> the consequences were far worse and more destructive.
This doesn't sound right - there were a few blocks in Minneapolis, and maybe Seattle and Portland, that had some damage. But not like the many square miles of Los Angeles in 1992.
And of course, none of this compares to the riots of the 1960s.
We are not yet even one year out from the date of Floyd's death. I think it's premature to say what the societal consequences of this are. (I lived in Los Angeles in 2012, and there was a lot of discussion then about how different the aftermath of Rodney King seemed in 2012 than in 1993.)
Since it's been less violent and less disruptive and less dangerous to criticize than the response to Rodney King within the first year, my assumption would be that it would turn out better than the response to Rodney King?
>All in all I'd prefer the LA riots to what we got. It's not even close.
How many people died in all the #BLM riots combined, again? Because all in all I'd prefer six dead to sixty-three dead. I was there for the Rodney King riots, and you're right, it's not even close.
The Rodney King riots occurred at a time when "anti-racism" was aligned in a more constructive direction than it is today. That's not a function of the riots; that's something that happened independently when nobody was rioting. If you have something like the Rodney King riots today, the result is not "OMG too many people died, we were wrong, we have to strive for a colorblind society", it's a more intense and more violent push towards black identity politics. Modern antiracism is much worse than 1990s antiracism(*), but the Rodney King riots were much worse than all #BLM riots combined. Both of these things can be true.
* Because 1990s antiracism was an actually good thing,
I finally stopped being lazy and went ahead and replicated your methodology, and can confirm it checks out. I'm going to give you a minor finger-wagging though, for including 5 months of partial data in a 10-month rolling average - it's a round half so certainly no accusation of skullduggery, but in this case it also happens to return the local maxima. Cutting all the partials removes half the latest spike, while including all of them suggests a decrease since February.
I think there's a methodological problem in that insofar as "transgender" only fairly recently started replacing "transsexual" in any broad-based way. I would think a combined graph of the two terms (and perhaps "transexual" spelled with one N) would give a more accurate picture.
"Transsexual" had an interesting trend in the late '00s, but the dominance of "transgender" over the past decade looks to be precisely the signal Scott's talking about. It's simply too popular to have been a substitution effect.
"While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers. I can’t deny that many far-right people have been banned. But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way."
Twitter has been less censorious than other places. Facebook doesn't allow Spencer, for example.
The banning doesn't have to be done in a "useful/consistent way" to be effective. Here's Vox gloating about how no-platforming "worked" in the case of Milo and Alex Jones.
It's clear censorship has destroyed the voices of the most prominent people of the far right, so why wouldn't it work to stop a movement?
"Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him?"
Because the extremists are where you get the energy from. If Ben Shapiro is the most extreme person in your universe, and all he's arguing for is going back 10 years, that's not going to be "edgy," which is what gets the cycle started. The right end of the political spectrum has been unnaturally truncated, instead of being allowed to grow organically, which is necessary for these internet cultures to rise.
Also, Ben Shapiro is a loser. I don't just mean that as an insult, it's a whole part of his shtick; look him up on youtube incredulously reciting the lyrics to "Wet Ass Pussy" and talking about how wet his wife's vagina isn't.
Shapiro is promoted by the powers that be, because he's a vision of exactly what they would _like_ the Right to be; a group of five-foot-tall castrati talking about how taxes on the rich should be lower and pop music shouldn't use so darn many swears.
"Because the extremists are where you get the energy from."
I think you're going to need to argue that at length. In terms of triggering respectability cascades it seems to matter much more whether the next slightly more respectable+influential person has access to your writing than whether a normie does. The vox article suggests that it undercut their commercial viability, but I'm sure if you or I put in the slightest effort we could find whatever they've been writing in the meantime.
As an electorally oriented dem who really wishes we could cut off talk about trans rights/defund the police/open border's" and keep the media focused on our core message of "we are going to take money from the rich and give it to everyone else" I'm kind of curious to read why my preferred approach would backfire.
However, I mean this in good faith as someone who thinks your substack is worth readingf. But in the same way the left needs to wrestle with "why do we alienate older minorities" the right absolutely has to come to terms with "how come we've alienated everyone under 30". And just as the preferred leftists answer of "corporate media is why Hispanic truck drivers oppose trans rights" just doesn't quite cut it, I have a hard time believing "our message is perfectly optimized for people under 30 if only the evil SJW's at Facebook would stop censoring us" from the right. The conservative movements reliance on older voters and large scale funders just has to be part of why its media has failed to generate an appeal to younger people and you can't completely pass this off on censorship.
Yes, that's the way YouTube radicalization works, as everyone who's written about this know. It's basically people just watching video, getting recommended something else, etc. The internet is often about people getting sucked into things. Censorship therefore works, even if someone already committed can find whatever they want online.
As I thought the preceding sentence indicated that was not a contention about how virality works, but a contention about how fringes influence the elite. My mental model is that the power of fringes is in their ability to generate new styles and positions which influence marginally more respectable elites until at some point the normie piano teacher/youth pastor I had in 2nd grade starts talking about anti-imperialism and intersectionality.
Banning virality hurts the ability of Milo et al to financially support themselves, but doesn't interrupt the cascade of support for identitarian ideas from far right internet figures -> Tucker Carlson writers -> rest of Fox News & normie conservative media. I'm not saying the cascade has already successfully happened, I'm saying it is ongoing and contested. This suggests that censorship hasn't totally disrupted the ability of fringe groups to influence aligned elites. The problem for the right fringe is that there just aren't enough mainstream right-of-center figures popular with the under 30 set for the fringe ideas to cascade down to.
I think the left actually has been pretty successful channeling the energy of their extreme wing to move the country towards them. Yes, it hurts them in elections, but when they do win they get a much more liberal policy direction.
So if Democrats were moderate, I think they'd win say 50% of elections and govern like moderates. They've been taken over by their left wing and now maybe win 40% of elections and go much more radical, while always moving the Overton window (Republicans fighting trans women in sports has them giving up on gay marriage, Republicans fighting critical race theory includes them giving up on affirmative action, etc). I think partisanship is really strong and each side will portray the other as extremists no matter what, so for an ideologue the rational thing is just to enact policies you prefer.
On almost everything, the Biden administration is far to the left of Obama, look at size and scope of their stimulus bills if you're only interested in economic issues.
I don't think that the conservative message is actually optimized to win young people, of course it's not. But, even though it's not my politics, I think idenitatrianism could have won the youth if allowed to grow, and you can look at Europe for an example where the far right often does best with young people.
I'm a big fan of the Biden stimulus and I hope the child allowance is made permanent. But Biden didn't have big enough coat-tails to win statehouses, get anti-gerrymandering legislation or PR statehood. If politics proceeds as normal, R's will control congress from 2022 to the next realignment or crisis, and a stimulus bill will be the only major progressive legislation passed this decade. To consistently get 52-53% of the popular vote and not be able to do anything outside of emergency measures is just deeply frustrating. I kind of hope the supreme court overturns Roe because I think that's our only shot at congressional majorities.
The left has been (too) successful at channeling its fringe's energy into controlling speech norms in professional environments, but in terms of policy, we're going to get a temporary stimulus then nothing for a decade, while conservatives will have a 6-3 (or 5-3) Supreme court for the foreseeable future. Trump is a defeat for Trumpism in that he failed to satisfy the cultural/demographic concerns that animate the GOP base, but the party superstructure exists to cut taxes and prevent economic redistribution and the 2016 realignment + 2020 statehouse victories will let conservatives stand athwart congress yelling stop for a long time.
I don't think it's the platform that's 'wokified' it is the messaging. Biden's stimulus gave $350 billion to local governments. Local government budgets are 90% schools and *police*. This was a major sticking point and something Pelosi wanted included in the second Trump stimulus but R's fought it. So when it comes to actual policy Biden's presidency resulted in expanded police funding (or at least cities hit by Covid not having to cut back) opposed by Republicans, but would anyone hearing endlessly about "defund the police" and BLM think that's the case?
The democratic party needs to tone back on the woke messaging and win in rural areas because we have a constitution designed to govern a collection of agrarian republics and the senate isn't going anywhere. That said, places like Wisconsin where Democrats in 2018 got 53% of the vote for state assembly and only 36% of the seats are engaged in outrageous levels of gerrymandering that can't be attributed to geographic efficiency. State governor elections are purely popular vote affairs, and we get some moderate D's in red states and moderate R's in blue states. It's the malaportioned statehouses and legislature that are most polarized.
I have some sympathy for cultural conservatives, but at some point they just have to realize that their entire media ecosystem seems to exist to convince them that state power is an effective way of redressing cultural losses, and then delivering corporate tax cuts when they win. But, I'm sure the next round of kicking out the RINO's, and electing fighting politicians that are maximally offensive to young/educated people will reverse decades of cultural drift to the left.
Hidden in that "$350 billion to local governments" is the fact that "local governments" that are getting the aid money are mostly large, extremely progressive cities that spend lots of money on progressive policy.
The right didn't alienate everyone under thirty. It wasn't facebook that did it either. The answer is quite simple: University education is mandatory, and complying with Leftist praxis is mandatory at most universities implicitly if not explicitly. This is a project that has taken the Left decades to complete, and calling it whining over facebook *both* discredits the Right as being sore losers about a real structural disadvantage the left created for themselves, and discredits the political ability of the Left for being able to manipulate liberal institutions so well.
Man I sure hope so, that would be great for those of us on the left if the right doesn't cement minority rule through constitutional technicality in the next decade. I'm only kind of joking.
