Weak Men Are Superweapons (2014)
slatestarcodexabridged.com
slatestarcodexabridged.com
This reminds me of the Buzzfeed story circa 2012 about how Christians were campaigning against Starbucks for their holiday cups unadorned with Christmas paraphernalia. It became a meme right away to the delight of people who already weren't very fond of Christians. I thought this was particularly strange because even my most conservative Christian friends held opinions in the vein of "If you're a Christian and are getting upset about these cups, you're way off". I was really curious to figure out who all of these Christians were that held this opinion and, lo-and-behold, it was one single Christian from Arizona. This particular "weak man" argument was the basis for much criticism of Christian culture for a couple of years.
Maybe this seems less significant nowadays after the media has shown us consistently over the better part of the last decade exactly what level of depravity it will sink to in order to gain a click, but at the time it was really surprising.
Fox running a bit telling their viewers they should be angry about something isn’t evidence that anyone was actually angry.
Even if the kernel of the story isn't true there are a lot of people who are easily manipulated by this sort of outrage journalism.
Something about it stuck with their audience, it seems, since here's them covering a new iteration in 2019... https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/starbucks-risks-more-war-...
> Whether an aversion to using the word “Christmas” extends beyond Starbucks is difficult to measure. But in 2017, President Trump tweeted on Christmas Eve that Americans were “proud to be saying Merry Christmas again,” since he took office.
It's nice that your conservative Christian friends aren't so easily triggered, but that Trump quote points to the views of a sizable set of their peers.
It's easy for people to laugh at such concerns when they don't see them as plausible, but when you also have people like Dick Costolo promising shootings and a violent revolution, it's hard to know who can be trusted. When the left spends a year "mostly peacefully" killing dozens of people and burning our cities, it becomes a lot easier to believe that they might want a full revolution. Again, not to say that these concerns are necessarily justified, but that it's very difficult to know whether they are or not. If one prefers to err on the side of caution and criticize Starbucks here, I think that's a legitimate position.
(Kind of hoping that someone can give me a good way to debunk these concerns, so I'm just going to ignore any troll responses).
[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=Vhgk72OGBRYC&pg=PA65#v=one...
However, I think something significant to note here about if it's an overreaction or not is that even these cups are still traditional Christmas colors. We're a really long way away from them saying something like "it's not a holiday season at all," or "the actual holidays are some other time."
So if on one side we have a "let's be a little more inclusive of our friends celebrating different holidays" and on the other side we have "let's replace your holidays to help encourage a future violent revolution" it seems to me that they've only taken the babiest of baby steps towards the former, not the latter. (One wonders what the reaction would be if they came out with Hanukkah colored cups - lets not forget that there are non-"replacement"-motivated other holidays out there...)
Of course, this is a lot more believable nowadays since we deal exclusively in caricatures but as I said earlier, it was novel at the time.
(The company eventually won a lawsuit about this https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/business/worldbusiness/20... )
So, no, none of this was novel to me in 2015... you seem to be reading in the "en masse" part yourself. A substantial number of people believe in this War on Christmas stuff and do let it influence their behavior, including the 2015 cups. You seem to only be willing to accept that it's either just 1 person, or EVERYBODY.
I can show you more links if you want, but so far you're not even trying to consider the counter-evidence people have posted here... if you were actually curious, it's easy to Google. But - ironically, considering the claims of your original post - your mind seems made up.
I agree that the Starbucks choice of greeting is a "babiest of baby steps" which is probably why only one person really cared in a country of 300 million. But I really struggle to understand the justification here, and it seems to be related to other Culture War crusades. How is avoiding Christmas inclusive? Everyone knows what country we're in and that most people celebrate Christmas, so why would anybody be offended by saying "Merry Christmas"? This matters because if you don't see it as an "inclusive" move, then it just comes off as a way to snub people who do celebrate Christmas.
That is, I can kind of believe that many liberals honestly see these things as "inclusive", but from the outside they actually seem "exclusive". The whole liberal platform is supposedly to tolerate and include, but in practice they seem to hate and exclude about 40% of the country. I just can't see very much of the tolerance and inclusion from my perspective.
