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Contra Innuendo Studios On "Didoing"
Today, another video from Innuendo Studios in their "Alt-Right Playbook" series just dropped, and it describes a move in an argument where Person A will propose a small gesture that they assert will make things better for some group, and Person B counters by essentially agreeing that society is unfair around the issue being discussed, but that it is such a minor problem that it is not worth addressing. Innuendo Studios' preferred word for this move by Person B is "Didoing" (after the Dido song Thank You which features the lyrics "[...] it's not so bad"), but he also points out that some people have called this issue "The Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness", which I prefer as a name for this, since it doesn't rely on knowledge of a song from 1998 to explain.
According to Innuendo Studios, Person B's hidden premise is that "it is okay for things to be unfair, within a certain tolerance." That "some people do and should take extra precautions just to exist in the world alongside the rest of us."
My own politics lean towards social democracy, and aside from some anti-woke skepticism, I am far from "alt-right." But to the above I have to say, isn't Person B obviously correct?
Innuendo Studios initially frames the discussion around content warnings, so let's start there. I want to set aside, for a moment, the question of whether content warnings are actually successful at addressing some alleged unfairness in society. Let's grant for the sake of argument that they are 100% successful at addressing the issue of people with PTSD or anxiety attacks having their conditions activated as a result of media they are consuming.
That still doesn't answer at what level society should be trying to deal with this issue. As I see it, there are four basic levels a coordination problem can be solved in society:
Now I believe the question becomes, assuming that content warnings work, at what level should we try to solve the problem that they solve?
None of these options are without downsides. If we create a new government bureaucracy to do this, how do we stop it from trying to seize new power or misusing the power it was given? If we enshrine a new social norm, are we prepared to accept the ostracism of people from polite society for its violation? If a private organization tries to solve the problem, how can its limited reach be solved so the maximum number of people possible enjoy the benefits of the solution? And doubly so for individual actions.
We already live in a world where there are a ton of voluntary systems for content ratings, from the MPA film rating system to the United States pay television content advisory system to the ESRB. All of these systems are being done by private industry, and don't have the force of law.
We also have successful examples of crowd-sourcing trigger warnings with sites like Does The Dog Die.
I don't think it would be unreasonable for a person to think that this level of dealing with the problem is more or less acceptable. We haven't delivered a perfect solution to all people, but we've achieved reasonably good coverage at a tolerably low cost to society in terms of money and resources invested. Sure, some people might find this incomplete resolution unsatisfying, or on the other side believe that even the level we're currently investing in it is too high.
All discussions are going to end up like this in the end, whether we're talking about whether the government should have programs to pay for eye glasses for people, or whether we're talking about whether we should force private companies to build handicapped spaces in parking lots.
If we have a list of societal interventions we're considering implementing, I think it is obvious that you should do the ones that have the highest impact with the lowest cost of societal resources to implement. It doesn't mean that the problems that you don't focus on aren't problems, but they might be small enough problems that you don't actually need any larger coordination to solve the problem.
I think it would be worth prioritizing relatively cheap interventions like eyeglasses, which can have huge positive impacts on people depending on the level of impairment they started with, over more untractable problems that tend to be the focus of woke bellyaching.
No matter how you try to solve a problem in society, there will always be trade offs. You're always compromising between bigger interventions in Area A and Area B since every resource that matters is finite, and I think most people find it acceptable to leave many small problems unsolved. We're okay with saying, "suck it up, everyone has to deal with some level of unfairness, and the current status quo already solves most of the most important issues you have to deal with." Or alternatively, "The status quo is indeed unacceptable, but we should focus on solving big, important issues X, Y and Z, and we won't be getting to your tiny issues any time soon, if ever."
There has to be a Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness, whether you're "alt-right" or not. Most of the argument is about where the line should be drawn.
This whole analysis is off-base, because it fails to examine the reason why content warnings, and most other identity-based lobbying, are effective or not effective.
Thesis/TLDR: Content warnings aren't effective because they prevent exposure to a "triggering" stimulus, they are effective because by giving them society is acknowledging the power and importance of the individual/group that could be thus triggered. This is a salve to the wounds of most identity based issues, such as racism or sexual assault, because the primary harm of those issues is the feeling of the individual lacking power.