To be more serious I do think way back in the 60's the right started on a path of defecting from mainstream academic/journalistic/cultural institutions and constructing parallel institutions. Right wingers frame this as a victimization by lefties, but I it was also facilitated by the fact that electoral politics/donor money meant that they never really needed to cultivate a version of their ideology that could persuade intellectuals and creatives. The rise of Limbaugh and Fox in the 90's cemented the dominance of anti-intellectualism in the GOP, and then Trump/Hillary in 2016 accelerated education polarization even further.
For weird reasons I got into a google group with a bunch of formerly centrist 60+ STEM professors/lawyer (and one truck driver who is somebody's cousin). Some of these old dudes voted for Romney and they're mostly weirded out by BLM/Trans stuff. But Trump's election sent them down the "piss tape is real rabbit hole". These are tenured profs at top 20 research universities who are spending most of their time doing legit research and the rest of their time speculating on what the server at Trump tower was sending to Russia. It's possible I'm over-extrapolating from anecdotal evidece, but the extent to which Trump was just maximally offensive to even older normie educated types goes underappreciated in discourse about what happened to blue tribe epistemological bubbles.
Competition in a hierarchical group can only really exist along one axis and with one winner. If the competition is social, the winner is often determined by who complies best to that standard, not who is most correct in an objective sense. See the replication crisis for example. Scientists who intentionally or unintentionally made huge errors that resulted in false findings thrived in many fields, while conscientious scientists lost. The scientific competition in many fields wasn't to produce correct scientific findings, but to produce content that make journals more interesting (so boring, unfashionable, etc correct science lost out to more entertaining, fashionable, etc incorrect science).
When people compete on ideology, only one ideology can be successful.
If your theory was right, the data would show that it is rightists who were leaving academia, while centrists remain. However, in reality, centrists were leaving/replaced just as quickly as people on the right. This is far more consistent with a competition to be the most left-wing, rather than Limbaugh and Fox anti-intellectualism being off-putting.
Besides, the left have their own absurd beliefs that are extremely off-putting to many and this is often merely palatable to the people in academia because they have intellectual rationalizations or because they pretend that those beliefs don't exist ('no enemies on the left'). There is no reason why you could not have a right wing-dominated university that is accepting of crazy right wing beliefs like the current universities accept crazy left-wing beliefs.
Many popular beliefs among the left are extremely wrong and if you look at how they behave, many people on the left may not even truly believe them, rather than want to believe them for moral reasons, social acceptance, etc). Are those beliefs really accepted because they are 'intellectual?'
Your argument is as correct, and as wrong, as arguing that social-democracy lost in the Soviet-Union because social-democracy was not appealing to the soviet party, because social-democracy was not intellectually persuasive. In reality, social-democracy wasn't competing on intellectual grounds, but all ideas were measured against communism. So social-democracy lost not because it was bad at creating prosperity, at running a country or was inherently offensive to bureaucrats, but because it was poor at being communism. Similarly, many academics are now losing in academia not because they are incorrect, but because their beliefs/work fails to measure up to ideological standards.
I think it's an exaggeration to say that the left totally dominates the social sciences today. I have been a human sciences aficionado for the last 49 years. And I haven't seen any decline in social science findings supporting my general worldview, in part because I constantly adapt to new findings, but largely because new advances have typically validated the best old research. For example, the genetic revolution of the 21st Century has largely vindicated the best human scientists of the second half of the 20th Century.
Granted, naive journalists tend to not get that tropes like "Race does not exist" are scams to keep scientists from getting persecuted by know-nothings. But if you read the scientific journals carefully, you will know what's what.
"The rise of Limbaugh and Fox" was an effect of left-wing antiscientific ideological competition. Marx and marxist thought has been in serious fashion *ever since* 1960, despite both him and Adam Smith having their primary economic worldviews absolutely and fully debunked.
Actual unhinged leftist terrorists had no problem acquiring prestigious posts at universities.
Consider the following, that instead of the Right rejecting intellectual thought, that intellectual thought has been to lesser or greater degree captured by the Left and was (slowly at first - but increasingly now) used to provide statistical and scientific argumentation for the correct beliefs.
The parallel platforms and institutions were created because frankly, any institution that has to deal with Title IX will eventually be captured by the left - all of the things that were warned about (hiring quotas, deliberate discrimination against white people) when the CRA and Title IX were being debated are here today.
You may be able to say that "the Right has an anti-intellectualism problem" - but when the prominent intellectuals are erasing papers because they say the wrong thing and establishing ideological litmus tests for entry into the intellectual life of our country - there is no actual valid intellectual life in the country, just a class using the vestiges of old reputations to secure privileges.
""we are going to take money from the rich and give it to everyone else" I'm kind of curious to read why my preferred approach would backfire." You don't see how your socialist, and not in the "Strong safety net" sense, but in the "No one can accrue wealth without worrying whether the government will take it away" and "One's economic security is entirely dependent on who manages to take control of the government" sense, platform could backfire?
I consider myself on the right. I think the issue we have is not people getting deplatformed, but the fact that we're reliant on people on Milo Ywhatever and Alex Jones for "energy" in the first place. Both were largely just provocateurs. Jones is an outright embarrassment. Milo seemed like an okay guy at some times, I guess, at least when he was calling BS on obvious BS, but there was always a bit of juvenility to his shtick. Perhaps we could find someone semi-serious, next time, to try to red-pill earnest, intelligent young people with? I won't be holding my breath, but one can dream.
Intellectually, I'm basically an heir to the debates in the early 1970s among data-driven social scientists, with me being closer to the neoconservatives like James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, but carefully reading centrists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan (the four-term Democratic U.S. Senator from New York) and James Coleman and socialists like Christopher Jencks. Indeed, the first thing I ever published was a letter in National Review when I was 14 in 1973 in which I made a joke about Jencks' book-length meta-analysis of the Coleman Report, "Inequality." My role model as a statistics-driven opinion journalist has alway been Daniel Seligman, who more or less invented blogging with his "Keeping Up" column in "Fortune."
Way back then, it was not considered extremist to be well informed about basic social science data.
"Nutpicking" is a real word in the blogosphere, and it means exactly what it sounds like: criticizing a movement by picking apart its nuts-est supporters. It's basically strawmanning, except the strawmen are real and just non-representative.
As I understand it, strawmanning is when you attribute a position to your opponents which they do not actually hold, and weakmanning is when you pick a small and nonrepresentative subset of your opponents and pretend that they are the norm. E.g. see section II here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
I think both words are of comparable age but came from different communities - weakmanning being from the rationalist community and nutpicking from the political blogosphere.
Even before dating apps got big, I didn't know many couples that met the "sitcom way" of the guy asking out the girl at random (i.e. seeing someone at a grocery store, gym, etc.). There are a few cases here and there, but it's primarily friends that are on the far, far right hand of the extraversion bell curve. The vast majority of couples I know (pre-dating apps) came about from hanging out as a part of a friend group, drunkenly hooking up one night, then going further from there.
Hmmm. I feel very bad for all of you looking right now (I'm older and missed this change). Approaching women was never easy, but if what I'm reading here is true, it's basically gone from scary and humbling to "why bother?". I'd say the apps don't sound so bad, but the men and women I know who used them didn't have a lot of positive experiences. They (we, I suppose; I used It's Just Lunch briefly, and that's sort of an app) met their spouses in more traditional ways. My wife and I went on a blind date. One of our friends got knocked up after a drunken night with a guy she went to high school with back when. Good thing he turned out to be an awesome guy. My sister asked her boss out on a date and they got hitched. Good times.
Mostly: people in my orbit met at work, got set up, or, in a distant third, met at a [thing, usually a bar]. I'm putting this here as a levee against the inevitable "oh, things don't ever actually change. Approaching a girl at a bar is unthinkable now, it must never have happened" type of comment. It happened, it went from scary to kind of depressing as you aged, and you scored once in 50.
Dunno - I think the "meet at bar" think still happens - what I virtually never ever see is the sitcom style "guy randomly approaching a stranger in a sober setting and asking them out" - that's really the "why bother" scenario.
It was never really a thing, but was for a time heavily promoted in pickup blogs. I think it started out more as shock therapy for the kind of clueless pickup-blog-reader who was afraid to talk to women at all for fear of rejection.
It does happen. I've done that quite a few times before so I know it happens for sure. A brief list of places I was able to either make out/get dates/get numbers from women where nobody was drunk: yes bars (people in bars aren't always drunk), on planes, in airports (arrivals and departures), a car rental desk, dancing lessons, coffee shops, technical conferences (multiple times). Some I've forgotten.
I do have the feeling though, that if I lived in the USA I'd have been much less likely to try this due to the prevalence of the type of feminism that Scott has talked about. Living here in central Europe I never really was scared that I'd chat up or date a woman, she'd not be interested and decide to communicate that via some sort of freak-out where she accused me of being a creep/misogynist/attempted-rapist. Asking girls for numbers felt very "safe", modulo of course the chance of rejection.
I did very strongly get that impression from one of the American girls I dated (very briefly), partly because she told me a story in which she had engaged in exactly that kind of meltdown with another guy, apparently unaware of how crazy it made her sound - she was "nearly raped" by a guy who did and said literally nothing that could have created any such fear, by her own telling of the story!
I'm not trying to brag or anything like that, I just think it's a huge shame that men are now (reasonably!) afraid to do this because positive interactions with strangers are one of the things that gives life colour. It's not a fantasy or fiction story. And although it turned out that sitcom style pickups were indeed possible, in the end I didn't meet my wife that way.
I'm in the US and fairly introverted, but I can still think of one time I sort of did this, which was at a mind-numbingly boring company orientation event where she was prepared to goof off with me (I don't really consider this meeting her through work because it was a very large organization and the people at the event were all strangers from different departments that seldom if ever interacted). It led to one not-good date.