Sorry if I'm a bit all over the map, but I'm trying to understand, not debate.
If I'm Jewish in America, I'm used to people talking about Christmas, so I'm probably not gonna be offended by it anymore, but if someone said something to me about the right holiday I would probably appreciate it.
Whether "happy holidays" vs "Merry Christmas" counts for much instead - since it's still no more personalized to me, especially when still wrapped in red and green - I can't really say myself, since I celebrate Christmas personally, but I don't have any reason to disbelieve the non-Christians who've told me they appreciate things like that. It's something to say "hey, we realize that you exist!"
It seems like there should be a way to do that without feeding into the whole Culture War thing. The holidays generally fall on different days. Why not say "Merry Christmas" on Dec 25 and say "Happy Hannukah" on the appropriate date(s), etc.? That would be more inclusive without appearing to snub anyone, and it would be interesting to hear about holidays you might not otherwise be aware of.
I've been immersed in both sides of this for different large parts of my life, but I find it hard to place the blame on both sides. The Christians who get upset seem to be demanding a right of exclusivity that I find unreasonable.
I don't really care about placing blame. My objections are often because I don't feel that liberal ideas actually achieve what they claim to be for. I'm often for the stated ideal, but against the implementation. In this case I feel that the implementation is not very inclusive but does seem exclusive, and it could be done a lot better.
Hanukkah is an 8-day festival, not a 1-day holiday. Which day do you propose to be the "correct" one and what gives you the right to make that decision? Sometimes Christmas falls during Hanukkah; would it be okay to say Happy Hanukkah on Christmas?
I don't celebrate holidays. I play along for friend & family gatherings. I'm frequently told "Merry Christmas" several days in advance, and several days following, December 25. I hear Christmas music for an entire month leading up to the day, and frequently for weeks afterwards. Why should "happy Hanukkah" be limited to a single day?
It seems as if you're operating from an axiom that many other discussants do not agree on. No wonder the conversation seems like it's folks talking past each other.
You compare Christmas to Halloween and Thanksgiving, which are in the US secular holidays. The most common argument I've heard for wishing everyone "Merry Christmas" is that many people celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday. That's fine for anyone who does so, but it's not a correct assumption in general. I celebrate Christmas because it is one of a set of holidays that tells the story of Christ's birth, and it's an important part of the liturgical calendar. I do not want Christmas to be secularized. I know I do not share my approach to Christmas with random coworkers, and in particular with non-Christians, and I do not want to pretend I do. It's a religious holiday for me and it irks me to treat it otherwise.
So it seems like you're trying to cheapen or appropriate my religious observance to be a cultural marker instead, a marker of "being American". But the colonies were established in large part by religious dissenters, including in particular Puritans, who were highly critical of the secular Christmas. So you betray the roots of the American nation in forcing secular observance of Christmas on people.
Having abandoned both American ideals of religious liberty and Christian ideals of sincere and sober religious observance of the birth of Christ, what, exactly, are you left with?
If it's a religious holiday to you, then that's great. That's a good reason for not wanting it to be considered part of American culture, but it doesn't change the fact that it is.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
It's pretty much that simple. It's just good manners and common sense.
As someone whose heritage comes from a fairly radical side of European Christianity, the overworship of Christmas itself is idolatry, so I have no sympathy from that point of view either.
Do you have a citation for that because I have only ever seen research pointing to the opposite.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summ...
As far as I know, the body count of police killing unarmed black people far outstrips any body count of BLM protests.
> The Post’s data shows police fatally shot 13 unarmed Black men in 2019.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fac...
> Over the past five years there has been no reduction in the racial disparity in fatal police shooting victims despite increased use of body cameras and closer media scrutiny, according to a new report by researchers at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
...
> Among unarmed victims, Black people were killed at three times the rate (218 total killed), and Hispanics at 1.45 times the rate of white people (146 total killed).
https://news.yale.edu/2020/10/27/racial-disparity-police-sho...
