-appointed experts intellectually honest, rigorous and accountable, and #3 it’s a frontal challenge to the anti-intellectual tendencies of the SJ Left, which might even help them sort that BS out and nurture a more coherent/less emotive SJ framework.
Sealioning is literally just civil call outs. It’s a a third order strategy; you first have people signaling shibboleths in public, often decrying the outgroup for a perceived crime. The out group notices this flames them for it. The original group uses this as more evidence that the outgroup is bad.
So a second order strategy is needed for the outgroup if they wish to call out the first group. They instead respond civilly. Sometimes this is done in good faith, sometimes in bad faith. It matters not; the ingroup is threatened by the outgroup taking the moral high ground. So they come up with a third order strategy, a term to make this civil calling out an unacceptable practice.
Much like “it’s not my job to educate you,” this may have come out of an actual issue (people trolling behind polite words), but thanks to memetic drift it’s become nothing more than another way to justify tribalism.
So now it’s considered bad form to disagree in a civil manner and bad form to disagree in an uncivil manner?
It’s a nice kafkatrap, isn’t it.
That said, the early sealioning generally came from when a horde of people descended upon someone on Twitter; even if they were all civil, it was quite unsettling. Toss in the evolution of the “it’s not my job to educate you” defense and what started as a request not to be mobbed turned into a catch all for brushing off disagreement.
Now you’re getting it.
Which is why the uninvited initiation of a debate without mutual agreement on the terms of engagement will rarely result in productive discourse.
Everything you say can be double-plus smart and reasonable, but if it’s intrusive, unsolicited and on someone else’s “turf” it will be ignored or perceived as something mischievous. And of course, trolls have used civil-sounding badgering as a tactic to fluster their targets. it’s a no-win scenario, but sadly reflect on how many millions of online hours have been wasted engaging in this practice.
People who want real debate need to think about creating venues in which real debate can occur. Right now, there’s a a shitton of asynchronous argument that is thoroughly non-conducive to vetting the durability of ideas.
Adding a few points: at the beginning of the term’s use the phenomenon happened as much or more with casual observers (people who had no idea what was happening other than what they read in one news article) as it happened with actual members of the other faction. Also, at the beginning it didn’t look much like an insult, and you’d see people going “heh, yeah, I guess I’m like that sometimes”. The connotation of dishonesty built over time.
Nowadays, the most harmful part of this meme is that asking someone to “back up their accusations with evidence” apparently pattern-matches to “sea-lioning”, and is thus not only dismissed but taken as evidence itself. This, I submit, is both crazy and crazy unproductive.
How does one feign civility, I wonder… How is “feigned” civility different than civility?
Not asking you, Emblem, just musing.
I think, in this context (largely judging by the comic), feigned civility would refer to someone who attempts to mimic civil behavior (speaking politely, etc.) while engaging in an inherently UNcivil action (following someone around and constantly badgering them to defend their position)
Walder Frey offering the bread and salt when he knows damn well he’s gonna slaughter your whole party later that evening?
I see. I guess I see the word “civility” as something strictly formal rather than material (e.g. I’m least polite with the people I like and respect the most). Might be a language thing (not a native speaker).
But I must confess, what actually bothers me about it is the implicit or explicit accusation of dishonesty.
The contested spaces were truly contested, though the SJWs didn’t want to accept that (note I said they attempted to expel me; they were not successful, the best they could do is block). The SJWs want all public and semi-public fora to be echo chambers for their own views. They would not recognize a “neutral” field because to them any field which allows their opponents a voice is doing wrong. Remember that to them, “no platforming” is not only good policy but a moral imperative.
In their view you don’t allow racist misogynist scum to speak; they might cause distress in an less-privileged person or worse, they might actually influence someone else into heresy. If you get the chance to observe them in their echo chambers they’ll say these things in almost so many words.
I know it’s tempting to assume these are reasonable people amenable to debate and to, if not changing their views, at least an agreement to disagree. They’re not. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself (I’d recommend doing it under a throwaway pseudonym).
Believe me I’ve tried. I don’t doubt that the bulk of the True Believers lack the prerequisite appreciation for/understand the importance of defending their own positions against interrogation. Their authoritarianism is blinding and their logic is self-justifying and circular.
But there must be a few sophisticated, well respected leadership figures on at least a few subjects that can be tempted out of the echo chambers to face a challenge. For chrissakes, even fundies had the self-confidence to hold their own against Hitchens/Harris/Dawkins!
The unwillingness for ANYONE of note on the SJ side to submit to contentious dialogue from good-faith opponents of ANY kind, if such is the case, is beyond embarrassing.
It’s more embarrassing for the non-SJ thinking community as a whole if a singular incoherent ideology can win the day by sheer assertion and steamrolling.
Scott, your thinking appears to me to be confused about the pizza parlor and the tech conference. You label yourself inconsistent for feeling uncomfortable when a conservative techie is blacklisted by a conference, and also feeling it was wrong to issue death threats against a religious family who (actually the teenage daughter, cornered by an activist reporter) said they would hypothetically not make pizza for a gay wedding. You imply both the religious family and the liberal techies are just following their conscience by discriminating against those they disagree with, so to be consistent you should not criticize either one, whereas the technie conference blacklisting someone for their private poltical beliefs bothered you, and the pizza family didn’t.
I don’t see you as being inconsistent. The liberals who attacked the pizza parlor were the same as the liberals who blacklisted the conservative techie – trying to hurt and destroy people they disagree with. This is wrong. You are naturally uncomfortable with both cases. Your gut knows more than your head in recognizing both as repugnant, scary attacks on privacy and conscience.
The pizza parlor did not actually discriminate against gays. They didn’t hurt a single gay person. Their sin was hypothetical, and even the voicing of an opinion was instigated not by themselves, but by entrapment. In contrast, the conference did harm the techie they excluded (tried to exclude? I’m not familiar with the incident.) It is entirely consistent to feel uncomfortable with the thought police.
Anti-discrimination laws were originally meant to protect individuals from being discriminated against because of a group they belonged to. The pizza parlor would be wrong to refuse serving gays who came in and ordered a pizza or to blacklist gays for employment; they have the right refuse to participate in an activity (a gay wedding) that goes against their religious beliefs. The tech conference organizers would be wrong to exclude conservatives from presenting or coming to the conference; they have the right to not participate in conservative conferences.
You mock conservative fears of liberal Stalinism by saying a Stalinist dictatorship is not coming to America. Academia, Hollywood and the media – the three greatest levers of power in molding public opinion in our country insist on an almost Stalinist level of group think conformity and have succeeded in blacklisting conservatives to an alarming extent. (I have not rigorously checked these statistics: Washington correspondents , only 7 percent Republicans allowed; Hollywood 14% contribute to the Republican party, in academia only 11% Republicans allowed – percentages of actual conservatives would be miniscule.)
“What is the most important amendment to the Constitution? “Brennan said the First Amendment, because all the other ones come from that. If you don’t have free speech you have to be afraid, you lack a vital part of what it is to be a human being who is free to be who you want to be.” Your own growth as a person will in time be constricted, because we come to know ourselves by our thoughts.” (from Wall st J column by peggy noonan 8-16-13)
Your three great levers aren’t having much affect in practices….they didn’t prevent the Iraq war, or the execution of Bush.
And when did the churches get pushed off the list?
Don’t forget that even most of the left supported the Iraq War back in the day, so I don’t think its not being prevented can be used as evidence against the left’s cultural power. Note also that the “mainstream” view, as far as I can tell, is now that going into Iraq was a mistake; I’d attribute the shift largely to the way the war has been portrayed in the media and Hollywood/TV industries.
I think it’s far more likely that the shift was due to what actually happened. That is, the war dragged on far longer and killed far more people than the Bush Administration had promised, most of the reasons for starting the war turned out to be completely false, and it ended up paving the way for the rise of a new regime that is in every respect much worse than the one the war overthrew. I find it very difficult to imagine any sort of media coverage that could have possibly convinced people that the war, or at least the way it was carried out, was not a mistake.
Besides, the only War on Terror movies that have been successful have been relatively pro-war or at least pro-soldier like Act of Valor, Lone Survivor, and American Sniper. All the thoughtful dramas about The Heavy Costs of War ended up preaching to the very small portion of the choir that bothered to watch them. This includes even The Hurt Locker, which has the ‘honor’ of being the lowest grossing Best Picture winner ever.
Ditto for TV. Contrast the massively successful 8 season run of 24 with the short lived and now totally forgotten Over There.
As an illustration of the value of double-checking before you open your mouth, I was going to say those movies aren’t all about Iraq (Act of Valor takes place in Costa Rica and Lone Survivor in Afghanistan), and maybe Afghanistan still had wider support, but nope, apparently Gallup says it’s one of the least popular wars ever.
I don’t think your examples support your argument. E.g. the pizzeria. I wouldn’t care even if the pizzeria refused to serve conservatives. Likewise I would still care about the tech conference if they banned gays from speaking.
For some reason the tech conference censoring people feels a lot stronger than having to eat pizza somewhere else.
I am also upset about communists being treated badly during the red scare, and I don’t support communists at all. Or now reddit censoring groups of people that I despise. Not because I support those people in any way, it just feels very wrong to violate free speech.
Scott, one of your main argument seems to be: being bullied unfairly and cruelly by a social justice group, feminists for example, is good for you because it actives your mirroring ability and thus makes you more sensitive to how that group feels bullied. Did I get that right?
A few points:
-It is true that being bullied often makes people more sensitive to the bully’s feelings. They may even come to agree that the bully is the real victim, thus justified in their cruel attacks. This is not a healthy response. It is called identification with the aggressor, as you know, and leads to self-destructive, masochistic behavior. If you are a battered wife, or a “battered” white male who wants sincerely to be sensitive to women, it seems sensitive to concede the batterer is right and grovel. This just leads to more abuse.
For outsiders especially, it is so much easier to justify the bully, whether it be a battering husband, an Islamic terrorist, an anti-Zionist, a militant feminist – that way you don’t get attacked. The victim always can be found to have brought it on himself or herself, or deserves it for past sins or alleged sins. It is easier to turn it into a tit for tat, two sides the same, story, as you do in your post.
There was a fantastic column on the subject of liberal bullying today, “Dr Matt Taylor’s shirt made me cry, too – with rage at his abusers. An astrophysicist who deserves our applause has been pilloried in his moment of triumph.”
Forgive me for quoting a lengthy clip:
“he wasn’t crying with relief. … He was overcome with guilt and shame for wearing what some people decided was an “inappropriate” shirt on television. “I have made a big mistake,” he said brokenly. “I have offended people and I am sorry about this.”
I watched that clip of Dr Taylor’s apology – at the moment of his supreme professional triumph – and I felt the red mist come down. It was like something from the show trials of Stalin, or from the sobbing testimony of the enemies of Kim Il-sung, before they were taken away and shot. It was like a scene from Mao’s cultural revolution when weeping intellectuals were forced to confess their crimes against the people.
Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.”
Scott – do you really think that spectacles like this excite a sensitive “mirror neuron” that is “liberalism’s strongest weapon” by sensitizing witnesses to how much all those women suffered at the sight of Dr. Taylor’s shirt?
On the contrary, it undercuts feminisms valid problems and valid claims on our sensitivity, and makes them into fascist jerks.
I don’t like exposed bosoms on shirts or on the street, but frankly, it’s none of my business what the man wears. Your generation has to learn to live and let live.
I have to agree with fairhaven’s point that being attacked in this fashion doesn’t trigger one’s “mirror neurons”. I’ve been attacked all my life in one context or another, most notably at school, I don’t need any education about what that’s like. Furthermore there is an asymmetry to social-justice attacks: they discredit the causes that they claim to support. People (like me) who once supported those causes now can’t, because extremists have taken over the debate around those causes, and the stated end-goals are not going to be delivered anyway.
And most people being attacked by someone are only going to hate back. It’s a sticky question this, because if you’re being attacked on an ideological basis, then I would say there’s clearly something wrong with the ideology, but many people conflate the ideology with the people delivering it, or worse, with the people it claims to defend. I think it’s likely that ‘social justice’ will make the situation more dangerous for minorities, because a lot of people will feel it’s the minorities that are attacking them, rather than a subset of predominantly white, middle-class, university graduate types.
You write, “The social justice narrative describes a political-economic elite dominated by white males persecuting anybody who doesn’t fit into their culture, like blacks, women, and gays. …(this narrative is )relatively plausible; Congress and millionaires are 80% – 90% white….”
Isn’t this the kind of hand-waving misuse of numbers that you normally deplore?
You think it is plausible that earning more money or being in Congress is causality related to persecuting people?
What makes such a theory plausible? Prejudice is negatively correlated with education among whites (the reverse among blacks), which is positively correlated with success.
Here are some other numbers: 45% of millionaires are women. Gay households are among America’s wealthiest earners. Eight percent of millionaires are black (from statistica.com) – not so bad for 13% of the population.
Millionaires isn’t even a static group: half of millionaires between 1999 and 2007 were so for only one year; 15% were millionaires for two years. Only 6% were millionaires nine years in a row.
Two thirds of American millionaires are self-employed, and three-quarters of them are small scale entrepreneurs. They are lawyers, doctors, accountants, welding contractors, auctioneers, rice farmers, owners of mobile-home parks, pest controllers, coin and stamp dealers, and paving contractors. Few inherited any money. The idea that they persecute any class of people is not proven by the color of their skin or how much money they earn, is it? (from NYTimes.com/books, “The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of American’s Wealthy”)
You do know that half the rich people in America are Democrats and half are Republican?
In 2012, NPR asked the non-partisan Pew research the party affiliation of the richest 20% of Americans, (incomes over $100,000). How many are Democrat or Republican? Answer: the same percent.
In 2008 Obama carried the majority of the richer rich, those making $200,000 or more per year. These Democrat super-rich live on the two coasts. Does that make them more plausible as persecutors? They are the power elite. They dominate not only the economy, but also the media, Hollywood and academia, all the levers of persuasion.
A 2009 Quinnipiac poll notes that socially liberal values rise with income – “support for same-sex marriage also rises with income, as those making less than $50,000 per year oppose it 54 to 39 percent, while voters making more than $100,000 per year support it 58 to 36 percent.” The very rich are disproportionately strong social liberals….
“…A review of the 20 richest Americans… found that 60 percent affiliate with the Democratic Party…Among the richest families, the Democratic advantage rises even higher, to 75 percent.”
Does that mean that being Democrat donors is correlated with elitist persecution of minorities?
In 2002, those who gave a million dollars or more gave $36 million to the Democrats and only $3 million to Republicans, a 12:1 ratio. Of the top 10 individual contributors to candidates that year, only one gave to Republicans.
Would anybody claim doctors and lawyers persecute blacks, women and gays more than people who aren’t in the elite? And this is plausible because of their income?
I don’t think your plausibility test holds up.
I think he meant “plausible” as in “colourable”, which is a very low bar to clear.
But then Scott is comparing the SJ argument (politically or financially successful white males are by definition sexist, homophobic and racist), which is not actually plausible (or true), with the conservative argument (we are excluded from jobs in academia, Hollywood and mainstream journalism) which is both plausible and true, to make a symmetry that does not actually exist. The SJ claims of being abused are assumed by their ideology and used as tactics even when known to be untrue, and the conservative claims of being abused are based on actual causation.
I think there are some flaws in the anti-gay-pizza/far-right-speaker analysis. In the former case, it’s the customers who directly receive the product who are doing the boycotting. In the latter, it’s the interface between speaker and listener (i.e. the conference organisers).
For a more accurate comparison, suppose the pizza shop had been booted out by their landlord for holding anti gay marriage views after a few members of the public complained. Now on a level playing field, each of those scenarios is equally upsetting to me, because it’s not the business of the intermediaries to decide what views are aired.
If the postal service decided to stop sending mail from people thought to be bigoted in some way, I’d be angry. If a teacher was sacked for being vegan, I’d be angry. If a public figure was sacked due to their ethnicity, I’d be just as angry. In each case it’s because the ‘objectionable’ attribute in question has nothing directly to do with the actions effected. Bigoted people can write letters about non-bigoted subjects. Vegans can accurately teach history. Black mayors can cut ribbons at opening ceremonies without referencing their race. Good pizza can be cooked by homophobes, and useful technology can be invented by racists. Preventing people from fulfilling their useful functions in life because of something irrelevant which they may or may not be able to help is wrong and upsetting, but deciding personally to forgo their pizza/lecture/etc. because you dislike them is perfectly reasonable.
News at 11: encouraging people to co-operate does more for them to get along and work together than blame-slinging and side-making.
(I mostly share because I really like this guys work)
A common enemy works best though. http://lesswrong.com/lw/lt/the_robbers_cave_experiment/
The dark secret of trying to be more rational is that you can’t escape the object level. the lizard brain always wins in the end, because it has to win in the end, because you can’t escape the object level.
Hello, may I ask, what does “object level” mean? Does it mean “relating to specific cases”?
I’d like to ask a question to people who are supporting the SJW side of sci-fi battles.
Let’s make a moderate left-wing model.
If a resource is finite and fixed-sum, then all it matters is its distribution. And its distribution pattern will follow the distribution of power – in other words, fighting to redistribute it can be called just and fair, even if it takes authoritarian means, because fixed-sum resource means fixed-sum authoritarianism: either it goes to those who already have power or to goes to those who fight to get more power. If it is distributed as power is, then the sum of power invested into in distributing or redistributing is also constant. Left-wingers who think wealth is fixed-sum, can justify their support for the governmental redistribution of wealth this way.
If a resource is the opposite, if its non-finite and not-zero-sum, if its available quantity depends purely on how much work and ingenuity humans input into it, then there are no good arguments for authoritarianism at all. Then we can really afford to be libertarians about it. Then it is alike to an endless frontier, with good quality farmland unused, waiting for homesteaders – all that it takes is labor and brains and there is no potential injustice at all.
I think writing (and also software) is this second type. Therefore, people can really afford to be libertarian about them. Therefore, authoritarian methods are really unjustifiable.
The point is, if you want, for example, sci-fi with non-binary gender, you don’t somehow need to take a fixed resource and wrench it from the hands of one group of people and give it to another. It is not like it being the farmland of England and then either the Saxons rule it or the Normans, so they must fight over it because they cannot just wave a magic wand so that another island pops up from the Atlantic, full with golden wheat fields and fattened cattle. But in literature is is such a magic wand! It is called writing. The space of potential writing is not fixed-sum. It is endless. All you need to do is to write it. Writing is like a form of agriculture with infinite amount of farmland so there is never a need to fight. All you need to do is to homestead that part of an endless frontier, ripe for taking. Nobody is holding it hostage. Nobody is occupying it. It is yours to take. Start early, and if there is a market for it, you can dominate that kind of market. You can be to non-binary gendered sci-fi or whatever else you want what Asimov was to robots or Gibson to cyberlimbs. If there isn’t much of a market for it, well, as a consolation prize, a small market niche can still be all yours. Sometimes it is not the worst outcome if you become a big fish in a small pond.
