problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
I notice that I am confused.
Frankly I've noticed I can't predict at all how people will react to things here, or what the basis is for people liking or disliking a post. People here will consistently upvote, say, source-less rants about how they feel like immigrants degrade their home country as top-level posts (which I find to be immensely low-effort content), but will react badly to other posts even if more well sourced. I also don't feel like my post clearly broke any rules in a way most of the other contributions here already don't.
I mean, I understand that people don't necessarily care about this, and that's perfectly fair. There's lots of things I come across here that I don't personally care about either, but I just ignore it and move on. It's a consequence of being in a general purpose political community. I certainly don't go on to leave pithy, low-effort comments about how little I give a shit about what's been posted. I also don't think that it's completely irrelevant to the current political climate.
It seems that people here upvote and downvote posts based on a completely alien set of criteria to me, and I'm too much of an autist to predict what's acceptable posting and what isn't. The only thing I can find that's consistent is that even here, speaking about Gamergate in 2023 is low status, and will be treated as such. It's the closest thing to something everyone has silently agreed not to touch, and doing so is considered a faux pas.
At the moment, Nyberg has 13.3K followers on Twitter, which is a fairly high number considering her last post was in 2018. The people who defended her, such as Dan Olson, are fairly prominent even now (Olson is a fairly popular YouTube documentarian nowadays, who's roughly BreadTube-adjacent). He accused 8chan of hosting CP and yet changed his twitter handle to include "Butts" in solidarity with Nyberg.
Even granting the idea that she was, it would be wrong to say that the entire story was suppressed.
I'm not saying the entire story was suppressed, rather that the reporting about this subject has been slanted and that the media has been silent about this in a way they wouldn't be if the shoe was on the other foot. For you to consider something as "suppression" it basically needs to be scrubbed from the internet, which clearly isn't the situation we're talking about here.
This is rather something that hasn't reached the mainstream because no mainstream news sources will report on it in any honest way, and the ones that do report on it from what I've seen have simply painted Nyberg as the victim, such as this Quartz article that alleges that Gamergate spread "baseless accusations of pedophilia" about Nyberg. The Young Turks were willing to cover her, but not to talk about her pedophilia - to talk about her Twitter bot. It seems that the mainstream certainly doesn't consider her insignificant enough not to report on at all, rather they would rather just not report on her in the "wrong" way.
I'm not saying she was as nearly as big a deal as Sarkeesian or Wu, but this situation most certainly wasn't a complete nothingburger, either.
Here is the link to the education standards, and here is the primary section they are getting angry over. It isn't even saying that "slavery benefited blacks" per se, it's saying something much more defensible:
SS.68.AA.2.3 Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.
This isn't even wrong. Here is, for example, a page from George Washington University saying the very same thing:
Slaves had many noteworthy skills and talents which made plantations economically self-sufficient. The services of slave blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, shoemakers, tanners, spinners, weavers and other artisans were all used to keep plantations running smoothly, efficiently, and with little added expense to the owners. These same abilities were also used to improve conditions in the quarters so that slaves developed not only a spirit of self-reliance but experienced a measure of autonomy. These skills, when added to other talents for cooking, quilting, weaving, medicine, music, song, dance, and storytelling, instilled in slaves the sense that, as a group, they were not only competent but gifted. Slaves used their talents to deflect some of the daily assaults of bondage. They saw themselves then as strong, valuable people who were unjustly held against their will rather than as the perpetually dependent children or immoral scoundrels described by so many of their owners. Indeed, they found through their artistry some moments of happiness, particularly by telling tales which portrayed work in humorous terms or when singing satirical songs which lampooned their owners.
Richard Toler was trained as a blacksmith during slavery and later went on to try his hand as a carpenter and stonemason. He could also play the fiddle but recalled that he and his people were always treated poorly on the plantation:
https://www2.gwu.edu/~folklife/bighouse/panel19.html
But when Florida's education system says it, it's problematic and three million inflated hitpieces need to be written about how terrible Florida and Desantis is, despite the fact that educational institutions like GWU have explicitly taken the very same perspective. Politics is the ultimate mind-killer. I suppose you could make a coherent argument that if the picture being painted of slavery is primarily a positive one the Florida standards encourage teachers to lie by omission. Except it's clearly not doing so, because in a section right afterwards:
SS.912.AA.1.7 Compare the living conditions of slaves in British North American colonies, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, including infant mortality rates.
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes the harsh conditions and their consequences on British American plantations (e.g., undernourishment, climate conditions, infant and child mortality rates of the enslaved vs. the free). Clarification 2: Instruction includes the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations (i.e., poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease). Clarification 3: Instruction includes how slavery was sustained in the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and Brazil despite overwhelming death rates.
And in another one:
SS.912.AA.1.9 Evaluate how conditions for Africans changed in colonial North America from 1619-1776.
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes both judicial and legislative actions during the colonial period. Clarification 2: Instruction includes the history and development of slave codes in colonial North America including the John Punch case (1640). Clarification 3: Instruction includes how slave codes resulted in an enslaved person becoming property with no rights.
It's funny, because the critics are claiming that Florida's education standards are presenting a "sanitised" view of history, while in reality the people who want a sanitised half-truth to be painted are the critics themselves, who would readily strip demonstrable historical facts out of the record to support their political project.
I'm trying to stay away from politics for now, but I feel a bit compelled to add to your comment.
As someone who's been involved in them before, Internet communities dedicated to the arts are probably the worst in this regard. There was a Discord server I was in a couple years back dedicated to a specific electronic band where the very same thing happened to me, except it was more farcical than this. So, some background - I was an early user of the server, I was casual friends with one of the mods there, and while little interesting conversation could be found from them they were at least pleasant to talk to. At first, the server was a fairly low-key place where one could talk about a certain artist's works, share their own music, etc. I came to be known as a regular there.
At some point, after an influx of new users, the server took on an explicitly political bent, despite (if I remember correctly) a rule stating no politics in the server. People would speak at length about politics and always from an incredibly progressive viewpoint, and when people would bring up concerns about the politicisation of the server the response was "Some people don't have the privilege of not thinking about politics". You had regular bashing of people like Jordan Peterson in there. You had users openly endorsing sentiments like "I hate men", stating that there was value in these open and unabashed statements of group hatred because it might enlighten people about their "privilege". The progressive conceptualisation of identity-based privilege and oppression, as well as the directionality of that oppression, were all taken as unchallengeable fact in that server and it never needed to be rigorously proved or demonstrated, just asserted.
Quite predictably, there was also talk about the underrepresentation of women in electronic music. The answer was always that some nebulous socialisation of sorts dissuaded them from trying their hand at it. Inherent or innate factors were not considered. As far as I know, no studies on the gender difference in empathising-systemising (E-S) or the impact of E-S on music preferences were ever linked there. It's also worth noting that the server at this point was also filled to the brim with purportedly gender-dysphoric people who identified as something or other. IIRC, one of the most political people on the server at the time I was there was a trans woman from Iran. I remember this person posting video of their "interpretive dance" which basically consisted of them uncoordinatedly jumping up and down on their bed while a song played in the background. I swear to God, I am not making this up.