If you weren't super-extroverted, it seems hitting up strangers was a lot easier if you frequently found yourself in situations where everyone was bored and there was nothing to do but either stare ahead blankly or make conversation with strangers (this scenario happens basically never post-iPhone).
E.g. I recall an airport security line circa 2005 that took 90 minutes to get through and I spent most of the time making very good conversation with the young woman behind me. Would have asked her out, and I got the impression she'd have accepted, but we were flying to different cities and lived on opposite coasts.
Yes, airports proved to be good places to meet women perhaps because on a plane phones don't work :) But I think there are still lots of situations where people aren't on their phones, or would rather enjoy an amusing conversation with a stranger than flick through Instagram for the 3rd time that day. So it's not quite so bad. My dating years were mostly post-smartphone.
Well very good then. I think I was single and looking for a total of 3 months in the post-iPhone world before I met my wife, but I just notice that I find myself engaging much less often in these types of conversations with strangers (as 99% of such conversations in my life were not with an attractive single woman). I suppose people might be open to them, but as an introvert I find it much easier to break the ice with someone staring at the pattern of the carpeting than someone staring at social media.
There are lots of guys on Youtube who film themselves asking girls on college campuses for their phone numbers. The girls do often seem surprised, but lots of them give their numbers. Most of them seem flattered and happy to be asked.
No, the guys tell the girls afterwards that they're just making a video, and I assume just delete the numbers. I'm sure lots of the numbers are fake, but then again there are lots of guys that did this (I watched them in 2019; I don't know if they did it during COVID or if they're going to start doing it again) and tons of videos, adding up to at least hundreds or even thousands of numbers. I'll bet that at least hundreds of the girls were sincere. :)
That's interesting, I thought the old "wiser" advice was to not meet women in bars, and instead to try to meet them in grocery stores, etc. Like this clip from Superbad:
I don't know many people who asked someone out at a grocery store or gym, but I know a lot of people who don't drink, want to ask out someone in their friend group, and don't know how to do it or whether it would be socially appropriate.
The only way I've really seen that work is subtle hints communicated through other members in the friend group. It's a bit "high school", but asking out someone in friend group blindly has the potential to be even more awkward than someone at random. I've virtually never seen that. You usually send feelers through others to see if there's at least some level of reciprocation. Typing all this out just underscores the genius of dating apps btw.
That one is tough, because part of the expectation of "going out on the weekend to the pub" is "possibly meet someone", but the expectation of "going to the grocery store" is "ooh, they have two for the price of one on the new chocolate bars!" not "possibly meet someone", unless it's in the explicit context of Singles' Nights (did that ever take off as more than "article in news media about reporter went to one"?)
Not that I'm ever at risk of this happening but if I thought that when I just wanted two litres of milk and some crusty bread rolls, I'd also have the possibility of being asked out, oh God another place I have to dress up for?
Talking to women is now socially inappropriate. The messaging for the last 10 years from *women* to *women* , particularly from feminists is that "all guys are rapists, always be on your guard there are MEN around". Ergo, justified or not - women who haven't been made painfully aware that everyone is trying to sell you something have started to internalize the Inherent Danger of Men.
A friend on a different platform was saying something about having to worry about a new stalker every time they met someone - and my immediate reaction was "holy shit you need therapy", that person had significant traumas that they were working through - but the Life Experience was brought up to make a point about a perfectly normal conversation about "how much is it acceptable for a male person in the vicinity to flirt with people if eg, they're working on her house".
Instead of "you need therapy, the base rate of this thing is very low despite the astronomical consequences, and a few basic self-protection practices will basically stop this from happening in almost all but the most egregious possible cases" - the correct response is "Thank you A for educating me on HOW HORRIBLE this can be psychologically, B that man is HORRIBLE and maybe a RAPIST. You should report them to the POLICE".
When I think "getting a romantic partner the sitcom way" I think "date people at work" because so many sitcoms are set at work and need to ship their characters together.
"My concern is more about there being a culture of fear, where people who oppose whatever the wokest 10% of the population thing are scared into silence"
This is a complicated thing to try and solve, the fear isn't just made up of fear of social rejection, but also fear that speaking out might harm the good things that have come from whatever movement is in question. That's not an unfounded fear, there are a lot of countries around the world for example where gay rights are being undermined and removed. There's a big information deficit for all involved about what influence their raising their voice might have.
Also, it should be pointed out that a lot of the fear is due to propaganda designed to inspire fear in hopes of creating a backlash (which has largely worked), rather than rational fear that's proportional to actual risk.
Like, during the satanic panic, a lot of parents were legitimately scared for their children's safety, that they would be abused or murdered by satanists. But if your response to that was 'we have to search even more vigilantly for all the satanists in order to wipe them out so people can feel safe again', you probably weren't helping matters.
I wonder if someone, anyone, has actually tried mapping the actual number of incidents. I don't trust any estimation that is based on "i've seen n articles about people being cancelled". The exposure those articles get is driven by memes, not by reality.
Bonus points if you can do an historic comparison with say the red scare.
The difference being that _literally no one_ managed to summon a demon or whatever the fear was. _Some actual number of real people_ have had negative life reactions for expressing relatively innocuous opinions and beliefs. Is that number much smaller than some people think it is? Yes. But it's not zero, and the fear isn't entirely unfounded. I do _generally_ agree with you that one vector of attack is to reduce the fear. I think if fewer people were afraid and were willing to say the things they want to say, then it would be harder to enact negative repercussions. But If everyone did that _some people_, at least early on, would face real, significant backlash, so we also need to be actively fighting the impulse to punish people for expressing opinions.
> The difference being that _literally no one_ managed to summon a demon or whatever the fear was
As a kid who's mom never let me play D&D because of the media panic, I've never been particularly sympathetic to the Satanic Panic fearmongering of the 80's, but I wouldn't say there was *NO* basis whatsoever for it -- there was.
Serial killer David Berkowitz, aka, the "Son of Sam", who claimed to have been part of a Satanic cult and performed the murders as some weird ritual act:
So the media definitely manufactured it, but there really *was* at least one crazy guy who killed a bunch of young people in horrible ways and at least claimed do be doing it in the name of Satan.
Pretty sure D&D specifically had nothing to do with the murders? Given it only came out 3 years before the first one I'd be surprised if Berkowitz had even heard of it.
Look, my only point was to say that as tenuous and overblown as the Satanic Panic was, it wasn't responding to *literally absolutely nothing*. This isn't to justify it or say it was a good idea or reasonable or anything like that. Just that it didn't come out of *absolutely nowhere*, because
we do indeed have this one very well documented high profile case of gruesome and terrifying murders of young people murdered by at least one guy who claimed ritual Satanism as his motivation (whether we believe him or not).
I am once again asking people to stop constructing weird fictional narratives about a dead gay comedy forum.
SA was never some even-handed centrist discussion board. Like most of the 00s internet forums it was about 75% lefties broadly construed and the remainder was mostly libertarian (not well-disposed towards McCain). Something like 50 accounts lost their McCain ban bet and only a few of those were actual regulars. It was not some great epoch-shifting exodus.
And they most likely didn't go to 4chan. By the time 2008 rolled around, 4chan had been a separate website from SA for years (and had spun off of an entirely different subforum with not much overlap to the politics boards). They mostly ended up at various spinoff forums where they accreted all the other bitter people who got banned over the next few years over things like "faggot" becoming dispreferred nomenclature and just memed themselves into fash.
4chan went right-wing because there was a coordinated effort by Stormfront to colonize it and make it right-wing. There were explicit threads about this on Stormfront, and the userbase there was much bigger than the userbase of McCain supporters on SA ever was.
I'm not sure I agree with all of this. SomethingAwful posed a problem that has overtaken a very large portion of the internet: what happens to you when you surrender totally to irony? When you lose the ability to simply understand the world around you without mental quotation marks over everything you think and do? Some people devolved into the nihilism of the altright, all of the "ironic" f-slurs and n-words congealing into an ideology, even if that ideology was really for the lulz. Some got overbearingly woke but stayed ironic about everything but injustice. They tell the same shitty Weird Twitter jokes they always have but pepper in "ACAB! BLM!" now.
My entire point here is that "some people" was not that many people. I am sure you could probably find at least, like, one guy who had the arc described by the original commenter. But it wasn't some kind of cause-and-effect with 4chan where all the McCain toxxers picked up shop to 4chan, waited several years for /news/ to be created, and concertedly tipped what was by then an entirely separate website to the right. The numbers and timeline just don't add up.
When I talk about Something Awful being the starting point for a lot of this stuff, I'm largely just pulling back to the link between that and the Shit Reddit Says community. That's the place where I think it was actually weaponized, using these issues essentially as a moral license for ironic radicalism and bullying.
That's another thing different from either of these first two things! Shit Reddit Says was GBS. 4chan was ADTRW. The McCain toxx thread was LF. If this is gibberish to you, please consider not having strong opinions about Something Awful Dot Com
People have a really hard time grasping just how different the various sub forums were/are on SA. I spent 10+ years hardly ever venturing out of AI or SHSC. I'm not sure there are many useful generalizations you can make about the SA forums as a whole.
Yeah, plus the fucking place has been around 20+ years so all three of those are also different in time as well. (4chan spun off in like 2003, the election was 2008, and reddit scolding was more of a 10s thing)
I forgot how much concern there was about details of SA culture and history. I did hang out mostly in LF, so my view is skewed by that. I remember a lot of discussion about the exodus circa 2009-2010 and a lot of cross discussion about posters who used to post on SA that were posting on 4chan. How much of that happened is in my memory a lot, but it was 10+ years ago so who knows anymore.
>This captures a fear I have too. Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest. The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin, and it’s hard to blame people who aren’t confident of hitting that window, and sometimes that looks like arguing against it before the the mooting could be honestly described as “serious”.
