An important difference from the comparison to the Maoist movement and the like (besides degree), is that historically these spirals had at their heart, at least at the beginning, a premeditated ploy for power. The posturing was conscious and malicious.
It's really important to point out that that's not usually the case with the internet version. People aren't setting out to build an instagram moral empire; in fact they may set out with genuine, legitimate concern for the real moral issues. The problem comes from that "ratchet effect", where the only way to stay safe is to keep escalating things. The internet abstracts away people's humanity, dampening any compassion/charity, and the temperature rises on its own. Seeing this lack of (original) malice makes it easier to forgive and to step outside of the cycle.
> a premeditated ploy for power. The posturing was conscious and malicious.
Do you really think that Mao was completely cynical and didn't believe that what he was doing was "the right thing" that would improve the lives of his countrymen? Most people think they are doing "what's right," and some are willing to overlook unethical acts (or actions that let them accrue power to themselves) if it serves the greater good.
I tend to believe both these folks, and Mao for that matter, intend to do what they think is right & what will make the world better–and if you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, so be it.
It's a comforting thought that there are "bad people with bad intentions who do bad things on purpose" and "good people with good intentions who do good things (and occasionally do bad things by accident)" but in reality these two groups are not that distinct.
(It goes without saying that these folks are not "as bad as Mao" I mention it only because it was already brought up as an example.)
I agree that these folks are probably acting with good intentions. And that can actually make the situation worse. This CS Lewis quote comes to mind: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
But CS Lewis was wrong as history of genocides and purges show. None of them started for the good of victims and they were definitely in the category of worst oppression.
I think Lewis had in more in mind something like what happens to Winston in George Orwell's 1984, where it wasn't enough for the Party for him to obey them but not agree with them; it wasn't enough for the Party to discover that he didn't agree with them and kill him; they were only satisfied once they'd tortured him into agreeing with them as well.
I'd much rather be under killed for disagreeing than tortured until my captors are satisfied that I really agree with them.
Afaik, all genocides involved a lot of torture - both of targets and of those who refused to cooperate or talked against it. Sometimes it was to gain information, force agreement, force compliance etc. It also involved quite a lot of petty rule making to keep those who were being oppressed in line.
And quite a lot of it was basically for fun or hate.
--------------
Besides original quote is about motivation. People who organized genocides were fully ok with their own conscience. They were in fact proud over their own good work.
And as fun it sounds and as easy it is to use against certain disliked people, it is not true in the sense of how world really works when things go bad.
Things have calmed a bit in the hacker community, but we have had our fair share of individuals over the past few years trying to carve out their little slice of the purity spiral.
Perhaps they do believe what they are doing is "right"; right for others or just them. I think the underlying motivations are more subconscious TBH. Certainly toxic individuals.
Seems live and let live has played its course. We are getting back around to "live the way I tell you".
Mao certainly had a thirst for power no matter whether he thought he was doing good or not. But at some point, you have to wonder if refusing to bathe because you clean yourself on the bodies of teenage virgins, as Mao did, is really done in the belief of the greater good or not.
>But at some point, you have to wonder if refusing to bathe because you clean yourself on the bodies of teenage virgins, as Mao did, is really done in the belief of the greater good or not.
Idk if Li's book is to be trusted since some of it sounds comical but that's not exactly what it says.
I believe it said he received only nightly rubdowns with hot toils and when he said "i wash myself inside the bodies of my women" the context was....well his genitals.
For Mao it was a ploy for power from the Lenin playbook.
As the PLAs and CCP old guards power grew he had to cut that down a bit via the red guards. It morphed a bit and there was infighting but it was a tool to wrest control from other factions.
> Most people think they are doing "what's right," and some are willing to overlook unethical acts (or actions that let them accrue power to themselves) if it serves the greater good.
Yup, just look at the Ten Commandments. There's exceptions to "thou shalt not kill" [1].
Only about 1/6 in, but Mao's lust for killing and torture is well documented. He also had an advantage rising to power in the party since he had no problem killing other communists, while most of them only killed for the cause, not for themselves.
It's a historical fact that he's responsible for more deaths (50m-70m) than both Hitler and Stalin. And that's his own citizens, in peacetime.
Still, did he think of himself as a good man doing good things? I'd say probably. That's how almost everyone sees themselves. When they lie to others, it's often because they've told the same lie to themselves first.
I haven't read much about Mao, but in the case of Stalin, his actions were calculated to the last ruble.
The Kuleks were stripped of their assets to pay for the industrialization and armaments Stalin felt was needed for Russia to enter the 20th century. It turns out he wasn't a minute too soon.
Who built the Russian factories? Americans! After the Detroit auto plants were finished, the builders were contracted by Stalin.
Stalin is considered to be a monster in the West, but at the same time he was a great leader when his country needed him.
Good people with good intentions are often misled by toxic people with toxic intentions, and end up acting as enablers of their toxicity. Even Mao, wise and good-intentioned, was misled by the Gang of Four.
> The problem comes from that "ratchet effect", where the only way to stay safe is to keep escalating things.
This reminds of accounts I've read of the Khmer Rogue. Nobody, including Pol Pot, started out intending to kill nearly 50% of Cambodia's population.
But the communist zealotry created an environment of extreme paranoia. Capitalists and counter-revolutionaries were suspected of being everywhere and sabotaging everything. Even the shakiest unsubstantiated accusations were enough to put someone on the execution block.
The result is that people became so fearful that they started preemptively lobbing accusations at everybody and anybody. Even if you think your neighbor might possibly accuse you in the future, you're better off putting in a call to the secret police about him before he gets the chance.
Trust is a social phase state. One that's easier to fall out of than we think. We take it for granted that we encounter thousands of people in our lives and vanishingly few try to cause us harm in any way. But that's an accomplishment that took countless of generations of hard and careful work.
Pol Pots vision was pretty dark, though, and the horror rather immediate. His ideology was extreme for communist standards well before he got into power.
> It's really important to point out that that's not usually the case with the internet version.
I don’t believe this at all. Taking over online communities with puritanism and forcing out any non-compliant participants is a very easy pattern to see, and is very obviously a play for power (especially when the new moral authority comes from outside the community to begin with). Throw a patreon/Kickstarter... on top, and you have a play for power and wealth. I have no doubt there are naive participants in all of this, but there are a long list of incredibly successful sociopaths who have built entire careers on top of this, and a much longer list of moderately successful sociopaths who have done the same.
I'm a bit more optimistic than the author. Whatever the name ends up being, this is phenomenon is only getting better known and pretty soon lots of communities will be immunized against it when a majority of the people in them have already seen it happen before and start calling it out in the early stages. Purity spirals will never completely stop, but their impact will likely be contained, starting in, oh, a couple decades or so.
We can hope. The internet is an unprecedented acceleration mechanism for this pattern; that's why it's becoming so common. It's possible that with that commonality will come awareness; it's possible it won't. We'll see.
Awareness is already on the way. It's been there from the beginning in primitive form in the right wing's disdain for "political correctness", but I've seen pretty hard-line progressives acknowledge that cancel culture (IMO a different face of the same problem) is toxic. This is biting everyone, and even though humans are dumb sometimes, it's not a stretch to believe that we'll notice it. The internet accelerates identification and naming of problems as well.
The problem with the "anti-political-correctness" camp is that it traditionally goes much farther. It's all relative, I suppose, but "turns out cancel culture might be bad" is a long way off from "I resent the very idea of having to be considerate towards others". And then those two and everything in-between get lumped all together, so that the former tends to be judged based on the latter's history.
Political correctness begins with notion that you can set a policy that adjudicates what is "right" i.e. "moral". What follows is a struggle for who has the authority to set moral policy. That's where you get these purity spirals from.
Being against political correctness is being against the idea that another fallible individual has the authority to say what it is moral for you to speak or write. This stance rails against the notion that anyone should have any power over your speech save arguing against it with speech or writing.
Political correctness, better termed "moral policing" always ends with the attempt to silence those judged to be "wrong". This is incompatible with the principles of liberty.
Me personally? I'm against political correctness because of what it really is, not because I wish to be rude with impunity.
The difference is that soft-left progressive purity spirals tend to end with online bullying, while authoritarian purity spirals tend to end with people getting killed.
Admittedly there is some overlap where people lose their jobs.
Of course there has to a collective standard for morality. The problem with purity spirals and witch hunts is that they stop looking at specific criminal acts - slavery, theft, murder, and rape aren't morally justifiable, however you slice it - and become more about group conformity and public professions of ideology.
