When articles drop off the front page like that, it's because of user flags (and sometimes automatic flamewar detection, IIRC), not anything the mods are doing.
There's been plenty of discussion over the past month or so on why this might happen. IIRC, check some of the Peter Thiel-related submissions from around the time he donated to the Trump campaign.
Sometimes it's a function of user flags (which affect the ranking even if [flagged] isn't visible) which is a more democratic process, and sometimes it's a function of what whether the mods determine that the discussion is constructive and valuable to the overall health and purpose of the HN community. I don't know if the mods always comment when this is the case, but they have in the past done so.
My understanding is that there are also algos at work, for example posts that are very young but have many comments fall faster, as a way to negate flame wars.
You're right. Forgot about those when I initially commented, and noticed a sibling had already mentioned them so I thought it was gratuitous to update mine.
This is probably a good move. They should also suppress fake news sites that are obviously not satire, but are meant to mislead. I can't believe I actually support preventing people from sharing things, but somehow this propaganda has to be exposed. This is a sad state we are in now.
There are several major "right wing" corporations that do just that. As a consumer you can make your choices accordingly (Hobby Lobby and Chick-Fil-A come to mind)
You might be inclined to grant someone permission to stand on your lawn, but chances are if they stood on your lawn and then held up a sign that said "Send Jews to the gas chambers!" you'd likely ask them to leave. And if they refused, you'd eventually force them to leave.
And calling that expulsion "enforcing your world view" would be a very extreme way of explaining what you did.
It's voluntary and free. If you don't like it build your own or go elsewhere. It is their community. Clearly they have made their choice over the cost/benefit of continued association with some people.
I'm not a fan of the "alt-right" or a lot of its subculture. I also don't find it particularly "alt", as much as it is "far" right. It is a lot of the ideas that powered the NSDAP enveloped in the language of the Internet and memes, with the targets broadened from Jewry to non-whites in general. However, I'm also not a fan of suspending these accounts for controversial views if they are not harassing people on the Twitter platform with the Twitter platform; it is crossing into a murky area that feels remarkably like political censorship. I know Milo et al were calling to brigade/raid users like Leslie Jones, and that's crossing the line, and it's clear he was banned for a reason.
But let's scope this out for a second, neutrally: if the subculture is sharing information that is against the political status quo to its own adherents, and it is organizing for its beliefs, should it be censored because its belief is fundamentally unpopular, especially when it is so far maligned from the political views of Silicon Valley? If Twitter aims to be a neutral platform, dissent takes more forms than just those that we agree with. It's being able to express, share, and debate those views that we can come to agreements on things.
The alt-right movement is in the crosshairs because a lot of people are still reeling from the election, myself included, and people are trying to find any and every excuse as to why Clinton didn't wrap this one up like it seemed to be happening in the exit polls and on the coastal cities. The alt right is popular, full of rage, and more than a little scary to some of us, but I don't think that means they should be instantly suppressed. Only hearing what politics are agreeable to you is how these types of movements rise in the first place.
It feels like political censorship because it is political censorship. Those with the "correct" political views can basically tell people to kill themselves, or worse, while Twitter turns a blind eye to literal terrorists (of the blowing themselves up with bombs variety) using their platform to spread their message.
You can say whatever you want about how terrible the people being banned supposedly were, but Twitter's priorities here are crystal clear. This was an ideological purge first and a (terribly subjective) ToS enforcement action second.
It's unfair and highly inaccurate to say that Twitter is turning a blind eye to terrorists on the platform. However, I'd be interested to know what radical leftist organizers are doing to use the Twitter platform and how many of them have ended up banned as well.
Hamas' official account had been around since 2010 [1].
235k accounts is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Twitter accounts are like email addresses, cheap and disposable. It took proliferation of articles like that one (and probably more importantly, a lawsuit) for them to get off their rears and do something about it. And this is after multiple reports over months, against unambiguously hateful accounts, some of which I personally participated in.
For some reason, it takes no such media shaming or legal action to ban, limit, or otherwise mess with the speech of the political right. Milo can just mention someone, someone else will say it's brigading, and off we go to the races. A celebrity can talk about getting hate tweets, and the CEO will drop what he's doing and personally reach out to them, while ISIS propaganda goes completely unchecked.
Feelings are less important than terrorist propaganda, full stop, end of story. No matter what you think of the political right, this is a disgusting inversion of priorities.
Unfortunately, the nature of Twitter makes debate unlikely to end in agreement. Twitter is just trying to improve the environment for its users so more people will join and stick around. Most people find the "ideas that powered the NSDAP" quite disgusting.
> Most people find the "ideas that powered the NSDAP" quite disgusting.
If we are truly building a society of tolerance, whether or not one has a visceral reaction to an idea should not stop whether or not one can discuss and debate it. I'm not a neo-Nazi, but I've talked at length with them about their views. I will give anyone a few minutes to explain what they are about, try to listen to it neutrally, and form my own opinion. My personal conclusion of neo-Nazism is that it is a way for white men that feel they have no economic opportunity to blame a convenient target, and they try to rationalize Nazi Germany's domestic infrastructural successes as a reason why the country was doing what was right. I think it is a prime example of scapegoating, and I find it violent and hateful.
If we are paying lip service to tolerance and acceptance of alternative worldviews to make ourselves feel like better progressives, we are doing our views a disservice and acting more hypocritical than those that blatantly wear radical views of censorship and discrimination.
Sure, but not everyone enjoys spending their time engaging with Nazi rhetoric. There are plenty of places outside of Twitter where you can actually choose whether or not to have a discussion.
> Sure, but not everyone enjoys spending their time engaging with Nazi rhetoric. There are plenty of places outside of Twitter where you can actually choose whether or not to have a discussion.
You could say the exact same thing about literally any view and it would be equally true.
No, in this case I disagree. You could say the same thing, word for word, about any real-world ideology and it would be equally true. If you think I'm wrong about that, I would like a concrete example.
(Maybe you think I'm trying to say that all ideologies are equally valid, but I'm not. I'm just pointing out that that particular comment is so reasonable-sounding and hard to argue with precisely because it doesn't actually say anything of substance.)
"Sure, but not everyone enjoys spending their time engaging with vegan rhetoric. There are plenty of places outside of Twitter where you can actually choose whether or not to have a discussion."
By this logic, Twitter should ban pretty much any ideology.
Let's look at it another way. Ban all hate groups, or don't ban any of them. However, don't pick and choose.
I don't agree with Neo Nazis. I hold Neo Nazis with the same contempt that I hold feminists. Why not apply the policy for all hate groups?
For example, in Australia we refuse to acknowledge the approximately 25% of violence and abuse by females within the household. The worst case statistic is NSW ("Twice as many female victims (19,488) as male victims (9,261) in New South Wales."). Not one of these victims is given a voice!
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/...
You will see that men who are victims of domestic violence are turned away from support groups. This doesn't surprise me as there is an aggressive campaign to ignore male victims from media, government and community support groups.
I conducted a Google search from 2015 to determine that 100% of references in the Australian media stated that domestic violence was a "male only" behaviour and the only victims represented were female. I checked over 2000 references! In other words, 2000 of 2000 references represented one gender with relation to violence.
If you listen to Cassie Jaye (the feminist who created the documentary The Red Pill), she says that feminists in media refuse to acknowledge male victims because it will take money away from female victims. In other words, if you are a boy or a man who is beaten or abused, feminists insist males get no representation or support. It's almost a complete media kibosh throughout the western world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itSTzV29bS0
So, why is Twitter not banning prominent feminists?
or, why isn't Twitter banning all media outlets who support such hateful messages that insist that some victims of violence should be ignored? This is a fundamental breach of human rights! You can't get much worse!
Check media references for an absence of any of the following,
80% of suicide victims are male
25% of domestic violence is by a female
90% of incarceration is male
You will also notice that Cassie Jaye said she was suppressed by feminists. Cassie also said that she was advised by feminists not to represent any issues that impact men. This would explain the media suppression across all western countries.
If you're going to ban a hate group, why not include feminism. It's certainly one of the biggest and most active groups today and actively violates human rights. I've given plenty of pointers in this single post alone to build evidence.
There is almost universal silence from the overwhelming majority of feminists on this topic. It's a sad indictement of the overwhelming majority of the feminist movement. Check media, documentaries from 2016, support groups, even discussion forums. The message is consistent and it consistently breaches human rights.
So, should Twitter ban hate groups? If you really must silence hate groups, then ban them all. And like you, I dislike spending so much of my time fighting hate groups like feminism because there is no impartiality on the topic. How extreme do you need to get before people will speak up?
Feminism isn't a hate group. Feminists (at least the overwhelmingly vast majority) aren't trying to abuse or kill men. It's true that female-on-male abuse is ignored too often, but I don't think you can blame feminists for this: they're just focused on other issues.
They push a subtle hate for sure with sexist undertones.
I had a recent conversation w two feminists where I pointed out a fact as reported by Harvard that women are getting paid less because they don't negotiate.
I hadn't even made a comment on the underlying reasons and two women jumped all over me.
They lumped me in with the root cause, made simplistic comments like "oh so it's the women's fault!" and challenged me to start a class teaching women to negotiate.
While I don't think that's a bad idea, it's BS to put blame on me and challenge me to do more than they've done because I'm a successful man that owns a few companies.
Over half my primary company is women and if you asked any of them they'd say I'm the best boss they've had and I empower them to succeed. I trust them. I've also changed a life by hiring a homeless person. I take chances on good people making career changes.
I've got a small company of about 20 employees and a bunch of contractors. I've done more for women in business than both of the 2 feminists combined. Yet I'm the bad guy. Funny they consider themselves liberal and do little for their causes.
It's absolutely ridiculous how feminists push blame and are so divisive. They think everyone is out to get them. Facts mean nothing. They want to talk about prior injustices and ignore the first "why".
Merely pointing out the fact that women don't negotiate means you think it's women's fault to feminists. I recognize we've gotten here for a variety of reasons but if business rules currently dictate you need to negotiate, maybe learn to negotiate and use research from industry experts to tell a compelling story and make more money.
Sure there are asshole sexist males out there but the women I know that know negotiation are on par with men.
Feminists also ignore how women treat other women in business. Throughout the companies I've worked for and my own, something like 95% of issues with coworkers involved women with other women.
> but I don't think you can blame feminists for this: they're just focused on other issues.
The problem is, liberals are vilifying Trump supporters for exactly that, being focused on other issues instead of social justice. They say that it doesn't matter that you disagreed with Hillary's liberal policies, putting conservatism over social justice makes you a complicit racist.
The most prominent example I've seen has been with abortion. People say they voted for Trump because of Hillary Clinton's policy stance on abortion, so they end up being accused of racism because making abortion a bigger dealbreaker than social justice apparently makes them complicit racists.
I disagree. I think there is most definitely a boundary between people with different opinions and people with opinions that are fundamentally at odds with living in a civilized society. "I don't like Goldman Sachs" is an opinion you can debate on its merits. "Kill all the Jew bankers" is not. The boundary is somewhere in between those two.
I can't speak to the particular accounts banned by Twitter, but the alt right have a carefully developed vocabulary designed explicitly to sneak across that boundary.
> I think there is most definitely a boundary between people with different opinions and people with opinions that are fundamentally at odds with living in a civilized society.
In this statement, you are unilaterally making a rule as to what ideals are OK to hold as part of "civilized society", and where the boundary is. Stating your society is more "civilized" than another is an opinion in and of itself, and arguably those who hold views opposite yours likely think your societal views also contain hints of barbarism or offend human nature.
There are multiple ethical views that humanity and even this culture have held throughout the past century alone that the predominant society has now decided are reprehensible, that other nations consider reprehensible, and then there are also views that have been considered reprehensible now widely accepted by this culture.
Personally, my beef is not with whether or not people agree or disagree with these views; the argument in this subthread is external to my original message:
I'm tired of the Valley's progressive ideology consistently espousing acceptance, free organization, and free speech when we as an industry keep taking steps that seem against it when we disagree with the information provided. It is the message of social media: people should be able to communicate and unite worldwide. If we aren't radically upholding this belief, then we need to change the mantra to be aligned to what it actually means: associate with us, our ideas, and our worldview, and we will give you a voice. If you don't, your voice on this platform will be stripped, even if you are not engaged in attacking those that disagree with you.
""I don't like Goldman Sachs" is an opinion you can debate on its merits. "Kill all the Jew bankers" is not. The boundary is somewhere in between those two."
I don't agree. "Kill all the X" is a hate speech and, depending on context, a threat of violence -- we already have tools/laws to act against such, so there's no need for more censorship.
I'm giving it as an example of something unequivocal. There is a ton of equivocal hate speech and Trump and his supporters were a boundless font of subtle, implied hate speech that never quite said what everyone heard. What about statements like when Trump said "2nd amendment people" could stop Hillary? Or simply spreading disinformation to demonize minorities by saying he saw Muslims celebrating in NJ? Or the classic line of being pro-white instead of anti-minority ? None of that is illegal but it doesn't mean it deserves a free open forum.
"None of that is illegal but it doesn't mean it deserves a free open forum."
Why not? If we silence them on few webpages, you think they simply will disappear? Trump as a president should be the wakeup call for everyone that forced, artificial politeness and political correctness won't make problems disappear.
so we shouldn't build a society of tolerance then, that way we don't have to debate nazism for eternity. i can't imagine a greater waste of time than talking at length with neo-nazis.
Full tolerance allows us to monitor those that might be harmful. You can't convert most of them but you can watch them.
And sometimes the people the majority thinks are being intolerant will end up being right.
Bottom line though: look at all the intolerant societies with no real framework. They don't fare well. The Founders of the US Constitution believed in unalienable rights for a reason.
Twitter has to choose between upholding the ideal of tolerance (4Chan is a good example of this) and trying to create a community of tolerance by running off the intolerant crowd.
I don't think there's a happy medium in this case because the alt-right seem to really like disrupting conversations that are inconvenient to them (instead of just tuning them out) and Twitter's short-form messages make that extremely easy because the conversations are so disjointed and often misinterpreted to begin with.
Thank you for the link. I didn't know there was a formal name for this.
> the alt-right seem to really like disrupting conversations that are inconvenient to them
That's aggressive behavior, then. I'm defending the alt-right's ability to use Twitter for expression and talk with themselves, and with people that have shown interest in their ideas. If they're off brigading every source they disagree with all the time with harassment and memes, that's a different issue, and Twitter should be wielding the banhammer in an egalitarian fashion on all groups behaving this way (per the views they hold themselves to.)
>I'm defending the alt-right's ability to use Twitter for expression and talk with themselves, and with people that have shown interest in their ideas
I don't think this was an outright purge of the alt-right, just those they saw as ringleaders of abusive brigading. Alex Jones and other big names from that group are still out there doing their thing.
>Twitter should be wielding the banhammer in an egalitarian fashion on all groups behaving this way (per the views they hold themselves to.)
That's a good point. He's anti-establishment which currently makes him very popular with the alt-right since they can rally around his conspiracy theories about democrats/Israel/whatever else they don't like. So not self-described alt-right but someone who has been lumped into that pile due to some of his views over the last few years.
Unrelated but I have a sneaking suspicion the alt-right will break with him anyway as soon as he starts focusing more and more on conspiracies about Trump.
But at what COST. As a platform shaping measure, this is clearly an intentional measure to create a /specific/ different echo chamber. This is the mechanic that just created a Trump presidency.
that's assuming a lot. maybe trump won, more than anything else, because he was the republican candidate in a year that a two term democrat was sitting in the presidency.
It's fair to say I'm assuming an interpretation that's difficult to prove on its own merit, but the implied counter-interpretation here implies that it was perfectly normal for him to be the republican nominee in the first place, and par for the course. Tides go in, tides go out. You can't explain that.
It was Hillary's to lose but the D's did have 2 terms which made it tougher. Nonetheless, Trump gave her fodder daily. She lost to Obama when he was hardly known. Nearly lost to an old and little known socialist atheist/Jew. Email scandal. Benghazi. Whitewater. Pay to play laundering / vast personal riches. All the scandals from the 90s. Deplorables. Saying blacks and Muslims can't succeed regardless of circumstance / "professional never do wells".
Her supporters act like she was squeaky clean. When I chatted with them they had hardly no knowledge of her or Bill's checkered past.
I've heard people say she lost because she's a woman. That's like the QB throwing 4 interceptions and saying they lost because the kicker missed a field goal.
I don't see "alt-right" as being so similar to "far-right" based on my limited exposure.
I've watched some debates with Milo as well as Gavin Mcinnes. They are definitely not what most Americans would call "far-right" -- in that they aren't anti-gay, aren't anti-drugs, aren't socially conservative, and aren't particularly hawkish. They seem to dislike Republicans like Paul Ryan almost as much as Nancy Pelosi.
Milo recently did a profanity-laden pro-Trump rally dressed in drag. That's the "alt" -- it's quite different than what a person would typically call Republican.
"alt-right" is mostly just a term used by the Clinton campaign to label their political opponents as weirdos. I don't think I heard anyone using it before Clinton did. I suppose Richard Spencer used it.
Before the 2016 election, the term was "classical liberal". I don't know about Milo, but at least Alex Jones has described himself as a liberal.
This article is racist af, and the comments are even worse.
This article basically has no source, and is a bunch of anecdotal race war bullshit. The only "facts" are so lacking in context that they are meaningless. Like number of total attacks for example....
I'm not a Breitbart reader but, after reading your comment, clicked through your link to see what was what.
To claim that it has "basically no source" is not true. The Breitbart piece links to the German-language article on which it is based. I'll link it here again for you:
The translator whose statements are featured in both the Brietbart piece and the original German article is allegedly a Christian Eritrean woman who has requested anonymity because she fears reprisals from the Islamic asylum claimants with whom her work requires that she interact.
Other people quoted in the German article are indeed identified by name.
Disclaimer: I am not vouching for the veracity of their statements, the integrity of the original German-language publication, or of Brietbart.
I can hardly call myself an expert on the "alt right" either, but the difference is in use of term.
When leftists think "Right wing" in the US think of the Christian theocracy. However, conservatism is only one sect of the right. The right is also reactionary, and the alt-right is definitely reactionary. I'd argue the alt-right fits nicely into Wikipedia's definition of far-right politics [1].
They have played Christians for a long time, but I suspect they have also over-played their hand, and are losing that support base, mostly via war, corruption, and generally taking the Christians for granted while completely disregarding their core issues, justice, mercy, compassion, &c.
There are other socially liberal issues outside of gay rights and drugs. On some of those counts Gavin is very very conservative (for example he is very very sexist).
They're all crap labels. They contain no knowledge.
What confused people call "liberals" aren't so about firearms and markets. "Liberal" is from the latin word for "freedom".
SJWs are not liberal. They don't want free speech.
CA is not a liberal state by looking at its taxes and firearms laws.
These are authoritarian ideas.
Rectification of names... Labels and Knowledge are totally independent things.
Freedom can include the freedom from harasment, which is a curtailing of speech. That's a liberal idea. The other alternative is 'let people say anything they want and they can just learn to deal with it', which doesn't work with e.g. death threats, harassment, etc. That's why one freedom might be more important than another.
People who claim it's a negative are usually upset that they can't attack, belittle, or harass other people for their own amusement, I've found.
Agree. The first thing I thought upon reading this was: would Twitter ban an account with the following description:
"dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world."
Undoubtedly not. The only difference, of course, is s/African/European/g.
I'm a liberal, but I feel that if this election has taught us anything, it should be that suppression of "undesirable" views only makes them stronger. It's almost as if the Founders foresaw this somehow, and having done so, created some kind of First Alteration of the Constitution to protect this kind of speech, realizing that attempting to suppress it would cause more harm than good.
I do realize that Twitter is not the government, but the same principle applies.
I feel like the left seriously damaged their ability to fight racist ideas when they abandoned the idea of equality.
Now, the left calls colorblindness and "all lives matter" racist. (Remember when Martin O'Malley was destroyed for saying that?) They create advantageous standards based on race, and even exclusive positions for non-white applicants. (For example, at the BBC.)
And I too doubt they would object to "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world."
MLK's dream that one day people would not be judged by the color of their skin was abandoned by the left before the alt-right rose to power, and I believe that helped the alt-right rise to power.
Institutional racism is real and because of that it can't be undone by just pretending everyone is equal all of the sudden. It is much more nuanced than you make it out to be.
That being said, many of the people that twitter banned are just straight up racist and xenophoic/intolerant speech should not be protected.
Any evidence of this claim? Cause as an outsider to the US I see a black president and a lot of reversed-racism (affirmite action I think you ppl call it)
After the whole year of Clinton propaganda the Clinton News Network is a joke to me, it's basically NK tier "news" (propaganda).
Besides that what You said is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
Please give me some scientific articles (there should be a plethora of them considering how hot this topic is) with actuall statistics and measurments that would support this claim.
In my opinion this is a victim complex (similar to the Jews and Holocaust) where people want to milk historical events for their own personal gains
Black Lives Matter means Black Lives Matter as well.
The All Lives Matter movement, as a reaction to BLM, is essentially saying that they don't, and that the racial struggles of American Blacks are irrelevant.
That is the reason why All Lives Matter is considered abusive.
> The All Lives Matter movement, as a reaction to BLM, is essentially saying that they don't
That's not what "all" means. It's turning the name of the movement by implying it means "only" Black Lives Matter. So All Lives Matter is saying that not only Black Lives Matter.
The question is why people of color have to come up with "BLM" movement. Why not Latinos, White or some other racial entity (not yet, because they are not demographically significant)? Because there had been numerous instances, when black folks have been murdered by police brutally without any repercussions from courts or government. So, this is not the time for all lives matter, yet.
Mind, since ~70% of the US population is white, that does imply whites are less likely to be killed by the police.
Predicting the likely response to this, of course, we get into the (surprisingly hard to accurately work out) question of what proportion of crimes are committed by people of various races, and to what extent that figure is manipulated by conscious / subconscious bias on the part of law enforcement. (It's a swamp, and I don't feel like arguing about it tonight, I just wanted to acknowledge it's complicated.)
Edit to acknowledge: yes, it's more like 60% white if you're splitting out Hispanic-origin into its own category. Still, disproportionate.
If we solved (1), everyone would be equally likely to suffer from police brutality. This would make us more likely to then go ahead and fix (2), because suddenly it would no longer be something which mostly happens to long-downtrodden minority groups.
Mind, if we fix (2) first, it's somewhat plausible that we might continue in a situation where minority groups are disproportionately targeted by the police, and we just go "eh, it's not that bad, we're not shooting them all the time any more".
> Predicting the likely response to this, of course, we get into the (surprisingly hard to accurately work out) question of what proportion of crimes are committed by people of various races
I find this argument (the one you are referring to) to be spurious. We don't calculate the number of rapes committed by men and there is no subsequent societal bias against men as criminal by default (or suspect by default). Not to mention the mindset leads to a feedback loop: "Of the bugs found during team code reviews, 50% were in Bob's code" will lead to everyone going through Bob's code with a fine tooth comb - and finding yet more bugs, while Stacy's code never gets a second glance regardless of its quality[1].
Yes, but whites are less likely to be suspects in crimes (per capita, since whites live in nicer areas on average), so the polices won't stop them as often.
> Mind, since ~70% of the US population is white, that does imply whites are less likely to be killed by the police.
The thing is most violent crime is commited by blacks even though they are about 13% of the population.
So please don't act like evil cops just hunt them down for fun, that's the biggest gripe with BLM. They act like it's 1900 when that's just BS
> When they shouted, "Black lives matter!" a rallying cry of protests that broke out after several black Americans were killed at the hands of police in recent months, O'Malley responded: "Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter."
O'Malley was eviscerated for that statement, even though he clearly agreed with the sentiment that black lives matter.
I can understand the concern that some have that turning "Black Lives Matter" into "All Lives Matter" could conceal the reality that people with darker skin have been disproportionately impacted by our Justice system, but I also agree with the contention that overreaching and overreacting to a statement that seems completely reasonable to people not deeply aware of the discussion can ultimately have the opposite effect and serve as fuel to movements like the alt right.
Yes, "black lives matter as well". That is a statement that I now understand and strongly appreciate the power and full meaning of, after spending a good amount of time and emotional and intellectual effort on it.
The problem is innocent people who happen onto the conversation, interpret it at first glance, not unreasonably, as some insane asshole saying "only black lives matter", engage in good faith on that basis, to uphold ideals that we can all agree are right... and subsequently are piled on by a mob who agree that the offender has just instantly and irredeemably proven themselves to be one of the worst things they've been taught it's possible to be. With a real, non-zero chance of their real lives being actually, materially ruined as part of this public shaming.
The problem is things like "Black Lives Matter" being used as a shibboleth[0] -- an excuse to form a gleeful lynch mob, giving everybody a pleasurable and community-affirming chance to engage in collective norm-enforcement against The Other.
The problem is an atmosphere where I'm so paranoid about even attempting to have a good-faith intellectual conversation about this that I have to create a throwaway account to remove a not-at-all implausible chance of having my life ruined for even engaging on this topic at all.
And this isn't even getting into the atmosphere that seems to really be setting in, where agreeing to listen to someone has become tantamount to agreeing with everything they say. That's the really frightening one.
There was, and only somebody who has no exposure to black troubles; or who simply doesn't care about them could understand the problem.
Also, please don't pretend that one thing destroyed him... that's nonsense that you're peddling. But it's unsurprising that somebody peddling racist lies is a liar.
Here is how Donald Trump described said candidate's apology for that: "And then he apologized like a little baby, like a disgusting, little weak, pathetic baby, and that's the problem with our country," [1]
Make no mistake, Trump and the alt-right are incredibly hostile to anyone who doesn't see Black Lives Matter as an evil, racist attack on white people, who don't think that blacks complaining about police violence against them is the real racism.
I may not have liked him, but I thought he was a more viable candidate than Clinton or Sanders. Certainly less intrinsically offensive than Clinton, who was a truly awful candidate.
You are interpreting "all lives matter" to mean this.
It could also mean that black people are not especially target by the police and that outrage at law enforcement is misplaced. For example we know that the rates of police violence against black people vs white people roughly mirrors arrest and conviction rates.
Now you might consider this incorrect, but I think it's a debate that has to be had in the open and not shut down by calling people racist.
My preferred analogy to use here is that saying "it's not just black lives that matter, all lives matter" is like going to your fire department and saying "it's not just houses on fire that matter, all houses matter".
Yes, of course, they do. But some houses need immediate attention because they're in danger.
Then it's a failure in marketing, as the fire deparment doesn't market itself as "department for throwing water at houses". Maybe BLM should be more clear about its goals?
I'm not really up-to-speed with US politics, but I know it's horrifying how easily and with impunity the police have been killing black people. Still, "Black lives matter" isn't a great slogan, and calling "all lives matter" racist definitely seems like an overreaction. I'm not familiar with ALM's positions, though, so maybe it's a racist organization in disguise, I don't know.
> Then it's a failure in marketing, as the fire deparment doesn't market itself as "department for throwing water at houses".
Well, the fire department does tell people that they need to pay attention to things that might cause fires. The response isn't "well, people should pay attention to all dangerous things! What about car accidents?"
I mean, this isn't a difficult concept to grasp. When someone is raising money for orphans, people don't usually say "but what about money for veterans?" When people are raising awareness about breast cancer, you don't usually tell them "hey, we should be raising awareness for all cancer." They don't get angry that Smokey Bear focuses on forest fires ("Oh, house fires don't matter to you?").
People understand single-issue campaigns for most things, but some suddenly have an issue with it when it comes to African Americans deaths. This naturally raises a few eyebrows.
Yeah its a knee-jerk reaction and sad. The more accurate slogan would be "Black Lives Also Matter" but that isn't as effective. I think we all really understand that's what "Black Lives Matter" means. The real question is, why the strong counter-reaction? Why the sophistry around the slogan? What is that covering for?
Why are you belittling it as a knee-jerk reaction and sad?
A group of people is experiencing horrible and unjust treatment. The implication of the situation is they don't matter, and the correct reformist statement is that they do matter.
Black lives matter also is not the correct statement. It is the correct understanding of the while situation but you need to keep in mind the nuance of language.
I don't live in the US, so I'm out of that particular loop, but I was talking to an american friend of mine about police shootings and he told me about BLM, and I said "but it seems to me that the issue isn't that the police shouldn't be killing black people, it's that the police shouldn't be killing anyone!".
It seems that the argument has been framed around black people's mistreatment in general, which is fair enough, but, when specifically talking about the police, it seems to me that getting the latter to be less trigger-happy would alleviate the problem for all races, which is why I find the focus on black people a bit odd.
Only if you don't know the stories. Its famous that white serial killers are treated better in some circumstances, than black people selling cigarettes on a street corner. One gets taken to McDonalds on the way to jail; the other strangled and killed.
I think it's a great slogan. If everyone (society at large) aleady believed all lives matter then it would be a dumb slogan. It's a great slogan because currently black lives don't matter in many people's eyes. In my experience the only people who don't like the slogan either don't think black lives matter or are absurdly blind to the reality of racism in this country.
The controversy isn't because it's a bad slogan. The controversy is evidence of it being the correct slogan.
> Black Lives Matter means Black Lives Matter as well.
Agreed.
And that implies that Black Lives currently do not matter, which hopefully we can all agree is a big overstatement.
I understand that movements need simple powerful slogans to chant and make bumper stickers from. That's fine. But let's not treat these three words as some definitive analysis of race in America.
All lives matter may be distasteful (I don't actually know anything about it and am not making a judgment one way or another) but calling it "abusive" is exactly the sort of over the top PC nonsense which fuels the alt-right.
EDIT: Perhaps I am wrong here, as I said, I know nothing about All Lives Matter, can you justify calling it an "abusive" movement?
All lives matter is a direct response to black lives matter and is trying to nullify the claims of the latter. It is functionally abusive because it actively fights increased awareness of the racism that BLM was(is) working towards.
The statement 'All Lives Matter' not as response to BLM would have been fine, but come on. No one here is blind to the current discussion to that extent.