Imagine the following personal scenario by analogy. Albert has recently gone through a viciously bad breakup, his girlfriend publicly cheated on him, and has left him for the other man. Their mutual social circle is aware, his friends at work know and have probably gossiped to the rest of the office. Everywhere he goes, everyone he knows talks about it, he can't escape it, even if people don't bring it up, he suspects that they are talking behind his back. He goes fishing with his father Brian, Brian asks him how he's handling the breakup, Albert says hey dad, I'm tired of it, let's talk about literally anything else. But Brian wants to know about the breakup, he's curious, he keeps asking, says hey come on I'm your father you can talk about this with me. Albert snaps, says it is my life and I don't have to talk about it if I don't want to. Brian says you don't want to listen to me because you don't respect me. Albert says you don't respect me or else you wouldn't insist on talking about something I don't want to talk about. Both become angry, both feel that the other doesn't respect him.
Now is Albert primarily angry at the thought of talking to his father, or his he primarily angry at the loss of power, that he has been robbed of the power to choose what to talk about? Is his father primarily angry that he isn't hearing about the breakup, or is he angry that his son doesn't respect him enough to confide in him? After this struggle has become about power and respect, is Albert going to be happier to talk about the breakup, or will it feel worse than ever to talk about it?
Trigger warnings are the same. Who are the groups who advocate for trigger warnings? Subaltern ethnic groups, and rape victims. What is the psychologically harmful experience of being a member of a subaltern ethnic group or of rape? It is the experience of lacking power, the feeling that one lacks importance, that others can abuse or instrumentalize your existence towards their own ends. Trigger warnings are an effective salve, not because they prevent exposure to the bad thing, but because by giving a trigger warning society is saying to them: you matter, you are important, you have power, we will allow you to decide what we talk about. This improves things for such a person, because they feel that someone cares about their feelings, about what they think. This is a normal psychological dynamic.
At the same time, the majority or historically dominant groups will experience this loss of power and agency as a psychological harm. This is a normal psychological dynamic. Worse, they will experience the loss more keenly than they experience any gain. That's a natural flaw in human minds.
This is also why the concept of trigger warnings is such a mind-virus: the dynamic this creates makes viewing the purportedly harmful content more harmful, not less, because now being "forced" to view the content will seem like a greater loss of power than providing the trigger warning originally seemed like a gain.
So to zoom back out to the whole concept of "The Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness" as you put it. The question isn't so much about unhappiness, it is about power and agency. Increasing the power and agency of subaltern groups, and concomitantly decreasing the power and agency of everyone else to determine their own lives.
I am, for the most part, the picture they put next to privilege in the SJWebster's Dictionary of Woke Terminology: blond, male, heterosexual, reasonably comfortable. Ceteris paribus, in the current system, left to my own devices I am capable of living a happy life pursuing my own interests. At some level of proximity and severity of unhappiness, that would be widely seen as inappropriate. If my mother was dying in the hospital, going on a climbing trip that weekend would widely be seen as wrong. If my sister and my nieces were out on the street, it would widely be seen as heartless for me to buy myself a new car. That balance of severity and proximity extends outward to some point, where it is inappropriate for me to do [X] while [Y] is experiencing [Z]. While someone close to me is miserable, I should not be left to my own devices to pursue my own happiness, I should be caring for them, to help them.
The argument here seems to be for a vast expansion of both the proximity at which I should be constrained in my actions, and the level of misery at which I should be constrained in my actions. To say I don't have the right to go on vacation the week my best friend's house burns down strikes me as a reasonable constraint on my freedom and agency, indeed helping him is an exercise of my agency and power as a person. Telling me that I don't have the right to have a comfortable life until everyone does, is to totally restrain my freedom and agency, it's to say I'm not allowed to do anything. Telling me I can't have an honest conversation about difficult topics in a college course until Black people are all happy, or until no one ever gets raped, is to totally restrain my ability to have a college education. At the same time, these arguments elevate the feelings of power of the powerless.
These arguments should always be about examining power and agency of the players involved.
Exceptional steelman of trigger warnings.
I finally understand. They're more easily understood as a way of gimping everyone else to make the triggered person feel more powerful.
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The number of arguments which boil down to some form of sorites paradox is very annoying.
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So "Didoing" is the new version of "Sealioning", eh? Also a rather unfortunate choice because the terminology is just one letter away from a Rochester poem 😁
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I would just have thought "Didoing" had something to do with the Aeneid. Killing oneself after a breakup, perhaps.
I thought it had something to do with "getting up to didoes".