At the risk of litigating a particular instance beyond the point of relevance, I think that quite a lot hinges on the specifics of what the proposal actually *is*, and judging it carefully and consistently. If the fear is that certain language will become common, showing its use throughout society is good evidence. If the fear is that it will be *compulsory*, it is poor evidence. Equivocating between the two is a huge epistemic problem - this isn't just politics, it's a concrete logical error - and leaves one in a position where one can feel threatened so long as any examples of their opposition exist. With only a little effort you can find examples of such all over the political spectrum, and I am extremely skeptical of ad-hoc proofs that the outgroup definitely does it more.
tl;dr: If you can't commit to a specific prediction, you're probably motte-and-bailey'ing yourself.
> That's the same issue, I was complaining about, though. These days, the distinction between "common" and "compulsory" is razor-thin if not nonexistent.
Says who? That's a failure of clarity and consistency, says I.
(Or alternatively: criticism is not the same as censorship.)
If a minority of people can criticize someone effectively enough that their works become inaccessible to people who would generally be receptive to them, then that criticism is indeed censorship. (Imagine, for a barely contrived example of this, a cabal of reputed movie reviewers agreeing be overly critical of a movie because they don't approve of the director's communist ideas. While technically they may be merely criticizing it, the effect as implemented is censorious.)
I reject the theory of censorship where the label is applied to anything that affects accessibility on the margin. Price tags aren't censorship. Advertising strategies aren't censorship. Search engine design isn't censorship. Distribution patterns aren't censorship. Negative reviews aren't censorship. Blocking isn't censorship. Counter-protesting isn't censorship.
An individual is not entitled to works that meet their tastes, nor is a work entitled to an audience. But there are barriers that should *not* be placed in their way.
Censorship is government action. Content restriction on the use of airwaves is censorship. Excessive public access fees are censorship. Legal barriers to publication are censorship. Age requirements are censorship. Fines and blocking and the use of the bully pulpit *can* be censorship when employed by officials, depending on more nuanced factors. Intellectual property is an edge case - actions taken by private individuals, explicitly backed by governmental enforcement.
Most societies agree that some common types of censorship are a good thing, and disagree on innumerable others. But it pays to be *extremely* skeptical when someone argues a new category of censorship is necessary to combat disfavored speech, or that a chosen category of speech is important enough to compel others to repeat it.
I find the distinction you're insisting on between government and non-government action pretty artificial. Surely if the Mafia comes in and burns your printing press, that counts as censorship?
> I find the distinction you're insisting on between government and non-government action pretty artificial.
The categories are indeed made for man.
> Surely if the Mafia comes in and burns your printing press, that counts as censorship?
No. It is a criminal act that can be addressed through the standard legal process, not requiring a revisiting of speech principles. And if the Mafia cannot be realistically defeated by the legal process, then your problem *still* isn't a speech issue.
Search engine design sticks out from your list in the first paragraph.
Somebody is literally playing censor there - acting with authority to prevent you reading something, in a way you can't just refuse to accept the way you could ignore a bad review.
Not to mention that the search engine market has very few prominent players. Whereas it's almost impossible to coordinate censorship of something even by the Western governments, 2-3 search engines are being used by more than 95% of all of their combined citizens, and they can easily collude or be coerced into censoring essentially anything.
> Somebody is literally playing censor there - acting with authority to prevent you reading something, in a way you can't just refuse to accept the way you could ignore a bad review.
No, unless the search engine is itself governmental and the restrictions aren't content-blind. You *can* in fact refuse to use a given search engine, or any search engine at all. You are not entitled to an unbiased algorithm, nor is Google obligated to serve results impartially - if you wish to *create* such an entitlement, compelling specific action from an existing private entity is not the way to do it.
If the linguistic prescriptivists start hunting people down for crimes against semantics, I'm definitely not making it through the first few rounds of executions. But it behooves us not to let principles attached to one definition of a word leak into others - censorship cannot both be a terrible violation of liberty that ought to be resisted *and* a casual everyday practice for smoothing social situations. See "failure of clarity and consistency" above.
I don't think "compulsory" is a meaningful term here. Is it "compulsory" to say "postal worker" and not "mailman"? To say "black person" and not "Negro"? My impression is that the government wouldn't arrest me in either case, but that in both cases, if I used the less preferred term in formal writing, my editor would tell me to use the more preferred term (and think slightly less of me), and if I used the less preferred term on an Internet post, I'd have people commenting telling me to use the more preferred one, and getting angry if I pushed back. I think this would be much truer for the second example than the first example. So are these terms "compulsory" or not? I think all you can do is admit that there are gradations of social pressure and stigma.
> I think all you can do is admit that there are gradations of social pressure and stigma.
Gradations, sure, and often distinguishable ones. This is part of the proactive argument in favor of precision rather than a defense for its lack - government action is not the same as doxxing is not the same as status games is not the same as motivated firing is not the same as being cast out by one's own support network. Conflating vastly different reactions is a serious mistake at the best of times, and there often isn't even a strict hierarchy of intensity.
(And on an object level, is why I'm deeply unsympathetic to an idea that this is something Democrats are uniquely or even disproportionately guilty of. If one hasn't noticed any government action from Republicans, one has missed quite a bit.)
Forget sympathy, I'm downright *hostile* to claims that government action is needed in the here and now to head off social pressures that manage a stream of anecdotes but somehow haven't resulted in those consistent measurable fears. IMO, the biggest failure of capital-L Libertarianism in the US is failure to be sufficiently skeptical of increasing government power to combat nebulous social threats.
"Capital-L Libertarianism" meaning individuals who primarily identify as libertarian as an organized political force. Compare conservative v. Conservative.
I think Scott’s point regarding the language is similar to the “Whole City is the Center” concern, where we have perfectly good words for things that don’t need to be replaced.
I am not defending “mailman” because some of them are not men... that’s a good word to change. Maybe a good example is “handicapped”... which I think became “disabled” and then “differently-abled.” (?) Has this accomplished anything? No one wants to be unable to walk or thinks that’s a good thing, but we should all agree that those who can’t walk deserve respect. Maybe the intent is to encourage the (in my opinion true) belief that a variety of seemingly bad conditions can lead to a beautiful diversity of talents and perspectives, like the archetype of the blind piano virtuoso?
Those who don’t want to extend such respect - bullies come to mind - are going to hear the new word and apply the same disrespect to it, so what does it accomplish? We’ve only achieved collateral damage to people who too slowly evolved to using the new word.
The changing of the words seems to be an unnecessary symptom of what was happening anyway: an increase in respect for previously marginalized groups. But maybe the two phenomena are inseparable, or the word change is in some way causal rather than symptomatic. I’m not sure.
There's a really great point on this that Freddie deBoer made back in late April on this that I hope he won't mind if I post here (seriously, Freddie, if it's an issue please let me know and I'll delete this post):
"Social justice politics are obsessive about the linguistic, symbolic, cultural, discursive, and academic to the detriment of the material. The reasons for this are pretty plain: the parts of contemporary society that the social justice world controls are media, academia, the arts, nonprofits - in other words, the domains of ideas, the immaterial. The man with only a hammer seeing a world full of nails, etc. But this means that basic aspects of material suffering ultimately receive scant attention. I already mentioned above that Meghan Markle received vastly more press coverage in that news cycle than the Black-white wealth gap that touches the lives of every Black American. From the standpoint of promoting mass racial justice this makes no sense. But the wealth gap is a difficult problem that the cultural industries have no capacity to solve, and they don’t spend a lot of time reporting on poor Black people. Because the British royal family is sensitive to public perception they fixated on that problem which they thought they could change. Sadly for poor Black people the wealth gap does not have a public relations team, nor is entry into wealthy royal families a realistic path for most. The triumph of the linguistic overall the practical can be found all over this world. For example, consider the recent rigid policing of the term 'person suffering from homelessness' over 'homeless person.' The thinking is that the former stresses that homelessness happens to some people at some point while the latter defines them by that condition. I’m sympathetic to this reasoning; it makes sense to me. I’m also sure that if you polled a thousand homeless people you would not find a single one who would list this among their top ten problems. But when you’re a bookish arts kid language is everything, and anyway, social justice politics does not have anything substantial to offer the homeless in material terms. So language policing it is."
Scott's answer to the former question is here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ and a response to your final point is here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/.
Unfortunately, I don't recall Scott ever writing an essay on who he does or does not regard to be a TERF.
Hadn’t read that one. BTW that hair dryer solution is bloody brilliant. I’m still stifling a giggle on JWB justifiable homocide gag too.
> the consequences were far worse and more destructive.
This doesn't sound right - there were a few blocks in Minneapolis, and maybe Seattle and Portland, that had some damage. But not like the many square miles of Los Angeles in 1992.
And of course, none of this compares to the riots of the 1960s.
We are not yet even one year out from the date of Floyd's death. I think it's premature to say what the societal consequences of this are. (I lived in Los Angeles in 2012, and there was a lot of discussion then about how different the aftermath of Rodney King seemed in 2012 than in 1993.)
Since it's been less violent and less disruptive and less dangerous to criticize than the response to Rodney King within the first year, my assumption would be that it would turn out better than the response to Rodney King?
>All in all I'd prefer the LA riots to what we got. It's not even close.
How many people died in all the #BLM riots combined, again? Because all in all I'd prefer six dead to sixty-three dead. I was there for the Rodney King riots, and you're right, it's not even close.
The Rodney King riots occurred at a time when "anti-racism" was aligned in a more constructive direction than it is today. That's not a function of the riots; that's something that happened independently when nobody was rioting. If you have something like the Rodney King riots today, the result is not "OMG too many people died, we were wrong, we have to strive for a colorblind society", it's a more intense and more violent push towards black identity politics. Modern antiracism is much worse than 1990s antiracism(*), but the Rodney King riots were much worse than all #BLM riots combined. Both of these things can be true.