I don't think it was a case of abandoning equality, as much as it was about defering 'colorblindness' until there is actual equality. However, the people on the left espousing these ideas seem to have forgotten to tell everyone about this, and assumed the rest of society would figure out what they meant. They haven't, and I think that's where a lot of the problem is for them.
HN is a bad place to discuss this sort of stuff because you're always risking karma, but here goes.
As a liberal, I will say that liberals drastically overplayed their hand the last 8 years. Many of us have been saying for a while that the language, tenor, and actions of recent liberal movements was ultimately counter productive.
I understand and share the demand to be treated decently and equally, but admittedly things kind of got out of hand. Micro-aggression, safe spaces, trigger words - all things that have good intentions but the people who advocated for them were often, to put it kindly, un-diplomatic.
With "demographics" on our side, many of us constructed this alternate reality where America, ready or not, was going to bend to our will - our worldview. And so we poked the bear. Over and over and over again. Then it woke up, tore our heads off and left us wondering what the f*ck happened.
I'm not sure if you intended this meaning, but it sounds like you see (your) liberal view as the ultimately right one which will inevitably triumph in the end, its just bad tactics right now.
I didn't notice this until after I got back to the US after some time in an authoritarian country, and I noticed that liberals had this similar authoritarianness of being unwilling to consider the merits of the other side, a feeling of we are certainly right and we are going to enforce it on everyone else through legislation. California just banned single-use plastic bags; it could have simply charged a fee commensurate with the costs of cleanup. Or the hot-button issues. Abortion: women's rights, yes, but the conservatives have a point that it is also killing babies. Homosexual marriage: people's rights, yes, but there are some good arguments to the other side, too. Usually issues have two sides because there actually are two different ways of looking at the problem, and to say that the other way is ignorant, intolerant, wrong, etc. is really not respecting the other side.
(Full disclosure: I am a conservative. I am not saying conservatives (!= Republican) are any better, certainly we have our own failings.)
I like your analogy about the bear, btw. I think you are probably right on. And even as a conservative, I was just as shocked as everyone else. Hopefully this election will get a good dialog going and people actually trying to understand the other side. That would probably make it worth it.
>I noticed that liberals had this similar authoritarianness
IMO this is what distinguishes a traditional liberal from a a progressive. For me, a liberal is basically libertarian with a belief the state can be used to ensure the rights of citizens are administered evenly.
IMO, if someone's actions aren't depriving another of life or liberty, the state doesn't have much standing in regulating that activity. Progressives believe state power can/should be used to protects their rights and their feelings. But, depending on the issue, you'll find conservatives taking the same stance.
Gay people getting married deprives no one of anything. Conservatives that want they're feeling protected are no different than the "SJW" so many of them rail against.
Like all things there are some grey areas. For example, the trans bathroom thing. I legitimately see both sides on that. Abortion is another I see both sides on and believe compromise is the best way forward.
You'll find "authoritarians" on both sides of the political spectrum. In some cases (like abortion) conservatives have their heart in the right places. So do progressive/liberals (environmental issues, for example). In other cases, both sides can begin to see the state as a tool to unnecessarily curtail the liberty of their countrymen.
> if someone's actions aren't depriving another of life or liberty
This requires definitions of what "life" and "liberty" mean. Once you choose these definitions you must ensure they are consistently applied to all your arguments.
> Gay people getting married deprives no one of anything.
What does "deprive" mean?
If we continued this discussion debating the definitions, the key would be ensuring they are applied consistently to all other claims by both parties. This is practically endless.
Maybe we need a new dictionary that is more specific and uses examples. Just like Stack Overflow Documentation - they realised that the key to good documentation is examples.
> For example, the trans bathroom thing. I legitimately see both sides on that
Really? I don't. It's a weird thing to care so much about.
> In some cases (like abortion) conservatives have their heart in the right places
Do they? I guess you could argue that cruel laws like the one Pence signed in Illinois are the only recourse they have for what they consider a moral battle.
I'm not sure how you can explain away fighting abortion while simultaneously fighting sexual education, contraceptive use, and welfare for those people who choose to keep the baby when they have no real hope of raising it well without help.
I agree with you. It wasn't something any thought about before. But once it made its way into the public discussion, I understand how some people would be uncomfortable with it: especially people who don't know any trans people.
>'m not sure how you can explain away...
I can't and I don't. I think people like Mike Pence are assholes. My personal stance is we should use the age of viability (as arrived at by scientific consensus) as a legal cut off.
> Abortion is another I see both sides on and believe compromise is the best way forward.
How would such a compromise look like?
> In some cases (like abortion) conservatives have their heart in the right places.
Right, but this is already your personal judgement. For example I personally feel that the conservative stance on abortion is cruel and creates more suffering.
Stop legal abortions at the age of viability as arrived at through scientific consensus.
>I personally feel that the conservative stance on abortion is cruel...
In some cases, it is. I'm not agreeing with all the anti-abortion arguments. I have also talked with "progressive" family members that have a cold/cruel absolutist view of it. In their mind, 8 months was fair game, because choice. When it comes to abortion, the assholery cuts both ways.
> Stop legal abortions at the age of viability as arrived at through scientific consensus.
The age of viability could be arbitrarily early as technology progresses so I don't see how that is a good criterion.
Instead I would argue for several different criteria. One is consciousness. This probably only occurs half a year after the child is born. Another one would be the ability to feel pain.
Regardless of all other concerns, as a practical matter, I would argue that once a baby has some sort of independent existence from it's parents (once it came out as a matter of fact, no matter when) then it ought to be protected.
> In their mind, 8 months was fair game, because choice.
Is this really a practical problem? Abortions after 3 months (sometimes after 6 months) are somewhat controversial, but also very rare. For example, the numbers in Germany seem to be that 97% of abortions occur early.
The late abortions are almost always related to very serious disabilities and this is a completely different topic. For those rare cases I would again argue that sometimes good arguments can be made for the abortion. It is not a clear cut case.
I think most pro-life people are motivated by their empathy and need to defend the weak. Still they are very authoritarian on the issue and just can't admit the other side's moral views are valid. Abortion being allowed lets both groups live according to their moral views while the ban enforces pro-life view on pro-choice people.
Abortion ban as political issue and abortion as moral issue are a different matter. The latter is an interesting thing to debate in light of various ethical principles. The former should be straightforward (if it wasn't for desire to impose your morality on others and control their lives). Once you admit both sides have a point the only option left is being pro-choice. Pro-life argument is based on "I am right, you are wrong and I am willing to legislate against you even though your decisions have 0 influence on my life". It's very similar to legislating against gay sex in this respect (no influence on you but as you find it disgusting you are willing to legislate against it).
Abortion is the biggest issue I disagree with conservatives and even though I lean more right as I am getting older and as the left (in my view) is collectively losing their mind this one I really can't get over.
I don't think you have understood the pro-life stance, then. One of the main functions of sex is to produce children, and it is well-known that sex has a decent likelihood of producing children. So if you choose have sex, you are also choosing to accept the responsibility to care for any children that come.
This is kind of tied in with the Judaeo-Christian worldview, which says that sex is only designed to be done within the context of an unbreakable covenant (marriage), because it bonds you together in a deep way. Sex isn't just an act, which is why divorce is so traumatic. Children are supposed to be conceived out of an act of love into a safe, loving environment. (Everyone is aware that this is often not the reality, but this is what the design is.)
All that is hard to explain, though, so it's easier for people say "it's morally wrong because God says so," which really isn't a helpful or even appropriate way of interacting with non-Christians. An appeal to authority doesn't work if the other person doesn't accept the authority...
Obviously, you are free to reject this view. You can even reject the moral part, but I think that fundamentally the conservative stance is taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions. We take a dim view of people who get drunk, drive, and kill someone, because driving carries a responsibility. So why are we okay with people who have sex and then kill someone to get out of their responsibility?
Hopefully this makes the pro-life position more understandable, even if you don't agree.
edit:
A more radical idea would be to ban abortions but allow the parents to give up the baby at birth as a ward of the state. The expenses would be covered by a new tax.
We would solve all our problems at once if only we could come up with a process that would make parenthood opt-in, rather than opt-out... Like a reversible vasectomy.
> Gay people getting married deprives no one of anything.
There's an opportunity cost. I expanded on that a few days ago, and rather than rehearse it again, I'll link the answer I gave to "What do anti-gay-marriage people gain?": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12933668
>Homosexual partnerships, which are incapable of producing children, thus are of no benefit to the state, and can only be an unproductive diversion of funds which otherwise would be allocated to the benefit of heterosexual marriages which can and often do produce children.
i think you're completely wrong here. Homosexual couples do adopt children and given the number of children in the foster care one can see how a homosexual couple adopting an existing child may be of even bigger benefit to the state/society/planet than a heterosexual couple producing a brand new child.
Like with most of the "liberal/progressive" agenda - ecology/climate, marijuana legalization, education, healthcare, social safety net, death penalty abolishment, equal gay and others rights, etc... - i wish to think that this is we, humans, becoming morally better, yet it is also very easy to notice that when the wide society accepts those ideas it is almost always correlates ("correlation is no causation"?) with the fact that at the time of accepting of the given idea that acceptance is economically more beneficial than the not-acceptance. Well, better carrot than the stick...
> Homosexual couples do adopt children and given the number of children in the foster care [...]
A commonly cited argument, to be sure. Let's look at the magnitude of its impact in practice. Per federal statistics, roughly five hundred thousand US children are in foster care, which is roughly two-thirds of a percent of children in the US, or six per thousand. Figures on the number of children adopted by homosexual couples are somewhat harder to come by, but the highest number I found cited by a pro- group calls it about 22,000, which works out to about 4.4 percent of children in care, or 26 per hundred thousand of all children in the US.
Does this benefit seem likely to outweigh the cost to the other 99,974 children and their families? Does it justify a federal transfer of wealth from those families - who, given the fashion by which the tax benefits we discuss are distributed, will tend toward the lower end of the income scale - to those homosexual couples already wealthy enough to consider adoption and be likely to gain approval?
There's an argument to be made that these figures aren't representative because homosexual marriage is so new, and will increase over time, and that's fair. Let's look at the best possible case. Roughly 1.5 percent of the US population identifies as homosexual. (We disregard self-identified bisexuals in this analysis; when they make up their minds, they all but unanimously settle on heterosexualism.) Out of call it 240 hundred million Americans, if every two homosexuals equate to one marriage, we have 1.8 million couples. With half a million children in care, to reach full coverage, the overall adoption rate among those couples needs to be a bit more than one in four.
Does this seem likely? That's four orders of magnitude, and roughly a factor of three thousand, over the general adoption rate - and if we disregard intercountry adoptions, as we have throughout this discussion and properly should here, it becomes more like a factor of five thousand.
I do not dispute that homosexual couples, unable themselves to produce children absent extensive scientific and medical intervention, are more likely than others to adopt. But five thousand times more likely?
As I replied to your linked comment, you're conflating the arguments. If you believe that marriage should be allowed if and only if a couple bears/adopts a child, then make parenthood a prerequsite for marriage, there's no point in instituting complex heuristics to try to guess whether a couple wants kids or not beforehand.
If that were the argument I was making, you'd have a point. But it's not, although I can see how it would be misgathered as such.
The essential difference I see isn't one of individual probability of parenthood, but of aggregate. Not all heterosexual couples rear children, true. But the likelihood of a randomly selected example rearing children is vastly higher than that for a randomly selected homosexual couple. That, I argue, is what makes it worthwhile for the state to support the former and not the latter.
To go into individual personal detail, as you seem to think I advocate, might in theory be a natural corollary of what I describe - but to do so in practice not only massively increases the bureaucracy and cost involved and brings in creepy edge cases, but requires a panopticon state in order to work.
> But the likelihood of a randomly selected example rearing children is vastly higher than that for a randomly selected homosexual couple.
Okay, but why guess? We already register children and parents, so only issue marriage licenses when a couple has a child. That takes the guessing out of it.
> but to do so in practice not only massively increases the bureaucracy and cost involved and brings in creepy edge cases, but requires a panopticon state in order to work.
I don't see how, the state already knows who a child's parents are.
What about postmenopausal women, a point raised elsewhere in this discussion? What about men and women who simply aren't fertile, for whatever reason? What about families in places where births aren't registered? Such places still exist. What about the death of a couple's only child? Is the marriage thereby annulled? What effect has all this on divorce? "Creepy edge cases." And I can't see how maintaining all this additional information on which married status is now contingent (unless it's not!) could be achieved without a massive increase of bureaucracy, with its concomitant cost.
As I've just mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think a lot of this has origin in my failure to make clear that I'm not arguing one vast change in the status quo versus another, but rather arguing one vast change in the status quo versus no such change. (Status quo ante at this point, of course, but let's not get hung up on that point, when we've spent the entire conversation to date assuming that this is still a question meriting discussion.) Making marriage contingent on procreative capacity would be a vast change to the status quo. Permitting homosexual couples to marry, exactly as heterosexual couples do, is also a vast change to the status quo. There are cases in which vast changes to the status quo are not merely justifiable but utterly necessary. This does not seem to me to be such a case.
> What about postmenopausal women, a point raised elsewhere
in this discussion?
What about them? By your logic, won't be able to get married, unless they adopt, since they can't have kids, it's clear-cut.
> What about men and women who simply aren't fertile, for whatever reason?
Same, no marriage, unless they adopt.
> What about families in places where births aren't registered? Such places still exist.
Can't get married unless they register their kids. We can't have them benefitting from the institution of marriage if they aren't willing to do the legwork.
> What about the death of a couple's only child?
Could go either way, they gave it a shot. I'd be for letting them stay married.
> What effect has all this on divorce?
I don't know, what effect does not letting homosexuals get married have on divorce? Same deal.
> "Creepy edge cases."
Not really, though, they have pretty easy answers.
> And I can't see how maintaining all this additional information on which married status is now contingent (unless it's not!) could be achieved without a massive increase of bureaucracy, with its concomitant cost.
What's the additional information? It's literally "do you have any children? yes/no", which the state already has. You're literally advocating guesswork instead of using one simple and readily available piece of information.
I don't know, these arguments are so bad that I feel like you're trying to avoid recognizing that my solution is clearly superior. It makes me wonder what the real reason for you being against homosexual marriage is.
So instead of changing the tax code to be more specific (change the marriage tax benefits to child-rearing benefits) you're proposing we deny one of humanity's oldest and most important rituals (which means a lot to people intrinsically and symbolically, having just married my wife I know the feeling) to an entire group of people?
Yeah I feel like you're post-rationalizing a gut feeling, because you didn't think too hard about alternative solutions to the incentives/tax burden problem.
Going to the courthouse to do paperwork surely is not the oldest and most important ritual you're referring to, but that's the only part of it that the state has power over.
> instead of changing the tax code to be more specific (change the marriage tax benefits to child-rearing benefits)
That's actually closer to what I'd consider preferable, which would be no changes to existing marriage rights, but a federal civil union statute with marriage-level financial benefits contingent upon child-rearing. But such a thing would never be taken seriously on either side of the political crevasse - far too much for conservatives, far too little for progressives, thus decried from both sides. Is it too soon to bemoan the equation of nuance with assault in the modern American political environment?
> deny one of humanity's oldest and most important rituals [...] to an entire group of people
An entire group of people who have never in Western history, perhaps not even in human history overall, had access to that ritual, until the Supreme Court last year discovered in the Constitution a right heretofore unknown. It is very hard to overstate the extent to which this represents an upheaval of tradition, and such things don't happen in a vacuum - or, utopianism notwithstanding, without consequence. Being myself a member of that roughly one percent of the population which has been led to believe it may enforce its will upon the whole without fear of backlash, I don't think it is too hard to imagine what kind of "gut feeling" there might be somewhere in the back of my mind as I speak on this subject, as I've so often done over the last few years.
It's possible my analysis lacks accuracy, although that's yet to be demonstrated, and falling back on insinuations of bigotry doesn't really indicate confidence in one's arguments. But if you want to know what motivates me to concern myself with the subject in the first place, you need look no further than fear. I don't want to find myself in a war, and I really don't want to find myself in a war my side is all but guaranteed to lose - and one in a hundred isn't the kind of proportion that's conducive to a win. But some people seem to want to start one, and to put me and mine in it. They say it's for our benefit, but I've been observing and comparing their claims and their actions for some decades now, and I think they are lying. I also see no reason to expect that, when all the heavy things they've so blithely flung into the air start coming down on people's heads, they'll feel any need to stick around and share the horror they've let us in for. That seems to me like an outcome toward which it's eminently reasonable to look with trepidation.
We'd got by this long without being able to marry. We could've been satisfied with Lawrence v. Texas, which is an amazing accomplishment in its own right, and given it another generation or two before we told the rest of America again that it could take its morality and shove it even further this time. No, that's not ideal, but what is? Nobody ever promised us, or anyone else, an easy life. Nobody ever promised us a just world, by our lights or anyone else's. And the whole concept of progressivism revolves around gradualism, or so I'd been given to understand - the idea, I gather, being that of modifying morality over successive generations by a process mainly centered on education and subtle social pressure, rather than forcible reengineering of whole swaths of society at a time. Quibble though I may with the nature of such a process and the purposes to which it might be put, I at least have to admit that it has a reasonable chance of working. Trying to do everything in the space of half a generation like this is liable to get a hell of a lot of us killed, and to leave those who aren't worse off than they were at the start. I guess that's easy to contemplate for people who don't stand to suffer as a result of it. Here on what's liable to be the pointy end, maybe not so much.
Seems like I mistook what you represented and attacked what I thought you were. Text is a bad place for casting stones like I did.
I don't know about gradualism. You seem to have a better eye on the strategy than me, so I'll take your word for it -- though I'm struck by your cynicism about allies fleeing you when things get hard... but I can understand where it comes from. The number of people who would put themselves in harms way for someone else's fight is pretty low, so your numbers indeed look bad.
Damn. Thanks for taking the time to reply. I hope for all our sake america isn't as dogmatic and lazy as you think it is..
>The essential difference I see isn't one of individual probability of parenthood, but of aggregate. Not all heterosexual couples rear children, true. But the likelihood of a randomly selected example rearing children is vastly higher than that for a randomly selected homosexual couple. That, I argue, is what makes it worthwhile for the state to support the former and not the latter.
so, according to that principle you declared, the state clearly shouldn't support marriage (no new marriage licenses and no tax benefits to the childless couples with already existing licenses. Shouldn't the state just automatically annul the existing licenses of such couples?) after the age of 50 or 55 - i.e when that likelihood fells below whatever threshold you consider "worthwhile".
Why are you focusing on taxes? Current government marriage is too tied to religion anyway. Make all government "marriages" be civil unions, no tax breaks but all the legal advantages such as sharing insurance and not having to testify against each other etc (this is the main point of getting married currently IMHO). Then make having kids give you tax breaks.
This should sate the religious (they can have their marriage rules and do whatever they want they just wont have legal standing, we aren't calling the legal union a marriage anymore). It should also fix your issues.
Note that I dropped the word married here in my proposal. It would be a civil union, not marriage.
In any case, the legal advantages are things that make it easier to live together permanently. As far as I'm concerned, if we moved to my proposal you should be able to get a civil union just for that reason.
So, if two best friends or roommates want to have a civil union because it makes their life easier have at it. If irreconcilable difficulties occur, then they can sever the union in court much like today's divorces.
I read you comment. I get your point on why the state provides benefits for marriage. You're argument that civil unions should suffice misses the point and is ignorant of the facts. The fight for marriage equality is not because gay people are overly attached to the nomenclature, there's a real practical difference between unions and marriage[1].
Also you quoted me in your response, but your comments made no argument against my quote. Care to shed light on why people you don't know getting married deprives you of something?
The comment I linked constitutes the counterargument you request, and also addresses the question of civil unions in detail. It is fairly substantial, which is why I linked it instead of repeating the same arguments in my direct reply to your comment.
Surely this entire argument is an artifact of the governments uneccessarry intervention in private and family life. If we remove the governments role in marriage completely then people can decide for themselves what role it should play. Small government is a sensible ethos but never seems to be applied to these conservative hot button issues.
Is it, though? The argument I advance against homosexual marriage proceeds from the legitimate interest of the state in supporting marriage and reproduction.
If it helps any, I hardly more often find myself in agreement with conservatives on most issues than with progressives...
You don't need state intervention to encourage people to reproduce. I am sure that groups that believe in waiting until marriage to have sex would acknowledge church marriages as they always did.
Cynically you could argue that the state benefits far more from dysfunctional families who are more likely to become dependant. I would rather the government spend money on sex education and contraception for teens than supporting married couples.
Indeed you don't, but there's a lot the state can do to encourage and facilitate children being reared in stable families which can prepare them for an adult life which is a net benefit to their society.
Your cynical argument has value as well. The trouble is that the only even temporarily stable state thus produced is a single-party state, and you can't really kick everyone off the dole once you've finished using it to get where you want to go. It's an ongoing cost whose magnitude is only ever likely to grow over time, and the probable economic result is frightening.
I'm looking to find a balance between the interests of the state and those of its individual citizens. In a heterogeneous society, which all societies to some extent are, this is a complex question. To oversimplify it benefits no one.
And do you really want to equate homosexuality and infertility, which for all intents and purposes is a medical disorder? Is that where you want this conversation to go? It's not where I want this conversation to go. My sexuality is not a medical disorder.
I don't believe the intent was to call your sexuality a disorder, it was to demonstrate the dangers of applying rights by class instead of universally.
There's a difference between applying rights and inventing them. The latter is certainly worth doing when it's warranted, but it also strikes me as worth setting a very high standard for doing so, because in a state constituted as ours is, to create a new right instantly overrides broad swaths of existing law and precedent. Such potentially dangerous actions should not be contemplated except in a case where their absence perpetuates a harm so grievous and unjust that nothing less will do.
As I've argued at length in this thread and the comments I've linked therein, I don't think it's reasonable to consider that standard met here.
All I'm doing is examining the inconsistencies in your position. You seem to think the ability to reproduce is important, except for heterosexual couples, where it doesn't matter.
Again: no. I'm not sure what value you find in attempting to mischaracterize my argument by assuming results which do not follow from anything I have actually said.
Did the status quo not already include such a right, this would be a meaningful point to raise. As it does, and we are in fact discussing heterosexual vs. homosexual marriage, I don't really see what you're getting at with it.
You're saying you want to not allow X because of Y. When others point out that making Y the criteria allows disallows A, B and C, you argue those points away as not important; you still want to allow A, B and C. That's basically special pleading. My conclusion - and I assume the conclusion of the people arguing with you - is that Y can't be your real reason for disallowing X.
I'm arguing that this change to the status quo (ante), of heterosexual specificity in marriage, was not warranted. To support that argument, I'm explaining why that status quo has value which is reduced, rather than increased, by permitting marriage among homosexual couples as well.
As I've tried, perhaps unsuccessfully, to point out, this isn't the same as arguing that permission to marry should be contingent upon procreative capacity. I can see how it might come across that way, from a starting perspective of weighing one vast change to the status quo vs. another such vast change, and I think I've failed adequately to clarify that I'm approaching the question instead from a perspective of weighing one vast change to the status quo vs. no such vast change. It's a different question.
You're cherry-picking one of many possible arguments for the status quo, arguing that this argument should be considered in the particular case of same-sex marriage while ignoring other cases where it might also pertain, and then repeatedly moving the goalposts, but whatever.
You're also characterizing this as a "vast" change. What is the vast change here? From a logistical perspective, it doesn't exist: you pass a law allowing same-sex couples to do the exact same thing that opposite-sex couples can...and now they can go do so using exactly the same procedures as opposite-sex couples could before, and obtain thereby exactly the same benefits (tax advantages of joint filing status, visitation rights, and a host of other small preferential treatments given to married couples).
Speaking of those benefits: while they exist, it is categorically impossible to uphold equality of rights and opportunities while opposing same-sex marriage. The only to reconcile these two positions is to either a) pick one or b) redefine marriage such that it confers no civil benefits (which would indeed be a vast change).
I've addressed all your other points elsewhere in this thread, but the following is new:
> You're also characterizing this as a "vast" change. What is the vast change here?
That marriage should now be an institution open to homosexual couples as well as to heterosexual. Taken in isolation, it doesn't seem like a big deal to me, either. But nothing in society exists in isolation, and quite aside from the historical novelty of it, many millions of people regard this particular change as a very big, and very undesirable, deal indeed.
The impression I have is that those with whom I've argued the point here today see no reason to doubt that they know better than those many millions who share this opinion - so much better, in fact, that there's no point taking very seriously any argument, opinion, or belief, other than that which they themselves advance, espouse, or profess - or at least already agree with on all substantial points.
I was that confident once, too. Sometimes I miss it. But nothing is ever simple, and pretending otherwise can make fools of us all.
Your assertion that LGBT rights activists didn't come up with civil unions isn't backed in history. In fact during the time DOMA was proposed many activists supported civil unions as a compromise. It was the right wing that chose to oppose that as well as the ENDA bill even when transgender protections (for folks like me) were ejected from the bill. So, I suggest you correct your statements on that post to be historically accurate.
If I'm wrong, I'd like not to be, but I'm having trouble finding references to substantiate this claim. Would you happen to have something suitable at hand?
Google it, trust me. Plenty of noise on the right during the 1990s/early-2000s was in strong opposition to civil unions as a whole. Whether it was Falwell and Roberts or the RNC talking heads it was always responded to negatively. They saw it as a slippery slope to full civil marriage.
There is no such thing as a libertarian that believes the "state can used to ensure" anything.
One of the core tenants of libertarianism is the nonaggression pact, and with this it is impossible to use the state to "ensure" too many things domestically.
This next part will seem hostile, but think about it logically.
The reality is that people usually want to enforce and others the qualities that they project from their own shadow; for instance, liberals tend to be racist (wanting special privaliges for one race or another, depending on the circumstance), and sexist (wanting to elect a treasonous criminal based on it being a woman alone), and thieving (wanting to levy money from others via taxation, for their own causes), and yet these three qualities are some of the biggest claims that liberals make against libertarians and conservatives, that they are greedy, racist, sexists.
That's a bit of a caricature. You're fighting some imagined liberals that you can possibly find on tumblr, not out there in the real world.
There are really not that many fighting on the internet about who said what about who's sexual identity.
Liberals care about someone who has to work 12 hours a day for minimum wage, has no meaningful time with their children, has to go to work even when sick or risk being fired, is possibly just a broken bone away from homelessness, and is preyed on by the financial industry with fraudulent credits etc. Oh – and when they get home, there's Mit Romney on FOX saying poor people are lazy.
As a liberal I know that these people may have made poor choices. Where's the father? Shoulda finished school! Why do you need a cell phone? I just don't care. I see the willingness to spend money on anything /but/ the basic needs of people: the military, tax cuts to levels last seen in the 1920, etc. Indeed, conservatives seem to enjoy the suffering of others to such a degree that they're willing to spend more on people when they get to throw them in jail, with a bonus if it's a 20-year wait for the electric chair.
There are all sorts of questions about incentivizing people, motivating them and punishing them at the core of all this. The problem is that these questions are discussed only in terms of morality, not practicality. Every single industrialized country can serve as a laboratory, and time and again we see policies that improve lives.
>Liberals care about someone who has to work 12 hours a day for minimum wage, has no meaningful time with their children, has to go to work even when sick or risk being fired, is possibly just a broken bone away from homelessness, and is preyed on by the financial industry with fraudulent credits etc. Oh – and when they get home, there's Mit Romney on FOX saying poor people are lazy.
Ridiculous. I can't tell you how many times I've heard those sentiments expressed when they're tapping away on their iPhones. Liberals care about whatever they currently feel the most strongly about. And they see no issues with using the fruits of Chinese laborers working in slave-like conditions while simultaneously agitating for the increase of minimum wages.
Someone using an iPhone doesn't invalidate their views - are they supposed to suddenly stop using a phone as a statement to the world?
I see plenty of issues with Chinese laborers working in slave-like conditions. I'm happy to discuss breaking trade treaties and dealing with the consequences to give these people better lives. I'd say their condition is worse than the American poor - so if anything, we should bias towards them.
But, we have power to fix these things within the bounds of our nation and refuse to do it. We have more influence over our country than any other.
> But, we have power to fix these things within the bounds of our nation and refuse to do it.
We do not. Increase minimum wages, and we increase inflation and the unemployment rate. You cannot legislate prosperity. You can legislate poverty though, as Venezuela found out.
> We have more influence over our country than any other.
We are the consumers of the world. If we suddenly stopped buying consumer electronics/clothing unless it was responsibly sourced and three times (at minimum) the price they were today, don't you think labor conditions would become suddenly far better?
You cannot legislate morality. You can coerce it through economic pressures and incentives, but just legislating that people have to be nice to each other doesn't work. Hasn't worked throughout history, won't be starting now.
> There are really not that many fighting on the internet about who said what about who's sexual identity.
And yet, there are enough to create a terrifying chilling effect for anyone whose beliefs don't fit in to the narrative, especially in hard-left milieus like college campuses or major tech companies, and the rest don't speak up against them.
> For example, the trans bathroom thing. I legitimately see both sides on that.
How? Requiring trans people carry papers just so they can use the restroom doesn't strike you as just as little bit terrible? Trans people already use whichever bathroom they feel more safe and comfortable in: All these bathroom laws do is make life harder for members of what is already a very marginalized group. There's literally no positive aspect to them whatsoever.
> All these bathroom laws do is make life harder for members of what is already a very marginalized group.
I've had discussions with psychologists and trans people.
This illustrates the disconnect we're seeing between the left and the public.
Trans people are a vanishingly small proportion of the population, compared to the people who have lost jobs when their manufacturing jobs moved overseas.
Worrying about their desires (a tiny percentage of the population) and de-prioritizing the desires of a far larger group of people is insulting to the people who have lost jobs and can't find new ones. Talk about skewed priorities.
