site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

20
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

@ymeskhout has written a couple of posts recently discussing the treatment of the Jan 6th defendants, a sequel of sorts to his series of posts on the evidence and court cases surrounding the Red Tribe accusations of election fraud in the 2020 election.

These post has gotten a bunch of responses raising a variety of objections to Jan 6th, arguing for violations of symmetry based on other events, questions about fairness, questions about framing, and so on. The objection that immediately springs to mind, for me, is that the posts are narrowly focusing on specific questions where the facts are on their side, in a bid to minimize surface areas to relevant counter-arguments relating to the Jan 6th riot in general. Certainly, I have encountered similar tactics by others in the past, and previous conversations with the OP have left me with the clear impression that they're a member of my outgroup.

So I think it's useful to state, as clearly as possible, that the general thesis I've just laid out is dead wrong.

Rumor-mongering is an obvious failure mode for political discussion. A lot of different people raise a lot of different arguments, present a variety of different facts, these cross-pollinate, and people walk away with an erroneous impression of facts. Then someone tries to correct the record, a whole bunch of people raise a whole bunch of new arguments, and people walk away with their erroneous impression strengthened, not weakened. This is a very easy problem to fall into, especially if you are good enough at rhetoric and arguments to self-persuade. Normal argument effects dig you in, and bias inclines you to think worse of the people arguing against you.

This effect combines poorly with another of the basic failure modes of political discussion that shows up here with some regularity: speculating and theorizing rather than simply checking facts. This allows one to spin out "evidence" ad hoc to support a position that can turn out to be entirely spurious. It is woeful to see an event commented here, and then a whole tree of a hundred comments going back and forth on some speculation, followed by a five-comment thread where someone points out an easily verifiable fact that renders the entire previous discussion and all the arguments in it completely pointless. More woeful is the realization that the entirely-fictional hundred-comment-thread did vastly more to modify peoples' internal model than the factual disproof. The third or forth time one sees this, one begins to contemplate serious drinking. Since examples are always helpful in driving a point home, here's an example of me confidently talking out my hindparts.

It is extremely important to be able to notice when you're wrong. It's important personally, and it's doubly important for a community like this one. Often, the people who are the best at pointing out that you're wrong are going to be people you disagree strongly with, and maybe don't like very much. The ability to point out error is one of the main reasons such people are so valuable to have around.

Here's what I've seen so far in the recent Jan 6th threads:

  • @ymeshkhout was presented with a number of specific arguments about Jan 6th. Many of these arguments consisted of bald assertions, absent supporting evidence or even links.

  • They did some googling, looked at the evidence available for the specific events named, and found that it absolutely did not match the claims being made.

  • They wrote up a calm, unfailingly polite post detailing the claims, who made them, and what the actual evidence was, with copious links.

  • If anyone actually conceded that their claims were false, I didn't see it. What I did see was a flurry of additional claims, some thankfully including links at least.

  • They then wrote up a follow-up post taking apart a number of the additional items raised.

  • the follow-up post appears to mainly be responded to by more claims, many of them highly tangential to the topic at hand.

I am no stranger to arguing with bad-faith bullshit. This is not what bad-faith bullshit looks like. This is, near as I can tell, what being wrong looks like. The proper response to that is to admit it and take your lumps like a grownup. If you can't do that, if you don't actually value seeing misconceptions corrected, you're acting like a jackass, and ymeskhout is doing this place a tremendous service to make that fact as obvious as possible, with bonus points for style.

I am fairly confident that both Jan 6th and the 2020 election were some degree of bullshit in meaningful, provable ways. Arguing it would take a fair amount of effort, effort that I have not chosen to spend, and so it behooves me to admit that it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, and not to expect other people to give my gut feelings any consideration. It's an argument I want to make, but it's an argument I cannot actually back up, and so it's not an argument I should expect others to take seriously.

To the extent that I think that the picture ymeskhout is presenting is false, the proper response is to put together a detailed argument, backed by the best supporting evidence I can dig up, on exactly how and why he's unambiguously wrong. Until then, I should accept that my point of view is just, like, an opinion man. That's my understanding of how this place works, and why it's valuable. In the meantime, the next time you see someone talking about mistreatment of Jan 6th defendants, a reasonable starting question might be "what's your evidence of this?"