Therefore, what the eff are you actually fighting over? Just take the parts of the endless frontier you like and homestead it!
Hat tip to ESR for the inspiration for frontier homesteading metaphor (“homesteading the noosphere”).
I agree with you, and like the metaphor you employ, but I think you’re missing a big chunk of the mindset here.
The first is that the things being fought over are typically seen as zero sum, like who gets the Hugo or what percentage of market share goes to which authors. Now taking the long view obviously investing in growing the SF market and making new awards to recognize excellence are both more productive uses of time than trying to push others out. But it’s often human nature to be shortsighted and envious so the failure to do so shouldn’t be surprising.
The second is that this is largely an ideological battle. If someone writes fiction with reactionary themes, then (given progressive assumptions) they are substantively working to halt human progress. If the genre was 90% SJ and 10% non-SJ then that is a problem for them the same way an apartment building where one in ten residents are career criminals would be.
Finally there’s a sense that the current distribution is itself unjust, and that any future growth would compound that by going mainly to the “privileged” authors. From that point of view trying to increase the size of the pie is suspicious, since it draws attention away from correcting past injustices.
Again, I agree with your argument. Just pointing out that it relies on assumptions that aren’t shared by the people it’s addressed to.
If someone writes fiction with reactionary themes
But what is “fiction with reactionary themes”? Some of the frothing makes it sound like the only alternative to what is on offer currently is “beat your wife and chain her up in the kitchen”, only IN SPACE!!!!
Now, I don’t like Military SF, but just because I’m not interested in Big Pulsing Guns. Same reason I don’t read Tom Clancy-style thrillers. Neither have I read any Lois McMaster Bujold, though I understand that she is very popular. I have no idea of her politics or would she be considered right-wing, left-wing, or what. Does she write “reactionary fiction” because she writes MilSF?
You see, my problem is this (and I’m not picking on you, Ever An Anon, you have summed up the question in a clear and useful manner): take That Bloody Dinosaur Story.
WHAT MAKES IT SF/FANTASY?
For all that we are told, it’s set in our-time, not even near-future. The fact that the fiancé(e) is a palaeontologist? That does not, of itself, make it SF. The fact that xir fiancé(e) is standing or sitting there indulging in a sad little revenge fantasy, including a momentary wish that xe was a dinosaur like the ones xe studies does not make it fantasy either. Is the palaeontologist even involved in cloning dinosaurs, time-travelling back to the past to study dinosaurs, falling afoul of a dinosaur-worshipping cult, or got on the wrong side of post First Contact dinosaur aliens who thought xir work digging up fossils was the equivalent of grave-robbing and desecration? No? THEN WHAT MAKES IT SF/FANTASY?
My objections to this story – apart from the fact that I think it’s a weak piece of work and not the literary masterpiece as some reviewers find it – are not based on “If this was only about a white cishet Christian Republican-voting couple being attacked by a black gang, and was written in the same way, I’d love it!” I don’t care about the gender identities, ethnic origins, sexual orientations, politics, religion, or what colour they paint their bathroom of the narrator and xir fiancé(e).
I do care that a medium piece of mainstream litfic (with a drizzle of, at most, watered-down magic realism) was put up as one of the best examples in the field of modern SF/Fantasy. (As for Marisol and her genie, in that story recommended as the kind of really good modern SF/Fantasy writing on offer instead of the Sad/Rabid dreck, well. Bradbury did magic wish-granting bottles a heck of a lot better in much fewer words in “The Blue Bottle”).
Imagine you go to a restaurant and order, say, sushi. The waiter brings out a plate of fried chicken and chips. When you say that’s not what you ordered, you’re lambasted as wanting to destroy the very art of cookery and of being some horrible anti-Japanese bigot who doesn’t recognise good sushi when it’s presented to them.
I don’t know if Vox Day is all that is claimed of him. If he is indeed a neo-Nazi, I don’t particularly want to give Castalia Books my money. But if the only place in town where I can order a plate of lasagne and get a plate of lasagne is that dodgy joint where the whispers are the owner mistreats his staff, what do I do?
Yes, it would be more virtuous of me not to eat there. But I am not going to take a bowl of water and declare that it is the best bowl of Irish stew I’ve ever eaten which is what the Hugo slates of recent years have given me.
If the only people out there willing to write and publish the kinds of things some of us like are the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies, where else do we go? The current regime is driving a lot of people into the arms of Castalia House or other places that may be dodgy joints, but you get what it says on the menu.
In addition, it seems like the sci-fi “establishment” is either quite incestuous or just very artistically conservative. In Dozois’s and Strahan’s best of anthologies, you see the same authors over and over again. Maybe it’s true that there are only 15 high-quality writers in the genre at any one time, but that seems doubtful to me. Perhaps the assurance that these 15 authors are going to get published no matter what leads them to writing non-genre work, which gets praised merely because they wrote it.
Neither have I read any Lois McMaster Bujold, though I understand that she is very popular. I have no idea of her politics or would she be considered right-wing, left-wing, or what. Does she write “reactionary fiction” because she writes MilSF?
No, because she doesn’t write MilSF. Well, maybe about three books’ worth, spread over half a dozen or so actual books, out of twenty-plus written. Most of her works are, shall we say, military-adjacent, but actual armed conflict is a means to an end and usually described from a distance. Her flagship series is the story of an intensely talented, charismatic, and motivated young man who really wants to be a war hero but due to some severe medical issues simply has no place on the field of battle and (mostly) knows it.
But reactionary? That’s a more interesting question. I do not know Bujold’s personal politics; I suspect liberal-ish but skeptical of the extreme left. As a writer, I suspect she upholds the NRx position better than Mencious Moldbug ever has – in part because mortal human beings can actually finish reading Lois’s books. The aforementioned flagship series, is also the story of an enlightened, liberal woman who stumbles into the opportunity to reform a militaristic hereditary monarchy – and choses to make it into a better monarchy, which is then convincingly portrayed as a place where ordinary people can live decent lives in peace and (relative) prosperity without fear of oppression or injustice. The democracies we see, are enlightened liberal utopias with the sort of petty bureaucratic corruption and busybody-ness real democracies always have.
Part of this is seeing things through the particular rose-colored glasses of the characters; Bujold is always faithful to her characters and I don’t think uses them as mouthpieces for her own political views. But the effect might well be described as “reactionary”.
Seconding the implied recommendation of Bujold.
Weber’s signature move is a half-dozen pages on the technical specs of a new weapon; Bujold’s is people thinking about how they can (or should) deal with other people. The stories center on persuasion and outwitting (with action scenes when plans meet reality), and that’s how major conflicts get resolved.
Her Vorkosigan series is very strong; her Chalion series (fantasy) likewise.
Well I think the answer to both of your questions (what is fiction with reactionary themes? / what makes it SFF?) are roughly the same: whatever they say they are.
I’m not trying to invoke Orwell (well maybe a little ) and say they’re trying to eliminate the idea of objective truth per se, but the whole postmodern idea of “socially constructed truth” that we occasionally have to deal with in biology originated in literary and activist circles. The ideas that categorization is inherently oppressive or that truth and logic are cishet white male concepts aren’t exactly foreign.
A more charitable and less conspiratorial view though might be that reactionary themes are a spectrum from “flat female / minority supporting characters” to “was literally written by HP Lovecraft” and that SFF has been moving away from high-concept hard sf / space opera / epic fantasy towards character focused stories with token paranormal elements for a long time now. I’m not sure this is actually more correct than my first guess but it’s definitely more flattering.
I’m not sure I really buy that, at least as novel-length SF goes. Ancillary Justice was high-concept as fuck, and it’s probably the highest-profile recent SF novel with SJ themes that I can think of. (Decent book, too, if a little heavy-handed.) I haven’t read any of the Puppy nominees, so I can’t comment there.
Maybe things are different in shorter fiction, I don’t know. What little I’ve seen of the nominees the Puppies got upset over looks less like an evolution of SF and more like straight-up magic realism, which has been a fixture of mainstream literary fiction with Important Social Themes for about forty years.
I don’t mind purple prose, good style, and well worked-out characterisation. But if I get a trite little piece that is tripping over its own hipster irony, what makes it a SFF work rather than something from the “New Yorker” slushpile?
I mean, even in these days, an Edgar award winner will have somebody bashed over the head or gutted like a herring, even if the next 358 pages are all about the moody maverick ex-cop and his troubled private life and grappling with the systemic corruption of the entrenched privilege of the rich who literally get away with murder.
A crime story with no crime would be a startling novelty that might perhaps not catch on. But a SFF story with no SFF seems to be what we have all been panting to read, as the hart yearns for flowing waters? I wish someone would argue this for me and not on the grounds of SJ representation. Believe me, if I was cheering for RAT Korga and Marq to get together when I read Delany’s novel fifteen or more years ago, I am not going to get my knickers in a twist about “ZOMG! A Hugo-nominated story about a gay Chinese guy coming out to his traditionalist parents, but filigreed with the frame-story McGuffin of Magic Lie-Detector Water which gets feck-all explanation! Thank the Cosmic Spirit of Sagan I have lived to see this day come at long last!”
Damn it, I don’t like David Lindsay’s version of Gnosticism, but C.S. Lewis, John C. Wright and myself all agree the man could write – and he had no problem going “beyond the gender binary” in 1920. Huge chunk of quotation from “A Voyage To Arcturus” coming up:
I identify as anti-Puppy and… I don’t often use the term “SJW” (Ozy had a good post on that) but I don’t think of myself on an “SJ” side either – as far as I’m concerned the best arguments in favour of the Puppies are the antics of Gallo et al.. On the Hugos I’m closest to George RR Martin. Anyway:
SF is indeed a big broad frontier and there’s plenty of room for exploration. SF Awards, in a sense, are another big broad frontier, although I expect it takes more social capital to launch a successful award than to launch a new book. Pre-existing SF awards with pre-existing prestige are not a big broad frontier, there’s a limited supply of these, and pretty much everyone involved recognises this – that’s why they’re involved and not going off touting some other award. The anti-Puppy side says that the Puppies are trying to steal the Hugos, the Puppies are saying that the Hugos were already stolen and they’re just taking it back, the anti-Puppies vigorously deny this, IMO successfully.
Sure, yes, there are SJ-inspired people who think that all or almost all SF should be a certain way. But they aren’t the whole of the anti-Puppy crowd.
Having a frontier you can homestead is no good if someone can just turf you out of your homestead as soon as you’ve built something good there.
In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if a few people haven’t already used something like the homesteading metaphor to tell the Puppies go away and get their own award.
“[G]o away and get their own award?”
To whom does the right to award a Hugo belong, if not to the voting members of each Worldcon?
Whether the Hugos had been stolen at any point in the past, or are being stolen now… the procedure for getting on the ballot and getting the award was fairly clear. Who had the right to nominate, who had the right to vote – all very clear, and open. Welcoming, even.
And quite explicit about how each year’s Hugo could be legitimately awarded.
As far as I’ve read, there’s no accusation of Puppies acting against the rules; considerable accusations of acting against the spirit of the rules, with complaints about campaigning for votes being most of them.
There’s not really a historical argument against campaigning – there seems to have been campaigning from the very beginning right up to the present day – though not on this scale, and not with a focus on mobilizing those who wouldn’t normally vote.
It would be a different and less tribal world in which the Anti-Puppy reaction to the unexpected success of the Puppy slate were ‘Welcome! Looks like we’ll need to be more organized ourselves next year.’
Instead, there are explicit plans to change how votes are counted, lest the electorate return another offensive result.
That’s one of the fascinating things about the mess – I don’t think anyone on either side expected the degree of success that the Puppy slate had in the nominating process. This is the third Puppy attempt to put more of the works they like on the ballot, and I don’t recall the previous attempts causing one ten-thousandth the chaos… largely, I think, because they didn’t manage much.
The electorate – I think there’s two issues here, the first is nominations vs the final vote and the second is the unknown composition of this year’s electorate. Also, tribalism.
Last year, the Puppies did pretty well at getting their favoured works on the ballot but very badly in the final vote, no Puppy work ranked above a non-Puppy work, and one ranked below No Award. The final vote uses IRV and thus is relatively resistant towards slate voting and things like that (that is, providing the nominations process doesn’t do something completely odd); the nominations process uses something similar to FPTP and thus is vulnerable to slate voting. The fact that the two procedures can give such contrasting results is a sign that at least one of these isn’t giving a reflection of the true will of the electorate (whatever that means) – it’s pretty clear I think it’s the nominations that are at fault, and possibly a rule change is in order. There’s an electorate for that too[1], and the Hugo organizers describe the procedure for this on the site.
The other issue – there appear to be lots of supporting memberships this year and no-one is quite sure who they are. On the one hand, these may be people very similar to this year’s Worldcon attending members – for example people who attended last year. On the other hand, they may be… uncharitable people might describe them as “entryists”, more charitable people might describe them “people likely to change the character of the electorate”. It remains to be seen who these people are and what they’ll make of the Puppies. If I recall right, supporting memberships didn’t carry voting rights until comparatively recently, and I’d be perfectly happy with Worldcon deciding to return to that system in future.
Tribalism: correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be suggesting a “fight slates with slates” attitude. This doesn’t seem to be particularly non-tribal, rather it entails pushing things more and more in the direction of tribalism. And, y’know, I really don’t want people to have to have a pre-Hugo Hugo (well, a pre-Hugo nominations Hugo nominations) where the real action happens, I want the actual Hugo nominations process to do its job properly.
[1] There’s a meeting at Worldcon, which attending Worldcon members can turn up to and vote at.
Slates vs. slates, with everyone included in the larger tribe of ‘fan’, wouldn’t have been such a bad outcome. It would, I think, be as good an outcome as one could hope for, and better than one can reasonably expect as of today.
‘Entryism’ as a charge presumes those entering were by right outside the community before; in this context, it degenerates into ‘no true fan.’ That doesn’t seem like a productive line of argument, though it is true that one way of avoiding the change in electorate is closing off entry, or requiring loyalty oaths, or other proofs of (in this case) fannishness to ensure that only the right sort enter.
Changing the rules so that supporting memberships can’t nominate raises the barrier from anyone willing to put up $40 for a supporting membership to anyone willing to put up $210 for an attending membership. Does that alter the rate of change in composition?
The major problem with disenfranchising the supporting members in order to slow the change in the electorate is that this fresh tide of supporting members purchased the supporting membership almost solely for the franchise. Locate the franchise elsewhere, and will they not pursue it elsewhere?
Perhaps, at that price, many wouldn’t; more than the number of the existing electorate that would also drop out over the increased expense? I have no idea what the compositional effects of that change would be, though it would tend to shrink the electorate.
I’m aware that the there’s a legitimate way to change the voting rules and that this is what’s being proposed. Putting the rules of the system themselves in play is still an interesting response, and one that betokens a loss of faith in the system to provide results generally accepted as legitimate.
There isn’t a perfect voting system – we know this. Different systems are subject to different ways of gaming them, and can be expected to produce different results. There are thus far intractable difficulties with aggregating preferences across people to any tolerance closer than ‘good enough.’ As you wrote, the ‘true will of the electorate’ is a phantom; as you wrote, different voting procedures (using the same electorate) can (and often do) produce different results; still, elections serve as useful Schelling points at which to consider a question settled for until the next vote.
The problem is that the nomination election hasn’t been taken to settle the issue of ‘who’s on the ballot this year’ – but that’s no fault of the process.
To put it another way, procedurally speaking, the Hugo nominations process did its job properly this time too: the nominations were made by those with a right to make them, counted fairly (at least, I’ve heard no accusations about ballot stuffing), and the ballots were duly drawn up.
If you want a different procedure, then arguments can made for alterations and improvements. Still, I would not expect changing the method of voting to accomplish anything significant; the essential problem of a material number of people with strongly differing preferences remains.
Make a different procedure, and everyone motivated to nominate or win will adjust their strategy in turn.
As a SF reader, this all seems kind of ridiculous. It’s 100% fighting over prestige and is pretty meaningless to almost every reader. Any veteran reader knows that the Hugo (or nebula) is no guide to quality. Do books get a significant “Hugo bump” in sales when nominated or after winning?
See, a lot of what you call “entryists” are people who purchased the supporting memberships in order to support and vote for the Puppies. But that does NOT mean that they’re not long-term fans or uninvolved or a rent-a-mob.
I had no idea how the actual sausage was made. Being an idiot, I thought “The Nebula is the professional writers’ award but the Hugo is the fans’ award” meant exactly that – that the fandom voted for each category (maybe in a postal vote or write-in poll).
I had no idea the Hugos were OWNED by Worldcon, or that only Worldcon attendees and/or those who purchased memberships were entitled to vote. And I’ve been reading skiffy since I was seven, so I will greatly resent any attempt to brand me as some ignorant Johnny-come-lately who’s not a real fan.
How many more fans were there out there, like me? Ignorant of how the machine worked? And who purchased those supporting memberships this year in order to vote not because they’re racist sexist homophobic religious bigots but because they don’t like being called that, want to see the stories they like get nominated (even if they don’t win) and were simply and plainly pissed off enough to get involved?
I didn’t purchase such a membership, but only through a mixture of laziness and sadness and not wanting the last shred of fannish idealism to puff into dust. But I do very much resent Irene Gallo tarring me and others like me as GamerGaters and political drones voting as directed by our far-right overlords.
Slate-vs-slate – who draws up the slates? Who gets to get involved in which slate-drawing process? How do you avoid the slate-drawing processes falling victim to the same problems we have here. Suppose the Puppies have an open primary for SP4, and a bunch of anti-Puppies join the primary with their own slate-within-a-slate. If you don’t have open primaries, then who gets to decide which slate? The only case I can see for slate-vs-slate is multiple tribes, one slate per tribe – and people condensing into 2 or 3 tribes to maximise the power of the slates – just like elections under FPTP systems.
“Entryism”, “no true fan”. GRRM has a point about the Hugos being Worldcon’s award. As the Hugo site says, “The awards are run by and voted on by fans”, but not “the fans” – it’s very open about Worldcon members being the electorate. GRRM’s point is that the Worldcon members are what make the Hugos the prestigious award they are.
So if we re-restrict the Hugos to attending members anyway; it’s a steep price for someone who only wants to vote. For someone who actually wants to go to Worldcon anyway – I contemplated it last year but narrowly decided against it, and the Hugos were not a factor in my decision – it’s not a steep price, it’s effectively free. If you want to go to Worldcon for it’s own sake, not just for a vote, that’s a good enough proof of fannishness for me. At any rate, it should have an effect on the composition.