Also, if you thought you were Napoleon or black (and happened not to be black), you'd be roundly laughed at and diagnosed with a mental illness, and sent to therapy, resources permitting. Similarly, you can argue that Trans people have a mental illness - they think they're something they're not. It's just that the therapy to disabuse them of the notion is more trouble than it's worth.
Try to step out of your own perspective and look at it from the other side.
I'm not asking you to agree with the other side, just to give it a fair shake before putting it down.
Consider the viewpoint of a parent of a young (10-year-old) child. That parent sends their 10-year-old daughter into the women's restroom. If that restroom can be legally entered by any person who is willing to say out loud "I feel like I am a woman", that restroom is open to any number of adult men who prey on children to enter.
Yes, this is the ever-present, sometimes-alarmist "who will think of the children" argument.
But being a tired argument doesn't make it an inaccurate or illegitimate one. If there is no answer given for it, then it remains valid, if eventually tiring to hear.
> that restroom can be legally entered by any person who is willing to say out loud "I feel like I am a woman"
That's a conservative talking point, not the reality of the situation. In reality, a trans person will have to go far beyond just feeling like a woman to get away with entering a women's room; they will also have to take substantial steps towards looking like a woman.
You don't even have to feel like a woman to enter a woman's room, you just have to say you identify as a woman.
"Substantial steps towards looking like a woman." What does a woman look like? A woman looks like whatever she chooses to look like. Actually, she sort of looks like me after Taco Tuesdays where I have to use the restroom really badly and all the stalls in the men's bathroom are full.
If you are demanding that a "real woman" make herself subservient to what society thinks a real woman should look like, or maybe even get a note from a doctor diagnosing gender dysmorphia, I would advise you to check your cis privilege. /s
Go to a state that doesn't have a bathroom bill and walk into the women's room claiming that you feel like a woman and let me know how that works out for you.
I don't know who you have been confirming your biases with, but you have arrived at a position in contradiction of fact. To the degree to which gender is not a social construct, it does not seem to be perfectly aligned with sex.
I don't really have the stomach to dissect your Napoleon analogy, but instead I will simply note that you have made a false equivalence and suggest that laughing at or trivializing peoples' mental illnesses is not particularly helpful. I think that a comparison to phantom limb syndrome or alien hand syndrome would be more accurate. Most people can rely on their brain telling them accurate information about their bodies. Some of us are not so lucky. I can't begin to describe how difficult it is to have your brain constantly at war with itself. I can promise that therapy isn't going to fix that sort of brain malfunction, any more than "pray away the gay". With rare (and controversial exceptions), the majority of studies agree that HRT/GRS + therapy produces better quality of life than therapy alone. The suicide rate is pretty high for both groups though.
Manufacturing jobs and my body may both make Republicans feel uncomfortable, but are not otherwise linked. You are displaying emotional reasoning, not logic. There is no reason to compare these two things, and the worrying implication of your reasoning is that any injury to a minority can be absolved if the majority can be shown to have suffered some other harm.
There are a number of issues where conservatives have taken a stance against empirical reality (with its well-known liberal bias). It's tough to build a coherent worldview if it's not founded on empiricism. Trump epitomizes this problem. One hopes that the same may not be said of you.
> There is no reason to compare these two things, and the worrying implication of your reasoning is that any injury to a minority can be absolved if the majority can be shown to have suffered some other harm.
You are missing the main thrust of my argument.
Transgender issues are such a vanishingly small portion of the population of course people who speak about the economy will get more traction. And people who fixate on transgender issues will rightfully be seen as fringe elements who are completely out of touch with most of the country.
Complaining about not being able to use the bathroom you want to use instead of worrying about towns and communities getting hollowed out because of manufacturing jobs leaving and never coming back does not get you votes and does not portray your side of the argument in a flattering light.
It'd be like complaining about grizzly bear attacks while getting drunk and driving home. One is a much more pressing concern.
> There are a number of issues where conservatives have taken a stance against empirical reality (with its well-known liberal bias).
Let's be clear, the focus on transgender rights is a conservative one. Conservatives lost the fight on gay marriage and needed another moral crusade to rile up their base. So far it has been quite effective. Transgender persons are as you say, a tiny minority, and politically a nonentity. The status quo on bathroom laws was really just fine. Trans people are more worried about nomenclature and paying for therapy, and reducing the amount of nonsense required to legally change one's gender marker. Some progressive institutions were voluntarily providing accommodations for trans persons, partially as a safety issue as they are very frequently targets of violence, and this was also uncontroversial.
The main thrust of your argument was that we must either talk about jobs or trans issues. This is a false dichotomy. I'd say it's a pretty clever way to control public opinion, but we've seen these same rhetorical tactics being used against gay rights for some decades now. It seems to be very effective with the more emotionally driven populace.
> The main thrust of your argument was that we must either talk about jobs or trans issues. This is a false dichotomy.
This is most certainly not a false dichotomy. Everybody has a certain amount of mind share that they command. If you're talking about Subject A you're not talking about Subject B.
That goes a long way to explaining again why liberals seem so out of touch with most working class folks living in middle america.
They don't care about what rights a tiny portion of Americans have, or what bathrooms they can and cannot use. They care about getting jobs and food and making rent, which are the concerns of a much greater proportion of the populations.
When they hear about politicians ramble on about things that only affect a tiny minority of people, while ignoring things that affect much more people in a larger way, then you have an out-of-touch political party.
The ones "rambling on" are the conservatives. They invented this issue, and immediately started to legislate it. At which point people started objecting. Stop making laws about bathrooms and we all can stop worrying about it.
Mindshare may or may not be a finite resource but there is nothing suggesting that we are over-budget on that. But if that is a problem, again, your team created it. You are the party of legislating bathrooms and bedrooms. Own it.
Also, you may want to consider different news sources, as you seem to have a problem with repeating talking points instead of supporting your arguments with facts. This "out of touch" rhetoric is being heavily pushed by the right-wing apparatchik, and I am sure that you would rather be able to have your own opinions rather than the ones that the Party thinks you should have.
> The ones "rambling on" are the conservatives. They invented this issue, and immediately started to legislate it.
That is ridiculous. We've had gender separated restrooms for the longest time. It's only until now that social mores weren't enough to enforce the fact that you're just not supposed to use a restroom not of your gender, except for children with their parent under a certain age.
A law is a heavy handed way to solve the discomfort of most people, but it was passed in a state by its elected legislature. Since the Constitution doesn't say anything about sexual relations or orientation at all, it devolves to state rights.
> But if that is a problem, again, your team created it. You are the party of legislating bathrooms and bedrooms. Own it.
We are owning it. We're owning it because people aren't respecting long held social norms because of certain ideas of justice they have. Get over yourself. When a majority of people in a political jurisdiction believe a certain thing, either learn to live with it or move.
> This "out of touch" rhetoric is being heavily pushed by the right-wing apparatchik, and I am sure that you would rather be able to have your own opinions rather than the ones that the Party thinks you should have.
Ad hominem much? I have not attacked you personally at all, and you're insulting my ability to have my own opinions on thin evidence. I repeat points in the media because they make sense. Heck, I repeat facts every day. The mere fact that I repeat them so often doesn't make them less true.
Also, the left has been the political leaning that has clamped down heavily on thought crime and dissent. Note that Milo Yiannopoulos is far right, as he found the left far too stifling intellectually.
> That is ridiculous. We've had gender separated restrooms for the longest time.
Actually that's pretty modern, historically. And thanks for telling me what my gender is, I really needed the guidance.
> Since the Constitution doesn't say anything about sexual relations or orientation at all, it devolves to state rights.
State rights and the People. I don't feel the need to make a moral argument about human rights on this issue, but I am sure one could be made.
> Get over yourself. When a majority of people in a political jurisdiction believe a certain thing, either learn to live with it or move.
The majority is not always right, and democracy does not mean "majority rules". Also appeal to tradition is a fallacy, not a valid argument.
> I repeat points in the media because they make sense.
The triumph of rationalization over empiricism is nearly complete.
> Ad hominem much? I have not attacked you personally at all
Right, that thing where you said all trans people are insane or faking it was not in any sense a personal reflection. You do seem to be persisting in that belief though, which again does not reflect empirical reality. You are insisting that laws be made on the basis of your feelings -- and then blaming your opponents for it.
Thank you for elucidating what I've been attempting to communicate to people when I tell them I'm a liberal, not a progressive. Your point about conservatives being progressives of sort just in the other direction is spot on.
Thank you for elucidating what I've been attempting to communicate to people when I tell them I'm a liberal, not a progressive. Your point about conservatives being progressives of sort just in the other direction is spot on.
> I noticed that liberals had this similar authoritarianness of being unwilling to consider the merits of the other side
I am not American, but I must say on the level of politicians, Obama repeatedly tried to be bipartisan and was repeatedly rebuffed by the GOP who seemed intent on grinding the government to a halt. Frankly, and it made the Dems look like a pathetic 'hanger-on', IMO.
"Considering the merits of the other side" is a losing strategy in game theory when the other side always defects.
> ... in game theory when the other side always defects.
Consider the conservative position, and what strategy would work for conserving what is important to them. Any sort of compromise is a long term losing strategy, so of course they'll block progressive moves if they're capable. I'm not aware of any real trade ever being offered, something like: we want full on no joke equality of outcome for every flavor of the rainbow, and in exchange we'll give you the abolition of federal income tax.
Imagine if someone demanded you eat a sandwich made of human waste, and then they got upset when you refused to compromise and only eat half of it.
The human waste metaphor raises an interesting question - what do you think the role of elected officials in a representative democracy is?
I would also add that the media-portrayal of conservative perspectives if in multiple instances further to the right than that of the electorate. I'm happy to go into examples if you care (one example would be people wanting healthcare before the ACA became associated with the 'evil' Democrats).
The role of the elected is to carry out the will of the governed except in cases where it is the will of a tyrannical majority. I think that has been demonstrated to not work, unless your measure of success is counted by generations and not years.
I don't agree with you on the media-portrayal point, because I think your premise is way off. There is no unified conservative perspective in the way that there is with progressives. This last election has made it very clear that the old conservative guard, the ones most similar to progressives, who called for universal healthcare before Obama, are in a minority position.
I'm not likely to be the one you want to discuss this with though, as I'm an anarchist.
I don't see how this is a useful distinction, but am open to your input.
In the pre-ACA insurance marketplace, pre-existing conditions either precluded individuals from coverage or forced them to pay for more expensive plans. Self-employed individuals were in a similar position.
Without insurance, health care, ranging from the mundane to emergency room coverage, was/is exorbitantly expensive. What rhetorical clarity, then, do we gain by explaining that the ACA is not health care?
That is really not true given the full history of things. Most Republicans were very willing to compromise after Obama first took office, but he elected to completely ignore them instead since he had a super majority. At that point the only thing they had left to do was to be obstructionist, and I'm sure he was very aware of the potential political consequences of jamming legislation through in the beginning of his administration. In my opinion, the attempts at being bipartisan later were just political showmanship. Similar to how the Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare repeatedly even though they knew it would be vetoed. There was a lot of legislation that was voted on only because the knew it would get vetoed
It sort of does. Having been pushed out of negotiations around things like the stimulus bill they ended up as a unified opposition, which resulted in the "tea party" and the party moving drastically to the right
I think we must have lived in two different countries following Obama's election.
The financial world was crumbling, and both parties recognized that drastic economic action was required.
Later, when Obama undertook healthcare reform - a project he had won both EC and popular support for - Republicans initially supported him. The Tea Party and the coming midterm elections pulled them to the right, and their success in 2010 left us with the obstructionism that we continue to see.
Related to the 'political showmanship' - if you recall the Boehner-Obama negotiations, I could hardly characterize that as showmanship. Representative Boehner risked his position as leader to try to demonstrate Republican cooperation but was ultimately drawn back by his party.
Overall, I read your comment as one that is supporting the 'Republican party line' without the context of following the events occurring during the Obama presidency. I would be keen to read any evidence you have in contradiction to the points I have raised.
[1] Here's an article describing the orchestrated obstructionism from the lens of 2012:
[2] First, I should say that the individual mandate in Obamacare is fundamentally a 'Republican' (vs conservative) idea, having been implemented in Massachusetts and appeared in 'Republican'-leaning journals.
Second, there was Republican support for the ACA. You'll say 'no one' voted for the bill but the bill's signing was delayed as additions were continually made to appease Republicans who were on, the fence but eventually decided not to vote for the ACA. One Republican Representative did support the bill after it was clear it would pass. Indeed, there had been bipartisan efforts to create an ACA-like bill before the Tea Party pulled the Republicans to the right; see the third link.
Weren't those negotiations with Boehner mainly just intended to avoid sequester? That's a fairly unusual situation. Outside of that I don't recall anything, but I may have just not paid enough attention.
As for the party moving right, that's basically what I was referring to. Having been excluded from negotiations on legislation early on, with the stimulus bill and such, the Republicans became a unified opposition when many were initially willing and politically able to compromise. This is what made room for the tea party in 2010, which has been a big obstacle for them afterwards in my opinion. It's all sort of a lose-lose situation.
I don't have much time to look up references at the moment, but the TARP and other stimulus-related bills enjoyed bipartisan support.
I still disagree with your second assertion. The Tea Party forcing the Republicans to the right happened outside Washington and didn't seem directly related to anything Obama or the Democrats had done.
About the Boehner-Obama moment: while (if I recall correctly) it ultimately led to another budget, in the thick of their negotiations, they would have changed tax law as well. [1] I agree that there are fewer easily memorable moments of bipartisanship after 2010 but I do not agree that the Democratic supermajority (which really only lasted a year, due to Scott Brown's election in Massachusetts) played an important role in promoting obstructionism.
Rather, the Tea Party and the ACA fight provided cover for the Republican leadership to do what they had already been planning (see the Washington Post link from above for an unattributed source who claims the same).
I was incorrect about the reason the Boehner-Obama negotiations began - it was the federal borrowing limit [2]. Reports at the time, and since, suggested that this fight was totally unnecessary, as the all expenditures accounted for by the borrowing limit would already have been approved by Congress.
> unwilling to consider the merits of the other side
Yes, but now people are going for an immediate overcorrection.
Tossing Brandon Eich out of Mozilla is the type of behavior that liberals probably should reconsider. I do think he was wrong, but is he really an evil man who deserved get kicked out of his company. I don't believe so.
Is the University of Toronto professor who is fighting to not use preferred gender pronouns a terrible person who liberals should hate? No, I don't think so. Especially when his argument is that it's compelled speech and violation of his charter rights.
Are the white supremacists and other racists who have come out of the woodwork to support trump bad people. Yes. They are. They need to be opposed.
> the conservatives have a point that it is also killing babies
It's not killing babies.
That being said, it's completely understandable that it is a moral issue for people. They believe it is wrong. That's not a viewpoint that makes you a bad person.
> there are some good arguments to the other side, too
Oh really? What are they? I've yet to hear a single one.
I'm willing to say that, yes, most "liberal" ideas are ultimately right, and will ultimately prevail.
History has by and large been a march towards these ideals. Freedom, equal chances, some organized support isolating you from the raw&random powers of markets&nature.
That believe isn't new, by the way. The first progressive would have said: "We believe these truths to be self-evident".
Isn't that just using a cherry-picked definition of "liberal"? How do you define "liberal" if you say history has been a march towards these ideals?
My understanding of how Americans use the word "liberal" is that it's an alternative way of saying "left wing". In that case history has not been a march towards left wing views, surely the fall of the USSR, the rise of Reagan and Thatcher ... it's been the opposite.
And aren't "liberals" now pitching for unequal chances? Like, HRC should be President because she's a woman, affirmative action, get women into tech funds etc?
It looks like you just picked a few things that are widely regarded as good, and labelled them liberal.
> And aren't "liberals" now pitching for unequal chances? Like, HRC should be President because she's a woman, affirmative action, get women into tech funds etc?
Your scope of the playing field is limited. Affirmative action is indeed unfair when you consider only the choice at hand. You have to back up and take in a larger scope. Minorities are frequently disadvantaged in many areas of their lives: they are born into poverty at a larger percentage than whites; they are policed with much less forgiveness; they are killed by police at a much higher rate, and must live with that fear at all times; their fathers are incarcerated at a much higher rate. The list goes on and on. Affirmative action is an attempt to give an advantage in important employment and education opportunities to make up for those disadvantages.
>And aren't "liberals" now pitching for unequal chances? Like, HRC should be President because she's a woman, affirmative action, get women into tech funds etc?
Saying this reveals a dire mis-understanding of access and opportunity in society. The reason those initiatives are needed is because of the extreme amount of inequality that currently exists.
Women would not need to be put into tech if they were already well there. Affirmative action would have no purpose if minority groups were properly represented.
These are initiatives fighting the status quo, which has an extreme bias towards men and white people. It is exactly the opposite of giving "unequal chances."
You're over-estimating the appeal of the liberal movement on younger people. If some college kids can't openly talk about their inclination to right wing politics that doesn't make them 'liberals'.
I was referring to the shift in racial demographics and how unless the GOP cleaned up its act they would cease to be a national party. That was kool-aid we all drank from and it turned out to be poison.
I think you're missing some perspective on this; a small % of activists on the left (mostly on college campuses) do not represent the trends of liberals in the USA. I can't think of a mainstream Democrat who considers these serious causes (including liberal ones like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren).
The reality is the left has been making huge inroads on social causes in the last eight years - in fact, this may be the primary enduring legacy of the Obama years. The public perception of gay marriage, police violence against blacks, and marijuana use have all drastically shifted and led to very real changes that won't be undone. I wouldn't call this overplaying their hands.
Also, I wouldn't extrapolate much from this election. Obama is a fair bit more liberal than Hillary and is extremely popular compared to her.
A vocal minority + rapid societal change + social media echo chambers = reactionary backlash = Donald Trump presidency
>I wouldn't extrapolate much from this election
I would. 60+ million people voting for a man as odious and unprepared as Donald Trump says a whole lot to me. That and pretty much total Republican domination on the state level. The GOP is one state house away from being able to call a new constitutional convention[1].
>I would. 60+ million people voting for a man as odious and unprepared as Donald Trump says a whole lot to me.
Let me rephrase: you are extrapolating the wrong thing when you say the "liberals drastically overplayed their hand" and then use this election as evidence.
Obama almost certainly would have annihilated Trump (his support in rural swing states is much stronger than Hillary's), and he's more liberal than Hillary. For all we know, Bernie could have done decently. Hillary's downfall is that she's seen as an out-of-touch corrupt establishment politician, which Trump (and Obama) were not.
Hillary's problem is that she's just not likable, in the sense that people are not going to get excited to vote for Hillary.
Obama got people excited. He had a message he got out to people and they responded in a huge way. I'm really not sure what Hillary's was.
Trump got a different set excited. Sure some are deplorable. A lot are just republicans. A lot are people who just want their lives to be as good as they used to be, or their parents were.
I've seen tons of facebook groups full of people sharing fake articles with absolutely nothing to back it up, it happened on both sides but the stuff about Hillary was completely off the wall yet people lapped it up.
It's not just a small percentage of activists. I'm 21, and I live in Ohio, which Trump won by 9 points, and it seems like a huge portion of people about my age are proponents of these ideas, on or off of college campuses. People call things "white" as in insult, they constantly say things like "white people have no culture", and really do seem to believe that all evil in the world is the result of things white men do. Anyone who tries to disagree with them gets shouted at and accused of being a long list of terrible buzzwords. As someone from a very poor family who didn't have great opportunities, this shit is infuriating. It basically seems like some sort of cancer is rapidly metasticizing and there's not much of anything that can be done about it. There's 0 willingness to have a discussion about anything.
Huh, out on the West Coast I've only encountered a minor amount of this coddling "it's all white racists fault" BS on college campuses. I've expected more, but the worst I've seen is pronoun related (aka "What's your pronoun?"), which I respond to with schlee, cause fuck tracking someone else's pronoun, that is not my job. Use what you want, don't try to force me to remember your shit (name, pronoun, etc)!
In my personal experience there seems to be a pretty big difference based on the age. People who are like 26 are much less aggressive about it than people who are 18-22.
Sounds like the trope "anyone who was not a liberal at 20 years of age had no heart, while anyone who was still a liberal at 40 had no head" still holds true.
Considering how dumb/immature the average product of an American high school is at 18, I'm not surprised they think like that (and are aggressive about their beliefs) Also, considering how some choose to treat college like an extended party, they carry over the same traits to 22.
But hopefully, the job market hitting them in the face after graduation beats some liberal bullshit out of them.
Also, class warfare and money will always trump identity politics and all that social justice BS. If there's anything the US can get behind it's their hatred of the poor (yes, well-off left are just as guilty of this, just more implicitly)
Sounds like "if the only tool you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" view of the world. People throwing "white" as a slur, then react like a victim when someone opposes. Hypocrisy over 11, but sadly fixing it would take psychotherapy, because they're prone to this behaviour not having any prospects/purpose in life.
>People call things "white" as in insult, they constantly say things like "white people have no culture"
I'm black and I wish folks realized that stuff like that needs to kept behind closed doors. I'm not one of those black folks that tries to twist the definition of racism such that it can never be applied to us. It's ironic that lots of the same folks who talk about "micro-aggressions" are purveyors of them.
I'm white and I call things white as an insult when they offend me for cultural reasons. There are some behaviors I associate with white people that are unpalatable to me, and I call them out, when I might avoid the cultural call-out to other cultures because a) they are relatively more oppressed than my (white) culture and b) I do not see the interior of that culture all day every day, as an outsider to it; I decline to arrogate myself that way.
>It's not just a small percentage of activists. I'm 21, and I live in Ohio, which Trump won by 9 points, and it seems like a huge portion of people about my age are proponents of these ideas, on or off of college campuses.
This is just a personal anecdote. I'm 23, also live in Ohio, and went to a very liberal private school. I have never met a single person who has un-ironically said these things.
Yeah, I would imagine things are milder than they have been in my experience. But I've heard people say the phrase "white people have no culture" upwards of 10 times by several different people, the majority of whom were white themselves, which is a little mind boggling.
Although Obama was opposed to gay marriage when elected, I will say that this is an issue that the progressives have driven into the public consciousness.
But Trump will be the first elected President to support gay marriage when entering office.
> police violence against blacks
There are far more protests about police violence against blacks now.
I think changing the mindset of Republicans will have the most impact. If we had another candidate they would have made "defending traditional family" a stump issue.
I've been saying this to my HRC-supporter friends, many are horrified that I could vote for Trump. A few are no longer friends (by their choice, screaming at me from the top of their lungs that I voted for Hitler).
The manner in which we discuss our differences matters.
For this election, for me (a moderate in a left-leaning city), the left was worse. I genuinely hope they can change.
Micro-aggression, safe spaces, trigger words - all things that have good intentions
Regardless of intent, they are ultimately part of the problem, not the solution. I understand that the latter are responses to the first, but they all serve to paint every member of society with an us-vs-them brush.
In the end, dialogue is a necessity to reform your broken society. Segregating off each subgroup into their own community, whether by choice or government policy, only increases distance and polarization and makes it harder for everyone to engage with other parts of society.
You'll/us/we lost the election because the candidate didn't motivate people.
For the past 8years republicans stalled all your legislative attempts.
Before that they created wars and before that they created Fox News.
Along the way people created global warming deniers, creationism and vaccine denial.
America is at the forefront of figuring out ways to packages and deliver emotions to leverage policy and votes.
Communication had already failed for the past decades.
Memes/Facebook/fake news are red herrings - symptoms, not the diseases.
The American legislature has become more contentious and partisan - iirc voting across party lines is seen as a sign of disloyalty.
The issue is that the strategies applied and improved here are studied and applied elsewhere.
A massive wall of propaganda and emotions.
How can communication happen when even straight up Adoption of GOP programs (iirc mitt Romney launched the predecessor to Medicare.)is cause to Reject it.
Basically how can you talk when people are rarely going to hear you?
?? I suppose the question is how can signal be sent over lossy/noisy(hostile?) channel without degradation or subversion
That's not what happened. What happened is, voters who said they were going to vote for a Republican largely did actually show up and vote for a Republican. Whereas a significant minority of voters who said they were going to vote for a Democrat stayed home instead.
As for "smug liberalism" where if only uneducated people were given the facts, they'd make the right conclusion and be liberal, is probably a real thing; i.e. there are educated people who are still ignorant and there isn't a lot you can about it. A major factor in getting along with each other is living among each other, and that really doesn't happen in rural areas of the country. There's no real effective way to impart city dormitory life, not just social tolerance but diversity appreciation, to people who don't live in cities.
The election is really not that big of a surprise. The country is this divided. It is very difficult for the same party to win three election cycles in a row. And, key Democratic party demographics didn't show up to vote in sufficient numbers that it affected the outcome of the election.
This is not "tore our heads off" territory, that's hyperbole.
So, LGBT people and other minorities should just not be "uppity" when it comes to our civil rights? So we're just to sit there while rich city liberals get to decide which bills get passed and which don't? If you want to lose the next election worse than you did this time just keep doing that. And btw, Trump won because he lied to the Rust Belt voters that he'll bring back jobs that basically don't exist anymore. They'll be plenty mad by 2018 but if you keep playing this limousine liberal crap then expect them to be madder at you all.
Equality of opportunity cannot be pursued or achieved if it ignores the fact that the starting conditions are not the same for everybody. This is what the left is trying to address.
The message of black lives matter is not that they matter more than other lives, it's that they _also_ matter, in a world where it seemed that non-black lives were valued, but black lives were not. It took steps to try to ensue that blacks were treated the same as others.
The All Lives Matter movement took no steps to protect all lives. If it did, it would be a great cause. But it existed solely so that racist assholes could slam the BLM movement with bullshit rhetoric. It's a garbage movement cited solely by garbage people.
This is a tired old argument, so let me just quote Daniel Victor:
Those in the Black Lives Matter movement say black people are in immediate danger and need immediate attention, like the broken bone or house on fire.
Saying “All Lives Matter” in response would suggest to them that all people are in equal danger, invalidating the specific concerns of black people.
“You’re watering the house that’s not burning, but you’re choosing to leave the house that’s burning unattended,” said Allen Kwabena Frimpong, an organizer for the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter. “It’s irresponsible.”
More to the point: It is a given that all lives matter, said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an assistant professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University.
“That has always been an assumption,” she said. “The entire point of Black Lives Matter is to illustrate the extent to which black lives have not mattered in this country.”
“if we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, ‘all lives matter,’ then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of ‘all lives.’ ”
The thing is the statistics show the blacks should address themselvs cause the biggest contributor to black deaths are other blacks.
But as with everything evil whitey is at fault
Hi. I live in a historically black neighborhood. There are countless community demonstrations against violence, marches, charity barbecues etc. Think about maybe why you don't see those on the news and why Breitbart et al. tend to focus on just the violent aspects and not the actual community building that happens.
> I feel like the left seriously damaged their ability to fight racist ideas when they abandoned the idea of equality.
The idea of equality is not some abstract mathematical notion. The left's treatment of social issues, including affirmative action, stems from decades of serious empirical study of society, rather than from an imagined "spherical-cow" sociology. That does not mean that the policy is the right one -- either ethically or the best means of achieving its goals -- but I think that the debate should be carried out based on all we know about our real society, though history, anthropology, sociology and psychology, rather than by deliberately ignoring them in favor of an idealized model that bears no resemblance to reality. You can disagree with leftist policies on many fronts, but you cannot say that the left has abandoned the idea of equality based on your observations unless you choose that imagined model.
I agree with your broader point that suppression of viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas is a bad idea, but I strongly disagree with the idea that Twitter is inconsistent for treating compositionally identical sentences differently.
For example, if you substitute "Swedish" or "German" or something more specific than "European," you get something that doesn't set off alarm bells, just as with "African" (or "Eritrean" or "Egyptian" - although you might set off alarm bells with "Hutu" or "Tutsi.") Why?
I would wager at reasonable odds that a randomly selected American organization promoting the "heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent" will actually have an agenda dedicated to marginalizing or removing "undesirable" elements of the population (they will have an explicitly racist agenda, and support - if not directly participate in - hateful, illegal behavior).
I would take the opposite side of that bet for the corresponding group with "African" or "Irish" substituted in.
Words and symbols need to be understood against the cultural backdrop in which they appear. It means a very different thing to fly a giant national flag in the United States vs. in Germany (during anything other than a soccer match). The composition of a sentence is not sufficient to derive its significance, or its level of moral acceptability.
And of course, it's perfectly conceivable to have a non-racist group in America with the description you provided. It almost certainly has happened. It's just not what actually happens in the real world most of the time, for "lots of reasons."
It's uncomfortable to get down in the muck and deal with ambiguity and complexity. Evaluating whether or not a statement or group or personality is racist and worthy of approbation is generally really difficult. That doesn't mean it's impossible, especially at the extremes, and especially if you're willing to tolerate a false-positive rate.
I would take your side on most of your bets. But I disagree with your implied conclusion that banning this type of speech is therefore OK.
The reason is that it places our government (or Twitter, in this case) in a situation of making impossible judgment calls. A person who is "proud of their European heritage" could be anything from a docile recent Polish immigrant to a rabid neo-Nazi. Yes, you can make probabilistic determinations as to which account or individual is truly racist and who is not, but to what end?
Speaking very broadly, we live in a democracy. And the underlying "faith" that is necessary to believe in a democracy is to believe that voters can distinguish between true and false, right and wrong. If we don't have that, we are completely lost.
So I choose to believe that voters are mature enough to see alt-right posts on the Internet and, on average, consider the reasoning and reject it. What's the harm of letting voters see the alt-right's arguments and decide for themselves? Either we believe the median voter can come to rational and ethical conclusion or we don't. If we don't, we have much bigger problems than deciding what Twitter's specific censorship policy should be.
But those alt-right accounts are in fact not "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future", but dedicated to attack everything that isn't. It's just a façade to hide behind and act like a persecuted minority.
I agree with your conclusion but not the comparison.
The context at the moment is that there are many rabid, racist, some violent, followers of these sites out there who have recently felt validated.
