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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Can we talk about Rebekah Jones? Should we? I'm honestly incredibly conflicted about these questions. One of the rules of the Motte is that we shouldn't weakman:
Discussing Jones feels like walking a tightrope (called "meaningful cultural and political issues") that has been strung over an open toxic waste pit (called "are my political opponents just mentally ill?"). Out of sheer both-sides-ism I want to say "there are surely equally bizarre figures in right wing politics" but I can't actually find any. The best I can do is to say, suppose you combined Marjorie Taylor Greene's extremism with George Santos' fabulism, then made the resulting chimera guilty of the things Matt Gaetz was only ever rumored to have been guilty of doing--that would get you pretty close to Jones, I think. Except that MTG and Santos and Gaetz aren't darlings of reddit and don't command fawning loyalty from major media outlets, which Jones also does.
As a refresher, I first learned of Jones back in the old subreddit, when someone posted about her COVID activism. I don't remember when I learned of her criminal activities, but to simply quote the Wikipedia:
Jones went on to say she was going to run for office in Maryland (IIRC), but when that didn't pan out for unclear reasons, she returned to Florida. I don't know how much she has received in crowdfunding from the anti-DeSantis crowd at this point, but two early efforts pulled over half a million dollars. Jones has continued to hold herself out as a "whistleblower," specifically against the DeSantis administration in Florida, even though these claims appear pretty thoroughly debunked.
"Aha!" You might say. "PolitiFact leans left, and debunks Jones, so even the Left is willing to disavow this nut!"
Sure, maybe, to some extent. She went on to win the 2022 Democrat primary to challenge Matt Gaetz for his seat in the House of Representatives, so at least 16,000 Democrats still preferred Jones to someone with an actual legal education and genuinely relevant experience. And yes--by this logic, some 50,000 Republicans preferred the candidate who was under investigation for sex trafficking minors! It's baffling, I agree. But this is one of those "meaningful cultural and political issues" I mentioned--the only way I can make sense of any of this is to take a deep breath and remind myself that most people lack anything approaching coherent principles, they don't care about these details--they only care to win.
Anyway, that's all just the background!
This morning I woke up with this in my feeds.
If you don't want to read "WhitePeopleTwitter" (and I wouldn't blame you), it is a tweet from Rebekah Jones, followed by others, which I have partly reproduced here:
Naturally, Jones also provides links to her crowdfunding platforms of choice. The reddit "discussion" is... predictable? Outrage, occasional people (mostly, but not always, downvoted) asking whether this is legit, very few people posting actual information. Well, proles gonna prole I guess. But the headline in the Miami Herald?
So, that sounds bad! But is it really why he was arrested? In fact it is not. He was arrested for posting stuff like this:
As this information was coming out, Jones added to her tweetstorm:
It's not clear when these events are supposed to have occurred; Max Nordau shared video of Jones delivering her son to the police station. Rather, as this tweet suggests, it appears that "Rebekah Jones tried to blame DeSantis and RAISE MONEY off law enforcement stopping a possible school shooting."
I don't know what Jones' problem ultimately is. Narcissism? Paranoia? DeSantis Derangement Syndrome? That she is a habitual fabulist is well-established. That she has profited substantially from vocal opposition to all things DeSantis is a matter of public record. She is a sufficiently shady known quantity that most really big national news outlets seem reluctant to continue signal-boosting her, but the Miami Herald (by circulation, reportedly Florida's seventh-largest paper) still seems happy to run false headlines at her mere behest.
This seems discussion-worthy, and yet part of me wants to just not even post about it because it seems wrong, somehow, to even discuss Rebekah Jones. Giving her any attention at all feels a bit like encouraging a delusional person to persist in their delusions; she clearly wants notoriety, she doesn't seem capable of handling notoriety in a healthy way, surely it would be best to just stop paying attention to her?
But also, this is a kid talking about doing violence at school, with guns or knives. Is narcissism hereditary? Did his home environment contribute to this? [CONTINUED BELOW]
Sounds like it to me, although I'm no psychiatrist.
In her tweet, she claims the son is autistic. Could be real, although if it has anything to do with his mother, I suspect "mother seized upon some minor tics to she could feel special by claiming an autistic child" is the most likely relationship.
I find it a little hard to believe that you couldn't find any such people if you looked. For example, do you think that megapastors who claim God wants them to buy a private jet are any less narcissistic? (Also claiming that COVID was already over in March 2020 due to prayer and that even those who lost their job should continue to give him money). As far as I can tell, people like Copeland and Joel Osteen are just as delusional and narcissistic as Jones and have suckered in at least as many people.
More options
Context Copy link
IMO Jones' prominence is not any sort of big mystery. Despite (or due to) opposition to lockdowns being tarred with the label of conspiracy theory, in practice to support lockdowns oft requires conspiracy theory. Especially when it comes to Florida. The outcome of DeSantis running a relatively lax policy of restrictions surrounding covid, which his opponents insisted would cause megadeath, was instead a middling outcome. The empirical results are in: lockdowns don't reduce covid deaths. But the entire political legitimacy of blue tribe now rests upon those restrictions serving to stop something that they did not, in fact, stop. So you need an explanation for Florida's middling outcome. Enter stage left, Jones, with a conspiracy theory about DeSantis covering up deaths, playing both into your biases and your need to have some way to soothe over the monstrous crimes blue-state governments did under the guise of stopping covid.
She is merely filling a gap in the market for conspiracy theories that she was best-placed to exploit.
Jones aside (I am in her district and she's...interesting.) there is some fishiness involving Florida's Covid reporting in particular. They haven't supplied data to the CDC, for example, for a few weeks: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#county-view?list_select_state=Florida&data-type=CommunityLevels (there are NOT zero cases or deaths). The state surgeon general, Joseph Lapado, also has a...questionable record of statements and actions during the pandemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Ladapo.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but DeSantis loves Lapado playing down Covid for tourism reasons and attracting the kinds of residents who feel the same way. No one in FL is interested in lockdowns, but playing down vaccination and failure to encourage vaccination in a state full of old people is just poor leadership. Failure to update Covid data with the CDC makes it difficult for residents to determine risk. And there have been issues with Florida's leadership throughout the pandemic.
Florida updates it's data every two weeks. Demanding daily updates for number of cases of one particular virus, indefinitely, seems like an unusual demand for rigour: Nowhere pre-2020 was this demand expected. Nor is it clear what purpose such data would serve to individuals in determining risk. Case numbers are largely a product of testing, unlike inherently delayed random sampling. And this is even if we believe that the CDC is something that is respectable enough to be worthy of being supplied data by anyone.
Ladapo's questionable statements like... Supporting informed consent, as any medical professional should? Acknowledging that there's no empirical evidence for masks?
Florida's vaccination was done on the basis of oldest first. This seems obvious enough to me as a strategy, but apparently many US states decided to vaccinate "essential workers" including people in their 20s at negligible risk first? Do you think that a strategy other than by age is more effective?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
At this moment pretty much no-one's political legacy rests on anything Covid-related. Poof, two years of high weirdness gone from public memory.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This seems like another example of someone having a personality disorder, but no one noticing because they express it by shouting political slogans. You can see Borderlines acting as attack dogs for political activism all the time.
Joseph Rosenbaum was the poster child of exactly this dynamic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
An important piece of context here is that she has made a seemingly false claim about a police interaction with her children before. She claimed that police officers pointed guns at her children while serving a search warrant on her house. That was not shown in the body camera video that was released by the police department, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
More options
Context Copy link
This is...interesting, given the recent context of not one, but two different 4Channers getting busted by a Florida sheriff over Fedposting.
Also, I do suppose that sanity is a resource we are running out of on the national level. Hard to say what'll happen when enough nutty people get into Capitol Hill.
What? That seems like a big deal. How are they arresting internet warriors? Some day I’m going to be in jail for saying something anti trans.