Legitimate ways to change the rules; you keep saying that the Puppies followed the procedures OK, and that’s all that matters. But if so, then it’s likewise fine for the voters to No Award the Puppy-only categories and to change the rules to prevent slate voting ever again.
Sure, this year’s nominations have happened, and this year’s Hugos should proceed according to the rules in force this year – that is, the formal rules in force.
Working out how to prevent slate voting is trickier for nominations than for the final vote, I’ll admit that. The problem is that there are lots of eligible works for nomination and having a big preferential ballot for all of them would be clumsy and difficult to administer. Still, as mentioned earlier, preferential systems are much less vulnerable to being gamed, and to the vote-splitting problem, than FPTP-like systems. People who are bigger voting nerds than I could probably supply more details; it’s certainly the case that some systems are more vulnerable to strategies and tactics than others.
I’m hoping, though, that Plan A will work – that the new voters will be appropriately Worldconish – as in, they’re actually using their Supporting Membership to support Worldcon – and that enough of them will involve themselves in the nominations as well as the voting itself to drown out any slates that might be in force. I hear that the turnout for nominations has historically been lower than for the vote itself. People shouldn’t need to busy themselves with the early stage to keep slates out, but if that’s what it takes, hey, it might also improve the nominations in other ways.
You’re absolutely right on that point, though you may be ignoring the next couple iterations of likely events:
The Hugos give no awards in about half its categories. This is largely seen as spite voting and tarnishes the entire ceremony. The Hugos brand is noticeably though not drastically damaged, and a constituency interested in an alternative prize has proven its existence and ability to make noise. So another award steps in, either via another convention giving them out or some existing award branching into SF.
This is all just fine with me (and I assume with most people), it’s the market working as intended, but it lays out a good motive for the Hugo leadership to try and keep things from schisming that badly.
Slate vs. slate? This not a new problem. This is a very old problem, with lots of functional solutions and at least as many dysfunctional ones – see also politics. My own guess is that the Hugo nominations will remain an open primary, with various people trying different ways to coordinate voting on scales ranging from ‘asking a friend’ to ‘broadcasting it all over the internet.’
As for who draws up the slates – why, the same as it is now and has ever been: anyone who cares to try to persuade another to vote similarly.
Restrict the franchise to attending members only, and I would not be surprised to see if a some number of Puppies decide to attend. The logic runs the other way too: if you’re spending that much, you might as well attend. What result? Could be anything from discovering that the differences aren’t too great, to having a separate party going on down the street, to starting fresh feuds.
It is indeed possible to No Award the Puppy nominations, or to change the voting rules, all within the existing rules. That’s not out of bounds. It is, however, a definite step away from that optimistic view of ‘fan’ being the primary relevant tribal identity.
Minimizing slate voting would be an interesting challenge… but two points there. First, it wouldn’t be a return to the past – there’s quite clear evidence that slates aren’t new; just as there’s equally clear evidence that they haven’t been as large, nor as interested in getting more people in. Second, it will involve trading off something usually thought desirable in a voting system – the trade may be worthwhile, of course, but it will come with problems of its own.
I can heartily endorse the hope that the new voters will be considered appropriately Worldconish by all concerned… but drowning out slates? Why is that even desirable?
Voting slates, in an open write-in primary, represent nothing more than people agreeing ahead of time how they intend to vote in a secret ballot. They’re not binding. They’re literally not even enforceable, without breaching the secrecy of the ballot.
In what universe would it be possible – or desirable! – to prevent Worldcon members from discussing ahead of time what eligible science fiction they liked?
I concur absolutely when you write ‘ hey, it might also improve the nominations in other ways.’ If you don’t like the nomination results, get involved! It is (so far) still the privilege of any supporting member to do so, so it’s not very expensive either.
Deiseach:
I must admit to being somewhat surprised by GRRM’s description of the Hugos – I too had heard the thing about Nebulas and Hugos but I suppose that’s a case of things you hear turning out to be not precisely right. On reflection I suppose there’s a strong case for the Hugos to try more to be what they’re commonly held to be, which means keeping the supporting memberships as is. However, if you’re aiming for “the fans’ award” I think “Worldcon” is closer to that than “whichever bunch of slate voters gamed the system best”; YMMV of course. Hopefully the outcome will be that lots of people get keen on slate-free nominating and drown out the slates, then we can avoid such messy and contentious things.
The new voters bit – yeah, in retrospect I think I messed that one up, I think the charitable/uncharitable thing does make wrong and bad implications about people who aren’t typical Worldcon attendees but who aren’t exactly rent-a-mob either (there’s a very wide range of people who fit that description) – apologies for that.
As for Gallo… as I say, if anyone could bring me round to the Puppy side, then the likes of Gallo could. There’s no cloud without a silver lining, and one silver lining has been getting to see who on “my side” has been conducting themselves in an honourable manner (IMO, GRRM and Eric Flint for example) and who, erm, hasn’t (Gallo for a start).
Urstoff: hear the Puppies and anti-Puppies say in unison: “they started it!”
notes: Hugo nominations aren’t like any sort of primary. The point of a primary is for a party – or at any rate, some group smaller than the whole electorate – to decide who their candidates are. That’s what I was talking about.
I’m not hoping the newcomers will be considered sufficiently Worldconnish, I’m hoping they’ll be sufficiently Worldconnish.
People discussing work in advance; fine. People talking at length about the merits of specific pieces of work, or even just saying “I’m voting for X” – great. People getting people to read works they might be interested in nominating – superb. Authors writing blog posts pointing out their Hugo-eligible works – not slates, whatever people might say.
Drowning out slates; the problem with slates is that they give slate voters an advantage over non-slate voters, at least in systems that are vulnerable to it. The lack of enforceability is a red herring – if you want the advantage of a voting slate, you vote for the slate. I, and I expect many people, don’t want to be forced to choose between being a sucker who nominates independently (thus losing out to the slaters) or nominating according to a slate. I want to be able to nominate and vote according to my true preferences without losing out. In the context of the Hugos, that means no slates – or slates getting drowned out by independent nominators and voters.
Hugo nominations, like primaries, delimit those eligible for votes in the general. There are certainly ways in which they differ from primaries also – as you note, primaries are often for specific groups smaller than the whole electorate (though there are open primaries also).
For clarity on the Worldconish question, and my choice to rephrase it from ‘being’ to ‘being considered’: I’m less interested in whether the new flood of supporting members are like some ideal member of Worldcon, and more in whether both they and those who have historically attended Worldcon regularly can find common ground enough to consider each other legitimate members – hence the choice of words. I’d intended to convey that I endorsed a subset of your own hope, not to misquote you.
As far as nominating independently vs. slate advantages, and being a sucker, and losing out… this seems incoherent, a sorites definitional problem.
You say it is ‘superb’ for someone to get others to read works that they might be interested in nominating after. What if they do that for several works? For ten? What else do you think a slate is? A list of works, collected for the use of others, in considering what those others might nominate. Where in the process of heaping superb action upon superb action does the accumulation suddenly transform into a detestable slate?
Or run the analysis from another end: you nominate your preferences, without discussing it with anyone. Someone else spends considerable time and effort getting people to read the works she hopes will be nominated, and indeed persuades many people to follow her lead. Were you a sucker in this instance? Did your vote count for less than hers, because she persuaded others to vote with her as well?
If you ‘want to be able to nominate and vote according to [your] true preferences without losing out’ in an election, the usual way of doing that is to arrange to have more votes for your preferred candidates than for the alternatives (in a FPP system; in a IRV system the same, but less simply described). Most ethically, you could do this by persuading other voters to share your views (functionally starting your own slate)… but there are other options ranging from restricting the franchise to outright corruption.
notes: Despite the Sorites paradox, people seem perfectly competent to use the word “heap” in everyday practice. Even if you can’t define a bright line, being able to define upper and lower bounds for where the line might be is useful – especially if some alleged “heap” is considerably larger than the upper bound or considerably smaller than the lower.
Furthermore, if people aren’t trying to game the system, such sharp definitions aren’t necessary.
However, let me make my own draft attempt at line-drawing. Things that carry the message, explicitly or implicitly, “even if you prefer work X over work Y, please consider voting for/nominating work Y ahead of work X” I think are on the bad[1] side of the line (even if “X” isn’t specified – “Y” must be specified); “please devote time and effort to contemplating the merits of work X, we hope you’ll find it a good choice” is on the good side.
The Puppy slates are clearly on the bad side of the line, and beyond. A particularly pernicious feature is putting enough candidates on the slate to “pack out” some categories and shut out non-Puppy candidates. This has been particularly disruptive.
Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, this is all getting far beyond my original point, which was to say that the “wide open frontier” thing is irrelevant. I’ll give the Puppies one thing – when they say they think the Hugos have been stolen, I’m prepared to believe they’re sincere about that. Likewise when friends who went to Worldcon last year and greatly enjoyed the Hugo process say that this year they’re very annoyed about the Puppies having unfairly grabbed most of this years nomination space, I’m prepared to believe they’re sincere about that too.
Anyway anyway, this comment box is narrow, I’m late for work already, we’ve got far off the original point and these matters have been debated ad nauseam et ultra by better informed people elsewhere.
[1] There are situations, like UK general elections, which are irretrievably party-political, and the only thing to do is to join in with the rampant tactical voting and pre-vote organizing. But when a situation isn’t like that, it’s worth trying to stop it from getting like that, and if it has got like that, it’s worth making a few attempts to retrieve it.
That makes more sense – being irritated at tactical voting fits better with your earlier statement that you want to ‘nominate and vote [your] true preferences without losing out’ than being irritated at slates as such.
In the vote to award the Hugo, they’ve got IRV in place – and that’s literally designed to let you vote your true preferences AND vote tactically at the same time. Not perfectly, and it isn’t beyond gaming either, but that’s the design.
Still, I’m not sure that there’s a stable way to sort out your good ‘consider recommending X because X is excellent’ from ‘consider recommending X over a still more excellent Y.’ Brief check of the Sad Puppy 3 and Rabid Puppy 2015 slate announcements yields nothing useful; both talk about how good the Xes recommended below are, not about ‘don’t vote for Y.’
The explicit campaign for them, as far as I can tell, was on the basis of ‘vote for what you like; we like X, and think you will too.’ There’s absolutely an element of ‘don’t vote for Y,’ along the lines of Deiseach’s complaint above about TBDS – ‘how did this even win a Hugo? It’s medium quality litfic, and not SF!’ – but from what I’ve seen it’s directed at past Hugo nominees/winners (usually explicitly focused on TBDS, but there are others) rather than other present-day eligible works… that is, it’s directed at things that couldn’t be nominated anyway, and used as an example of what could happen if you don’t nominate/vote.
Ultimately, any vote for X is not a vote for Y. Preferential voting systems make for longer lists, but a vote for [A, B, C, D, E] is still not a vote for Y.
The only place I’ve seen ‘don’t vote for Y, regardless of excellence’ as an active idea is the argument for No Awarding Puppy nominees for slate-packing (as distinct from the also common ‘No Award Puppy nominees because they’re bad quality’ argument).
Adjusting your objection from ‘slates’ to ‘packing out’ a ballot during the nomination stage makes more sense as well.
The current proposal to amend the Hugo nomination process over at Making Light is to put SDV-LPE in place, instead of ‘top n by votes’; I think it likely you’d be happy with it should it pass, in the sense that you wouldn’t have to think about nominating tactically much.
I think that there’s no way to avoid politics in any human institution: at most it can be disguised or displaced. That said, it’s possible to have the politics of fandom line up on a different set of axes than the politics of elected office, and that would be desirable.
Thus, I share (my understanding of) your hope that the Hugos might not become irretrievably party-political.
Still, the trend over the last several decades has been for the personal to become the (party-)political, so I’m not optimistic.
@Peter
Basically all I know about Sad Puppies I learned from the dialogue between George Martin and Larry Correia, and one or two other posts by them (I don’t have opinions about the Hugos, and I’m mostly interested because I recognized the ludicrous misinformation campaign from… elsewhere). Anyway, Correia’s answer to your question (well, Martin’s) is here, among other places. I think it sounds plausible:
When I started this the Hugo Awards were not portrayed as the awards that belonged to WorldCon. They were portrayed as the awards that represented the best of all of fandom. After my first experience seeing how the sausage was made, I publically said the same thing you said there, that the Hugo Awards don’t represent all of fandom, they represent one tiny part of fandom.
I was called a liar.
(…)
So I said I would prove it, and I did.
Here we are, a few years later, and oh how the narrative has changed. Now we are being told that the idea that the Hugos represented all of fandom and not just the tastes of one small convention were misconceptions. Now the most successful author in the world and editors for the biggest scifi publishing house are telling us that it belonged to just WorldCon all along.
Too late. When people like me kept getting told that it represented all of fandom, we believed you. When you told us that if we wanted the stuff we liked represented better we should get more people involved in the process, we believed you.
And we did. Now we’re the bad guys.
(…)
I am glad we are on the same page now.
If important people like you had said this to the people feeling disenfranchised before, then you wouldn’t be seeing this backlash now.
But instead of telling us the truth, that we were right and the Hugos belong to just WorldCon and didn’t represent all of fandom, my people were insulted, and told we were stupid, and that we liked stupid unworthy things. When an outsider dared to complain in public about how they would never get considered, they were told it wasn’t because WorldCon was biased, it was because they just weren’t good enough.
etc.
Don’t see anything plausible about it; seems like straightforward demagoguery to me.
Correia claims a bait-and-switch that never existed. Behind the blistering rhetoric, what do we know about the Hugos on the object level? There’s a con, it has an award, the award is tied to that con’s specific policies and culture. Over the years, this award grew in importance and became the most popular/prestigious one in SF, and did so in the normal marketplace-of-ideas fight with other awards. It was never “official” in any way, it wasn’t sponsored or touted by any state, it wasn’t even the official award of any SF writer’s organisation (that’s the Nebula).
There was never a claim that the award “represented all of fandom”, what would that even mean? The award strives to reflect the best works in the field of SF (not “fandom”), as selected by a particular group of fans grouped around one large and well-known con. Because the award has apparently pleased writers and readers of SF better than other awards, it acquired its cachet.
Suppose someone would say: “Didn’t you say before that the Nobel prizes represent all of humanity in their choice of the most illustrious achievements in physics, literature, medicine, etc. every year? I’m pretty sure you said that! And now that you’re called out on this, you’re claiming that actually the Nobel prizes are merely a choice of a tiny insular group of a few Swedish academies! So before you pretended that it represented all of humanity and now you admit that it’s a just a bunch of Swedes that are a tiny part of humanity? What hypocrisy!”
Correia’s claims are approximately as stupid as that.
Anthony, you say:
“There was never a claim that the award “represented all of fandom””
GRRM says:
“You know, looking back, I am probably partly to blame for some of the misconceptions that seem to exist on this point. For years now I have been urging people to nominate for the Hugo Awards, and saying things like “this is your award” and “this award belongs to the fans, the readers.” I felt, and still feel, that wider participation would be a good thing. Thousands of fans vote for the Hugos most years, but until recently only hundreds ever bothered to nominate.
Still my “it is your award” urgings were not entirely accurate.
Truth is, the Hugo Awards belong to worldcon. The World Science Fiction Convention.”
———–
I’m going to take GRRM’s word over yours on this one.
Anatoly, I spent years as a non-American SF fan reading about (and reading the) Hugo winners, and I was convinced it was the fans’ award as distinct from the pros’ awards.
That there were publishers’ awards, and awards given out by certain groups of whomever, and the Nebulas which were the writers’ choice – but from what I understood, the Hugos were the fans’ choice, the voice of the majority, picking their favourites, sure, but also what they thought was the best.
And then, when all this blew up, I suddenly found out “Er, no. This award belongs to WorldCon and when we say ‘it’s the fans’ choices’, what we mean is that the fans who pay to attend get to vote. Or the fans who purchase memberships. You thought it was a free vote by everyone? What kind of stupid dummy are you?”
Yes, I’m a stupid dummy. But Correia (whom I know not, so not carrying water for him) is not so far off the mark about a ‘bait and switch’ when what had been touted as ‘the people’s choice’ suddenly turned out to be “We OWN this and you get no say unless you BUY a say”.
Anatoly, it seems like a lot of that is dependent on Correia’s factual claim as follows:
“After my first experience seeing how the sausage was made, I publically said the same thing you said there, that the Hugo Awards don’t represent all of fandom, they represent one tiny part of fandom.
I was called a liar.”
It may be that Correia is misrepresenting a true event, or building a mountain out of a molehill, but to the extent that he’s accurately representing his experiences, I’d want to know more about that before I called him stupid on this front.
Thank you, Forlorn Hopes, Deiseach and Jos for thoughtful responses.
There’s a proud tradition in America of having more “democratic” awards than is typical in other countries (compare, e.g. how Oscars vs Cannes winners are selected). Hugo self-consciously belongs in that category, which distinguishes it from most other SF awards. I think its fans are often proud of the fact that it is this democratic award, determined by fans, that ended up the most illustrious and prestigious in the field; and they often say things like “it’s the fans’ award” or “it belongs to the fans” to emphasize that this is what distinguishes it from most other awards, including the Nebula.
This may lead to a misunderstanding like you describe, Deiseach, especially for someone who’s not a writer, not an active US fandom participant, not a con goer, etc. I’m not American either, and for a long time I didn’t know how Hugo was judged. At some point I got curious, went onto Wikipedia and read about it. I may have been mildly surprised that it’s tied to a particular con, I don’t remember, but I definitely didn’t feel cheated or anything. It isn’t like someone described to me a specific all-fan voting procedure that turned out to be false or something! And more importantly, I would stress: unlike you and I, Larry Correia, you may be sure, was not under this illusion for any time during which he was a published SF author. Of course he knew exactly how the Hugo works. Everybody who’s published in American SF knows (also, every physicist knows how Nobels are determined).
Forlorn Hopes, GRRM admits to using phrases like “it’s the fans’ award”. But again, please think carefully, *what is the possible confusion on the object level*? When you strip down the rhetoric, what do you imagine Larry Correia have been confused by? Do you think he didn’t know how Hugos are voted? Do you think that people who said “it’s the fans’ award” counted on him not to know how Hugos are voted? No. Inside fandom, everyone knows how the damn Hugos are voted (in general terms, not in details).