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I think most people take a Person B position towards at least some things. If only for practical reasons. The problem, building on @KnotGodel's post below, is that this is too high a level of abstraction to be useful. Are Person B positions always correct? Plainly not. Are Person B positions never correct? Also no. All the interesting discussion is in the contexts in which we should be more like Person A or more like Person B.
Coming back around to the content warnings discussion I think there are plenty of interesting discussions to have here. Should university professors include content warnings on their syllabi? In their lectures? Should movies have these warnings before they start? Games? If we think in various situations these content warnings should exist then what do we do when people don't provide them? These are all interesting questions. Much more so than trying to reason in the abstract about whether we ever ought to alter our behavior to accommodate others.
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I watched the video, and I agree with your conclusion. Yes, person B is obviously correct. Not every media and aspect of life is accessible to everyone
Some examples of problems where life is unfair and it would be absurd to try to make things fair.
Yes, I realize these are absurd examples, but absurdities often put premises and assumptions into question.
Innuendo Studios doesn't touch on his premises and assumptions - that the scale of a problem that affects someone is worth addressing. Or how much time/effort should be spent solving these problems. He barely touches on the idea of what level of inconvenience should be acceptable to accommodate certain groups of people.
Also, notice the framing of the premise "some people do and should take extra precautions just to exist in the world alongside the rest of us" which puts the idea that person B thinks those people should not exist if they don't take those extra precautions.
Speaking of trigger warnings, I can think of a few (admittedly not well thought out) reasons why I may not want trigger warnings that are different from the strawman he used at the start of his video.
Also ironic this guy talks about power in his video when trying to enforce societal changes such as implementing trigger warnings (and some people even go so far as to try to make it mandatory) is in itself a display of using power on people by enforcing changes that they don't want imposed on them. Rules for thee, not for me I suppose.
Or build tools to allow everyone to translate anything into their native language. Technological solutions to social problems are great!
Yup, I routinely use translation tools that give me access to certain hobbies of mine (Untranslated Japanese and Korean games and web novels). I've even communicated with people on Japanese Discord servers. Praise to technology!
I think the issue is that there are people with the mindset that such solutions have to be built or provided, rather than hoping that market solutions will resolve these problems. And rarely is it the case that they will make the effort to build those solutions themselves, they'd rather mandate other people use their time and resources to fix problems they see in the world.
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Spitballing here (and also I don't care) but given that we're talking about digital content, maybe someone could write a bot that uses AI to review the item and add some reasonable (low-hundreds) list of triggers as metadata, and then the consumer can set their pertinent triggers and automatically receive a warning that they want, whereas everyone else is unaffected.
Again I don't have a horse in this race but this seems workable pretty soon.
In fact, though, I side with those who argue that it's on the consumer to decide what they wish to consume. If there's a market for trigger warnings, well, the market will provide solutions.
I also side with those who suggest that avoiding things which make one uncomfortable (or 'open up' 'past trauma') is a major impediment to the healing process. Trauma-as-identity is a failure mode for human existence and getting over it as quickly as is healthy is imperative. And yes, fwiw I say this as someone with some hard things in my past.
This is probably the ideal solution for trigger warnings for people who may want trigger warnings. (And for those, if they exist, that may benefit from trigger warnings).
I wonder if this solution is adequate for the activist type that might argue on the point of trigger warnings though. I'm sure most reasonable people would be perfectly happy with such a solution, but something tells me there is a small vocal group of activist types that would not be satisfied with such a solution and would rather force putting trigger warnings in front of media. Couple of reasons they might come up with:
I don't think I'm making up a caricature or a strawman here. If you watch the video, near the end of this video Innuendo Studios make the following statements:
"If you are a person with triggers it means other people can provoke a panic response in you against your will. The severity of the response is frankly immaterial. The point is, they have power over you. And if you're going to operate in this world as equals, you need their word that this power will not be invoked."
He also summarized the viewpoint of the Didoer as follows: "Yes I do have power over you... and you should just let me have it."
Would people who view the world in such power dynamics be satisfied with the proposed solution? Actually, your solution might be a really good test to see if the other person genuinely wants to help people who have traumas/PTSD or if they're just ideologically motivated.
(Disclaimer that I know you're not making this argument.)