4chan has always responded to US law enforcement requests. In this case it was "X should be shot in the head (in minecraft)" posting.
I meant the government arresting them. It looks like overkill to me. Unless there’s a credible threat in here.
Given that it was a Florida sheriff that was to be minecrafted, I could imagine the man himself getting the ball rolling to do so.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
4chan, the biggest honeypot ever. no one should use that site ever
Where else can you even talk without censorship? There's basically nowhere left anymore and the few alternatives glow even harder.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
When The Motte was on Reddit, there was a post about women possibly having a... personalised... take on what they experience relative to reality. Was the post-author... you? A childhood magazine was involved, I believe, and AOC was invoked (not in the magazine, but the comment/post, or maybe in the replies).
In combination between that post, my experiences, one of the last comments from Namrok on women being possibly p-zombies, @WhiningCoil 's recent comment on 'white-knuckling' it, and other sources such as a comment here about wishful female thinking, there is maybe something to this as to a wider unified hypothesis.
For some people, the intensity of an erotic relationship is one of the few times in their lives that they actually closely focus on another human being on a daily basis. And since all or almost all people are partly crazy, and many people act especially crazy when experiencing erotic emotions, unsurprisingly such close focus on the other person soon uncovers that... the other person is partly crazy. And since these relationships are erotically charged, it soon becomes easy to generalize the observation of craziness into "all {people of gender I am attracted to} are crazy".
More options
Context Copy link
Right, if you ask a group of men or a group of women, all you’ll get is an anecdote avalanche about the other’s tendency to twist the truth. But that is not the answer, that is the question.
It’s like the Riddle Of The Two Guardians That Say The Other Is Lying. You do know a couple of things: they can’t both be lying, and they can’t both be truthin’. So which one is lying? Is it the one associated with intuition, emotion, empathy, verbalizing, fluidity, manipulation, or the one associated with force, rudeness, objectiveness, stoicism, logical, rational, legal, systematic thinking ? I’m honestly struggling to come up with a stereotypical characteristic that would point an alien to Man the Liar.
Standard disclaimers about generalization apply, no overarching claim of male superiority.
Well, men have produced most of history's thieves, politicians, con artists, military strategists, and so on... most fields in which deception plays a big role are dominated by men, not by women. On the other hand, I've seen a statistic which seems to show that marketing employs more women than men at least in the US.
The data seems to not support that either men or women are the bigger liars.
Most fields are dominated by men without further qualification.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Used-car salesman, carnival barkers, compulsive braggarts, corrupt and scheming politicians, loan-sharks, con-men and grifters of all kinds, are far more likely to be male than female, and all of these are definitely stereotypically-male archetypes. I have personally known numerous dishonest men whose personal testimony I’ve found so unreliable that if they told me 2+2=4, I’d have to manually check their math.
I understand that you might have a more specific interpersonal context in mind - i.e. if you’re listening to a man and a woman describe who is at fault for their ugly break-up, whose account should you consider more reliable? - but the people whose lying has the most far-reaching and impactful societal effects have historically been overwhelmingly male.
Those don't really work, they're just random examples, as if ‘The Amazons, Margaret Thatcher, Aileen Wuornos” were valid counters to a thesis of men’s greater tendency for violence.
Do female politicians, car saleswoman etc, have a particular reputation for honesty? There needs to be a comparison and contrast with women in similar roles for the counters to apply. And general, widespread acceptance. So “Men like bacon, women eat hot chip and lie” fails. I can accept ‘strongly driven to achieve power and wealth’ as a decent ‘pro-lies’ male characteristic you’re trying to get at with your examples.
The numerous stereotypes I listed are claimed by women when presented in a more positive light. Both sides of the aisle back me up, like they would on male violence.
I'd probably get less pushback if I completely separated the argument into its two components: First ask A) Are women more or less X (emotional, intuitive, etc) than men? and later, a propos of nothing, wonder B) does characteristic X make one more or less likely to lie/rationalize? Because A + B together implies something negative about women, I have to contend with offtopic condemnations of men.
I don’t see what historical societal consequences have to do with the expected truth-value of men and women’s statements. You're saying it didn’t matter as much when women took liberties with the truth? I’ve read a redpill argument along these lines supporting Woman being The Liar, but like all evolutionary arguments, that one’s pretty weak imo.
@Goodguy Don’t just declare perfect equality after listing two conflicting examples. There can be only one. It’d be preposterous to do that with male violence.
But what unites the three examples you’ve provided is that they are all surprising or counterintuitive, because they represent inversions of the qualities one would associate with women. Whereas the examples I provided are recognizably masculine archetypes - Donald Trump, for example, is frequently referred to as an appealing masculine archetype, because of his pure will-to-power and his ability to “hold frame”: to adhere to a particular narrative framing in order achieve a desired result, such as obtaining/maintaining power, or humiliating his enemies. This is a dominant and masculine form of lying; it’s the kind of lying you can only do if you’re either already in power, or if you hold (or believe you hold) a hidden leverage which will soon grant you an edge over your interlocutor.
That, and they are all united by “confidence and the ability to project that confidence in order to inspire trust/deference.” Whereas the feminine counterpart is “fragility and the ability to project that fragility in order to inspire protection/indulgence.” Both are prevalent forms of lying, and I don’t see one as more frequent than the other.
Why would you assume they equalize? Who's more likely to lie, one with overt power, or one with no power/covert power? Does the master lie more to his slave, or the slave to his master? Does the dictator lie to his ministers, or do they lie to him? The mouse to the cat, lawyer to the judge, jester to the king?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
On that topic, Emil Kirkegaard has a post about sex differences in rationality. It speaks about a test called the Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking (CART) which seeks to measure tendency towards rational thinking, with a higher total CART score implying higher performance on the test.
A 2016 book by Keith Stanovich found on the topic of sex differences: "[I]t can be seen that the total score on the entire CART full form was higher for males than for females in both samples and the mean difference corresponded to a moderate effect size of 0.52 and 0.65, respectively. ... Moving down the table, we see displayed the sex differences for each of the twenty subtests within each of the two samples. In thirty-eight of the forty comparisons the males outperformed the females, although this difference was not always statistically significant. There was one statistically significant comparison where females outperformed males: the Temporal Discounting subtest for the Lab sample (convergent with Dittrich & Leipold, 2014; Silverman, 2003a, 2003b). The differences favoring males were particularly sizable for certain subtests: the Probabilistic and Statistical Reasoning subtest, the Reflection versus Intuition subtest, the Practical Numeracy subtest, and the Financial Literacy and Economic Knowledge subtest. The bottom of the table shows the sex differences on the four thinking dispositions for each of the two samples. On two of the four thinking dispositions scales—the Actively Open-Minded Thinking scale and the Deliberative Thinking scale—males tended to outperform females."
There is also a possibility to indirectly measure sex differences in rationality by checking who believes irrational things, but "it is important to sample widely in beliefs without trying to select ones that men or women are more apt to believe". Kirkegaard draws attention to a 2014 study that does such a thing. This study instructed participants to select on a five-point scale how much they agreed or disagreed with a claim, and "scores were recoded such that a higher score reflected a greater rejection of the epistemically unwarranted belief". The unsupported beliefs were grouped into the categories "paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscience". In all of them, men scored higher than women, suggesting greater male rejection of unsupported beliefs in every category.
In other words, if one sex was more likely to distort reality in line with their biases, I would expect it to be women.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Agree that Men are no less likely to rewrite their own perspective on their own memories. I think a lot of this is linked to the need for internal self-consistency. If someone express traditionally conservative morals, yet acted in a very not conservative way earlier in life, it makes sense they would write it off as a "wild time" in their life, with a likely follow on of "but I grew up / got more mature etc." What's more, I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with this. Learning from experience and changing your views based on that experience is sort of how humans work. I'd rather someone used to be kind of an asshole and then got over it versus continuing to be an asshole but somehow "consistent" in their values?
