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Notes -
More Olympic culture warring: Olympic Games official has accreditation revoked for...
Honestly, I can't even complete the headline, it feels too much like giving credence to the delusion. Can you guess? Here's a hint: think 2017.
Yes, that's right. The rest of the headline is "‘white supremacy’ hand gesture."
Dictionary.com has a whole entry on the "circle game" which is mostly not about the circle game, but is about the "OK hand gesture" that in almost no context has ever been a genuine signal of white supremacist beliefs. The Telegraph article asserts without evidence that "its use as a far-Right symbol is apparently on the rise." And from Dictionary.com:
Even the ADL's own expert had this to say about the "OK hand gesture" in 2017:
Of course, the ADL has since changed its tune, because, well, if you're not a part of the solution, there's money to be made prolonging the problem, I guess. I honestly kinda thought this particular meme had run its course when it got misapplied during the Kavanaugh hearings. It got new life when the Christchurch shooter flashed it in 2019, but that was more than 5 years ago, now--an eternity on 4chan. I don't know--did it actually catch on in Europe? Apparently it caught on in Brazil, kinda--
I hadn't heard the Brazil story before now. "The crime of racism" sounds pretty damn Orwellian to me, but I live in the land of the First Amendment... people do things differently in foreign countries. I'm also a little taken aback by the actions of the Brazilian journalist, who did not report a man saying racist things, or a man harassing people, but a man who might have been positioning himself on camera while making a hand signal that has sometimes been associated with having beliefs outside the Overton window. I already hold journalists in pretty low regard, generally, but this Brazilian displayed all the dignity of a classroom snitch, minus any compelling evidence that there was anything to snitch about.
For whatever it's worth, offensive hand gestures are nothing new for the Olympics--not even for these Olympics. But flipping the bird in each case appears to be pretty context-informed. As far as I can tell from the story, the dude maybe playing the circle game and maybe not doing anything especially deliberate at all was booted without hesitation:
I have never been much of a sports fan, but the Olympics in particular really get me conflicted. I've seen some remarkable displays of athleticism; Olympic gymnastics and figure skating are events I have on several occasions watched on purpose and with some interest. But I simply have no good feelings at all for the IOC. They are intellectual property trolls; they have for example attempted to use their trademark to prevent criticism (fortunately they lost that case, but the First Amendment doesn't reach everywhere). Other, specific cases of corruption are pretty well known. I, personally, would never spend any money in direct support of the Olympics, despite my occasional interest over the years.
Though I've little reason to care too much about one subcontractor getting an unceremonious boot for what, to my eyes, looks like playing a silly game he probably didn't even know had been at the center of a culture war flare-up five years ago--I do have reason to care about a slow, global slouch toward Orwellian big brother/little brother behavior. When people talk about "threats to democracy" and "the rise of fascism" I don't see Nazis goose-stepping down main street; I see progressives enforcing ideological conformity through everyday acts of institutional bullshit. This is "cancel culture," writ small.
A couple weeks ago, when right-wingers got that one Home Depot worker fired for supporting the assassination of a former President, there were reams of articles produced (including one by our own Scott) calling for a cancel culture ceasefire; reams of articles, along with torrents of tweets from left-wingers.
When a random Olympic official then gets cancelled for, in contrast, making an innocuous hand gesture, have any of these same peaceniks continued their call for ceasefire?
What exactly is a "continued call"? Do you think Scott should be posting on every example of cancel culture? He (and many others) have been consistently against it.
Ignoring all of them, except for one aimed in the "wrong direction", tells us very much.
Not that Scott is guilty of that. But "what do you expect me to do, respond to all of these" is the cry of the malicious selective enforcer.
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Yeah, Scott wasn’t a great example, for precisely the reason you give (he’s very principled and ideologically consistent, even despite whatever meanings and groanings have arisen from certain portions of his readerbase post-ACX).
Rather, I’m primarily referring to the wider array of more-explicitly-left-wing twitterers and bloggers who developed a sudden interest in opposing cancel culture during that one moment in time a few weeks ago. IIRC, a number of these folks’ reactions can be found linked to in the Culture War threads from that time. At the very least, it would be nice for the people who participated in that groundswell against cancel culture then to post a tweet now showing that they’re opposed to it in this case, too.
True,
people like Matthew Yglesias, Contrapoints, and TracingWoodgrains would be far better examples as they were all solidly in the "no bad tactics, only bad targets" and "its just a bit of harmless trolling" camp right until those tactics started to be weilded against people/institutions they cared about.
Do you have any examples of TracingWoodgrains saying "it's just a bit of harmless trolling" right until those tactics started to be wielded against people/institutions he cared about?
