How knitters got knotted in a purity spiral
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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.
Someone did this as a joke in 1959. See "Society for Indecency to Naked Animals"[1] They got the purity cycle going.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Indecency_to_Naked...
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'd much rather be under killed for disagreeing than tortured until my captors are satisfied that I really agree with them.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Yup, just look at the Ten Commandments. There's exceptions to "thou shalt not kill" [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_kill#Justified_...
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.
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.
I assure you he is considered a monster in Ukraine, too. Because he was.
I've heard this said many different ways, but yours might be my favorite so far.
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.
It's like Kindergarten Khmer Rogue.
(Damn people will be primed for it when the time is right...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(warning, contains British Humour)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 personally prefer to look at it as not bad and good, but rather loathsome and slightly less loathsome.)
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.
At least as seen from here, something fundamentally changed starting around 2015, and a lot of people seemed to have lost their moral compass.
These days I hang out with the sinners. Saints are not to be trusted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Redemption is to just try not to be 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?
Motte and Bailey.
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.
https://unherd.com/2020/01/modern-politics-is-christianity-w...
It's also very good and worth reading.
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?
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"
No one. If there was such an authority, you wouldn't have a "purity spiral" to begin with.
Who is more credible? How are we sure which one is?
https://quillette.com/2019/02/17/a-witch-hunt-on-instagram/
https://quillette.com/2019/06/07/instagrams-diversity-wars-r...
https://quillette.com/2019/07/28/knittings-infinity-war-part...
You could gather and directly examine evidence yourself:
https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col...
https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col...
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.
Is it possible that some people accuse those who believe Quillette is objective of being caught up in such a community?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette
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?
Shrug.
At this point I think I'm going to bow out of this conversation. Good luck on your quest for objectivity!
> 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.
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"?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Fundamentally, it's a question of motive and character. This applies as much to the right as it does to the left, etcetera.
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?
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.
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?
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?
> 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.
What makes you so good at telling when people are masking some underlying truth?
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.
Til next time.
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.
'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.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/03/race-to-dinner...
"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?
This will be fascinating for future internet archaeologists.
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."
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
Sticks and stones will hurt my bones, and all that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
What do you mean?
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.
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.
There was an recent news article about how J.K. Rowling managed to do what you suggest: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/has-jk-rowling-figur...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The Woke and the Trumpists hate each other because they're each other's outgroup.
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.
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.
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.
There are so many fun words like this.
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.
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.
Didn't communism last until 1989 in Bulgaria?
Humans are fascinating, as a group we are stupid while the constituent individuals may be wise. Quite the opposite of ant colonies...
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.
But yes no one is being kidnapped by these people. Just attempts to drive them to suicide or financial ruin
They don't need to, social media throws peoples lifes wide open. How many people have lost jobs because of internet outrage?
Let me re-introduce you to China and Russia
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.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/02/social_media_arrest...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uk-man-jailed-over-facebook-sta... (2012)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7415233/Mother-arre... (2019)
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.
Here's the Crown Prosecution Service page for communications offences committed on social media: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/social-media-guideline...
Emphatically disagree. A slogan of totalitarian government is “the process is the punishment.” — no conviction necessary.
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.
https://twitter.com/syptweet/status/1038891067381350401?s=20
See also: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-peo...
> please report non-crime hate incidents,
> 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.
"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.
https://caldronpool.com/teenager-with-aspergers-placed-under...
Tell me again why you don’t think agents of the government would do awful things in the name of the people and law and order?
We live in an era where people are accumulating power by breaking boundaries.
Who said I didn't think that?
I just don't think they're doing it on a large scale now.
We should remain vigilant, but be mindful of where we are as well.
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.
[1]https://unherd.com/2018/11/the-growing-power-of-the-youtube-...
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.
That's culture.
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 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.
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."
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.
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
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.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/10...
This is not correct, and not what you are saying now.
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?
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]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Horner#2016_U.S._presiden...
W.B. Yeats
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.