This seems to map 1:1 with mental illness. Through that lens, anyone could have a powerful and irrational response to anything and of course we all understand — I hope — that global civilization can't entirely rework itself to cater to every individual's specific needs. If the common-sense part of this argument isn't enough, it could be pointed out that those needs are contradictory. The reality is that people are different, and different is inherently unequal, and thus different people cannot operate in the world as equals. This is plain as day to anyone who isn't way up on some kind of blinding ideology.
This is interesting because it makes protecting the experience of the, uh, entriggered person the responsibility of anyone seeking to express themselves at all. A message of "It's your job to improve your life" makes a lot more sense than "It's everyone else's job to improve your life." People with these issues are free and, in my book, even encouraged to agitate for themselves. And the rest of us are free to do the same. The chips fall where they may.
If someone has actual power over you, and that power is intolerable to you, the solution is historically violence. As you suggested earlier, I think, my concern is that something like this ends up being enforced by violence via the state. And, as you say, some people aren't going to be happy with any kind of reasonable compromise.
As always I worry about the power of women's tears in politics.
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I'm pretty sure you can trigger a panic response in just about anyone by pointing a gun at them or telling them their family member was run over by a car.
True, but it sounds like what Innuendo is driving at is the asymmetry of the power differential. You can induce a panic attack in me by pointing a gun at me (or any other of a long list of things which the average person can reasonably be expected to find upsetting), and I can do the same to you - it's perfectly symmetrical. But if I've gone through a traumatic experience that you know about, you can induce a panic attack in me by doing something far less overtly threatening than pointing a gun at me: say, telling a rape joke in my presence. Whereas if I tell a rape joke in your presence, it will have no effect on you. Between us, "jokes involving rape" are assymetric weapons.
Moreover, if you threaten me with a gun you may face legal repercussions (or at the minimum a drop in social standing, if I garner a reputation as a dangerous person), but if you tell a rape joke in my presence, it may have no impact on your social standing at all, while having a devastating impact on my mental health. (Now that I think about it, this may be what woke people were driving at with the whole "microaggressions" discourse.)
In practice I don't think it's anything like as black-and-white as this. Not everyone who's been raped and thinks that trigger warnings are a reasonable accommodation is going to reliably have a full-blown panic attack every time they hear someone tell a joke involving rape, and plenty of people who are opposed to trigger warnings on principle will nevertheless find themselves getting extremely upset about something much less overtly threatening than having a gun pointed at them. Once you know someone well enough, you can push their buttons in all sorts of subtle ways that wouldn't necessarily strike an outside observer as obviously cruel or abusive.
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Yup, which really puts into question the values and philosophies that guide these breadtubers. Fascinating how people view the world through such a lens!
To steelman Innuendo Studio's) point, I think there is an agreed-upon base assumption about basic human decency and respect when operating in the world and that it's safe to assume that normal people will not invoke such a power. So nobody would for no reason just pull a gun at someone or tell them their family member was run over by a a car. Or that the other side has the option to do the same to you. But in the case of trigger warnings, some people can and will abuse such powers if there are enough people on their side that make it socially acceptable. You can invoke their trigger, but they can't invoke such a response in you.
However, I have not met a single person who would knowingly expose a person their their stated traumas/triggers, even amongst the anti-trigger warning crowd. At best some edgy internet trolls, but they do whatever they can to rile other people up. Innuendo Studio makes a pretty uncharitable depiction of the opposing side.
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I’m struggling to see how Didoing represents a fallacious argument. There’s always going to be some level of unfairness and unjustness in any free society simply because the actions necessary to achieve perfect justice would be so draconian as to make life worse for everyone including those it claims to help. If I want to create a society in which wealth and connections do not confer an advantage, then I must then micromanage every hiring, promotion, firing, and business contract made to make sure that money and power don’t figure into those deals. And that doesn’t even begin to address the limitations that any authority would have to fix these problems. We have millions of problems and need to prioritize them in order to create the best possible outcomes for the largest number of people. Screwing 99 to bring justice to 5 whether by action or allocating resources, time and attention isn’t a good way to make a better world.
This is actually something that frustrates me with the left. We actually do have a lot of problems that we need to address. Our school system, particularly in urban areas is a giant mess. Our healthcare system really only works for people with good insurance. Our infrastructure is broken to the point of being unusable. The list of problems is very long. Yet, for all of those issues, we’ve made the priority basically symbolic things — representation on TV or in board rooms, pronoun usage, and hanging flags.