Dissent, debate, and non-conformity become immoral acts in themselves - and that is not a valid moral position.
> The difference is that soft-left progressive purity spirals tend to end with online bullying, while authoritarian purity spirals tend to end with people getting killed.
That's the classic left—right apology.
I find both wrong. Just as I don't think you get to burn down cars, just because other people are bashing other peoples' skulls in.
For some reason, a large part of the extreme left pays lip-service to non-violence, but is always quick to deflect criticism about left violence by pointing to (more extreme) right violence.
I don't find that convincing and believe both sides need to be locked up. Sure, the murderers longer than the car burners.
> For some reason, a large part of the extreme left pays lip-service to non-violence, but is always quick to deflect criticism about left violence by pointing to (more extreme) right violence.
THIS! I'm not on the right but I've always felt that one of the right's biggest tactical errors was to allow their movement to be be seen as the violent side. Nothing in history that I've seen would suggest that the right, even the extreme right, is inherently prone to violence and yet this point is made frequently, casually by even fair minded people.
I think the error in your argument here is to always reduce the application of political correctness down to flawed individuals.
If there is consensus at a societal level that certain hateful speech should be prevented for the general good of society, (and there is) then enforcing that makes sense. We've evolved past bear baiting and public flogging (in most parts of the world), we can evolve past racism, sexism and other limiting behaviours.
There is not a consensus on prevention of speech, hateful or otherwise. There is the attempt to claim a consensus, but only so as to move on to creation of enforcing bodies.
I think we should enforce laws against behavior, not speech or thought. Political Correctness attempts to police speech and thought. This is dangerous, especially when armored with the force of government. You get tribunals in Canada charging people with hate crimes for writing books.
Government is people with power. It always, always comes down to flawed individuals. It is flawed individuals applying it to flawed individuals.
Should there be outcries against racism and sexism? Yes. Should there be laws that say if you act based on bias (denying jobs, housing... etc.) that you face consequences of punishment under the law? Yes.
Should there be someone allowed to decide that your facial expression requires that you be subjected to 2 hours (or 2 weeks) of "education"? No.
We can come to an agreement on what we as a society consider to be "nice" and "polite". That's part of how societies work. We must never enforce being "nice" (to Stewart Lee's take) because it is an ever-changing, subjective thing. How will we come to value the next societal advancement if we aren't allowed to hold and discuss opinions that differ?
This freedom is too important to a civilization dedicated to freedom to allow it to be sacrificed on the altar of propriety, anyone's propriety.
> If there is consensus at a societal level that certain hateful speech should be prevented for the general good of society
I would be interested to know (1) How you have determined such a consensus exists and (2) How you have determined that preventing hate speech is in fact generally good for society.
I don't think summarizing "anti-political correctness" as "I don't have to be considerate towards others" is even remotely connected to reality. I think you need to get out of your filter bubble.
I grew up "outside of my filter bubble". I was raised on Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, the very mouthpieces of political-incorrectness. And I bought into it for a long time, until I gained some perspective on the world and came to understand that brashness is not a virtue. We live in a society.
Something that offends someone else may not comprise a universal moral truth, but making an effort to consider how your words affect others, including others whose backgrounds you may not understand at all, does. And certainly, going out of your way to rail against others' sensitivities (political incorrectness) helps nobody.
It's possible that your personal definition of "anti-political-correctness" is different from mine, but I venture to say that the public at large, presented with the term, interprets it the way I do.
>going out of your way to rail against others' sensitivities (political incorrectness) helps nobody.
It helps the people who are being bullied or silenced, with those sensitivities used as a justification.
Typically those sensitivities aren't involuntary. They're inculcated and exaggerated, both individually and on a mass basis, specifically as a lever to gain power over other people. If that lever for power stopped working, the vast majority of those sensitivities would stop existing.
Anti-PC is helpful because it sets out the right incentives. Instead of incentivizing people to become helpless, mentally-ill wrecks who "can't even" in the face of the slightest emotional or intellectual challenge, it incentivizes people to be the most centered and independent version of themselves they can.
> including others whose backgrounds you may not understand at all, does.
There is a certain soft bigotry in the assumption that differences in background account for as much as people think they do. The "perspective that I gained in the world" is that ppl are remarkably similar with some mostly surface differences.
The point is, there has to be room to ask "Is your taking offence to this legitimate under any reasonable standard?"
That's exactly how e.g. Trump uses the term at his rallies. On the right nowadays, "politically incorrect" simply means what everyone else would call "being an asshole". The term has been corrupted beyond recovery, and we should just stop using it.
I would simply re-iterate my point. I think you (also, as a different person than I originally replied to) need to get out of your filter bubble. You do not understand why people find political correctness offensive. Note how I do not phrase that as a question. It is definitely not that they just don't want to have to be nice to people.
When you understand, you may well still not agree with it. (The idea that "understanding is agreement" is a very naive one, but popular nonetheless.) But you clearly do not understand it.
You are making assumptions about me that are simply invalid. In fact, I have deep concerns about the sort of culture originally denominated by "political correctness", especially its effect on freedom of thought within the academy. I am merely pointing out that the term has been coopted by people who use it maliciously and in bad faith, to the point that I don't think it makes sense to use it anymore.
> The problem with the "anti-political-correctness" camp is that it traditionally goes much farther
People always overcorrect. Always. One generation's parenting is too hands off? The next generation will helicopter parent. Political correctness getting too puritanical and histrionic? People react by literally embracing Naziism. Democracy shows signs of stagnation and corruption? We get neoreaction.
The Internet seems to intensify this too because all the social platforms are programmed to prioritize content so as to drive engagement. Maximum divisiveness drives engagement, not balanced opinions.
> The problem with the "anti-political-correctness" camp is that it traditionally goes much farther.
I think it only stereotypically goes farther. Consider the viewpoint of someone who sees no difference between an outspoken feminist and something at the head of one of these spirals, and consider whether you might be in the same position regarding the right wing. Certainly, the environment I grew up in was simultaneously disdainful of political correctness while demanding courtesy toward everyone.
I think I read you wrong initially. You're not saying religions do this, rather there are groups who pretend to be religions that do this.
And you're correct about that. Religions tend to have a very specific set of rules and that's it. So there's no spiral, rather there is a specific level to get to and no further.
But these other groups do tend to spiral. However they also tend to burn themselves out quite quickly.
It's one of the ways of distinguishing a religion from a cult.
Not as much as you would think. In particular, religious groups that enter really tight spirals tend to blow themselves out. I'd say religions are successful in spite of their purity spirals rather than because of them.
I've personally had several anxiety breakdowns trying to grapple with the hatred I see on Twitter, and I've been fortunate enough to never really have any aimed at me directly.
The key is mindfulness. Healthy detachment. Decouple your internal moral system/self-judgement mechanisms from those of the people around you. The two don't need to line up perfectly; they shouldn't be the same thing. Theirs may be rooted in real and valid experiences, even if it comes out as something destructive. Yours may too. You don't have to fight anything or anyone to gain your own peace and clarity. Stepping back is the only way out of the spiral.
My solution was to delete my Twitter account. I've never regretted it, and feel downright smug when I hear about the latest purity shitstorm in the communities I used to follow.
I use Muted Words and block accounts liberally, to scorch-earth anything that might possibly be adjacent to anything political. This filters probably 90% of what I would otherwise encounter. I don't delete my account because it's a uniquely vibrant resource for game dev and digital art, two of my hobbies.
The actual people I follow are generally really nice; it's just the people they occasionally retweet and then the replies that other people make to those retweets that get into the mud.
Have you found new communities, though? Surely there is some lost value -- maybe not specifically on Twitter, but generally -- when one drops an old group.
The only communities I miss were on old-school forums, not Facebook or Twitter. There could be plenty of drama but not at the scale and virulence of Twitter. I think the reason is that people were more interested in communicating than in signaling.
Huh, that's an interesting approach. My solution was accepting that most people are horribly stunted when it comes to moral reasoning and empathy, lacking the ability and/or will to behave with what I consider to be basic human decency. All of the people that I personally know and consider to be good people find the kind of behavior you're describing just as alien as I find it. None of us understand the universal claim that the Internet as a medium[1] pulls evil behavior out of good people; as far as I can tell, a basic capacity for empathy is a pretty effective safeguard.