I made quite a lot of attempts to argue that politics should be out of the server, that it didn't belong in a server dedicated to an electronic artist, and nobody really acted on it - instead, they continued having political discussion in complete contradiction to the rule. Eventually, I decided that if they didn't want to adhere to an ethic of "no politics", I would not be bound by that rule either. When they were having one of their many progressive-leaning discussions, I decided to outline some of my problems with that ideology in as polite and moderate a fashion as I knew how. I garnered responses, and before I could answer them a moderator came in and stated that things were "getting too political". The politics rule was conveniently invoked, and the entire conversation was shut down in a manner that allowed progressives to have the last word.
I left the server for a bit, and when I came back, things didn't seem to be that much better. I had only a bit of time to speak with some of the users there before I was abruptly banned from the server, and a longstanding friend of mine (who was still in there) posted me the text of conversations involving the mods - including the one who I was friends with for a good while - where they were shit-talking me. Stating that I had expressed "harmful things", and that I "creeped them out". My "harmful" take was stating that the relations between the sexes aren't characterised by oppression.
Apparently the topic of my banning still comes up with some regularity every now and then in that server.
I'm not the person who made the claim about the pedo/LGBT overlap, and I didn't actually set out to make a point about that (though I will say NAMBLA was a bit too close for comfort with the early LGBT movement, I wouldn't necessarily think it automatically discredits all LGBT politics).
Rather, the point I was personally trying to prove was more defensible - just to point out that many of the people who engaged in anti-GG (including some very prominent ones) were willing to provide cover for terrible behaviour while at the same time being moralistic crusaders who claimed that those who would disagree with them were bigoted. Sarah Nyberg herself is less interesting than the reaction to her. You'll see people bring up Gamergate even today in order to make a generalised point about how "the alt-right" functions or something or other (like an Ian Danskin video I addressed here or this Kotaku article posted just on Tuesday), and having these examples of undeniably bad behaviour on the anti-GG side (which seem to have been quite widespread) helps to counter that.
You shouldn't concede ground to your opponents or let them define the narrative, even concerning culture wars that are long over, because these things can be used against you. And having many little examples like this can help tip someone's perceptions of who it is they've been associating with. I'm not saying this alone is a bombshell piece of evidence and it's not like I'm stating that you can "discredit" all of progressivism with one instance of misconduct, it's just something that taken jointly with plenty of other evidence (some of which was outlined in my other post on the topic) can help to demonstrate an overarching point.
Nyberg appears to be some small-time individual who got 15 minutes of fame and has moved on to doing whatever she does now. Her twitter feed is mostly about plugging her own stream/Patreon, quote-tweeting some lesbian novel bot, and talking about trans politics from a clearly pro-trans perspective (and I mean in the normie online progressive way).
I definitely agree that at the moment she's not someone with a huge amount of cultural reach (she did have more during Gamergate), I posted this more because it's probably the most stark illustration of just how unprincipled a good amount of the progressives engaging in that specific culture war were.
But it's worth considering that when you search up Nyberg on Google, you get her twitter, a LinkedIn profile, and then a Medium piece which clearly comes down on the side that Sarah is an actual pedophile. DuckDuckGo straight up links to the "Why you shouldn't stand with Sarah Nyberg" piece at number 1.
Interesting, it doesn't show up like that for me on Google. The very first result is Intelligencer, which links to this article speaking with a good amount of mirth about Sarah Nyberg's Twitter bot that exists to troll the "alt-right" online. The second result is to her Twitter. Further down, articles about the whole debacle do show up, and I will concede that the information about Nyberg being a pedophile is on the internet and can be found - but only as long as you know about Sarah Nyberg in the first place, and almost always from non-mainstream sources.
My comment at the end of the post was more to do with the fact that any memory of her 15 minutes of fame (and how she was defended by the progressive camp) doesn't really exist much on the internet. When you search up "Gamergate" you often get long lists of what the mainstream perceives that Gamergate did wrong, and meanwhile things that the anti side did that's objectionable - even something as objectionable as this - has been mostly scrubbed from the general discourse around the topic. I've seen people in real life that know absolutely nothing about it, and essentially just parrot stock anti-GG talking points from videos and articles they've found around, and often they are surprised when I tell them these things. Hell, my dad at one point read something about the topic and I had to disabuse him of certain notions about how it all actually played out.
It's not impossible to find sources that are congenial to Gamergate, but they're a definite minority, and represent the parts of the internet that are frequented almost exclusively by the terminally online.
Well, TIFU.
Today I managed to achieve the incredible feat of making it to work over two hours late. I was so smashed that I slept for 11 hours, through an alarm, and made it to work at 11:35 AM. Was expecting to be raked over the coals once I got there and apologised, but instead my superior repeatedly told me it was alright and that she was just worried if something had happened to me.
While I am usually a very reliable worker and often work close to 50 hour weeks (for a job that pays far lower than the median Australian salary), I don't feel good about it. At all. I stayed three hours after close of business just to try and make up for it and got off work at 8pm, something I was told I didn't have to do but did anyway. I feel especially bad because my superiors are genuinely nice to me and even though the job is tiring, requires a lot of task juggling, and doesn't pay very much at all, that's not their fault and I would really like to not disappoint them.
I mean, yeah? Is that surprising? Why would a mainstream org even care? Progressive hypocrisy isn't that hard to find and it's over some nobody? Even if I ran the most anti-woke paper in existence, I probably wouldn't dive into the specifics of one pedophile and her progressive defenders from the Gamergate era.
The mainstream tends to love excavating initially niche things and making them into huge stories, as long as it conforms to their preexisting ideological bent. They kind of control what is niche and what's not, and typically the things that get dragged into the spotlight are culture wars they feel they have a good likelihood of winning. The media dictates the cultural reach of a story as much as it responds to it.
In addition, I would like to record as many instances of progressive misconduct I can find. It's not just the magnitude of these instances that matter - the frequency at which it occurs also matters when you're trying to convince normies of your point, and finding more than a few fairly egregious instances and being able to document them exhaustively - niche or not - does help you. And some of the people who supported Nyberg - such as Leigh Alexander and especially Dan Olson of Folding Ideas - are not niche.
That's fair, but I don't think this is the best example of how Gamergate was poorly treated. The nicheness of the story itself overshadows the "progressive hypocrisy/culture-warring" aspects, imo.
I mean, I agree, but I've already covered the main thrust of my point as to how Gamergate was poorly treated in my previous top-level thread about it and don't really care to write about what I've already addressed a second time. This just builds on that. The issue is that at this point I've covered most of the major, mainstream topics in the culture war that I have strong opinions about. I am very much a specialist with a very limited scope who espouses the approach in this blogpost: "So if you want to stop being an NPC, simply say “I don’t know” to all the matters that don’t concern you. And that will give you the time to not be an NPC on all the matters that do".
I've addressed the topics I care about (mainly identity-progressivism) ad nauseam in many forums IRL and online for years, and so most of the new information that I'm coming across is necessarily going to concern less mainstream topics and situations. Of course, I definitely don't expect everyone to care about the minutiae of the culture wars I look into. But this is a weird forum with weird people that may or may not find it interesting. If there's a place on the internet at all it belongs to, I think it's this one.