Hell, that's a pretty good practice generally, isn't it?

In a contaminated media environment filled not only with not only bad-faith actors, but poor-capability ones? Heavens no.

To pick one recent example of how sub-par framing distorts discussion-

To the extent that I think that the picture ymeskhout is presenting is false, the proper response is to put together a detailed argument, backed by the best supporting evidence I can dig up, on exactly how and why he's unambiguously wrong.

I am no stranger to arguing with bad-faith bullshit. This is not what bad-faith bullshit looks like. This is, near as I can tell, what being wrong looks like. The proper response to that is to admit it and take your lumps like a grownup. The proper response to that is to admit it and take your lumps like a grownup. If you can't do that, if you don't actually value seeing misconceptions corrected, you're acting like a jackass, and ymeskhout is doing this place a tremendous service to make that fact as obvious as possible, with bonus points for style.

Here's what I've seen so far in the recent Jan 6th threads:

The single word in the third section that undermines all the rest is the qualifier 'recent.' Recent does not negate the iterative game-nature of people's engagement of a topic, and basing an argument only on the most recent action is less an isolated demand for rigor, as much as a demand for isolated rigor.

Just as any analysis of the Jan 6th legitimacy is fatally flawed if separated from the nature of election-law changes and documented coordination between partisan activists, government officials, and media groups to support that party before the election (and admitted afterwards- you can find the link yourself, thank you kindly, and if you can't then this goes back to competence rather than faith), a discussion on motte posting dynamics in the present is missing something very significant if it doesn't address that this isn't just a 'recent' exchange, it's someone who brought their pet hobby horse into the themotte.org after an established history, and pattern, of the same. A pattern that- as you say- did increasingly little to change minds, and the number of people who maintained engagement with said individual gradually declined. They did not stop doing so because exhaustive links to specific incidents or contexts of concern were disproven and overturned by the power of logic, they did so because over time they realized there was no point in engaging in such a way. The people whose minds could be shifted were already shifted; the people who could not were not going to be.

This is not what being wrong looks like. This is what evaporative cooling looks like, when the only people remaining to make effort-posts are the most-motivated. You may as well ask why Julius's Motte opposing arguments decreased in quality, when by the end he was probably the source of more warnings and kickings than meaningful counter-arguments.

Which, actually, is a better substitute-person for your argument, since it's clear where your sympathies are on this context but your broader point- if it's to be valid- needs to be valid for not just the people you think are in the right, but also wrong. Just as a justice system isn't for the people we sympathize for, a critique of the quality of engagement on the motte needs to address what engagement expectations realistically are.

One of the issues Julius B-something, or highschool-is-slavery McGee, or whatever his various alts were- wasn't simply that he was a bad faith actor, it was that he was just bad, as in incompetent, in both communication and scholarly skills, but he was only ever open to changing one of those. (The writing part, to be clear- so that he could be a better sophist in selling his point.) The people who were more familiar with the scholarship did not, in fact, respond to every Julius post with yet another immaculate sourced response decisively proving he was wrong... after the first few times. They gradually stopped replying at all, leaving him unchallenged except for the likes of less-scholared (and more prone to banning) people, for the sheer fact that he just kept posting. Once people knew what he was posting, and what he was going to continue posting regardless of what was said, and that saying so would make no difference...

By your framework, the point that after a year or so Julius B-whatever ended up with opponents like BestIrishGirl Ame who got in more trouble for opposing him rudely and who weren't able to really engage on a evidence level was a failure point of the community. With only a modicrum of twsting, Julius was providing a community service even, for exposing the jackasses, and overcoming them with style. (And endurance.)

I must dissent. And not simply because who is the asshole, or who has the style, is a subjectivity that does more to reflect the evaluator's preferences than the subject. Or that low-quality responses still serve a valid role in challenging motte-and-bailey arguments that would otherwise go uncontested for lack of engagement of at all, but be expected to continue indefinitely and shape the expectations of the forum as a whole if completely unchallenged.