We're limited to collections of news stories. The collections seem pretty broad - the criteria is basically "killed during a BLM protest"[1][2]. PolitiFact goes with 12-19 by June[3]. The Guardian counts "at least 25" by October[4]. (I don't have a count for the past three months). This counting of deaths of course opens the door to all kinds of quibbles over which deaths "count", e.g. it's not possible to prove one way or the other whether this woman in Minneapolis[5] would have been raped and killed without the cover of the rioting.
Is this sourcing acceptable to you, or do you really need a proper study?
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/george-floyd-protests-deaths_... [2] https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/07/0... [3] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/aug/07/facebook-p... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-kill... [5] https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/05/29/woman-found-dead-i...
This kind of hyperbole discredits anything else you would have to say.
I mean, the rest is basically just unmasked racism, so it also discredits itself. So there's that.
If we're even less lazy, we can click through to more 2015 articles, such as this other Fox one https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/not-everyone-thinks-starb... which does the "both sides" thing in a nice convenient not-just-an-example-from-Arizona-dude way:
> An article posted to Breitbart London even called the plain red cups part of the “War on Christmas.”
> “This is a denial of historical reality and the great Christian heritage behind the American Dream that has so benefitted Starbucks," wrote Andrea Williams of the U.K.'s Christian Concern.
> But not all Christian groups feel the same way. Paul Batura, vice president of communications at Focus on the Family, said snowflakes and carolers are not symbols of Christmas.
> "I wonder if we’re not overthinking or overanalyzing this,” he said. “Christmas isn’t found in a cup or in a snowflake. Instead, it’s found in the hearts and minds of those of us who believe that God sent His only son to earth in the form of an innocent, helpless baby."
Growing up in evangelical media, these aren't caricatures.
"Twitter is 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about it"
I think you could substitute "Twitter" with just "social media"
This is standard journalistic practice - one person is happenstance, two people is coincidence, three people is a trend.
Point being, it is not just the systemic political issue of being for or against that SA suggests shores up the Weak Man, but their beliefs themselves which shift and flow and pop in and out of existence. The only antidote to not fall in with the politics or the belief is to maintaina sense of self doubt and empathy. (And i say that as someone who also self diagnosed with much research, but also doubts).
And even that doesn't protect you from other peoples' beliefs. Has no one read Foucault's Pendulum?
Sadly Dan Brown didn't.
But no. That book has an undeserved reputation for being difficult.
When I see my neighborhood adorned in coroplast signs every year reminding me that "it's okay to say Merry Christmas", it becomes believable that someone will get butt-hurt about a Starbucks cup. Then again, perhaps the weak man argument here is of those that are against saying "merry xmas".
I don't know how to present this theory in a falsifiable way, but I get the distinct feeling that a lot of these culture war battles are conjured up out "weak man" arguments in a hyper-real manner.
Buzzfeed writes an article about how conservative nuts (more properly a single conservative nut) is boycotting Starbucks because there's no Madonna in their latte foam. Blue tribe clicks the article and laughs at Red Tribe for being so stupid. Red tribe clicks the article and decides "Blue tribe is laughing, at us!". Red tribe grifter starts accepting donations to buy Starbucks cups and throw them into a paper shredder. Blue tribe starts a Foundation for Freedom from Religious Latte Art demanding depictions of Satan in their lattes. Suddenly everyone has extremely strong feelings about something as absurd as whether or not there should be a Madonna depicted in their latte.
In many cases, it seems the original nut turns out to be someone who spent most of their life at reality TV auditions.
If you take that one step further down the sequence of events, though, we'd be aiming that critique at the Christian side of the media that's been making hay about the "War on Christmas" for decades. Find one person saying something, or one company doing something you can take the wrong way, use it to tell your audience they're under attack; lather, rinse, repeat. Growing up in it, I'd hear about this stuff in youth group, in chapel in school, even in not-officially-religious classes like History. Before the internet, it wasn't easy to escape that bubble if your parents were deep into it.