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Person B is using the, "The world isn't fair/perfect, grow up", defense that was common sense a generation or two ago. I remain convinced that the Internet has forced us to regress so far in terms of social development that what was once common sense is now forgotten wisdom (but, then again, 'common sense isn't so common' is also an ancient aphorism).
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I think the answer is that "tolerable" is just a poor framing for such conversations.
There are specific policies/actions with specific benefits/costs and they should largely be evaluated separately.
Asking whether trigger warnings are good/bad is silly. Asking whether the MPA should include a "sexist humor" label on relevant films (e.g. like the "graphic violence" label) is a specific change that can be discussed. Asking whether college professors should be fired for not warning a class that a book contains a rape scene is a specific change that can be discussed. etc
People love arguing broad ideas, but insight usually comes from getting down to brass tacks.
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I think you're overthinking it. The entire purpose of that guy's propaganda is to provide attack vectors for leftists confronted with counter-arguments to their demands; post the video and go "look everyone, this guy did didoism! Ban him!" Just do a site:reddit.com search for the video titles to see how they're meant to be used.
This is how the whole "breadtube" ecosystem works. It's a tool for hurting people as effectively as possible: look at what they did to Internet Historian and Wendigoon just today.
Talking about it like it has actual "ideas" is critiquing the finish on a knife that's being used to stab you.
I always roll my eyes when people's idea of debate is to use a Bingo card and immediately discard one's argument if they vaguely fuzzy pattern-match to an item on the card. It's why I'm not a big fan of simply citing fallacies, like "that's an ad hominem", at least not without elaboration on how exactly what their interlocutor said is fallacious in that manner.
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...What did they do to internet historian and wendigoon? I like both of those people rather a lot.
Hbomberguy's plagiarism allegation against Internet Historian(25 mins).
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He's been accused of plagiarizing his man in a cave video from some mental floss article. No clue how legit the accusations are, given the source is bread tube I'm taking them with an enormous grain of salt and hope IH makes the rubble bounce.
Don't let pointless internet tribalism cloud your thinking - IH absolutely plagiarised the article without citation, then had to rewrite afterwards. I don't think the other attacks on him needed to be included in the video, but the man in cave accusation actually had legs. Furthermore, the biggest target of the video was actually someone ostensibly on Hbomberguy's team (Somerton).
I doubt that this is Hbomberguy just acting without bias, since he more-or-less gives Hasan Piker (and other react streamers) a pass despite react streamers committing arguably worse plagiarism, and Hasan is another BreadTuber friend. Around the same time his video came out, a couple other videos attacking James Somerton also came out. It's really hard to not see these videos as coordinated.
What videos apart from his were attacking Somerton?
Secondly, why does there need to be coordination. The accusations against Somerton were first discussed openly on Twitter long before this video.
Philosophy Tube's, for one.
I think there's a chance of coordination because an independent attack would be quickly refuted with accusations of homophobia and bigotry, but if everyone in the community agrees, then the attack becomes okay.
Which PT video are you referring to?
Secondly, as far as I know, the issue with the initial Somerton accusations was that he had much more clout than the person accusing him. His fans can't send HBomberguy off the internet with death threats or whatever, the dude is much bigger and isn't going to succumb to such attacks. That probably has more to do with why this attack stuck and previous ones didn't.
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Null of Kiwi Farms seems to agree that blatant plagiarism was perpetrated.
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While I don't discount that it wasn't random happenstance that Hbomberguy looked into the particular creators that he did, you're sort of ignoring that the fact that the main target of the video (indeed the person to whom the last 2 hours is entirely devoted to) is James Somerton - a leftist, queer content creator broadly on the same "side" as him.
I don't think you need an excuse to not spend 4 hours of your life watching a drama video (even if it is a thoroughly researched, well-presented drama video.) However, I don't think Hbomberguy's political commitments left him unable to mount his attack. On the contrary, because he's doing a bit of an own goal with the main target of the video, I'm inclined to give greater weight to his claims that James Somerton engaged in plagiarism and therefore wronged the community he belonged to.
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You can go and look at the LTT subreddit and their forums, people were openly expressing the notion that the botched benchmarks didn't really matter and the only thing that did was the prototype GPU or whatever that the other company had provided and LTT had given away.
Moreover, HBomberGuy literally called out a gay YouTuber on his own side, to the point that the guy literally deleted his social media and patreon page.