I acknowledge that it's a little weird to have one's model of human decency exclude such a large chunk of people from being defined as "good" (whatever that means). But it's grounded in the failure to meet very, very low bars for behavior, ones that most people would claim they agree with. Models are only as good as their usefulness, and it's much more useful to distinguish between those who are capable of empathy and the rest than it is to find a distribution centered around the population median.
[1] Or other forms of groupthink or outgroup homogeneity
It's in my nature to treat everyone as acting in good faith, by default. So when someone would cast a judgement, even a broad one about a demographic, that I couldn't clearly acquit myself of, I would internalize that judgement and direct it towards myself.
This has proven to be totally unsustainable, at least on the internet. Still, I don't think most people make bad judgements out of fundamental malice, but out of a) lack of critical thought, and b) the phenomenon described in the original post where judgement towards others becomes a defense mechanism.
So what I try to do now is neither internalize nor outright dismiss others' vitriol, but to accept that it's probably a) rooted in something real and valid, and b) unrefined by critical thinking and also warped by social pressures to a point where it can't be taken at face value.
I wouldn't even say I'm bitter. I just think of the average person and average people in groups as forces is nature. You don't get deeply upset when there's a rainstorm, why get upset when you see horrible people acting horribly? Accepting the reality lets you try and avoid/shelter yourself from its excesses. In this case, that means trying to fill your life and your time with decent people, uncommon as they are; expecting as a baseline basically-evil behavior from large groups of people (govt, social movements) unless the institutions are well-designed; avoiding things like politics where the final judgment is people's unaccountable opinions; and understanding how this manifests in individual behavior when you do have to deal with the average person (eg I have no real interest in fashion, but I dress well because I've noticed how incredibly differently people treat you, a fact that's backed up by what studies have been done).
Regarding your "loathsome vs less loathsome" statement: The key point here is that I know people that are very, very decent, and I've had some success in limiting my close friend group to only people like that.
Eh, that just seems like a matter of where you set your standards. The environment shifted to slightly reduce the barrier to be horrible, revealing which people were below the new waterline. IMO, if all it took to be horrible to others is a little anonymity and/or groupthink, you weren't that decent a person to begin with.
I hate to seem insensitive but why would anyone feel anxiety over a bunch of fake bots retweeting each other? You realize that most of Twitter isn't real, right?
I've been conscious of and annoyed by the symptoms of these spirals for years. I was aware that this was the effect of one-upping and a desire to demonstrate personal virtue, but I didn't have a name for this phenomenon or a very complete model of why people were interested in these types of communities.
The purity spiral! A nice name, and a model that seems to describe the situation very nicely.
It's a lot like a religion. Purity tests, dogma, things you can't say, good vs evil, self-flagellation, original sin, kicking people out who don't conform...
Definitely a lot like religion. I really recommend the book "Christianity: the first three thousand years". Post historical crucifixion of Jesus the first few hundred years of Christianity sound like a purity spiral, monarchism, gnosticism, origenism.
The original church in Antioch first applied the word catholic to Christianity (καθολικός / katholikos) but was then later ejected from the western church in 1054 for not being catholic enough.
I think most people agree racism exists and is bad.
The central conceit of this article, and all the other ones about socially deleterious movements, is the assumption that the author is objective enough to identify those movements - which in this case concerns identification of racism going, in their mind, across the line which they see so clearly. I'm always curious about what qualifications or experience they have that makes their vision so clear.
Even if I assume for a moment that they see where that line is so clearly compared to others, I have to ask myself if they're identifying a genuine social movement - or if they might be mistaking the ability of the internet to now allow people to say what they think instantly to others, with some kind of new social ill.
> I think most people agree racism exists and is bad.
Sure, by the definition of racism that you and I would use. But not by the one that's been weaponised in these purity spirals. By their definition, as explained by the academic interviewed in the podcast, it is literally impossible for someone raised in modern society NOT to be racist. Taking offense at being called a racist is more evidence of racism. Trying to explain how you aren't racist is more evidence of racism.
It is like Original sin, but without any path to redemption.
Its really not rocket science. If you say hurtful things when you don't mean to, that's one thing. Denying the other party's feelings are valid and continuing to say hurtful things for really no reason other than to be stubborn makes you a jerk.
> "If you say hurtful things when you don't mean to, that's one thing. Denying the other party's feelings are valid and continuing to say hurtful things for really no reason other than to be stubborn makes you a jerk."
I note that this says nothing about the original speaker's feelings and opinions. If the other party denies the validity of the speaker's feelings and opinions, are they not also jerks?
Telling people you aren't a racist and didn't mean the thing they consider to be racist in a racist way is in no way denying the other party's feelings are valid.
Ok, but which authority gets to objectively identify when accusations of racism have been weaponised? How do we distinguish between "weaponised" accusations of racism, and legitimate ones?
This was brought up right at the end in the BBC podcast. The academic said something like "you don't get to distinguish. That accusations were made means that something was done to warrant some reaction". I feel the academic agreed that it could be weaponised but saw that its not possible to distinguish and that there would always be some justification.
The presenter suggested that the solution would be to not believe in the ideology. "The best way to get rid of witchfinders is to get rid of the belief in witches"
So who gets to identify objectively when a purity spiral exists? Almost all people in a "purity spiral" have the impression they're applying the appropriate amount of "purity".
Are you trying to assert that there is no such thing as a purity spiral because there is no objective definition of one, and no authority that can definitively identify one?
No. I'm trying to decide whether I should trust the people that are in a "purity spiral" who say they're being reasonable, or the people gesticulating at the knitting community and saying there's a purity spiral there because they said so.
Who is more credible? How are we sure which one is?
If it was possible to objectively decide who is more credible then the world would be a much simpler place. You'll have to decide for yourself who to trust
That's honestly a very postmodern view! I think given that the article linked doesn't have any experimental or quantitative basis, I'll choose not to trust it.
There are a number of things you could do. You could look for corroborating accounts. For example (note these are a three part series written by the same person):
Ultimately I guess you have to make your own judgement of what kind of ideas and behaviour you deem 'reasonable'. The difficulty, I suppose, is if you yourself are caught up in one of these purity spiralling communities. It's hard to maintain objectivity in such a situation. Delusional people don't know that they're delusional. People caught up in a cult don't think they're in a cult.
I've seen people only come to understand how insane things are when the mob finally turns on them, but by then it's too late to get out unscathed.
> The difficulty, I suppose, is if you yourself are caught up in one of these purity spiralling communities. It's hard to maintain objectivity in such a situation. Delusional people don't know that they're delusional. People caught up in a cult don't think they're in a cult.
Is it possible that some people accuse those who believe Quillette is objective of being caught up in such a community?
It'd seem so. Now who am I to believe? Should I believe Quillette because three different articles corroborate accounts of purity spirals? Or should I believe the editors of this other page when they say Quillette isn't objective.
Should I infer from comments on the internet some social malady that needs a remedy?
Why trust the authors of rationalwiki over the author of those Quillette articles? As you yourself asked: Who is more credible? How are we sure which one is? Perhaps nothing is knowable, and you should never believe anyone about anything ever.
At this point I think I'm going to bow out of this conversation. Good luck on your quest for objectivity!
The journalists of Jacobin Magazine, endorsed by Noam Chomsky, also think Quillette is pretty batshit. I hope you uhhhhhh.... get out of the cult? Or is it not a cult? Hopefully there's some objective evidence that it isn't, somewhere. Maybe deeming things cults is just the objective thing to do these days?
> Perhaps nothing is knowable, and you should never believe anyone about anything ever.
Or maybe I should be sceptical of claims that some social illness is pervading internet communities when that claim is made with only anecdotal evidence.
Your line of conversation was spiraling towards the philosophical underpinning of knowledge. The parent poster cheekily pushed you off the cliff and ran away.
Appealing to the authority of Jacobin and Chomsky won't get you back. Doubly so when the question that started this whole thing is (I hope you don't find this uncharitable paraphrasing): when do claims of foo rise to the level of "genuine foobar"?
> Your line of conversation was spiraling towards the philosophical underpinning of knowledge.
Actually, this is a fundamental flaw of some counter-arguments to my line of argument. I'm pretty clearly undermining the idea that there exists an authority that can identify the social ill of "purity spirals". I'm not making any epistemological claim. But people like the commenter that "pushed me over a cliff" (lol) seem to quite often think "well, you're saying my claim that the left-wing is a cult has no objective basis, therefore you don't believe in any objective basis for anything! HA!"