Correia uses the phrase “represented all of the fandom” – which I’ve never heard anyone say or seen anyone write about the Hugos – as a way to sneak the supposed bait-and-switch in. There’s a difference between “the fans’ award”, which can clearly be understood as a rhetorical flourish (and even if it can be misunderstood by an outsider as in Deiseach’s case, it can’t be misunderstood by someone in fandom), and “represents all of fandom”, which makes it seem as though the award pretends to *speak* for all of fandom’s opinions. And then you find out that only a few thousands vote according to some particular con’s rules, and you explode in faux outrage. If you think about it, “represent” is a funny word to use in this context. When speaking about an award, “represent” is normally used to connect people to the honor: “this award represents all the hard work of my coworkers, the support of my family etc.” You don’t normally say that the *institution* of the award, rather than the particular choices made, “represents” somebody or other. I tried to find somebody saying that e.g. the Academy Award “represents” all of American film industry, and couldn’t. It sounds funny, as though the award speaks for all of them. Which is exactly the nuance you want to carry if you want to create a false impression that the award somehow speaks for all the fans everywhere, and those that paid the $50 and voted are stealing it from everyone else.
“all of fandom” would mean exactly what it says. Imagine a book that’s loved with fans everywhere except Worldcon.
If the Hugo’s represented all of fans that book would get an award and a book that’s only loved by worldcon atendees would not.
And when GRRM says “the fans” he is implicitly refering to all of fandom. That’s why he appologiesed, because he knew Correia was right
I imagine Larry Correia believed that his books would be judged on the quality of the writing, the plot, the charachters, etc. Instead they were judged on his politics.
That’s what confused and upset him (assuming it is true – and given how extreme the overreaction to the puppies is, I’m thinking he might be right.)
Anatoly – I don’t think it’s false outrage. Nor do I think Correia’s complaint is about the object level process by which Hugo’s are awarded. That’s not what he says in that link at all.
Instead, looks like Correia got rejected from the Worldcon in-group (his perception is that it was over political reasons), and decided he’d show them. Show them all!
Reading Correia’s account, he had a best-selling first novel, got nominated for a Campbell, and got insulted as being a bad person. Also, finished dead last for that Campbell.
At which point he tried to laugh it off, talked about the Hugos as an insular Worldcon popularity contest, and pointed to all those voting with their hard-earned cash.
At which point others with understandable and substantial investments in the Hugos being meaningful, important, and legitimate argued that no, those awards are the right and true rankings for the year, and Correia’s sales figures were irrelevant; he lost because he was a bad writer, that this was sour grapes, and that politics weren’t the issue.
At which point Correia looked at the small number of voters and the even smaller number of fans, and decided to… show them all.
To his credit, he attempted to take positive action to address the perceived insularity of Worldcon by urging more people to get involved.
To his credit, he turned down his Hugo nomination in this year to emphasize that he considered “making the award represent more of fandom to be a far more important prize than another rocket ship lapel pin (I actually never even got the one from last year).”
It seems to me that he’s also demonstrated that politics was and is involved in Hugo nominations/voting; whether that’s to his credit depends on whether sunlight disinfects or struggle makes more partisan – or rather, depends on which of those effects dominate.
notes, what do *you* think – do you think Correia wasn’t given the Campbell for political/cliqueish reasons?
I think you’re offering a plausible analysis of what motivated Correia. I don’t know that it happened this way exactly, but it definitely could have. There’re two problems with Correa’s motives though:
1) I don’t buy the underlying object-level claim that the Hugos have been politicized and SJWized to exclude conservative/right-leaning/military/whatever – depends who you ask – works. I find GRRM’s analysis of this claim very convincing. It’s a laughable claim. Certainly there’re interest groups, internal politics, bickering and individual voting on ideological grounds, but there’s nothing nearly resembling the paranoid picture presented by Puppy leaders; it is all pure invention.
2) What he says about the supposed bait-and-switch with “represented all of fandom” vs “represents one tiny group of fans” is still demagogic bullshit, for the reasons I tried to list above. It’s a justification for the puppies made up after the fact, and has nothing to do with his true motivation (which was probably along the lines you sugested).
Forlorn Hopes,
OK, but what I’m saying is that such a situation makes no sense to anyone in fandom and no one would take a rhetorical flourish like “the fans’ award” to refer to such a situation. The basic structure of “Worldcon attendees vote for books they think best” (excluding details such as nomination, supporting memberships etc. etc.) doesn’t allow for anything like that. GRRM knows the basic structure, Correia knows the basic structure, and everyone in fandom whom GRRM may have been encouraging to participate more in Hugos using phrases like “the fans’ award” also knows the basic structure. GRRM apologized because he’s a nice person and because he recognized his rhetorical flourish blurred the boundary between fans-who-register-and-can-vote and just-fans; but it doesn’t mean he seriously thought that he made people think… what? that Worldcon attendees would magically channel the hivemind of all fandom and collectively vote that instead of their opinions? There’s no non-ludicrous scenario here!
OK, sure, I agree he believed that (though I ‘m inclined to thinking he was mostly wrong). But what does *that* have to do with the “represents all fandom” crap? According to this, if Worldcon attendees judged Correia’s books on the writing, plot, characters etc. *as they genuinely understand those*, w/o invoking their disgusting lefty politics, and gave him an award, he would’ve been just fine with the fact that only “a tiny insular group” voted and all the “represents all the fandom” crap would never come into play, correct? Well, that’s what I’m saying: the “represents” thing is a bullshit motivated reasoning.
@ Deiseach
I spent years as a non-American SF fan reading about (and reading the) Hugo winners, and I was convinced it was the fans’ award as distinct from the pros’ awards.
This USian liberal says “Me, too.” Of course there would have to be a mechanism and a fee of some sort to run the election, and of course the former high fee and requirement to attend Worldcon in person would slant the pool of voters to the more wealthy and leisured. Who, as in most groups full of old white men, would probably have conservative political attitudes, so any political slant in the results would probably favor the Right. So when the nominated works did not favor the Right, or the MilSF etc stuff, I assumed any political slant must be neglible, so the Hugo probably was “the [all-] fans’ award” (and not too far off the eventual sales figures).
I had been annoyed that the buzz I saw mostly praised books because of the race etc of the author! It was quite a while before I saw anyone mentioning what The Three Body Problem was actually about. I dismissed this as me reading mostly left-leaning blogs; but when the Puppies said this attitude was actually influencing which books got nominated — that did fit the local buzz I’d already noticed.
I don’t see this as deliberate bait-and-switch*; but a Hugo sticker on a book cover, or “Hugo winning author” in a publisher’s list, didn’t have room for “Winner of an award belonging only to Worldcon, who do not claim to really represent all fans”. So, after many years of letting the “all fans award” reputation ride — these sudden loud disclaimers are definitely a switch.
* more like a motte and bailey
There wasn’t much analysis to do – that’s pretty much what Correia says at the link, rather than the portions of the link excerpted above.
As to 1) – agreed. No conspiracy doling out rockets. An echo chamber, yes; a secret society, no.
As to 2) – I don’t think so. I agree it is clearly demagoguery, but I don’t think it was made up after the fact, nor made up by the Puppies, nor used by only one side. I do think that it’s been use for decades, generally by those trying to make the Hugos more impressive, more legitimate… more meaningful. The fans’ award! The People’s Choice!
I’d bet that the reason Correia harps on it is that he was told his loss was deserved because all of fandom had weighed him in the balance and found him wanting (likely in reaction to him arguing that the Hugo was a Worldcon popularity prize)… and so he got fixated on ‘no, that’s not all fandom.’
Do I think he was robbed of a Campbell for political/cliqueish reasons?
No. (1)
Is it conceivable that politics played some part in the Campbell process? Sure. The decisive one? Maybe, but the result was overdetermined – so that’s not supported by what I know.
More relevantly, I don’t think he would have won in a straight contest of quality.
Haven’t read Beukes, so can’t be certain… but that caveat aside, I would have voted for Saladin Ahmed that year. And for Wells before Correia. Lev Grossman was a predictable if disappointing result, though.
His radicalization, so far as I can tell, traces less to losing the Campbell than his reception at the con and online, where he was (or certainly felt that he was) subjected to a running two-minute hate for being ‘conservative/right-leaning/military/whatever’. While that process did not involve all, or most, Worldcon members, it did leave him with the impression of a hostile con environment… and a determination to make that space safe for others like him.
Fearful symmetry indeed.
1 to his credit, neither does he. His account is “I had read Wells and Beukes and knew the quality of their work was excellent. In any fair wordsmithing contest either could kick my ass, and I hadn’t even read Ahmed or Grossman yet, but if they were as good as the other two, then there would be a lot of quality works to choose from.”
@ notes
No conspiracy doling out rockets. An echo chamber, yes [….]
For the category of Accurate and Fair-Minded, that is the best term I’ve heard yet, though better would be ‘an echo chamber phenomenon’, since many different fora are involved.
Anatoly, what you say about Worldcon is true.
But I’ve seen “Hugo award winner!” slapped on the cover of many’s the book, and the award does have a cachet that translates – or used to – into sales. So it involves both the perception of being a judgement “Yes, this is quality work” and of being useful as a sales booster. And book publishing and sales have been in a parlous state for the past twenty years or so; witness all the rí-rá over self-publishing, e-books, etc.
So the Hugos are a prize worth fighting for, whether you sincerely consider you are broadening the parameters of SF/Fantasy past the same old same old tired plots and characters, or you are The Evil Legion of Evil who want to write modern-day versions of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s politics in his “Lensman” stories.
As an aside: I was horrified by the justification for a military coup in one of the Lensman books (e.g. if the people, cozened and led astray by trade unions and other tools of Commie influence, had voted in the ‘wrong’ President, the head of the Corps would have had no qualms about mounting an armed insurrection, overthrowing the civil government, and setting up a military rule).
I still love and adore Worsel of Velantia despite that shock to my innocent little Irish centrist-right political convictions. The moral of this digression: you can love sapient and sentient space dragons without falling into lockstep with their creator’s views of what Real American Democracy should be like.
Anyway! Back to the point! I think that, being on the inside, is precisely why Correia saw how it was sewn up. Maybe his only reason for getting stuck in was “I’ve sold a shedful of books, why am I being blocked for an award? You hoity-toity literary types think being commercially successful is a sin, or something?” but it also seems that he, or the types of books he writes (I have no clear idea what they are) were being blocked on ideological grounds.
Now, I can well sympathise with not wanting to read a story about Space Marines Blowing Stuff Up IN SPACE!!!! because pages of description of guns and ammo are not my thing. But at least if the story is about space marines IN SPACE!!!!, it will involve space in some way, shape or form, which is kind of maybe a bit necessary for a SCIENCE FICTION award? Rather than a story about a do-gooder failed playwright who, oh yeah, finds a genie in a bottle after a world-ending event and makes it all better with her three wishes after she and the ex-theatre critic genie indulge in interminable watching TV shows, films, and discussions of the plays what she wrote.
I’d prefer “Sgt. Bigmuscles pulled out his BLAMMO3000 with the three-klick long belt of high calibre KILL’EM DEADER THAN DEAD super space ammo and in a six-page exceedingly detailed description of exactly how the gun goes “bang”, blew away the hordes of the Slimy Alien Lizard Invasion Force that had appeared in their brick-shaped space invasion fleet off Saturn” over yet another “No, listen, this story really is the bestest example of modern work in the field and it’s about a tri-racial genderfluid barista who befriends a homeless trans shaman from Taos who may possibly be an alien but probably not as that’s only an allegorical trope for how the White CisHet Establishment needs to be challenged for its treatment of the differently abled”.
There was never a claim that the award “represented all of fandom”, what would that even mean?
As others have pointed out, the claim was explicitly and authoritatively made, by at least one of the people now trying to refute it. And as a long-time SF fan, please don’t ask me to go quote-mining, but trust me that the Hugos were almost universally understood to represent and “belong to” fandom in general, from the start to about 2014.
What that means is, approximately, this:
We want to have a set of awards to give to the creators and creative works that fandom, en masse, believes most worthy. Given the resources of a bunch of self-financed amateurs in the age of snail mail, the best that could be done was to invite all the fans to come to a convention, poll everyone who shows up, and have a snazzy party to hand out the awards.
And everyone who made last year’s convention, everyone who wanted to come to this year’s convention but couldn’t make it, to the extent that we can identify them in a way that doesn’t blatantly encourage stuffing the ballot box, and we’ll move the convention to a new city every year. If that doesn’t get everyone, and it won’t, what it does get ought to be at least a representative sample, slightly skewed for wealth but with N>1000.
Only in the most pedantically legalistic sense were the Hugos the property of Worldcon, and nobody ever took that to mean anything beyond “well, if some publisher decides to give all their books a ‘Huego’ award or something, these are the guys who will file the trademark-infringement claim”. A Hugo was an indication of fannish acclaim, not of worldcon acclaim.
Until the events of 2014, which seem to have led the Blue/SJW echo chamber (thanks to “notes” for just the right word) to believe that, by making the SFFWA and Worldcon sufficiently unpleasant for SF’s Red/Grey contingent, they could turn both the Nebula and the Hugo awards into the Best SJ Fiction of the Year awards. Only to learn that, per the long-established rules of Worldcon and the Hugo, their adversaries don’t have to actually show up in person to take back the Hugo.
Agreed that this will probably break the Hugo, and that it will be nigh-impossible to create anything of similar stature to replace it. The alternative being to diminish the Hugo, I’m kind of OK with that. We’ve got fifty-plus years of Hugos that really do represent fandom as a whole, and future generations shouldn’t need a footnote to recognize the future’s lesser awards.
I’ve wondered this too, but I think the criteria should be a simple, “Could this story have been told without the science fiction and/or fantasy elements?”
Because I read that playwright-and-her-genie story too, and I thought it was quite clever in how it mingled the fantasy elements with the cultural homages. It could just as easily have been about movies or TV or books rather than theatre, but it did have to have an artistic focus, and the theatre is sorely underutilized as a motif these days.
On “Hugos represent the fans,” the two biggest awards in SF are the Hugos and the Nebulas. The Nebulas are voted on by authors. For about as long as I’ve known that either award existed, I’ve known that the Hugos are voted on by the Worldcon fans. Do the Worldcon fans represent all fans? Presumably not, and as Martin actually discusses in his long series of posts about the puppies, probably even less so today than they did up to the 80s, as fandom has continued to grow, and Worldcons haven’t (a trend I consider unfortunate, but I don’t run Worldcons, and the people who do don’t get rich doing it, so I don’t feel it’s my right to complain if they feel running comicon sized events would be too much work for them). But contrast classes are important; the Hugos are more representative of fans than the Nebulas, by a large margin. And I think that’s often what people mean in calling it the fan award, that between the Hugos and the Nebulas, the Hugos are the fan award of the two. And so I find Correia’s quote mining quite unconvincing.
@ John Schilling
“a representative sample, slightly skewed for wealth but with N>1000”
Bingo. That’s what I took many more words to approach above, without reaching the key: representative. Sure there would be minor skewings in various directions. And some highly promoted best-sellers would get disproportionately high uninformed votes, and books in a popular series riding on its coat tails might sweep several years’ awards; so the rules should weigh against such out-liers. But if the convention voters’ verdict (and even the Short Lists) are too far out of line with the sales of mid-list books, then these voters are for some reason not a representative sample of “the fans” or “all fandom”, or whatever.
ETA fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Correia shows several of Correia’s books in various reputable Best Sellers lists, starting with his first, self-published SF novel ~2008.
I don’t think there was a decision by (most 1) Hugo voters in 2014 to purge anyone; in most echo chambers, only a fraction are shouting, and it’s mostly variations on a theme. As long as everyone’s in harmony, it’s not too bad (unless, of course, they’re shouting at/about you).
Presently, fandom echoes cacophonously to multiple themes.
1 One exception, largely self-invited. And even that decision looks less like conspiracy and more like shunning.
I don’t think there was a decision by (most) Hugo voters in 2014 to purge anyone […] One exception, largely self-invited. And even that decision looks less like conspiracy and more like shunning.
What happened to Jonathan Ross looks an awful lot like purge by twitterstorm, definitely far more than “shunning”, and if you’re going to describe it as “self-invited”, I’m going to ask what you mean by that.
That action had a substantial effect on how the con and the 2014 Hugos were perceived, especially in anticipation.
I wasn’t talking about Jonathan Ross – he wasn’t on the ballot, he wasn’t associated with Sad Puppies, and that’s what I was writing about in the referenced post.
I agree that that was a twitterstorm blowup at Ross while he was scheduled to present, and he did withdraw rather than go through his designated 15 minutes of being hated for no good reason. I’d say that here, too, most Hugo voters weren’t involved – but those that were, were loud, and were in position to arrange for an online mobbing. In another era, Gaiman’s endorsement might have ended things before it hit critical mass; not this one.
One of the tragic aspects of it was that it looks highly contingent: that twitterstorm doesn’t seem to have been based on his character or his actions, but to have blown up from a single throwaway tweet whose author may have intended only to express her own anxiety over her perception of his humor. (To her credit, she apologized afterward – not that the damage could be undone).
You are entirely correct that this event colored the perception of the rest of the con.
VD, by contrast, really does seem to have invited the shunning and to revel in being the outcast bogeyman.
Deiseach, sure, the Hugo is valuable. Sure, there’s a cultural fight for it. Sure, there are SJW-y types who want social justicy fiction to get Hugos, because they honestly think the best SF is leftist SF, and being leftist is what makes it the best. I wish they’d gone away, but they probably won’t. I’m genuinely afraid of them and their ilk, and I think they bode ill for SF.
But you know what? They *didn’t* take over the Hugos, and they didn’t trash the Hugos. The Puppies did. The Puppy leaders’ cries of total ideological exclusion from the Hugos are either inventions or lies of paranoid fools, as GRRM very ably demonstrated (and the best response Correia was able to give against that calm demonstration of real ideological diversity in the Hugos was a repeated display of hurt feelings).
There was intense ideological fighting within American SF before, notably during the Vietnam war. People took sides, didn’t speak to each other, and often voted cliqueshly, as people would. The echo chambers and little cliques have *always* been there. But nobody trashed the Hugos until now. If you could look at any year’s result closely enough, you’d never see a vote done merely according to the works’ literary qualities (as it would be in my ideal world). There’s always been some partisanship and some in-fighting and yes, some whispering behind people’s backs probably. And still the award prospered and grew in prestige, because those things did some harm, but not too much, and fans’ actual preferences have been more important. And. There’s. No. Evidence. That. This. Changed. In. The. Last. Few. Years. No real evidence. Larry Correia getting nominated for the Campbell but not getting it is not real evidence. Larry Correia being hurt by someone giving him cold shoulder on the conference floor is not real evidence. There is danger to SF from the SJ camp, I’ll be the first to say. But the Hugos were holding up. They were relatively OK, somewhat politicized, *as always*, but on the whole they weren’t damaged. And then those fuckers came and trashed them.
