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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35059 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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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for the Rolling Stone article A Rape on Campus by Sabrina Rubin Erdely which made waves about 10 years ago before it was retracted by the publication for purportedly lacking in veracity.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.

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.

Even here, and it's antecedent, I recall users getting modded for nakedly asserting Smollett was an obvious hoax.

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.

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.

provides minimal attack surface for objections and puts the burden of counterargument on the other side.

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".

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."

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.

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.

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.

Are you talking about on /r/themotte? Because I do not recall that.

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.

EDIT: Thanks to @gattsuru for finding the link

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.

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