The sex difference I see (incoming: anecdata) is that female self-revision seems to frequently remove any personal agency let alone fault. It's not that Alice chose a bunch of Bad Boy Bobs in her 20s because she wanted fun and thrills and, hey, turns out Bad Boy Bob was in fact a Bad Guy. Instead it's (ancedatally) more often "Bob turned out to be such an asshole who could've known that a guy with prison time, no job, and a stolen motorcycle wasn't a sweetheart!"
Whereas, with my male friends, I hear a lot of "Yeah, she did sleep with three other dudes but .... she was a stripper and I knew that so .... what're you going to do."
All this being said, I don't chalk it up to innate brain differences between men and women. Ideas and culture matter. Contemporary feminism is rooted in hyper-liberation theory and maximal individual freedom of expression without any consideration of personal responsibility, let alone behaviors that strengthen societal bonds. Women are told that sexual libertinism earlier in life is a profound way of expressing themselves. How can there be any self-critical examination of mate selection criteria and interpersonal trust if the whole point is to just do it!
"Well, aren't young men fed the idea that they can have fun in their 20s going out to bars and bedding dozens of women as well?" Sure, but, as has been pointed out many, many other times on The Motte, it's fundamentally harder for all but the top .1% of men to get sex on demand. Secondly, and more broadly applicable, how many Bro-movies have some variation of "don't stick your dick in crazy?" Is "fuck boi" not a term in common usage in a derogatory manner? As underdeveloped as these ideas may be, at least there is some concept of future repercussions of reckless personal decision making (bonus: hasn't "Man up" been used by both TradCon folks as well as all but the most insane gender-dismantling leftists?)
Young people in society will always have higher degress of openness and risk taking. We need this for society to continue to function. The balance that tradition and positive elder role models play is to create the acceptable outer bounds of those behaviors to create a hard check on catastrophic (both personal and societal) consequences of those decisions. I think current feminism has done a lot to blow up even the outermost of those boundaries. The current result, and future prospects, were excellently summed up in @FiveHourMarathon's quality post from this March
That does often happen with men, sure. However what also happens very often is "man gets with new girl, man's friends see that she is crazy, man doesn't see it because he's too into her to care, months later man realizes that she is crazy". Which is the same thing as your Bob example from above.
Anyway, if you ask enough guys for their opinions you will probably eventually find criticisms of women for doing pretty much anything whatsoever. If the woman goes with Bob, someone will say that she is being irrational even though she finds Bob to be hot and it's pretty rational to want to fuck people you find hot. If she follows her more logical side and goes with Tim the nice nurturing guy, someone will say "see, women are not as big risk-takers as men are" or "she actually wants Bob, she is just using Tim as a beta provider". If she decides to not sleep with anyone, someone will say that she is a prude. If she sleeps with both Bob and Tim, someone will say that she is too promiscuous.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sure, it's a human tendency -- this difference I notice with (not all) women (by no means limited to romantic partners, either) is that this personal narrative is much more likely to involve blatant errors in fact. My mom is particularly bad for this -- we mostly just kind of let it go, because these "facts" are by now solidified into rock-solid memories for her. It makes me wonder about some of the stories concerning myself when I was too young to remember.
More options
Context Copy link
Can we not talk about her. I skimmed your thing so maybe there’s something new but didn’t notice it.
As someone from the right and more than most here I just assume I’m being lied to constantly. It’s such a strong bias I don’t need to be reminded of when a lower class person lied to me and all the national media picked it up.
Usually it’s NYT style lying where they give true facts that are misinterpreted.
More options
Context Copy link
I’m sure I kept it around somewhere…ah…there it is
This isn’t quite dating, but I think it’s important to keep in mind. The stochastic inability of mottizens to understand women is not very good evidence of an actual, insurmountable gap.
Do mottizens do a particularly bad job of “understanding women”?
All I ever see in the sex/dating threads is men bragging about how successful they are with women.
I’m not sure how else to interpret sloot’s “wider hypothesis.”
That’s also what I was trying to get at with “stochastic.” Clearly there are some commenters who have very limited ability to model women. Not enough for me to think they’re on to something.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A p-zombie is a being that is objectively indistinguishable from a human but has no subjective experience. To imply that women are p-zombies because they behave differently from men, which is what I would guess the Namrok comment that you are referring to probably does, would be to fundamentally misunderstand the p-zombie concept. Part of the whole idea of a p-zombie is that its behavior is indistinguishable from that of a human.
If someone manages to find that comment, it might be interesting to read.
I remember it, and posted light agreement -- the instances I've noticed are more along the lines of "creates false memories that align with one's worldview" than p-zombie-ism. (IIRC this was the sort of discussion that led gemmaem to flee to theschism?)
I can see how women are disturbed by this kind of talk, but I do think there's a... tendency there. R. Jones I figure is simply a nutter -- there's lots of men that act like this but they usually just get locked up, and nobody thinks it's a bad thing when their kids are confiscated.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Comedian and marriage guy Mark Gungor has a whole schtick on why men and women are fundamentally incomprehensible to each other, the model of boxes vs wires. I’ve linked to the start of the part most people go to the video for, 55 seconds in.
Other examinations I’ve leaned on for preparing for understanding women’s behavior and choices include the Dave Sim’s Cerebus comics and Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder comics, particularly her graphic novel “Five Crazy Women”. (If a woman warns you that all women are crazy, listen to her.)
This video is very interesting to me, in the sense that it does not resonate with my experience, at least of my own internal life, at all. I think I’ve made allusions before to the fact that I tend to recognize within myself many patterns and frames of mind that are generally associated with femininity; my free testosterone levels have certainly increased over the years and I’ve observed a concomitant decrease in the prevalence of these patterns, but I still seem to experience them far more often than the modal heterosexual man. This is why I’ve always held out a bit more sympathy for a soft version of the “gender is a non-binary spectrum separate from sex” cluster of ideas than one might expect, given my opinions about many other culture-war topics.
I think it is very obvious that masculinity and femininity are bimodal distributions; in that sense, I’m certainly in strong disagreement with the full gender abolitionists and gender-sex-separators. Where I think a lot of the more fertile disagreement lies is the question of just how many people sit somewhere in the psychological overlap between those distributions, and what to do with them. I’m completely uninterested in entertaining discussions of what to do about the vanishingly small number of people who are physically intermediate between the two poles, but as someone in the awkward position of finding myself psychologically somewhere in the undifferentiated middle ground, it’s odd watching a video which clearly the vast majority of people find insightful and relatable and getting pretty much nothing out of it myself.
As a male (but not an especially masculine one), this is also very much not my experience, but I notice that most of the men I know also don't seem to have this either, even ones who are more masculine than me in general. So clearly something is wrong here. I only know my own experiences, and I don't ever think about literally nothing. I don't know what that even means, other than being unconscious. But I don't think it matches most of the men I know, so I'm mostly just extrapolating from there. It's probably not true, and if it's is true for some men it's probably not true of people who I encounter in my filter bubble. I'm torn between three possible hypotheses. In approximate order of how likely I think they are:
1: This is a made up stereotype based on conversation preferences. Nobody really experiences nothing in their mind, they just daydream about unimportant stuff and then when asked about it either lose their train of thought and forget, or are embarrassed by how silly it was. It's easier to tell your wife that you were thinking about "nothing" than it is to tell her you were imagining the broader ecological implications if squirrels didn't have tails, or that you were trying to find symmetries in the patterns on the wall, and then have her judge you and ask questions about what's wrong with you that you'd think about something silly like that. Or if you were imagining having a threesome with two of your favorite celebrities, and you think she'd get angry if you admitted something like that. It's entirely possible that enough men (not all men, but a non-negligible number) have negative experiences with women questioning their inner thoughts and starting conflicts over it, or they just don't enjoy having conversations when they're trying to have alone time to think, and they learn to say "nothing" as the easiest response. And if enough do this, and men do this more often then women, then it becomes a stereotype.