The point I'm making by saying Quillette is a "cult" is that my claim it is a cult is as credible as Quillette's claim that purity spirals exist and are cults. Shove
> Appealing to the authority of Jacobin and Chomsky won't get you back.
Appealing to authority by linking Quillette articles is just as fruitless. My entire line of argument is that linking to these articles like they somehow identify an objective social malady is an appeal to authority, with no basis in actual authority.
>I'm pretty clearly undermining the idea that there exists an authority that can identify the social ill of "purity spirals".
You can't undermine a point nobody is really making. Maybe someone is making it somewhere, but tracking back up this comment chain I can't find it. 8 levels up probably_wrong explicitly says "No one" is such an authority. And further asserts that the type of claims suggest that the question is of a type where such an authority can not exist.
If I had to guess, what you actually want to do is tell people off for making and sharing personal assessments of social situations to the best of their own abilities and doing it at a lower evidentiary standard than you're comfortable with. If so, have the courage of your convictions to admit you think that either (A) nobody should do that at all, or (B) you're so much more better at it than them that they shouldn't do it. Or maybe (C) tell them to stop because you disagree but don't want to wade into such imprecise debate.
From the outside, you're not articulating your point well enough to avoid looking like epistemological flailing.
> If so, have the courage of your convictions to admit you think
Well that's not "so", so I'm not going to admit something that isn't so.
> From the outside,
How are you simultaneously discussing this with me while being outside the discussion?
> You can't undermine a point nobody is really making.
Excellent! If people are making the point, I'm undermining it, and if they don't think they're accessing objective truth in this discussion, my observations in my comments still stand. shove
It's impossible for someone raised in modern society to not be influenced by its thousands of cultural associations and tropes. That's not much of a leap; being exposed to something (anything) and it having absolutely zero effect on you is not how humans work. It's not a bad thing, since most tropes are positive or neutral. But if some of those tropes are harmful, you can refute them and act counter to them, but that doesn't mean they won't still have some influence on your thought processes.
I'm not religious, but from my understanding, it is kind of like original sin. Humans are flawed; you can't fix that but you can minimize it and you can be forgiven for it. Same goes for the specific flaw that the brain is really prone to stereotypes, as a sort of cognitive shortcut.
Edit: By the way, contrary to a claim in a link in one of my sibling replies, this is not a 'sin' specific to white people. People who are themselves members of minority races are influenced by the same tropes as everyone else.
Just the opposite: it's perfectly normal for people to classify things, people, ideas, to have all kinds of such thoughts - it's normative and healthy.
It is not sinful or flawed in any way.
That this happens among 'all kinds of people' is not hugely relevant.
That people would try to classify normal behavior as examples of racism is extremist.
In some situations, said subconscious thoughts might alter decision making in small ways is something we should be aware of, but even then it's not 'sinful' and the mere suggestion is at the root of the problem.
We're not talking about actual racists here, we're talking about ladies knitting groups and the minor triflings that develop into purity wars.
> Just the opposite: it's perfectly normal for people to classify things, people, ideas, to have all kinds of such thoughts - it's normative and healthy.
Indeed, which is why I said:
> It's not a bad thing, since most tropes are positive or neutral.
However, in the specific case of tropes that are racist or have racist components, being influenced by them certainly is bad to a varying extent.
> In some situations, said subconscious thoughts might alter decision making in small ways is something we should be aware of, but even then it's not 'sinful' and the mere suggestion is at the root of the problem.
I think we’re in violent agreement. The important thing is to be aware of unconscious bias, and try to counteract it where possible.
> We're not talking about actual racists here, we're talking about ladies knitting groups and the minor triflings that develop into purity wars.
I’m referring to actual racist tropes. I cannot speak for the knitting group example: the article certainly makes it seem like the accusations of racism are crying wolf, and it is probably accurate to a significant extent, but the article also obviously has an anti-‘political-correctness’ agenda, so it may be presenting the facts in a biased manner.
(And, unsurprisingly, the website it’s published on is anti-progressive more broadly. From a skim of the current front page, in terms of concrete social issues, I see one article saying that “the inconvenient truth is that transwomen are male”, while another recounts media bias” “when I worked for a pro-life organisation”. More abstractly, I count at least 5 articles complaining about progressives and political correctness.)
A lot of the time you just get into an argument over semantics. Does someones behaviour meet the definition of the word "racism"? People just have more or less extreme defintions. Really it shouldn't matter.
I tend to agree that prejudice is part of the human condition. The response to that should be humility, but also an attempt to counteract that prejudice in ourselves. In an ideal world we would be able to call out racism without it being a taboo. It shouldn't neccessarily mean that the person is bad, but that they may be wrong.
The line is not between what is too racist (or whatever) and what is not. It's between people who are willing to entertain viewpoints different from their own yet held in good faith, and people who use personal attacks and identity-based gatekeeping criteria to shut down discussion, marginalizing their opponents, signaling their virtue to those aligned with them, and generally furthering their social goals.
Fundamentally, it's a question of motive and character. This applies as much to the right as it does to the left, etcetera.
My argument still fundamentally applies to your characterisation of the people involved.
Who is the authority that is saying these people are unwilling to entertain different viewpoints? Why does anyone feel they haven't just examined those viewpoints thoroughly and decided they aren't worth holding?
Is the motive and character of these people something quantifiable?
I don't claim to be able to look inside somebody's head. Would you claim that motive and character do not, in fact, exist?
And I don't think your argument applies to these characterizations, actually, because I'm talking about two fundamentally different approaches to discourse: in one you are interested in building up your own argument and crushing the other person's (or deciding you actually agree, or identifying subjective factors and agreeing to disagree, or whatever) and in the other you don't give a shit what they're saying, you just want to shut them up and make yourself look stronger. The motives mirror the rhetorical techniques involved.
I'd argue that actually it's fairly clear when somebody's rhetorical strategy falls into one or the other camp, but just like many other parts of the human experience it's not something we can currently express with numbers. If that's your criterion for deciding whether some part of the human experience can be reasoned about, I think you're already overextending yourself by participating in this conversation at all.
And it's fine to walk away from a conversation, or jump into the same old argument for the Nth time with no intention of changing your position, or whatever. But if you are going to attack an argument or viewpoint, you need to attack it and not the person behind it. My previous comment did not cover these bases because I wrote it on a smartphone on the bus. Sincerest apologies.
> Would you claim that motive and character do not, in fact, exist?
No. I'd claim that people aren't able to objectively access those things in other people.
> I'd argue that actually it's fairly clear when somebody's rhetorical strategy falls into one or the other camp,
I also think that the people that think they have "common sense" think that what common sense is, is fairly clear. I also think that we can easily find people that disagree on what is and isn't common sense.
> the human experience
Implying that this judgement of the rhetorical strategies of a group of people is an obvious part of the human experience is immediately contradicted by the observation that the humans you're judging disagree with that judgement. Clearly there is at least something non-obvious about this judgement in some cases.
So then we fall back to the same ol' question. How are we determining that the rhetorical strategies employed in "purity spirals" are an element of the human experience that can be objectively reasoned about? How are we determining that these people aren't hooked into the clarity of sight that you seem to be implying you have?
> I also think that the people that think they have "common sense" think that what common sense is, is fairly clear. I also think that we can easily find people that disagree on what is and isn't common sense.
The lack of an authority certified to definitively classify something does not imply the lack of any theoretically applicable classifications thereof.
> Implying that this judgement of the rhetorical strategies of a group of people is an obvious part of the human experience is immediately contradicted by the observation that the humans you're judging disagree with that judgement. Clearly there is at least something non-obvious about this judgement in some cases.
Do they disagree, though? If they were somehow forced to tell the truth about their motives, what would they say? If we could look inside their heads with a machine, what would we find?
And please note, I've said nowhere that people pursue either of these strategies consciously. Some people use both at different times; they seem to scratch different itches. For instance, a lot of people start with the first, and move on the the second when they start to "lose".
> How are we determining that the rhetorical strategies employed in "purity spirals" are an element of the human experience that can be objectively reasoned about?
I've identified two strategies: attacks on arguments, and attacks on the people fielding them. Do you claim that this distinction does not, in fact, exist?
You're retreating into subjectivity, relativity, and uncertainty, but I've been here all along. I'm afraid I've used far too many words to describe that simple distinction, but it's all I'm talking about, and either it exists or it doesn't. Do you agree that it exists? Can a distinction be made, in any sense, between an attack on an argument and an attack on a person?