* Because 1990s antiracism was an actually good thing,
What word is the Google Ngrams chart for? "transgender"?
*Google Trends
The word "transgender". I've edited that to be clearer.
I finally stopped being lazy and went ahead and replicated your methodology, and can confirm it checks out. I'm going to give you a minor finger-wagging though, for including 5 months of partial data in a 10-month rolling average - it's a round half so certainly no accusation of skullduggery, but in this case it also happens to return the local maxima. Cutting all the partials removes half the latest spike, while including all of them suggests a decrease since February.
I think there's a methodological problem in that insofar as "transgender" only fairly recently started replacing "transsexual" in any broad-based way. I would think a combined graph of the two terms (and perhaps "transexual" spelled with one N) would give a more accurate picture.
A quick glance:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=transgender,transexual,transsexual
"Transsexual" had an interesting trend in the late '00s, but the dominance of "transgender" over the past decade looks to be precisely the signal Scott's talking about. It's simply too popular to have been a substitution effect.
Huh, that's very interesting. And yes, I take your point.
Nick Denton is not even particularly close to being a billionaire, though he is a wealthy man.
"While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers. I can’t deny that many far-right people have been banned. But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way."
Twitter has been less censorious than other places. Facebook doesn't allow Spencer, for example.
The banning doesn't have to be done in a "useful/consistent way" to be effective. Here's Vox gloating about how no-platforming "worked" in the case of Milo and Alex Jones.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/5/18125507/milo-yiannopoulos-debt-no-platform
It's clear censorship has destroyed the voices of the most prominent people of the far right, so why wouldn't it work to stop a movement?
"Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him?"
Because the extremists are where you get the energy from. If Ben Shapiro is the most extreme person in your universe, and all he's arguing for is going back 10 years, that's not going to be "edgy," which is what gets the cycle started. The right end of the political spectrum has been unnaturally truncated, instead of being allowed to grow organically, which is necessary for these internet cultures to rise.
Also, Ben Shapiro is a loser. I don't just mean that as an insult, it's a whole part of his shtick; look him up on youtube incredulously reciting the lyrics to "Wet Ass Pussy" and talking about how wet his wife's vagina isn't.
Shapiro is promoted by the powers that be, because he's a vision of exactly what they would _like_ the Right to be; a group of five-foot-tall castrati talking about how taxes on the rich should be lower and pop music shouldn't use so darn many swears.
"Because the extremists are where you get the energy from."
I think you're going to need to argue that at length. In terms of triggering respectability cascades it seems to matter much more whether the next slightly more respectable+influential person has access to your writing than whether a normie does. The vox article suggests that it undercut their commercial viability, but I'm sure if you or I put in the slightest effort we could find whatever they've been writing in the meantime.
As an electorally oriented dem who really wishes we could cut off talk about trans rights/defund the police/open border's" and keep the media focused on our core message of "we are going to take money from the rich and give it to everyone else" I'm kind of curious to read why my preferred approach would backfire.
However, I mean this in good faith as someone who thinks your substack is worth readingf. But in the same way the left needs to wrestle with "why do we alienate older minorities" the right absolutely has to come to terms with "how come we've alienated everyone under 30". And just as the preferred leftists answer of "corporate media is why Hispanic truck drivers oppose trans rights" just doesn't quite cut it, I have a hard time believing "our message is perfectly optimized for people under 30 if only the evil SJW's at Facebook would stop censoring us" from the right. The conservative movements reliance on older voters and large scale funders just has to be part of why its media has failed to generate an appeal to younger people and you can't completely pass this off on censorship.
Yes, that's the way YouTube radicalization works, as everyone who's written about this know. It's basically people just watching video, getting recommended something else, etc. The internet is often about people getting sucked into things. Censorship therefore works, even if someone already committed can find whatever they want online.
As I thought the preceding sentence indicated that was not a contention about how virality works, but a contention about how fringes influence the elite. My mental model is that the power of fringes is in their ability to generate new styles and positions which influence marginally more respectable elites until at some point the normie piano teacher/youth pastor I had in 2nd grade starts talking about anti-imperialism and intersectionality.
Banning virality hurts the ability of Milo et al to financially support themselves, but doesn't interrupt the cascade of support for identitarian ideas from far right internet figures -> Tucker Carlson writers -> rest of Fox News & normie conservative media. I'm not saying the cascade has already successfully happened, I'm saying it is ongoing and contested. This suggests that censorship hasn't totally disrupted the ability of fringe groups to influence aligned elites. The problem for the right fringe is that there just aren't enough mainstream right-of-center figures popular with the under 30 set for the fringe ideas to cascade down to.
I think the left actually has been pretty successful channeling the energy of their extreme wing to move the country towards them. Yes, it hurts them in elections, but when they do win they get a much more liberal policy direction.
So if Democrats were moderate, I think they'd win say 50% of elections and govern like moderates. They've been taken over by their left wing and now maybe win 40% of elections and go much more radical, while always moving the Overton window (Republicans fighting trans women in sports has them giving up on gay marriage, Republicans fighting critical race theory includes them giving up on affirmative action, etc). I think partisanship is really strong and each side will portray the other as extremists no matter what, so for an ideologue the rational thing is just to enact policies you prefer.
On almost everything, the Biden administration is far to the left of Obama, look at size and scope of their stimulus bills if you're only interested in economic issues.
I don't think that the conservative message is actually optimized to win young people, of course it's not. But, even though it's not my politics, I think idenitatrianism could have won the youth if allowed to grow, and you can look at Europe for an example where the far right often does best with young people.
I'm a big fan of the Biden stimulus and I hope the child allowance is made permanent. But Biden didn't have big enough coat-tails to win statehouses, get anti-gerrymandering legislation or PR statehood. If politics proceeds as normal, R's will control congress from 2022 to the next realignment or crisis, and a stimulus bill will be the only major progressive legislation passed this decade. To consistently get 52-53% of the popular vote and not be able to do anything outside of emergency measures is just deeply frustrating. I kind of hope the supreme court overturns Roe because I think that's our only shot at congressional majorities.
The left has been (too) successful at channeling its fringe's energy into controlling speech norms in professional environments, but in terms of policy, we're going to get a temporary stimulus then nothing for a decade, while conservatives will have a 6-3 (or 5-3) Supreme court for the foreseeable future. Trump is a defeat for Trumpism in that he failed to satisfy the cultural/demographic concerns that animate the GOP base, but the party superstructure exists to cut taxes and prevent economic redistribution and the 2016 realignment + 2020 statehouse victories will let conservatives stand athwart congress yelling stop for a long time.
I don't think it's the platform that's 'wokified' it is the messaging. Biden's stimulus gave $350 billion to local governments. Local government budgets are 90% schools and *police*. This was a major sticking point and something Pelosi wanted included in the second Trump stimulus but R's fought it. So when it comes to actual policy Biden's presidency resulted in expanded police funding (or at least cities hit by Covid not having to cut back) opposed by Republicans, but would anyone hearing endlessly about "defund the police" and BLM think that's the case?
The democratic party needs to tone back on the woke messaging and win in rural areas because we have a constitution designed to govern a collection of agrarian republics and the senate isn't going anywhere. That said, places like Wisconsin where Democrats in 2018 got 53% of the vote for state assembly and only 36% of the seats are engaged in outrageous levels of gerrymandering that can't be attributed to geographic efficiency. State governor elections are purely popular vote affairs, and we get some moderate D's in red states and moderate R's in blue states. It's the malaportioned statehouses and legislature that are most polarized.
I have some sympathy for cultural conservatives, but at some point they just have to realize that their entire media ecosystem seems to exist to convince them that state power is an effective way of redressing cultural losses, and then delivering corporate tax cuts when they win. But, I'm sure the next round of kicking out the RINO's, and electing fighting politicians that are maximally offensive to young/educated people will reverse decades of cultural drift to the left.
Hidden in that "$350 billion to local governments" is the fact that "local governments" that are getting the aid money are mostly large, extremely progressive cities that spend lots of money on progressive policy.
What do you find "fully-wokified" about the party platform?
The right didn't alienate everyone under thirty. It wasn't facebook that did it either. The answer is quite simple: University education is mandatory, and complying with Leftist praxis is mandatory at most universities implicitly if not explicitly. This is a project that has taken the Left decades to complete, and calling it whining over facebook *both* discredits the Right as being sore losers about a real structural disadvantage the left created for themselves, and discredits the political ability of the Left for being able to manipulate liberal institutions so well.
Man I sure hope so, that would be great for those of us on the left if the right doesn't cement minority rule through constitutional technicality in the next decade. I'm only kind of joking.
To be more serious I do think way back in the 60's the right started on a path of defecting from mainstream academic/journalistic/cultural institutions and constructing parallel institutions. Right wingers frame this as a victimization by lefties, but I it was also facilitated by the fact that electoral politics/donor money meant that they never really needed to cultivate a version of their ideology that could persuade intellectuals and creatives. The rise of Limbaugh and Fox in the 90's cemented the dominance of anti-intellectualism in the GOP, and then Trump/Hillary in 2016 accelerated education polarization even further.
For weird reasons I got into a google group with a bunch of formerly centrist 60+ STEM professors/lawyer (and one truck driver who is somebody's cousin). Some of these old dudes voted for Romney and they're mostly weirded out by BLM/Trans stuff. But Trump's election sent them down the "piss tape is real rabbit hole". These are tenured profs at top 20 research universities who are spending most of their time doing legit research and the rest of their time speculating on what the server at Trump tower was sending to Russia. It's possible I'm over-extrapolating from anecdotal evidece, but the extent to which Trump was just maximally offensive to even older normie educated types goes underappreciated in discourse about what happened to blue tribe epistemological bubbles.
