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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   17968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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There was some contemporaneous discussion in the old BLR here. Good to see the denouement, to what extent anything like this ever ends.

In 2015, Matthew Francis, a science journalist, wrote an article for Forbes titled “The Problem With Naming Observatories for Bigots.” He wrote that Mr. Webb led the anti-gay purge at the State Department and that he had testified of his contempt for gay people. He credited Dr. Prescod-Weinstein with tipping him off, and she in turn tweeted his article and attacked Mr. Webb as a “homophobe.” Those claims rested on misidentification and that portion of Mr. Francis’ article has been deleted without notice to the reader.

This part's pretty funny: the current page for that article gives a blank editor's note, but comparing the original 2015 version to the one from from 2016: removing the troublesome paragraph leaves the story referencing "the party line" it doesn't actually establish or define.

("misidentification" is a bit euphemistic: the original allegations depend on a mess of wikipedia citogenesis.)

The basic contours of being motivated to save face are obvious enough, sure, but the part that continues to be absolutely bewildering to me is that dogged stubbornness only makes you look worse! I'm guessing there must be some other benefit here (assuming, of course, people who refuse to admit error are behaving remotely rationally) but I can't understand it.

The steelman is that a lot of the anti-Webb position never cared specifically on the alleged memo Senate testimony. And that seems pretty well backed up by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, one of the people Francis was using as a source and who later joined the campaign at length on twitter, on her substack, which doesn't seem to even be trying to argue the facts on the ground for the specific acts there. The point is the system, and it's hard to pretend Webb bucked the trends; even where he took the moral route, it's no coincidence it happened to overlap with LBJ's political goals.

The... less overtly charitable analysis's that many of these people get the same or better career boost from papers like this mess) than from her 'classical' work (which, tbf, she does do!); there's a reason they've gotten lots of coverage in the culture war threads, whether for those papers or for the EO Wilson kerfluffle. So I'm not sure that her framework for 'face' is the same as yours or mine.

At a deeper level, from seeing lesser versions of this sort of drama in other environments, my impression's that it's a social thing, somewhat related to how social animals evaluate trust. The point of someone taking this role isn't to evaluate any specific claim's accuracy, or even whether a person's act was right or wrong, but to evaluate whether the person is Good or Bad. Retreating from claims about memos or congressional testimony aren't retreating from central claims, it's just different evidence for the actual matter on trial, that Webb Shouldn't Be Celebrated. That's not specific to 'woke' witch-hunts (or to, for another 'easy' Blue Tribe parallel, harassment allegations that start at rape and reduce down to someone 'being sketchy' before they get booted); I'm sure you've seen it from prosecutors that want to push the horns-and-halos effect as far as a judge will let them go before excluding testimony as 'character', and the Red Tribe equivalents in religion or sexual misbehavior are not exactly far off.

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