If your gentle website "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world." had a similar atmosphere of whipped up feeling around it, potentially leading to abuse/violence, I'd expect exactly the same response, or at least the need for response.
Whether the response is correct or not, as you suggest, is another matter, but your comparison doesn't accept the context of current events.
It sounds like you're not only for banning abuse, but for banning emotionally-charged material that can make abusive people feel validated. To me that sounds like going too far.
Twitter demonstrates the SJW commitment to one of the five fundamental pillars of their social justice ideology.
I fucking hate white people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Trump. Fuck you!
1:57 AM 9 Nov 2016
Twitter, in response to a complaint about the above tweet:
Thank you for reporting this issue to us. Our goal is to create a safe environment for everyone on Twitter to express themselves freely. We reviewed your report carefully and found that there was no violation of Twitter's Rules regarding abusive behavior.
I fucking hate black people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Clinton. Fuck you!
4:08 AM 16 Nov 2016
Twitter, in response to a complaint about the above tweet:
We've investigated and suspended the account you reported as it was found to be participating in abusive behavior."
Behind on of the two tweets, there's a few hundrend years of slavery & oppression, based on race. Context is important.
Edit: Why do I even bother. That same blog has the following snippet in another post:
The white nations of Europe are, collectively and historically speaking, humanity's golden geese. It is to the long-term benefit of all Mankind to avoid killing them, or even adulterating them, through immigration, invasion, or assimilation.
You realize that white Americans were not the only folks to own slaves or oppress a people, right? Ask yourself this, would the results be different if I tweeted that from the Barbary coast were roles were largely reversed? How about from a SLAVic nation?
And? This isn't a discussion on the slave trade. I was pointing out that the origin of the comment was by a biased source, which changes the context of the text to thinly veiled racism.
And by biased source, I mean a racist idiot promoting his shitty ideas.
Every race had been subjugated violently by another. Claiming one deserves special treatment is itself racist. Ask yourself this: Would the situation with the tweets be reversed if someone from the Barbary coast, which has a history of white slavery, reported the two tweets?
You're treating this as if blacks and whites are somehow symmetrical in the context of American society. No serious social scientist would treat the two expressed views as equivalent.
It actually says that if a person really is more harmed then they should get a bigger box. The ethical discussion behind that logic is rich and nuanced. As to "being allowed to be more racist", then that's not about that at all. It's about the racial discrimination on their part causing less actual harm. The two views here are 1. the conservative one, in which ethics is best decided from a personal perspective, which depends on the person's feelings and intent, and 2. the liberal one, in which ethics is decided on the amount of harm or good actually done, regardless of the person's personal intentions or feelings (of course, it's always a spectrum rather than two extremes).
What I always find amusing is how conservatives get mad that liberals are so sensitive to "taking offense", when the exact opposite is true. It's just that conservatives apply their own ethical perspective (where intent and feeling matter a lot) on the liberal view, and then think that the conclusion does not follow or is unfair. But the conclusions are a consequence of a completely different ethical framework, where they do make sense precisely because to liberals, the intent to harm and the feeling of being hurt don't matter as much as they do to conservatives, and what matters is the global effect actions have.
To a conservative, being racist means feeling negatively about other races or intending to harm them. To a liberal, being racist means taking any action that increases or perpetuates the actual harm done to certain races regardless of feelings or intentions.
Social scientists use the definition I attributed to liberals, because those of them who study racism are not ethicists and don't attempt to determine which ethical perspective is more "correct"; instead, they care about actual changes in society, and the truth is that the social effect of white people (we're always talking statistics -- again this is social science, not ethics -- so it's white people one average or as a group) discriminating against blacks is far more detrimental than the other way around (because whites possess more power), and therefore more racist. It is more "wrong" if your ethical perspective is not subjective but objective, and judges not intent but outcome.
Which doesn't discredit the equivalence, it discredits social scientists, since any layman can look at the two statements and see that they are facially the same.
That's a purely ethical perspective (although even in that perspective ethics, I don't think your conclusion is clear-cut at all), but Twitter's decision may be based on social damage rather than just ethics. The damage done by someone who represents power when attacking those with less power is greater than the other way around, regardless of the beliefs of the speakers. This, BTW, is why I'm so frustrated when people understand these things to be about someone taking offense. When society approves (or approves by ignoring) marginalizing actions and speech, there is actual damage being done through social signaling regardless of whether anyone present has been personally offended or not.
I'm not sure understand what you're asking. Researchers in every field are always a "self appointed caste" and, yes, they tend to be privileged. Racism as an academic term is defined by the academic discipline that studies it, just as physicists get to decide what constitutes energy under the academic definition of energy, even though the word had existed thousands of years earlier, and with a different meaning. I don't think academics often get to decide who gets their life ruined, but social researchers do study the process of what ruins life in society. Have I addressed your questions?
Why do you say "without repeatability and predictability"? Social studies must be reproducible. When they are not, they are discredited (where are you getting your information about social science?) As we speak, there are academic organizations being formed to do exactly that: to reproduce more social science results. Prediction, as I explained, is generally impossible, just as it is impossible in computer science and biology in the general case, but in simplified situations, it exists and it is expected. Not only that, it is being used as a technology. Many manipulation techniques employed by large websites employ social science results to great effect.
I think you're attacking a strawman image of social science that's been constructed by people who really have no clue. That's not to say that the social sciences aren't plagued by many methodological problems, but we actually do know quite a lot.
That disconnect is because the definition of racism has changed over the last 8 years in practice, and since the development of privilege theory and systemic racism in academia ~30 years ago.[0]
Racism used to be something you did if you were white; now it's just "who you are".
Since the civil right movement 50 years ago, white Americans have agreed to a racial compact:
- whites are banned from doing anything overtly racist
- whites are banned from engaging in identity politics (that is, favoring white/Western culture and people over others)
- whites will accept a double-standard that allows other groups to engage in both of these behaviors (and not deem them "racist")
In exchange, blacks and others wouldn't call whites racist unless that compact was explicitly broken. When they did, whites agreed to make the charge stick—you'd lose your job, career, etc. A charge of "racism" was very, very difficult to undo.
IMO, this was all a good thing and worked pretty well.
Basically, that's all changed now—at least on the right, now that all whites are "racist" by definition. The alt-right in particular has agreed not to make charges of racism a deal killer, and in particular, is no longer enforcing that compact. Under the old compact, the alt-right is definitely racist.
Apparently, though, so is half the country now because by the old definition, absolutely, Trump is a racist with his comment about the judge's Mexican heritage, and whites should have made the charge "stick". As Speaker Paul Ryan said "textbook racism". Trump's comment should have—and would have—been disqualifying under the old compact.
IMO some whites have dropped the racial compact because of the development of privilege theory and systemic racism and the frankly "original sin"-like notion that all whites are racist. Who wants that?
> That disconnect is because the definition of racism has changed over the last 8 years in practice, and since the development of "systemic racism" in theory.
What you call "systemic racism" has been known simply as "racism" in academic circles for the past few decades. Put succinctly, in research circles, racism is the property of a society that results in grossly unequal distribution of power among social groups viewed as different races; sexism is analogous. There is no assumption of ill intent or negative feelings, as those associated with xenophobia (or misogyny). There are very good reasons why this definition is much more useful to study this phenomenon.
The only thing that's changed in recent years is that the public at large has been exposed to those well accepted, well studied academic terms, while misinterpreting them to mean something else. Here's a recent article about this: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
It's not that all whites are racist by the academic definition, but that our society is racist, and so people in it who intentionally or not further the racist social dynamics can be said to carry out racism. Those people are both black and white, but as it's mostly whites who have more power in society, it is statistically correct to say that whites are more racist. It's just that "racist" doesn't necessarily mean what you think it does.
All you say is true, as I understand it, but there are two problems:
First, social scientists are overwhelmingly liberal. Normally, I don't have a problem with an appeal to "academic circles" as I'm in them. But this is a legitimate reason, I think, for conservatives to be skeptical of the motivations and reasoning here in such a politically-fraught topic.
Secondly, redefining words with existing meanings is a bad idea that only leads to confusion. A crude analogy: imagine I redefine the word "moron" to mean "an uninformed consumer of news". Then, I go around calling people "moron", and am surprised when they are offended, and are not placated when I tell them the word's new meaning. They might wonder: might I not have chosen that particular word to make uninformed consumers of news appear worse than they really are?
I think it is disingenuous to blame the public for "misinterpreting" what is meant by "racism" in this context, even though all you say about its academic meaning is true.
> this is a legitimate reason, I think, for conservatives to be skeptical of the motivations and reasoning here in such a politically-fraught topic.
It is a legitimate reason to be skeptical, but not a very interesting starting point for a discussion if one side isn't even interested in rigorously studying the subject at all. There's a vast knowledge gap between the two sides.
> Secondly, redefining words with existing meanings is a bad idea that only leads to confusion.
In the case of racism it's not clear which definition came first. In the case of sexism, the situation is clearer: the academic, feminist definition came first, and has indeed been continually misinterpreted.
> I think it is disingenuous to blame the public for "misinterpreting" what is meant by "racism" in this context
I'm not blaming the public for the misunderstanding at all, but many people are actively hostile to even trying to understand the more well-researched point of view, so I'm not sure you can blame the academics, either.
After all, people who have not studied psychology, sociology, anthropology or history find it hard to accept how social dynamics and prejudice work through them without them being aware of it, just as it took 300 years for people to accept that some disease is caused by invisible microbes. Sadly, we do not yet have a simple, self-evident experiment like Pasteur's to demonstrate the existence of racism (and even after Pasteur's experiments, it took a couple of more decades for most people to become convinced). So you cannot deny the active resistance to the idea.
Wikipedia contains interesting sections on the etymology of both "racism" and "sexism". "Racism" (and the older term, "racialism") have been around since at least 1900. It originally seemed to have mostly related to pseudo-scientific methods of categorizing people by race, and circa WWII, acquired its now most-familiar meaning of "belief in the superiority of a particular race".
"Sexism" was coined by analogy to "racism" in the 1960s, within an academic context, but had not yet acquired the additional connotation you're talking about (the "systemic" part). The first occurrence in print defines it thusly: "Sexism is judging people by their sex when sex doesn't matter." No apparent mention of institutional or systemic effects; those probably came later.
So what we have here is a word, "racism", which acquired a well-known public meaning c. WWII that meant what we would now call "extreme, overt racism", and a word, "sexism" defined by analogy to it in the 1960s. It seems plain to me that much of the public is still going by these older definitions.
The fundamental problem is that, under the old definitions, calling someone "racist" (and probably "sexist"), is a very serious accusation. There is a reason Nazis seemingly come up in every discussion about racism: they are the ones who gave the word its modern, common meaning. In some ways, calling someone "racist" is therefore a direct, linguistic analogy comparing someone to a Nazi.
Academics later refined and repurposed these words. If they, and media surrogates explaining their ideas to the public, had stuck to terms like "(institutional) bias/prejudice", we wouldn't have nearly the degree of problems we have. Certainly it is important to distinguish between implicit, explicit, and systemic biases, which is exactly why we shouldn't use the same word for all of them. And if the goal is progress and understanding, we probably shouldn't use an emotionally charged word that gained its modern definitions from the Nazis.
We cannot realistically expect the public to read academic publications before voting. I'm in biology, and it would surely be nice if voters would read my papers so that they understand issues in medicine better (maybe they would increase NIH funding!), but that's completely unrealistic. No, it is up to academics and media to communicate clearly with the public, and I am arguing sociologists have failed miserably in this regard.
> We cannot realistically expect the public to read academic publications before voting.
No, but we can hope that people would at least listen to those who dedicate their lives to a rigorous study of society rather than dismiss their views based on nothing of the sort. Academics (and journalists) don't explain those terms and the reasoning behind them only in academic publications.
There's been so much open questioning of experts and authorities that often people no longer trust someone who claims to be an expert.
Think of controversial topics such as tobacco, climate change, anti-vaccination, GMOs. Skepticism is great, healthy, and necessary. When those who are honest about the role of skepticism, what "theory" means, and the limits of what they're able to show meet with those who are willing to politicize the debate and speak in absolutes, or at least disingenuously widen the gaps of doubt beyond what's reasonable, who's likely to win that argument in a television sound bite?
Couple this with false balance in reporting, and you have a culture of people who don't know who to believe, and understandably may default to believing evidence that confirms what they already do.
This of course is not a criticism of your comment. This is a situation that I see playing out every day, and it honestly scares me. I don't know how we come back from this.
I totally agree. I think that ironically this has created an atmosphere where manipulating people is easier than when the elites had more influence. It may be harder to manipulate all of the people in the same direction, but it's easier to manipulate a large group.
I agree wholeheartedly with grzm. And I do believe the skepticism he is talking about has generated one positive result: if you want people to believe in expertise now, you have to not just define terms and explain reasoning, but show concrete proof.
People believe (mostly) in modern medicine not because of our fancy jargon, or our explained logic about why the cell does this or that, but because it obviously works.
I am a liberal living in a conservative state, with many conservative friends and family. I can assure you that many of them have never heard the reasoning and arguments you're referring to. Sure, you can find it on Slate. But they don't read Slate.
But if and when these conservatives are confronted with these arguments, they will mostly agree that implicit bias exists, and accept data about unconscious associations, police profiling, etc.
But they do NOT accept the conclusion drawn from it -- that we are all therefore "racist". Because to them that term is as much or more a political tool for moral condemnation as it is a description of objective reality. And we liberals (I assume) would be kidding ourselves if we didn't admit it has been used this way frequently.
And they also tend to resist the conclusion that we ought to do this or that about it -- because science, if sociology claims to be one, never does or can tell us what we ought to do, only what is reality (the is-ought problem). Once we start talking about what we should do, we are completely outside the realm of science.
> if you want people to believe in expertise now, you have to not just define terms and explain reasoning, but show concrete proof.
Yes, and even then you should expect a few decades or centuries for people to be convinced. I think the evidence is here, but sufficient time hasn't passed.
> And they also tend to resist the conclusion that we ought to do this or that about it
I have absolutely no problem with that. People are free to have different views about the goals, and even if the goals are shared, about the best means of achieving them. I'm just not so happy about the denial of facts, but I'm well aware that it takes a long time for facts to sink in.
> Once we start talking about what we should do, we are completely outside the realm of science.
Absolutely, and I don't think social research is about telling us what to do, but classifying actions as racist isn't prescriptive but descriptive, and is certainly under the purview of science.
> Because to them that term is as much or more a political tool for moral condemnation
Right, but there's a problem here. First, saying that the term is just a tool for moral condemnation serves their interest of resisting the facts behind it. Second, in addition to being an academic classification, it is used a (rather weak) tool for condemnation that serves as a very weak defense much stronger opposing forces of marginalization. I mean, in the end, politics is a struggle over the distribution of power. One group yells "women belong in the kitchen; blacks are inferior" or whatever. What tools do you suggest the other side use to fight back? Present evidence? They do, but you just said that the intended audience don't read Slate. So moral condemnation is such (rather ineffective) means.
(TL;DR: I believe the term is being used both proscriptively and descriptively, and that is the heart of the problem)
> One group yells "women belong in the kitchen; blacks are inferior" or whatever.
I, and even most conservatives, would have absolutely no problem calling that racism or sexism. Those are overt, direct statements meeting the popular definitions of those terms.
I am assuming we are debating the more expansive definitions that are more under public dispute.
> saying that the term is just a tool for moral condemnation serves their interest of resisting the facts behind it
I agree, as long as it can be established that it does indeed have a useful purpose as a descriptive term.
> classifying actions as racist isn't prescriptive but descriptive, and is certainly under the purview of science.
I find the assertion that it isn't prescriptive, especially when you later admit that it does serve at least partially as a tool for moral condemnation, unconvincing.
But it could be both prescriptive and descriptive, so how about that?
You are surely aware that one fashionable definition of racism, with some academic support, is that it is equivalent to power or privilege, and therefore no member of a disadvantaged group can be racist, and all members of a privileged group are by definition racist.
In addition to being needlessly provocative and drawing attention away from "real", intentional racism, this kind of definition is utterly useless from a descriptive standpoint. After all, if it is completely equivalent to power/privilege, why not use those words?
And if racism occurs completely without choice on the part of the accused, is it not paradoxical to use it as a term of moral condemnation, since morality presumably requires choice?
Another common usage is the idea that racism is a set of power structures in society that promote unequal outcomes. If abstract, nonhuman entities (societies, governments, etc) can be racist, apart from the racism of their constituent members, how can the same term be used as a term of moral condemnation?
Note that I am not objecting to the idea that privilege, implicit bias, or self-perpetuating power structures exist. They certainly do.
But I am arguing that conflating these things with overt racism (or anything involving conscious choice, and therefore subject to moral condemnation) is intellectually muddled, counterproductive, and is at the heart of why conservatives are so angry about this issue.
> I agree, as long as it can be established that it does indeed have a useful purpose as a descriptive term.
But it does. The definition has become more refined in order to be more useful. This is commonly done in science.
> You are surely aware that one fashionable definition of racism, with some academic support, is that it is equivalent to power or privilege, and therefore no member of a disadvantaged group can be racist, and all members of a privileged group are by definition racist.
This is very inaccurate. The "fashionable definition" you're is really a very simplified, catch-phrasy shorthand for something much more subtle, which is this: Racism is the property of a society or social dynamics that create and perpetuate an unfair distribution of power between groups viewed as races. It is this definition that is shortened to be "discrimination plus power". Obviously, groups that are powerless in a society cannot shape it to withdraw power from themselves, which is why we say, as shorthand, "blacks can't be racist". But it is important to understand that in either case the word does not refer to individuals and certainly not to their sentiments, but to the way they are a vessel for social dynamics. Blacks, by being less powerful, are not as strong conduits for social dynamics, and hence they are not the mechanism for the perpetuation of racism, and hence "they" "are" not racist.
> In addition to being needlessly provocative and drawing attention away from "real", intentional racism, this kind of definition is utterly useless from a descriptive standpoint. After all, if it is completely equivalent to power/privilege, why not use those words?
This is perhaps better called xenophobia, just as "intentional sexism" is better called misogyny. I don't think it is more or less real than the academic definition, but it's not as useful because research has shown that the main mechanism by which racism is perpetuated has little to do with people's conscious intentions. You want to use the description of the main effect, not secondary ones that are perhaps more emotionally obvious but far less influential in practice.
> And if racism occurs completely without choice on the part of the accused, is it not paradoxical to use it as a term of moral condemnation, since morality presumably requires choice?
Without intent does not mean without choice. When I smoke a cigarette I don't intend to make myself sick, but if I know that is the likely outcome, then by smoking I choose to increase my likelihood of getting sick even though it is not my intent. The "moral condemnation" of smoking is effective in reducing smoking by drawing attention to this unintentional choice.
> If abstract, nonhuman entities (societies, governments, etc) can be racist, apart from the racism of their constituent members, how can the same term be used as a term of moral condemnation?
This is related to my smoking analogy. Once you know that your actions are part of an unwanted social dynamics, you can choose to change them.
> But I am arguing that conflating these things with overt racism (or anything involving conscious choice, and therefore subject to moral condemnation) is intellectually muddled, counterproductive, and is at the heart of why conservatives are so angry about this issue.
Right, but as in my reply to 794CD01[1], the difference is what you view as the main issue. Conservatives may view the issue as merely ethical, and when it comes to ethics, intentions matter a lot. The left cares a lot more about the result, and it turns out that what you call "overt racism" has very little effect on the result, and it is racism in the broader sense that is much more important. The left wants to draw attention to what it views as the bigger problem.
I'm sorry you're getting downvoted. I'm very happy you're willing to engage with me on this. Obviously I'm somewhat familiar with this subject, but not as much as you, and it's nice to have a more detailed discussion on HN.
> But it is important to understand that in either case the word does not refer to individuals and certainly not to their sentiments, but to the way they are a vessel for social dynamics.
> the main mechanism by which racism is perpetuated has little to do with people's conscious intentions.
Yep, I understand this, and this is key to the disconnect between academia and the public. Academia is saying, "it's not individuals, it's institutions, social habits, etc". That's a perfectly legitimate and important point to make.
But the public hears "you're racist" (by which academia and their surrogates mean, "you're a participant in these phenomena"), and understands it to mean "xenophobia" (implying intentionality). And you cannot fault the public for this misunderstanding because that is the common and historical meaning of the word.
> The left cares a lot more about the result, and it turns out that what you call "overt racism" has very little effect on the result, and it is racism in the broader sense that is much more important. The left wants to draw attention to what it views as the bigger problem.
As they should. I think we agree on just about everything except the question of whether repurposing an existing word is an unhelpful confusion-causing conflation or not. I do not question the motives of academia or the left on this issue, only their linguistic methods. They are the ones trying to make the change, so they are the ones responsible for clear communication.
More concretely, I am arguing that this confusion has cost the left dearly in this election on the very goals they claim to be working towards.
> Once you know that your actions are part of an unwanted social dynamics, you can choose to change them.
Just to be clear then, it is possible for a person, even a white person, not to be racist assuming they take appropriate actions? If so, I think we are very close to resolving our disagreement.
> Without intent does not mean without choice. When I smoke a cigarette I don't intend to make myself sick...
A decent analogy. I think however when we shift from the popular to the academic definition of racism, we have made a crucial shift from a "negative ethical obligation" (an obligation not to do direct harm to another) to a positive one (an obligation to take direct action to fix problems you didn't directly cause). Generally positive obligations are weaker and more dubious than negative ones, so this could be seen by conservatives as a bit of a bait-and-switch.
> I'm sorry you're getting downvoted. I'm very happy you're willing to engage with me on this.
Thank you, and that's OK. I have more than enough karma points here.
> And you cannot fault the public for this misunderstanding because that is the common and historical meaning of the word.
I don't know if the public is faulted for the misunderstanding or simply racism itself. But it is possible that it's a strategic mistake politically to call people racist and have it taken as a stronger insult than it is meant to be. I think this is certainly a good question for the left to figure out for itself.
> it is possible for a person, even a white person, not to be racist assuming they take appropriate actions? If so, I think we are very close to resolving our disagreement.
The thing is that I'm not sure how much a person can "be racist" individually more than be a part of a group that causes racism. But anyway, it is definitely possible for people to work against racism and make "themselves" (as a group) less racist, and ideally not racist at all. I certainly wouldn't call a person who works towards inclusion and fairness in their community or place of work racist.
> we have made a crucial shift from a "negative ethical obligation" (an obligation not to do direct harm to another) to a positive one (an obligation to take direct action to fix problems you didn't directly cause)
Not exactly because harm is still perpetuated (even if I wasn't the one who dunked you in the swimming pool, if I'm keeping your head under water I'm still causing you harm) but obviously we're talking about less personally caused harm, and you're right that there's an aspect of a call for help here. In terms of political strategy, the question is this: if I turn out to be keeping your head under water unintentionally (say because I just want to lie on my floating mattress), which is more effective for you -- to say that I'm perpetuating the harm done to you, or to beg me for help? The latter may be more effective if it's just me and you, but I don't know which is more effective when entire social groups are concerned.
If "discrimination plus power" is required for racism, then low income white skinned people, and especially homeless white skinned people, can't by definition be racist. This mean only people with money enough to change society (top 1%) or people that can exercise power through a higher position in society has the ability to be racist.
The top 1% is general perceived as having most power in society as a single group, and much more than white skinned people counted as one group. Individuals of the top 1% has significant more power than the average individual of people with white skin.
Then we have politicians and CEO's, which as a group has power somewhere in the middle between the previous two when counted as one group, but as individuals might very much have more power in average than anyone of the top 1%.
We also got convicted criminals that by law, are made powerless and removed from the voting pool. Surely they as a group holds no power to perpetuate an unfair distribution of power.
If we want to keep the definition of "discrimination plus power", what amount of power and how do we measure it? How do we measure a groups ability to be vessels for social dynamics? Do we only count the quantity of power, or the average power per individual?
I think you are misreading him. I gave two possible academic definitions of racism that I had heard of, A) "discrimination plus power", and B) "systems creating unequal outcomes" (or "systems of oppression").
It seemed to me that he was clarifying what those who believe A) mean, but personally goes with B) more. Which is good, because for the reasons you mention, A) is more extreme.
B) is a better definition in general, but it clashes quite a bit with what I would call recent trend(<20 years) from the left of blaming groups of people rather than culture. Its the idea that society is the one that creates unfair distribution of power between groups, and culture the vessel for the perpetuation of it. It did not blame individuals based on their skin or sex, demanded that they fixed society because of privileged position, but rather sought to change cultural norms by causing a change from the inside.
> If "discrimination plus power" is required for racism, then low income white skinned people, and especially homeless white skinned people, can't by definition be racist. This mean only people with money enough to change society (top 1%) or people that can exercise power through a higher position in society has the ability to be racist.
Not exactly, because the academic definition does not apply directly to individuals anyway (as opposed to xenophobia, which is a personal trait). Racism, like every social dynamics, is a statistical phenomenon. Also note that even even within the bottom, say, 5%, white people still have more power than blacks. But you are correct that racism generally works through people with more power.
> The top 1% is general perceived as having most power in society as a single group
First of all, we are not interested in quantifying exactly what share of racism does every individual or a slice of society hold. It is implied that racism works through power, so you can do the math.
Second, you mentioned "a single group", so I'll raise a point I find interesting. In social research, there are several kinds of groups we're interested in. Groups that are merely statistical set (how much money does the 1% have etc.), groups that have cohesion and common interests, and groups that are perceived to have cohesion and common interests whether they do or don't. The top 1% are certainly a group in the first sense, possibly a group in the second sense, but probably not a group in the third sense, although that may be changing as some politicians and political groups are trying to make people view them as such.
> Surely they as a group holds no power to perpetuate an unfair distribution of power.
That's true (although they may hold some power in their local communities).
> If we want to keep the definition of "discrimination plus power", what amount of power and how do we measure it? How do we measure a groups ability to be vessels for social dynamics?
It's not very easy and it's not very precise, but it doesn't have to be. We're trying to understand the basic mechanics; predictions are impossible anyway due to intractability. You can measure power in several ways. One is to measure it through proxies like money or positions (e.g. average income, or how many women CEOs there are). Another is to measure its effects, like whose groups interests are best served by legislation (at the various legislative levels).
> Do we only count the quantity of power, or the average power per individual?
Whichever is more useful for whatever it is we're discussing, but when we talk about groups, it is often the total power, rather than "power per capita" that counts.
Thanks for further elaborate on it, but it does leave me with a strong sense of contradictions. The initial one being, if want the group with highest total power, why not just use the full mathematical set of people (ie everyone). you can't get anything more powerful in order to change society, and no other group is as blameworthy for current status quo.
It reminds me of a dilemma regarding to voting power. Germany has the most seats of any country with a total of 13%, while Luxembourg has 0.8%. Clearly Germany has more power, and when it comes to influence power in EU, one should go there to cause change. However, a Luxembourg citizen vote counts as 10x more than a german vote as a result of degressive proportionality, which mean by efficiency, any campaign would gain more influence per unity of work going after Luxembourg citizen. So where should the effort go to cause social change in the EU, and whose citizens deserve being blamed for faults?
> That's true (although they may hold some power in their local communities).
During the time of the Black Panther Party, one could easily see how they held a lot of power in local communities, caused by the massive race segregation that existed and still exist to some degree. If we also drag into this discussion some psychology, almost every person in the world has a local space for which they are in control and got highest power. Its a survivability trait in order to regulating stress levels against an otherwise threatening environment.
Looking at the local level seems as a poor method to study the mechanics of racism, and even worse for making predictions. Reductionism is a popular academic method, but it also widely criticized for lacking the ability to make predicts from a theory and thus verified the validity of said theory. The lack of verification is where science normally leaves and cultural, religious or political believes begin.
> even within the bottom, say, 5%, white people still have more power than blacks
Do you have data that shows that homeless people with black skin have less power than homeless people with white skin? I find it generally implausible that people who can't fulfill the lowest level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs has any distinguishable level of power in their subgroups. My best guess would be a proxy like police policy, but then we are entering the area of people being "acted on", and that is generally not considered as an aspect of power. Left politics is quite active in advocating that "acted on" is the opposite of power, regardless of the benefits that the acted on gets.
> why not just use the full mathematical set of people (ie everyone). you can't get anything more powerful in order to change society, and no other group is as blameworthy for current status quo.
First you need to explain whether by "use" you mean in social science (as an explanation) or in politics (as a strategy). I think that either case doesn't work well. Obviously, all sorts of trivial sets are the causes of everything, but a useful model must be more refined to provide insight on the mechanics of the process (and as a strategy, that's just hard).
> So where should the effort go to cause social change in the EU, and whose citizens deserve being blamed for faults?
I don't know. I'm not a political strategist (I'm not a social scientist, either, but I studied some).
> it also widely criticized for lacking the ability to make predicts from a theory and thus verified the validity of said theory. The lack of verification is where science normally leaves and cultural, religious or political believes begin.
That's not quite true. Social science, as well as biology and computer science to some degree, deal with intractable dynamical systems. On a large scale, it is a mathematical impossibility to make predictions about biological systems, computer programs and social dynamics. Biologists can't predict evolution -- only explain it retroactively -- but that doesn't mean they don't understand the mechanics. Likewise, social science can only make predictions in very constrained conditions, like those studied in social psychology. If science were restricted to studying only tractable processes, we wouldn't get very far. Also, the word "science" may not be the best word to describe social research, anyway, but that doesn't mean that the knowledge gathered there is religious or political.
> Do you have data that shows that homeless people with black skin have less power than homeless people with white skin?
I wasn't quite talking about homeless people. Unless a homeless person denies access to food and shelter to people of other races, I won't call them racist. But as to data, how about this[1]. In the US, blacks are more likely to be incarcerated than whites of even much higher economic status:
What's more, even young black people who follow the rules and are never incarcerated are less likely than similar white people to accumulate wealth as they get older. As of 2012, the median household wealth of black participants in the study who had never been incarcerated at some point in their lives was $16,200. Those who had been incarcerated had zero wealth at the median.