Competition in a hierarchical group can only really exist along one axis and with one winner. If the competition is social, the winner is often determined by who complies best to that standard, not who is most correct in an objective sense. See the replication crisis for example. Scientists who intentionally or unintentionally made huge errors that resulted in false findings thrived in many fields, while conscientious scientists lost. The scientific competition in many fields wasn't to produce correct scientific findings, but to produce content that make journals more interesting (so boring, unfashionable, etc correct science lost out to more entertaining, fashionable, etc incorrect science).
When people compete on ideology, only one ideology can be successful.
If your theory was right, the data would show that it is rightists who were leaving academia, while centrists remain. However, in reality, centrists were leaving/replaced just as quickly as people on the right. This is far more consistent with a competition to be the most left-wing, rather than Limbaugh and Fox anti-intellectualism being off-putting.
Besides, the left have their own absurd beliefs that are extremely off-putting to many and this is often merely palatable to the people in academia because they have intellectual rationalizations or because they pretend that those beliefs don't exist ('no enemies on the left'). There is no reason why you could not have a right wing-dominated university that is accepting of crazy right wing beliefs like the current universities accept crazy left-wing beliefs.
Many popular beliefs among the left are extremely wrong and if you look at how they behave, many people on the left may not even truly believe them, rather than want to believe them for moral reasons, social acceptance, etc). Are those beliefs really accepted because they are 'intellectual?'
Your argument is as correct, and as wrong, as arguing that social-democracy lost in the Soviet-Union because social-democracy was not appealing to the soviet party, because social-democracy was not intellectually persuasive. In reality, social-democracy wasn't competing on intellectual grounds, but all ideas were measured against communism. So social-democracy lost not because it was bad at creating prosperity, at running a country or was inherently offensive to bureaucrats, but because it was poor at being communism. Similarly, many academics are now losing in academia not because they are incorrect, but because their beliefs/work fails to measure up to ideological standards.
I think it's an exaggeration to say that the left totally dominates the social sciences today. I have been a human sciences aficionado for the last 49 years. And I haven't seen any decline in social science findings supporting my general worldview, in part because I constantly adapt to new findings, but largely because new advances have typically validated the best old research. For example, the genetic revolution of the 21st Century has largely vindicated the best human scientists of the second half of the 20th Century.
Granted, naive journalists tend to not get that tropes like "Race does not exist" are scams to keep scientists from getting persecuted by know-nothings. But if you read the scientific journals carefully, you will know what's what.
If they have to write false conclusions, doesn't that prove the point?
"The rise of Limbaugh and Fox" was an effect of left-wing antiscientific ideological competition. Marx and marxist thought has been in serious fashion *ever since* 1960, despite both him and Adam Smith having their primary economic worldviews absolutely and fully debunked.
Specifically - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardine_Dohrn
Actual unhinged leftist terrorists had no problem acquiring prestigious posts at universities.
Consider the following, that instead of the Right rejecting intellectual thought, that intellectual thought has been to lesser or greater degree captured by the Left and was (slowly at first - but increasingly now) used to provide statistical and scientific argumentation for the correct beliefs.
The parallel platforms and institutions were created because frankly, any institution that has to deal with Title IX will eventually be captured by the left - all of the things that were warned about (hiring quotas, deliberate discrimination against white people) when the CRA and Title IX were being debated are here today.
You may be able to say that "the Right has an anti-intellectualism problem" - but when the prominent intellectuals are erasing papers because they say the wrong thing and establishing ideological litmus tests for entry into the intellectual life of our country - there is no actual valid intellectual life in the country, just a class using the vestiges of old reputations to secure privileges.
""we are going to take money from the rich and give it to everyone else" I'm kind of curious to read why my preferred approach would backfire." You don't see how your socialist, and not in the "Strong safety net" sense, but in the "No one can accrue wealth without worrying whether the government will take it away" and "One's economic security is entirely dependent on who manages to take control of the government" sense, platform could backfire?
I consider myself on the right. I think the issue we have is not people getting deplatformed, but the fact that we're reliant on people on Milo Ywhatever and Alex Jones for "energy" in the first place. Both were largely just provocateurs. Jones is an outright embarrassment. Milo seemed like an okay guy at some times, I guess, at least when he was calling BS on obvious BS, but there was always a bit of juvenility to his shtick. Perhaps we could find someone semi-serious, next time, to try to red-pill earnest, intelligent young people with? I won't be holding my breath, but one can dream.
Jon Stewart was also just a clown. There's an important place in any movement for provacateurs and jesters.
Milo was only banned in mid-2016. There was no sign of the zeitgeist among young people moving right at the time.
Am I really "far right" by any rational standard?
Intellectually, I'm basically an heir to the debates in the early 1970s among data-driven social scientists, with me being closer to the neoconservatives like James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, but carefully reading centrists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan (the four-term Democratic U.S. Senator from New York) and James Coleman and socialists like Christopher Jencks. Indeed, the first thing I ever published was a letter in National Review when I was 14 in 1973 in which I made a joke about Jencks' book-length meta-analysis of the Coleman Report, "Inequality." My role model as a statistics-driven opinion journalist has alway been Daniel Seligman, who more or less invented blogging with his "Keeping Up" column in "Fortune."
Way back then, it was not considered extremist to be well informed about basic social science data.
"...and this seemed non-fake and non-nutpicking..."
Typo?
"Nutpicking" is a real word in the blogosphere, and it means exactly what it sounds like: criticizing a movement by picking apart its nuts-est supporters. It's basically strawmanning, except the strawmen are real and just non-representative.
So another word for weakmanning, then?
Weakmanning could be built from invented weak arguments, I think. Nutpicking (or at least honest nutpicking) is based on actual nuts.
As I understand it, strawmanning is when you attribute a position to your opponents which they do not actually hold, and weakmanning is when you pick a small and nonrepresentative subset of your opponents and pretend that they are the norm. E.g. see section II here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
Particular case of it. Not every weak representative of a position is nuts, although it's hard to find good examples in the culture war.
I think both words are of comparable age but came from different communities - weakmanning being from the rationalist community and nutpicking from the political blogosphere.
Even before dating apps got big, I didn't know many couples that met the "sitcom way" of the guy asking out the girl at random (i.e. seeing someone at a grocery store, gym, etc.). There are a few cases here and there, but it's primarily friends that are on the far, far right hand of the extraversion bell curve. The vast majority of couples I know (pre-dating apps) came about from hanging out as a part of a friend group, drunkenly hooking up one night, then going further from there.
Hmmm. I feel very bad for all of you looking right now (I'm older and missed this change). Approaching women was never easy, but if what I'm reading here is true, it's basically gone from scary and humbling to "why bother?". I'd say the apps don't sound so bad, but the men and women I know who used them didn't have a lot of positive experiences. They (we, I suppose; I used It's Just Lunch briefly, and that's sort of an app) met their spouses in more traditional ways. My wife and I went on a blind date. One of our friends got knocked up after a drunken night with a guy she went to high school with back when. Good thing he turned out to be an awesome guy. My sister asked her boss out on a date and they got hitched. Good times.
Mostly: people in my orbit met at work, got set up, or, in a distant third, met at a [thing, usually a bar]. I'm putting this here as a levee against the inevitable "oh, things don't ever actually change. Approaching a girl at a bar is unthinkable now, it must never have happened" type of comment. It happened, it went from scary to kind of depressing as you aged, and you scored once in 50.
Dunno - I think the "meet at bar" think still happens - what I virtually never ever see is the sitcom style "guy randomly approaching a stranger in a sober setting and asking them out" - that's really the "why bother" scenario.
Ah! Yeah that was never a thing, I think. :) I'm with you. TLP wrote a great piece about that exact situation: How Not To Meet Women (https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/10/how_not_to_meet_women.html)
It was never really a thing, but was for a time heavily promoted in pickup blogs. I think it started out more as shock therapy for the kind of clueless pickup-blog-reader who was afraid to talk to women at all for fear of rejection.
You do see it in sitcoms though... go rewatch Friends or Seinfeld. Half their relationships are started this way.
It does happen. I've done that quite a few times before so I know it happens for sure. A brief list of places I was able to either make out/get dates/get numbers from women where nobody was drunk: yes bars (people in bars aren't always drunk), on planes, in airports (arrivals and departures), a car rental desk, dancing lessons, coffee shops, technical conferences (multiple times). Some I've forgotten.
I do have the feeling though, that if I lived in the USA I'd have been much less likely to try this due to the prevalence of the type of feminism that Scott has talked about. Living here in central Europe I never really was scared that I'd chat up or date a woman, she'd not be interested and decide to communicate that via some sort of freak-out where she accused me of being a creep/misogynist/attempted-rapist. Asking girls for numbers felt very "safe", modulo of course the chance of rejection.
I did very strongly get that impression from one of the American girls I dated (very briefly), partly because she told me a story in which she had engaged in exactly that kind of meltdown with another guy, apparently unaware of how crazy it made her sound - she was "nearly raped" by a guy who did and said literally nothing that could have created any such fear, by her own telling of the story!
I'm not trying to brag or anything like that, I just think it's a huge shame that men are now (reasonably!) afraid to do this because positive interactions with strangers are one of the things that gives life colour. It's not a fantasy or fiction story. And although it turned out that sitcom style pickups were indeed possible, in the end I didn't meet my wife that way.
I'm in the US and fairly introverted, but I can still think of one time I sort of did this, which was at a mind-numbingly boring company orientation event where she was prepared to goof off with me (I don't really consider this meeting her through work because it was a very large organization and the people at the event were all strangers from different departments that seldom if ever interacted). It led to one not-good date.