I think all the people performatively outraged about LoTT being targeted are more solidly in the "no bad tactics, only bad targets" camp. If Trace had done something like that to a liberal group, they'd be raising glasses to him to this day.
See my reply to 4bpp below
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Besides the overall inappropriateness of inserting this sort of drive-by attack against a member of this community in a completely unrelated context, the connection you are trying to make to make your attack work is way too contorted. What does "only bad targets" (not having universal principles) have to do with "just trolling" (not acknowledging the impact of your actions), and what does either have to do with the action of Trace's you presumably are still seething about (Sokalling LoTT)? As far as I can tell he neither contended that there are bad targets for being made ridiculous by being baited into posting fakes, nor did he claim that doing so would be inconsequential fun. If anything, his detractors are the ones who were shouting bad target after cheering on any attempt to bait and make ridiculous their opposition before.
It's not an "unrelated context" though.
Ive been reading and commenting in Rat-Adjacent spaces under various pseudonyms since my freshman year of college. I watched the transition of LessWrong from a place to discuss epistemology to a social club for a Silicon Valley nerds to vent thier spleens and "pwn the normies" in real time.
The three people I mentioned were not picked at random, they were picked because they played an active role in that transformation by arguing for the legitimacy of the so-called "dark arts" so long so long as they were weilded "appropriately".
As those "dark arts" gained acceptance, those who were not part of the SV/MIRI/EA clique drifted away and evaporative cooling took over.
I agree with @raakaa is that Scott is a bad example, because as i remember it Scott was one of the few grandees of the rationalist movement to actually stick to his guns and try to push-back against this transformation while it was happening, for this he became a target for these "dark arts" himself.
Call it "Seething" if you like but as @Dean observed last month memory and context are powerful things.
I'm with you as far as lamenting LW drifting from its original purpose, however you want to describe the direction, but what does that have to do with anything? If you want LW fundamentalism, you obviously lost the moment you waded into a CW forum - "politics is the mind-killer" and all that. For that reason alone, neither cancel culture nor opposition to it can be a core LW cause. If you are looking to describe a hypothetical shared ethos of the "annus mirabilis SSC reader diaspora", rather than the LW community, then sure, being against cancel culture is part of it - but making a fool out of LoTT was not cancel culture by any reasonable definition. The post you linked under
also does not seem to contain any argument for Trace either being in the "only bad targets" or in the "just kidding" class, or being in favour of cancel culture. Rather, it just appears to be a dunk that you are particularly fond of. Do you expect me to update in favour of anti-Trace after reading it, so I reason "Trace bad, cancel culture bad, therefore Trace likes cancel culture"?
The point of that subthread was that it was difficult to read the moralistic framing of thier objection as genuine or sincere when they had, up until very recently, been advocating for and engaging in similar behavior and that when confronted with fact thier responce was "screw you" instead of "I screwed up".
My point is that these incidents are not "unrelated" they are examples of the same fundemental failure-mode being discussed and make for a better example than Scott Alexander for the reasons stated above
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I had an account on LW-sphere discourse at the time (2012-2015ish? imo), if not particularly active on LW-proper.
I don't know where you're getting TracingWoodgrains into the Dark Arts stuff. He started his current display name in 2018 in a mix of /r/slatestarcodex and SSC-open-thread proper education-posting. He's mentioned having read LessWrong in the 2010ish space, and it's possible that he commented to some degree, but he hasn't publicized any username he had at the time, and his writing style is vastly different from any Dark Art advocates like fual_sname or 08res (or even adjacent people like nydrawku).
((I've got my complaints about both his position and his tactics, but they're a lot more prosaic.))
Yglesias is absolutely following in that approach, often to the point that's less 'parallel evolution' and more 'who stole whose homework', but I don't think anyone has accused him of being on LessWrong. Contrapoints is less Dark Arts and more Sneer, which is maybe closer to what you're motioning around, but again more someone people in the ratsphere talk about than someone who argued for the legitimacy of the Dark Arts (or Sneer) themselves on LW.
I was introduced to the rat-sphere around late 2012/early 2013 and the transition period I'm thinking of was around 2015-ish. Its hard to point to exactly when the schism began as it happened slowly over time, but it was largely complete by the time Scott had his "You're Still Crying Wolf" moment in 2016.
As for the rest lets just say that those who attended some of the early rat-space meet-ups at the house of the UC professor who carried a duck were a memorable crowd.
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None of those people seem very much like each other.
Did you not finish reading the comment? Specifically the bit about them all being in the same camp.
I’m pretty confident they aren’t.
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I'm not sure they do all believe the same things about cancellation.
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