So you think they'd agree with your statement that -
> you don't give a shit what they're saying, you just want to shut them up and make yourself look stronger. The motives mirror the rhetorical techniques involved.
- is a fair characterisation of their own tactics???
> I've identified two strategies: attacks on arguments, and attacks on the people fielding them.
Have you though? Because people seem to sometimes not see the distinction as clearly as you. Have you ever encountered someone who took what you thought was an attack on their argument as a personal attack?
Isn't it possible that some arguments made by the "purity spiral" crowd are the former but you perceive them as the latter?
> You're retreating into subjectivity, relativity, and uncertainty, but I've been here all along.
For example, does accusing me of retreating fit into the attack on argument category, or the attack on people one?
I believe that the distinction is functionally useless because it is incredibly subjective in many contexts. No authority exists that can claim with certainty what side every argument sits on in that fairly limp dichotomy.
Okay then. We have arrived at something like the terminal state I earlier called "identifying subjective factors and agreeing to disagree", and there's nothing more to talk about. But I'll answer one of your earlier questions, since I think it's an interesting one:
> So you think they'd agree with your statement that - is a fair characterisation of their own tactics???
Frankly, yes. in a lot of cases, if they were really being truthful, I think they would. I say that because I have myself followed these impulses in the past, seeking to tear someone down and make them look like a fool (and myself reciprocally stronger) rather than attack whatever argument they were peddling. In my defense, I tend only to do this when my opponent has already stopped saying meaningful things (if they ever started in the first place) and started throwing slurs, but probably not always, especially in the past.
I'm not afraid of being honest, and I have the benefit of being old enough to be able to look back on past versions of myself and somewhat clearly see all the different ways I've been a total asshole to people, many of them total strangers. So I guess my theoretical jerk-revealing machine would have a threefold approach:
1. Add ten years to the subject's age. (filled with life experience and growth; not sure how that works, but this is a thought experiment so)
2. Induce an intense reflective/introspective episode in them.
3. Force them to be honest.
Some people probably just don't have it in 'em to grapple with this aspect of themselves even with the above help, but I expect more do than one might think.
Seriously, though, if you don't think the distinction between attacks on arguments and attacks on people is at all meaningful or useful, we're 100% done here. That last bit is a bonus; feel free to read it and take what you want from it, or not.
It isn't useful for setting some objective metric by which arguments can be judged because people commonly disagree on what category an argument falls into.
The line is frequently pretty obvious. For one thing, the "you can't be a rebel if you don't wear the right uniform" effect becomes very large; it ceases to be about the purported subject and becomes about saying the right things about the right subjects, about agreeing with the right people in the right way and more importantly about not being different in the wrong way. On the other hand, it may be very hard to see the situation from the inside; I don't know.
For another, and I believe this to be invisible from the inside, the reaction begins to be completely out of proportion to the alleged crime. Speaking as someone who decided that knitting wasn't for him because counting is hard, is racism in the knitting community really a big problem? One that requires an emotional response? I mean, I know people who in casual conversation seem to relate skin color to intelligence and common sense. I know people who seem to equate wealth or income to personal worth, or culture, religion, job, or interests with value to society. Whether someone's knitting is too insensitive is way down the list.
That line seems reasonably clear in a lot of cases, like the author's Puritans in the American colonies, various communist flaps, young adult books, and yes, knitters.
The author's spiral is pretty obvious, too: at some point, if the community doesn't disintegrate first, eventually any difference becomes intolerable (which is spectacularly ironic for a "diversity" issue), all the wheels come off, and the lack of self awareness in many if not most people comes out in all its glory.
It's even more clear: when you are not allowed to have an opinion based on something you can't control, like your race, for example, you know it's war.
'White Fragility' supporters will effectively deny the opinion of anyone who is White, because of course, 'how could they possibly know?' and 'they are guilty of perpetuating racism by virtue of their Whiteness'. This is 'race war': you are 'guilty' and you 'must apologize profusely and enduringly'.
In Scientology, anyone who is against the group is labelled as 'suppressive' - that means, among other things that they don't take the 'suppressive' person's arguments or actions at face value. Don't get into argumentation or rhetoric with a 'suppressive' - just undermine them and destroy them by any means possible.
The 'White Fragility' ideology gives people with grievances a very powerful, fascist ideology to validate their anger: "my opponents are wrong by their very nature, and their arguments can have no value". I mean, that's a pretty powerful rhetorical tool, just invalidate whatever anyone else says because of who they are.
The Guardian has an article right now about this [1] i.e. White women paying Women of Colour to tell them all the ways that they are racist. It's not without controversy even among attendees.
The thing is - most people are willing to examine racial issues on some level. 85% of Republicans believe that racism exists in America. Obviously, these things vary, some narratives are more broadly acceptable than others, but by and large, people are willing to listen at the right time and right occasions. But this kind of toxicity draws some pretty hard battle lines, upon which many otherwise 'allies' will join the other camp or ignore entirely.
I've personally become very cynical about the issue, and I believe most popular figures talking about the issue are interested mostly in how people perceive them and not much more, i.e. just enabling the ratcheting.
"People who are part of the Normative or Dominant Group may inadvertently or unconsciously think or act in a manner that may be insensitive to people in Non-Normative groups" - that's a conversation to be had.
But ... "White people are by virtue of their Whiteness guilty of propagating oppression and therefore cannot contemplate otherwise, ergo those who attempt to disagree with any of our rhetoric are 'fragile' or 'Nazis' and their arguments should be dismissed out of hand merely as further attempts to deny or oppress" - is not a conversation, it's totalitarianism.
'Purity' within groups derives systematically from the latter approach.
Is it? We've identified at least enough people in the knitting community that think it isn't obvious. How can we be sure our definitions of where the line is are consistent with even the general population?
Sadly, I just learned a new term: "emotional labor."
The original author wrote "I have had responses from several Indian friends and readers today who had nothing but positive and encouraging responses. I’ll have to see if anything I said offended them." And the ultra-triggered guy who kicked off the criticism wrote back "Instead of asking your Indian friends to perform more emotional labor for you and assuage your white women’s tears, maybe do some reflection..."
I guess we should all reconsider sharing cultural experiences and questions with each other. Too much "emotional labor."
> Sadly, I just learned a new term: "emotional labor."
It's also an (increasingly common) misuse of the term as originally coined.
Originally it referred to things like cashiers needing to remain calm and cheery even in the face of unreasonable and hostile customers. The claim is that this kind of labor goes beyond the job description and should therefore be compensated.
> Multiple times you compare the idea of going to India to the idea of going to another planet – how do you think a person from India would feel to hear that?
As a person from India I feel literally nothing. Yeah this lady is over-exoticising India but that's between her and her eventual disappointment. But she's not wrong that India is VERY different and it's not wrong to compare it to going to another planet. Exaggeration is at the heart of excited metaphors. Fuck these people getting offended on my behalf.
I must be out of touch or too old or both, but what compels these individuals to fall in line? Why can't they tell their critics to buzz off? Some possibilities I can imagine:
- The identities are real, so there is danger of external real-life impact (harassment of friends/family, job loss, etc)
- Craving for approval - might get ostracized by the community
- Internal impact - might e.g. lose business from the community if it's some kind of store
Pretty much. An accusation of being -ist can get you fired IRL. Even if you're completely in the right, a big enough mob will convince your boss you're 'toxic' and they'll let you go.
There's risk in becoming embroiled in controversy; less risk in placating it. If you wrote something you felt was empowering and some people reacted negatively, you might feel that there is a lot more that you don't understand and that pushing blindly on could be risky.
These high profile knitting bloggers make their money from their knitting blog. My wife for example follows them on Instagram and buys their products. Being “cancelled” is like being fired from a job for them.
I find the whole idea that it matters if people are offended to be pretty infuriating. Not it does not. Intent matters. Whether one of an infinite number of readers was offended is irrelevant. There will always be at least one.
I think it depends what you mean by 'offended'. If people are just annoyed or outraged, yeah, no problem if you want to ignore that. But if my words are really hurting people, of course that matters to me. It doesn't guarantee that I shouldn't have said them, but it would be pretty callous just to dismiss it as irrelevant.
You are making some assumptions that I am unwilling to make. I cannot easily prove that you even exist. You could be a bot, or a sock puppet, or just a persona that only exists on HN. It makes zero sense for me to spend any time worrying about whether you were offended by something I said. Especially when there may be billions of you reading what I write. I can control my intent, and I have to be satisfied with that.