So yeah, now that they’re trashed, I hope you can see why it makes me angry to see Puppy supporters engage in such naked motivated-reasoning bullshit to make the act of trashing look virtuous. Oh, the Hugos were such a lie, they told us they represented all of fandom, but actually were just a Worldcon vote! What specious bullshit. Or take another brilliant piece of narrative, spun by John Schilling here in this thread: apparently the events of 2014 “seem to”, in his mind, convinced the SJWs that they can (note the tight cohesion of the out-group, a telltale mark of a conspiracy theory) make the Red/Greys feel unwelcome at the Worldcon and so exclude them forever; and that must inevitably lead to Hugos being diminished *in the future*, so therefore he’s OK with them being destroyed *now*. How brilliant is that! How convenient! How about you wait for a few years to see if that supposed diminishing actually takes place, and maybe then think about destroying them? (this rhetorical ‘you’ stands for Puppy leaders now, not John Schilling).
You know, the funny thing is, I guess one small part of why I’m angry is that I don’t want to rethink my attitude towards SJWs and SF, but I feel like the reality is forcing me to. I’ve been aghast at the attempts to enforce leftist and SJ-type politics in SF ever since Racefail’09, which was a truly horrible scandal that was the first to showcase SJ-type groupthink broadly (SF suffered from SJ before it was cool). I share your distaste for trendy kinda-sorta-SF-but-really-oppression-olympics stories. But I have to face the facts, and the facts tell me that with all these scandals, and all these dangers, and all the twitterstorms and whatever, the SJ side did not achieve *anything* as bad as trashing an institution as valuable as the Hugos. And the Puppies just did. So I’m thinking now that the Puppies are MUCH more dangerous to SF than the SJWs, on the evidence we have. I don’t like it that I’m thinking that, because I’m very capable with emphasizing with much of the Puppy-style resentment, because they believe SF shouldn’t be politicized and I vehemently agree, because because because. But I can’t wish the facts away.
I’m going to be blunt. You’re victim blaming.
The sad puppies organised a voting slate. Is that against the spirit of the convention? Sure. Did it break the Hugos? Maybe.
The response to the sad puppies was to brand them racist and more on both major media publications and on the personal pages of people in the industry who should know better. (Vox Day, sure, but Brad Torgenson, you’ve got to be kidding).
So either you can convince me that slandering the sad puppies was acceptable. (Hint, don’t bother trying); convince me that the worldcon community was not involved in that slander; or you should blame whatever clique is behind the slander for destroying the Hugos.
Right now I have no trouble believing that a community that’s responsible for such outrageous slander after sad puppies won the primaries would be guilty of everything they’re accused of doing before sad puppies. This is a community where Requires Hate was high status for gods sake.
If Brad Torgenson wanted to defend himself, or defend his tribe, from what’s now evidently a quite real threat. And his method is less than 1/10th as bad as the threat (he organised a voting slate, that’s not exactly evil. They slandered him on major media publications) you don’t get to blame them for the consequences of their self defense.
You want to blame someone for the Hugos demise; blame people who encouraged cliquishness.
@ Anatoly, Forlorn Hopes
Jumping to my own bottom line, I think the Hugos need more categories of Best Novel. MilSF would be a clear one, Action SF another, Hard SF another. Cultural SF would suggest Hellspark or The Left Hand of Darkness.
Offhand, I can’t think of a good objective name for ‘SJ SF’ or ‘Token Author SF’. Some people are calling these ‘Message Novels’, but we’d better make that ‘Leftwing Message Novels’ and ‘Rightwing Message Novels’, for easily imaginable reasons.
This would give a lot of scope for disagreement as to which category a book belongs in — The Three Body Problem seems to be Hard SF though buzzed as ‘Token Author’ — but there would be less occasion for slates such as the Puppies’.
As for what Forlorn Hopes called ‘victim blaming’, I think the more important point is ‘See what you made me do’. If No Award takes many categories — that would greatly damage the reputation of the Hugos in the outside world.
I don’t think it’s quite so bad, for either side.
I don’t think most Hugo voters particularly cared about shunning or no awarding; I think a vocal minority did and do. There’s a larger group that’s wondering what the hell happened, and they might radicalize in either direction… or they might not. Too early to tell.
The Hugos aren’t ruined or trashed – not yet, and maybe never. This year, I don’t think anyone, on either side, really expected the kind of domination of the nominations that occurred. Next year, I’d expect things to start settling toward a new equilibrium quite rapidly – optimistically, a stable new equilibrium with a broader chunk of the fanbase involved.
I don’t think that outcome is inevitable, but I do think it’s still possible.
Even voting ‘no award’ in many categories isn’t necessarily trashing the Hugos – so much depends on intention, perceived and actual. There’s a parallel universe where some obsessive elementary school-kid exploits a coupon-clipping loophole to get loads of supporting memberships and has his entire school write in his slate, starting with, say, the Tripod trilogy (handwave the eligibility years for a moment). With over 200 people voting en bloc, the nominations are swept. Recriminations? Some. Demands for a better nominations system? Yes. Calls for
fixing the coupon-clipping loophole? Yesterday. But would that trash the Hugos, or would it be celebrated as the ‘littlest fen’ taking the field?
The difference between that world and this one is that the SP campaign tends to feel that Worldcon is… not enemy territory, but enemy occupied territory. And there are more than enough on the SJW side of things who think of the SP as enemies to make a fight of it.
What actually has a chance – and no more than a chance – of trashing the Hugos is an escalating cycle of hatred between the opposed camps. Even then, things may settle into a new normal.
As for new categories… I think, given shifting reading patterns (primarily, the increasing length of novels and series, and the decline of readership for shorter forms), there’s an argument for breaking the ‘best novel’ award up and adding a ‘best long novel’ and a ‘best saga’ (possibly also, ‘best really long novel’)… and I’d try that before setting up subgenre awards.
(I do remember Racefail. That’s a whole ‘nother mess).
I feel like the whole thing could have been avoided if someone at Worldcon talked to SP and just said “hey, we may or may not agree with you, but as part of the Sci-fi community we think you have a right to an opinion, but if you are going to slate could you try and leave some slots open as to not black out the ballot?”
SP then feels acknowledged and knows they can get some of their books in, your Worldcon voters don’t feel shut out, and all the drama is avoided. Communication people, it’s what makes the world go round.
I’m not sure what you mean here. That I was wrong to call it victim blaming, or that a string of no awards is the real risk to the Hugos?
@ Forlorn Hopes
The latter. I agree there’s some victim blaming, but a string of No Awards plus all the noise the anti-Puppies are making is where real damage (if any) to reputation will come from.
Imagine a news item like this:
‘No Awards (the Hugo equivalent of None of the Above) has swept X of the Y categories of the Hugo this year, in what its promoters describe as an attempt to [insert actual quotes like “burn down the Hugos”]’
To the Secret Masters of Distribution (ie chain store buyers, mainstream reviewers, library purchasers, etc) a Hugo announcement of winners with many categories marked No Award would hurt Worldcon’s credibility.
Though as notes wisely said, soon it will probably shake down without permanent damage. Especially, I think, after the SMOFs change the rules.
@ Held In Escrow says:
I feel like the whole thing could have been avoided if someone at Worldcon talked to SP and just said “hey, we may or may not agree with you, but as part of the Sci-fi community we think you have a right to an opinion, but if you are going to slate could you try and leave some slots open as to not black out the ballot?”
Oddly, that’s what Torgensen intended, but he rolled Too Much Effect. He later blogged that if he does it again, he will either have fewer names in each category, or so many names as to split the SP vote.
@ Forlorn Hopes
@ Forlorn Hopes
The latter. A string of No Ards plus all the noise the anti-Puppies are making is where real damage (if any) to Hugo reputation will come from.
Imagine a news item like this:
‘No Awards (the Hugo equivalent of None of the Above) has swept X of the Y categories of the Hugo this year, in what its promoters describe as an attempt to [insert actual quotes like “burn down the Hugos”]’
To the Secret Masters of Distribution (ie chain store buyers, mainstream reviewers, library purchasers, etc) a Hugo announcement of winners with many categories marked No Award would hurt Worldcon’s credibility.
Though as notes wisely said, soon it will probably shake down without permanent damage. Especially, I think, after the SMOFs change the rules.
Forlorn, on the larger, longer emotional view, I agree that the Sad Puppy side has been the victim, and is being wrongly blamed — for more than one thing. Currently it seems to be, ‘Your running a slate has forced us to back Noah Ward to burn it all down.’
Still I don’t quite like the assumption that the Puppy side has been acting from hurt feelings, justified or not. If it’s correct that the nominations have been non-representationally light on MillSF books and heavy on ‘Message’ books, then putting up a slate is a rational way to invite a silent majority-or-whatever to stand and be counted.
This seems pretty plausible to me (its the bit you cut). Larry seems to have been mistreated by worldcon and decided to strike back. And maybe make the hugos into something he considers a force for good.
I think LArry more or less ruined the Hugos. Which is pretty unfortunate. But I find it hard to get mad at Larry. If a community treats people like shit some of those people will get very pissed off. I feel bad for the deserving authors. It would have been better for Larry not to wreck the Hugos, but it feels to me he was “within his rights” to strike back if he feels like it.
The dude declared war on the Hugos imo. But imo he is not conducting the warfare in an “ungentlemanly” way.
Larry:
“You know what I found? WorldCon voters angry that a right-wing Republican (actually I’m a libertarian) who owned a gun store (gasp) was nominated for the prestigious Campbell. This is terrible. Did you know he did lobbying for gun rights! It’s right there on his hateful blog of hatey hate hate! He’s awful. He’s a bad person. He’s a Mormon! What! Another damned Mormon! Oh no, there are two Mormons up for the Campbell? I bet Larry Correia hates women and gays. He’s probably a racist too. Did you know he’s part of the evil military industrial complex? What a jerk.
Meanwhile, I’m like, but did they like my books?
No. Hardly any of them had actually read my books yet. Many were proud to brag about how they wouldn’t read my books, because badthink, and you shouldn’t have to read books that you know are going to make you angry. A handful of people claimed to have my read my books, but they assured the others that they were safe to put me last, because as expected for a shit person, my words were shit, and so they were good people to treat me like shit.
At first I was shocked, then I got angry. What the hell? This is supposed to be the most prestigious awards in scifi and fantasy?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not lumping all of the WorldCon voters in with that perpetually outraged, politically motivated clique. I know plenty of voters read my books and just didn’t think they were as good as the people I was up against. Awesome. I salute you for you being an honest person with an honest opinion, and let’s face it, people have different tastes.
But don’t tell me now that the Hugos don’t have whisper campaigns…
Though I knew I still had fans voting, and I figured there were a lot of honest people who would give my works a fair shake regardless of my politics, I also spent most of my adult life as an auditor who did statistical analysis for a living. I understood how Australian Rules voting worked, and the rankings are not most popular to least popular, but rather least disliked to most disliked, and 72 hours after the nominations came out it was pretty obvious I was going to be most disliked.
Then I went to my very first WorldCon.
Mr. Martin, you talked about your positive, joyous experiences at WorldCon. How you were welcomed as a peer, about how you had all these great, wonderful, memorable experiences.
But I’m betting before your first WorldCon a whole bunch of malignant lying bastards didn’t spread the word to thousands of complete strangers that you were a racist, sexist, homophobic warmonger who deserved to be shunned.
Side note, I’m not racist, sexist, or homophobic, but if that crowd (I’ll talk about the derogatory label my side uses that you don’t like in a minute) decides you are the enemy, they will smear you with those labels, regardless of the evidence. If you don’t believe me, read the many, many news articles about Sad Puppies that came out a few days ago working off that same script.
I met many wonderful people at that WorldCon. I also had many people treat me like garbage. I was berated by other panelists. I had people get up and leave the room when I entered. I had belligerent drunks challenging me at room parties because “Oh, it’s that fucker”. “
you write:”If a resource is finite and fixed-sum, then all it matters is its distribution. And its distribution pattern will follow the distribution of power – in other words, fighting to redistribute it can be called just and fair, even if it takes authoritarian means, because fixed-sum resource means fixed-sum authoritarianism: either it goes to those who already have power or to goes to those who fight to get more power.
I don’t think it is true that fixed sum, finite resources are distributed by power, which justifies an authoritarian taking and redistribution. In a rule of law, limited government, free enterprise society – which America used to aspire to and approach to a remarkable extent – many resources are distributed by the application of hard work, talent, luck, good character, impulse control, good values (the Ten Commandments). It is leftist ideology that assumes resources are distributed primarily by power.
>the application of hard work, talent, luck, good character, impulse control, good values
I think you are not thinking about really fixed sum, finite resources here. These are _productive_ virtues, which suggests that people who have them make more of certain resources. And this is important.
If something is truly finite, you cannot make more of it no matter how much you work on it. Hence, you mostly just fight over it.
The central point of leftism is the idea that money/wealth is a fixed sum resource, hence distributed by power. So this is really what the political argument really rages about – whether it is fixed or not fixed: grow-the-cake vs. cut-up-the-cake.
But IMHO it is very clear that if some resource WAS fixed, then it would be really so. The political debate is more about what resources are fixed and what not.
I was thinking of finite resources like getting into an Ivy League school. Being elected to Congress (one of Scotts examples of leftists targeted power elite).
Of course, you are right, financial success is not finite. That is the great downfall of the power is needed to distribute wealth self-serving ideology.
You say that the debate is centered on what resources are fixed. I thought the point was insightful that the debate is centered on process: if goods are distributed by naked power/privilege, then it is justifiable to redistribute them by government power/authoritarianism. For example, a Kennedy uses his privileged wealth to become more weathly ,hence expanding his wealth – it is not finite, but it is distributed by inheritance, which leftists consider “power,” not “good fortune.”
The idea of finite resources controlled by arbitrary power is a good approximation to some of the microeconomic situations leftists typically care about. For instance, if you are worker, your likelihood of getting a raise depends a lot more on the whim of your employer than objective measures of productivity.
I have to say that I tried to make a variant of this argument to the sad puppies. I think they should go off and start their own fandom, with it’s own cons and awards. They’re totally right that the existing fandom is elitist and discredited: the fan-base is drawn from an overwhelmingly white, aging, middle-class, college-educated demographic that does not represent the public, and the awards represent nothing but “what a small bunch of middle-class old lefties like”. As the ‘social justice’ atmosphere of SF gets steadily worse and nastier (and yes, even with RequiresHate gone, it’s going to continue to degrade) so more and more people are going to jump ship. By attempting to fight for the territory of Science Fiction, the Puppies are fighting for control of a sinking ship. They would do better to jump in the lifeboats and land on an island somewhere, and build a new community that’ll still be standing when the old one finally hits bottom.
But they won’t do that, because there’s some kind of deep-seated human need to fight for existing territory.
As for the ‘lizard mind’, all the lizards I’ve met were perfectly harmless and never caused any trouble. It’s always the primates you’ve got to watch out for.
I’ve been involved in sf fandom at least marginally for more than 25 years, attended dozens of conventions including Worldcon, and I have trouble recognizing it from your description.
Of course it’s not representative of “the public”! Most of “the public” has zero interest in sf. Of course people who read and write for fun are more likely to be college educated than the norm. That being said, almost one-third of U.S. adults have a college degree, so it’s not like that’s extraordinarily distinctive any more.
There are quite a few progressives in fandom, certainly, though I think few of them match the SJW stereotype. When it comes to politics, the libertarian perspective is substantial and at times dominant.
You don’t have to be left-wing to be appalled at Vox Day.
Pingback: Thoughts on Hatred and Persecution | askblog
I think it’s a little bit simpler in some ways than you’re making out. The problem is when either the Left or Right lose sight of individualism and either analytically assume or rhetorically proclaim that individual behaviour is determined by (e.g.) class/gender (for the Left) or national/religious/cultural (for the Right) membership or affiliation. It works that way both positively and negatively (the membership leads to bad/good things).
The Right’s been guilty of this in the past, certainly, but at the moment it’s the Left’s turn on the naughty step. The Left needs to engage in some serious self-examination at the moment, because ideologically it’s running on fumes. There’s too much automatism, too much prior assumption of the correctness of “our” socio-cultural-political analysis, which seems currently to be doing nothing more than giving some kind of imagined licence for the venting of hatred.
When an important working scientist like Tom Hunt gets persecuted by a baying mob for some mildly off-colour remarks, it’s really time to call a halt and take stock.
One would think.
Yes. The humiliation of Dr. Matt Taylor for wearing an objectional shirt while reporting on a historic scientific accomplishment is another example of what happens when the bullies are allowed to run wild.
Have you considered spending less time on the internet and more time at church?
The song ‘Tearing Everyone Down’ by Anti-Flag is about this very topic, though it doesn’t have quite as much insight.
Pingback: Getting Past the Feedback Loop | Bandits No More
Maybe true equality is when everyone feels oppressed.
Pingback: Yes, Even Polyamorous Drug Users are Conservative | Dry Hyphen Olympics
The chance that I will be in this exact situation is zero; the chance that anyone I care about will be in a situation like this is vanishingly small. But I’m concerned about this and other low-probability events because I see my ideological opponents are advancing the ball down the field in my direction in a game that’s bigger than a miscarriage of justice at a college rape tribunal.
The position you take on the Amherst rape case says important things about your understanding of the nature of sex, rape, due process, and gender equality. If elite colleges throw due process out the window in rape cases, that has no effect on me. But when I see people accepting or endorsing this, that concerns me. Those people can vote and sway others, and someone holding a belief that due process can be suspended in campus rape cases is not likely to stop there. Those views are bad on campus, but perhaps none of my concern if they stay there. If I see them metastasize into the broader culture, that’s something that I want to stop.
So when something like this happens, I think it’s important to take a roll call vote: “Show of hands, who thinks suspending our normal due process conventions is okay when rape is alleged?” And those people need to be engaged to prevent them from spreading this poison further. That’s why it rings true when you write:
Except that for anyone with perspective, it’s not the last step. There are more to follow. I don’t begrudge the SJW’s their desire to fight me at every step, but I would like them to be aware that there are many, many steps to go, and this is not the end of the world.
Of course, not being a consequentialist, I’m not tempted to “throw longer-term values” away in service of good ends.
Are there any examples of liberals getting the Brendan Eich treatment? I don’t doubt that it has happened, but I don’t know of any examples.
The closest liberals come to this phenomenon is when they’re being chastised for strongly anti-Israel views. See Norman Finkelstein’s sitch with DePaul Univ.
There was Steven Salaita getting “un-hired” for his anti-Israel tweets. Going a little further back, Ward Churchill is an ambiguous case – he was investigated after disparaging the 9/11 victims and eventually fired for actual misconduct, but it’s unlikely he would’ve been caught had he not said what he said.
Note that all the examples we’re finding are from academia, and are radical leftists getting purged by mainstream liberals. Leftists tend not to get involved with right-wing institutions to begin with.