I am surprised that the author of this article is surprised, since there's a lot of critical theorist writing that dovetails well with what is happening in these anti-racist workshops.
For context, I've been reading a bunch of critical theorist scholarship recently. While it's been aggravating because much of it has been written in intentionally long-winded and obfuscatory language and almost all of it describes an underlying belief system so inherently objectionable that I'm convinced exposure to it is inevitably going to damage people's sanity, I've found it's been useful in understanding what this particular cohort of ideologues believe. It's become abundantly clear that the beliefs espoused in these workshops don't start and end with some radical, offended grievance-obsessed students, this insanity exists at the very core of Critical Social Justice ideology.
For example, this:
During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy.
This is an idea that has cropped up multiple times. I'm sure everyone here already knows about the infamous infographic that labels "objective, rational linear thinking" as a quality of "whiteness" and "white culture". This is, however, not new: the seed of this idea can be traced back very far in critical race scholarship. For example, here's an article by John Calmore called "Critical Race Theory, Archie Shepp, and Fire Music: Securing an Authentic Intellectual Life in a Multicultural World", which came out in the early 1990s. It was so influential it got included in a compilation book called "Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement" by critical race theorist par excellence Kimberlé Crenshaw. I first found it cited in this video and initially struggled to find the text online so I could read it, but eventually managed to download the full text from this admittedly seedy-looking file upload site.
In the article, Calmore declares: "As a form of oppositional scholarship, critical race theory challenges the universality of white experience/judgment as the authoritative standard that binds people of color and normatively measures, directs, controls, and regulates the terms of proper thought, expression, presentment, and behavior." So you can see here the expression of the idea that the standards that white people create in their societies are the standards that people of colour are bound to follow, and CRT stands in opposition to this because adapting to these standards supposedly renders people of colour inauthentic. "Hence, a major theme of critical race theory reflects the colored intellectual's persistent battle to avoid being rendered inauthentic by the pressures of adapting to the white world and to take instead an oppositional stance by relying on one's true existential life, which is rooted in a world of color even though not stuck there."
With that covered, Calmore begins attacking the expectation of objectivity and neutrality in scholarship as one of these dictates and pressures that supposedly prevent Black folx and other people of colour from being authentic, and what he instead endorses is an approach characterised by the production of intentionally biased scholarship personal expression: "As a reflection of authenticity, critical race scholarship also rejects the traditional dictates that implore one to write and study as a detached observer whose work is purportedly objective, neutral, and balanced. In the classic sense of “professing,” critical race scholars advocate and defend positions. Fran Olsen points out that traditional scholarship's appearance of balance presupposes a status quo baseline that hinders both understanding and social change. Critical race theory tends, in response, toward very personal expression that allows our experiences and lessons, learned as people of color, to convey the knowledge that we possess in a way that is empowering to us and, it is hoped, ultimately empowering to those on whose behalf we act. Those of us who profess critical race theory are, in simplest terms, trying to be true to ourselves."
And here's the author disparaging neutrality in legal discourse. "When people of color deemphasize an individuality that tries to transcend color—when we attempt, in other words, to express valid generalizations generated out of race consciousness—we challenge the underlying inadequacy of dominant legal discourse, that which Kimberlé Crenshaw has labeled “perspectivelessness.” This position of perspectivelessness holds that legal analysis is possible without taking into account various conflicts of individual values, experiences, and world views. According to Crenshaw, by stripping away the analysis of any particular cultural, political, or class characteristic, this perspectivelessness is presented as the objective, neutral legal discourse, with a corollary of “color blindness,” used to reduce conflict and devalue the relevance of our particular perspectives."
The text then launches into an incessant, repetitive lament about how black intellectuals supposedly often uncritically bend to the pressures of dominant white academia and white culture, and eventually at the end advocates that "As African Americans in dominant white society, we must guard against institutional co-optation that socializes us away from our own identities and value systems."
In other words, the critical theorist view is that these academic and scholarly virtues we're familiar with have no value in and of themselves, they are only considered to have value by white academia (this is also true for other aspects of "dominant white American culture"). Critical race theorists think this is racist, they think that "Black thought" or the deprioritisation of objectivity and other such values in favour of Black experience and Black racial consciousness is equally good (or in fact better), but that it is denigrated and devalued simply because of White society. And when coloured scholars and intellectuals endorse and practice "white virtues", they consider them to be people who have lost their racial identity and who are just inauthentically capitulating to the pressures that White society places on them. So being a person of colour doesn't save you from criticism.
The Telluride professor seems bewildered by Keisha, but really all she was doing in her workshops was teaching them ideological tenets that have long existed in critical race theory. As James Lindsay notes in his criticism of critical theory, objectivity is thought of in critical theorist circles as a "myth that’s used to marginalize other ways of knowing and uphold dominant systems of power." The reason why these students reacted to the citation of incarceration statistics in that way is because they think this is an invocation of (white!) objectivity to silence and devalue Black voices and Black subjective experience, and is thus problematic. It's entirely consistent with the worldview and is a fantastic example of the mind-rot that critical theory cultivates in the minds of its believers.
So here's an admittedly fairly trivial matter that's been on my mind lately. This is a bit of Fun, bit of Wellness, take it mainly as a lighthearted question because it's really not weighing on me too badly all things considered.
It's Friday and I'm home after 10 hours poring over numbers in Excel spreadsheets. I find that after a workday like this it's hard to get myself to do anything at all, it's almost as if there is a daily quota of mental effort I can expend on things. Once I devote all of that to preparing people's financial statements, income tax returns, business activity statements and so on I can't devote any more of my focus to my own projects and endeavours. Not to mention memory limitations, I am now using a significant portion of my storage capacity to track goings-on at work (made worse by my clients' numerous demands, which I will mention later) and remember the appropriate accounting and tax treatment for various matters as well as the relevant circumstances of each of my clients. The work itself isn't necessarily super difficult in and of itself, it's just that there are a lot of clients asking for a lot of different things.
It's quite hard to coordinate anything after work too, because my clients are often absolute fucking children who expect they be catered to on a timeframe that suits them - for example, they want things to be done at a certain time yet sometimes take forever to provide the information necessary to do the work they request, and their delays sometimes require me to stay long after close of business. Yesterday, I had scheduled something with a family member at 6pm, and near close of business the client returned with over a dozen transactions they wanted me to process (while this is something that happens on Thursdays the client usually provides the relevant info earlier in the day), and I was forced to complete the work hastily and hand it over to a reviewer - who unsurprisingly found errors. Said reviewer was not happy about that, and I have stopped planning anything after work because of this. Compared to other stuff that's happened though, this is a small matter - this same client requested that we do work over the Christmas period for them, when the office is closed and people are expected to take annual leave. Please note, they sprung this on us in November, when almost everyone else working on the client had already made travel plans, and as a result I might be the one who has to do that work.
I can't really list anything significant I do outside of work at the moment, because as it is right now the work week smashes me enough that I can't build up the level of focus necessary to actually do things. In other words, I feel as if I'm becoming my work, and I'm not sure if I like that.
How do you not be a boring person after work? Help, please.
In the US, where people and income are easier to keep track of, a third of custodial parents who are owed child support receive nothing.