2: This is an intelligence thing, not a gender thing. Maybe people with IQ below a certain threshold really do space out and think about nothing sometimes. I suspect if you were thinking about literally nothing you'd be trapped there forever, you have to have some sort of route for external stimulus to reach your brain, but I suppose your conscious mind could be off while your unconscious is still on. Or more likely they're thinking about very little which gets rounded off to "nothing" when queried. This is pretty far from my experience, I suppose the closest I can think of is when I'm really sleepy and my thoughts seem to slow and get muddled. Maybe some people do this on purpose as a sort of micronap? I don't know. If this is the correct explanation, then I can think of two possibilities for why this is stereotyped as a gender thing. One possibility is that it is socially uncouth to criticize women in certain ways, especially about their intelligence, so if men and women both do this men who talk about women doing this will be criticized for being misogynistic, while women who talk about men doing this will be sympathized with. The other possibility is the male variability hypothesis. If this only occurs in people with IQ below 90, and men have higher IQ variance, then more men will have this feature, therefore the stereotype might get applied to men more. It could even be the case that there is a genuine gender component to this in combination with the IQ thing. Like, maybe it only happens to women with IQ less than 80 and men with IQ less than 90, so some couples with the same IQ might see differences across gender. Heck, it could even be the case that it never happens to women, and happens to all men with IQ less than 90, and it would still be consistent with lots of men in general having it, while none of the men you or I interact with have it.
3: This is a genuine gender thing. Some sort of hormone or brain structure or socially nurtured psychological patterns cause some men to sometimes think about nothing. That is, there is a common causal source (other than IQ) of many correlated masculine traits, and empty brain. The stereotypes are right, even if not universal, and you and I are just less masculine than all of the meatheads out there. Maybe I'm wrong about the inner worlds of the intelligent but not feminine men around me, and they do sometimes think about literally nothing, just not when they're around me. That seems vaguely plausible, if you actually pay attention while you're at work and socializing and save your sitting around thinking about nothing when you're alone at home.
Again, I think 1 is the most likely, then 2, then 3. But I suppose any are possible.
I am personally of the “it’s not stuff they’d actually want to remember thinking about, so they forget about their thoughts” camp. Maybe I’m an outlier here, but I can’t ge5 my brain to shut up most of the time. And unless I’m thinking about something specific, it’s generally inane stupid shit that I don’t even care about. Like, it’s pieces of tv shows, do the Cards play this afternoon, songs, what’s the word for X in Y language, what would be different if the Chinese had discovered the New World instead of the Spanish?
I don’t talk about it because it’s kinda weird and nobody would actually care that much.
More options
Context Copy link
3.5: This is a head injury thing, and stereotypical masculine activities are more likely to result in head injuries.
I hadn't thought of that. I'm doubtful that this is the main cause, because this would still be pretty rare even in men, and I'm not sure that would be enough to create the stereotype. But it could be this.
It may be rare in men as a whole, but still common enough in some notable subsets of men (eg, athletes in certain popular sports) to create the stereotype.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is funny you mention “finding symmetry in the patterns on the wall.” I do trivial stuff like that all of the time (including whenever I see numbers try to figure out how using different mathematical functions get to the number 1)
I do that with words, when I see a new word or phrase I immediately try to find anagrams, cyphers, puns, spoonerisms or see if I can figure out the etymology in my head.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That doesn't ring any bells, but if you recall sufficient detail to dredge it up I'd be interested to see it. By "childhood magazine" are you talking, like... Highlights for Children? Teen Vogue? I'm struggling to even think of concrete examples of "childhood magazines" so if I ever wrote a post about one I'd be surprised!
Which WhiningCoil post are you talking about? CTRL-F for "knuckl" doesn't give me hits on two pages of user history.Nevermind, found it.More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think that violence is, if not necessarily a good reaction, at least an understandable reaction to being forced by the state to spend eight hours a day at a containment center run by a bunch of glorified babysitters. Of course in practice, many school shooters target not just school staff but also their fellow students, often not even because of any justified personal grievances against them.
This comment has received at least three reports, with some commenters saying they've reported this comment.
I am responding with a modhat to remind the reporters that this is a forum for testing shady thinking, which means that by default even shady thinking is allowed. While concrete threats of violence are in many instances illegal and would in any event violate our ruleset (at minimum by excluding the targets of such threats from the discussion), opinions regarding what might arguably justify violence are not the same as threats of violence.
From the reports, @Goodguy stands accused of being "pro shooting up schools" and sounding "really unhinged." From @NolanE's comment on the other reported comment:
But this is uncharitable and suggests an aversion to thinking charitably about the motives of violent people, which--if we actually want to prevent school shootings, or even threats of school shootings--it might be helpful for us to think about clearly and accurately. @Goodguy says that violence is "not necessarily a good reaction" but an "understandable" one. This is supported with a characterization of public education that many people disagree with (some, here in the comments), but not one that is presented as the only or even the correct perspective. Nothing about this comment "justifies" school shootings--only attempts to explain them.
There is a famous story about John Adams defending British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials. It has become the center of essays, books, television productions... Adams does not seem to have even been excessively sympathetic toward the soldiers, though he was certainly accused of such sympathies. Rather, he just regarded it as an injustice for the soldiers to go to trial unrepresented, and he had some rational doubts about the stories he was hearing. In the end, many of the soldiers were actually acquitted, because there was good evidence that they weren't involved or at fault, but this evidence would not have come to light had public opinion prevailed and the soldiers simply been lynched. Still, there were some people who continued to regard Jon Adams as "pro shooting up Americans" as a result.
In hopes of throwing reporters a bit of a bone, I want to say something like "@Goodguy's comment could be higher effort," but even that I think would not be quite right. If @Goodguy had written a higher-effort version of this comment, I think it would only have strengthened the objections; the comment as written does not excuse or defend school shootings, only explains (some of) them in a way that could potentially be probative of root causes. That it does so succinctly helps, rhetorically, to strengthen the idea that shooters are not being defended as, well, the "good guys"--just as humans responding to an arguably coercive environment.
If anyone using this website ever turns out to commit a serious crime, I will be very sad about that! But I'm not going to moderate people for trying to understand violence, on grounds that understanding violence might lead to violence. Because I think the opposite is at least as likely to be true--that honest attempts to understand violence could help us to prevent it.
Obviously that’s rubbish. School shootings are neither justifiable nor “understandable” by any sane metric, and there is in fact no real distinction between those two phrases.
How can anybody “understand” an adult shooting a few 6 year olds, based on “workplace hostility” is beyond me. They aren’t workers for one thing. The shooter often has no relationship to the school.
(Maybe @Goodguy wanted to talk about workspaces in particular he didn’t. He preferred to understand school shooters.)
You vaguely admit that he has no real justification when you say were he try to explain his position it would be worse for him.
Nice piece about John Adams though, albeit totally unrelated. After all I didn’t suggest a mob take out @Goodguy, or that there be an online lynching, but reported him to whatever travesty of due process this site enforces. I myself got a 2 day ban for a perfectly good analogy a while back. So banning can be done. You can do if you try.
And the whole lecturing tone is a bit off, isn’t it? The weird defense of goodguy’s post could perhaps be a bit less verbose, and not dwell all that much on rather irrelevant American history, but it drips with unearned condescension.
Anyways I don’t see any way to delete myself from this community, so feel free to ban me. This is to be clear because I don’t want to be associated with y’all. I can see why Scott cut the posters here out of the loop.
There is a huge difference between "justifiable" and "understandable." We often understand why people do things without believing they were justified.
You caught a ban for offering your "analogy" in bad faith.
You know you can just... go away, right?