Aside from Salaita, there was also Helen Thomas, and Jim Clancy, who were media figures; Bill Maher had his ABC show cancelled after he claimed that the 9/11 terrorists were not cowards; there was the whole Dixie Chicks fiasco back in 2003 or whatever; Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan were pressured into leaving the John Edwards campaign by The Catholic League; at around the same time as the Eich episode, Christians unsponsored 10,000 children through WorldVision after WV adopted a policy of hiring married gays; one that might be a little bit more controversial here, but I think arguably still fits is Anita Sarkeesian.
Not all of these are direct parallels with the pizza place or Eich, or Moldbug, but I think between them there’s enough similarities that they all deserve to be listed as sort-of-equivalent examples of boycotts and politically motivated firings, unhirings, and so on from the right/anti-SJW.
It seems to me that most of these are over Israel, blasphemy (my impression is mainly against Catholicism, but not sure about that), or anti-war sentiment/patriotism issues.
That’s silly. It’s abortion that is the divisive issue, which is why you see Catholics involved in it so much.
There are Catholics on both sides of the abortion issue; see Nancy Pelosi giving a theology lecture about Church teaching permitting abortion in times past.
I don’t think The Catholic League is influential enough to get people fired so easily; I think Amanda managed to make herself a big enough liability that ditching her made sense (if she’d been worth it, do you really think John Edwards’ team wouldn’t have told Bill Donoghue to take a running jump?)
That being said, I was delighted to hear Amanda got the push, because I don’t like her. So, consider me uncharitable when it comes to her!
While I was originally on Salaita’s side of the mess (I thought the purpose of the tweets was not to be antisemetic but rather just hate for Israel as a nation), his recent tweets (the most telling of which has been deleted) pretty much put that to rest; the guy’s a full on “Jewish lizard people control the world” nutbag would have have Mel Gibson backing away in discomfort.
It seems to happen to Peter Singer all the time. Just happened recently in Germany.
Invited to speak on Veganism, dis-invited for the usual reasons.
Yes, liberals get purged for being too right-wing all the time, but that’s not what Brian was asking for.
And Singer is so weird, he’s not a good example of anything. Infanticide is not “the usual reasons.” Also, he was supposed to talk on a left-wing topic, so political purity is more relevant, though philosophers’ whole job is keep an open mind.
I meant the “usual reasons” for Singer.
I don’t think he maps as too right-wing, as I’m sure any number of Catholics on this thread would be happy to confirm. But I do agree he’s harder to place.
It is a perfectly analogous situation to Moldbug though, and I didn’t see 1/1000th of the reaction – pro or con.
Pingback: Lightning Round – 2015/06/17 | Free Northerner
I think that there is not a symmetry though, or at best a shallow symmetry. Take GamerGate for example, this isn’t “Righties vs. Lefties,” This is a somewhat coalition of left leaning liberals and conservatives opposed specifically to the sort of SJW mentality.
I’ll grant there is an equivalent right wing version of SJW’s but for the most part many in the Anti-SJ brigade are not exactly conservative.
Another example of your examples being bad, the jokes. If a friend joked that they wanted to kill all white men, I would know it was obviously over the top kind of humor. Depending on the context and the person of course. Same if someone made a joke about women in the kitchen, or a racist joke, or any kind of offensive humor.
But in a different context, said by a different person, these become totally different. I have heard racist jokes from people who actually believed the stereotype behind them, and they just make me uncomfortable. The same about the extreme feminist who jokes about wanting to kill all white people.
Depending on the source, these jokes are good examples of motte-and-bailey.
Safe in the keep on the motte, everything’s just a joke. Down in the bailey, “sandwich” ever so slightly reinforces a gender role, and “kill men” ever so slightly reinforces the idea that men are the enemies of women and need to be fought.
I recall a minor scuffle last year (?) over shirts, mugs, and assorted tchotchkes bearing the phrase “I Drink Male Tears.” Jessica Valenti proudly sported one. Safe in the keep on the motte, feminists argued that this was an obvious joke that attempted to neutralize the stereotype of the man-hating feminist. Down in the bailey, men deserve some emotional discomfort because that means that the Patriarchy is being dismantled.
A curious form of dismantlement.
“It was just a joke” is classic bully behaviour. Indeed various people other than the butt of the “joke” may well find the “joke” hilarious under such conditions – getting those others to join in with you rather than supporting the butt of the “joke” is all part of the cruelty.
“Life is pain, highness. Anybody who says differently is selling something.”
I don’t believe for a second that they’re joking. The fact that I used to go along with this sort of thinking is part of how we got to this point in the first place.
Of course, I don’t think they quite realize the consequences of coming out quite so openly with their hatred.
I’m just playin… unless you’re gonna do it!
What consequences?
Pingback: Scott Alexander’s “Fearful Symmetry” | More Right
I believe Yoda said something about this:
“Fear is a path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate… leads to suffering.”
Apparently that’s true in real life.
(I hereby apologize for referencing the prequels.)
The Left has deteriorated into a pseudo-religion, with its own versions of many religious trappings. Tithing (taxation), seminaries (academia), parables (the various tropes of the Progressive Narrative) and guiltmongering (arguments from privilege) are just a few of the most prominent. I blame Separation of Church and State, because in Darwinian terms, ditching God is the natural adaptation of do-gooders and moralists barred from government by that doctrine. SJWs are merely the crusaders and inquisitors of that pseudo-religion.
Which is not to say that racism, sexism, et cetera don’t exist. It’s to say that Christianity had a lot of good in its ideas, too, and its adherents did a lot of good. But the good of neither is any relevance or comfort to the witches being hunted.
I voted Democratic in 2000, 2004 and 2008, but I wouldn’t have if I’d known this SJW drek would be the situation now, and I sure don’t plan to again until it’s fixed or its adherents made much less relevant by serious losses.
Indeed, when you use a sufficiently loose definition of “religion”, you can call just about anything a religion.
Non-merican here, but I have the impression the Dems are far to the right of SJWs. Also, what SJWs do seems to be largely unrelated to that kind of politics Dems/Reps do, like laws and stuff.
However, one advantage of a Bush-type Rep president would be that liberals would again focus on hating him instead of each other. I mean this is what basically happened IMHO. Liberals felt empty after their favorite hate target left office, so they started to pick on each other hence SJWs were born.
The extreme SJW-wing is a body unto itself. It’s definitely not the Democratic party. Go read one of their manifestos, if you can stand it. It’s barely coherent and the primary target they seem concern about is white feminists.
There’s certainly a much larger group of people with vaguely PC sentiments willing to mindlessly signal boost social media outrage when all it costs them is a click, but those are not SJWs.
That link only reinforces me in the decision that not joining up to Twitter was a good idea.
What I can make out from it is that she and some other Tweeters (is that correct?) went on strike from producing the materials they produce (artwork? opinion pieces?), and to their bemusement, alarm and anger, instead of the world ceasing to turn, the Professional Grievance Industry went merrily on without them.
That may sound dismissive of really oppressed people, but when the author is complaining that they (the Toxic Twitterers who withdrew their labour) missed out on lecture fees, flights, and opportunities for junkets, then I for one garner the impression it’s more about what goodies they can scoop up and less about education and representation of the masses.
Best I can tell, she thinks that she and her friends came up with ideas that got ignored because they’re black, trans, poor, whatever, and as soon as some Wellesley white chick with a blog said exactly the same thing, she got invited on national speaking tours.
Which may very well be true. It sounds plausible enough. Wherever you go in life, there are going to be power dynamics and the ugly, poor, socially awkward, whatever it is, get the shaft. The problematic part of it (and I hate that they ruined the term “problematic”) is their answer is to create a seething culture of rage that largely ends up directing bullying at other weak people. Like Crystal O’Connor is really some malevolent power broker.
I can’t help but feel you’re right on the mark, Deiseach.
Every other word seemed to be about some piece of financial or status-oriented recompense being denied the group the writer believes they represent. It’s a howled demand for what I believe the neoreactionaries call “spoils programs”.
(… Oh, and also it definitely looked like a group of people who don’t understand how class works, because their bullshit theory framework doesn’t account for it, being overwhelmingly created by upper-middle-class academics. Want to understand why those super-accessible Wellesley chicks get the national speaking tours and you get to sit and scream on Twitter? It’s because you just aren’t the right kind of people – and race, disability and gender are very minor factors in that compared to class.)
I’m tempted to suggest “twits”.
Democrat and Republican are both very large groups, containing multitudes. It is as much a mistake to equate Democrats with SJWs as it is to equate Republicans with libertarians, or even conservatives.
However, each of those groups are important players within the larger parties, so it’s not wise to just ignore them either, and it is true that a victory for their respective party serves to empower them as well. The fear for the each side is always that their counterpart in the other party is running the show. How true this is is hard to gauge.
As an example, I just saw a post from one of my Facebook friends about the decision to put a woman on the ten dollar. She’s preemptively angry that it will probably be a white woman. I can’t help but think if it was a black, she’d be mad if it was a straight black woman, then mad if cis, then mad if not wheelchair bound or not deaf. It’s hard for me to believe people like this even have a real agenda aside from find things to be mad about. “Agenda” seems to imply some end state you’d be satisfied with. Even Valerie Solanas had an end state. This is more like as long as there exists more than one person in the world, I’m going to work to reduce the power of the most powerful one left.
Late, but while I think the symmetry of the fear and lashing out is similar, I think that there are important differences between some of the cases talked about here.
I think of myself as part of the political mainstream relative to a lot of people around these parts of the Internet, the quiet majority whose approval picks the winner, aren’t hugely concerned about society going anywhere worse than where it is now, don’t tend to politically campaign, and there is one norm I take fairly seriously: If you’re throwing slurs at, denigrating, trying to lower the status of people who aren’t involved in the political conflict, members of a minority or similar, then you’re a bad person; you’re a culture soldier attacking innocent civilians.
If other people start doing those things to you in response, those other people are merely soldiers attacking soldiers who attacked civilians, which can potentially end messily but is generally a good thing to exist for incentive reasons.
Thus, I think the pizza parlour is in the wrong; they threatened a political status move against innocent people and got retaliation as a result. Whereas I think the people calling for the conference to boycott Moldbug were only executing a strike against another culture warrior who strikes against them, both sides picking their means mostly based on what they deem most effective, which is pretty neutral all around.
I think whether the targets are participants in the culture war or not is pretty critical when evaluating whether people are violating norms or merely engaging in tit for tat.
Does it matter to you that they intended nothing of the sort? This is your framing, completely different from theirs.
I buy that they didn’t consciously intend it as such, but I’m fairly sure the reason it feels intuitively sensible in their position to say “we won’t cater gay weddings because they’re immoral” as opposed to “we won’t cater weddings for members of other denominations because they’re immoral” is because the former’s thought of as a politically acceptable status move against a cultural enemy and the latter isn’t politically acceptable and would be a move against a present cultural ally.
I think you need to consider people who are just acting on what feels intuitive as “intending” what those intuitions are based upon.
I think it would be good if these kind of not particularly thought through things didn’t draw as unrestrained a response, though.
I can see *reasons* why the responses are so unconstrained, given how they’re responded to in turn, but the side in question has enough leeway that they could get away with a more gradual response and should.
Did anyone ask them if they’d cater weddings from other denominations? We live in a world where parents do sometimes refuse to go to their own children’s weddings for exactly this reason (also worth noting that this doesn’t mean they stopped loving their children…). But that’s not a hot political topic.
Haven’t checked the source recently, but if I recall correctly, they asked if they would serve a divorced person or a second marriage or something like that and they said yes, they would.
Or maybe I’m confusing them with another case, but I remember a bunch of my lefty friends spreading a “look at this evil small business, they hate homosexuality but they’ll serve divorced people just fine!” meme…
That’s kind of an interesting perspective I hadn’t thought of. Voluntary culture warriors are fair game.
That’s very unfair to the pizza place, though. Go watch the interview. It’s their teenage-looking daughter working the cash register that some reporter trolled into stuttering her way through saying sure, if someone wanted us to cater a gay wedding, we wouldn’t. I’m almost completely certain the chances of a gay couple ever going to Memories Pizza to ask to have their wedding catered were indistinguishable from zero. Hours later they’re getting Yelp-mobbed and receiving death threats and every liberal activist type I knew on Facebook was just overjoyed. That was a seriously low point, man. It’s damn close to finding the absolute weakest target possible to pick on just to score points.
I guess “fair game” is accurate and the connotations reasonable. I tend to view it as a bunch of warriors fighting other warriors- it’s sad that’s it’s going on and it’d be good for whoever is going to win to win as soon as possible and the conflict to end, but none involved are morally blameworthy for merely fighting, only for the causes they choose to fight for.
I think the entrapment aspect to this case was bad. I get the idea of going after people who are inclined to kind of opportunistically wage a culture war and bide quietly in the absence of an opportunity, since it’s seeming like the cultural conflict in general is going that way in the absence of any kind of surrender. But I think they still shouldn’t do it.
I think they still shouldn’t go around asking people unprompted, and would have no problems with a negative reaction to the TV place on the grounds that they shouldn’t be going around trying to get people (especially teenagers) to admit to bad things, but that doesn’t make the pizza place in the right for having that intent either.
To continue the war metaphor, if a bunch of soldiers come into town and demand to be fed and quartered at my expense then does resisting them make me an enemy soldier and thus fair game?
If someone is minding their own business (literally in this case) and someone else comes in demanding their support or else, only one of them is plausibly a culture warrior. “Bring me Earth and Water” is not an innocent request but a demand for submission, and retaliating against polite refusal is naked aggression.
Refusing to trade with one person in the same manner you trade with someone else is both allowed (where not disallowed by law) and a pretty straightforward and obvious move against that person, and it’s unreasonable to say that they don’t get to respond by refusing to trade when you want to.
Denigrating a person is also both allowed and a pretty obvious move against that person, and it’s unreasonable to say that you get to do it to them without them doing it to you.
And because you don’t get to set the bounds of every conflict to be those which most benefit you, people get to respond to one of those legal acts with the other. And if there’s more of those people than there are of you, that will probably suck for you.
Doing any of that *can* be moral enough if people are doing it to you first and you’re not going to complain they’re breaking the rules when they respond in kind.
But it’s not moral to do it against innocent people, and treating gay people as collectively responsible for the existence of your enemies is no more moral than treating white men as collectively responsible for the existence of your enemies. You can’t treat them all as soldiers just because they’re the base soldiers are recruited from.
Not “person”, “ceremony”.
The mirror image wouldn’t be, say, having a “no Christians” sign on the door. It would be saying “no, I wouldn’t cater at a pro-life fundraiser event”.
Given that the purchaser of a product has full rights to refuse to trade with any seller for any reason whatsoever, why should it ever be “disallowed by law” for a seller to do likewise?
In plainer words – why is it that I have the right to refuse to buy a pizza from someone because I don’t like their religious choices, but the pizza parlor does NOT have the right to refuse to sell me a pizza if they don’t like mine.
@Caue: A closer equivalent would be refusing to provide food to a wedding between divorced people, or refusing to provide food to a wedding between two immigrants you don’t think should have been allowed into the country, or an atheist refusing to provide food for a religious wedding. And none of those things would be okay either. I can’t agree with the premise that a wedding constitutes a political campaigning event merely because of the people involved in it.
@MattM: I don’t think refusing to buy from someone because they’re a member of a group is any more moral than refusing to sell to someone, and I think refusing to buy or to sell are just as reasonable reactions to someone who has engaged in culture warring against you, yours, or people you sympathise with.
My core objection is to considering people who are getting gay married to have done that simply because they are doing so.
All our laws are biased against employers and sellers in favor of employees and customers. This is because there are more employees than employers, and everyone is a buyer, but not everyone is a seller.
And we wonder why there are so few good jobs.
I was going less for “political” and more for “against your morality”.
As an atheist, it wouldn’t be emotionally bad or morally worrisome for me to serve a wedding, gay or otherwise, so that doesn’t work. Any analogy must take into consideration that this would be forcing someone into doing something they think is morally wrong (and maybe icky as well).
@JBeshir,
So according to that logic, if I ask a Hindu restaurateur to cater my bullfight and he naturally refuses to do so, then he is a culture warrior and it would be proportionate and reasonable for me to organize a ruinous boycott on that basis?
Or better yet, what about a skinhead who goes to a black barbershop every time he needs a fresh pre-rally shave. Not a very smart move but then again skinheads aren’t notoriously smart guys. Can he retaliate against the barber in good conscience if he says no?
The problem that I’m underlining is that coercing people into participating in events that they find objectionable is in-and-of-itself an act of aggression.
If you think your cause is righteous enough to justify random acts of aggression, well that’s on you. But saying that your targets are the ones who started the fight is insane.
@Ever An Anon: Yes, I think it would be unreasonable to tell skinheads or neo-nazis or whatever that they weren’t allowed to respond to being boycotted with a boycott of their own. They’re doing a bunch of morally wrong things but simply “fighting back” isn’t in and of itself one of them.
I certainly wouldn’t accept anyone telling me “this person has refused to serve a friend of yours but you still have to do business with them” so I can’t reasonably expect them to accept it either.
On the Hindi case, they definitely are trying to influence the world in the direction of their cultural values, and they definitely are refusing to serve you in the process of doing so. I’m not sure if “a guy who happens to be organising a bullfight” is as clearly invalid a class to refuse as “a guy who happens to be getting married to another guy rather than a girl”, and possibly norms against using gender as a determining factor in the morality of actions come into that.
But I am pretty sure that you and anyone who agrees with you are permitted to decide not to do business with anyone who decides to not do business with you.
A trickier question is whether I’d have a problem with them being called horrible people for it. I think perhaps people are entitled to set out the case for why they think it was immoral but perhaps it would be good if there was a norm against harsh personal attacks against people who at least semi-credibly wouldn’t be engaging in personal attacks if the tables were turned, including the non-hypothetical pizza place.
I don’t think that’s as critical or easy to enforce a norm as “political people, no screwing over random people to make a point”, though.
“Or better yet, what about a skinhead who goes to a black barbershop every time he needs a fresh pre-rally shave. ”
How is this any different than a gay couple going to a small christian bakery and demanding a wedding cake?
I mean, other than the fact that most Christians are totally harmless and non-violent. My guess is you don’t see a lot of gay couples going to bakeries owned by fundamentalist muslims and demanding such things, but I’m just speculating here…
Because the skinhead is culture warring against you, calling for you to be at the least inconvenienced, so you’re allowed to defect against them as a tit for tat, but gay people getting married aren’t in the general case, so you aren’t allowed to defect against them in the general case.
Except we aren’t talking about merely “gay people getting married.” The pizza parlor is not off on some giant crusade to prevent gay weddings from ever happening.
We are talking about the subset of “gay people getting married and demanding Christians cater their ceremony, when multiple non-Christian options who would happily cater the ceremony are readily available” which I would suggest absolutely is an act of culture warring.