If you and I were talking face-to-face, then I may adjust how much I care about your feelings. But even then, it is entirely possible that your hurt feelings are unreasonable.
I mean, you can't prove that anyone you meet face-to-face isn't a p-zombie or a projection of your own mind either, but I doubt you're an actual solipsist. And I don't think you honestly have much trouble telling the difference between me and a bot. Yes, for all you know any given person could be a troll or sockpuppet, but you also know with very high confidence that there are many real and sincere people at the other end of the internet.
But maybe we disagree less than it seems:
> I can control my intent, and I have to be satisfied with that.
If this includes modifying what you say when you learn unexpected things about the effect of your words, that makes perfect sense to me.
But if it means refusing to take that information into account, I don't think you can really claim good intentions.
Yeah, it's a saying, but unfortunately it's nonsense. Non-physical bullying can drive people to suicide, or traumatise them for life. And insensitive discussion of painful topics can dredge up old trauma, etc. You're free not to care about all of that, but pretending it doesn't exist is just wrong.
Bullying falls under intent, so that isn't really on point.
Who defines what insensitive means in a public forum? As a willing participant in the discussion, the onus is on you to opt out if the discussion makes you uncomfortable. Nobody is targeting you.
If the world has to censor all public discussion that may be painful or dredge up old trauma for some random person, then it is going to get extremely quiet.
> Bullying falls under intent, so that isn't really on point.
As a response to you, true. It was just one of the most obvious disproofs of the 'sticks and stones' adage.
> Who defines what insensitive means in a public forum? As a willing participant in the discussion, the onus is on you to opt out if the discussion makes you uncomfortable. Nobody is targeting you.
Who defines any of our social or moral concepts? I'm not arguing for some kind of language police, I'm saying I care about whether my words are likely to cause harm, and I think other people should too.
> If the world has to censor all public discussion that may be painful or dredge up old trauma for some random person, then it is going to get extremely quiet.
I think you're creating a dichotomy where actually there's a massive continuum. You can care about the way your words affect other people, and modify them accordingly where appropriate, without self-censoring every thought that could possibly hurt anyone.
She had no need to apologise as she did. I was absolutely baffled reading her post trying to work out how someone might take offence.
That first critical comment goes against what I like about HN's rules - the idea of arguing in good faith. Don't look for a way to be offended, but give someone benefit of the doubt. She was excited about being brave to visit somewhere away from home - first with Paris (where she felt some advantage in knowing the language) and then with India (where English will get you by in most places anyway).
Bringing in Mars to talk colonialism was just next level.
> Instead of asking your Indian friends to perform more emotional labor for you and assuage your white women’s tears, maybe do some reflection on how your equation of India with an alien world reinforces an “other” mindset that is at the core of imperialism and colonialism.
Aside from being mean and insane, this sort of thing is an absolute gift to the political right, including its extreme elements. There are people who don't know many 'liberals' or leftists IRL, whose perception of the whole left half of the political spectrum can be significantly shaped by a few links to idiocy like this. And there are people who have had bad experiences at the hands of bullies using 'progressivism' as a cloak for cruelty and status games and intellectual laziness, whose suspicions this will only serve to confirm.
To anyone in those categories: please believe that 'the left' is not all like that, and although this bullshit is more common than it should be (and far more widely tolerated), it is still a fringe thing. And think about how your beliefs and your 'side' would appear to someone focusing on its worst or dumbest elements.
That was the icing on the cake. I went off to google "emotional labour" and still not sure I understand the point.
Might be way off track, but I think of some of this type of response or outrage-on-behalf-of-others as a form of busywork. If you are somewhat housed and somewhat fed, your basic needs are met, do you look for drama or a fight to win?
OK, so the thing to know about "emotional labour" is it's used in at least two ways (that sorta overlap).
Definition 1: Most jobs sometimes require you to demonstrate a certain set of emotions, and if you're feeling differently at the time to succeed you'll have to change gears pronto or be really good at faking sincerity. Some jobs require a lot of this - so much it's the most difficult part of the job.
For example, if you work for a call centre and have to convince people not to cancel their cable service, the company will probably want you to be upbeat and friendly every time you answer a call, while many callers will be frustrated and mad at your employer, and keen to share those feelings with you.
Obviously, every job has a certain element of this - but for some jobs it's a big, difficult part of the job.
Definition 2: The same, but including non-employment activities and reducing the big-and-difficult-part requirement.
For example, I don't much enjoy talking on the telephone, so if I've got to phone several plumbers to get a quote for some work, overcoming that dislike is emotional labour under the second definition.
"emotional labour" is absolutely a real thing, but that isn't it.
Emotional labour normally means stuff like remembering family birthdays, planning gifts, organising visits to friends and family, planning social events, etc. Things that take work that involves thinking about the emotional states and responses of participants involved
If one lived their entire life in Kentucky and has rarely traveled far from home, India absolutely is "culturally alien" to them. Saying you're excited to step outside your comfort zone and go somewhere you don't fully understand the culture is not offensive.
I think it's a mistake to judge intra-community fights based on sample sizes of a single discussion. Much like domestic arguments, the surface disagreement is often not what the fight is really about, and it's not easy to understand it without knowing the context, how long the forum participants have known each other, how disagreements have played out before and so on.
There are a lot of unwritten rules and informal relationships in any forum with a persistent membership, and in my experience it takes months, sometimes years of observation to be able to read them accurately.
I don't know, because I have no context to judge it by. Things like that don't take over a community unless there's some sort of history between the forum participants.
She absolutely had the need to apologize, she was facing forces much more powerful than her who could destroy her livelihood. Don’t fault the peasant for kneeling before the King.
What the article talks about is that as the purity spiral tightens, the number of outcasts grow, and can actually re-form the community, while those on the inside consume each other in increased frenzy.
The spiral will always find new victims, go to new heights, so it might be better to refuse to kneel, weather the frenzy, your 15 minutes of fame, and then move on once it passes.
Maybe. I don't know, it would be fascinating to know what the best way to defeat this phenomenon is.
> "The spiral will always find new victims, go to new heights, so it might be better to refuse to kneel, weather the frenzy, your 15 minutes of fame, and then move on once it passes."
The "transphobia" purity spiral is absolutely maddening, it just hasn't eaten itself completely yet. The current orthodox view inside of it is that anyone who claims to be trans is trans, regardless of their biological gender, psychological gender, gender expression, name, pronouns, or gender dysphoria. So a person who was born female, is female, presents female, uses a female name and female pronouns can still be trans simply by virtue of her saying that she is. Anything else is "gatekeeping", and expressing this view is "transphobic", and sentenced with immediate purity spiral mob justice.
I'm hoping this spiral dies out quickly, so that the LGBT movement can go back to sanity, it's not in a good place right now.
What works for one of the wealthiest and most famous women in the world may or may not work for a knitting blogger. It would a far riskier play for the blogger than for Rowling.
In her case, maybe ignore the comments that were critical in that way? Don't give them oxygen/validation personally.
Alternatively, I tend to play a straight bat (this might be an Australian/English saying) in response to something like this and with minimal text - less you say, less there is to attack in response. If you indulge them too much, it only encourages more.
Right. As the article states, in-groups always attack apostates the hardest. There's a funny related phenomenon where people who try their best at being vegan get attacked for not being "vegan enough", instead of applauded for at least trying.
Because it works. People who want to join the in-group are vulnerable to its criticism, but people who don't want to join don't give a shit in the first place.
So when the woman in the article responded to the attack, the attackers smelled blood, and piled on, and increased their attacks. prompting her to defend herself even more, thereby giving even more material for the attackers. So it seems you have to defuse it before that point in time. Easy for me to say, really hard to recognize in the moment.
Because that's the annoying paradox. If you get attacked, and you start thinking that you maybe were wrong, that you maybe wrote something bad, that you maybe hurt someone else, having those thoughts, those doubts, show that you didn't intend to. Yet the very proof of you not having ill intent, simply invites more attacks.
I agree. I'm not vegan, but I often come across scenarios such as that you described. Same with people making an effort to reduce their environmental footprint. "But you drive a car when you have to pick up three children from separate locations within a short timespan! Practice what you preach!" "I saw you eat red meat last week!"
Communities used to be small with the members mutually dependent upon one another, e.g. a medieval village. Everyone knew everyone else and the arrangement had to work. If it didn't work then people suffered and could be seen to suffer.
So it's perhaps not so surprising that large 'communities' which are full of strangers and where membership is optional are subject to very different problems.