Or do posters here really think there really are a lot of people out there trying to eliminate Christmas?
To be clear there are people who take offense to the phrase “Merry Christmas”, which is what some traditionalists (Christian or not) take issue with, but no one is making a weak man argument about them either, i.e., no one says most people take offense to Merry Christmas.
That's why weakmen are super weapons. You have to use them. If you do look at your own tribe and say 'yeah that person is a loon' then you risk the whole tribe itself, and you can't have that.
If someone chooses to say "happy holidays" rather than "merry Christmas" out of sensitivity or political correctness, that does not constitute cancelling. The term cancelling is usually used for deliberate and sustained social pressure and boycotting campaigns. As far as I am aware this has not occurred on any significant scale to try to stop people from saying "merry Christmas".
In the other direction, however, this has very much happened. Conservative Christian organizations have called for boycotts of companies who don't mention Christmas in their Christmas marketing (or, in some cases, even just for mentioning non-Christian holidays) repeatedly over the last two decades. [0]
To avoid weak-manning here: I'm sure this is a pretty fringe group and not at all representative of Christians in general. But it is clear that the campaign to force people to use traditional Christmas greetings and imagery has always been more prominent and aggressive than the campaign to abolish traditional Christmas greetings.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_controversies#Retail...
When you interact with public employees and 10 out of 10 say "Happy Holidays", it becomes a social norm. Breaking that norm then feels uncomfortable, and people who are already biased against Christians will seize the opportunity to say that Merry Christmas is insensitive.
You can only say that the messaging for "Bring Back Merry Christmas" is more aggressive - the tactics on the Happy Holidays side are certainly ruthless, because there's a profit motive behind it.
In this case, as you said yourself, it's just a plain and simple profit motive. Companies want as broad appeal as possible, so they instruct their employees to use neutral greetings. There is no intent there to destroy the traditional greeting, so it's clearly not cancelling.
I think it feeds into the feeling of victimhood. It seems all-encompassing. Which makes these people sternly-pro-Merry-Christmas.
Your last few sentences are right: the people I know who are outraged about the war on Christmas are Christians of a certain type who feel like they have not received what has been promised to them. They're well-off, have houses built for them in nice new suburban developments, have a couple cars, don't seem like they're hurting for money or jobs, but they've just really got a chip on their shoulder about other people getting what they deserve.
I'm probably re-centering a category right now :) This was a very interesting article and it's fun to try to find all the examples of this I can.
This creates a harmful tribalism.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/an-unmerried-woman/
From that article, Walmart tries to play it off like they only "suggest" their employees say Happy Holidays.
But I've worked at Walmart, and if you've ever worked at a place like that, you know that people who don't follow "suggestions" are quickly fired.
They do other dumb things, like for a long time plenty of people wouldn't buy any music there, because they censored it. Here's the New York Times making a parallel argument to yours, 25 years ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/12/arts/wal-mart-s-cd-standa...
Of course, in that situation it's somewhat likely that Christians comprise most of the group that Walmart is trying not to bother.
There are good reasons to know your audience before using the greeting, but it’s very rare to hear it at all in many parts of the US, which does seem strange when 90% of the country celebrates Christmas. Since Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Halloween are completely fine to say to a stranger I think it’s fair to say the greeting has been canceled, for better or worse, regardless of original intent.
Yes, its very controversial to claim that is the general view.
> here’s a Huffington Post article that argues against it
But…it doesn’t argue either against saying Merry Christmas or that it is “rude” to say it (or that anything is “rude”.) It argues that it is illegal (a form of workplace religious discrimination) for your boss to compel you to say it, outside of narrow circumstances where it may be a bona fide job requirement.
This confusion of arguments that being compelled by government, an employer, etc. to do X is improper and/or illegal with arguments that choosing on your own to do X is immoral, rude, etc. is sadly common.
“If you do celebrate Christmas, then please don’t forget that there are many other religious holidays being celebrated in December. Some of your customers and coworkers may not want to have Christmas shoved down their throats.”