I looked into the Census Bureau source that this statistic is based on, and the data seems to be based off self-reports by custodial parents, it is not being based off any kind of formal tracking of child support (that method of doing things poses problems too, as it does not include payments made through unofficial channels, but I won't get into that at the moment). Here are some selected quotes:
In this report, child support supposed to be received refers to the amount due as self-reported by the custodial parent. This amount includes both formal, court-ordered support (awards), as well as informal support agreed to between parents.
Of the 6.4 million custodial parents with child support agreements, 88.2 percent reported that these agreements were formal legal orders—established by a court or other government entity—while 11.8 percent reported informal agreements or understandings.
A total of $18.6 billion of child support was reported as received by custodial parents, amounting to 62.2 percent of the $30.0 billion that was supposed to be received in 2017 (Figure 6). ... Overall, custodial parents reported receiving $20.6 billion directly from non- custodial parents for support of their shared children in 2017, which included $2.0 billion received by 505,000 parents without child support agreements.
The technical documentation, which can be found here on the Census Bureau's website, notes this, too: "All household members 15 years of age and older that are biological parents of children in the household that have an absent parent were asked detailed questions about child support and alimony." It is asking the custodial parent, the one with the child in their household, not the non-custodial parent. And looking at the questionnaire used to assess child support payment makes it very clear that the intended target of the questionnaire is the recipient, not the obligor.
Here are some more selected quotes:
S300INTRO DO NOT READ
THE NEXT QUESTIONS ARE ABOUT WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN ACCORDING TO THE (AGREEMENT/UNDERSTANDING/COURT ORDER/COURT AWARD)
IF THE RESPONDENT TELLS YOU WHAT THEY RECEIVED, PROBE TO MAKE SURE IT WAS WHAT THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO RECEIVE
S313a So you said you were SUPPOSED to receive $X (per month, per week, every other week, twice monthly, per year) (including back support), is that correct?
(1) Yes (2) No
===>_
S313b How much child support, in total, were you SUPPOSED to receive? ENTER THE AMOUNT
===>$,_ .00
S326INTRO DO NOT READ
THE NEXT QUESTIONS ASK ABOUT THE CHILD SUPPORT THE RESPONDENT ACTUALLY RECEIVED
S335 What is the correct amount of child support you ACTUALLY received in 2013? ENTER DOLLAR AMOUNT
===> $,_ .00
I could not find an equivalent questionnaire asking the non-custodial parent what they paid.
This is not, in any way, a trivial source of bias and needs to be kept in mind when you're using these statistics, but the Census Bureau does not disclose this as being a significant limitation of the data - despite the fact that they have used this methodology for a while and despite the fact that this census data has been used for decades to drum up huge social scares around deadbeat dads with no acknowledgement of the possible bias involved.
These caveats were outlined decades ago by Sanford Braver, who states in his book "Divorced dads: shattering the myths" that to answer these questions completely accurately, respondents would have to remember twelve to twenty-four different payments over the past year. In the absence of precise information, many if not most respondents will just try to make up a best estimate, which is a circumstance that allows for an incredible amount of bias to enter into one's results - even worse when you consider that many people are deeply angry at their exes. And if the census officials come to their conclusion based on reports by custodial parents that is going to hugely distort things, the effect being that the results will come with a built-in bias against non-custodial parents.
Braver conducts a study himself where he solves this problem by asking matched sets of custodial and non-custodial parents, and unsurprisingly, custodial parents (mostly mothers) report a much lower percentage of payments made than non-custodial parents (mostly fathers). 13% of mothers report receiving nothing despite being owed support, but only 4% of fathers report paying nothing despite being obligated. When looking at the overall payment statistic, divorced mothers report receiving between two-thirds and three-quarters of what they are owed, and fathers report paying better than 90 percent of what is owed. If we were to do what the Census Bureau did and interview the non-custodial parent only, child support nonpayment is barely even a problem at all!
He states, after this, "I am certainly not arguing that interviewing only fathers is what the Census Bureau ought to have done. I don't believe that noncustodial parents' reports should be uncritically accepted as truth, either. To me, it merely points out how erroneous the present practice of accepting the mother's report as truth without qualification is. When studying something as emotionally wrenching as divorce, it's nearly impossible for people to answer without bias. Indeed, both parents' reports are likely to be biased. In the absence of trustworthy objective official data to the contrary, it seems safest to assume that noncustodial parents are probably overstating child-support payments made, and custodial parents are probably understating. Thus, the truth lies somewhere in between, and our findings can best be thought of as "bracketing" true child-support compliance. In short, we must conclude that how much child support is not being paid remains in substantial dispute, but the amount being paid by divorced fathers is almost certainly higher than most official estimates. Deadbeat divorced dads are nowhere near as numerous as the stereotype portrays".
As to the divorced dads who don't pay, Braver notes that you can’t assume that this represents wilful noncompliance - the single biggest factor relating to nonpayment is typically unemployment and when you exclude fathers who experienced a period of unemployment from consideration, the compliance rate rises dramatically.
EDIT: a small correction
I like Hanania in general, but it really is striking how much the change seems to be about having something to lose.
This seems to be a common trap people fall into, the second people gain any amount of status within the system their ideas quickly soften and become more in line with the cultural hegemony. Hanania isn't an exception. I don't even think this is necessarily intentional dishonesty per se, people are primed to shift their beliefs the second the costs of that belief become unacceptable.
I'd wager your average, well-adjusted person is engaging in motivated self-delusion on many different topics without being aware of it, and that it is the people who have nothing to lose (or think they do) who have the ability to entertain independent thought the most. This doesn't mean they necessarily come to the correct conclusions, it's rather that their conclusions are not constrained by social desirability and are more "honest" in that regard.
I think we can see all around us many of the failure modes of trusting these people with the governance of our country and the production of our cultural narratives. They are fundamentally unserious people, addicted to attention and applause, attracted to head-in-the-clouds utopian nonsense because they never fully grew out of a sort of perpetual narcissistic adolescence, convinced that the key to solving hard problems is just telling a really good lie and crafting a feel-good narrative so aesthetically-pleasing that it can’t help but manifest into reality. This is a spot-on description of the personalities of many of the theatre people I know, and I wouldn’t trust them to organize a bake sale, let alone run a country.
I've spent a not-insignificant amount of time around "music people", and for the most part they are much the same. I happen to be one myself, but don't feel particularly "attacked" because I don't feel it describes me well - a generalisation doesn't necessarily apply to every individual member of a group.
The first problem is that many of these people don't look at societies as large emergent entities which are governed and shaped by forces that are outside of anything we would consider as "humanistic values" (example: Scott's Moloch), rather they tend to see societies as being almost solely a product of ideology. When that is the primary lens through which you view things, you end up adopting this incredibly airy-fairy idea that you can shape society into anything you want and IF ONLY you could get enough people on board we could live on Heaven On Earth. Most "artsy people" really don't tend to develop very complex thinking about societies and why they operate the way they do, and it doesn't matter how much history or anthropology or evolutionary theory or whatever they learn, most of them in practice tend to remain stuck in this mindset.