> [Professor Kuran's] theory relates to things like the fall of the Soviet Union, where almost no one saw the end coming, because they hadn’t realised that an entire population was falsifying their experience to each other. He sees a clear parallel.
The article didn't seem to indicate how the end of this movement would come, unless I missed something. Based on this analogy, how would this come about?
If we draw from the Society analogy, people realized that their neighbors weren't happy with the government all along and production quotas weren't actually being met.
So presumably, the author thinks people will look around and realize that. . . they were all more racist and sexist then they were letting on? Yeah the analogy doesn't actually hold when stretched that far. One of the key steps in purity politics is to engage in self-flagellation about your own inadequacies as a member of a privileged group (if you are) or to ham up the victimization and harm inflicted on you (if you aren't). I suppose there would be some "realization" that the "harm" being claimed is being blown out of proportion, but again I think this is something most people understand already.
Other way around. They will realize they (and most people) aren't actually racist and sexist, so why are they bothering with the whole social signalling they are doing?
Same place as the lines for "lets you check wikipedia" in the source code of the browser you're using.
In other words: nowhere in particular, yet when you take the end product as a whole, it's there still the same. The realities of group selection will not be mocked.
So, maybe not "literally in our genes" like GP wrote in the sense of specific location, but ineradicable nonetheless.
This concept of "ineradicable yet impossible to pin down" is a pattern you'll see anywhere development happens from abstract top-down pressures. Amazon's problems with AI-assisted hiring are relevant here, as is the connection between corporate malfeasance and quarterly targets.
More that they were being a bunch of godamned idiots who were neither helping outreach against bigotry, harming actual bigots, nor helping those harmed by it really. The collective lie/delusion is that they are involved in anything remotely good in spite of intentions.
I would put it in the Soviet analogy as "Even if the boss and shareholders get richer from your work under capitalism doesn't mean that the Soviet system did anything to help the workers. They are doing perfectly fine and you are only hurting yourselves."
Not a perfect metaphor of course but really the nominal target is fundamentally irrelevant to the impact of their actions.
I love and hate the evolution of the use of the word 'bigot'.
Such folks engaged in purity policing throw it around like it's just another word for 'bad person', but almost every use of it I see is highly ironic.
The dictionary definition is 'a person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions.' Almost everyone I've ever seen calling someone else a bigot online was using it to shame or beat down those who are not displaying bigotry, but merely different opinions.
They may have been objectionable opinions. They may even have been racist or sexist opinions. But never have I seen 'bigotry' applied correctly, and usually it seems to be applied by people unaware that they are the bigot in the situation.
I suppose in time the original meaning is lost, and we are left with just another insult. Which is a shame. But in the mean time I get to enjoy the irony.
I've only recently gotten any good at seeing the metagame strategies evolve. I used to get worked up when new words came into favor overnight to be abused in various ways.
They lie to us we are getting paid, we lie to them that we are working.
The USSR and Eastern block knew what the problems with the system were and the collapse of the system was the outcome exactly no one wanted. With predicable results.
Adam Curtis' "Hypernomalisation" talks about this exact topic - the system collapses because everyone, from top to bottom, is engaged in a lie, either knowingly or unknowingly. All it takes is someone who is willing to take a stand and say "wait, none of this makes any sense". That's basically how communism in the Eastern Europe collapsed, and that's how these communities can - once enough people realize that this entire self-policing of morality doesn't make any sense because in fact everyone is excluded by the insane rules the community collapses.
Having been there for the collapse, no that is not how the regime collapsed. It was 20 somethings pushing for concessions on the prices of bread and powdered milk and the powers that be caving into demands and then deciding that they would be better off without communism and going further than any of the protestors expected.
This movie was made in 1967: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_(film) and was seen by 20% of the population of the country at the time. This is not the product of a society where no one had any idea what was wrong and how it could be fixed.
Knitters or Open Sourcers, the history repeats. Instead of knitting patterns and diversity discussions we have Codes of conduct and... diversity discussions.
Humans are fascinating, as a group we are stupid while the constituent individuals may be wise. Quite the opposite of ant colonies...
> In 1967, Mao’s Red Guards took to the streets determined to root out the ‘four olds’ of traditional Chinese culture, killing hundreds of thousands in the process.
There’s a lot of parallels to Mao and what we’re witnessing in culture today. Another example is Mao’s use of “thought examinations” to consolidate power and influence.
I certainly see the parallels: both Mao and groups in modern Western culture are trying to control thought at the expense of free speech. But let's not overstate this: nobody is going door to door and carting people off in hoods for their ideas.
No, but people are trying to ruin wrong-thinker's lives in other ways, like obsessively contacting their employer about their "problematic" behavior trying to get them fired, imitating them online and posting absolutely beyond the pale material, obsessively contacting anyone/group that supports the person and trying to get them dumped, etc.
But yes no one is being kidnapped by these people. Just attempts to drive them to suicide or financial ruin
This is a really chilling phenomena of our age, and I wish there were more downward societal pressure against it. The scariest part is that they really believe they’re acting in the public good, and the ends will justify their means.
A total of 625 arrests were made for alleged section 127 offences in 2010 – a number which had ballooned to 857 by 2015.
During the years 2010-2015 2,130 people were arrested between 2010 and 2015 for “sending by public communication network an offensive / indecent / obscene / menacing message / matter” – which is a criminal offence under section 127.
Thanks for bringing this up. That is a very concerning trend. Still not quite Mao level, but it certainly is starting to look a lot more like totalitarianism.
> A total of 625 arrests were made for alleged section 127 offences in 2010 – a number which had ballooned to 857 by 2015.
There's a very low bar to being arrested in England. The arrest rate isn't important, it's the conviction rate that you need to be presenting. Also, the law is developing (because that's how a system with case law works) so you need to be showing what's happening now, not ten years ago.
That last link isn't a great example. She engaged in a long running campaign of harassment, using two twitter accounts to harass and defame someone, including leaking financial and medical information. There's a reason the Daily Mail isn't a reliable source for wikipedia. These conversations always seem to place the right of some cunt to behave like an utter cunt above the rights of all the people who have to interact with that person to be protected from protracted campaigns of harassment. The UK and EU sees protecting the rights of others, protecting them from harassment and defamation, to be a legitimate aim.
What used to be called Collateral Consequences of Criminal Conviction nowadays increasingly attach at the point of arrest (and even more so at the point of charging, even if an acquittal is the outcome of the trial) because of publicity (names end up in the press often when people are arrested and then are available on Google forever) and the fact that they'll be listed on enhanced criminal records checks (needed for entry to certain occupations like teaching or in many cases financial services).
> The arrest rate isn't important, it's the conviction rate that you need to be presenting.
Being publicly arrested and held against your will, even for only 24 hours, is still a very significant punishment. If charges are filed and then later dropped, they can hold you longer or require you to post bail. It can cause you to miss work, especially if you can't make bail. Frivolous arrests are definitely a form of punishment without trial.
Hate speech is illegal in the UK. This means you can report social media posts and the police will knock on the poster's door (I guess if they can figure out who it is) and "investigate".
If you clicked the link, why quote it out of context?
> In addition to reporting hate crime, please report non-crime hate incidents, which can include things like offensive or insulting comments, online, in person or in writing. Hate will not be tolerated in South Yorkshire. Report it and put a stop to it #HateHurtsSY
In addition to reporting hate crime...
Anyway, it's quite easy to verify that hate speech is illegal in the UK. Plenty of people have been prosecuted for it.
I don't understand the confusion here. The quote clearly distinguishes between crime and non crime actions yet still encourages people to report non-crimes to the police. This is unacceptable thought-crime type stuff.
"Hate will not be tolerated in South Yorkshire" is also a disturbing sentence because hate is a totally normal, and healthy emotion to have. I hate the taste of parsley. I hate racists. I hate being caught in the rain with a flat tire, but more of all I hate the idea that the police would do these kinds of things.
Exactly... not yet. Given the tenor of the social justice warriors and the extreme right's proclivity towards kaos, I am not surprised by any measure of craziness we're seeing in our once stable country.
I feel like this dude should have and easily could have linked more often to various titbits relevant to his story rather than references loosely attached.
I don't disagree with the ideas in either but his other article [1] calls some dude talking about media control on his website selling anti-aging pills a tech philosopher and with such hyperbole employed and an unrefined search for backing for a premise one can inflate 2 or 3 people throwing shit in a small community into a vast mob.