Among white participants who had never been incarcerated, however, median household wealth was $192,000 by 2012. The median white participant who had been incarcerated reported wealth of $5,000.
Well, we do have the model of culture, which is a trivial set when thinking about groups of people, but refined when grouped by values and concepts. They define groups of people and impact power distribution, but is distinct in its aspect to be supported and enforced both by those with power and those without.
To take a few examples, female and male identity is defined by the same culture. A man will apply male identity as defined by culture, but also be expected (and enforced) to do so by both men and women in that culture. When we look at groups and define men as having more power as a group, it doesn't address if they have more power to change the cultural rules. The power a man has to voluntarily wear women clothing should be a hint towards that aspect, and if they have more power to do so than a woman wearing men clothing.
Similar, in the caste system, people from all castes shared and enforced the culture. People of high caste supported it, and people of low caste supported it as that meant that they themselves were not at fault. In the end it took a common effort to remove it from law in places like India, but as a cultural values it is yet to fully be eradicated.
> In the US, blacks are more likely to be incarcerated than whites of even much higher economic status:
Well, I did ask this before. Is "acted on", even if beneficial, a power? A lot of feminism theory when looking at movies and story telling criticize that being "acted on" diminish a person identity and power. Even if its a beneficial outcome in the case of incarceration, the person involved can't affect it or control it.
Looking at it from a cultural (and using the trivial set), we can easily see how such outcome can happen. I recall a test where actors, a white man, a white woman, a black man, and a black woman acted as if they stole a bike in broad daylight. The outcome matches perfectly the cultural expectation, with only the men drawing negative attention. The black man got the worst, while the white women got positive attention in that bystanders went and actually helped her to cut the protective chain of the bike. From a cultural perspective, society collectively define thieves as white women < black women < white men < black men, as least to most likely.
If we tried to predict this result using perceived power of each group, we would get something like W/M < W/F < B/M < B/F, with the potential to switch W/F and B/M depending if we regard race or gender as the more powerful sub group. Regardless, neither provide an accurate prediction, as white males end up second to worst when looking at the actual result.
From a cultural perspective, where we define it as controlling what power each group has, it does make sense that not all groups have the same power in all situations. It also make sense to define that the group that culture defines as having power, are themselves not able to control culture. At most, the group can proportionally affect culture, similar to that of a large sub group of citizens can affect the election result without the group having a majority.
If you're talking about political strategy, then there's not much I can say, as I have no idea what is the best strategy to dismantle a caste system. But if you're talking about a descriptive model, then I don't think cooperation is the same thing as support. The definition of power is exactly the ability to get others to serve your interests. The fact that a group with less power (the influenced) cooperates with a power structure that serves the powerful (or the influencers) is no indication that the interests originate there, too.
> If we tried to predict this result using perceived power of each group, we would get something like W/M < W/F < B/M < B/F
I think that you're assuming that power (or lack thereof) manifests itself in precisely the same way in every situation (male/female or while/black). It is, I believe, an incorrect assumption. Because men are dependent on women in many ways, it is not in their best interests to have women incarcerated more. My expectation would be that in every scenario, the outcome would be the one that best serves the interests of the group with power, regardless if they happen to coincide with the interests of the less powerful group in that particular scenario. Also, social dynamics that shape social perception are, of course, statistical and work globally. Locally we can get behavior that doesn't tell the whole picture. For example, if you only considered how men and women behave on dates, you may wrongly conclude that women have more power because men pay for them and open the door for them.
> it does make sense that not all groups have the same power in all situations
That may be true, but on the scale any researcher who studies social structures who isn't a psychologist is interested in, the more powerful group gets its way in almost every case. It's just that social dynamics that perpetuate such large-scale power are usually not visible on a small scale.
What benefit is it for a group to have themselves incarcerated? I could see how one group could grant protection to themselves and their interdependent group, but it seems strange, even contradicting, that the group with power would grant protection to someone else but then not do so to themselves.
And if we allowed such concept to enter the calculations, every other power indication must be put into questioning. Social science commonly make a point of gender distribution in the work environment. We naturally conclude that since more men are in CEO/higher pay position, that must be a result of power. However, a Chinese study showed that >80% of women won't consider dating a man if he doesn't own his own apartment and earn above a cultural set amount. 50% even consider it wrong for man to be outside if not earning that amount, as he should stay inside and work until he has increase his earning. Does this mean that women in such culture are the one in power, and that they just happen to give up power in the work force since its in their best interest to have men with high income?
If we are to include such relations, and from my perspective, results that are not Nash equilibrium, we end up with an impossible high burden of proof on social science. The researcher would basically have to prove the non-existence of such relationships.
> if you only considered how men and women behave on dates, you may wrongly conclude that women have more power
Its not easy comparing two asymmetrical reproductive strategies and asking which one are in more control, but a general consensus seems to be that whoever invest most are the party that are more discriminative and more selective. Where humans end up depend generally on the one studying it, and the methodology used, and local extremes.
> the more powerful group gets its way in almost every case
Depend on the time scale. If we look at an elected party, they will by definition get their way in almost every case until next election. At that point, their power, which was given by society as a whole, can be removed. The question is then, where that power ever part of the group or was it just granted?
Going back to cultural values, it doesn't change as rapidly. By allowing groups to have different power in different situation, it is also less rigid in its predictions. If the same cultural values are kept over time, you also get the effect that groups gets their way consistently over time as per the culture. The thing that would disprove culture as the culprit of power, is if a group had power to change such culture. Do you know of any such case?
> What benefit is it for a group to have themselves incarcerated?
I don't understand what you're referring to.
> However, a Chinese study showed that >80% of women won't consider dating a man if he doesn't own his own apartment and earn above a cultural set amount... Does this mean that women in such culture are the one in power, and that they just happen to give up power in the work force since its in their best interest to have men with high income?
But that is the whole point of the power discourse. Power shapes social norms.
> Its not easy comparing two asymmetrical reproductive strategies and asking which one are in more control
I think it is fairly obvious that men have more power in most cultures.
> The question is then, where that power ever part of the group or was it just granted?
The power is "a part of the group", but it ebbs and flows. Government is a mechanism that interacts with power (like all social mechanisms). If the government structure is binary, i.e. only one party can be in control at any one time, then this will naturally amplify power fluctuations because that's how binary mechanisms work.
> it is also less rigid in its predictions.
It's very hard (or even impossible) to make predictions in an intractable dynamical systems. That's just a mathematical reality. That's why social science doesn't try to make predictions on a large scale and over long durations, because that's just mathematically impossible. Similarly, biologists are unable to make predictions about evolution. They have no choice but to be content with retroactively explaining the dynamics.
> The thing that would disprove culture as the culprit of power, is if a group had power to change such culture. Do you know of any such case?
Plenty. The French revolution has dramatically changed cultural perception of aristocracy and hereditary power. More recently, feminism has changed cultural norms dramatically. It was once believed that women don't have the (biological) mental faculties to be good doctors or lawyers. The deeper and more internalized cultural norms are, the longer the process. There is an amazing book called The Civilizing Process[1] by Norbert Elias that chronicles the gradual social development of disgust. It shows how things we perceive to be visceral are actually the product of social processes.
The swirling mustached man who in western culture symbolize evil and criminality. If men as a group has all the power, why would men as a group allow men to be incarcerated in higher rate than women? We have similar situation with the phrase "women and children first". Why would the group with power sacrifice their life for members of a less powerful group?
> I think it is fairly obvious that men have more power in most cultures.
In the context of dating? Social science looks at outcomes, and women are more discriminative and have more decision of the outcome. Outside of some extreme local situation where some elderly religious male leader decides whom a woman will form a religious bond with, which in my country is highly illegal and carry prison sentence, I can't say there is much signs that men decide the outcome of dating. Looking at proxies for dating culture (ie romantic movies), that impression is further reinforced that women decide the out come of dates and men only have the option to try date enough women until one will accept him.
But any conclusion must come with the consideration that men and women has asymmetrical strategies when it comes to dating.
> Power shapes social norms.
Or social norms shapes power. If men must be bread earners in order to be successful in reproduction rituals, those who are more inclined to do so will reproduce at an evolutionary higher rate than others. Such incentives should, through not guarantied, impact the power balance in the work force. In cultures that do not have such culture should as a result have a distinct different power distribution in the work force. I would guess (since I don't have the data) that Chinese society has a more extreme gender segregation in the work force than countries where income has a lower impact on dating.
> Government is a mechanism that interacts with power
One could easily think that it is the citizens that control the government that votes a party into power. The common phrase, S/He who pays the piper calls the tune, implies a power relation. Naturally, a political party has power, but revolutions general happens to parties that travels too far from the cultural structure. Somewhat ironically, cultural changes often happen in the turmoil.
> Plenty. The French revolution has dramatically changed cultural perception of aristocracy and hereditary power.
I might be mistaken, but it wasn't aristocracy and hereditary power that was in control of the French revolution. It seems that the group in power did not get their way, and the cultural changes came from the less powerful groups working together.
Old style feminism did change cultural norms, and most what I have read and seen was caused by the goal to create change by targeting cultural values. They were not the group with power, and the change was not cause by getting the most powerful group to change culture. Instead culture was changed from within by changing gender norms and expectations. There is plenty of old Swedish movies that illustrated 1980s parents that attempted to eliminate gender identity as a concept, switching or removing gendered clothing and toys.
New feminism, which is a style of feminism I strongly oppose, is the idea that men and women have different strengths, perspectives, and roles in society. Difference feminism success seem to mostly be about pinning groups against groups and causing what people call the gender war. Old feminism advocated that everyone are human and differences in society is caused by a harmful culture, one that they had a good track record in fixing. Since everyone are human, they even managed to make the word feminism to be a synonym to the word equal, which seems quite hijacked by new feminism.
The Civilizing Process sounds interesting and valuable read, but not sure how it links back to the concept that a powerful group shapes society and culture. Going back to racism, the initial proposition was that the group with mos...
> If men as a group has all the power, why would men as a group allow men to be incarcerated in higher rate than women?
I'm not sure I understand the premise. The fact that a group is powerful (and therefore serves itself) does not imply that the members of the group are necessarily allies. Even shared interests do not imply alliance. In fact, the more powerful each member of the group is, the less reason there is for them to be allies. Powerful groups usually become allegiant to one another only when threatened by a large accumulation of less powerful groups (that together have a lot of power).
> In the context of dating?
Maybe not, but this is getting into very specific contexts. I'm generally talking about social, or political power, in the context of distribution of resources. This is what most social scientists mean when they say "power" and don't qualify the context. Dating is quite special anyway in that the dynamics usually involves a very small number of people, so there can't be interesting alliances.
> Or social norms shapes power.
It's not either or. Nearly all dynamical systems involve feedback. But from a political point of view, what matters is that social norms are malleable. I won't go so far as to say that biology plays no role in social norms, but I don't think we have any reason to believe that our society today is anywhere near the boundary of biological forces.
> If men must be bread earners in order to be successful in reproduction rituals, those who are more inclined to do so will reproduce at an evolutionary higher rate than others.
Regardless of my previous statement (feedback etc.), I should warn against relying too much on behaviors attributed to a prehistoric past, which is largely unknown. We're not sure exactly about the different roles men and women had in prehistoric society.
> One could easily think that it is the citizens that control the government that votes a party into power.
Yes, but one citizen does not vote a party into power. Lots of citizens have lots of power.
> It seems that the group in power did not get their way, and the cultural changes came from the less powerful groups working together.
Less powerful groups working together is precisely a way to gather power. That's why capitalists hate unions. A worker alone has far less power than the capitalist. But combined, they are quite fearsome. It is a very crude and simplistic description, but the power of the rich is in their money, and the power of the poor is in their numbers. It's just that it's much easier for a rich man to yield his power than for a large group of poor people, because they must coordinate.
> New feminism,
I don't like this distinction. Feminism is simply the ideology of having women attain the same power as men. Feminists simply have different strategies of attaining those goals. When people start talking about "new" vs. "old" feminism, I get the sense that they really cherry pick some feminist strategies that they like and some that they don't.
> The Civilizing Process sounds interesting and valuable read, but not sure how it links back to the concept that a powerful group shapes society and culture.
Only indirectly. The thesis is that the top echelons of society want to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi by adopting behavior that is more refined. Eventually, the lower classes want to resemble the high classes, and mimic the same behavior, and the cycle starts again. What is interesting is how internalized things have become that we can literally throw up when seeing behavior that was once common place. I mentioned it as an example of social dynamics shaping norms.
> and you can't do so by only addressing the most powerful group.
Ah, maybe that's the source of the misunderstanding. The most powerful "group" does not necessarily hold most of the power. Power is spread, just not equally. To give a simple example, to chang...
Since we are getting to the point where the HN formats are making lines be quite short, I would just like to say thanks. My goal by continuing the discussion was to see the view and understand the arguments when discussing groups with power as a source for racism (and by extension, other ism's). Out of happenstance, only two days ago I also listened on a keynote that highlighted the importance to listen and see the human in on-line discussions.
> Powerful groups usually become allegiant to one another only when threatened by a large accumulation of less powerful groups
Such groups are very temporarily in coherency, and don't seem to match the concept of "white men" when described as a cause for ism's. If anything, grouping people based on race or gender without a very specific context seems to loose all the attributes of a allied group with aligned interests and goals.
> Nearly all dynamical systems involve feedback ... Eventually, the lower classes want to resemble the high classes, and mimic the same behavior
I think studies done by Robert Sapolsky on social ranking in baboons to be quite enlightening on this. He showed that if you group individuals by ranking, number 3 competes with 2 and 4 but not with 1 and 5. To theorize, I think that when individuals of a class mimics the behavior of whoever is at top, they do so in order to primarily compete with the nearest ranking members of the same class. The power relation between the top and those at the bottom becomes very indirect and largely unintended through this mechanism.
> I should warn against relying too much on behaviors attributed to a prehistoric past
Fully agree, and mostly bring it up as a point where we tend to view men as powerful because some nation forbids unmarried women to be outside, while we have similar situation in nations where unwealthy men are also not allowed outside. The variation in culture has a much bigger impact on power distribution and liberty than gender has on a global scale.
> [New feminism]. I don't like this distinction. Feminism is simply the ideology of having women attain the same power as men. Feminists simply have different strategies of attaining those goals.
If we look at the left and right politics, both strive to attain economical progress and prosperity. The distinction is in the strategies of attaining those goals, the values behind it, and from that a lot of effort and energy is expended to fighting each other. A think a major factor in this is when two strategies conflict with each other, you end up with two opposing ideologies with the same goal.
To take a few example, Difference feminism encourage and promotes diversity, and have a large undertone of biology in their message. A company should strive 50% women and 50% men because men and women are different and brings different values. The older feminism movement want to eliminate the defining aspect of diversity, and have companies only see the humans behind the applicants for which the natural result should be, spread over enough companies, 50/50.
To bring a second area of conflicting strategies, lets bring up domestic violence. A key statistics that new feminism commonly brings up is that 80% of reported perpetrators are men and 20% are women, often witch explicit implication of testosterone as a biological cause for violence. A common phrase used by feminist is "men violence against women". However, if we look for supporting evidence in homes where there is two men living together, or two women, we don't get the expected result of higher and lower violence based on gender. What we find is that regardless of the genders, the amount of domestic violence is identical.
New feminism reaction to that data can be read in several papers and reports, released in the last 20 years. The full title, often cut in half, is now days "Mens violence against women and violence by people in same-sex relationships", perfectly matching the data and (in my view) completely missing the point. ...
> Since we are getting to the point where the HN formats are making lines be quite short
Just click on any of the comments to make them the root.
> If anything, grouping people based on race or gender without a very specific context seems to loose all the attributes of a allied group with aligned interests and goals.
But "allied group" and "aligned interests" are very different things. When we study groups, we don't always care what one person in the group feels towards others in the group, or whether person X and person Y are business competitors. X may really want Y to fail, but even the opposite outcome is better to X than a communist revolution. Anyway, it is a fact that white men have been more powerful than white women or black men in the West, at least for the past few hundreds of years.
> The distinction is in the strategies of attaining those goals, the values behind it
I think that different values result in very different goals, and I think that conservative and white Americans have very different notions of how they want the world to look. Jonathan Haidt has a nice talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b86dzTFJbkc
> often witch explicit implication of testosterone as a biological cause for violence
I don't think that's the implication at all. It's unlikely that feminists would emphasize a biological cause, and besides, I don't thing they (should or do) care what the cause is.
> I would even go as to say that the strategies should simply focus on reducing the human behavior of turning verbal arguments into physical confrontations, rather than focus on gender.
I don't know.
> if we want to stop racism we can't only talk about white men.
Again, I don't know how to stop racism, and I must admit that I haven't closely followed the political messaging by different advocacy groups, so I'm perfectly willing to accept that the messaging was wrong.
> white men have been more powerful than white women or black men in the West
So how do we define power in this context. If members of the group has conflicting goals and conflicting interests, how do the group as a whole "get their way most of the time"?
We could use a proxy like wealth and work position, but that leaves us with the problem that quite explicit in the Chinese culture. If men are culturally forced to seek wealth and profession, is that power? When there such major incentive for men to seek wealth, which I will emphasize by cite OkCupid (West data) statistics blog: "If you're 23 or older [male] and don't make much money, go die in a fire". The effect of wealth for men is as correlating and explicit as looks are for women.
Comparing white men with black men works better using that proxy, through there is additional factors. The most powerful factor for wealth is being born by wealthy parents (per any article I have read on the subject of wealth). Unless a nation has an immigration that matches the wealth of people currently living there, those people are going to be at a major statistical disadvantage in their ability to gather new wealth.
Politics is however a nice proxy for checking if a group is getting their way most of the time, since plenty of political decision intentionally impacts group of people. When balanced in respect to wealth, do schools in black areas get less funding/focus then schools in white areas? Do parks get more built/funded in white areas than black areas? If so, is it because of the political representation (ie, since black population in the US is 8%, the 92% will carry a majority in all decision and in theory dominate any decision). This is part of the problem why most nation aren't rule by popularity vote, since high population density of cities would dominate the lower population of the rural area and carry a majority in all political decisions. However, the cost to such system is that all votes don't counts as equal, and all system that I know of is based on land and not on race.
> It's unlikely that feminists would emphasize a biological cause
A common comment I see is that new feminism is extremism, and they don't represent the mass movement that view everyone as humans. While I do hope that is true, key note speakers on tech conferences is heavily weighted in the new feminism camp, and when it comes to political activism, there seem few who represent the view that cultural roles and values in gender and race is harmful.
> how do the group as a whole "get their way most of the time"?
I think you're making the mistake of confusing intent with outcome. Power, like pressure, is a statistical property. Gas particles don't need intent in order to have communal properties. Also, I think you're associating judgment with power, as if someone is saying that having power is bad. I think it's important to first understand what power is as a neutral attribute, and only then understand the criticism (which, BTW, boils done to "with power comes responsibility").
> If men are culturally forced to seek wealth and profession, is that power?
Yes. Again, power is not about how you feel and what you want, but what you have. I know nothing of Chinese culture, but Chinese men may suffer terribly from stress and depression, but they still have power.
> since plenty of political decision intentionally impacts group of people.
Right, but, again, we're talking statistics here. If some decisions affect me negatively and some affect me positively, but overall, 80% are positive for me and 80% are bad for you for, say, the past 50 years, then, obviously, there's something going on here.
> the 92% will carry a majority in all decision and in theory dominate any decision
Being a majority is a great source of power. If the majority doesn't treat the minority equally, that's discrimination.
> and they don't represent the mass movement that view everyone as humans.
You may be more sensitive to these things than me, but I don't think you're being fair. "Black lives matter" isn't about white lives. It points out that blacks are discriminated against and that should stop. Feminism, old as new, points out the discrimination and unfair distribution of power between men and women. It's not about men's problems. If I'm getting mugged and I yell, "help, someone is mugging me", I don't think it's fair to say, "why aren't you also yelling for the woman getting raped two blocks over?!" Advocacy groups are supposed to focus on one problem, or one kind of problems. Simply saying "everybody has problems" may be absolutely true, but would terrible advocacy. Also, distinction between new and old advocacy is pretty much a constant. People always say, we were fine letting you have what you asked for yesterday (even though they really weren't fine), but now you're asking for too much or stepping out of line.
> Yes. Again, power is not about how you feel and what you want, but what you have.
Knowing the source is critical to solve a problem. If cultural pressure is the source, shouldn't it be solved? Seems a bit to me like blaming black people for being in prison, demanding that they should fix the issue of being jailed more than white people.
A key feature of science is to figure out and understand how a system works and what affects it. How successful has efforts in the past been in trying to get people that are forced into a situation to also fix the problem of being forced?
> If some decisions affect me negatively and some affect me positively
This was part of what I was wondering about. Could you define in what way 80% of decisions have been positive for say, men in general in the last 30 years? In order for things to be positive for the group as a whole, the decision can't be significant contradicting within the group. I can't think of any interest that is that exclusively an interests to men but the opposite for women, and carries a significant majority.
> If the majority doesn't treat the minority equally, that's discrimination.
Should 8% get equal 50% influence? With winner take all decision, majority will always dominate the minority. In an election, the winning 51% get 100% representation, while the loosing 49% get 0%. That is not equal, and many nation solve this in a imperfect way by having more than 2 party system, through practically all retain some limits.
A problem with the word discrimination in this context is that intent is lost. 92% voting what they want and 8% voting for something else is generally not considered discrimination since the 92% don't intentionally try to miss treat the 8%. You need intent for discrimination, which is by its nature create before the end result.
> Advocacy groups are supposed to focus on one problem, or one kind of problems.
A common reply I get, but there is three major issues with it. First, feminism proclaims to be about gender equality, and over half its existence the movement stood for that. Its only in the last 30 years that the movement changed course.
Second, having an alternative movement that focus on Mens Right is bad for everyone. Equality don't need to have competition between two polar movements. If your house on fire, the fix is not to use fans and try to cool it down. Having two polar movements with the same goal is only causing less understanding, more fighting, and less empathy, and shouldn't a movement about equality stand for more than that?
Third, it should be said that sex segregation has only gotten worse in the last 30 years, a trend that many people are surprisingly surprised about. Difference feminism is sometimes, rather hushed, accused of this, and I don't disagree.
> we were fine letting you have what you asked for yesterday
Except when that what people asked yesterday, and what people are asking tomorrow, is polar opposites. One side want people to be treated equally regardless of gender and race. The other side want people to be treated different based on gender and race, but demand that the outcome to be equal. You can only fulfill the later demand by taking back the earlier and reversing progress.
> "Black lives matter"
I always found that adding the word "too" transforms the message. I also think it is way too early to evaluate the movement, as it could go as black panther movement and be about guns and violence, or it could be about reducing murder caused by racial tensions. The later has general support in society.
As a side note: Thanks for the link to Jonathan Haidt talk. Very interesting, through I have heard some exception to the left politics being pro-science and pro-lenience with crime. In particular, feminist (assuming left) groups successfully lobbied to prevent medical research on causes for rape, with statements that such research could result in lower jail sentences and people avoiding justice with insanit...
> Knowing the source is critical to solve a problem.
Right, but I think it's important to separate social science from politics, even though the two are related, just as we separate science from technology.
> If cultural pressure is the source, shouldn't it be solved?
I don't think social pressure is the source of power, but just the form it takes, but I agree that in order to change society, those who work to change it would eventually need to address such social pressure. It's just that these things tend to change on their own once material conditions have changed -- but it takes time. It's a little like those who claimed that soldiers would never be able to accept integrated units in the military. Instead of sending psychologists to treat the white soldiers' anxiety, they just integrated the units. After a while, everybody got used to it, and the social pressure and norms changed. Social norms almost invariable (history shows) follow practice, rather than the other way around. Social action therefore strives to change practice, and the norms follow. I am not aware of cases where action can first directly change norms. Sometimes norms change "naturally", due to technological or material changes that are not a result of social action.
> How successful has efforts in the past been in trying to get people that are forced into a situation to also fix the problem of being forced?
Isn't that what revolts are? Revolts fix the problem for both sides.
> Could you define in what way 80% of decisions have been positive for say, men in general in the last 30 years?
First let me say that things have gotten better for women. But the lack of social-security-paid maternity leave and subsidy of child care, still work against women in the US.
You could say that social norms demand that this be the case, but, like I wrote above, I think history shows that social norms are usually reflections of material conditions rather than something deeply ingrained, and also nobody said that power doesn't have any downsides. It's like a king who feels lonely at the top; lonely he may be, but he's still the king.
> Should 8% get equal 50% influence?
No, but it should get 8%.
> In an election, the winning 51% get 100% representation
I'm not interested in fixing the system or in whining about it; just in describing it.
> since the 92% don't intentionally try to mistreat the 8%.
I'm not sure. E.g., in America, the Republican party has been working for years to curtail the voting power of blacks below their share in the population.
> You need intent for discrimination
I don't think so. I can invite people to a party on the roof of my building, which has no elevator. I discriminate against handicapped people without intending to.
> Its only in the last 30 years that the movement changed course.
I strongly disagree with that.
> shouldn't a movement about equality stand for more than that?
I don't know; I know absolutely nothing about political strategy.
> The other side want people to be treated different based on gender and race, but demand that the outcome to be equal.
I disagree; that's not what that side wants at all. That side wants everyone to be treated in a way that recognizes that people are different, but doesn't want the outcome to be the same for every person individually. Nobody is asking that a single, uneducated black mother from Philadelphia be granted a Harvard diploma or get a job as a New York lawyer. They just want the statistical power distribution to be fair. I see no contradiction between this and any previous demands.
> it's important to separate social science from politics
If you don't recognize the politics in science, you end up with eugenics and bias in the data.
If you separate science from politics, you get decision not anchored in reality. The biggest improvement to government process (a field rarely talk about) in the last 200 years was the cost-benefit analyses. Scientific methods are a core part of government.
> It's just that these things tend to change on their own once material conditions have changed
Lets structure this a bit, since we have two different theories: is it social values that leads to material conditions, or is it material conditions that leads to social values.
If its the first case is true, we should see signs of social values being changed while material conditions lagging behind. The opposite should be true for the second case.
I would claim that the case of the solider lacks to mention a critical third-party. Its not that the soldiers themselves that decided to integrated the units. Its an outer force, in this case the military leadership who do not share the same cultural values of the soldiers, and that outer force is what forces a material change for which later results in a cultural acceptance by the soldiers.
Take Japan after WW2. Its was not that the Japanese suddenly decided to change their cultural views about Imperial rule. The allies, who did not share the cultural views of those in Japan, imposed a material change (ie, the forced surrender and statement from the emperor). After a time, citizens of japan accepted the new reality and cultural values and norms changed.
An other case would be to look at the revolution that created the Soviet Union. People didn't just suddenly decide to create a revolution, and then after a few years have cultural values changed. The cultural values changed much earlier, primarily because of lost wars, which cause people to loose faith in the tsarist autocracy. The process was very slow, and took somewhere between 100 and 50 years, ending with the revolution. At that point, Social norms had already changed, a fact that the Tsar Nicholas II where very aware of.
To ground this into current situation with men being more pressured into taking higher paying jobs than women, the government as a third-party would need to basically go in and decide who works where and how much people should get paid, and the government would need to have a different cultural view than the rest of the population. I doubt either requirement could happen, the first because communism had already tried it, the later because a government with different cultural views than the population is unlikely to get voted in.
> But the lack of social-security-paid maternity leave and subsidy of child care, still work against women in the US.
Is that a positive decision for men? I know that where I live, Sweden, both those things exist and our work market is even more gender segregated that the US work market.
If we consider the extreme pressure that the dating site data shows, how much will a few months/year of paid leave change things. Will men start to seek women who can support a family, thus sending social pressure for women to seek higher paying jobs? Will women change their cultural values of seeking men with higher paying jobs?
Looking at Sweden, what it did is to silence the false myth that women are a bigger risk to employ than men. It did not change the cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles in society.
> the Republican party has been working for years to curtail the voting power of blacks
There is indeed political efforts to win at all costs and to try prevent voters from voting rather than win them over. I would not go and claim it is anything supported by white men as a group, but rather a fringe behavior by people whose income is based on being an politician. A other word for it would be corruption, buts its not commonly used word for describing such behavior.
> If you don't recognize the politics in science, you end up with eugenics and bias in the data.
That's not what I meant. I meant let's separate the science (i.e., what the reality is) from the technology (i.e., how to apply what we've learned about reality). Both are important and intertwined, but I need to know when you're talking about the science and when you're talking about the technology.
> I would claim that the case of the solider lacks to mention a critical third-party. Its not that the soldiers themselves that decided to integrated the units.
Of course. That's how social action usually takes place: by forcing those who oppose it after obtaining a coalition with enough power to do that.
> The process was very slow
That's exactly what I said in my previous comment. Social norms can change in two ways: quickly after a material change (sometimes due to social action and sometimes due to a sudden technological or environmental change), or slowly and "naturally". But social action almost invariably changes conditions first (by shoving them down people's throats).
> I know that where I live, Sweden, both those things exist and our work market is even more gender segregated that the US work market.
Indeed, that is a very interesting phenomenon and one that is currently being studied. I don't know if we have a good explanation for it yet. But again, this is mixing science with technology. That certain laws work in favor of men doesn't mean that removing them would shift the balance in favor of women (as there may be other forces in play). If I have a noose around my neck and am slowly suffocating, there is no question that this is bad. But that doesn't mean that cutting the noose is better, as I may be hanging over an abyss. So this is why it is crucial to separate observation and description from prescriptions. We can discuss them both (although I know little about political action) but they are not the same thing.
> It did not change the cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles in society.
1. Not yet (in the US, it took the south over 100 years to get over blacks' perception as subhuman; in fact it may not even be complete). 2. See above.
> I would not go and claim it is anything supported by white men as a group
You're using that word again: support. When talking about power we don't care what you think, feel or support. We care about the power you have. Those actions work to increase the power of whites. Whether all, some or a tiny minority of whites actually support those actions is irrelevant to this descriptive analysis.