Why is it impossible to believe that other people can care about this for the stated reasons?
Just to be clear, "given away" is a huge understatement. First, Linus Media Group told Billet Labs that they were going to give the prototype cooler back to them. Then they slept on it for a long period of time without giving it back. And then they sold the prototype at auction.
I didn't remember all the details, but yeah, that sounds about right. It really is bizarre that people think this isn't enough to motivate the response to LTT.
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Have to agree with /u/Testing123 here. Hbomberguy's evidence that Man In Cave was plagiarized from a single article was fairly convincing. For what it's worth, I also think Internet Historian and James D. Rolfe came out looking the best of all the plagiarists in that video. For Internet Historian, it seemed to only be a single case of blatant plagiarism, while for Rolfe it seems like he is mostly guilty of selling out (all of the actual plagiarism done without his knowledge by his scriptwriter.) Meanwhile, it looked like iilluminaughtii's entire career was built off of sloppily plagiarizing documentaries, and James Somerton just compiled and read essays from other thinkers in the space, including entire books.
I wouldn't be too sure on IH only doing it once. Some people on his subreddit have started digging into Cost of Concordia and think he might have done the same there. It's not obviously bullshit on the face of it.
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Cool, but why is everybody and their dog calling the guy a Nazi?
From what I understand, IH has multiple videos covering 4Chan drama/stories, but he was never highly critical of 4Chan, which would have been evidence against him being a Nazi. He also unironically likes Tucker Carlson and has stated on his subreddit that his politics aren't exactly welcome online, though that obviously covers anyone to the right of Stalin in some circles. Lastly, there are comments which don't appear to be ironic anti-Semitism on his channel from others, which HBomberguy accused him of having because he "cultivated that audience".
It's ultimately a lazy smear, but the actual critique of him plagiarizing stands apart from that, nor was the jab at his audience more than a throw-away line in HBomberguy's video.
That's nice, the accusation of plagiarism is fair game. I don't really care since, from what I understand, he worked it out with the author of the plagiarized article, but knock yourself out. But trying to smear someone through n-th degree guilt by association is garbage, and in itself a valid thing to criticize.
I didn't say you couldn't criticize it, I read your message as asking why anyone was calling him a Nazi. I was just explaining that, that's all.
Sorry for being unclear. My point was that "look at what they did to Internet Historian and Wendigoon just today" referred to slandering them as Nazis, not accusations of plagiarism.
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Because it's easier to kick a guy when he's down? Enough of Internet Historian's fans are sufficiently distasteful of his plagiarism, and his clumsy attempts to cover it up that they're not willing to go to bat to defend his edgy humor and imputed political stances. That leaves a clear path for those who always hated him to mount their attacks.
It's just a bit odd to fixate on the plagiarism, when talking about "what they did to Internet Historian", and you know he's being slandered as a Nazi.
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Can you elaborate your thoughts on the Internet Historian? I though the Hbomber video convincingly demonstrated that he committed plagiarism, albeit not as badly as the other subjects in the video.
https://twitter.com/legotrillermoth/status/1731734318287052993
It's not about "plagiarism," it's about making lists of people they want to hurt and then finding ways to hurt them.
There's always going to be people online who care less about principles than scoring a point against the other team. Even so, I think it is a strange way to defend someone, by saying, "You're only pointing out this bad thing they did because it gave you a chance to own a member of the out group." Essentially, it's the same playbook from the other side: the bad things people on your team do don't matter, because they weaken your team's position.
The only time your principles matter is when you're applying them against members of your in group, otherwise it goes without saying that you'll happily see your enemies torn down for their violations.
I think it's okay to say, "I'm not happy with Internet Historian for plagiarizing his Man In Cave video, but this one smoking gun of plagiarism is not enough for me to discount his larger body of original, properly cited work, which I still enjoy and will continue to support."
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It’s fair game. You shouldn't close ranks over bad actors out of partisanship. What you gain in fanaticism, you lose in credibility. If the NYT published an article with credible evidence that Trump was The Serial Killer of Times Square, should you ignore it because it’s partly politically motivated? And as vorpa says, hbomber's main target is a gay queer theory popularizer(although hbomber still dings him for misogyny and insufficient wokeness, like everyone else).
If the past twenty times Joe Biden was a serial killer the Times never mentioned it, yes, I should ignore it, because in the hypothetical world where the Times did this, serial killing just wouldn't be such a serious thing. Of course, this won't happen in the real world precisely because serial killing isn't that way.