I must dissent because recognizing when [insert actor here] has [pet topic x] for which they are sufficiently fixed in their views to negate the value of engagement, not engaging with their argument is the appropriate way to deal with [insert actor here]. Engagement on their preferred passion project really is a waste of time for all involved, it is an invitation for angry rebuttals and accusations of bad faith more likely to draw censor themselves than the actual person of bad-faith-but-is-polite-about-it, and it's not apparently changing the minds of anyone involved. By not engaging [pet topic x] directly, you can instead address other topics of possible mutual engagement (Julius's poor writing skills), or provide general signalling to the broader audience of what, and why, the risk of engaging the person is so that they are aware of the dynamics and risks at play.

I don't think I'm alone in this either- you're doing a similar dynamic, in this particular post, whether you intended to or not. You're speaking broadly, generally, and non-specifically about unnamed posters, and without source citations or evidence to boot. You're not calling out individuals, or confronting them in long exchanges. You're doing a relatively limited, relatively polite, dismissal of their arguments without engaging them directly, and doing so with a broader intent to shape the broader discourse, but no real expectation of affecting the individual(s) in question.

(And how could they? Many may not even realize you're referring to them.)

Per any model where conclusively proving your opponents are wrong every time is the right way, this is the wrong way. But as a model for engaging- or rather, not-engaging- with individuals for whom not-engaging is not only the path chosen, but attempting to marginalize through rhetoric rather than counter-evidence is the way, this is fine. You can call people jackasses or losers without being in violation of the Motte's rules if you're sufficiently vague, and that's fine. (It'd be pretty unenforcable otherwise.) Far be it for me to tell you otherwise.

But to do this, you had to make a decision on whether the person or group of persons was a good-enough actor (faith, competence, whatever) to pursue engagement going forward, or so bad that you instead began a general effort of isolating the sort of individuals in the community, so that they do not remain as unchallenged in their bailey as in an otherwise pleasant motte. Yes, this accelerates the process of evaporative cooling, where eventually only the assholes or the obsessives engage. But evaporative cooling around a poster is not the problem, it is product of the mitigation process, and more importantly the mitigation process is itself the consequence of prior patterns and past history.

Which comes back to not just what is recent, but what previous trends established the pattern of treating people like infohazards, or possibly Julius B-somethings.

Hello everyone, I continue to have no idea what Dean is talking about, either in the post above or in the many responses to me (ex. most recently here). I know that Dean does not like it when I talk about 2020 election fraud theories, but I have no idea exactly why. This is a saga that has been going on for almost two years now, and I keep linking to this exchange in May 2021 as illustrative.

For example, Dean accused me of being selective with what theories I cover. When I asked which ones I should pay attention to, his responses were: "I'm not particularly interested in trying to feed you sources to be judged by you on your standards on credibility to consistency standards you impose that helpfully weed out things other people might care about and could even be true." and "I am uninterested in providing you sources on other people's positions given your conduct on this topic."

I don't know if I'm off-base here, but this reads to me as "It's not my job to educate you" which does not strike me as helpful or productive. Does anyone disagree with my interpretation?

I still continued trying to figure exactly what I should do differently. When I asked if focusing on Trump's theories was valid, Dean claimed accused me of incompetence and bad faith because "you are supposed to know that a lot of what Trump says is nonsense no matter what he talks about" and then I'm accused of lying about something (no idea what exactly): "In two sentences you have given what could be called lies about other peoples positions already given to you. This faux ignorance of other people's posts made just hours or minutes ago, and significant mis-representation of what has already been given to you, robs an exchange of sources or justifications of any value."

I've confessed that I don't know what I'm supposed to do differently. I mean, besides adopting Dean's preferred conclusions of course. Short of that, can ANYBODY provide ANY insight into the specific concerns and what EXACTLY I should do differently? I love feedback! Especially when I can understand it.

Hello everyone, I continue to have no idea what Dean is talking about, either in the post above or in the many responses to me (ex. most recently here). I know that Dean does not like it when I talk about 2020 election fraud theories, but I have no idea exactly why. This is a saga that has been going on for almost two years now, and I keep linking to this exchange in May 2021 as illustrative.

Indeed it is, and as said before I maintain it is more condemning of you than defending. To quote from the May 21 you link to-

It was a reflection of your reoccuring flaw on this topic, which is to conflate far too diverse circumstances and contexts into a nominal narrative that ignores or dismisses people's actual positions/concerns while presenting a viewpoint they don't hold as the undisputed reality.