The second problem is that their cognition is in large part governed by aesthetics (unsurprisingly so, perhaps). Their political thinking and what they like/dislike are basically determined by what resonates with them on the most aesthetic and superficial of levels, and a huge amount of their political criticisms amount to implying that their opponents' optics are bad and distasteful to them instead of actually engaging with the meat of the arguments being made. Again, knowledge doesn't seem to change this because it's a fundamental, deeper problem with their mindset and personality that's independent of how much one knows.
These two things seem to predispose them to adopting revolutionary, utopian leftist ideologies (e.g. communism) and clinging hard to these beliefs even when they observably break apart on contact with reality.
So, I belong to that portion of gay men who are completely uninterested in women. I have never felt particularly attracted to women in any manner nor feel any desire whatsoever to have sex with them. If a woman propositioned me, I would indeed turn her down. Perhaps it is my autistic inability to see things from others' perspectives, but the idea that women are so impressively attractive to men to the point that men are willing to endure the contradictory and punitive norms around courtship that are placed on them (which is apparent even from an outsider's perspective) is frankly wild to me.
I absolutely think that a portion of people in the rainbow community are reacting to social incentives and there are those who do so in order to extract benefits from the current social environment (non-binary being a popular one in certain circles), but there are people who are exclusively gay.
Young men commit the vast majority of violent crime in every population on earth.
And are we going to acknowledge the flip side of this, too? I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men.
Even in non-dangerous scenarios, you can see greater male helping behaviours in a public context.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2786599
"One hundred forty-five experimenters "accidentally" dropped a handful of pencils or coins on 1,497 occasions before a total of 4,813 bystanders in elevators in Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. In picking up the objects, females received more help than did males, males gave more help than did females, and these differences were greatly exaggerated in Atlanta."
In addition, this study does a review of the literature surrounding gender and helping.
"Many previous studies have found that males are more likely to give help than females and/or that females are more likely to receive it than males (e.g., Bryan and Test, 1967; Ehlert et al., 1973; Gaertner and Bickman, 1971; Graf and Riddle, 1972; Latane, 1970; Morgan, 1973; Penner et al., 1973; Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972; Piliavin et al., 1969; Pomazal and Clore, 1973; Simon, 1971; Werner, 1974; Wispe and Freshly, 1971). A few studies have found no main effects due to sex (Gruder and Cook, 1971; Thayer, 1973) and in one case males were more likely to receive help (Emswiller et al., 1971). Two studies have found cross-sex helping to be more frequent than same-sex helping (Bickman, 1974; Thayer, 1973), one has found same-sex helping to be more common (Werner, 1974), and most have found no difference. Although the relation of sex to helping may depend on the specific type of help requested, it is clear that in the preponderance of settings tested to date, males help more than females, and females receive more help than males."
Heroism is likely mostly engaged in by men. As this article notes:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369/full
"To this end, we investigated reactions to newsworthy, exceptional social roles that are often dealt with in the media: hero and murderer. Both social roles attract much attention and have similarly low percentages of women (ca. 10–20%). In the US, only 9% of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving others are women, and in Germany only about 20% of similar medals are awarded to women. This may be because there are fewer women in professions such as firefighters, soldiers, or police officers—jobs involving dangerous situations where jobholders can act heroically."
I would differ from the authors here. Fewer women in dangerous professions is likely not a very big reason for the difference in heroism found between men and women, because the Carnegie Hero Medal excludes from awards of persons such as firefighters whose duties in their regular vocations require heroism, unless the act of heroism is truly outstanding. "The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued, which precludes those whose vocational duties require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty; and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hero_Fund
This article in Men's Health notes "nine out of every 10 Carnegie heroes have been men".
"Heroic rescuing behaviour is a male-typical trait in humans ... This study looked at news archives of local papers in the UK in order to discover what kind of characteristics rescuers possess. It was found that males were highly more likely to rescue than females were".
When it comes to men there's very much a misleading tendency to focus on the negative manifestations of their tendency towards public sphere agency and ignore all the positive ways it manifests. I think in the past we had a more balanced viewpoint surrounding it, and there's been a very motivated attempt to stamp out positive perceptions of men due to an idea that these perceptions are problematic. It's very hard for me not to see the slow erasure of positive male qualities from the public discourse as being intentional.
And also the next problem with your point is that it basically ignores the role women play in creating violence. Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women. And you can easily see plenty of instances throughout history of women weaponising that social expectation and openly cajoling men into performing violence against others, as I mentioned in a previous comment of mine. But violence by proxy perpetrated by women is, again, largely a topic that is taboo in the public discourse.
However, given that race is a social construct
This is such an irritating motte-and-bailey. The motte is "Discrete racial categories are imposed classifications since race is in reality a continuous phenomenon", and the bailey is "Therefore race is not a meaningful biological phenomenon and should not be thought of as such". The motte is trivially true if a bit uninsightful. The bailey is utterly ridiculous.
A fact which often has good Bayesian foundations!
Given epistemic learned helplessness and the ability of the internet to invent narratives and fabricate 'evidence', considering the motives of the source when you hear a surprising piece of information meant to motivate you towards some action is often a good idea.
Frankly, reflexively defending someone with the rest of your in-group simply because your out-group attacked them does not have good foundations of any sort. "Considering the motives of a source" is generally a good principle, I agree. That just as much applies to your in-group as it does to your out-group, and defending someone from critique without knowing whether that critique has basis or not is not epistemically justifiable. The motives of those making a claim are ultimately irrelevant to the truth of a claim. "Being skeptical" does not entail "knee-jerk rejection", especially in situations when the evidence is already there for you to look at.
Regarding your other comment on this, I have no doubt that at least some of the people here were ignorant in some way or other (though some, such as Galvez and Ryulong, were almost certainly being dishonest). I tend to believe, however, that this lack of knowledge was because they actively decided not to look at or consider any of the evidence although, again, it was readily available to them at the time, then formed their own opinions based almost solely on preconception. It was wilful ignorance borne out of tribal partisanship that caused them to defend this, and that definitely deserves scorn.
Yep, beat me to it. The UN has a history of gender-discriminatory policy favouring women, and justifying these policies with sophistry and extremely flimsy arguments. In Haiti, the UN's justification for distributing the food to women was to claim (without a shred of evidence) that women were more likely to distribute food equitably, and also that most men had women who would give the food to them. Here's a CNN article reporting on it and laying out some of the UN's justifications.
For my part, I would say it's incoherent to justify this policy with the idea that most men have women who will distribute the food to them, since it's not as if women don't also have men who will distribute food to them too - it can be used to justify it both ways. I for one also think it would have been infinitely better if they distributed the food equitably themselves instead of crossing their fingers and hoping the women would do it for them - maybe they should consider completing their job instead of only doing half of it. But it's mainly covered in a positive manner, with the gender discrimination brushed over as an afterthought or even justified. Even the CNN article approaches it from that angle, despite indications that there were men who were excluded from necessary aid (quoting one who stated "What about me? I didn't get anything. I need food. ... Many people could not participate", completely in contrast to the UN's lip-service claims that they would try to make sure no one in need was excluded).
Additionally, as this blog post from the same author notes, a lot of their already tenuous justifications for women-only food aid in Haiti might have actually been even more questionable in the context of that specific disaster because "due to the timing of the earthquake at 4:53 pm, a high percentage of casualties were women who remained in the household, while men and children were at work or in school, leaving a high percentage of single-male headed households and households with only one, or no remaining breadwinner."