> Its a meaningless term if everything everyone do is unintentionally discrimination towards someone.
That's why social scientists take great care to explain what kind of discrimination they're talking about. But your example of the elevator isn't completely artificial. Look at all the laws enacted to make public places accessible to disabled people.
> Before it, the trend where going towards less segregation. After it, to more.
Sorry, I don't see it.
> Recognizing peoples similarity is more important than to recognizes the minute way people are different, and it just happen that I prefer a society that focus on similarities than a society that focus on differences.
But we're not talking about individial differences. In America, blacks and whites aren't different in some minute way. One group has been enslaved for two centuries, and then forcibly put down for another two centuries. We're talking about major, catastrophic differences in the way society has treated different groups for centuries. We can't just say, alright, from now on we're all the same, because centuries of gross discrimination and exploitation have already made significant material marks that should be addressed.
Could you be a bit more explicit. A lack of social-security-paid maternity is not technically a law, and as I mentioned, where I live it exist and is gender neutral.
A few years ago I did an experiment and made a few data searches through the Swedish law, looking at what laws explicit mention gender. Recalling right, there were six laws that explicitly mentioned women, and zero laws that mentioned men. Out of the six, four where identical written laws which guaranties that women can request a female employee in certain situation (like when arrested and searched). Personally I don't see why the law don't just grant this to everyone, which is how the medical system works (you can always request a doctor of your own gender).
Of the remaining two, one is an oddly from of insanity clause for infanticide. Not sure why pregnancy induced depression isn't just include in the practice that deals with insanity clauses, but for some reason the law writers just decided to add it under the murder section and there explicitly write that women can be given a lower punishment for infanticide in such situations.
The last law is one that I find quite sexist and lumps together women and children as incapable of contacting the victim of crime support agency after being a victim of a crime, and thus forces the police to do it for them. The effect is that statistically 7 times more funds is used when a woman is a victim of a crime then a man. I have very little understanding for why the law can't just provide this service for everyone regardless of gender, except that government funding for victim of crimes support would have to be significant increased.
> it took the south over 100 years to get over blacks' perception as subhuman
This is true, but I would assume there where a trackable trend over that time span with decreased racism. Would you say there is currently a identifiable trend in changing cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles? If so, where would you say it points to?
> You're using that word again: support. When talking about power we don't care what you think, feel or support. We care about the power you have.
A major issue with using a single method in analyzing the world is that simplifications tend to give the occasional wrong conclusion. If we where to use the same method for power in assessing which farm land is benefiting from global warming, it would not say anything about causes. The group that causes global warming, and the entities that would benefit from a few degree hotter climate are not connected. When assessing the cause of voter suppression, the group not being suppressed is unlikely to hold an significant insight to the cause.
> laws enacted to make public places accessible to disabled people.
Yes, laws tend to be discriminative in what group they want to protect and what solutions are considered acceptable. This was very clear during the burka controversy last summer in Europe. Everyone was busy talking how laws that dictate what to wear on beaches was discrimination, completely ignoring that the existence of nude beaches shows that such laws already exist in public beaches. Society has just agreed that discrimination against nudists are acceptable and people who disagree should just create their own beaches out of sight.
> One group has been enslaved for two centuries, and then forcibly put down for another two centuries
Trying to repay bad blood from over 400 years is a recipe for war. Those perceiving themselves as a victim for things that happen centuries before they were born have increased stress and fight-or-flight responses, if I recall right.
> We can't just say, alright, from now on we're all the same
This just might be a bit socialistic comment, but yes we can. Those that have significant material marks, be that from being born to parents that got discriminated against or who randomly happen to end up on the lower end of the social ladder, sh...
> A lack of social-security-paid maternity is not technically a law
What do you mean? It is a property of the legal system.
> looking at what laws explicit mention gender.
BTW, that's not a very good way to find legal discrimination. For example, suppose there was a country with no laws against rape (some Arab countries are not far from that). It doesn't mention sex, but women are raped by men far more than the other way around, or even (grown) men by other men. Such an absence is a clear legal discrimination against women (and probably children).
> Personally I don't see why the law don't just grant this to everyone
I don't know, as I'm not familiar with those laws and their goals, but you should always keep thinking about power. It's OK to treat men and women differently if it doesn't create a power disparity. The goal isn't to make women and men identical, but to allow them to have equal power.
> I have very little understanding for why the law can't just provide this service for everyone regardless of gender, except that government funding for victim of crimes support would have to be significant increased.
Again, I'm not sure, but my guess is that this is a "black lives matter" point, aimed to fix a discrepancy in reality. Laws are not written in a vacuum, and sometimes laws are aimed at specific people who are discriminated against at the time the law is written. One of the first things you learn when you study history is that a new law tells you a lot about changes in society, because people don't legislate against things that don't happen or they don't perceive as threats (the threats can be imaginary). The law is not the code for a simulation program; it is a set of steps for using the collective power of the stat to interact with social reality.
> Would you say there is currently a identifiable trend in changing cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles? If so, where would you say it points to?
Of course, and it seems pretty obvious to me. As recently as a few decades ago, women who put having children on hold to have careers were viewed as freaks. Just watch Mad Men.
> Society has just agreed that discrimination against nudists is acceptable
Nudists are not a social group just as chess players aren't, and it isn't a religion, either. It's OK to argue whether forbidding nude beaches is right or wrong, but it has nothing to do with the issue of burkas on the beach.
> Trying to repay bad blood from over 400 years is a recipe for war.
It's not "bad blood". Those are real effects, which are a major cause for current conditions. And where did you get 400 years? As recently as 50 years ago, there was a legal separation of blacks and whites in the US as well as overt economic discrimination.
> The historical cause is of lesser importance than the present need.
I agree. Fixing the wrongs isn't about the past, but about fixing the current effects of past deeds. If I steal your car so you can't get to work, giving it back isn't a matter of settling past issues, but correcting the problem of you not having a car because I stole it.
> Do you find that compatible with the successful abolishment of gender segregation in buses that the feminist movement fought for?
I am not familiar with that experiment or its goals.
A lack of something is not a property. The legal system lacks infinite number of things. Its not a meaningful definition if infinity is included.
> It's OK to treat men and women differently
And there we got a key disagreement. It is not OK to treat people different based on gender. Any such treatment will cause local power disparities, like bias that cause real harm.
>> why the law can't just provide this service for everyone
> my guess is that this is a "black lives matter" point
The reason why the law treat women as incapable to pick up the phone and contact the agency is rather obvious. Cultural views and values. The problem is the result of power disparities for victims, where gender has a seven time factor in dictating who gets support and who doesn't. As a group, victims of crimes is one that should also be discriminated against because of their gender.
> As recently as a few decades ago, women who put having children on hold to have careers were viewed as freaks.
One of the theories behind that "interesting phenomenon" that is gender segregation in nations like Sweden, it describe how women after world war 2 started to have more time to spend on a career rather than spending all time on raising children. Men however are still stuck with the same expectation to support the raising of children, so their role in the work market has been static. Neither is a cultural change away from women being solely valued for their ability to raise children, nor men being valued solely for their ability to support the raising of children.
> Nudists are not a social group just as chess players aren't
Unsure if you are aware, but I find that comment highly offensive. Lets just start by quoting the lead in the wikipedia article on Naturism. "Naturism, or nudism, is a cultural and political movement practising, advocating and defending personal and social nudity". There exist a long history of nudism philosophy, culture, and values. I find your comment similar to someone saying that black people are not a social group, just as people wearing glasses aren't.
People who believe that clothing is constraining their identity is equally discriminated by a law that require specific form of clothing on beaches. All the effect of discrimination, like being hurt and feeling rejected is current reality of those people. The stigma of "being the wrong kind of person" and having that discrimination not even acknowledged is very harmful.
> And where did you get 400 years?
>> One group has been enslaved for two centuries, and then forcibly put down for another two centuries
Two centuries, plus two more centuries, is four centuries.
And what material marks has been created for which black people exclusively can have? Is there a reason why the solution to those problems should not be used on society as a whole for anyone with the same material situation? It sound to me like you want solution to only go to people of black people because they deserve it more because of past injustice?
> I am not familiar with that experiment or its goals.
> A lack of something is not a property. The legal system lacks infinite number of things. Its not a meaningful definition if infinity is included.
Of course it is! In math, the subset of the reals that includes all non-rational numbers less than or equal to five, has the very clear, very meaningful property of not containing the infinity of numbers greater than five. It also has the very meaningful property of not including the infinity of rationals. Whether you want to define a set by what it includes or what it excludes is merely a matter of convenience, and each can be more or less meaningful depending on context. Infinity poses no problems, because things can be put into meaningful sets.
> It is not OK to treat people different based on gender.
That is your moral viewpoint. There have been many ethical discussions on this. Let me just give a quick outline of why this may be perfectly OK. If the current conditions of the population are the result of negatively discriminating against women, a very reasonable way to correct the social discrimination is by having the law give special treatment to women. There's no point debating this at length here, though, as ethical values are deeply ingrained and are very personal. I just want to point out that there are several ways of looking at this, and several reasonable ethics.
Like I said before, social sciences study the society that we have, not an imaginary model of society made of spherical cows. Similarly, I assume that activists are interested in changing the society we have by enacting laws for this society. Questions of what's fair in an ideal society may serve as inspiration for writing a constitution that should last forever, but simple laws are like a steering wheel. If the car has a flat tire and swerves to the right, a law dictates that the wheel should be held turned to the left, even if it doesn't make any sense to drive an unharmed car in this way and may even spell disaster. If the reality is that the car has a flat tire, then the law should address that reality.
So, when you see a law, don't ask "is it fair in an ideal society?" but try to see what conditions in real society the law is trying to address, and whether or not you think that would help.
> Any such treatment will cause local power disparities, like bias that cause real harm.
I think that's an empirical question. If your goal is to minimize harm (and that is a liberal goal, but not always a conservative goal, so I'm not saying that must be your goal), you just need to see which causes more harm: taking corrective action against existing discrimination or not.
> As a group, victims of crimes is one that should also be discriminated against because of their gender.
Victims of crimes are not a social group. It's a very different form of discrimination.
> Neither is a cultural change away from women being solely valued for their ability to raise children, nor men being valued solely for their ability to support the raising of children.
I think we have a strong disagreement over facts here.
> There exist a long history of nudism philosophy, culture, and values.
That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how nudists consider themselves; what matters is how they are perceived by society. Society views nudism as a practice, not as an identity (similarly, BTW, to how homosexuality was perceived in classical times, just to show you how things change). In addition, I don't think nudists' power is curtailed by society, which is the main idea here. Whether or not naked bathing is allowed on certain beaches has no effect on the power (influence) of the nudists in society.
> All the effect of discrimination, like being hurt and feeling rejected is current reality of those people.
Like I said in an earlier comment, feelings of hurt and rejection are usually what conservatives attribute to liberal goals because that is a feature of conservative thought. Liberal thought is about power. Sim...
It can be if they have meaningful attributes to differential themselves. To anchor that to social-security-paid maternity, it only relevant as an attribute if it has been considered but then rejected. Such qualification would distinguish it from any arbitrary element of the infinite set, and the qualification can be supported by facts.
> I just want to point out that there are several ways of looking at this, and several reasonable ethics.
This is why I earlier mentioned that difference feminism and Egalitarianism to be like the left and right. Both claim to have the same goal but significant different in values and ethics. Acknowledging the similarities is important, but also understand why most focus is on the differences.
> not an imaginary model of society made of spherical cows
No one has been talking about theoretical society. I could interpret it as an attempt to devalue ethics based on equality, but there we would just hit a wall of disagreement.
> try to see what conditions in real society the law is trying to address, and whether or not you think that would help.
So the law in question clump together women and children and define them as incapable to ask for support. The conditions that brought that law is ridden with cultural values of women, and caused by values that defines women as helpless victims. The local power disparity is very clear, as is the harm.
> If your goal is to minimize harm ... you just need to see which causes more harm: taking corrective action against existing discrimination or not.
Or let me put the same question. What causes more harm: Taking actions that treat people equally, or take discriminate action in order to save money.
> Victims of crimes are not a social group.
This is the second time you define what is and isn't a social group, and I don't find it fact based. To reference Robert Sapolsky, a special skill of human behavior is its ability to be part of multiple social groups at the same time. Victims of crimes is a group that deserve societys protection and understanding. Its not a place where gender should have a seven times impact. Its the other side of the coin that lets race and gender be the most significant factor in determining punishment for criminals.
> I think we have a strong disagreement over facts here.
The good thing with science is that science change when the facts change or when people provide better theories (often praised as the difference between science and religion).
> It doesn't matter how nudists consider themselves; what matters is how they are perceived by society
This is also why not all religions are treated equal. A Muslim friend once said that smaller religions that didn't have 20% global followers in the world should not have their believes respected in the same way. From egalitarianism view I disagree, and its a poor method for harm reduction.
> Whether or not naked bathing is allowed on certain beaches has no effect on the power (influence) of the nudists in society.
Since nudism is generally banned and made illegal in practically all societies except when done in excluded areas, I would say it has a very direct and explicit power effect on them as a group. We could of course say that beaches are minor thing, but so we could also say about burka wearers being denied access to beaches has no effect on the power of the Muslims in society. Just because nudists are a popular group to discriminate against doesn't make it less of a discrimination nor ethical.
Clothing is a central part of practically every culture that exist, similar to gender identity. Native culture is easiest distinguished by what they chose to wear. It is rooted deep in signaling, and can be easily identified in the most common religions to the smallest of sub cultures. Looking at nudists and transgenders, its questionable which group causes more reaction from people who defends their cultural views by denying others.
> Victims of crimes is a group that deserve societys protection and understanding.
They are. Perhaps I wasn't making myself clear: they are not a social group in the sense studied by sociologists and historians who study power, racism etc..
> I would say it has a very direct and explicit power effect on them as a group.
It does not. Power is basically influence. Whether or not nudists are allowed to take their clothes off in public beaches bears zero impact on their influence in society (e.g. the money they can acquire, the high-position jobs they can get, the political office they can be elected to etc.)
> but so we could also say about burka wearers being denied access to beaches has no effect on the power of the Muslims in society.
No, because Muslims are discriminated against outside beaches because they're Muslim. Nudists are not. Therefore, like segregating buses, this sends a signal.
> Looking at nudists and transgenders, its questionable which group causes more reaction from people who defends their cultural views by denying others.
Again with reactions :) This is not about reactions, not about feelings, and not about identity. I am talking only about power. The reaction to the way transgenders dress is only relevant in this context based on their existing status in society. If I (not a transgender) would walk outside wearing women's clothes on Halloween and would get laughed at, it is completely different -- in this context of power -- from a transgender who gets laughed at, because of the transgender's existing status. Same goes for Muslims.
> punishing injustice than fairness
It is not about punishing past injustice. It is about correcting (stopping) an ongoing injustice. You don't have a car because I am currently still holding on to it.
> Just because difference feminism believes that its for the greater good doesn't make it less of a contradiction.
I think you're obsessing too much about the details, and I can't help you because my value system is not disturbed by the same things that disturb yours. Unless I were a veteran feminist activist considering a certain political tactic, I just wouldn't worry about the differences between "difference feminism" and other forms of feminism. The differences between different feminist activities are much more subtle than you make them out to be.
I care about politics in the large -- who wins, who loses -- and not so much about the ethics of every single law. I have never studied the philosophy of law or ethics, so I can't contribute much there.
> No one want to see signals that some groups they identify with are worth less all day long. Its harmful.
Right, but sociologists -- again -- don't study what's right or wrong, and are not concerned with how people feel. If men were actually made significantly less powerful than women in society, or if whites were actually made significantly less powerful than whites, then that would be something that's very interesting to historians and sociologists. As this is currently far from reality, these things you talk about are simply outside the scope of most of social science. I guess they're in the realm of ethics.
Both transgenders and Muslims are allowed to show their identity in society, which are the times where they can get discriminated against. Nudists can't, and are thus indistinguishable from non-nudists in situations where influence and money exist.
If transgender people were not allowed to wear clothing of their choice, or act outside their born gender, no discrimination could happen (in the context of power). Same with Muslims. Identification is required for the form of discrimination you are talking about, and that which is illegal is not done in the open.
But here I would say that the definition being presented here do clash with reality. Making the act of doing identifiable faith, transgender, or other self-identity illegal in order to protect those groups from discrimination is not exactly how society in general view discrimination. The closest we get is the argument behind uniforms, where the idea is to hide peoples social group identity and strengthen the new social group. While partial effective, I have also heard that humans are quite good at identifying social groups even when hidden. It would imply that nudists are not so blessed from discrimination as you describe, and as a minor note I also recall quite a few movies where a nudist family is found out inside a gated community.
> You don't have a car because I am currently still holding on to it.
In that example society will provide cars to anyone that needs it. I have a car, and you have one.
The stated moral question was if society should fix material situations for everyone rather than exclusively those that are in a material situation because of past discrimination.
I will also remind that in this made up example, the suggestion solution was to treat everyone equal from this point on. Any existing discrimination are to be stopped, be those positive or negative.
> if men were actually made significantly less powerful than women in society ... As this is currently far from reality
A fact I disagree with, especially in local context but also on a global scale. Money and work positions are useful proxies for power, but they are an imperfect representation and devalues all other form of influence that exist. For example, living 10 more years in average is a quite power property, and extends influence of the social group.
The race situation is more clear in the local context of US, but less so on a wider scale. Money is again used here as a proxy, but comparing money in one nation to money in a other nation is imperfect. Mots nations are not ruled by the richest person in that nation. Its also very questionable to compare a poor farmer influence in one nation with a poor farmer influence in an other. Influence at international politics tend to be limited to a small number of people.
Thinking on it some more, I suspect a major part of the disagreement (regarding power) is the usage of the word power, influence, control in a interchangeable ways.
To take a trivial example from game theory, a seller and a buyer discussing price. In the classic example, the agreed price represent the result of sellers power vs the buyer power. Since its trivial, control, influence and cause-effect reflects the same values, so if the price is low it means the buy both has higher power and more control over the price.
But then we add a second seller. The position of the buyer has increase and we would say that the buyers power has increased. Inter-group competition influence the result, but the buyer aren't in control over how that competition plays out.
Then we add an government entity that adds regulation which incidentally limits supply. This increase the sellers power, but is completely outside the control of the buyer and the seller. This entity has no stake in the outcome of the transaction, derive no power from it, but got full control.
When talking about power disparity, we need to define what resource the groups are competing over, but also acknowledge that it won't tell us anything about who controls the outcome. To do that we need to define cause and effect, and that require more than just looking at the result. As a political matter, I believe that government intervention should focus on power disparity when it impacts the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and it should do so by addressing each individuals need. It should focus on control disparity for everything else.
You are trying to extrapolate from particle behavior to the behavior of the entire system. This is provably intractable. Think of power as a collective property, like pressure or temperature. They are very important, very useful properties, but they are completely meaningless if you want to discuss the behavior of a single molecule. Complex systems are characterized by their quantitative intractability. Our math is simply too weak, so we concentrate on areas where it is meaningful, rather than try to build a universal theory.
> I believe that government intervention should ...
That's politics, and is really not my thing. But even if you are interested in social science solely from the political perspective (like an engineer who's interested in science just so they can build what they always wanted to), I think you should separate the more descriptive elements (the science) from the prescriptive ones (technology), as the latter do not always directly flow from the former, and also require a good dose of ethics, which is may be very personal.
I didn't bring up the game theory example because it can be used to build a model over a single transaction (or molecule). The same model can be used to describe property owners as a group. Since the economic models are complex enough to involve more parameters than the buyer and seller, our economical understand of society know that a housing bubble isn't caused by the property owners. They might have the upper hand, have more pressure to apply, but they aren't what causing the end result of increase prices.
You say that the social science concentrate on areas where it is meaningful, but much of what we have discussed is focused on the end result. Do the property owners have, in the average, the upper hand in negotiations and do they get their way most of the time. Its an odd place to stop asking further question and not ask the question that really matter, which is what model can predict the price tomorrow.
The big benefit of such model is that such theories can be tested, and later used in prescribing ways to influence the outcome.
I don't think anyone wants to "stop asking" but mathematical models of such complex systems are extremely difficult. We haven't even been able to come up with a decent mathematical model of the brain (and no, neural networks is not it), and the brain is likely a much simpler system than human society.
But even if we had a good explanatory mathematical model, it could not be used to predict anything because of a technical reason, although one that seems to be -- as far as we know -- limited by theoretical constraints: our mathematical techniques simply do not allow us to predict the behaviors of systems with so many variables and so many interactions. Even numerical simulations (the kind used in weather forecasting) would diverge very quickly. In fact, measurement alone would likely take more time than the validity duration of the prediction.
The problem is not unique to the social sciences. Even if biologists could understand the evolutionary mechanism in its entirety, it seems like prediction is beyond our means. All we can do is work back from results to causes, and figure out which evolutionary pressures were more powerful. Computer science is limited by similar constraints: we can explain how a bug came to be, but working forward in time and preventing all bugs requires a computational effort that is probably out of our reach. So the social sciences -- except for very special cases in psychology, where the number of variables is kept artificially low -- is content, like biology and computer science, to provide historical explanations only.
But we don't need perfect models. Sometimes its enough just to get a idea over what influence the outcome. The popular science book freakonomics has a famous example where its describe crime and what influenced the outcome. Interestingly, it involved neither actions done to the criminals nor victims.
In the case of race we are both in agreement that there exist a power difference, ie that the outcome is not identical. What we have not talked about it what influence it. For example, is it the material starting point that causes ripple effects and influencing the outcome? If so there should be some validating data from isolated local areas where the material starting point is smaller or greater, result in a detectable effect. If we can't find such support, it would strongly hint towards invalidating such theory.
> But we don't need perfect models. Sometimes its enough just to get a idea over what influence the outcome.
Sure, this is very common in the social science.
> there should be some validating data from isolated local areas where the material starting point is smaller or greater, result in a detectable effect
Absolutely. What do you think sociology/history/anthropology journals publish? They're full of such studies.
> In particular, feminist (assuming left) groups successfully lobbied to prevent medical research on causes for rape, with statements that such research could result in lower jail sentences and people avoiding justice with insanity pleas.
Do you have a source for this? This sounds like fake news or a gross distortion.
Robert Sapolsky, on talk about sexual behavior and aggression. If it is in one of the lectures I suspect, its about 3.5 hrs I would need to go through to give you an exact time stamp.
I couldn't find any primary source. The most reasonable assumption is that it is false or distorted enough that it may as well be. In any event, in the hypothetical universe where this is true, this does not represent any kind of feminism I'm familiar with, and I try to be as radical a feminist as possible.
You reaction is expected, even if I had hoped for a bit more open mindness.
The context is rather simple, scientific, and the time Sapolsky spent on it very short as it was just a brief mentioning.
Studies has shown that one particular part of the brain lights up on both situation involving arousal and situations involving threat. The theory suggested from this is that part of those committing sexual assault do so because their brain confuses signals of arousal with signal of threats.
As a side note to the above, he shortly mentioned that the researchers of the study wanted to create a official medical criteria/condition/wordIdon'tremember from this theory in order to raise funds for further research. However, politicians got involved and blocked it because of lobbying from feminist groups on the argument that doing this could lower jail sentences for convinced rapists.
The end result being that the feminist groups blocked this research on rape. It also match perfectly with the political rethric when it comes to rape, as I often see feminist group putting weight on the "fact" that those who commit sexual assault are completely healthy and "do not have a higher rate of Schizophrenia than anyone else", as if all mental conditions were linked to Schizophrenia.
> The end result being that the feminist groups blocked this research on rape.
This is the part I find hard to believe. I couldn't find any mention of such an event occurring.
> as I often see feminist group putting weight on the "fact" that those who commit sexual assault are completely healthy and "do not have a higher rate of Schizophrenia than anyone else", as if all mental conditions were linked to Schizophrenia.
I have never encountered the feminist position you're referring to.
That position (regarding Schizophrenia) was something I read when I was interested in reading what the feminist political party in Sweden thought about the subject (after listening on that lecture), and clicked on the first link Google gave.
What sort of evidence? This argument smells a bit circular. Sociologists know more about society because they're Sociologists? The entire field appears to be little more than a collection of fallacies in action. People ignorant of the conclusions of sociologists would likely intuit their way to better outcomes.
> The entire field appears to be little more than a collection of fallacies in action
It "appears" this way only to someone who is completely uninterested in anything more than a cursory look. After getting my bachelor's degree in mathematics, I went to grad school to study history (which entails studying some sociology), and I can tell you first hand that it is no such thing. Even a shallow overview of the social sciences and the rigorous methodologies they employ will convince you of that. Obviously, those are not exact sciences, and social researchers are well aware of that. But the rigor of their methods is not much different from those employed in, say, medicine. Does every social science result deserve the same degree of epistemological confidence as a mathematical theorem or a physics experiment? Of course not! Are there false or even ridiculous "results"? Certainly, although the field as a whole eventually rejects them. But it is far, far, more rigorous and valid than the beliefs of people based on personal observation and gut feeling. And I hope this is obvious: even an ancient Greek who looked up at the skies and took notes of stars' positions but knew nothing about gravity or Copernicus, knew more about astronomy that a person who isn't even interested in studying the skies and recording observations, regardless of how incomplete the Greek's knowledge was.
The difference is that believers in homeopathy don't employ anything resembling the scientific method, and there's plenty of evidence against its validity. Social researchers absolutely do use the scientific method, and you don't have any evidence against the validity of their results (obviously, some are wrong -- just as in medicine -- but the field as a whole is serious and as rigorous as possible).
Just as I was preparing to answer your comment about physicists, you edited it. But wow, is this really your argument - "disprove the results or they are considered valid"? Ever heard of Russel's teapot?
Using the method is nice, but let me know when they learn to reliably predict anything, such as election outcomes.
And you let me know when mathematicians come up with ways to predict intractable processes. Sadly, dynamical systems are subject to similar undecidability and intractibility results as those affecting computer science. Biologists can't predict specific evolutionary adaptations, either, but that doesn't mean they don't understand the mechanics of evolution. Tracing the cause of a bug is much easier than predicting program behavior, but the fact that we can't predict a program's behavior doesn't mean that computer scientists don't understand the principles of computation. Intractable processes in general can be explained in retrospect, but not predicted.
I'm not saying you should consider every social research result valid, but you cannot dismiss a discipline that employs rigorous observation and the scientific method by employing nothing of even remotely similar rigor. The burden of proof is on social researchers, but they have carried it as much as mathematically possible at present. What you cannot do is ignore the evidence by closing your eyes and saying it doesn't exist, or by picking bad apples as example. It's like an evolution denier saying that evolution is bogus because there are no fossils or whatever, and citing as evidence some cases of fake fossils.
The difference is, when real scientists say they know, they will tell you p-values and usually they can reliably predict things. And when they don't know something, they usually say so.
Contrast that with loud aggressive types who will call someone racist and demand that we agree unequivocally, because they know better. That is, until someone higher in their pecking order comes up with even more ridiculous redefinition of dictionary words.
> The difference is, when real scientists say they know, they will tell you p-values and usually they can reliably predict things. And when they don't know something, they usually say so.
In that case, social scientists are real scientists. I don't think you've been reading social science. Social science papers in some disciplines are often filled with so many p-values that they come out of your nose. In fact, I think you have a grudge against something that you have no idea what it really is.
> Contrast that with loud aggressive types who will call someone racist and demand that we agree unequivocally, because they know better. That is, until someone higher in their pecking order comes up with even more ridiculous redefinition of dictionary words.
Again, I think you're ranting against windmills here, but I don't know how you decide how ridiculous definitions are. Scientists change definitions rather regularly as they learn more about the subject. Are you studying society? What qualifies you to judge academic definitions of academic terms? The fact that energy has been a "dictionary word" centuries before physicists have "redefined" it does not make their definition ridiculous.
Academics don't demand that you agree to call someone racist. They have a very clear definition of racism, and they tell you when something matches that definition. Your agreement is irrelevant. Choosing to use a different definition is your prerogative, but it is also irrelevant.
Not really. The article makes it pretty clear that giving a platform to spread these ideas has enabled the ideas to spread. In this case, permissive policy is what made the undesirable views stronger.
In the long term, ~20 years, it probably doesn't matter what Twitter does today. It's a way for them to connect, now, with their primary demographics by making something of a political stance.
While I think your point about needing a place to have conversations that can rectify the backwardness of Hate As A Platform (HAAP?) make sense, there are two points I would make. The first would be that some proof that Twitter was providing that exchange point would help, it seems like instead its a place for trolls and bots to roam free at the moment and Two, and perhaps this is the more important one - we should be hesitant to look to private companies as rights providers. Its not that private companies shouldn't have a conscience, but that we should be cognizant of where we are getting our rights from...
The alt-right feeds off this. They want to be called racist, xenophobic, etc., because they believe that society has applied these terms too aggressively to folks who weren't actually racist or xenophobic ("the boy who called wolf"). There's a lot of anger stemming from that, which leads to behavior that's hard to understand for many people. They're not trolls, but there is an element of trolling in what they do.
If you were, say, an excellent PR consultant. Some "alt"-right group comes along and wants to hire you, willing to pay your standard rate and demanding relatively standard work. Would you be willing to?
Almost all would probably decline. Not just because we wouldn't enjoy the work, but also because it is something that, by definition, would help them and support their goals (according to their judgement – otherwise they wouldn't hire you).
Should people working at twitter not be allowed to make similar decisions? It's not hyperbole – look at reddit, and how it has devolved to something like a lowest common denominator. I'd leave as fast as I could instead of lending support to the toxic community.
Do they have a right that overrides mine? No. Private entities are more or less free to decline any customers, exceptions only where they have monopoly power (telecom, water).