I maintain this is the case, because you are continuing to do this in your attempt to defend against it.

For example, Dean accused me of being selective with what theories I cover. When I asked which ones I should pay attention to, his responses were: "I'm not particularly interested in trying to feed you sources to be judged by you on your standards on credibility to consistency standards you impose that helpfully weed out things other people might care about and could even be true." and "I am uninterested in providing you sources on other people's positions given your conduct on this topic."

I don't know if I'm off-base here, but this reads to me as "It's not my job to educate you" which does not strike me as helpful or productive. Does anyone disagree with my interpretation?

Yes, and claims of ignorance like this is why I doubt your good faith.

I have, by your own link that you keep referring to, stated that I am uninterested in providing you sources on other people's positions given your conduct on the topic. What is my allegation of your conduct on the topic? My characterization of your conduct is- per the May 21 link- your reoccuring flaw to conflate far too diverse circumstances and contexts into a nominal narrative that ignores or dismisses people's actual positions/concerns while presenting a viewpoint they don't hold as the undisputed reality.

Your very response is to conflate different circumstances (quotations, in this case) to ignore a stated position, and assign a position I do not hold.

In this very citation paragraph you engage in this. The very reason of why I do not provide you sources is in your link, because of your conduct. Which you conflate with... 'it is not my job to educate you.'

My position is not that it is not my job to educate you. Stop lying about the position not only given to you, but that you cite.

I still continued trying to figure exactly what I should do differently. When I asked if focusing on Trump's theories was valid, Dean claimed accused me of incompetence and bad faith because "you are supposed to know that a lot of what Trump says is nonsense no matter what he talks about"

Oh, hey, conflating past conversations for a unified narrative. I'm sure that the actual context had no meddlesome distinctions from any other discussion, such as the literal versus serious dynamic that was relevant around Trump, or specific Trump messages in the context they were provided.

and then I'm accused of lying about something (no idea what exactly): "In two sentences you have given what could be called lies about other peoples positions already given to you. This faux ignorance of other people's posts made just hours or minutes ago, and significant mis-representation of what has already been given to you, robs an exchange of sources or justifications of any value."

Clearly a sentence that internally references other posts made at the time is has no missing context that is being ommitted for the sake of a narrative here and now.

I've confessed that I don't know what I'm supposed to do differently. I mean, besides adopting Dean's preferred conclusions of course. Short of that, can ANYBODY provide ANY insight into the specific concerns and what EXACTLY I should do differently? I love feedback! Especially when I can understand it.

Sure. Stop lying.

Stop lying about other people's positions are when they give it to you. Stop lying about people having never given you other arguments in the past. Stop lying that you haven't been provided insight into the specific concerns.

If you can't understand what someone says, confess incapability. If you can't remember what someone said, or find where it was, confess the failures of memory or recordkeeping. If you can't accept what other people say as valid, you won't be able to confess that sort of failing by its nature, but lack of selfawareness is no reason to lie about not being given reasons in the past.

To stop doing the flaw you have been described as having, stop conflating far too diverse circumstances and contexts into a nominal narrative that ignores or dismisses people's actual positions/concerns while presenting a viewpoint they don't hold.

Now, I have no expectation of you doing such, and fully expect you to pull out the May 21 link the next go around to go 'why has she never told me', instead of this, but that's only because this is, what, the fourth exchange on this subject where you ask the same questions about why you've never been given an answer?

My characterization of your conduct is- per the May 21 link- your reoccuring flaw to conflate far too diverse circumstances and contexts into a nominal narrative that ignores or dismisses people's actual positions/concerns while presenting a viewpoint they don't hold as the undisputed reality. Your very response is to conflate different circumstances (quotations, in this case) to ignore a stated position, and assign a position I do not hold

That's a lot of words, and if he was doing that, it'd be bad, but can you link these broad statements to specific examples when you make them? You linked a few reddit posts and I have no clue how they relate to the above.

having, stop conflating far too diverse circumstances and contexts into a nominal narrative that ignores or dismisses people's actual positions/concerns while presenting a viewpoint they don't hold

Which circumstances, contexts, narratives, what actual positions/concerns are being dismissed, what viewpoints aren't held? I genuinely don't know what you're saying.