It definitely might be clickbait but it was one of the first Google results. Clearly at least some people think the greeting is “shoving Christmas down their throats”
There are two views here, broadly, about canceling 'Merry Christmas':
a) it's a popular view on the left
b) it's not a popular view on the left, but some on the right have acted as if it is
View b) is equivalent to agreeing that this whole thing is an example of a 'weak man' argument, and a) is equivalent to disagreeing with it. I struggle to see how anyone could read camjohnson26's comments and conclude that they meant b). They cited a link as evidence of a) and complained when I suggested it wasn't persuasive.
1) The left saying: "Those silly righties are mad at Starbucks because they won't put Christmas decorations on their cups!"
2) The right saying: "Those silly lefties hate religion so much that they get mad if you tell them merry christmas!"
You started this thread by mentioning the first one. Someone replied to you that 'bring merry christmas back' was indeed a thing. Then camjohnson26 replied to them, saying "They wouldn’t feel like they need to bring Merry Christmas back if the overly politically correct voices hadn’t tried to cancel it in the first place."
Note that the first half of that (people trying to bring the greeting back) is a reference to weak man 1, and the second half (people trying to cancel the greeting) suggests that weak man 2) wasn't an exaggeration, it really happened. It is that latter half that I responded to.
Does the left think it enough to meet some arbitrary threshhold that allows us to call it 'widespread'? I dunno, that sounds totally subjective and semantic. Luckily that's not what we're arguing about (I just used that term as a short way of saying 'as widespread as the right has claimed'). What we are arguing about is: were the claims from the right about the left being against 'merry christmast' roughly accurate, or a big exaggeration? I claim the latter, and camjohnson26 (I'm fairly sure they would agree) was saying the former.
I'm a liberal, living in a very liberal city. I don't need you to tell me what the left thinks. Believe me, I've heard plenty of politically correct stuff from my side that I think is silly (and presumably you would agree). This just isn't one. You can go to a collectivist bookstore with BLM posters in the window, where the History section is labeled "Herstory," and still be wished a Merry Christmas by the person running the register.
You're welcome to disagree of course but this might be a good time to step back and remember where the goalposts started. You didn't set out thinking this was something you would have to prove with evidence. You said, "I don't think it's controversial that..." and then a bunch of people said it was.
In any event, I don't think it's super important; this seems like it is clearly an example of a 'weak man', because however strongly the left does or doesn't think it's rude to say Merry Christmas, it seems incontrovertible to say that Fox News presented us as believing it somewhat more than we do, and for the reasons discussed in the article.
Strongly disagree. Also, the first sentence of the article you link kind of contradicts you here. Please consider the possibility that this is one of those ginned-up-for-clicks things.
"the cups story may be one person but it's reflective of a larger group" is exactly the "weak man" fallacy/mode of group stigmatization that the blog post is about.
Maybe that's why they are so upset?
But for sure, I happily celebrate the cultural holiday known as Christmas.
What's worse: There are some people who celebrate Christmas but who choose not to wish others a "Merry Christmas" out of fear of offending them. Peak woke.
As in the OP, there's probably somebody you can point to who holds any dumb position you want to argue against, but there isn't really an anti-Christmas side of the public discourse in America.
Likely more prevalent are the people who don't like corporations, public services, etc. wishing everyone Merry Christmas year after year while ignoring the holidays of other religions.
To avoid all of this, many places are switching to "Happy Holidays", except there are a not-insignificant number of people who are upset by this and feel that companies/governments should be saying "Merry Christmas" because they should be aligned with Christianity.
I have yet to see anyone get riled up.
1. Think of something crazy upsetting someone could say.
2. Find the 3 people who have already said it on Twitter.
3. Write your article quoting them, and watch the clicks and rage roll in.
2015, and, like, every media outlet in the country, not just Buzzfeed.
> I was really curious to figure out who all of these Christians were that held this opinion and, lo-and-behold, it was one single Christian from Arizona.