Other mental gymnastics that the UN offered up to justify their actions in Haiti was to claim (again without any substantiation) that women were being pushed out of food lines, but even if we are to charitably interpret the UN and the WFP's statements and assume women being pushed out of line was actually a problem instead of a rationalisation created by an organisation desperately trying to justify their actions, they could've solved this by establishing different food distribution centres for men and for women instead of prioritising women, thus reducing clashes between men and women through sex-segregation while creating no such gender discrimination against men when it came to their food distribution. This is such an easy solution it's hard to imagine them not thinking of it unless all their staff and policy-makers are mentally challenged, and so this is not a satisfactory justification or explanation for the policy.
Rather, I think this is a blatant example of the UN's gender ideology bleeding into their aid programmes. Placing food in the hands of women is part of their attempts to Empower Women. In this 2001 discussion here they talk about the prospect of utilising humanitarian crises to push their gender agenda - and in it, specifically targeting women for the distribution of resources is touched on as one of the possible methods for "empowerment". The concept of using disasters to promote a gender agenda has existed in the UN for a very long time, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2014 Ebola outbreak were just the instances which the mainstream reported on.
EDIT: clarity
Part 1/4
Recently, someone sent me a video about GamerGate made by BreadTuber Ian Danskin in 2021. The video in question is his talk to UC Merced about "digital radicalism" using GamerGate as a case study. Here is the link to the video and here is the link to the transcript of the video, posted on his Tumblr.
It's truly shocking how many errors and misrepresentations there are in it. There are so many I can't and won't cover them all, but I do want to highlight the most notable ones.
Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.
Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.
I'm genuinely not sure where he's getting the idea that Gjoni posted to 4chan. Not even his supposedly "too comprehensive" RationalWiki source detailing the timeline of GamerGate states that Gjoni posted it on 4chan - it just states "Eron Gjoni publishes "The Zoe Post" on Wordpress, accusing Zoe Quinn of infidelity. This time the post is shared to 4chan's boards /b/, /v/, /pol/, and /r9k/." One of his other sources claims Gjoni attempted to sic 4chan on Quinn, but this claim is not cited.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Gamergate
According to The Zoe Post, here Gjoni’s side of it:
“If you take my recommendation to opt against the TL;DR — yes, this is written almost entirely in shitty metaphors and bitter snark. It’s a post about an ex, and the tone reflects its intention as the starting post for forum threads entitled Cringe-Worthy Break Up Stories on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, because I figured it would be best to announce on friendly communities in innocuous ways. Penny Arcade and Something Awful deleted those threads, so now this blog stands alone. I will not take it down, because I know the information is important, even if what I have omitted means you never might."
"And no, I never posted this to 4chan.”
https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/
There is, however, another page on RationalWiki which states that "After he got banned from Penny Arcade and Something Awful, he shared with 4chan's /r9k/ and /pol/ who then decided to call her a "whore" and a "cunt".[1][2] How non-misogynist."
https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Gamergate_claims&diff=1587662&oldid=1587661
RationalWiki posts two sources to "prove" that Eron Gjoni shared with 4chan's /r9k/ and /pol/. However, none of their sources prove at all that Eron Gjoni shared it - others rehosted what was removed from other places as posted by Gjoni, but he himself did not provably rehost on the chans himself.
The tone of these chans is very 4chan, meaning it's not amazing. However, I found no evidence suggesting Gjoni sanctioned or approved of either.
I'd also add that Gjoni has stated repeatedly that the reason why he posted them on Penny Arcade and Something Awful was because they had positive views of Zoe, not because they had a history of harassing her.
"I chose the Penny Arcade forum because all mentions of Zoe there have been positive. I chose the Something Awful forum because Zoe used to visit there a lot before making DQ, and they like her in a "we knew her before she was famous" sort of way."
"She was a regular on Something Awful. And they like her in a "we knew her before she was famous" sort of way. Which is why I chose Something Awful as one of the two boards to drop this one."
https://web.archive.org/web/20141204063637/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BxRecBCIAAEIcOG.png
Then, Danskin goes on to make this bombshell of a claim:
What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.
Now, his source for this is the Boston Magazine hit-piece on Gjoni, entitled "Game of Fear". Here is the link (to an archive page, since I would rather not give clicks):
https://web.archive.org/web/20221008092349/https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2015/04/28/gamergate/
Reading it is incredibly funny, actually. There's not a single piece of evidence presented in the article in favour of these claims (because they're based on interviews), and the tone reeks of exaggeration and editorialising. But I'd think if you're going to try to use Gjoni's own statements to impugn Gjoni, I'd think looking at Gjoni's actual statements would be a better source for that instead of accounts of his statements that are filtered through a lens of journalistic bias.
Here's Gjoni's two-part commentary on the Boston Magazine article, entitled "What The Hell Is Journalism Even". As far as I can tell, it is still unfinished to this date, but what exists seems to demonstrate a clear pattern of falsehood and misrepresentation in the Boston Magazine article.
https://antinegationism.tumblr.com/post/117661182576/what-the-hell-is-journalism-even-part-1
https://antinegationism.tumblr.com/post/117729753311/what-is-journalism-even-part-2-zachary-jasons
Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest.
Incorrect. This is a really big error. Here's what Gjoni actually says the "typo" is in his edit to the Zoe Post:
"There was a typo up for a while that made it seem like Zoe and I were on break between March and June. This has apparently led some people to infer that her infidelity with Nathan Grayson began in early March. I want to clarify that I have no reason to believe or evidence to imply she was sleeping with him prior to late March or early April (though I believe they’d been friends for a while before that). This typo has since been corrected to make it clear we were on break between May and June. To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature."
https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/
So as you can see here, Gjoni was not correcting a section in the Zoe Post which stated that she slept with Nathan Grayson for a good review of Depression Quest. He was correcting a typo which made it seem like they were on break between March and June instead of May and June.
In fact, he literally couldn't have retracted the statement that she slept with Nathan Grayson for a good review of Depression Quest because not a single sentence in The Zoe Post ever states that in the first place. Even when you go back to the earliest archive.org snapshot of the Zoe Post (all the way back in 16 Aug 2014), no such claim is made.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140816104303/https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/
The only mention of Depression Quest he made is contained within his later edit identifying the typo, and the purpose of him mentioning it was to caution people to be careful when making claims about the conflict of interest.
Even Nathan Grayson himself admitted that Gjoni did not state in his post that Quinn traded sex for reviews.
Given the centrality of The Zoe Post to the whole thing, this mistake is incredibly damning. It establishes that Danskin hasn't even read the Zoe Post. You would think that someone speaking at UC Merced about the Quinnspiracy and Gamergate would have at least read one of the Quinnspiracy's central documents, but this seems to imply that he's simply obtained his information from predictably slanted secondary sources.
Here's a link to Part 2 of this post, in case it gets buried under the replies.