More options
Context Copy link
Honestly, it seems to me that you have taken an impractically high degree of offense at Goodguys post. I think it takes only a small helping of charity to see his post as reasonable and motte-adequate. What exactly did he do wrong? Are school schootings a unique evil where one may not play devils advocate even on the motte?
More options
Context Copy link
Scott is still on good terms with The Motte AFAIK. He even offered to host ads for the site after our migration. We parted ways because people who disliked the Culture War thread harassed him and IRL swatted him.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How often do comments get reported here? I feel like I pretty often seen thinly disguised calls and sometimes undisguised calls for violence here.
Actually I am a bit surprised given this site's political leanings that anyone on this site cares about school shootings enough to be upset by something that describes them as in some cases understandable. But then, I like being surprised by this place.
More options
Context Copy link
If I were to summarize my objection to the op comment - "extraordinary cllaims require extraordinary evidence". I can understand why OJ Simpson would kill his wife. But i think there is a lot of information missing before I can come to the conclusion of "of course he would shoot up the school".
Well, OP's suggestion was:
And the conclusion was not "of course"--the conclusion was "I understand."
Do you find stories of prison violence extraordinary? Do you think prison violence is an inescapable fact about imprisonment? You might object that schools are meaningfully distinct from prisons, but if you've never encountered comparisons between schools and prisons before, well, now you have--and I assure you that they are common comparisons. You might say "schools are meant to benefit children" but prisons are arguably meant to benefit criminals (through rehabilitation). You might say "school is not so unpleasant as to justify murder" and I'd say that's true! But no one in this thread has yet said "murder is justified." Only explained one thing that might drive a person to commit murder.
And sure, OP could have said more about it, but the difficulty there is, the more you say about it, the more it sounds like you are trying to claim that the violence is justified, rather than claiming that it is understandable. I didn't mind going to school as a child, but I undertstand that many people find the experience absolutely torturous.
More options
Context Copy link
That's an uncharitable re-phrasing of the op comment. He simply calls it "an understandable reaction" to what some would consider involuntary capture, but then qualifies it with the observation that many school shooters appear to kill not only their "captors" but random fellow "inmates" (implying that op believes there's a good chance these shooters are simply unhinged people).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Reported this too.
Reported for what, exactly? @Goodguy is not advocating violence, just expressing that he empathizes with (understands) the motivations of school shooters. Understanding, especially regarding unpopular opinions, is why many of us are here. If your goal is to reduce school shootings, you should be spending even more time trying to understand this failure mode of young men.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't understand, explain it to me please. As a person who spent school years in soviet union I have NEVER thought about school in this way.
Grade school was in a bad neighborhood and rough. There was bullying and fights. I got used to it because I felt like I had no other option. High school was in a different neighborhood and much more peaceful. I was a teacher's pet so I did not feel confined, I enjoyed getting out of the house and often enjoyed interacting with other people. The schoolwork was easy so it was a pretty mellow time. It was later that I looked back and started to think that high school, too, was an unjustified waste of time. Even the nice teachers were part of a system of compulsion. My opinions about education really got cemented when I myself did teaching work for some time and so for the first time had to be the one doing the compelling. I am very glad that I got out of that way of making money. I find it viscerally disgusting on some level to make kids' lives more boring to shape them into something that their parents and other usually stupid authority figures think they should be. When I was a captive of the education system myself, once I got away from the violent school, my intellectual talents and easy ability to charm adults made me enjoy a lot about school but when I spent time as one of the captors I saw many bad examples of what forced education can do to fuck up a sensitive kid. From what I can remember, that is when I really started to hate the whole thing whole-heartedly.
Some might argue that this is bullshit because when I was in grade school I did not hate it, when I was in high school I did not hate it, so how can I speak about the issue?
Well, in grade school the immediate jungle reality of being around hundreds and hundreds of volatile young people and the occasional fear of getting assaulted were enough to keep any more abstract hate of the enabling system out of my consciousness.
And though I enjoyed high school to some extent, well, I suppose that there are also soldiers who enjoyed war and then became anti-war years later. That they enjoyed war does not invalidate their criticisms of it.
More options
Context Copy link
You have to remember that this site/former subreddit heavily leans toward the type of person who despised going to high school. The median person, while thankful they're no longer in high school, doesn't think of it as some evil prison. Like, as an actual poor-ish kid who was in honor/AP classes, I actually largely enjoyed school (outside of math, because I wasn't great at it).
I thought that the "kid who was in honor/AP classes" was sort-of the majority of the people here, so why would they despise going to the high-school?
And now I noticed that there is a distinction where you reference the time in "high-school" and the Goodguy just has "school" in his comment.
Former AP kid checking in. What a boring waste of time (most of) high school was. Just sitting in an uncomfortable chair hour after hour. Filling out some busy work worksheet in one class. Half paying attention to a lecture in another class while finishing all my homework. Reading novels in class. Getting told to put that book away, what are you doing, can you pay attention? But there's so little content that I'll ace the class without particularly focusing on in class lectures.
At the time I knew something valuable was being squandered by spending much of my teenage years sitting around bored.
I obviously learned valuable things in high school. But far too little content spread among hours of sitting around bored. As the beneficiary of a good public high school, taking all available honors and AP classes, getting an AP Scholar award, etc: I don't have fond memories of high school.
More options
Context Copy link
Well there's a difference between being good at it and liking it.
I never did mind learning things, but doing pointless busywork and being under the unrestrained diktat of petty tyrants with no appeals? Yeah I was pretty mad about that. Getting fucked with by people who have authority over you with no recourse isn't fun.
I felt about school like I assume Russians did about the Soviet Union by the end. Just going through the motions because you're not going to change the damn thing whilst knowing it's mostly bullshit.
And much like in the Soviet Union, excellence can buy you the ability to not have to think about authority not liking you, so I tried to be Sergei Korolev as much as possible.
Still, I think I owe my enduring skepticism of institutional power at least in part to those early encounters with the possibility of its abuse. And I assume I'm not alone in that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Before I am tempted to make snarky comments about American schooling vis a vis the Soviet system, would you care to elaborate on what school life was like in those days? I'm curious what the experience was like.
To be quite honest - I forgot. I blame it never being the bad/horrible expirience.
Of course there was always outstanding moments(both good and bad).
I remember the subjects that I loved and teachers that were receptive to my zeal. Damn, history was my jam. Mathematics too, until we got to integrals in the last year(?) and I just couldn't grasp that and that hit me pretty hard with some sort of "imposter syndrome" that only got away in university. Some extracurricular clubs like a radio one that I joined for a year. Participated in a few competitions between schools that my teachers took seriously and we got a lot of knowledge to cram on a short notice.
Some pranks on a teachers, and getting punished in return. Gym class that everyone hated except of few people(like this guy) that thought "hey running 1.5km timed seems like a good idea". Even though you didn't have the time for shower afterwards and wet towel was the only thing saving you for next few lessons.
Overall I would describe my time in school as "busy". There was just enough time before the next thing and after that some activities and bus home took me like 30min, some homework and I spend the rest of the day outside with the neighborhood friends that mostly were going to different schools than me. I remember being absorbed quite frequently with a fantasy book that usually kept me awake till 2am, and then I realize that I can't get back to sleep anyway so might as well read until my eyes will close themselves.
The only regret I guess is that I didn't get a girlfriend during that time, so no romance stories. And then I learned that a few of girls were hitting on me but I was too thick to notice.
Edit: But I guess I'm glossing over your question so let me try to remember and describe my schedule on a weekday.
->waking at 7:30, light breakfast
->travel to school on a bus -30min
->arrive sometime before first lesson, have a chat in classroom with whoever in at the time, grab books/notes for next three lessons and leave the rest as to not drag the heavy backpack around.
->8:30 class start 45min long with 15min break between. Usually chatting amongst the classmates/friends from same age or 1year higher/lower form other classrooms nearby. Or talking to teachers while they are preparing for the lesson.