No, it wasn’t.
Now, sure, it became a controversy because of one internet (and former radio and TV) evangelist in Arizona, who already had substantial attention because of other campaigns he’d launched that year, but it got picked up by a lot of the publicly Christian political and media voices already engaged in the “Christians victimized by secular society” narrative, (including eventually President Trump, because it was active that long.)
To be fair, I also saw many times more people “fighting back” against that mostly invisible enemy.
People like moral signaling, they usually get their ideas from others / ridiculous media stories.
When "everything is political," it is sufficient to isolate an opponent from a conversation because in that view, all power comes from attention and approval of others, because they have been trained to be psychologically actuated by shame. It's why, "not a good look," has become a standard put down, even among some men. This idea of litigating for power is why many people don't like lawyers, and when half the middle class is educated to act like the seediest of prosecutors, you get that thing that's wrong with someone you just can't put your finger on. I have some actual friends like this, and we find a way, but part of why there is so much hostility in the culture is because one side never thought they would need a new bare-metal up critical framework to conceive of how awful we've educated some people to become. One of the SSC rules was "be charitable," which is the value that the weak-man style of argument throws out. It's basically being uncharitable. So glad to see Alexander articles on HN lately.
I don't think I hear "not a good look" the same way you do. in particular, I don't hear it as a putdown, more of a cynical comment that expresses something like "I don't necessarily oppose what you are saying/doing, but I hope for your sake that other people don't notice".
> This "weak man," tactic is taught in undergrad, the idea is to destabilize an opposing view to neutralize the person holding it. The emphasis is on "neutralize," because the underlying strategy is based on the premise that there is no truth, only power, and for an opponent to be neutral, or do nothing, means there is no resistance to your agenda.
I'm having trouble fitting this in with what I currently see in the world. it doesn't seem like either "side" would be content with my neutrality/silence. they seem to want nothing less than full and vocal alignment on every issue.
> This "weak man," tactic is taught in undergrad, the idea is to destabilize an opposing view to neutralize the person holding it. [emphasis added]
Where is this taught?
> when half the middle class is educated to act like the seediest of prosecutors [emphasis added]
So you're bringing in economic class now, and for some reason explicitly assigning this behavior to prosecutors.
But look at half (or more by the time I click 'reply') the comments here. They're discussing whether or not there is a War on the War on Christmas, they fell into the same rhetorical trap the article itself is discussing. This is great entertainment and a wonderful way to clear my mind at the end of work on a slow Friday.
These tend to be the vast majority of arguments that people see because controversy gets clicks and the more reasonable people are straight up afraid to appear to support the other side by disagreeing with the more unreasonable folks with a shared alignment.
This is a good description of something I’ve failed to put into words myself. Thanks for this.
Is there any way to avoid this?
People are aligning with complex theories with no underlying basis, other than their feelings and utopian visions, and then getting emotional about it.
Surround yourself with people who disagree with you, but are good at it.
By making a complex argument, you deceive others into thinking that you have refuted another argument, when in fact you have not done so; the fallacy of your argument was hidden by it's complexity.
1. "the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving." -- Oxford languages, via Google; https://www.google.com/search?q=sophistry (retrieved 2021-01-22)
2. "(of a machine, system, or technique) developed to a high degree of complexity." -- Same as [1], above.
I’m never a big fan of using these words that take some ancient group of people or school of thought and turn the name into an adjective which has at best a loose connection with the reality of what they were.
Does the dictionary definition fit? Somewhat, but maybe not the best choice.
I could also try to deconstruct some of the common complex-to-refute arguments, but I'm afraid the message would get lost in the following controversy.
What I'm saying is my perceptions following experiences I have had myself.
I suppose one could disagree with me by showing counterexamples of generally recognized public arguments for this and that and how they can be refuted simply. You have a point though. I'm not sure how I could avoid that criticism and still make an effective argument.
That would be quite interesting to read nonetheless, if you’re willing to do so.