The roots of this rejection of procedural fairness in leftist thinking can be traced back quite far, for example Herbert Marcuse published an essay in 1965 called "Repressive Tolerance" containing ideas that really seem not all too dissimilar to most current leftist rhetoric. It's critical theorist-talk, which means the entire text is 11 pages of violence against the English language, but here's a link anyway:
https://sites.evergreen.edu/arunchandra/wp-content/uploads/sites/395/2018/07/tolerance.pdf
In it, Marcuse argues that the rationale for free speech - which was one of determining truth - has been invalidated, because society would have to be "free of indoctrination" for free speech to serve its function (he never coherently outlines what a society "free of indoctrination" would look like and under what conditions he would consider free speech valid). He then claims that society exists in a state of "false consciousness" which precludes rational thought and discussion and disadvantages the left, and states that if the pathway to a subversive (read: leftist) majority developing has been blocked by what he calls "indoctrination", it is okay for people to use undemocratic means to re-open that pathway.
Of course, he seems to constantly imply throughout that he wants special favours to apply to his ideology where it's okay when he does it, because he then calls for making a distinction between "progressive and regressive indoctrination". Despite stating that media is one of the great vectors of indoctrination where truth is determined for the masses, he also makes it clear that he is okay with journalists editorialising in line with his values, in fact he outright endorses this because impartiality is misleading and "such objectivity is spurious". If this was done by his culture war opponents Marcuse would almost certainly label this as indoctrination, but he seems to want an exception for himself.
On page 6:
Or, if a newscaster reports the torture and murder of civil rights workers in the same unemotional tone he uses to describe the stockmarket or the weather, or with the same great emotion with which he says his commercials, then such objectivity is spurious — more, it offends against humanity and truth by being calm where one should be enraged, by refraining from accusation where accusation is in the facts themselves. The tolerance expressed in such impartiality serves to minimize or even absolve prevailing intolerance and suppression.
Marcuse then goes on to argue for "intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left". He posits that right-wing ideas constitute "clear and present danger" and advocates for "the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print and picture". He posits that tolerance of certain viewpoints in the current environment creates and maintains a repressive society, it prevents their attempts to emancipate and liberate, and that means that "tolerance has been perverted". In Marcuse's conceptualisation of things "true" tolerance was always about being a partisan tool of subversion which was intolerant towards the repressive status quo, and non-partisan tolerance is a bastardisation of that because it "serves the cause of oppression". Which seems like a clear redefinition of its meaning to me.
Pages 9-10:
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: ‘fire’. It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.
The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and “philosophies” can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the “marketplace of ideas” is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the “end of ideology,” the false consciousness has become the general consciousness — from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights.
In Marcuse's writings, you can also see the groundwork for why leftists seem to love percolating their propaganda into the education system. Because people grow up in a repressive world, repression will find itself in the academic enterprise too, and this is a "pre-empting of the mind" which means impartiality and autonomous thinking is impossible. To Marcuse, it is only right as a result that the student learns to "think in the opposite direction", to internalise subversive leftist propaganda.
However, he goes even further. He identifies neutrality when analysing history as being distortion of reality, because it doesn't impose his preferred value system onto historical occurrences. People shouldn't be allowed to evaluate these occurrences on their own merits without it being already coloured by selective framing because it "reproduces acceptance of the dominion of the victors in the consciousness of man", and therefore bad. And he identifies the young as the vector through which his views can spread, because they have not had enough time to properly internalise "repressive" ideas yet.
Page 10:
In a world in which the human faculties and needs are arrested or perverted, autonomous thinking leads into a “perverted world”: contradiction and counter-image of the established world of repression. And this contradiction is not simply stipulated, is not simply the product of confused thinking or fantasy, but is the logical development of the given, the existing world. To the degree to which this development is actually impeded by the sheer weight of a repressive society and the necessity of making a living in it, repression invades the academic enterprise itself, even prior to all restrictions on academic freedom. The pre-empting of the mind vitiates impartiality and objectivity: unless the student learns to think in the opposite direction, he will be inclined to place the facts into the predominant framework of values. Scholarship, i.e. the acquisition and communication of knowledge, prohibits the purification and isolation of facts from the context of the whole truth. An essential part of the latter is recognition of the frightening extent to which history was made and recorded by and for the victors, that is, the extent to which history was the development of oppression. And this oppression is in the facts themselves which it establishes; thus they themselves carry a negative value as part and aspect of their facticity. To treat the great crusades against humanity (like that against the Albigensians) with the same impartiality as the desperate struggles for humanity means neutralizing their opposite historical function, reconciling the executioners with their victims, distorting the record. Such spurious neutrality serves to reproduce acceptance of the dominion of the victors in the consciousness of man. Here, too, in the education of those who are not yet maturely integrated, in the mind of the young, the ground for liberating tolerance is still to be created.
Marcuse's entire essay is basically "We're right and they're wrong, and their ideology is dangerous and it's everywhere, so we get to suppress our outgroup however we want in service of our Utopia and proselytise our values in the education system". In short this rejection of procedural fairness has existed in the left for a very long time, and if I had to guess what caused the shift you outline I'd say that, for the most part, the recognition leftist thinkers were previously paying towards actual liberal values was done primarily out of convenience and based on what they thought they could get away with.
The most scary thing about Marcuse's logic is that if you can suppress your ideological opponents, your ideology is probably not a subversive minority without the power to become a majority in the first place. It is a perfect weapon for an ideological group who is in fact powerful but pretends not to be for the purposes of political convenience. Once basically every institution was under their control, the left got to continue indulging in their intoxicating delusion of being a subversive movement under attack by a profoundly repressive society, and using that as a pretext to attack and suppress their culture war opponents.
EDIT: added more
In fact, I wouldn't have minded much how the Jan 6th rioters are treated if BLM rioters were treated the same
It's very noticeable that there's a massive double standard in how this stuff gets treated depending on the political affiliations of the rioters or protestors.
When this topic comes up, I always think about the freedom convoy in Canada and the disproportionate fury directed towards it. Media reports about them were overwhelmingly negative to the point of even attempting to associate them with Nazis and confederates. GoFundMe shut down their donation page and seized their funding, and eventually the protest was deemed to be a public order emergency and the Emergencies Act was invoked to clear the blockade despite a lack of evidence that the Ottawa protests posed a salient threat to Canadian security. Trudeau's opinion was that "Illegal blockades and occupations are not peaceful protests", despite the fact that he supported protesting farmers in India who were doing the very same thing with the rationale “Canada will always stand up for the right to peaceful protest".
Meanwhile, BLM and Antifa (as part of a repeated pattern of behaviour) have committed arson, looted, rioted, assaulted people, tried to create their own "autonomous zones", etc. Yet these protests are considered to be "mostly peaceful", and the media has generally been very lenient on them and have attempted to justify their behaviour. But when a trucker convoy engages in a blockade in order to protest against government interference in what should be a private decision, that's a disruptive, threatening, fear-inducing, anti-government insurgency and everything possible should be done to get rid of them.
I mean, yeah, I think the heart of the GG movement was trolls trying to harass and victimize women in retaliation for entering their cultural spaces, but my impression is that everyone on the other side vehemently denies that and claims that GG was a lofty movement rooting out corruption and tearing down the lies and abuses of the SJWs.