If you weren't super-extroverted, it seems hitting up strangers was a lot easier if you frequently found yourself in situations where everyone was bored and there was nothing to do but either stare ahead blankly or make conversation with strangers (this scenario happens basically never post-iPhone).
E.g. I recall an airport security line circa 2005 that took 90 minutes to get through and I spent most of the time making very good conversation with the young woman behind me. Would have asked her out, and I got the impression she'd have accepted, but we were flying to different cities and lived on opposite coasts.
Yes, airports proved to be good places to meet women perhaps because on a plane phones don't work :) But I think there are still lots of situations where people aren't on their phones, or would rather enjoy an amusing conversation with a stranger than flick through Instagram for the 3rd time that day. So it's not quite so bad. My dating years were mostly post-smartphone.
Well very good then. I think I was single and looking for a total of 3 months in the post-iPhone world before I met my wife, but I just notice that I find myself engaging much less often in these types of conversations with strangers (as 99% of such conversations in my life were not with an attractive single woman). I suppose people might be open to them, but as an introvert I find it much easier to break the ice with someone staring at the pattern of the carpeting than someone staring at social media.
There are lots of guys on Youtube who film themselves asking girls on college campuses for their phone numbers. The girls do often seem surprised, but lots of them give their numbers. Most of them seem flattered and happy to be asked.
Were the numbers checked? Sometimes women give out fake numbers.
No, the guys tell the girls afterwards that they're just making a video, and I assume just delete the numbers. I'm sure lots of the numbers are fake, but then again there are lots of guys that did this (I watched them in 2019; I don't know if they did it during COVID or if they're going to start doing it again) and tons of videos, adding up to at least hundreds or even thousands of numbers. I'll bet that at least hundreds of the girls were sincere. :)
That's interesting, I thought the old "wiser" advice was to not meet women in bars, and instead to try to meet them in grocery stores, etc. Like this clip from Superbad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvV59uxbqgM
The whole thing being that bars have this expectation of people being there to try to pick up women, and therefore women are hyper-on-guard.
I don't know many people who asked someone out at a grocery store or gym, but I know a lot of people who don't drink, want to ask out someone in their friend group, and don't know how to do it or whether it would be socially appropriate.
The only way I've really seen that work is subtle hints communicated through other members in the friend group. It's a bit "high school", but asking out someone in friend group blindly has the potential to be even more awkward than someone at random. I've virtually never seen that. You usually send feelers through others to see if there's at least some level of reciprocation. Typing all this out just underscores the genius of dating apps btw.
That one is tough, because part of the expectation of "going out on the weekend to the pub" is "possibly meet someone", but the expectation of "going to the grocery store" is "ooh, they have two for the price of one on the new chocolate bars!" not "possibly meet someone", unless it's in the explicit context of Singles' Nights (did that ever take off as more than "article in news media about reporter went to one"?)
Not that I'm ever at risk of this happening but if I thought that when I just wanted two litres of milk and some crusty bread rolls, I'd also have the possibility of being asked out, oh God another place I have to dress up for?
Talking to women is now socially inappropriate. The messaging for the last 10 years from *women* to *women* , particularly from feminists is that "all guys are rapists, always be on your guard there are MEN around". Ergo, justified or not - women who haven't been made painfully aware that everyone is trying to sell you something have started to internalize the Inherent Danger of Men.
A friend on a different platform was saying something about having to worry about a new stalker every time they met someone - and my immediate reaction was "holy shit you need therapy", that person had significant traumas that they were working through - but the Life Experience was brought up to make a point about a perfectly normal conversation about "how much is it acceptable for a male person in the vicinity to flirt with people if eg, they're working on her house".
Instead of "you need therapy, the base rate of this thing is very low despite the astronomical consequences, and a few basic self-protection practices will basically stop this from happening in almost all but the most egregious possible cases" - the correct response is "Thank you A for educating me on HOW HORRIBLE this can be psychologically, B that man is HORRIBLE and maybe a RAPIST. You should report them to the POLICE".
When I think "getting a romantic partner the sitcom way" I think "date people at work" because so many sitcoms are set at work and need to ship their characters together.
"My concern is more about there being a culture of fear, where people who oppose whatever the wokest 10% of the population thing are scared into silence"
This is a complicated thing to try and solve, the fear isn't just made up of fear of social rejection, but also fear that speaking out might harm the good things that have come from whatever movement is in question. That's not an unfounded fear, there are a lot of countries around the world for example where gay rights are being undermined and removed. There's a big information deficit for all involved about what influence their raising their voice might have.
Also, it should be pointed out that a lot of the fear is due to propaganda designed to inspire fear in hopes of creating a backlash (which has largely worked), rather than rational fear that's proportional to actual risk.
Like, during the satanic panic, a lot of parents were legitimately scared for their children's safety, that they would be abused or murdered by satanists. But if your response to that was 'we have to search even more vigilantly for all the satanists in order to wipe them out so people can feel safe again', you probably weren't helping matters.
I wonder if someone, anyone, has actually tried mapping the actual number of incidents. I don't trust any estimation that is based on "i've seen n articles about people being cancelled". The exposure those articles get is driven by memes, not by reality.
Bonus points if you can do an historic comparison with say the red scare.
The difference being that _literally no one_ managed to summon a demon or whatever the fear was. _Some actual number of real people_ have had negative life reactions for expressing relatively innocuous opinions and beliefs. Is that number much smaller than some people think it is? Yes. But it's not zero, and the fear isn't entirely unfounded. I do _generally_ agree with you that one vector of attack is to reduce the fear. I think if fewer people were afraid and were willing to say the things they want to say, then it would be harder to enact negative repercussions. But If everyone did that _some people_, at least early on, would face real, significant backlash, so we also need to be actively fighting the impulse to punish people for expressing opinions.
> The difference being that _literally no one_ managed to summon a demon or whatever the fear was
As a kid who's mom never let me play D&D because of the media panic, I've never been particularly sympathetic to the Satanic Panic fearmongering of the 80's, but I wouldn't say there was *NO* basis whatsoever for it -- there was.
Serial killer David Berkowitz, aka, the "Son of Sam", who claimed to have been part of a Satanic cult and performed the murders as some weird ritual act:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berkowitz
So the media definitely manufactured it, but there really *was* at least one crazy guy who killed a bunch of young people in horrible ways and at least claimed do be doing it in the name of Satan.
I'm a little skeptical that he wouldn't have killed anyone in the absence of D&D, whatever he claimed his motives were.
Pretty sure D&D specifically had nothing to do with the murders? Given it only came out 3 years before the first one I'd be surprised if Berkowitz had even heard of it.
Look, my only point was to say that as tenuous and overblown as the Satanic Panic was, it wasn't responding to *literally absolutely nothing*. This isn't to justify it or say it was a good idea or reasonable or anything like that. Just that it didn't come out of *absolutely nowhere*, because
we do indeed have this one very well documented high profile case of gruesome and terrifying murders of young people murdered by at least one guy who claimed ritual Satanism as his motivation (whether we believe him or not).
I am once again asking people to stop constructing weird fictional narratives about a dead gay comedy forum.
SA was never some even-handed centrist discussion board. Like most of the 00s internet forums it was about 75% lefties broadly construed and the remainder was mostly libertarian (not well-disposed towards McCain). Something like 50 accounts lost their McCain ban bet and only a few of those were actual regulars. It was not some great epoch-shifting exodus.
And they most likely didn't go to 4chan. By the time 2008 rolled around, 4chan had been a separate website from SA for years (and had spun off of an entirely different subforum with not much overlap to the politics boards). They mostly ended up at various spinoff forums where they accreted all the other bitter people who got banned over the next few years over things like "faggot" becoming dispreferred nomenclature and just memed themselves into fash.
4chan went right-wing because there was a coordinated effort by Stormfront to colonize it and make it right-wing. There were explicit threads about this on Stormfront, and the userbase there was much bigger than the userbase of McCain supporters on SA ever was.
I'm not sure I agree with all of this. SomethingAwful posed a problem that has overtaken a very large portion of the internet: what happens to you when you surrender totally to irony? When you lose the ability to simply understand the world around you without mental quotation marks over everything you think and do? Some people devolved into the nihilism of the altright, all of the "ironic" f-slurs and n-words congealing into an ideology, even if that ideology was really for the lulz. Some got overbearingly woke but stayed ironic about everything but injustice. They tell the same shitty Weird Twitter jokes they always have but pepper in "ACAB! BLM!" now.
My entire point here is that "some people" was not that many people. I am sure you could probably find at least, like, one guy who had the arc described by the original commenter. But it wasn't some kind of cause-and-effect with 4chan where all the McCain toxxers picked up shop to 4chan, waited several years for /news/ to be created, and concertedly tipped what was by then an entirely separate website to the right. The numbers and timeline just don't add up.
When I talk about Something Awful being the starting point for a lot of this stuff, I'm largely just pulling back to the link between that and the Shit Reddit Says community. That's the place where I think it was actually weaponized, using these issues essentially as a moral license for ironic radicalism and bullying.
That's another thing different from either of these first two things! Shit Reddit Says was GBS. 4chan was ADTRW. The McCain toxx thread was LF. If this is gibberish to you, please consider not having strong opinions about Something Awful Dot Com
People have a really hard time grasping just how different the various sub forums were/are on SA. I spent 10+ years hardly ever venturing out of AI or SHSC. I'm not sure there are many useful generalizations you can make about the SA forums as a whole.
Yeah, plus the fucking place has been around 20+ years so all three of those are also different in time as well. (4chan spun off in like 2003, the election was 2008, and reddit scolding was more of a 10s thing)
Politically it's definitely "were" at this point, all the boards now are very "woke" and have been for many years.