I have to wonder how many of these morality spirals aren’t instigated by actual trolls.
An example of this was the explosion of transgender issues into the mainstream soon after gay marriage was legalized. I recall reading a fringe right-wing blogger about the “lesbian vs transgender conflict”, a few years before the “T” in LGBT became more prominent. This prominence may well have been engineered by trolls in an attempt to alienate a group of people who were rapidly being accepted into mainstream society.
Infiltrate a community, set off a purity spiral. Collapse the community, and then, as a bonus, complain about “virtue signaling”, “wokeness” and “cancel culture”. Repeat.
Now imagine that both sides are doing it. Now imagine that there have been several iterations of this process. Now imagine that the people involved have gone through so many iterations that they've lost sight of which side they started on.
S/he was right to start with. Sure, people do it unconsciously but you're foolish if you don't think there are also people who do it systematically and even document the process.
> Lindsay pointed to the atheist movement of the mid-2000s, from which he’d come: a community that once had the wind in its sails, but had imploded into infighting by 2011, as half of its members jagged off in an social justice direction. Soon enough, the likes of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins were being problematised as stale, male and pale.
I'm not saying virtue signaling was never a force in the atheist community. But it seemed at the time that the thing that people were most upset about was the rampant sexual misconduct. The thing that people were second most upset about was disagreement over whether Wheaton's Law is a good idea or not. Trying to paint that whole sad, sorry mess with the same brush as this knitting Instagram situation is. . . wait for it . . . problematic.
Atheists are exactly the same as knitters that they succumbed to purity spiral. There was even one lady complaining about selling "fake" jewelry, being sold at convention which I think was any jewelry that's similar to the one she sold.
Atheists just got hit harder because people can just withdraw from atheist community. Knitters have harder time doing that because it's (part of?) their income. They have to play the game the way it is played.
If atheist community was to defend itself from purity spiral it would have to look something like that:
When news of sexual misconduct started popping up they should issue just one statement. "This society is about atheism. We are not in the business of promoting moral behavior. We will do everything that is required by law but nothing more. You can get molested in any large gathering of people. Atheists are not significantly more moral than average people. We can't and we won't attempt to provide you with complete safety or any illusion of it."
Unfortunately people took the bait, got uplifted and thought it's the right thing to do and that it helps them. That was the spiral. Then audience moved away because society stopped being about what they were interested in.
This article has really good observation. Parallels to pre-internet purity spirals are very interesting. Seems it could work with printing press (+direct contact in densely populated cities). It worked way better when radio was discovered. But internet makes it possible to consume any community.
The atheist movement, at that point, had spent a very long time flogging basically all religions for being overly tolerant of sexual misconduct by their leaders, and had been publicly arguing that atheists are morally superior precisely because they aren't as tolerant of things like sexual misconduct.
To then, after the movement's own leaders started getting outed for engaging in the same kinds of behavior, take an about-face on that position and say, "Whoops, guess we didn't care about morality after all," would have been many things. But, just speaking from a purely strategic perspective, since that's what I think you're trying to do, it would undoubtedly have been a spectacular own goal.
They are flogging religions not for sexual misconduct or tolerance to sexual misconduct but for not reporting suspicions of sexual crimes to the police where they can be properly investigated.
That's plenty to differentiate atheists for religions. "We report our members to police if they are suspected of sexual misconduct and cooperate fully and religions do not. Because they pretend they all are saint and we don't."
At least as of 10 or 15 years ago, it was all that and more.
I kind of stopped paying attention after the "Dear Muslima" affair, which could be interpreted, among other things, as an attempt to move the moral goalpost. Sounds like perhaps the attempt was successful.
Don't forget about how many Atheist YouTubers went full anti-feminism after Gamergate. It created some of the strongest repugnant feelings for the community (even today).
There was a lot going on around Gamergate that wasn't directly related to gamergate though. I used to follow games journalism quite fervently and stopped around 2013 due to the purity spiral it was going down.
Feminism wasn't just standing around doing nothing. Grifters and frauds exploited feminism and attacked games and game players. Feminists fell for the grifters and fraudsters grift and fraud and dutifully went after game. Then they went after those who defended games. Then they went after those who defended the defenders of games.
Those on the gamers side of gamergate are the only reason the purity spiral was broken. And that includes a very large number of people who weren't originally on the gamers side of gamergate.
I believe that the allure of being in an Internet mob is that it inverts the traditional monarch-subject power structure. Normally the crowd must cower before the individual King... in an Internet mob you can take even the highest status individual and make him cower before your crowd.
Jeez... it almost seems like social justice warriors could be a false flag operation by virulent racists, with how effectively they can turn sensible moderates against everything that they stand for.
This kind of activism is definitely counterproductive -- but a 'sensible moderate' worthy of the adjective would be aware that there is nastiness and idiocy to be found among the advocates of every position on every issue, and so changing your mind about substantive questions on that basis is just handing your brain over to whoever can dredge up the most egregious examples and bring them to your attention the most efficiently.
>Thing is, the only way they can succeed is if people take it seriously and keep the spiral going.
Why would that stop anything? I spent half an hour over Christmas explaining to an aunt why the circle game [0] wasn't a white supremacist thing. All because the media chose to fall for the most inept trap ever planned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_gesture#White_power_symbol
The very term "social justice warrior" is an invention of the reactionary right, though. Flinging it around as an invective like this is exactly the same psychology at work as calling moderate-but-mildly-clueless knitters racists. You're defining an out group and shunning them.
This only gets better when people start to talk about specifics and be (to use your word) sensible about things. Drawing up battle lines trying to make the people you don't like take a stand with the SJWs is making things worse.
How is that inconsistent with what I wrote? Words change. The definition used upthread was clearly perjorative and used within the (new! that's literally what the article was about!) Oxford definition described by the coverage you linked to. And it's an insult, and an invention of the reactionary right.
Good grief. The current pervasive use of "SJW" as a derogation, as used by zweep above in the comment to which I directly replied, is an invention of the right. Better?
> The very term "social justice warrior" is an invention of the reactionary right.
No, it wasn't. It was invented by the Left, unironically. They would call themselves Social Justice Warriors. Many leftists still proudly maintain that they "fight for social justice". Same energy. It was only later that the term was used derisively by the right, putting the term in ironic quotation marks.
It is exactly the same as "fake news"; originally used by someone in the lefty media (CNN?) to deride Fox News, but popularised by Trump against CNN. Or did you think Trump came up with that all by himself?
> It is exactly the same as "fake news"; originally used by someone in the lefty media (CNN?) to deride Fox News, but popularised by Trump against CNN. Or did you think Trump came up with that all by himself?
This is pure bullshit. "Fake news" was first used to describe completely fictional news outlets writing about fictional people and fictional events, mainly designed to go viral on facebook for ad revenue.
For example, Paul Horner[1]:
> His stories had an "enormous impact" on the 2016 U.S. presidential election according to CBS News;[17] they consistently appeared in Google's top news search results, were shared widely on Facebook and were taken seriously and shared by third parties such as Trump presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Eric Trump, ABC News and Fox News.[18] Horner later claimed that his work during this period was intended "to make Trump's supporters look like idiots for sharing my stories".[19]
> In December 2016, while speaking on Anderson Cooper 360°, Horner said that all news is fake news and called CNN "fake news", which was one month before Donald Trump leveled the same criticism at that network.[23]
"Fake news" was first used in the 17th century. Today, it is a term deployed by President Trump against news outlets he doesn't like. But he didn't invent the term. He heard it from someone using it against news outlets he does like.
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
Some might claim the BSD community's focus on security to be a purity spiral, but it's arguably produced things of value. Having small communities around who occasionally drive themselves to the extremes of a particular idea can useful for broader society.
That's not the sort of purity that the article is talking about. The article is talking about purity for purity's sake -- a relative and subjective set of rules that exist to provide levers of power.
A singlular and uncompromising focus on OS security serves an absolute and objective purpose, that being... OS security. To the extent that it is objective, it is less subject to being coopted for political purposes.
It's really important to point out that that's not usually the case with the internet version. People aren't setting out to build an instagram moral empire; in fact they may set out with genuine, legitimate concern for the real moral issues. The problem comes from that "ratchet effect", where the only way to stay safe is to keep escalating things. The internet abstracts away people's humanity, dampening any compassion/charity, and the temperature rises on its own. Seeing this lack of (original) malice makes it easier to forgive and to step outside of the cycle.