->11:30 long break for 30min (I think). Replace books/notes for next 2-3 lessons. Can get grub from cafeteria (I usually had sandwich from home for this time). Good time to go outside if weather permits.
->12 another 2-3 lessons in a row.
->about 15 do afterschool stuff if needed. Go to swimming pool for a practice on tue/thu. Or spend around 1 hour talking with friends that live near the school. Occasionally spent near a huge metal contraption that looked like two-story pyramid. Yes....we did have a game to try a knock each other off it.
->17 at home for quick homework and dinner
->18:30 outside time (unsupervised, heh)
->usually at 21 at home doing maybe other homework, reading books, pc time. (mostly because sun is down)
->22-23 go to sleep
I think your response is actually a good way to illustrate why school shooting makes sense in an American context and why it doesn't in a Russian/rest of the world context. Your summary of school is pretty unemotional, including a list of daily routines and focusing on the drudgeries of your daily life. You just mention girls for one line. When Americans are asked about their highschool experience, especially young men online, you're likely to get a lot more of an emotional response, with a more bombastic tone and a litany of perceived injustices that they experienced. Americans generally want to be the most successful and well liked and popular person in the school and they often can't stand accepting their place somewhere else on the totem pole. Young American men are driven to externalizing their problems, blaming the social situation rather than on themselves or something outside of everyone's control, so to punish the externalized enemies is more logical in the American context than in most countries. Any time the weak are able to be armed it's really no surprise that sometimes they will take the opportunity to try to claw back some dignity through violence.
Is that because American high schools are vastly different or is it American culture? The big difference I see between American culture in general is the sense of focus on indignities suffered, things that are lacking, or the bad feelings these things engender.
I think a large measure of violence, especially the spree-shooting type of violence is caused by the way Americans are taught to expect things and to focus on feelings of indignity, failure, and other negatives. There’s a pervading meme of entitlement in America, and as others have said, finding fault with the outside world when the promised good life fails to materialize. If there were a profile of the spree-shooter, it would go something like this:
A child of middle class parents, [shooter] had drifted in life, ending up with very few friends, a low wage job, often had failed out of college or trade school. He/she (most often a he) spent most of his time online, and had very few friends and no significant other. He/she often still lives at home.
The child has a problem of failure to launch or at least successfully launch. He’s been sold on the idea of the American dream, where he’s supposed to have a good job, a girlfriend, lots of friends, and their own place. They have none of that, they’re supposed to, but they don’t. And the other part of this is because of the growth of esteem culture (the idea that everyone is just naturally good and worthy without the need for growth and change), and therapeutic culture (the idea that all feelings are valid and true and you should fully welcome them and dwell on them) creates a toxic stew in people who for various reasons don’t have what they were promised, aren’t ever going to get it, and are doing exactly what society says to do — stew in the negative energy and negative feelings.
Now other cultures have done much better. Confucians believe in enjoying the moment, in looking to self-cultivation, and in fulfilling social obligation. Traditional religions say “this is God’s will”. Stoicism and Buddhism say that clinging to things is bad and makes you miserable. In any other system, the idea is not “rage against the world and the people who have wronged you,” that’s American culture where we see not getting our way less as a common part of the human experience, but as a sign of great injustice that must be fixed. Shooting people, essentially, is the equivalent of the child who throws a tantrum because mom wouldn’t buy him a toy at Walmart.
Yes. I agree with everything you said, but you put it more eloquently than I did. Thank you. The entitlement and immaturity of American people is really shocking after you've spent time away from it for a while, from my experience as an American.
When I was in Europe recently, people kept asking me about Karens in America. I didn't understand why everyone was so hung up on Karens, surely Europeans have Karens too? But then I realized that they really don't have the same culture of entitlement that America has, so they largely don't have Karens either. School shooters are basically operating with the same mindset as Karens but with guns instead of screaming at an Apple store employee. People in Europe also seem more secure in their place in society, it would be ridiculous for a rich Frenchwoman to scream at a clerk for example, it's just not done because people have internalized their own class and status in a way that America has yet to solidify.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is all interesting, thank you. Doesn't seem too radically different in terms of structure and substance from the Western way (at least, on the surface).
More options
Context Copy link
I have somehow never really considered what schooling was like in the USSR, so if you ever care to write more about it, I'd be happy to read it!
The problem is that one would be comparing their memories of a Soviet school with the synthesized version of the generic American school from the media, which isn't what American schools are really like. You would want someone who went to both schools to compare their lived experiences.
And even then it wouldn't be fair. Russian designer Artemij Lebedev loves to mention how he spent the school year of 1990-1991 in the US and returned to what was still the USSR in August 1991 because the American school was terrible. The caveat is that he went to School 57 in Moscow, one of the best if not the best school in the country (think Thomas Jefferson High), and to Parkville High in the US, which is far from being the best school in Baltimore.
More options
Context Copy link
Oh nooo..... I'm only in my 40s, so you can definitely say I embellished the time period, my life was disturbed by the USSR fall. Although I cannot even remember those times outside of watching some tv of Moscow Parliament being shelled from a tank.
Yet the mundane life at the time didn't change much. We went the next day and sat at our desks.
There were reforms targeted for schooling in the end, but we got them in "waves" as to not the rock the boat too much and teachers we're not changed....at all. I know my younger brother got caught between a few of them as the primary language was changing from russian to ukrainian.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Even to this end, most of the shootings seem targeted towards people that would normally be considered "contributors to a toxic work environment" (with a possible devolution to random killing because, well, the penalty for
latenessmurder is already death).I guess that's why I really don't see them as much of an issue, and believe it in the interest of those predisposed to perpetrate that workplace toxicity to claim as loudly as possible that "it's totally random" (and ensure that the ones that are mostly random get elevated far beyond their normal range)- because it means a world where the victim has a final argument.
There's a further response here about how this generalizes across cultures but that's for another time.
What a strange comment. It seems to justify school shootings (including young children) because of workplace toxicity.
I’ve reported it. Let’s see.
They seriously need to explain what they mean by toxicity and how on earth that explains shooting a bunch of children, but I appreciate the Chen Sheng Wu Guang Uprising reference.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It strikes me that it may or may not be bullshit. But the idea that DeSantis in 2023 spends one minute thinking about Rebekah Jones is laughable let alone that he concocted a scheme to “get at her” by arresting her son on trumped up charges. Even if the democrats are correct that DeSantis is a fascist (ironic given that with respect to the most authoritarian imposition on freedom in the last seventy years DeSantis was on the freedom side), they also must acknowledge the guy is competent. It would be really incompetent to go after a not even E lister in Rebekah Jones.
The Occam Razor is that after a school shooting police are wary of the next shooting and so are over active. But that doesn’t let Jones be a #resistance leader.
If you regard lockdownism as a variant of fascism (I don't, but some do) then DeSantis probably qualifies as the single most prominent and influential anti-fascist on the planet.
There were multiple other governors who refused to lockdown at all.
There were about 6 or 7 governors who didn't issue stay-at-home orders.
There were governors who even if they did, opened up much quicker and with fewer restrictions.
And there were governors who cracked down on localities attempting their own "lockdowns" far quicker than desantis.
Despite desantis's very successful campaign of rewriting history around his covid hysteria actions, e.g., shutting down beaches and sending in staties to arrest teenagers on the beach during spring break, they do not reflect what he actually did.