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This is one person expressing this viewpoint, and no one was coming after IH until it was clear that he had plagiarized the Mental Floss article.
It is absolutely not one person, it's the entire breadtube ecosystem this morning. Pretending it's just one person (and they deserved it anyway!) is a bad attempt at damage control.
How is it the entire breadtube ecosystem? Even in the responses to this person, there are people disagreeing with them.
If you're gonna present this as "breadtube/the left is out to get IH", you need stronger evidence than this.
I was going to link you to the new thread, but noticed you've already seen it and have now switched your position to "and he deserves it."
This was entirely predictable, because it's about making lists of people they want to hurt and then finding ways to hurt them... And relying on their fellow travelers to make excuses for it.
The only thing predictable is how you leapt to idea that I was doing the "it's not happening, but if it is, he deserves it" meme. This is behavior that must be downloadable from somewhere, it's so rote and repetitive. No one can criticize a person you like in good faith, can they? No, they must be part of a left-wing conspiracy.
More to the point, that thread isn't proof of your claim. You didn't argue that they thought he was a Nazi, you argued that they were, in concert, coming after him before the plagiarism accusation.
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In war, you have to have “acceptable losses” because casualties are inevitable. Some level of risk must be acknowledge as irreducible. Practicality must reign.
Many political debates are based on the perfectionist premise that there are no “acceptable losses” for a given issue.
Diminishing returns, impossibilities, impracticalities, opportunity costs, compromise, tradeoffs; these are to be ignored or denied and you’re a Bad Person for bringing them up.
Either side of any debate can do this on any given issue, of course, but I think it’s currently more common on the left.
I encountered so many goodthinking midwits during Covid who really had never encountered the idea that nothing is a costless action. I had a hundred variations on this exchange between 2020-21.
"Is it worth opening the pubs/opening the schools/going into the office if it means people die?"
People died because of all of these things before Covid. If "someone dies as a result" is a reason not to allow something, we should immediately ban all motor vehicles.
"Well no, because even though a small number of people die in motor accidents every year, we still need motor vehicles for a functioning economy."
Congratulations, you now understand the concept of a "cost-benefit analysis". Please apply this concept to lockdowns, social distancing and so on.
And they did, and they reached the conclusion that pubs, schools and offices don't need to be open because you can do all that via Zoom.
You can call that wrong, or motivated reasoning to justify their compliance, but in my recollection it wasn't as simple as pointing out that costs exist either way.
I completely reject the claim that remote schooling for young children is anything resembling an effective substitute for in-person schooling, so "you can do all that via Zoom" falls at the first hurdle. Likewise "you can do all that via Zoom" is cold comfort to the thousands of Irish people who lost their jobs because their job couldn't be done via Zoom, but wasn't considered an essential service.
We must have been moving in radically different social circles. The scale of the midwittery on /r/ireland was something to behold. I lost count of how many times I had to patiently explain to people the concept of "excess death toll": a lot of people seemed genuinely surprised (even incredulous) when I told them that 85 people died in Ireland every single day in 2019. The median poster there was out of college (so unaffected by schooling being done remotely), capable of working remotely (so unaffected by economic shutdowns), introverted (so didn't really mind not being unable to go out to pubs or nightclubs, and was perfectly content sitting at home watching Netflix) and young (so unaffected by disruptions to the health service wrought by Covid). To the extent that these people were aware of the costs associated with lockdowns, it was limited to a vague recognition that spending time by yourself for months at a time can be rather trying (for which state of affairs, being socially awkward introverts, they had little sympathy). Most people there genuinely did not seem to appreciate the scale of the costs associated with lockdowns, and routinely glossed the anti-lockdown position as "imagine caring so much about drinking pints with your friends that you're willing to step over a hundred dead bodies to get there".
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Can't find it but there was a SSC or LessWrong piece about how the optimal number of motoring deaths is not zero unless we decide it's worth banning motoring altogether.
I know this argument from Mitchell and Webb.
What an excellent sketch.
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It's funny seeing this when viewed in the context of "Vision Zero" and similar urbanist movements.
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“The optimum level of BadThing is not zero” is a common econ aphorism.
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The optimal amount of [bad thing] is not zero.
Someone in the comments says it better, but the optimal amount of bad thing is 0. What is optimally non-zero is bad thing detection/prevention.
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