Is fighting them out in the open the more valiant thing to do? No – I don't argue about chemtrails, or religion, or flat earth or evolution. Because it doesn't work. The chance of them convincing me that evolution isn't real is 0. Unfortunately, even though I'm right, my chance to convince them is about the same. Because none of this has anything to do with facts – it's red tribe vs blue tribe, and the right's search for a sense of belonging that Reagan sold to the highest bidder.
Is it going to empower the extremists to ignore them? Considering the ideas aren't new, I can only conclude that the internet has given them increased visibility and therefore helped their rise. If reasonable people decide to curtail their options for propaganda – by hiding them from Facebook, Twitter, Google the way conspiracy theories were ignored by reasonable people in the past, they may just shrink back to their appropriate size of plus or minus 0.
I guess this comment is what people said "normalizing hate speech" is all about. The "alt" right isn't a subculture sharing unpopular information against the status quo, this is a group of people spreading hate speech against other, vulnerable groups.
Thank you for this. People don't seem to get that the alt-right on twitter thrive on harassment, death threats, and all sorts of nastiness.
Personally, I'm okay with kicking Nazis to the curb. Their ideas are regressive, harmful, and absolutely counterproductive to the future of the nation. And to those crying out "oh but civic discourse, let's build bridges"...have you ever talked to these people? They aren't trying to talk, they are trying to put a boot in your face if you're not white.
Twitter has a history of banning right-wing accounts for petty tweets, and leaving alone left-wing accounts that spread hashtags like #KillAllMen, and post sexist tweets against men, or racist tweets against white people. Twitter also is notorious for banning anti-muslim tweets, or even accounts ran by activists fighting for women rights in islamic countries.
It’s in their right to do this, but don’t talk about this like Twitter’s doing something warranting a discussion.
I think, in a way, the media is kind of empowering the "alt-right" by constantly referring to them as the "alt-right". It presents it as the little guy vs The Man, and I think that makes it much more palatable than "far right."
Influential people who think the government is intentionally making gay frogs, that media needs to be under strict control, that climate change is a Chinese hoax, and that everything is us vs (((Them))) just got a candidate that represents their views into the White House. There's nothing alt about it. It's just straight up mainstream now. Referring to it as such takes away from the rebel factor and reveals that this is, in fact, just the new system, as bad as the old one.
I was thinking about this earlier. It's so silly. Neo Conservative was already taken so lets make up a new term to label people with. "I know, how about alt-right..."
Really? The alt-right side don't support immigration and like their own culture - which is a very common thing across the world, particularly amongst the working class. neo nazis specifically advocate violence.
I generally vote for the Labour party, but that doesn't mean I and my fellow Labour voters (Corbyn aside) support Mao/Chavez/PolPot-style murdering of our enemies.
this is how the Alt-Right frames itself, and it's pretty ingenious. People discuss protection of culture, and completely step over the part about "their own culture".
The Alt Right ideology relies on the principle that White culture is the "true" culture of the nation, and that other contributions simply do not count. They cast an illegitimacy to the history of minorities in the US.
The debate about protecting the culture is irrelevant because they do not want to protect the nation's culture. They want to protect White culture.
It's the same as the (generally left) folk feel fine about when preserving areas from other cultures.
Want to preserve Oakland or the Mission as is? That's fine.
Don't like seeing women forced to walk around in burkas and girls having their genitals cut (I live in London where these re both issues)? That's racist. Obviously Islam isn't a race, and this makes no sense, but it's something people still claim.
Either preserving existing cultures is OK or it isn't.
I'm sure genital mutilation is already prohibited under British law. The problem with the burkas is that is it of course difficult to determine or prove that they are not worn voluntarily. I know some girls from liberal (Christian/Atheist) families who converted to Islam who wear a Niqab. I can guarantee you that they are not "forced" to do this.
FGM is illegal, but there has been zero prosecutions, and estimated a few thousand girls mutilated since the laws were passed.
One of the reasons FGM goes on in the UK is precisely that people don't want to be seen as judging a culture, even for something which is statistically more likely to happen in a culture: ie, the problem could be addressed with medical inspections in schools but this won't happen for fear of being called Islamophobic (oddly enough I learnt most of this from reading Bridget Christie's book, and she's pretty damn left). A similar situation occurred in the systemic rape cases in Rotherham.
And yes, of course people can voluntarily submit to something, it doesn't change that others are forced.
So I've checked and I agree that the numbers of mutilations that apparently happen in the UK is quite shocking. But I don't see how medical inspections in schools are the answer to be honest.
First of all, mixing Chavez in with Mao and Pol Pot is ridiculous. Pol Pot is responsible for killing 1.6 million people. He ran labor camps, etc. Please name how many people were killed on purpose on orders of Chavez. Please name a labor camp.
I'm not even sure if Mao should be directly compared to Pol Pot. Probably not.
Second, the Labour party has been social democratic for at least 30 years. It cannot be compared to communist parties at all.
Chavez tortured most of his opponents. No killing fields, or year 0, but advocating and using violence for political purposes is clearly a connection. Obviously, Momentum aside, Labour is against such ideas, that was precisely my point.
Edit: you edited your post to add:
> "Pol Pot is responsible for killing 1.6 million people. He ran labor camps, etc. Please name how many people were killed on purpose on orders of Chavez. Please name a labor camp."
...after I added multiple sources showing Chavez using torture and other forms violence. Nobody claims Chavez was as violent as the others - in fact, I specifically claimed the opposite in my reply before you edited your post. Merely that he used violence including torture.
edit: I did not edit my post after you provided any sources! From the start it contained "Pol Pot is responsible for killing 1.6 million people. He ran labor camps, etc. Please name how many people were killed on purpose on orders of Chavez. Please name a labor camp."
That's not a source, that's a Google search. In fact even for your search no results come up (for me) that suggest what you claim. And I'm not even talking about the reputation of potential sources.
I have actually made an effort and checked, for example Amnesty International for the time that Chavez was in power. I don't find evidence that he tortured most of his opponents, sorry.
Yes, it is a Google search. That is a stellar observation. Using a search engine would have been less characters than asking me. For example, you could click:
> The security forces have reportedly used excessive force, and detained large
numbers of opposition supporters, during nationwide street protests against the
government of President Hugo Chavez. At least nine people have died and scores
of others have been injured, including a number of police officers. Amnesty
International is concerned that there may be further politically motivated
violence, and disproportionate police response.
> At the hospital he was detained by the DISIP, Chavez's secret police, and taken to their headquarters for questioning.
> During his interrogation, fingernails in his left hand were torn out. After being further tortured and injected with drugs, the secret police took him into the bowels of the building and placed him in a cell.
Or this from the BBC (I have heard of these):
> Venezuela troops 'used torture'
> Troops are accused of beating and kicking detainees
Venezuelan ombudsman German Mundarain has said security forces tortured some protesters who were detained during recent anti-government demonstrations.
Are you seriously claiming Chavez isn't a well known human rights abuser or are you debating what constitututes 'most' or 'an opponent' like whether that changes my point that Chavez used violence just as Mao and Pol Pot did and that most normal humans think that's a bad thing?
For this thread I'm focusing on the claim that "Chavez tortured most of his opponents" and that he is supposedly comparable to Pot Pol (again a guy probably killed 1.6 human beings). These claims are ridiculous.
Reports about occasional police violence (can even happen in the US) and single cases of torture (not from a reputable source) are not enough for such a broad claim.
Again: I'm simply grouping well known violent leaders, I am not comparing the scale of their violence. Pol Pot is also very different from Mao: again, that doesn't change the point about far-left leaders using violence existing or that most mainstream left folk wouldn't support this.
Are you saying that Chavez isn't a torturer or that the BBC isn't a reliable source? If so I think I'll end this conversation here.
the media is kind of empowering the "alt-right" by constantly referring to them as the "alt-right". It presents it as the little guy vs The Man, and I think that makes it much more palatable than "far right."
Great observation and you hint at a simple solution - call them by their conventional moniker: the far-right. There's nothing new about their ideologies and "the far-right" elicit a different response from people than the newer and unfamiliar "alt-right".
Maybe, and in some cases you're likely right. In others, might it not be people who consider themselves right (and not extreme) but no longer feel the Republicans (the traditional right) truly represent them?
As an aside, there are likely plenty of people on the left that feel similarly.
might it not be people who consider themselves right (and not extreme) but no longer feel the Republicans (the traditional right) truly represent them?
The far-left/left/center-left etc and right side counterparts are defined by policy and ideology, so whether they feel the GOP was in touch doesn't really make a difference.
You wouldn't call the Republicans "right" if they started handing out generous welfare packages to the masses.
> The one dimensional political spectrum, with n-right vs n-left, doesn't work at all.
It's not a good way of accurately gauging the political spectrum but I'm not sure I'd say it doesn't work at all. A better method would be to add two more axes so you have x, y and z which would allow you to measure social policy (services, infrastructure), fiscal policy (an increase or decrease in state assets, taxation) and international relations (trade, alliances). The end result would be a kind of tetrahedron that represents the shape of a party's policy (that's not the point of it - it's just an interesting feature of having a three dimensional gauge).
> It's not a good way of accurately gauging the political spectrum but I'm not sure I'd say it doesn't work at all.
As it fails in such a modest charge, I'm comfortable saying that it doesn't work. The only variable that it would come close to measuring is individual freedom vs collective comfort. A multidimensional representation would do a better job, but it would quickly become so complex that it would be useless - as most people hold contradictory ideas.
That is why far-right does not accurately describe alt-right, think of it as a second dimension on the traditional spectrum.
> think of it as a second dimension on the traditional spectrum
Maybe I'm missing something but in this thread I haven't seen anything that shows how the alt-right is fundamentally different to, despite the flawed labeling system, what is standard fare for the far-right. What sits in this second dimension, and does the rule apply to the left? Is it consistent?
I'm certainly no expert on the matter, but I'd doubt anyone who said they were. The first thing that comes to mind is that the alt-right is nationalistic and has no problem with some form of collectivism. The far-right, on the other hand, is much closer to the min part of minarchism.
The alt-left, if it is presently a thing, is even less defined than the alt-right. But in the interest of maintaining symmetry, I'd say that it would have a progressive agenda by way of individualist means. Emergence?
> ... that media needs to be under strict control ...
Is that really an alt-right position? I lost interest in politics a long time ago, but the last time I heard that sentiment was from the left - calling for the Fairness Doctrine to be brought back.
I don't think so. If anything the alt-right probably believes that the media is already under extremely strict control by the left. The elections made it very clear that the majority of the main stream media is in line with Hillary/the Liberals/the regressive Left. Almost every media technology company is also perceived to be in line with that pro-liberal media bloc (See: Twitter's almost exclusive banning of right-wing rule-breakers, Facebook's pro-Liberal news curation, Google's perceived tailouring of Hillary search results).
The alt-right probably wants free speech above all, to the point where hate speech is permitted in much the same way that safe spaces are today.
I absolutely hate it as a term. It's an exercise in rebranding of an ideology and it's a pretty clever one as well. Alternative (alt) implies that they're somehow ideologically different from the rest of the "right". They aren't, they're as you say just further right.
Also alt with the lower case a carries with it some techy payload as well which together with people like Thiel makes it look like its some expression of ideas about the future when it's mostly about nostalgia for the past.
I can't believe how easily this has been swallowed by everyone particularly the media.
You've continued to create multiple accounts to post primarily political and ideological rants. This is an abuse of the site, so we've banned these accounts.
Where I live a lot of kids have been arrested and imprisoned for that salute.
It so strange as an American expat living under a military dictatorship where any improper speech is harshly dealt with to see American slowly but steadily moving in the same direction. What's weird is it's starting with restrictions on speech in the private sector and education. I'm wondering how long before laws and the courts get behind the restrictions.
Not long friend. Our campuses reflect a growing antipathy toward free speech.[1] Whatever starts there usually ends up in the courts.
I've become convinced that the American left is now totally post liberal, in the sense that they consider classical liberalism -- à la John Stuart Mill -- highly offensive.
Seems like there is a case to be made that Trump should be suspended. Would certainly be a loud statement but also would put twitter in an interesting position.
Twitter doesn't turn a profit, do they? If they get a couple months of losing users, that could easily pop their inflated stock. I'm not sure this is a good move for them.
IF they don't turn a profit, doesn't that suggest they're doing something wrong and should change, rather than that they should conservatively refuse to change anything and hope that they will suddenly start turning a profit that way?
Your conclusion appears to be "Twitter should change something".
There are a lot of things businesses can do to increase profits: They can get more users, they can cut employees, they can move their offices to cheaper areas, they can pursue important business deals, and more.
If a plane is off-course, you wouldn't go to the cockpit and start flipping levers and pressing buttons at random. But you could make the same arguments you've made against a person opposing that idea.
Personally I have stopped using Twitter all together - along with Facebook news; as both channels are dominated by people that are into racist and misogynist behavior - all in order to spread their hate speech. Something I simply do not subscribe to.
If they don't curb the hate speech and racism they are even closer to being cut entirely out of my life - I would think this is what they as a company has to balance vs people that are into those things and appreciate having a platform for such behavior. As of right now - I personally - would never work for a Twitter/Facebook, due to the online presences that they actively support, albeit I'm sure that talent pool is not #1 priority.
It's definitely not an easy position, and I guess it kinda shows that touting yourself as a tech company when you are really a platform for good/bad/medium ideas comes with its own set of challenges.
Not a good idea at all, I am never for censorship and I think we are losing sight of why freedom of speech is important which is insane to me.
It is good all these ideas are out there even if you don't agree with them. Shrouding them will only encourage it.
Strict absolutist and authoritative law/parenting almost always leads to acting out, while passive law/parenting let's knowledge decide individual choice.
Putting a stranglehold on knowledge that is bad will give people more desire to find confirmation biases in it. Let them naturally learn it is bad themselves.
This is just the Streisand effect and way too similar to what they do in China, like the censoring of Kim Jong Un fat memes[1]. Twitter just got political and that is not wise in business.
Isn't it obvious? They've been censored. Matt Lauer can't even ask legitimate questions about Clinton's private email server without being publicly censured for being a "bad" journalist.
For those readers of such material who are rational critical thinkers, then yes they will see it as bad for themselves and it will leave a bad taste in their mouths, and it will also waste their time
For those with irrational hateful right-wing ideology, it will reinforce their existing miserable attitudes
I agree that censorship is bad. But all publications select their messages. For example, scientific publications don't publish articles on homeopathy or communication with the dead. Are they censoring such material ? Shouldn't they be committed to fair and balanced presentation of ideas ? Aren't they _biased_ towards genuine evidence-based science ?
The reason scientific publications select real science rather than crank bullshit, is that their readers are trying to get real work done, and they rely on peer-review to filter the shit
You have to filter-out the noise in any communication channel. The problem we have with FB & Twitter is that the low signal-to-noise ratio is impeding our decision-making processes
there is censorship everywhere...they select only what they agree with and ignore what they don't understand even if there is an explanation for it...why is no one investigating this
Are the banned "alt-right" commentators commensurate with ISIS propagandists? If so, how much else ought to be banned? Black power groups? Anti-fascist groups? Many "social justice" accounts post anti-white, anti-male messages with impunity. Should we then paint all people concerned with social justice with the same brush?
Doesn't make it false either. There is significant overlap between established neo-Nazi movements and the "alt-right", both in membership and rhetoric.
Where else are they going to go? There is a "significant overlap" between social justice and anti-white, anti-male, anti-cis propaganda. There's no convenient label to stick on that one just yet, but if you want to be consistent you're going to have to paint all social justice people with that brush.
We already know the atrocity of a region being ruled by ISIS - imagine a country run by alt-right types. We don't have to look very far back in history to see what that would be like. Twitter is acting appropriately here in not wanting to aid the rise of such a movement.
This is a boring question. Reality is more complicated than drawing stark lines around everything. There may be some gray areas Twitter also has to deal with, but that's not a counter argument to the obviously positive move of removing abusive bigots.
"Boring question", yet you responded to it. Reality is "complicated", yet the move is "obviously positive". Others think it would be "obviously positive" for social justice accounts to be suspended. Many self-described social justice activists engage in racist and sexist rhetoric. Will you be just as enthusiastic to throw the label "bigot" on them? Will you be just as quick to lump them all in together?
Rejecting a culture seems a little different than wanting to kill people from a culture, but maybe in the social media age speaking out against something is as bad as physical violence, because of the hurt feelings.
> Those with the "correct" political views can basically tell people to kill themselves
That's just simply untrue. Hyperbole and lies don't help in these conversations. (And I say this as someone who thinks that Facebook and Twitter have no place being arbiters of "truth").
Downvoted to -4 on HN for saying that Twitter doesn't allow liberals special privileges to threaten violence on Twitter. Gotta just love this place sometimes, and by love, I mean that it's full of shit.
And the same thing from the other side is trivially easy to find too. Your comment implied that Twitter looks the other way, but only for liberals, and that claim is laughable at best and it's a trivial task to find counter-evidence.
Besides, the first three pages of that search have zero tweets that involve someone telling someone else to kill themselves. They're all mock conversations, or memes, or literally a discussion of the fact that the punishment for attempted suicide is death. Or people encouraging others to call suicide hotlines, or a joke about killing yourself to get insurance money. I'm literally looking for a threatening tweet in that search and can't find one.
>Am I to understand that suggesting Trump voters kill themselves is acceptable?
I have no idea how you would've come to that conclusion, I certainly don't think it and didn't imply it.
Is this really the game we're playing? Really? I have to go find three tweets of Trump supporters telling HRC supporters to kill themselves? Do you really think that can't be trivially found?
Go ahead, I'll wait. Yes, I really think you can't find that, unless we're getting different search results for some reason. I'm not doing some cherry picking of the results here, these are literally the first tweets I can find where "kill yourself" is directed at a person or group and not obviously humorous.
That last one came up in the search while I had the search open, even.
I stand by my original statement and believe I've proven it.
So yeah, we are getting different results. Just looking at your top 3, I don't even see those posters in the list. I'm not blocked by them or anything, since your links work for me when logged in.
Filter bubble shenanigans?
There is no need whatsoever for these theatrics over a simple disagreement, for crying out loud. If I had my druthers, the owners of every single tweet linked in this thread, yours as well, would be banned from Twitter, if not brought up on harassment charges.
You will note that I said Twitter has no issues with those with leftist political leanings telling others to kill themselves. That statement is still true, but misleading in the light of what you linked here. Twitter apparently has no issue with anyone telling others to kill themselves.
And people wonder why their stock price is falling off a cliff...
>There is no need whatsoever for these theatrics over a simple disagreement, for crying out loud.
Oh I dunno, it might have something to do with you implying that I support the idea of any person telling any other person to kill themselves.
>You will note that I said Twitter has no issues with those with leftist political leanings telling others to kill themselves. That statement is still true, but misleading in the light of what you linked here. Twitter apparently has no issue with anyone telling others to kill themselves.
That was an awfully artful way of saying you were full of shit without having to actually admit you were wrong. Nice.
Ironically, I was actually remarking, just hours ago, about Twitter's horrible moderation and response to abuse before even seeing this thread. I would have readily agreed that they suck at handling abuse, but instead you went with "a liberal conspiracy to allow threats towards conservatives" despite the incredible ease of finding counter examples.
you implying that I support the idea of any person telling any other person to kill themselves.
!? Holy shit dude, if that's what I implied, I apologize, because that was absolutely not my intent whatsoever. That statement was directed at Twitter, not you.
That was an awfully artful way of saying you were full of shit without having to actually admit you were wrong.
I was wrong. Better? I was more interested in trying to figure out how and why I was wrong.
but instead you went with "a liberal conspiracy to allow threats towards conservatives" despite the incredible ease of finding counter examples.
Fine, we'll instead go with "a liberal conspiracy to to place angry conservative tweets as more important than terrorist propaganda", something for which there is plenty of evidence of.
>Fine, we'll instead go with "a liberal conspiracy to to place angry conservative tweets as more important than terrorist propaganda", something for which there is plenty of evidence of.
And someone already addressed that alternative flavor of absurdity yesterday too. Twitter has purged hundreds of thousands of terrorism-related accounts and continues to do so. (I'm sure you'll counter with the Hamas account, but you already know why that's a poor counter example when faced with hundreds of thousands of accounts being purged).
BTW, this is called "moving the goalposts". Are you now asserting that Twitter intentionally allows terrorism accounts to proliferate? Or are you implying that they have an account banning quota and they use it all up on conservatives and have none left over for terrorists? God damn, the mental gymnastics here are just something else.
Except the Hamas account (and others) had been around for a lot longer, and received more reports, and they decided to do something about it only (coincidentally, I'm sure...) after a lawsuit was filed.
Did the CEO get off his ass and talk to someone from the State dept? No, but he sure got off his ass to talk to some random Hollywood celeb who was getting mean tweets.
As I said earlier, and you apparently missed in your angry rant, 235k accounts is nothing. It's utter child's play, given how disposable Twitter accounts are. Twitter has a "trust and safety" team that's entirely far too concerned about feminist's feelings and not concerned near enough with terrorists using their platform. If that makes me this terrible monster, sign me up.
I literally pre-empted your whining about Hamas and yet you went straight for it anyway. You and I and everyone else know why the Hamas account sticks around. Not everyone views them as a terrorist organization, certainly not in the same family as ISIS.
And the 235K thing? I could've said a million, or a billion and you'd just spit out the same cop-out answer that "it's not enough". You've created an argument that carries no weight, requires no evidence or actual numbers. You just keep handwaving and yelling "what about all those terrorist accounts", all whilst only clinging to your single, knowingly flawed example. Never mind the fact that this is all still a distraction to cover up how wrong you were at the outset of this conversation.
And of course you've moved the goal posts even further by again inventing yet another evidence-less claim that Twitter is somehow bogged down with "feminists' feelings". You didn't even try to qualify that assertion. You just made up some new bullshit claim to try and throw out there and see if it sticks without any support whatsoever.
Besides, if you think Twitter is unable to handle any other abuse because they're bogged down with "feminist's feelings"... I don't even know what to say other than are you freaking kidding me? One, I see dozens of posts saying far more disgusting things aimed at women than 'kill yourself' every week on Twitter. Two, Twitter can do more than one thing at one time and continutes to take down new accounts linked to terror groups constantly.
And of course you're the type of person to classify mob harassment of women, death threats and sexual harassment as "feminist's feeling" because you're a jerk with an agenda who doesn't care about reality, facts, or discourse.
It's also painfully obvious that you skirted my explicit questions from the last post because they exemplify how completely nonsensical your characterization of Twitter is.
It's like I'm talking to a delusional, angry GamerGater who pulls "feminism" out of nowhere as some sort of wildcard to distract from the absurd claims in this thread.
I look forward to your next post where you again ignore everything I wrote, repeat your unsubstantiated nonsense again and probably move the goal posts for a third time.
But first: Yes, such posts are abhorrent and unacceptable and come from people who're very childish, emotional and lack self control.
That said, it helps to understand where this comes from. Many of these people (particularly the one responding to 2) feel that thanks to the policies of Trump and the people he surrounds himself with, they or their friends are being indirectly already being told to die. (LGBTQ, Obamacare recipients, others)
I am not making excuses for these reprehensible tweets, but i feel it is valuable to understand where the causes for them lie.
Everybody using Twitter in this manner feels themselves to be correct.
..I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to make, or how it is useful for discussion. Irrationality that ends in violence is irrationality that ends in violence.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12974189 for being much more uncivil than what is called for on this site. We have to ask again that you not do this.
Why does everyone think censorship is the answer? The idea that "evil" ideas pollute minds is the same reasoning that neocons have for why Islam must be stopped. It's bizarre and farfetched.
Our values of free speech and free expression are far more important than the cringeworthy and extremely stupid things some people choose to say.
Twitter should not ban these accounts, or should it ban ISIS accounts or anything else. Twitter is a platform, not a curation service or thoughtcrime police force.
Indeed. Turn the spotlight of publicity onto what people, be they good or bad, have to say. Turn a platform into a "safe space" and pretty soon any kind of criticism will be interpreted as harassment. This will deny users a powerful means of making progress. So ultimately it becomes an unsafe space.
Twitter doesn't have to be a neo-Nazi propaganda platform if it deems that unacceptable. They should (and do) have the freedom and liberty to choose who uses their service.
Can you give me a definition of this that can be consistently applied to all tweets?
The issue is that you can say something is "neo-Nazi propaganda" and it will shut down the discussion and publicly shame the person because the phrase is so powerful.
Evil ideas need to be analyzed and refuted absolutely. Their adherents should write them up in depth and place them on the web so that they can be discussed widely and in depth and, if erroneous, be refuted.
It's hard to see how 140 character snipes, provocations and occasional calls to hostility fall into that category. But maybe.
Is it censorship to remove random stickers from telephone poles? To erase graffiti?
Ask 100 people what is evil and I'm sure you will get similar number of different answers. Is abortion evil? Is religion evil? Is being proud of your history and heritage evil? Is being gay evil? Not everything in life is black and white. In fact, most of things are grey, so it's important to allow both (or even more) sides to express their views, even if somebody else might find it evil. If it goes down to threatening with violence, outright racist slurs etc. we have laws to deal with it.
Looks like the time has come for Twitter to choose to be either a community or a platform. Really either is fine for a business to be but the choice does need to be made decisively.
Freedom of speech runs headlong into freedom of association.
Twitter has a huge harassment problem. This has serious implications for their business; as we saw the other week, Disney passed on acquiring them in part because of the harassment situation. This seems like a good and necessary move to strengthen their business by making their platform a more tolerable place to visit.
Why can't they just provide better filtering tools. You choose who you can follow. They should pull some of their ad-targeting tech to focus on filtering harassment.
I'd imagine at least part of Twitter's rationale for doing this was to make users contrast their proactivity with Facebook's stalling on labeling or removing fake news. Twitter looks more on top of things as a result.
I don't care about the politics of this move but this is why I have never, and will never, use third party platforms to communicate. Centralization always leads to abuse.
Regardless of the alt-right point of view, I can only hope that https://gab.ai takes off and does not get shut down or sabotaged. We need a neutral social media.
What we need is decentralized social media without any one entity running it who can impose anything from censorship to advertising to going out of business.
No thanks. I don't like gab either since they're basically a hive of crackpots. I've seen everything from the Illuminati to "cultural marxists" blamed for people being transgender. Sorry if I'm not keen to interact with those folks, but I don't think me being trans is a disease or a problem. If it's a problem for them then they can solve it by staying out of my way just as I've been staying out of theirs.
From Twitter's perspective, I'm figuring they see these people not as a political movement, but simply as a nest of trolls, who go around harassing people and inciting mobs and are thus poison to the network.
The right to free speech is fundamental to a better society.
Ideally we have a free market of ideas fostered by tolerance and respect for different points views. Not being willing to expose yourself to different points of view creates ignorance.
Corporate censorship like this sends a signal that Twitter is not willing to be that communication platform for free speech.
I can't really see how the answer for what just happened in these elections, is even more "socially acceptable" censorship.
Clearly a lot of people were faking their world views on the social media in order to appear "politically correct" and avoid being shunned and attacked from people that see themselves as politically correct and informed.
And then, on the ballot without anyone looking, they, of course, voted against that and we got Trump, Brexit, etc...
And now, people are expecting that the answer to on how to actually get these people back, inform them, make them more open and try to show them a better view of the world, is to censor their thoughts even more?
Something tells me the term Alt-Right is becoming one of those worn out labels thrown around with the same amount of precision as a sawed off 12 gauge.
529 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 362 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12966699 (343 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12971779 (21 comments)
That first link with 343 comments and over 100 points in an hour was on the third page before it was two hours old.
Sometimes it's a function of user flags (which affect the ranking even if [flagged] isn't visible) which is a more democratic process, and sometimes it's a function of what whether the mods determine that the discussion is constructive and valuable to the overall health and purpose of the HN community. I don't know if the mods always comment when this is the case, but they have in the past done so.
Would you say the same if Twitter were owned by the right-wing and was banning left wing users?
You might be inclined to grant someone permission to stand on your lawn, but chances are if they stood on your lawn and then held up a sign that said "Send Jews to the gas chambers!" you'd likely ask them to leave. And if they refused, you'd eventually force them to leave.
And calling that expulsion "enforcing your world view" would be a very extreme way of explaining what you did.
Are Stephen Colbert / daily show etc. included in the list?
But let's scope this out for a second, neutrally: if the subculture is sharing information that is against the political status quo to its own adherents, and it is organizing for its beliefs, should it be censored because its belief is fundamentally unpopular, especially when it is so far maligned from the political views of Silicon Valley? If Twitter aims to be a neutral platform, dissent takes more forms than just those that we agree with. It's being able to express, share, and debate those views that we can come to agreements on things.
The alt-right movement is in the crosshairs because a lot of people are still reeling from the election, myself included, and people are trying to find any and every excuse as to why Clinton didn't wrap this one up like it seemed to be happening in the exit polls and on the coastal cities. The alt right is popular, full of rage, and more than a little scary to some of us, but I don't think that means they should be instantly suppressed. Only hearing what politics are agreeable to you is how these types of movements rise in the first place.
You can say whatever you want about how terrible the people being banned supposedly were, but Twitter's priorities here are crystal clear. This was an ideological purge first and a (terribly subjective) ToS enforcement action second.
It's unfair and highly inaccurate to say that Twitter is turning a blind eye to terrorists on the platform. However, I'd be interested to know what radical leftist organizers are doing to use the Twitter platform and how many of them have ended up banned as well.
235k accounts is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Twitter accounts are like email addresses, cheap and disposable. It took proliferation of articles like that one (and probably more importantly, a lawsuit) for them to get off their rears and do something about it. And this is after multiple reports over months, against unambiguously hateful accounts, some of which I personally participated in.
For some reason, it takes no such media shaming or legal action to ban, limit, or otherwise mess with the speech of the political right. Milo can just mention someone, someone else will say it's brigading, and off we go to the races. A celebrity can talk about getting hate tweets, and the CEO will drop what he's doing and personally reach out to them, while ISIS propaganda goes completely unchecked.