In order to refute the claim though requires an appreciation for subtlety which the people doing the arguing don't often have. The refutation is complicated, the claim doesn't need to be.
Beyond just being a strategy for individuals, doing this contributes in a tiny way to lowering the temperature of the whole room.
The conclusion is that people must always fight to defend against splash damage because as left unchecked it is a "super weapon."
I think this is a pretty interesting viewpoint.
The hard part is the bar for opening up is impossibly high. There's also the chicken/egg problem: someone can't get to know you without you opening up, and you can't open up until someone gets to know you.
I feel like this is a big factor in increasing loneliness among adults.
It seems the strongest way to win arguments nowadays is to simply go on the offensive and ignore their claims. The opposite side has millions of tricks.
First, they hope you are stupid. If not, they will pretend to be stupid, and not understand what you are talking about. And even if you refute them, they may come back the very next day and claim that they won the argument.
When you post online, hundreds of lurkers may read your comment. If you don't even dignify the enemy with a response, they are much more likely to buy in to your emotional rhetoric.
because it is now behind an authwall.
Or to put this another way, there are people in my orbit who feel perfectly comfortable spouting "Men are the worst!" and "all men are stupid!", but would be extremely upset with you if you swapped the gender in those statements.
Him choosing that specific aspect might itself be a weak man.
the author has popularized another term for this -- motte & bailey doctrine: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bri...
> So the one problem is that people have a right not to have unfair below- the-belt tactics used to discredit them without ever responding to their real arguments. [i.e., the Jew in czarist Russia or "not all men are like that"]
> And the other problem is that victims of non-representative members of a group have the right to complain, even though those complaints will unfairly rebound upon the other members of that group. [i.e., the guy that complains about the Westboro Baptist church]
So how can one hold bad actors accountable without discrediting the larger group? For that to be possible, I think one has to know the critic is acting purely in good faith, to know that their aims are just, e.g., to target Westboro and not as a wedge to undermine organized religion. Unfortunately, most of Twitter seems to be bad faith by people seeking affirmation for call-outs and satisfaction from venting.
We're not going to find a way to punish a bad actor because the cost of risking the tribe is too great.
When seeing it in others you may be able to present better responses, especially if you're aware of how your response might be perceived.
(Not disagreeing with your post, just discussing a complication.)
Looking at this thread and how people are (respectfully) pointing fingers at each others (and their own) arguments, it seems clear to me that avoiding such arguments is generally hard.
When you want to support or illustrate an assertion you make with an example, the example will virtually never apply to everything the assertion covers. Often it might not even be possible to find an example that covers the majority of some group/trend/phenomenon (or know what constitutes a majority in the first place).
Maybe this means to be more judicious in making general statements (probably not a bad idea). But in some respects, for example a trend among recent occurrences of something, you have nothing but isolated events to discuss in the first place. Even if there is some objective quality behind it, requiring yourself to never refer to individual data points (as that could be construed as weak-manning) might make it impossible to get at the core of it. And that's before going into how your arguments are perceived.
And yes, the above is intentionally (overly) general. Examples would help illustrating the argument, but are immediately subject to weak-manning. I wonder what others think on this.
This was probably the first time I began to think of the mid-2010s as a past time to reminisce about.
When I think about centralized social media, I think about an ultra-fine grain subdivision and liquidation of human social interaction into a digitally mediated and transparently priced attention economy. I see an infinite screen pixelated by individual smartphones manned by individual human beings, being driven by a PageRank algorithm like a display controller. To visualize something like that is to visualize an incredible feat of human engineering. But it is also to visualize an intrinsically uncanny valley and a hellish cacophony of synthesized speech and high-strung puppets.
Do you get the sense that all the interaction is ginned up to seem more compelling than it really is, that it's sort of an arms race. Well, maybe it is. Maybe it is the same cold war which never really ended, simply accelerated in a new era with new weapons, and of course horrific new ways to enact the same old brutalities.
It's certainly an interesting thing to look out for.