>and had spun off of an entirely different subforum with not much overlap to the politics boards
What forum?
I forgot how much concern there was about details of SA culture and history. I did hang out mostly in LF, so my view is skewed by that. I remember a lot of discussion about the exodus circa 2009-2010 and a lot of cross discussion about posters who used to post on SA that were posting on 4chan. How much of that happened is in my memory a lot, but it was 10+ years ago so who knows anymore.
>This captures a fear I have too. Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest. The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin, and it’s hard to blame people who aren’t confident of hitting that window, and sometimes that looks like arguing against it before the the mooting could be honestly described as “serious”.
At the risk of litigating a particular instance beyond the point of relevance, I think that quite a lot hinges on the specifics of what the proposal actually *is*, and judging it carefully and consistently. If the fear is that certain language will become common, showing its use throughout society is good evidence. If the fear is that it will be *compulsory*, it is poor evidence. Equivocating between the two is a huge epistemic problem - this isn't just politics, it's a concrete logical error - and leaves one in a position where one can feel threatened so long as any examples of their opposition exist. With only a little effort you can find examples of such all over the political spectrum, and I am extremely skeptical of ad-hoc proofs that the outgroup definitely does it more.
tl;dr: If you can't commit to a specific prediction, you're probably motte-and-bailey'ing yourself.
> That's the same issue, I was complaining about, though. These days, the distinction between "common" and "compulsory" is razor-thin if not nonexistent.
Says who? That's a failure of clarity and consistency, says I.
(Or alternatively: criticism is not the same as censorship.)
If a minority of people can criticize someone effectively enough that their works become inaccessible to people who would generally be receptive to them, then that criticism is indeed censorship. (Imagine, for a barely contrived example of this, a cabal of reputed movie reviewers agreeing be overly critical of a movie because they don't approve of the director's communist ideas. While technically they may be merely criticizing it, the effect as implemented is censorious.)
I reject the theory of censorship where the label is applied to anything that affects accessibility on the margin. Price tags aren't censorship. Advertising strategies aren't censorship. Search engine design isn't censorship. Distribution patterns aren't censorship. Negative reviews aren't censorship. Blocking isn't censorship. Counter-protesting isn't censorship.
An individual is not entitled to works that meet their tastes, nor is a work entitled to an audience. But there are barriers that should *not* be placed in their way.
Censorship is government action. Content restriction on the use of airwaves is censorship. Excessive public access fees are censorship. Legal barriers to publication are censorship. Age requirements are censorship. Fines and blocking and the use of the bully pulpit *can* be censorship when employed by officials, depending on more nuanced factors. Intellectual property is an edge case - actions taken by private individuals, explicitly backed by governmental enforcement.
Most societies agree that some common types of censorship are a good thing, and disagree on innumerable others. But it pays to be *extremely* skeptical when someone argues a new category of censorship is necessary to combat disfavored speech, or that a chosen category of speech is important enough to compel others to repeat it.
I find the distinction you're insisting on between government and non-government action pretty artificial. Surely if the Mafia comes in and burns your printing press, that counts as censorship?
A bit of a sidetrack, but I think that organizations which claim territory (organized crime, unions, street gangs) as proto-governments.
Right, and if the mafioso punches you in the mouth and you can't talk for a month, that's censorship too.
Or if he coughs at just the right time and nobody can hear what you are saying, that must also be censorship.
> I find the distinction you're insisting on between government and non-government action pretty artificial.
The categories are indeed made for man.
> Surely if the Mafia comes in and burns your printing press, that counts as censorship?
No. It is a criminal act that can be addressed through the standard legal process, not requiring a revisiting of speech principles. And if the Mafia cannot be realistically defeated by the legal process, then your problem *still* isn't a speech issue.
Search engine design sticks out from your list in the first paragraph.
Somebody is literally playing censor there - acting with authority to prevent you reading something, in a way you can't just refuse to accept the way you could ignore a bad review.
Not to mention that the search engine market has very few prominent players. Whereas it's almost impossible to coordinate censorship of something even by the Western governments, 2-3 search engines are being used by more than 95% of all of their combined citizens, and they can easily collude or be coerced into censoring essentially anything.
> Somebody is literally playing censor there - acting with authority to prevent you reading something, in a way you can't just refuse to accept the way you could ignore a bad review.
No, unless the search engine is itself governmental and the restrictions aren't content-blind. You *can* in fact refuse to use a given search engine, or any search engine at all. You are not entitled to an unbiased algorithm, nor is Google obligated to serve results impartially - if you wish to *create* such an entitlement, compelling specific action from an existing private entity is not the way to do it.
I think it still accords with central senses of word 'censor' in the English lexicon when I say that I censor what I say depending on context.
If the linguistic prescriptivists start hunting people down for crimes against semantics, I'm definitely not making it through the first few rounds of executions. But it behooves us not to let principles attached to one definition of a word leak into others - censorship cannot both be a terrible violation of liberty that ought to be resisted *and* a casual everyday practice for smoothing social situations. See "failure of clarity and consistency" above.
I don't think "compulsory" is a meaningful term here. Is it "compulsory" to say "postal worker" and not "mailman"? To say "black person" and not "Negro"? My impression is that the government wouldn't arrest me in either case, but that in both cases, if I used the less preferred term in formal writing, my editor would tell me to use the more preferred term (and think slightly less of me), and if I used the less preferred term on an Internet post, I'd have people commenting telling me to use the more preferred one, and getting angry if I pushed back. I think this would be much truer for the second example than the first example. So are these terms "compulsory" or not? I think all you can do is admit that there are gradations of social pressure and stigma.
My preferred pronoun (not pronouns) is 'she/he/it' (all three, with the slashes.)
But I tell people that if they prefer brevity, they may shorten this to 's/h/it'.
> I think all you can do is admit that there are gradations of social pressure and stigma.
Gradations, sure, and often distinguishable ones. This is part of the proactive argument in favor of precision rather than a defense for its lack - government action is not the same as doxxing is not the same as status games is not the same as motivated firing is not the same as being cast out by one's own support network. Conflating vastly different reactions is a serious mistake at the best of times, and there often isn't even a strict hierarchy of intensity.
(And on an object level, is why I'm deeply unsympathetic to an idea that this is something Democrats are uniquely or even disproportionately guilty of. If one hasn't noticed any government action from Republicans, one has missed quite a bit.)
Key word - "can". As in, "maybe, but maybe not."
Forget sympathy, I'm downright *hostile* to claims that government action is needed in the here and now to head off social pressures that manage a stream of anecdotes but somehow haven't resulted in those consistent measurable fears. IMO, the biggest failure of capital-L Libertarianism in the US is failure to be sufficiently skeptical of increasing government power to combat nebulous social threats.
The biggest failure?
Are you sure?
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/01/joe-biden-domestic-terrorism-bill-capitol-building
"Capital-L Libertarianism" meaning individuals who primarily identify as libertarian as an organized political force. Compare conservative v. Conservative.
Why is it a bad thing for language to evolve? Language evolution is natural and inevitable. I don't think I understand your position here.
I don't think his argument is that it's always bad for language to evolve.
I think Scott’s point regarding the language is similar to the “Whole City is the Center” concern, where we have perfectly good words for things that don’t need to be replaced.
I am not defending “mailman” because some of them are not men... that’s a good word to change. Maybe a good example is “handicapped”... which I think became “disabled” and then “differently-abled.” (?) Has this accomplished anything? No one wants to be unable to walk or thinks that’s a good thing, but we should all agree that those who can’t walk deserve respect. Maybe the intent is to encourage the (in my opinion true) belief that a variety of seemingly bad conditions can lead to a beautiful diversity of talents and perspectives, like the archetype of the blind piano virtuoso?
Those who don’t want to extend such respect - bullies come to mind - are going to hear the new word and apply the same disrespect to it, so what does it accomplish? We’ve only achieved collateral damage to people who too slowly evolved to using the new word.
The changing of the words seems to be an unnecessary symptom of what was happening anyway: an increase in respect for previously marginalized groups. But maybe the two phenomena are inseparable, or the word change is in some way causal rather than symptomatic. I’m not sure.
There's a really great point on this that Freddie deBoer made back in late April on this that I hope he won't mind if I post here (seriously, Freddie, if it's an issue please let me know and I'll delete this post):
"Social justice politics are obsessive about the linguistic, symbolic, cultural, discursive, and academic to the detriment of the material. The reasons for this are pretty plain: the parts of contemporary society that the social justice world controls are media, academia, the arts, nonprofits - in other words, the domains of ideas, the immaterial. The man with only a hammer seeing a world full of nails, etc. But this means that basic aspects of material suffering ultimately receive scant attention. I already mentioned above that Meghan Markle received vastly more press coverage in that news cycle than the Black-white wealth gap that touches the lives of every Black American. From the standpoint of promoting mass racial justice this makes no sense. But the wealth gap is a difficult problem that the cultural industries have no capacity to solve, and they don’t spend a lot of time reporting on poor Black people. Because the British royal family is sensitive to public perception they fixated on that problem which they thought they could change. Sadly for poor Black people the wealth gap does not have a public relations team, nor is entry into wealthy royal families a realistic path for most. The triumph of the linguistic overall the practical can be found all over this world. For example, consider the recent rigid policing of the term 'person suffering from homelessness' over 'homeless person.' The thinking is that the former stresses that homelessness happens to some people at some point while the latter defines them by that condition. I’m sympathetic to this reasoning; it makes sense to me. I’m also sure that if you polled a thousand homeless people you would not find a single one who would list this among their top ten problems. But when you’re a bookish arts kid language is everything, and anyway, social justice politics does not have anything substantial to offer the homeless in material terms. So language policing it is."
It also gets to me that Confederate statues get more attention than contemporary slavery.