Most prominent and influential does not necessarily mean most efficient.
whether he is or not based on your perception doesn't mean he should be, hence my comment
you're spreading the claim he is
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A not even E lister’s son, not even her personally.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
...aaand I hit the character limit. Well, I didn't have much more to add. But as political figures go, Rebekah Jones was not on my list of people I expected to ever hear about again. How is she still out there participating in society? How does she continue to get attention from the news media? As far as I can tell, she's never accomplished anything meaningful, ever. Her fifteen minutes of fame consisted in raising a large sum of money by being a critic of DeSantis who was willing to take dramatic liberties with the truth. And now there are likely thousands, even tens of thousands of Twitter and Reddit users whose priors just got updated in favor of "DeSantis is a facist" based on a kettle of lies and exaggerations amplified by institutions that will turn around tomorrow and warn us about misinformation.
I'd like to discuss the best ideas my political opposition has, but I'm increasingly concerned that "signal boost liars" is the best idea my political opposition has--or, if not their best idea, maybe just their most pragmatically effective.
I would distill it down to "signal boost anyone who is on your side in the given culture war battle, regardless of truth value."
Or even better, "signal boost literally anyone who is saying things that are helpful to your immediate instrumental goals, regardless of their truth value."
That last one allows you to signal boost even your opponents saying true things when it is politically beneficial to you that said true things be heard, or at least heard from the opponent.
Hence, if Trump is saying bad things about Desantis, this man that the left has uniformly agreed that had to be silenced is, in fact, worthy of signal boosting to the extent it hurts DeSantis/sows dissension amongst the GOP.
That is the simplest algorithm for any political actor to run. "Does this signal seem to help my tribe's goals? If so, scream it loud and wide. If not, ignore or stifle it."
The truth of falsity need not even be a concern!
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think that's is a very charitable way of describing this, but I do think there's a grain of truth to this that could lead to fruitful discussion. When I read this description of what happened, not having heard of this person before and taking the top-level post at its word, the first thing I was reminded of was the affair of Jussie Smollett, whose hate crime hoax was initially met with immense amounts of support and sympathy, leading to a TV interview where he theorized that the supposed hate crime was motivated by his outsized criticism of "45," i.e. Donald Trump, before the absurdities in his story quickly caused the public perception tide to turn against him. I think anyone with a clear head or a belief in ethics would have recognized the hoax was both bad in itself and highly likely to be bad for himself, but I'd wager Smollett had neither. And the adoration that he received in the brief period before his story broke down was very real and very sizable, something I'm guessing he truly got a lot out of.
And this in turn reminded me of the affair of Jackie Coakley, the University of Virginia student whose story of being gang-raped as part of an apparent frat house hazing ritual was the basis for the Rolling Stone article A Rape on Campus by Sabrina Rubin Erdely which made waves about 10 years ago before it was retracted by the publication for purportedly lacking in veracity. I don't remember it too well, and Coakley wasn't a public figure like Smollett who actively tried to publicize herself, but I recall what little we got from her was that she genuinely stuck to her guns that the story was real, despite the lack of evidence.
What these highlight to me is that there are some people who are so narcissistic and lacking in a sense of ethics and honesty that they're willing to lie in an effort to gain... something that feeds their egos. I don't know if it's called sociopathy or what, but I feel like it's very similar to the kind of mentality we see in (people I think are) scam artists like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos or possibly Sam Bankman-Fried or the guy who ran the Fyre Festival or Travis Pangburn. Who knows why they are the way they are, but they're that way, and they'll likely always be with us.
So as a society, it falls on the rest of us to have norms and rules and laws that allow us to accurately detect and prevent/punish people like that. And I think if you want to be charitable to your "political opposition," their failure is that they've created an environment that provides weak points for people like that to attack.
Another thing associated with your "opposition" I was reminded of when reading this post was "Believe Women" (FYI the fact that Jones in this story is a woman is tangential to the point I'm making, not least because her claim isn't one of sexual abuse). There is some controversy over what this actually means, muddled by the fact that "Believe All Women" was also a common variant of the phrase for a time, but the most charitable version of it that I've encountered is something like, "In the past, accusations by women against abusers were automatically treated with hyperskepticism, leading to many men to get away with abusive behavior, leading to more women being abused. Like it or not, you, by nature of living in this society, are also infected with this tendency towards hyperskepticism. In an effort to correct this injustice, you when judging the veracity of the next woman's claim of being abused, you should err on the side of believing her." This most charitable version still literally means that you personally should override what you personally believe to be your best judgment: your very ability to judge is not to be trusted, in favor of, well, "Believe Women."
The "Believe Women" meme is only one in a long line of similar memes and messages about overriding one's own best judgment in favor of taking claims at their word based on the particular scenario and identity. "Lived experience" is probably the most famous one. And there's a real belief that this is the ethical and just thing to do here, supported by a scaffolding of narratives around oppression and history and what is really believed to be social science. That the current oppressive structure of society has essentially infected the minds of everyday people with invisible - or "implicit" - biases that tilt them against the words of certain types of people, which must be actively fought against by consciously overriding their very ability to judge things.
When you have this sort of norm of shredding one's skepticism in certain circumstances, it becomes very easy to convince oneself that any particular case that makes one's enemies look bad must fit the circumstances. You do that enough times, and it just becomes automatic, to determine one's own skepticism based on how bad it makes one's enemies look, rather than based on the actual specifics of the situation at hand. And this norm has been pushed and pushed and pushed as the only correct thing to do in many influential leftist circles.
And let me be clear, I don't think this is well intentioned; but what I believe it is is an attempt at being well intentioned. This sort of downstream negative impacts aren't immediately obvious at first blush, but neither are they so counterintuitive and complex that it would take a genius to figure out. Every individual who believes in pushing some sort of sociopolitical message has the responsibility to think through things at least enough to figure this out. And the people who pushed this sort of norm hadn't. And so they failed in their attempt to be well intentioned. But they don't outright believe that "signal boosting liars" is their best idea. They just find themselves doing it because the norms they follow have corrupted their ability to distinguish between liars and truthtellers in cases where the lies are very flattering to their side.
I think this is a trap that everyone everywhere can fall into, and due to the asymmetry between the right and the left, the way it instantiates on the right-wing is different, looking more like authoritarian hierarchical organizations, such as the church. Our society has done a bang-up job in explicitly identifying and subverting such organizations for at least the past few decades, and I think (hope) we're catching up to doing the same for the left versions.
An aspect of this I think you left out, is how much honest to god bravery it took to point out that the Emperor had no clothes in these circumstances. These people were peddling ridiculous, obvious fictions. And mainstream institutions were willing to slander all critics for as long as they could until a certain critical mass formed, real acts of journalism occurred, and the trivially low bar of verifying "Does this person in the story even exists?" came out looking very badly for the liars.
Even here, and it's antecedent, I recall users getting modded for nakedly asserting Smollett was an obvious hoax. That's how much control they have over the overton window, that calling a spade a spade, if they make it "inflammatory" enough, becomes difficult to point out even in a place like this. They've already hacked our sensibilities to such a degree that we can barely tell the truth even to ourselves.
At least we still have that. A lot of people I meet don't. They're living off whatever the latest NPC update is uncritically.
Are you talking about on /r/themotte? Because I do not recall that. I recall people expressing skepticism very quickly. I thought the story smelled fishy right from the beginning, and indeed I think there was a general consensus in the early days that it was so obviously fishy that even mainstream journalists were being visibly cautious in their reporting, even before they were willing to openly question the story.
Here. It’s very much about the naked and culture warring, rather than mere skepticism, but given the original claim…
I don't think his response was culture warring, especially compared to the post it was responding to.
I'm with you that this particular response was hard to fault in its context, and the moderator action was bad optics. At the same time, though, while this risks airing something of a personal grudge that I've been trying my best to keep to myself most of the time, I think it was very representative of a general pattern of posts by Nybbler, who in my view has a knack for making perfectly rule-conforming and highly popular posts that seem to be perfectly optimised for driving away (or at least inducing meltdowns in) left-wingers in the audience, thus actively subverting the forum's purpose of bringing together opposing culture war groups in cordial discussion.