No, that’s not true. They did not say “We will refuse to cater a gay marriage iff the couple in question has spoken against religious freedom” or similar, they said they would refuse to cater a gay marriage, which means the relevant category is “anyone getting gay married”. Any other category would have to be implied by that.
Setting aside that the people that they’d refuse would thus also include anyone who would simply sadly go somewhere else instead, to engage the stronger question of whether it would be okay to refuse someone if it *was* known that refusing them would result in them starting a boycott…
People don’t get to have their legal use of refusal of service and speech against a party be justified self-defence, and the legal use of refusal of service and speech by said party and their supporters back afterwards be an offensive act, just because they had a fairly good guess that the otherwise innocent party would respond with tit for tat.
It’s not okay to deem people as having been aggressive towards you just because they’re the sort of people who would defend themselves if attacked.
You know, there’s a very simple solution to all this that nobody seems to have discovered.
If you don’t want to serve $GROUP, simply make it embarrassing for them to hire you.
For our hypothetical atheist caterer who doesn’t want to cater to religious activities, simply have all your catering equipment, worker aprons, etc, tastefully labeled with things like “THERE IS NO GOD, STUPID.”
Then say to anyone who asks that you will cheerfully serve all comers, so long as they are not so unspeakably rude as to demand that your freedom of speech be restricted.
Also, should go without saying, but for clarity, I also think death threats and similar things are just not okay from anyone for any reason. That’s a law, which includes things going on between the culture warriors, that we can reasonably expect everyone to stick to.
That pizza place was only a culture war combatant in the same way that every military-age male that gets exploded by a drone is a combatant. We may have defined it that way to soothe our consciences, but in reality, the decision to lob a missile in a given direction doesn’t mean the people on the receiving end weren’t actually civilians.
I feel I’m getting a bit far into the metaphor here and need to emphasise that a culture war is a thing on an entirely different level to actual violent conflict, but I think it’s more analogous to asking someone if they’d kill an American (not essentially a soldier) if they saw them, and responding to a “Yes” by deeming them a combatant.
They haven’t actually *done* anything yet, but they’ve said that they would if given the chance.
There’s significant issues with going out *looking* for people and asking them questions like that as a practice, but I think in the individual case it’s a fair judgement.
Expanding the category of “soldier” to cover the pizza place effectively obliterates the category of civilian. Once you have inquisitors going out and asking everybody where they stand on the issue, and are designating anybody who answers wrong as a “soldier,” then “soldier” becomes equivalent to “thinks the wrong thing.” This is what happened to the pizza place.
In that case, the only work “civilian” is doing is protecting your own people, as long as nobody on the other side is similarly canvassing.
No, just because thinking one wrong thing (“I should engage in war if I get the chance”) makes you a combatant doesn’t mean thinking *any* wrong thing does.
It *is* possible to think “I don’t agree with you, but I’m going to accept that we disagree and participate in civil society and follow norms of providing services to people I disagree with in that regard.”, and that’s what should be expected of a person in a modern society.
Not for them to go “I don’t agree with you, and I’ve lost the public debate over cultural norms, but if I get the chance I’m still going to try to enforce my cultural norms on people just to make a political point to them, their feelings be damned.”
No one should go after people for what they think, but if you’re waging a guerilla culture war, other culture warriors are not morally bad for fighting you, and iff you’re harming random people in the process of doing so you’re bad for doing it.
Thus, I think the pizza parlour is in the wrong; they threatened a political status move against innocent people and got retaliation as a result.
Can we at least get this correct, before commenting one way or the other?
Sequence of events:
(1) Indiana considers conscience protection/religious exemption/encoding discrimination and homophobia into law law (choose as you see fit and suits your narrative)
(2) Local TV station sends reporter out to small towns for reaction
(3) Reporter, doing her trawl of small businesses and locals for reaction, walks into pizza parlour, asks her question “Do you agree with the law?”
(4) Young adult daughter of owner, who is behind the till, thinks law is okay, agrees with right of people to refuse custom based on conscience, cites as hypothetical example “If we were asked to cater a wedding…”
(5) What daughter does NOT say: “We don’t or won’t serve gays here. If a gay or lesbian walked in here to buy a pizza, we’d kick them right out”.
(6) For whatever reason, possibly because most of the small town reaction is against the law but we don’t know, the local station led report with the pizza parlour. Anchor introduces it with “I’m here in welcoming South Bend, but it’s different elsewhere” (presumably, but again we don’t know, meaning that South Bend is LGBT friendly and inclusive but the small towns are hotbeds of homophobia – which, given that they went with the pizza parlour as the only one expressing support for the law, probably ain’t the case, but again we don’t know)
(7) Instant storm of reaction, with everyone and their granny taking it the way you did: Homophobic pizza parlour declares they refuse to serve gays! (Again, NOT what they said; anybody can walk in off the street and buy a pizza no bother, rather they were supporting the law on conscience protection grounds for certain exceptions).
Now, you can say if they sell pizza, they have to sell to anyone for any event they want catered. Or you can say that every business has the right to refuse service.
But at least can we get it clear they did NOT say “We refuse to serve all LGBT people because we don’t want them eating our pizza beside good, normal, ordinary citizens”?
Yes.
I’m glad that we’ve moved on from “I’m not doing any harm to anyone, I just don’t want to serve gay people, and anyone forcing me to do so is the real norm violator” to “I’m not doing any harm to anyone, I just don’t want to serve gay people who are getting married, and anyone forcing me to do so is the real norm violator”, but fundamentally “gay people getting married” are not people who are hurting you and you shouldn’t be making their lives worse to make political moves.
If “not serving pizza at their hypothetical wedding” counts as “making their lives worse” to a degree it justifies a public feeding frenzy against them, you’ve just created an insane amount of obligations that can be exploited at-will by anyone who just wants to hurt another person and get away with it.
The huge feeding frenzy was over the top, but that doesn’t put them in the right to say they’d refuse service.
I don’t think the obligations I describe are different from those which have existed for a long time. It isn’t like refusing to serve an interracial marriage would have been thought okay by a majority any time recently, the recent change is that people have noticed that refusing to serve a gay people is equivalently inconveniencing random people to make a point.
Is there something you would be willing to do for a person?
Great! I demand you do it for me, and if you don’t, I will have your livelihood and your interpersonal relationships annihilated. If you do it, I will just demand it again, and again, and again, and again, until eventually you do not meet my demand satisfactorily and I get to turn the dogs on you. Because this entire thing is just an excuse to allow me to hurt people.
You insist on this “to make a point”, but it looks like an Ideological Turing Test failure. Some religious people take religion seriously, believe it or not.
@Caue: I believe they are taking their religion seriously, and believe that they believe that their religion requires them to make a political move affecting people who’ve done nothing other than be gay people getting married.
I just think that this doesn’t make that morally correct to do. There are times people need to choose between violating their religion and doing something morally wrong, and this is one of them. Like a lot of other people doing morally wrong things they probably don’t think they are, though.
“fundamentally “gay people getting married” are not people who are hurting you ”
I know it is an obviously insane thing to do, but please entertain this thought for a while: not everyone shares your moral views. Not everyone thinks that their ethical sorting algorithm should be based solely on whether such and such action is directly harmful to their moral subject.
Are we arrived on the same page?
Regardless, even holding harm as the input of every moral function, society is a pretty complex system, and some would argue still (I know, these people are nuts, but they can’t help it) that fiddling with certain social norms will destabilise society in ways that will prove harmful to some of its members down the line.
So, they could make the argument that (and please, suspend your disbelief on this, it’s just a silly thought experiment) although the lovely Mr. John and Mr. Robert’s marriage would not be harming them, the event would be part of a process that would end up hurting, say, their grandchildren. I know – outlandish, right?
Not at all.
I really do think that I will have to spell it out to you: you don’t seem to be properly discerning the source and terms of the conflict. Not even starting to, in fact. Every single one of your posts is an example of communication failure.
Moldbug’s participation in a ‘culture war’ is discussing and pontificating on a blog. I’m not sure if it’s merely voicing political opinions that qualifies someone as a combatant in your view, or if these ideas also have to outside of the mainstream, but it doesn’t seem like much of a standard for promoting the free exchange of ideas.
I think not being politically active or involved in the situation calls for a pretty solid norm that people shouldn’t be targeted in a culture war, and that Moldbug doesn’t really qualify for that but random gay people getting married along with white men in general, rich people, poor people, etc, do.
I could see some kind of norm like that for the minimally politically active, especially those discussing ideas dryly and without campaigning, and I would definitely like norms about proportionality and decency within the politically active, too, but anything even remotely resembling a norm amongst the politically active people has someone start jumping out from behind it, cause trouble, then retreat behind it and go “you can’t touch me”, which naturally ends with the norm getting smashed to little pieces with lots of shouting, so in all honesty I don’t have much hope for norms that’d protect exchange of politically sensitive ideas until things quieten down and that stops happening.
In the meantime I think this certainly shouldn’t be spilling over to other people.
JBeshir, you have literally just attempted to define public ceremonies as not being speech. That’s not just wrong, it’s beyond parody.
Any definition of culture warrior as a “deprotected” category that picks up Moldbug also includes every gay person to ever post photos of their wedding to Facebook.
I haven’t defined it as not being speech, I’ve defined it as not being a political move. Not all speech is motivated by desire to create a political effect or message, not everyone is a culture warrior, and I don’t think posting wedding photos qualifies in the absence of a particular context that gave it a meaning as a “coded” message or similar.
I’m not nominating it as a “deprotected” category; they get the same legal protections as anyone else.
I’m saying that beyond legal protections, legal actions harming people who definitely are not even part of the conflict are clearly, straightforwardly, and categorically bad, as compared to legal, non-deceptive moves against people who make political moves themselves, which probably require dropping to the object level to judge and where it is far more reasonable for people to differ in the absence of any clearly agreed on norms.
If your definition of political move is insensitive enough to intent that it applies to people who passively avoid being part of something they consider morally wrong, then I don’t see how you get to say that posting these wedding photos isn’t a political move if somebody else happens to read it that way.
I do not have a non-intuitive way to say what is and isn’t a political move, one of those “I know it when I see it” things, but refusal of service based on group membership seems like it’d almost always be an example and posting pictures in the course of going about life without thinking about what other people should and shouldn’t be doing seems like it’d almost always not be.
It is surprising to me that it’s a point of difference, and I wonder what I can learn from that.
What you can learn from it is that you picked your winners and worked backwards, as nearly everyone does.
I don’t think it’s entirely that; my position is fairly nuanced in a way that doesn’t fit with it being simply about being convenient for one side.
I’m pretty consistent on these principles; I agree with the posts here that a lot of the coded attacks like “white dudes”, going after people because of jokes made in personal conversations, the whole thing about deliberately making people feel threatened, are clearly wrong and not at all murky, because the means by which they’re being targeted means that they clearly aren’t being based on anything the target did politically.
And I think most people would regard those acts as “a different sort of thing” than, say, speech and refusal of services aimed at a blogger who wrote posts about how there should be anti-discrimination-laws, even if they disagreed strongly with both. The former is attacking the innocent, the latter is “attacking one of ours” or “attacking one of theirs”.
I like the increased noise about those acts. I think there might be an awareness problem involved; I don’t know how typical I am, but I mostly hear about them through SSC, and when I’ve mentioned, say, Scott Aaronson’s problems to a friend involved in a university LGBT support/advocacy organisation in the US they hadn’t heard of them before either.
I’d *like* there to be more norms to how political people treat other political people. I’ll agree that there’s not absolutely none, bringing up Aaronson reminded me of one- people who are describing their own suffering as a result of problems should be treated sympathetically even if you disagree with their proposed solutions and them doing said description has a negative impact on your game of ethnic tension. The response he got was awful, and calling out the people who did it as having violated standards of behaviour was entirely correct.
But mostly when norms are discussed I see a lot of people proposing norms that are clearly primarily intended to improve their chances of winning, then being told off for acting in bad faith, and everyone walking away more pissed off at each other. I’m pessimistic about that changing until people think norms are more important than winning.
I’d *like* a government intervention in the form of a law against firing people for their political views, affecting both sides, because even with crappy enforcement it’d lower the upper bound on escalation. I don’t see that as likely to happen either, though.
I think probably my main bias is that I view the people who are engaged in this “fearful symmetry” behaviour as a separate group from the regular population, kind of suspect they have a bubble thing going where their friends on the same side are equally terrified and the people on the other side they deal with are also the most terrified of that side, and so am more bothered when things going on inside that group spill out of it than about things going on internal to it.
The objection to catering for gay weddings wasn’t “This supports our enemies in the culture war, must crush!” but “It is literally impossible for two men to get married, and if I act like it isn’t — say, by facilitating an event where two men intend to ‘marry’ each other — I’ll be helping to propagate a falsehood. Therefore, I’m not going to facilitate such events.” Surely you can see the difference between these two positions?
The difference isn’t material when the reason they’re so concerned about propagating a falsehood on this and exactly this, as opposed to propagating a falsehood about divorcees, or as opposed to propagating a falsehood that gluttony isn’t a sin, or whatever, is because it’s a political move right now.
I do not think this is something they are consciously aware of. Most people who do political actions go “social intuitions determine good political moves for them and theirs” -> “social intuitions highlight these things as *really important* to the conscious mind” -> “complex conscious rationalisation process occurs” ->”people do them” rather than consciously engaging in politics.
This kind of indirection doesn’t exempt you from norms the way “I completely coincidentally and for reasons entirely unrelated to politics said something that was a political move” might, though.
Well nobody asked them whether they’d serve a wedding of divorced people, or whether they’d serve somebody who was (for example) eating so much that he was clearly making himself sick, or whatever. Presuming that they’re only concerned about one particular issue when that’s all they were asked about is unsound.
Incidentally, if a fundamentalist government were somehow elected, and decided to make every businessperson sign a declaration saying that homosexuality is an abomination against the laws of God, would anybody who baulked at doing so suddenly become a “culture warrior”? Would the government be justified in forcing said people to quit their business?
That’s a new question to me and I’ve only thought about it a little, so I might be missing something important, but I’d say the answer is yes; they’re trying to change society so that either that specific symbolic declaration or symbolic declarations in general aren’t demanded. The only reason it’s distinct in the mind from just being an another arbitrary form to sign is the cultural or political effects.
There’s nothing wrong with campaigning for a better culture, it’s just that there’s a distinction between said people fighting with others who are trying to pull things in a different direction, and said people applying legal but atypical and unpleasant actions to innocent people as part of their fighting, and the former is an ugly mess that’s hard to judge and full of mostly tactical accusations and the latter is definitely not okay.
In one episode of the WW2 crime drama series Foyle’s War, there’s a scene where a conscientious objector is up before the local magistrate asking to be excused from military service.
“If,” says the magistrate, “you were in the middle of an air raid, and you found an abandoned baby lying in the middle of the street, would you pick it up and take it to safety?”
“Of course,” replies the objector.
“Aha!” says the magistrate. “But such an action could be construed as helping the war effort! You’re no real conscientious objector at all, you’re just a coward!”
The above is a slightly long-winded way of saying that your attitude in this thread seems to be like that of the magistrate in the TV show. Like him, you’ve broadened the definition of fighting in the war so wide that it’s practically impossible for somebody to count as a civilian, short of retiring from civilisation and living as a hermit in the mountains. It’s clearly ridiculous to claim that someone rescuing an abandoned baby is supporting the war, but I don’t see how it’s any less ridiculous to claim that somebody passively declining to take part in a particular ceremony is some kind of guerrilla waiting for a chance to ambush innocent people.
I was thinking about the symmetry between Irene Gallo and Tim Hunt. Everyone I’ve seen (including my own lizard brain) supports precisely one of them and condemns the other.
But trying to think about it objectively, the situations are pretty similar. They made an inaccurate sweeping generalisation about a group, in a way that’s not directly relevant to their job, but which slandered a lot of people they work with/for. They should probably either both be fired, or both be let alone to express their private opinions.
I think one difference between cases is the difference in outcome: as far as I know, Gallo wasn’t fired or forced to resign, and the public statement from Tor didn’t so much complain about about what Gallo said, but that she said it in a way that implicated Tor.
Oh, it seems that the RPs are (now?) trying to get Gallo fired. That, I think goes far beyond a fair and proportionate response. The internet hate machine should not take scalps like that, not for one side, not for the other.
“Slander” only applies to what one of them did, though.
And this symmetry only holds if intention doesn’t count for anything.
Like a lot non-feminists, I was freaked out by the recent story about a man who was raped while unconscious being declared the rapist and expelled from college without getting to tell his side of the story.
I freaked out about this for a somewhat different reason, it gave me strong echoes of high school in the early 80’s, where I was being repeatedly sexually assaulted by a group of girls. Eventually during one incident I had a full blown panic attack. (I have had a severe anxiety/panic disorder since I was 11, though it wasn’t diagnosed until much later.) As I fled, I knocked one girl over, which got me dragged in for attacking a girl, threatened with being reported to the police as a sex criminal, and finally forced to make an apology in front of the class. That I had been pinned against the wall and yanked on as though I was a broken lawnmower was irrelevant, men can’t be raped, therefore I was the attacker and had to be punished.
Yes, I grew up in a place that was probably rather backwards in sexual and racial politics even for it’s time, I’ve spent my whole life trying to get further away from that environment. The Fearful Symmetry I see is that suddenly it’s in front of me again. Social Justice pattern matches all too well to the things I’ve been running from for 40 years. Men are always the sexual aggressors, well, I’ve just covered that one. Women need safe spaces, yes, they were called ‘kitchens’, and the fact that women needed them was proof that they shouldn’t be allowed out of them. White men are responsible for everything, well, that’s why white men need to be in charge, so they can discharge that responsibility properly.
What I have finally been convinced of is that there is no place for my kind in this Brave New World of social justice, just as I didn’t fit in the conservative trying-to-be-50’s environment I grew up in. Somehow I need to keep going for a few more years, until my daughters can fend for themselves, then I can rest. Until then, I will follow blogs like this one, and watch for some reason.
I’m really sorry to hear about what you went through, and I wish there was a way to properly express my sympathies through text. In lieu of that, I hope your life since then has been a happier one and wish you greater happiness in the future.
Anyway, I know how appealing it can be to want to “rest” and it would be a lie to say that I never feel that way myself. But even in our highly politicized society it is still possible to find sources of meaning and good places for oneself relatively insulated from political concerns. Please reconsider whether rest is really what you want, because it’s not a choice that can be unmade.
Thank you for your concern, I should apologise for having posted. My post here seems to have been an early stage of something of a breakdown I had over the weekend.
Unfortunately, escaping political concerns is not an available option in the foreseeable future, my wife, eldest daughter, and numerous friends are all hellbent on forcing me to conform to their current social justice agenda.