“I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they’re ‘so speshul’ and go see a competent doctor.” - "you're so right! That is why I did a lot of research before I diagnosed myself. I'd really like to see a doctor about it as soon as I can."
"I am a proud atheist and I don’t like religion. Think of the terrible things done by religion, like the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church. They try to disturb the funerals of heroes because they think God hates everybody. But this is horrible. Religious people can’t justify why they do things like this. That’s why I’m proud to be an atheist.” - "these people are totally nuts! I as a Christian can not understand how they can justify their actions. No way this is something real Christians would do."
And so on...
As the article states:
> Alice, for her part, didn’t bother bringing up that she never accused Beth of being careless, or that Beth had no stake in the matter. She saw no point in pretending that boxing in Beth and the other careful self- diagnosers in with the careless ones wasn’t her strategy all along.
The whole conversation is opened with the thinly-veiled intention of discrediting (all) self-diagnosed autists in an uncharitable bad-faith argument. Do you think you'd be somehow able to steer it away from this very specific intention of the original author?
I will admit that this opens the door for other readers to not be swayed by the original "argument" (at least not to the same degree). But overall the question remains how you avoid fighting a losing battle.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/200186/five-key-findings-religi...
40% of Americans not only 40% of Christians are young earth creationists.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati...
This means 55%, a majority, of Christians in America are young earth creationists.
To use his term which I love ignorant people who believe crazy things are the center of the category.
If a "wing" of a party gains more than, say, 20% of the primary vote in that party, then it can no longer be dismissed as a fringe.
It definitely shouldnt be called “weak-man” though, it should be called something like “evil synecdoque”...
"False majority" seems descriptive
There are definitely worse things that people can say about men than "I hate that some men do x", such as "all men are trash." (I've actually heard someone acting men should not be offended by this). I'm more offended by that sort of talk, but I think when people stop being careful about the words they choose, it will easily devolve into the latter.
Can't remember who said or how the quote goes. (Any help? Some kind of eponymous law?)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-roman...
What does this have to do with "gratifying one's intellectual curiosity"?
> Likewise, when a religious person attacks atheists who are moral relativists, or communists, or murderers, then all atheists have to band together to stop it somehow or they will have successfully poisoned people against atheism.
This seems like a bit of a major step. While I agree that "weak men" are a slippery trick to argue against a movement, I don't think that they necessitate a total defense of all aspects of the movement. Saying that atheists should defend murderers or Christians should defend the Westboro Baptist Church because they share the label of Christian is taking a good base idea and following it to false conclusions. What I took out of the argument around "weak men" was that communities need to be more self-policing rather than more broadly defensive. I was waiting for the point where Scott Alexander would say "thus Christians must declaim the Westboro Baptist Church instead of allowing themselves to be lumped under the same label." Additionally, there are parallels drawn between feminism and mens rights ideas that seem to be false-equivalencies, or at least false-parallels.
In the comments I encountered a blog post that addresses some of these uneasy feelings I had https://heartheretic.blogspot.com/2014/06/talking-about-prob...
I am pretty sure that the person who orders the cover-up finds the rapists despicable. But they still do it, because scandals “splash” and tarnish way more than the peeople involved...
"People are saying such-and-such" and then showing a Tweet from some random nobody (i.e. 'weak man') to validate the fact - is how so many narratives are created.
Or - by simply taking the tiniest, most innocuous bit of human interaction ('some guy on a plane did what?') and blowing it up into a national story, as though it is in any way representative of anything.
This is how in a sea of actual facts, the general truth can easily be distorted, and they are, all day long.
Part of the reason for this is because we connect with human stories, not data.
Steven Spielberg's advice to Mike Bay about Transformers, was 'It should be about the relationship between a teen boy and his car'.
We like Judge Judy and TMZ, just all frazzled up in ornamental ideology that makes us feel smart for reading the New Yorker.
If we were really boring and sober, the world would be a different place. (I'm looking at you, German politics, which someone maintains it's sanity even with 'actual Nazis' in the midst, not these America yahoo versions.)