If I try to pin it down, it's a combination of dismissiveness of things the other side cares about, absolute confidence, and a laconic minimalism that provides minimal attack surface for objections and puts the burden of counterargument on the other side. Think of something like going into an Atheist-vs.-Christian debate forum and responding to someone making a long post about what it must have been like when Jesus realised his own divine mission with a one-line "Jesus was a cult leader. He knew he had no such thing." Most people here seem to intuitively understand that well enough to steer clear of posting like that themselves, but still can't get themselves to not cheer on it when it is done in favour of their own team; and it's stupidly hard to write a specific rule against it that doesn't wind up amounting to "don't just state facts" ("write like you want everybody to be included in the discussion" is the closest one). Darwin was being obnoxious and wrong, but he was the manageable kind of obnoxious and wrong that seemed to generally invite more and better engagement in the form of attempts to defeat his claims in detail. Nybbler's counterpunch, correct though it may be, had the nature of a school bully knowing precisely when the teacher is looking away so he can give you another subtle shove, so when you snap it looks like you are the unreasonable one.
Funny enough, I have a similar view of Darwin. He (or she) had an annoying habit of ignoring the meat of a response and focusing on one particular aspect (often in a straw man sorta way) to avoid having to concede the issue. Darwin generated responses precisely because Darwin attempted to dance around arguments instead of address them head on.
More options
Context Copy link
Nybbler’s comment was the opposite of content-free, it was an unhedged bet, and he deserves even more credit for it than the other wafflers who doubted the story. By adding confidence to the mere direction of the bet, it provided more of an attack surface.
Partisan hacks only think their attacks are sharp and to the point like nybbler’s. And I don't mean darwin. His laconic game elsewhere wasn’t too shabby either, and the people it annoyed argued much like you do.
More options
Context Copy link
No it doesn't, and I have no idea how you can describe it in this way. He literally stuck his neck out, if he ended up being wrong he'd look like a complete twat. All Darwin had to do to avoid looking like one was say something like "well, I guess we'll find out".
Interesting analogy. I spent my youth at these sorts of forums, and they were brutal to the Christians. Nybbler-type responses would have been seen as quite courteous.
Anyway, if the rule is supposed to be "don't be dismissive of things the other side cares about", I'm game, but that's in direct contradiction to letting progressives make sweeping claims about society, and to call their opponents racist, "fragile", and conspiracy theorists. The demand that everybody else just sits and takes it, and only responds in the nicest possible way, comes off as ridiculously one-sided.
I completely disagree, and in my opinion it's the opposite. If Darwin's comment resulted in better engagement, it's not thanks to the nature of his comment, which was making sweeping and obnoxious claims about his outrgroup, it's because everybody else knew they have to be on their best behavior or get modded. Nybbler's counterpunch was the snapping at the bully.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Back on reddit. The_Nybbler literally got banned for telling Darwin it's fake, while Darwin got to run around calling people racist for being skeptical.
Yep. IIRC Darwin was scolding us all for not taking that sort of thing seriously (I don't think it had even been discussed at all yet). I looked it up, concluded it was an obvious hoax, and told him to gloat while he could, because that story had more red flags than a May Day parade or something similar, and ate the ban for it.
Do you have any sense of when this might have occurred? The Smollett hoax happened in January 2019, before I was a moderator in the sub. Your first ban from the Motte was in June 2019 on an unrelated comment. Your next ban from the Motte was in May of 2020, then June, July, November, December--still no Smollett comments in the log on those.
I can't speak to your bans from /r/SSC, and it's always possible something got left out of the log! And Darwin2500 has a particularly infuriating gift for baiting people into crossing the line. But if you did eat a ban for a Smollett comment in the Motte, it would be interesting to see the context of that, I think.
EDIT: Thanks to @gattsuru for finding the link--looks like it was indeed /r/SSC, not the Motte--and it looks like a warning rather than a ban, but that is not entirely clear to me.
Nice that you/gattsuru found it, I've been looking for it all over the place. I swear to god the glowies at the NCRI deliberately made all the reddit search tools suck so they can keep the deets on everyone, while denying them to others.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is going to sound harsh, but I do think it's accurate, in that I think there always has been a sense that the best argument actually is "We will have the power". You know...that whole "Right Side of History" thing? And sometimes that "will" in the first phrase gets lost, so it's just "We have the power". And with that comes all sorts of Moral License and all that. In reality, we're talking pure Toxoplasma of Rage.
I really am very progressive myself, as well as liberal. Small-p. But I do think the full-throated embrace and exploitation of post-modernism is worrying for a whole host of reasons. Again, I'm not even opposed to post-modernism in a reflective, sober perspective. But what we're seeing here is something more like a search for power. The further you can go, and get away with if not outright cheered and supported the more pressure it puts on people to adopt your views/join your group.
Note, this applies to parts of the right as well, I think.
I agree.
Right. One of the things I'm thinking about in connection with this case is just... weaponized rage, I guess. Jones is, for whatever reason, a bottomless well of rage, and my instinct is to respond by not talking about her, or others like her. To exercise the virtue of silence, to pursue the ideal embodied in the rules about focusing on the best ideas of those with whom I disagree. But it seems like this might also be a kind of trap, where one side's "righteous anger" is always a straight-faced headline while the other side's "unhinged paranoia" gets a laugh track on the Daily Show.
Meanwhile, there is a victim in this: a child, not yet a teenager, who apparently finds life so burdensome as to plot mass murder, or at least to pretend that he is. Kids say stupid stuff, and I'd like us not to ruin their lives over it. But also, it kind of seems like his mother has already ruined him, in great measure, by being an avatar of the culture wars. Can we talk about that tragedy--and I do think it is a tragedy!--without careening off the culture war angles? I honestly just don't know.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Jesus Christ. It’s depressing to imagine a 13 year old making credible murder threats, but if he does…well, our hands are tied. Have you seen any links to the alleged meme?
Also, I guess this is an object lesson: just because there’s a political motivation to do something doesn’t mean it’s the wrong move. There are rules. Speaking of which,
There are definitely better ones to talk about. This is awfully close to the platonic ideal of “look what those people did.”
I was going to say “most everything in the current CW thread,” but it looks like it’s been derailed by date-me doc bullshit. So maybe Rebekah Jones really was the best the left had to offer.
More options
Context Copy link
Jones posted it. It's a fat police officer with the caption "cops in their car waiting for the school shooter to kill himself so they can go in." But the point is that the meme was not the problem, the threats were the problem.
Fifteen minutes ago Jones tweeted:
So she continues to maintain that this is about a meme in the face of overwhelming evidence against that claim. (The idea that she "bested" DeSantis is also just... wild. He won re-election with almost 60% of the vote.)
Did you notice me lampshade this at the beginning of my post? How about the tightrope metaphor? Was I too subtle? I did try to note that there are similarly bizarre figures on the "other side" (with the caveat that they seem to get less vocal support from rank-and-file conservatives; even Santos and Greene take flak from Fox News, do not enjoy the support of default subreddits, etc.). I do think this is an interesting case study for the idea that white liberals are more likely to have mental problems. I don't think Jones is the "best" of what the left has to offer! What catches my attention, though, is the apparently large numbers of leftists who apparently believe that she is, including, apparently, the Miami Herald. That's interesting to me, in ways that Jones herself really isn't.
Yeah, you were pretty clearly aware. Certified Deiseach moment.
I think that’s still against the spirit of the thread, if not the letter.
It is about the Culture War, in the sense of “here’s some two-movies-one-screen news coming down the pike which will probably ignite flamewars you may get caught up in, here’s a side of the story you may not see represented elsewhere, but feel free to research it yourself.”
I feel both smarter and dumber for having read it.
More options
Context Copy link
Opsec
Not sure I follow. Pretty sure that neither me nor nara is a Deiseach alt.
It would be pretty funny if naraburns had been running a "feisty Irish lady" alt all this time I guess.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link