It's a matter of degree. My perception from being in these spaces at the time that it happened is that GG believed on the balance that they were more correct than the antis, but they were more than well aware that there was a good amount of shit-flinging happening on all sides, and often tried to actively police their own communities in order to weed out that behaviour. Like users of KotakuInAction early on creating "Gamergate harassment patrols" and even Kotaku crediting Gamergate with tracking down someone who was sending threats to Sarkeesian.
There's also the fact that none of the criminal harassment was ever tied to Gamergate. I was in KotakuInAction when the whole thing was going on, and didn't see harassment being celebrated. In addition, the Gamergate surveys basically showed GG to have strongly left wing demographics, so that's some data which should be considered when you're evaluating them.
I will say I hardly ever saw any such caution on the anti side, who seemed to be impressively secure in the belief of their superior morality to the point where they seemed to believe they were just better people who could never be on the “wrong side of history” - in part, I think, because they were offered legitimacy by the mainstream in a way GG was not. I did, however, have an anti private message me to fling racial slurs at me (so much for being against harassment). So you might forgive me if my perception of this whole thing is very different from yours.
There's an angle from which defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption is not different from defending a saint against false charges of corruption. If the charges are false and you are restricting your defense to those charges, someone should be there to stand up for the truth and the integrity of the system that produces and considers those charges.
Of course, anonymous internet flame wars with millions of participants are never that clean. Obviously even if 99% of anti-gg people carefully restrict their defense to the charges of 'corruption in games journalism' alone, that's still 100,000 of the stupidest 1% producing memeable screenshots defending them against the pedo charges or saying they're a great person or whatever else.
The case in question here is not "defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption", but defending a pedophile against verifiable charges of pedophilia. The claims that were being made against Sarah Nyberg in this case were not that she was corrupt, it was that she was a pedophile, and as another user here has already noted GamerGhazi, at the time, basically censored info on their subreddit that might suggest that she was. The defence against her pedophilia was at least widespread enough for the largest anti-GG subreddit to actively police the dissemination of information about it.
I mean, if you can find me something like the mods of KotakuInAction moderating KiA to be an active hub for harassment or something in a similar vein, I will concede the point that yes, "both sides". But I have my doubts.
While Quartz had an obligation to make their statements factual, I don't think TYT have to cover the pedophilia allegations if they don't think it's relevant. A story about a bot that angers alt-righters is engaging enough for the left as it is.
I didn't think they had an obligation to cover the pedophilia allegations, but I do think it shows that Nyberg and her actions were engaging and significant enough to warrant coverage. Just not the wrong kind.
I don't think it's a nothingburger either. But I don't think Nyberg is or should be anything other than a third or fourth point at best when talking about how Gamergate was villified by the mainstream. She's just too niche for it to be that strong unless you're a terminally online person with an interest in what is now part of the Internet's ancient history.
To clarify, the primary point of making the post was not to demonstrate how Gamergate was vilified by the mainstream. It was to demonstrate just how far a good portion of the prominent figures in that culture war would go to defend and cover up and ignore acts that were frankly indefensible to score points against their outgroup, while at the same time claiming moral superiority.
The part where I said that I do believe the lack of mainstream coverage is because of the people it would implicate was just a side note towards the end of the post. It was not the main point.
Another interesting piece of information that people don't particularly like to acknowledge is that colonisation might actually have benefited the colonised countries' economies and resulted in improved health and general wellbeing when compared with the counterfactual situation.
For example, countries like Kenya benefited from the establishment of a cash economy, the modernisation of infrastructure, and the spread of Western medicine. There’s a study which used height data as a proxy for nutrition and health to investigate how well Kenyans did under colonial rule. It notes that “however bad colonial policies and devastating short-term crises were, the net outcome of colonial times was a significant progress in nutrition and health.” Other numbers quoted in that article show improvements in the health infrastructure as well as a steep decline in infant mortality during the colonial period.
This article, in trying to explain the end of colonialism, speaks of a population explosion that occurred pretty much everywhere in the colonised world, and notes that while sometimes this was a result of immigration, in most colonies it was a result of population growth. "[P]opulation increase during the colonial period presumably was not an exogenous event, but rather a result of changes produced by colonialism itself —specifically, increased employment opportunities and decreased mortality due to the introduction of European technologies." The author suggests the increased population resulted in more subversive activity and extralegal appropriation of profits which might explain decolonisation.
Interestingly, it was not during colonialism, but during independence that the situations of many of the colonised countries became how it is today. This World Bank report notes "Almost every African country has witnessed a systematic regression of capacity in the last thirty years; the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess. Many countries have lost professionals with valuable skills to more prosperous neighbors or to the developed world because of poor motivational practices, poor governance, internal conflicts, and civil wars. Guinea presents the most classic example of this decline. At independence, Guinea had a highly motivated public service, with clear rules on recruitment, promotion, and appointments to senior positions. Public sector infrastructure - roads, telephones, and so on-were adequate and well functioning. All these have broken down today."
And once the "colonisers" left, African politics became quite the corrupted hellhole. "[O]nce the political imperative of independence was achieved, the tools of nation building became a double-edged sword, increasingly coming to serve the ends of patronage in the struggle to retain and consolidate power. In this struggle, economic logic was the loser, resulting in factories located miles from critical inputs, paved roads extending into useless bush, while areas of high agricultural output were left unexploited for lack of transport. The heavy and often corrupted and corrupting hand of the centralized autocratic political system reached into all branches of the public service, controlling public administration, the judiciary, the private sector, and civil society."
Even the worst example of colonial exploitation, the Congo, had a better deal under colonisation then it does now. The Congo Free State under Leopold II was pretty bad, yes. On the other hand, the Belgian Congo was... okay, relatively speaking. Infrastructure was built, and living standards improved to a degree that would not be seen there at any point after. I think Moldbug makes a convincing case for it here, and it's notable that some Congolese after independence expressed a wistfulness for the days of colonialism. This Time article details such a perspective from a Congolese man.
"We should just give it all back to the whites," the riverboat captain says. "Even if you go 1,000 kilometers down this river, you won't see a single sign of development. When the whites left, we didn't just stay where we were. We went backwards."
“The river is the artery of Congo’s economy,” he says. “When the Belgians and the Portuguese were here, there were farms and plantations — cashews, peanuts, rubber, palm oil. There was industry and factories employing 3,000 people, 5,000 people. But since independence, no Congolese has succeeded. The plantations are abandoned.” Using a French expression literally translated as “on the ground,” he adds: “Everything is par terre.”
This is not necessarily a case in favour of colonialism and colonial policy, but if someone wants to claim that whites should feel some sort of endless historical guilt for the plight of third-world countries today and subject themselves to a system of racial reparations, they’ve got another thing coming.
Somehow I still haven't watched Fight Club myself and as a result can't comment entirely on what would be its antithesis, but regarding general nihilism-antidote movies: It's Such A Beautiful Day very deeply delves into nihilism and in fact fully accepts every single one of its premises, yet still somehow manages to come out the other end presenting a worldview that's incredibly life-affirming. It's probably my favourite animated movie of all time.
I suppose it is less about Making A Point About Society and more to do with dealing with one's mortality, lack of agency and other such topics, but it is a great movie that's hugely concerned with how to find meaning and beauty in the chaos.
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