Social Media Outrage/Cancel Culture

[swampfrog]

Yay!

However, didn't they say they already had plans to change the names?

Yes. I'm sure there's some internal memos that would be very interesting reading.

[falafel]

I will happily continue to shop at Trader Joe's.

Yay!

However, didn't they say they already had plans to change the names?

[swampfrog]

I will happily continue to shop at Trader Joe's.

A few weeks ago, an online petition was launched calling on us to “remove racist packaging from [our] products.” Following were inaccurate reports that the petition prompted us to take action. We want to be clear: we disagree that any of these labels are racist. We do not make decisions based on petitions.

[swampfrog]

Could be many places for this, but this interview with Glenn Loury is an excellent read. Discusses why if we accept that groups have differences, we have to accept disparate outcomes. Covers a lot of topics in Question and Answer format.

They say, “you’ve never been rousted by the police. You don’t know what it’s like to live in fear.” How much authority should that identitarian move have on our search for the truth? How much weight should my declarations in such an argument carry, based on my blackness? What is blackness? What do we mean? Do we mean that his skin is brown? Or do we mean that he’s had a certain set of social-class-based experiences like growing up in a housing project? Well, white people can grow up in housing projects, too. There are lots of different life experiences.

I think it’s extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative-authority move when it’s played. It’s ad hominem. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity? I want you to think about that for a minute. Were you to flip the script on that, you might see the problem. What experiences are black people unable to appreciate by virtue of their blackness? If they have so much insight, maybe they also have blind spots. Maybe a black person could never understand something because they’re so full of rage about being black. Think about how awful it would be to make that move in an argument.

The critique of structural racism is too long to quote, and snippets don't do it justice. Not claiming it doesn't exist, only that treated as a wholesale explanation if falls well short.

This as a summary isn't bad, but there's more nuance in the article.

What is the nature of the world that we live in? Why would I ever expect that there would be parity across the board between ethnic, racial, cultural, and ancestral population groups in an open society? It’s a contradiction because difference is a very fact of groupness. What do I mean by a group? Well, it’s genes, to some degree; it’s culture; it’s networks of social affiliation, of intermarriage and kinship. I mean the shared narrative, the same hopes, the dreams, the stories. I mean the practices of parenting and filial piety and whatever else there might be.

A group is a group. It has characteristics. Those characteristics matter for whether you play in the NBA. They matter for whether you learn to master the violin or the piano. They matter for whether you pursue technical subjects or choose to become a humanist or a scientist. They matter for the food that you eat. They matter for how many children you raise and how you raise them. They matter as to the age when you first have sex. They matter for all those things, and I think everyone would agree with that.

But now you’re telling me that they don’t matter for who becomes a partner in a law firm? They don’t matter for who becomes a chair in the Philosophy Department somewhere? Groupness implies disparity because groupness, if taken seriously, implies differences in ways of living life. Not everybody wants to play the fiddle. Not everybody wants to dunk a basketball. Not everybody is frightened to death that their parents are going to be disappointed with them if they come home with an A-minus. Not everybody is susceptible to being swayed into a social affiliation that requires them to commit a violent crime in order to prove their bona fides. Groups differ. Groups are not evenly distributed across society. That’s inevitable. If you insist that those be flattened, you’re only going to be able to succeed by imposing a totalitarian regime that monitors everything and jiggers everything, recomputing and refiguring things until we’ve got the same number of blacks in proportion to their population and the same number of second-generation Vietnamese immigrants in proportion to their population being admitted to Caltech or the Bronx High School of Science. I don’t want to live in that world.

[swampfrog]

Oops

And the Washington Post settles with Nicholas Sandmann also.

Edit: too late.

[Walter Sobchak]

First lawsuit filed, likely more to come.

Yeah, that's a punchable face. #SJBH

I hope the kid gets some money from this.

This is dumb. The kid and his parents won't get any money. The suit will be thrown out quickly. And the kid is used again as a pawn in some weird culture war, this time by the #MAGA crowd. He loses, and his name will forever be known for ill. Now that is sad. The adults in his life are not helping him.

Embedded Tweet

Another swish for mbn.

[swampfrog]

Fantastic analogy for the outrage mobs running amok on social media platforms.

The assessment of Trump is right on point.

Conflict on the IoB is shaped not by the strategic intentions of its nominal leaders (who largely have none, beyond keeping the conflict profitably alive and growing), but by emotional energy flows in the field of mooks. The best knights on the IoB, such as Trump, operate by an entirely reactive philosophy: “there go my mooks; I must find out where they are going, so I can get out in front and lead them.”

[swampfrog]

Fantastic analogy for the outrage mobs running amok on social media platforms.

A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage.

The connection to crash-only programming is more than cosmetic, but it will take some set-up before I can establish the conceptual bridge.

Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs.

[swampfrog]

This is great. Exactly what some of us have been saying about mainstream media.

https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

Mentioned in this thread. Sullivan is done also.

[SeattleUte]

This is great. Exactly what some of us have been saying about mainstream media.

https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

[Sleeping in EQ]

James Lindsay continues to get better at articulating his critique of Critical Social Justice theory.

This was a good read.

Just wonderful.

[MartyFunkhouser]

https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-just...d-open-debate/

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

I think one of the most significant signatures to this letter is Gloria Steinam. She is a feminist hero and many of the people that would call her a hero are engaging in this behavior.

[swampfrog]

Steven Pinker cancellation attempt response

Opening paragraph:

The Woke are after Pinker again, and if he’s called a racist and misogynist, as he is in this latest attempt to demonize him, then nobody is safe. After all, Pinker is a liberal Democrat who’s donated a lot of dosh to the Democratic Party, and relentlessly preaches a message of moral, material, and “well-being” progress that’s been attained through reason and adherence to Enlightenment values. But that sermon alone is enough to render him an Unperson, for the Woke prize narrative and “lived experience” over data, denigrate reason, and absolutely despise the Enlightenment.

[swampfrog]

One would hope that a pandemic would at least keep these discourses on the back-burner. No such luck. Of all the things we need to know about how this diseases operates, this is the one we need to analyze now?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...ictims/609250/

I worry the virus is disproportionately infecting and killing people of color right now—and we don’t even know. I worry the pandemic of racism is worsening the coronavirus pandemic right now—and we don’t even know. And Americans don’t seem to care to know.

[Omaha 680]

queer communism? WTH?

Such fringe studies make me chuckle. It's as if a few people get together and create a branch of study that says if only they specifically could be free to do whatever they want all the time without the pressures of traditional society norms or the reality that everyone needs to be concerned about providing for themselves what they can, life would be transformed into a utopia. I don't know what exactly they are imagining in their heads, but the practical reality would look something like the Manson family commune in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.