I did manage almost 20 years of a relatively happy life, with only scattered outbreaks of my mental issues taking over, so I will accept what I had.
Current events, oh so relevant at showing the fearful ASYMMETRY
https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
Context is one developer an an OSS project tweeted about transgender people denying reality. Twitter hate mob arrives on project demanding his dismissal. Response is “no”. Money quote: “We’re doing what must done for this to happen: making it socially unacceptable to have an opinion that discriminates people.”
311 comments in 3 hours. Jesus.
Holy shit, I know some of those people.
And now I kind of wish I didn’t.
Look at this twitter thread, where the dude’s trying to say he’s sorry and asking what he can do to help. Do they even realize or is everything just insta-boycott?
These outrage carnivals have (at least) two effects; directly disincentivizing badspeak and establishing that -they- are watching.
When you assume that the first is the primary goal and the second a side-effect, things don’t quite add up. Targets seem too haphazard, punishment seems too disproportional.
If you switch things around and consider ‘bite your tongue’ to be the primary message, and the exact targets mostly inconsequential, it all makes perfect sense.
In fact, the more trivial the offense, the less just the process and the more disproportionate the reaction – the stronger the message.
Sort of related. Is there any hope of culturally (not legally) punishing people who very casually accuse people of sexism and racism?
Example, I read an interview about Rand Paul in which he said his favorite band was Rush. Apparently, in response to this, a Rush band member commented that it “is obvious that Rand Paul hates women and brown people.”
Say what you will about Rand Paul, but I don’t think it’s “obvious” he hates women and brown people. I’m not saying he’s a great champion of women’s rights, he’s just not more racist or sexist than average, or at least gives no indication of being so (actually, he tries very hard to signal the opposite by speaking at historically black colleges, etc. though one could argue he’s just fishing for votes, etc.).
What’s obvious to me is that the band member hasn’t actually looked into Rand Paul’s personal life and come to this conclusion. What he’s done instead is thought “conservative politician=hates women and minorities.” And in the past I’m sure people have patted him on the back when he made this connection.
Now considering how harmful accusations of racism and sexism can be to a career, to say nothing of one’s feelings, shouldn’t such accusations be policed a little more carefully, or shouldn’t one at least get more flack for making them groundlessly?
I hate to bring in this issue too, but it reminds me of the people who are reluctant to ever prosecute or even denounce obviously false rape allegations, even when those allegations have resulted in men spending years in prison. They are afraid it will send the wrong message. I get the sense that the SJW crowd is also afraid that if they ever rebuke someone for making unfair, thoughtless accusations of racism and sexism, that it might somehow discourage people speaking up when real racism or sexism is happening.
I think 1. at this point, there’s hardly a risk of people being too afraid to level accusations of racism or sexism. 2. This just makes accusations of racism and sexism lose all their sting because they are thrown around so freely as to be almost a joke.
If that’s true, I would expect the results to be similar to the climate around rape: Most of the dangerous racists are able to skate because they have power and social cachet, most victims of racism are unable to do anything about it, but false accusations of racism become very attractive power plays and non-racists are routinely run through the wringer.
All of which is certainly consistent with the existence of Rachel Dolezal, the non-improvement of the black economic situation despite the sanctions on bias against them, etc.
A lawsuit by the named Puppies against Gallo and Tor would be a convenient starting place for a public lesson. All the evidence is public already, her statement is short and simple, and everyone already knows the story; there’s nothing complicated that they’d need to explain to their lawyer.
Disclaimer: That’s speculation about speculation. Someone elsewhere speculated that Tor’s quick and loud apology was from fear of lawsuit.
Well one traditional legal answer to this problem was to impose the penalty for the charge on those who made false accusations. (Granted, you asked for a cultural answer, but the theory stands).
This implies that all we need now is a twitterstorm centered on that band member.
Surely this symmetric and just action will make for a better world!
More practically, I think the only way that comes to pass is if – instead of getting patted on the back – people receive negative reactions for making that accusation. And that seems unlikely to come to pass while either racism exists or is useful as a shibboleth. Remove both of those conditions, and I’m quite optimistic!
Well I certainly think that there *should* be legal consequences for false accusations of rape, because being found guilty of rape gets you sent to prison.
Being accused of racism or sexism cannot result in a prison sentence, though I’m sure some people are working on that.
Concur that there should be legal consequences for willfully false allegations… but that’s hard to prove, and very few are interested in doing so of late.
Quite the reverse.
In US law, I believe the burden of proof is on the accuser. If zie cannot prove zis charge is true, zie is liable for damages.
I doubt that this case would get much in damages, but it would be a considerable nuisance to Tor, thus a heads-up for others. Which does sound symmetrical, but Gallo is not an obscure, random target; she struck a hard blow, which started the encounter.
The issue with serious consequences if that you’re chilling people who feel guilty and recant. Which is a greater effect remains to be seen.
In how many cases has a recant actually stopped the firestorm, or given much help to the victim? It did not in Jonathan Ross’s case, according to notes-the-commenter.
In the US, the burden of proof is always on the “accuser,” i.e. the plaintiff or the State, in legal situations. (The fact that this is arguably not true in some private investigation systems is one of the major reasons people object to them so strongly.)
However, except under very limited circumstances (e.g. what are called “anti-SLAPP” statutes) plaintiffs rarely have to pay defendants if they lose the case (fail to meet their burden.) We do not have a “loser pays” system. In the case of criminal law, if the accused cannot afford an attorney, the State will provide one for free, but it’s worth about what most free stuff is. If you pay a defense attorney and the State loses its case, it is not required to compensate you.
Can’t speak for other countries, but in America it IS in fact illegal to knowingly falsely accuse someone of a crime. Falls under a combination of perjury and obstruction of justice criminally, and could potentially meet defamation or slander in a civil case.
Of course, given the political climate around “sexual assault” police are VERY reluctant to prosecute false accusers, for obvious reasons. It only actually happens in the most egregious, obvious, and outrageous cases. The punishment for “false accusations” is also significantly less than the punishment for sexual assault is, so if someone is REALLY out to get you, it’s not that huge of a deterrent.
Then you also have to consider that many of the high profile recent cases of false rape accusations never involved the criminal justice system at all. They all were adjudicated through the bizarre extra-judicial tribunal councils that various universities have set up because some bizarre reading of Title IX makes them think they have to.
The cynic might suggest that this is the exact answer to the “why didn’t they go to the police?” question that pops up so often in these stories. Because they know that the police have to do a legitimate investigation, and that they get really pissed off if they find out you were making things up and wasting their time. As far as I know, the university justice systems do NOT punish false accusers whatsoever, but I could be wrong on this.
As Eliezer of Less Wrong said, “arguments are soldiers”. Friendly fire isn’t a mark of friendship.
When I saw this post, I thought to myself that I really really REALLY shouldn’t click on it because it will make my gut churn and make me cranky for two or three days. Then I clicked on it, and not only did I not become angry, I felt distinctly enlightened and contemplative. This is not the first time this has happened on SSS, though it’s rare. This never happens on other blogs.
There’s an ancient Rationalist myth that says if anyone ever manages to read all the way through Mencius Moldbug’s entire site, it will immediately be replaced by something twice as long and five times as hard to understand.
There is another, more ancient myth that says this has already happened several times.
It seems to me that the really consequential difference in the two cases is that in the pizza joint/customer relationship, the customer has the power: there are many pizza joints and customers have a choice over which ones they choose to give their business to.
But in the case of the tech conference, the shoe is on the other foot: the tech conference organizer has the power: there are many more persons who would love to present at a tech conference than ever will get the chance; the organizer can choose to award the slot to any one of dozens of people. By making political orthodoxy a pre-requsite for being a presenter at their tech conference, the organizers were wielding a strong weapon with financial and career success implications. A ‘chilling’ effect on freedom of speech seems to be not only the inevitable effect, but the DESIRED effect. Self censor yourself, or pay the consequences in your career. Most people are, rationally, cowards, and bullies depend on that fact.
So, I for one, say your gut instinct was correct. The two cases aren’t commensurate. The power relationships aren’t the same. A more equivalent situation would have been if the pizza place had refused to HIRE someone as a manager because they were gay.
(This point may have been made already in the 1k+ comments above me.)
I couldn’t get past the Yarvin/Pizzeria analogy. I intuitively felt that there was an important difference. After thinking about it for a bit, I decided that the critical difference was between a refusal to take part in an objectionable ACTION, and a refusal to deal with an objectionable PERSON, even though the dealings had nothing to do with the objections.
By analogy, suppose Jimbo walks into a Jewish Deli and asks them to cater lunch at his conference, “Holocaust: myth or fabrication?”, organized by his organization, The Fourth Reich. The owner refuses, saying he can’t in good conscience take part in such activity. I wouldn’t object to the owner’s decision in this case.
But suppose Jimbo only wanted the deli to cater his 4-year old daughter’s birthday party. The owner is about to agree, when the assistant whispers to the owner, “That man is a neo-nazi and anti-semite!” If the owner then says, “Get out of my store! We don’t serve your kind here!” I would certainly object: this is discrimination based on a person’s political views, which are unrelated to the service requested.
Now let’s apply this principle to the two cases you considered. Suppose Yarvin’s talk had been entitled, “The natural superiority of the white man”. Then I wouldn’t have objected if the conference organizers had decided not to give him a platform to espouse his views. Likewise, if the pizzeria owners had stated that they would refuse to sell pizza slices to gay men, I would strongly object. That would be discrimination against a person.
So it seems the principle works: reversing this parameter reverses how I feel about these two cases. And while I can come up with edge cases that don’t allow this principle to properly separate cases, it seems quite accurate overall in capturing my views.
So, can a handful of you refreshingly reasonable people spend a few minutes over on RationalWiki and smack some sense into them? :/
ಠ_ಠ
That would be a profoundly unpleasant waste of time.
Just like when they accuse someone of being a “Nice Guy”, the proper response is “Of course! When is being nice a bad thing?”
Of course, they’ll deny that is a valid comparison, because of [reason they constructed on the spot and will discard the instant the conversation ends].
Unless you really enjoy Rationalwiki (for some reason), I’d recommend you just drop it and ignore it.
I wrote (offline) a long response to a long post by John Picone, and was then unable to find the post in order to put up my response. I don’t know if I am doing something wrong or if he removed the post, but here is my response:
“People in the 1900s didn’t have many ways of causing significant changes that would persist for centuries.”
They believed they did—as in all three of my examples. Using up all of England’s coal, for instance, would have been a significant change that would have persisted for much longer than that.
My point was not about what they could do but about what they believed. If anything, the world is changing faster now than then, making it even harder to predict future problems and solutions.
“Higher CO2 content increases productivity for plants, as long as they have enough water and a good temperature range.”
Higher CO2 reduces water requirements, as I already pointed out.
“Those conditions may obtain in some parts of the world. I doubt it’ll increase production worldwide, and I expect the effects of previous prime agricultural areas no longer being prime agricultural areas, at least for the crops they usually grow, will suck.”
As I keep pointing out, we are talking about very slow change. Looking at the world at present, do you observe that if two places have average temperatures a few degrees apart, they grow not only different varieties but different species? Wheat is grown in North America over a range of 1500 miles North to South, from Alberta to Texas. Varieties vary with climate, but what do you think the odds are that, even without AGW, agricultural areas will keep growing the same varieties of the same crops a century from now?
“The IPCC’s SLR estimates are likely low.”
The simplest test is past performance. Was the SLR projection in the first IPCC report higher or lower than what actually happened? For temperature it was higher—have you checked SLR?
The second test is bias. It’s easy enough, reading IPCC reports, especially the summary for policy makers, to see what conclusion the authors want readers to reach. That suggests that any bias is likely to be in the direction of exaggerating the arguments for that conclusion, not of minimizing them.
“I do think that a substantial fraction of large cities are within the range of SLR we should expect.”
That range, for 2100, being? Something much more than the high end of the IPCC projections?
“The Dutch have been occupying land below sea level in a world with comparatively small year-on-year sea level rise. I expect it would be much more expensive if the wall had to keep being built every year. And, of course, that depends on local geology – with that much sea level rise, south florida isn’t a place any more, dikes or no dikes, because the local rock is porous.”
I don’t know what your “that much” is. I pointed at a web page that lets you see the effect of various levels, calculated from topographical maps. Even without diking, one meter still has a tiny effect on Florida.
And SLR *is* slow year on year sea level rise. Eight inches in the past century.
“Warming will be faster than the average since 1911. We know that because it’s already faster than the average since 1911. Trendline from 1970s (you know, where there’s actual statistical evidence of change in trend and aerosols aren’t a concern) is ~.17c/decade.”
Or in other words, you first assume that the previous pause (roughly 1940 to 1970) can be eliminated from the record by special casing it to aerosols, then deduce the average rate by looking at the period thereafter. As I think I already pointed out, the pattern of warming suggests some effect that alternately cancels and reinforces warming. If that interpretation is correct, you are taking a full cycle of reinforcing plus less than half a cycle of cancelling.
“If CO2 content in the atmosphere continues growing superexponentially (i.e., we do nothing), that will accelerate.”
You earlier made a claim about the effect of exponential growth in emissions. I questioned it. Are you now conceding that that claim was false, retracting it, and shifting to a claim about “superexponential,” whatever that means?
Why do you think emissions will continue to rise, exponentially, “superexponentially,” or even linearly, given the issues I already pointed out about resource exhaustion and development of alternative technologies?
“And yes, that is rapid. We’re seeing heatwaves that would have been once-in-a-thousand-years in the preindustrial (Moscow 2010).”
Given a large world, do you think it is surprising that there is a once in a thousand years event somewhere in it?
“I don’t understand why the evidence that if we continue emitting CO2, the Earth will warm up, on average, 1.7 degrees every ten years isn’t terrifying to you.”
Does the rate you are now claiming decribe the effect of current emissions on the equilibrium that will be reached several thousand years from now, ceteris paribus? It’s an order of magnitude higher than the trend line you just reported.
“3.2 mm/year is a fair amount of sea level rise, yes. Again, that one is going to accelerate if we continue growing atmospheric CO2 content superexponentially. This should be obvious given that straight-line extrapolation gives 32cm by 2100 and the IPCC projects as high as a metre (and their projections are running below reality here, by a fair amount).”
One meter, last time I looked over the report, wasn’t what the IPCC projected. It was the high end of the range of projections produced by the high emission scenario. The one that apparently burns twice the current estimate of the world’s supply of coal by 2100.
“RE: temperature mortality. See this paper, particularly these charts.”
Thanks. Bookmarked. Looking at the table, the only place for which they give separate figures for the effect of heat related mortality and cold related is England, for which the reduction in cold related mortality is about ten times the increase in heat related mortality. Have you noticed any of the people arguing for the perils of AGW mentioning that fact? If not, does that suggest that you may be basing your views on a biased sample of evidence and arguments?
Observe that the comments to that page emphasize reasons to minimize estimates of the benefits and maximize estimates of the costs. Given any complicated externality issue, it’s almost always possible to tweak the calculations in the direction you want—a point I have been making in the climate context for a long time.
“(and broadly speaking that has to be true eventually – at ~7c warming, some parts of Earth reach wet-bulb temperatures high enough that an inactive human in shade will die of heat exhaustion, but that’s probably not going to happen in any reasonable timeframe. We’d have to burn literally all the coal.)”
And in unreasonable time frames, populations shift. The U.S. alone had a million migrants a year in the period before WWI. The world is much richer now and transport technology substantially improved. If you are talking about changes over a millenium or two, you should expect populations to be highly mobile. Lose equatorial lowlands, gain Antarctica and the northern parts of the northern hemisphere.
Wrong post. here.
# I’m happy for many reasons. The first is that it has, as you’ve said, made
# privileged people afraid. I think this is only the beginning. Privilege creates
# safety, and as it is removed, I think the unsafety of the oppressed will in
# part come to the currently privileged classes. But if I could flip a switch and
# make every man feel the persistent, gnawing fear that a woman has of
# men, I would in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t even consider whether the
# consequences were strategic, I would just do it.
Does anyone else think that this “Yes! I would do it!” sounds like the scene with Davros from “Genesis of the Daleks”?
What this person misses of course, is that once men have that same ‘persistent, gnawing fear that women have of men’, (which I’m not sure all women have, but yes, some do) then things are going to get ugly very fast. I think that’s where we’re heading.
Gallo’s comment didn’t seem particularly more vicious then this.
http://s32.photobucket.com/user/starkeymonster/media-full//johncwright_gaypanic.jpg.html
On the topic of changing around the subjects, here’s a fun game: whenever Person A says that Person B said hurtful things and decreased Person A’s hedonic index, cross out whatever sounds Person B emitted and assume that Person B is holding a squalling infant.
(And by ‘fun’ I mean will ruin your life.)
Person A: These piercing notes assault my ears! This is a tortious offense!
(Person A’s oddly stilted manner of speech is a totally intentional effort to prevent Person A from resembling any particular person in the real world and is not just because I’m bad at writing dialogue.)
Person B: Look, I’m not trying to hurt you in the first place! Leave me alone!
Person A: INTENT IS NOT FUCKING MAGIC! You went out in public with a baby when you *should* have known it would hurt me; you clearly don’t *care* enough about my hedons. If you run over my foot with your car —
At this point the baby’s volume sharply increases. (Babies do not deal well with angry shouting.)
Person A: NOW look what you’ve done! Because you made me come over here and yell at you, I’m now subject to even greater assault! Which represents, by the way, the idea that defending against accusations is itself a further crime, rendered literally true in the form of increased anti-hedonic baby-screaming.
Person B: …who are you talking to?
Person A: I just thought I should clarify, since the metaphor was getting pretty tortured.
So far I’ve gotten shouted at by three of four possible groups:
(1) offended people for saying their feelings are the same as some totally unreasonable complaint about a crying baby,
(2) people who feel oppressed by baby-screaming for saying their genuine discomfort is the same as totally unreasonable attacks because something something the pitch of a baby’s cry activates neurons something something human universal whereas catering to busybodies breeds more busybodies,
(3) parents who are outraged that I could compare *their* being made to feel guilty by other people’s nasty glares when they didn’t do anything wrong to Bad Unrighteous People saying nasty things and trying to get away with it.
I also got (4) one complaint from a gentleman who was upset at me for calling men who have feelings ‘babies’ and saying that only women can have legitimate feelings and feel hurt when someone attacks them. I explained to him that my intent was not to offend him, and that I only used the specific example of a crying baby because it is a something unpleasant that everyone has personally experienced and can call to mind. I confess that I said all this without my brain making any connection between the exchange and the topic under discussion.
I also got two separate people get angry at me for saying that people who complain about hurtful language are babies. I’m…pretty sure that they just noticed the word ‘baby’ and didn’t actually pay any attention to the rest.