Feelings are less important than terrorist propaganda, full stop, end of story. No matter what you think of the political right, this is a disgusting inversion of priorities.
[1]: http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Why-are-terrori...
If we are truly building a society of tolerance, whether or not one has a visceral reaction to an idea should not stop whether or not one can discuss and debate it. I'm not a neo-Nazi, but I've talked at length with them about their views. I will give anyone a few minutes to explain what they are about, try to listen to it neutrally, and form my own opinion. My personal conclusion of neo-Nazism is that it is a way for white men that feel they have no economic opportunity to blame a convenient target, and they try to rationalize Nazi Germany's domestic infrastructural successes as a reason why the country was doing what was right. I think it is a prime example of scapegoating, and I find it violent and hateful.
If we are paying lip service to tolerance and acceptance of alternative worldviews to make ourselves feel like better progressives, we are doing our views a disservice and acting more hypocritical than those that blatantly wear radical views of censorship and discrimination.
You could say the exact same thing about literally any view and it would be equally true.
(Maybe you think I'm trying to say that all ideologies are equally valid, but I'm not. I'm just pointing out that that particular comment is so reasonable-sounding and hard to argue with precisely because it doesn't actually say anything of substance.)
By this logic, Twitter should ban pretty much any ideology.
I don't agree with Neo Nazis. I hold Neo Nazis with the same contempt that I hold feminists. Why not apply the policy for all hate groups?
For example, in Australia we refuse to acknowledge the approximately 25% of violence and abuse by females within the household. The worst case statistic is NSW ("Twice as many female victims (19,488) as male victims (9,261) in New South Wales."). Not one of these victims is given a voice! http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/...
Also check http://www.oneinthree.com.au/
You will see that men who are victims of domestic violence are turned away from support groups. This doesn't surprise me as there is an aggressive campaign to ignore male victims from media, government and community support groups.
I conducted a Google search from 2015 to determine that 100% of references in the Australian media stated that domestic violence was a "male only" behaviour and the only victims represented were female. I checked over 2000 references! In other words, 2000 of 2000 references represented one gender with relation to violence.
If you listen to Cassie Jaye (the feminist who created the documentary The Red Pill), she says that feminists in media refuse to acknowledge male victims because it will take money away from female victims. In other words, if you are a boy or a man who is beaten or abused, feminists insist males get no representation or support. It's almost a complete media kibosh throughout the western world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itSTzV29bS0
So, why is Twitter not banning prominent feminists? or, why isn't Twitter banning all media outlets who support such hateful messages that insist that some victims of violence should be ignored? This is a fundamental breach of human rights! You can't get much worse!
Check media references for an absence of any of the following, 80% of suicide victims are male 25% of domestic violence is by a female 90% of incarceration is male
You will also notice that Cassie Jaye said she was suppressed by feminists. Cassie also said that she was advised by feminists not to represent any issues that impact men. This would explain the media suppression across all western countries.
If you're going to ban a hate group, why not include feminism. It's certainly one of the biggest and most active groups today and actively violates human rights. I've given plenty of pointers in this single post alone to build evidence.
There is almost universal silence from the overwhelming majority of feminists on this topic. It's a sad indictement of the overwhelming majority of the feminist movement. Check media, documentaries from 2016, support groups, even discussion forums. The message is consistent and it consistently breaches human rights.
So, should Twitter ban hate groups? If you really must silence hate groups, then ban them all. And like you, I dislike spending so much of my time fighting hate groups like feminism because there is no impartiality on the topic. How extreme do you need to get before people will speak up?
I had a recent conversation w two feminists where I pointed out a fact as reported by Harvard that women are getting paid less because they don't negotiate.
I hadn't even made a comment on the underlying reasons and two women jumped all over me.
They lumped me in with the root cause, made simplistic comments like "oh so it's the women's fault!" and challenged me to start a class teaching women to negotiate.
While I don't think that's a bad idea, it's BS to put blame on me and challenge me to do more than they've done because I'm a successful man that owns a few companies.
Over half my primary company is women and if you asked any of them they'd say I'm the best boss they've had and I empower them to succeed. I trust them. I've also changed a life by hiring a homeless person. I take chances on good people making career changes.
I've got a small company of about 20 employees and a bunch of contractors. I've done more for women in business than both of the 2 feminists combined. Yet I'm the bad guy. Funny they consider themselves liberal and do little for their causes.
It's absolutely ridiculous how feminists push blame and are so divisive. They think everyone is out to get them. Facts mean nothing. They want to talk about prior injustices and ignore the first "why".
Merely pointing out the fact that women don't negotiate means you think it's women's fault to feminists. I recognize we've gotten here for a variety of reasons but if business rules currently dictate you need to negotiate, maybe learn to negotiate and use research from industry experts to tell a compelling story and make more money.
Sure there are asshole sexist males out there but the women I know that know negotiation are on par with men.
Feminists also ignore how women treat other women in business. Throughout the companies I've worked for and my own, something like 95% of issues with coworkers involved women with other women.
The problem is, liberals are vilifying Trump supporters for exactly that, being focused on other issues instead of social justice. They say that it doesn't matter that you disagreed with Hillary's liberal policies, putting conservatism over social justice makes you a complicit racist.
I can't speak to the particular accounts banned by Twitter, but the alt right have a carefully developed vocabulary designed explicitly to sneak across that boundary.
In this statement, you are unilaterally making a rule as to what ideals are OK to hold as part of "civilized society", and where the boundary is. Stating your society is more "civilized" than another is an opinion in and of itself, and arguably those who hold views opposite yours likely think your societal views also contain hints of barbarism or offend human nature.
There are multiple ethical views that humanity and even this culture have held throughout the past century alone that the predominant society has now decided are reprehensible, that other nations consider reprehensible, and then there are also views that have been considered reprehensible now widely accepted by this culture.
Personally, my beef is not with whether or not people agree or disagree with these views; the argument in this subthread is external to my original message:
I'm tired of the Valley's progressive ideology consistently espousing acceptance, free organization, and free speech when we as an industry keep taking steps that seem against it when we disagree with the information provided. It is the message of social media: people should be able to communicate and unite worldwide. If we aren't radically upholding this belief, then we need to change the mantra to be aligned to what it actually means: associate with us, our ideas, and our worldview, and we will give you a voice. If you don't, your voice on this platform will be stripped, even if you are not engaged in attacking those that disagree with you.
I don't agree. "Kill all the X" is a hate speech and, depending on context, a threat of violence -- we already have tools/laws to act against such, so there's no need for more censorship.
Does it make any sense to push the fringe away and offline when we can let them expose themselves and then monitor them?
Why not? If we silence them on few webpages, you think they simply will disappear? Trump as a president should be the wakeup call for everyone that forced, artificial politeness and political correctness won't make problems disappear.
And sometimes the people the majority thinks are being intolerant will end up being right.
Bottom line though: look at all the intolerant societies with no real framework. They don't fare well. The Founders of the US Constitution believed in unalienable rights for a reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Twitter has to choose between upholding the ideal of tolerance (4Chan is a good example of this) and trying to create a community of tolerance by running off the intolerant crowd.
I don't think there's a happy medium in this case because the alt-right seem to really like disrupting conversations that are inconvenient to them (instead of just tuning them out) and Twitter's short-form messages make that extremely easy because the conversations are so disjointed and often misinterpreted to begin with.
> the alt-right seem to really like disrupting conversations that are inconvenient to them
That's aggressive behavior, then. I'm defending the alt-right's ability to use Twitter for expression and talk with themselves, and with people that have shown interest in their ideas. If they're off brigading every source they disagree with all the time with harassment and memes, that's a different issue, and Twitter should be wielding the banhammer in an egalitarian fashion on all groups behaving this way (per the views they hold themselves to.)
I don't think this was an outright purge of the alt-right, just those they saw as ringleaders of abusive brigading. Alex Jones and other big names from that group are still out there doing their thing.
>Twitter should be wielding the banhammer in an egalitarian fashion on all groups behaving this way (per the views they hold themselves to.)
Absolutely.
Unrelated but I have a sneaking suspicion the alt-right will break with him anyway as soon as he starts focusing more and more on conspiracies about Trump.
Her supporters act like she was squeaky clean. When I chatted with them they had hardly no knowledge of her or Bill's checkered past.
I've heard people say she lost because she's a woman. That's like the QB throwing 4 interceptions and saying they lost because the kicker missed a field goal.
I've watched some debates with Milo as well as Gavin Mcinnes. They are definitely not what most Americans would call "far-right" -- in that they aren't anti-gay, aren't anti-drugs, aren't socially conservative, and aren't particularly hawkish. They seem to dislike Republicans like Paul Ryan almost as much as Nancy Pelosi.
Milo recently did a profanity-laden pro-Trump rally dressed in drag. That's the "alt" -- it's quite different than what a person would typically call Republican.
Before the 2016 election, the term was "classical liberal". I don't know about Milo, but at least Alex Jones has described himself as a liberal.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/16/translator-migran...
frontpage of breitbart today.
This article is racist af, and the comments are even worse.
This article basically has no source, and is a bunch of anecdotal race war bullshit. The only "facts" are so lacking in context that they are meaningless. Like number of total attacks for example....
To claim that it has "basically no source" is not true. The Breitbart piece links to the German-language article on which it is based. I'll link it here again for you:
http://kath.net/news/57457
The translator whose statements are featured in both the Brietbart piece and the original German article is allegedly a Christian Eritrean woman who has requested anonymity because she fears reprisals from the Islamic asylum claimants with whom her work requires that she interact.
Other people quoted in the German article are indeed identified by name.
Disclaimer: I am not vouching for the veracity of their statements, the integrity of the original German-language publication, or of Brietbart.
When leftists think "Right wing" in the US think of the Christian theocracy. However, conservatism is only one sect of the right. The right is also reactionary, and the alt-right is definitely reactionary. I'd argue the alt-right fits nicely into Wikipedia's definition of far-right politics [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics
Edited because my sarcastic use of tone didn't really have a place in the discussion.
The alt-right are younger neo-reactionaries who are tired of political correctness, tired of the media narrative.
Because the republicans have been using that as a very loud base for a long time now.
SJWs are not liberal. They don't want free speech. CA is not a liberal state by looking at its taxes and firearms laws. These are authoritarian ideas.
Rectification of names... Labels and Knowledge are totally independent things.
People who claim it's a negative are usually upset that they can't attack, belittle, or harass other people for their own amusement, I've found.
We have laws on harassment and threats. You don't get to suppress people's speech even if they are idiots.
That's a real liberal position.
Believing that people that respect that idea are bullies is both unfounded and unfair.
You say, as you attack and belittle people you disagree with...
(...not only people who behave that way, but everyone who thinks censorship is a negative.)
yeah, War is Peace
or, as they taught is in Scientific Communism classes, "Freedom is a conscientious necessity"
I would argue that it can't. Freedom is the freedom to do things. "Freedom from x" is just another way of saying "you're not allowed to do x".
One man's freedom may be another man's prison.
"dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world."
Undoubtedly not. The only difference, of course, is s/African/European/g.
I'm a liberal, but I feel that if this election has taught us anything, it should be that suppression of "undesirable" views only makes them stronger. It's almost as if the Founders foresaw this somehow, and having done so, created some kind of First Alteration of the Constitution to protect this kind of speech, realizing that attempting to suppress it would cause more harm than good.
I do realize that Twitter is not the government, but the same principle applies.
Now, the left calls colorblindness and "all lives matter" racist. (Remember when Martin O'Malley was destroyed for saying that?) They create advantageous standards based on race, and even exclusive positions for non-white applicants. (For example, at the BBC.)
And I too doubt they would object to "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world."
MLK's dream that one day people would not be judged by the color of their skin was abandoned by the left before the alt-right rose to power, and I believe that helped the alt-right rise to power.
Institutional racism is real and because of that it can't be undone by just pretending everyone is equal all of the sudden. It is much more nuanced than you make it out to be.
That being said, many of the people that twitter banned are just straight up racist and xenophoic/intolerant speech should not be protected.
Any evidence of this claim? Cause as an outsider to the US I see a black president and a lot of reversed-racism (affirmite action I think you ppl call it)
For example, http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/06/news/ferguson-arrest-warrant... shows that people in Ferguson are being arrested for things that wouldn't even be considered a crime where I live.
Compare that with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch or http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/27/us/oregon-standoff-ammon-bundy... and you will begin to see how crimes committed by white people are often punished by a slap on the wrist when the same crime committed by a person of color would land them in jail.
The All Lives Matter movement, as a reaction to BLM, is essentially saying that they don't, and that the racial struggles of American Blacks are irrelevant.
That is the reason why All Lives Matter is considered abusive.
That's not what "all" means. It's turning the name of the movement by implying it means "only" Black Lives Matter. So All Lives Matter is saying that not only Black Lives Matter.
It does happen to black people somewhat more often, per capita, but 50% of people killed by police are white.
Predicting the likely response to this, of course, we get into the (surprisingly hard to accurately work out) question of what proportion of crimes are committed by people of various races, and to what extent that figure is manipulated by conscious / subconscious bias on the part of law enforcement. (It's a swamp, and I don't feel like arguing about it tonight, I just wanted to acknowledge it's complicated.)
Edit to acknowledge: yes, it's more like 60% white if you're splitting out Hispanic-origin into its own category. Still, disproportionate.
If the main problem is (2), but society mobilizes to solve (1), thigs won't get better.
If we solved (1), everyone would be equally likely to suffer from police brutality. This would make us more likely to then go ahead and fix (2), because suddenly it would no longer be something which mostly happens to long-downtrodden minority groups.
Mind, if we fix (2) first, it's somewhat plausible that we might continue in a situation where minority groups are disproportionately targeted by the police, and we just go "eh, it's not that bad, we're not shooting them all the time any more".
I find this argument (the one you are referring to) to be spurious. We don't calculate the number of rapes committed by men and there is no subsequent societal bias against men as criminal by default (or suspect by default). Not to mention the mindset leads to a feedback loop: "Of the bugs found during team code reviews, 50% were in Bob's code" will lead to everyone going through Bob's code with a fine tooth comb - and finding yet more bugs, while Stacy's code never gets a second glance regardless of its quality[1].
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...
The thing is most violent crime is commited by blacks even though they are about 13% of the population. So please don't act like evil cops just hunt them down for fun, that's the biggest gripe with BLM. They act like it's 1900 when that's just BS
O'Malley was eviscerated for that statement, even though he clearly agreed with the sentiment that black lives matter.
I can understand the concern that some have that turning "Black Lives Matter" into "All Lives Matter" could conceal the reality that people with darker skin have been disproportionately impacted by our Justice system, but I also agree with the contention that overreaching and overreacting to a statement that seems completely reasonable to people not deeply aware of the discussion can ultimately have the opposite effect and serve as fuel to movements like the alt right.
The problem is innocent people who happen onto the conversation, interpret it at first glance, not unreasonably, as some insane asshole saying "only black lives matter", engage in good faith on that basis, to uphold ideals that we can all agree are right... and subsequently are piled on by a mob who agree that the offender has just instantly and irredeemably proven themselves to be one of the worst things they've been taught it's possible to be. With a real, non-zero chance of their real lives being actually, materially ruined as part of this public shaming.
The problem is things like "Black Lives Matter" being used as a shibboleth[0] -- an excuse to form a gleeful lynch mob, giving everybody a pleasurable and community-affirming chance to engage in collective norm-enforcement against The Other.
The problem is an atmosphere where I'm so paranoid about even attempting to have a good-faith intellectual conversation about this that I have to create a throwaway account to remove a not-at-all implausible chance of having my life ruined for even engaging on this topic at all.
And this isn't even getting into the atmosphere that seems to really be setting in, where agreeing to listen to someone has become tantamount to agreeing with everything they say. That's the really frightening one.
----
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
"Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter."
Whatever may have happened after, there was little justification to destroy that candidate for saying this.
Also, please don't pretend that one thing destroyed him... that's nonsense that you're peddling. But it's unsurprising that somebody peddling racist lies is a liar.
Make no mistake, Trump and the alt-right are incredibly hostile to anyone who doesn't see Black Lives Matter as an evil, racist attack on white people, who don't think that blacks complaining about police violence against them is the real racism.
[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/21/politics/martin-omalley-do...
People had to choose between two extremes, not one extreme and one moderate position.
It could also mean that black people are not especially target by the police and that outrage at law enforcement is misplaced. For example we know that the rates of police violence against black people vs white people roughly mirrors arrest and conviction rates.
Now you might consider this incorrect, but I think it's a debate that has to be had in the open and not shut down by calling people racist.
Yes, of course, they do. But some houses need immediate attention because they're in danger.
I'm not really up-to-speed with US politics, but I know it's horrifying how easily and with impunity the police have been killing black people. Still, "Black lives matter" isn't a great slogan, and calling "all lives matter" racist definitely seems like an overreaction. I'm not familiar with ALM's positions, though, so maybe it's a racist organization in disguise, I don't know.
Well, the fire department does tell people that they need to pay attention to things that might cause fires. The response isn't "well, people should pay attention to all dangerous things! What about car accidents?"
I mean, this isn't a difficult concept to grasp. When someone is raising money for orphans, people don't usually say "but what about money for veterans?" When people are raising awareness about breast cancer, you don't usually tell them "hey, we should be raising awareness for all cancer." They don't get angry that Smokey Bear focuses on forest fires ("Oh, house fires don't matter to you?").
People understand single-issue campaigns for most things, but some suddenly have an issue with it when it comes to African Americans deaths. This naturally raises a few eyebrows.
A group of people is experiencing horrible and unjust treatment. The implication of the situation is they don't matter, and the correct reformist statement is that they do matter.
Black lives matter also is not the correct statement. It is the correct understanding of the while situation but you need to keep in mind the nuance of language.
It seems that the argument has been framed around black people's mistreatment in general, which is fair enough, but, when specifically talking about the police, it seems to me that getting the latter to be less trigger-happy would alleviate the problem for all races, which is why I find the focus on black people a bit odd.
The controversy isn't because it's a bad slogan. The controversy is evidence of it being the correct slogan.
Agreed.
And that implies that Black Lives currently do not matter, which hopefully we can all agree is a big overstatement.
I understand that movements need simple powerful slogans to chant and make bumper stickers from. That's fine. But let's not treat these three words as some definitive analysis of race in America.
EDIT: Perhaps I am wrong here, as I said, I know nothing about All Lives Matter, can you justify calling it an "abusive" movement?
The statement 'All Lives Matter' not as response to BLM would have been fine, but come on. No one here is blind to the current discussion to that extent.
As a liberal, I will say that liberals drastically overplayed their hand the last 8 years. Many of us have been saying for a while that the language, tenor, and actions of recent liberal movements was ultimately counter productive.
I understand and share the demand to be treated decently and equally, but admittedly things kind of got out of hand. Micro-aggression, safe spaces, trigger words - all things that have good intentions but the people who advocated for them were often, to put it kindly, un-diplomatic.
With "demographics" on our side, many of us constructed this alternate reality where America, ready or not, was going to bend to our will - our worldview. And so we poked the bear. Over and over and over again. Then it woke up, tore our heads off and left us wondering what the f*ck happened.
That's why the serious discussion happens on 4chan. Say WTF you think, or GTFO.
I also upvoted you. :-)
I didn't notice this until after I got back to the US after some time in an authoritarian country, and I noticed that liberals had this similar authoritarianness of being unwilling to consider the merits of the other side, a feeling of we are certainly right and we are going to enforce it on everyone else through legislation. California just banned single-use plastic bags; it could have simply charged a fee commensurate with the costs of cleanup. Or the hot-button issues. Abortion: women's rights, yes, but the conservatives have a point that it is also killing babies. Homosexual marriage: people's rights, yes, but there are some good arguments to the other side, too. Usually issues have two sides because there actually are two different ways of looking at the problem, and to say that the other way is ignorant, intolerant, wrong, etc. is really not respecting the other side.
(Full disclosure: I am a conservative. I am not saying conservatives (!= Republican) are any better, certainly we have our own failings.)
I like your analogy about the bear, btw. I think you are probably right on. And even as a conservative, I was just as shocked as everyone else. Hopefully this election will get a good dialog going and people actually trying to understand the other side. That would probably make it worth it.
IMO this is what distinguishes a traditional liberal from a a progressive. For me, a liberal is basically libertarian with a belief the state can be used to ensure the rights of citizens are administered evenly.
IMO, if someone's actions aren't depriving another of life or liberty, the state doesn't have much standing in regulating that activity. Progressives believe state power can/should be used to protects their rights and their feelings. But, depending on the issue, you'll find conservatives taking the same stance.
Gay people getting married deprives no one of anything. Conservatives that want they're feeling protected are no different than the "SJW" so many of them rail against.
Like all things there are some grey areas. For example, the trans bathroom thing. I legitimately see both sides on that. Abortion is another I see both sides on and believe compromise is the best way forward.
You'll find "authoritarians" on both sides of the political spectrum. In some cases (like abortion) conservatives have their heart in the right places. So do progressive/liberals (environmental issues, for example). In other cases, both sides can begin to see the state as a tool to unnecessarily curtail the liberty of their countrymen.
> if someone's actions aren't depriving another of life or liberty
This requires definitions of what "life" and "liberty" mean. Once you choose these definitions you must ensure they are consistently applied to all your arguments.
> Gay people getting married deprives no one of anything.
What does "deprive" mean?
If we continued this discussion debating the definitions, the key would be ensuring they are applied consistently to all other claims by both parties. This is practically endless.
Maybe we need a new dictionary that is more specific and uses examples. Just like Stack Overflow Documentation - they realised that the key to good documentation is examples.
Really? I don't. It's a weird thing to care so much about.
> In some cases (like abortion) conservatives have their heart in the right places
Do they? I guess you could argue that cruel laws like the one Pence signed in Illinois are the only recourse they have for what they consider a moral battle.
I'm not sure how you can explain away fighting abortion while simultaneously fighting sexual education, contraceptive use, and welfare for those people who choose to keep the baby when they have no real hope of raising it well without help.
I agree with you. It wasn't something any thought about before. But once it made its way into the public discussion, I understand how some people would be uncomfortable with it: especially people who don't know any trans people.
>'m not sure how you can explain away...
I can't and I don't. I think people like Mike Pence are assholes. My personal stance is we should use the age of viability (as arrived at by scientific consensus) as a legal cut off.
How would such a compromise look like?
> In some cases (like abortion) conservatives have their heart in the right places.
Right, but this is already your personal judgement. For example I personally feel that the conservative stance on abortion is cruel and creates more suffering.
Stop legal abortions at the age of viability as arrived at through scientific consensus.
>I personally feel that the conservative stance on abortion is cruel...
In some cases, it is. I'm not agreeing with all the anti-abortion arguments. I have also talked with "progressive" family members that have a cold/cruel absolutist view of it. In their mind, 8 months was fair game, because choice. When it comes to abortion, the assholery cuts both ways.
The age of viability could be arbitrarily early as technology progresses so I don't see how that is a good criterion.
Instead I would argue for several different criteria. One is consciousness. This probably only occurs half a year after the child is born. Another one would be the ability to feel pain.
Regardless of all other concerns, as a practical matter, I would argue that once a baby has some sort of independent existence from it's parents (once it came out as a matter of fact, no matter when) then it ought to be protected.
> In their mind, 8 months was fair game, because choice.
Is this really a practical problem? Abortions after 3 months (sometimes after 6 months) are somewhat controversial, but also very rare. For example, the numbers in Germany seem to be that 97% of abortions occur early.
The late abortions are almost always related to very serious disabilities and this is a completely different topic. For those rare cases I would again argue that sometimes good arguments can be made for the abortion. It is not a clear cut case.
Related: "I wager that the fetus experiences nothing in utero; that it feels the way we do when we are in a deep, dreamless sleep." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-does-conscio...
Abortion ban as political issue and abortion as moral issue are a different matter. The latter is an interesting thing to debate in light of various ethical principles. The former should be straightforward (if it wasn't for desire to impose your morality on others and control their lives). Once you admit both sides have a point the only option left is being pro-choice. Pro-life argument is based on "I am right, you are wrong and I am willing to legislate against you even though your decisions have 0 influence on my life". It's very similar to legislating against gay sex in this respect (no influence on you but as you find it disgusting you are willing to legislate against it).
Abortion is the biggest issue I disagree with conservatives and even though I lean more right as I am getting older and as the left (in my view) is collectively losing their mind this one I really can't get over.
This is kind of tied in with the Judaeo-Christian worldview, which says that sex is only designed to be done within the context of an unbreakable covenant (marriage), because it bonds you together in a deep way. Sex isn't just an act, which is why divorce is so traumatic. Children are supposed to be conceived out of an act of love into a safe, loving environment. (Everyone is aware that this is often not the reality, but this is what the design is.)
All that is hard to explain, though, so it's easier for people say "it's morally wrong because God says so," which really isn't a helpful or even appropriate way of interacting with non-Christians. An appeal to authority doesn't work if the other person doesn't accept the authority...
Obviously, you are free to reject this view. You can even reject the moral part, but I think that fundamentally the conservative stance is taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions. We take a dim view of people who get drunk, drive, and kill someone, because driving carries a responsibility. So why are we okay with people who have sex and then kill someone to get out of their responsibility?
Hopefully this makes the pro-life position more understandable, even if you don't agree.
No-questions-asked contraception.
edit: A more radical idea would be to ban abortions but allow the parents to give up the baby at birth as a ward of the state. The expenses would be covered by a new tax.
No contraception is even less reliable.
There's an opportunity cost. I expanded on that a few days ago, and rather than rehearse it again, I'll link the answer I gave to "What do anti-gay-marriage people gain?": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12933668
>Homosexual partnerships, which are incapable of producing children, thus are of no benefit to the state, and can only be an unproductive diversion of funds which otherwise would be allocated to the benefit of heterosexual marriages which can and often do produce children.
i think you're completely wrong here. Homosexual couples do adopt children and given the number of children in the foster care one can see how a homosexual couple adopting an existing child may be of even bigger benefit to the state/society/planet than a heterosexual couple producing a brand new child.
Like with most of the "liberal/progressive" agenda - ecology/climate, marijuana legalization, education, healthcare, social safety net, death penalty abolishment, equal gay and others rights, etc... - i wish to think that this is we, humans, becoming morally better, yet it is also very easy to notice that when the wide society accepts those ideas it is almost always correlates ("correlation is no causation"?) with the fact that at the time of accepting of the given idea that acceptance is economically more beneficial than the not-acceptance. Well, better carrot than the stick...
A commonly cited argument, to be sure. Let's look at the magnitude of its impact in practice. Per federal statistics, roughly five hundred thousand US children are in foster care, which is roughly two-thirds of a percent of children in the US, or six per thousand. Figures on the number of children adopted by homosexual couples are somewhat harder to come by, but the highest number I found cited by a pro- group calls it about 22,000, which works out to about 4.4 percent of children in care, or 26 per hundred thousand of all children in the US.
Does this benefit seem likely to outweigh the cost to the other 99,974 children and their families? Does it justify a federal transfer of wealth from those families - who, given the fashion by which the tax benefits we discuss are distributed, will tend toward the lower end of the income scale - to those homosexual couples already wealthy enough to consider adoption and be likely to gain approval?
There's an argument to be made that these figures aren't representative because homosexual marriage is so new, and will increase over time, and that's fair. Let's look at the best possible case. Roughly 1.5 percent of the US population identifies as homosexual. (We disregard self-identified bisexuals in this analysis; when they make up their minds, they all but unanimously settle on heterosexualism.) Out of call it 240 hundred million Americans, if every two homosexuals equate to one marriage, we have 1.8 million couples. With half a million children in care, to reach full coverage, the overall adoption rate among those couples needs to be a bit more than one in four.
Does this seem likely? That's four orders of magnitude, and roughly a factor of three thousand, over the general adoption rate - and if we disregard intercountry adoptions, as we have throughout this discussion and properly should here, it becomes more like a factor of five thousand.
I do not dispute that homosexual couples, unable themselves to produce children absent extensive scientific and medical intervention, are more likely than others to adopt. But five thousand times more likely?
The essential difference I see isn't one of individual probability of parenthood, but of aggregate. Not all heterosexual couples rear children, true. But the likelihood of a randomly selected example rearing children is vastly higher than that for a randomly selected homosexual couple. That, I argue, is what makes it worthwhile for the state to support the former and not the latter.
To go into individual personal detail, as you seem to think I advocate, might in theory be a natural corollary of what I describe - but to do so in practice not only massively increases the bureaucracy and cost involved and brings in creepy edge cases, but requires a panopticon state in order to work.
Okay, but why guess? We already register children and parents, so only issue marriage licenses when a couple has a child. That takes the guessing out of it.
> but to do so in practice not only massively increases the bureaucracy and cost involved and brings in creepy edge cases, but requires a panopticon state in order to work.
I don't see how, the state already knows who a child's parents are.
As I've just mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think a lot of this has origin in my failure to make clear that I'm not arguing one vast change in the status quo versus another, but rather arguing one vast change in the status quo versus no such change. (Status quo ante at this point, of course, but let's not get hung up on that point, when we've spent the entire conversation to date assuming that this is still a question meriting discussion.) Making marriage contingent on procreative capacity would be a vast change to the status quo. Permitting homosexual couples to marry, exactly as heterosexual couples do, is also a vast change to the status quo. There are cases in which vast changes to the status quo are not merely justifiable but utterly necessary. This does not seem to me to be such a case.
What about them? By your logic, won't be able to get married, unless they adopt, since they can't have kids, it's clear-cut.
> What about men and women who simply aren't fertile, for whatever reason?
Same, no marriage, unless they adopt.
> What about families in places where births aren't registered? Such places still exist.
Can't get married unless they register their kids. We can't have them benefitting from the institution of marriage if they aren't willing to do the legwork.
> What about the death of a couple's only child?
Could go either way, they gave it a shot. I'd be for letting them stay married.
> What effect has all this on divorce?
I don't know, what effect does not letting homosexuals get married have on divorce? Same deal.
> "Creepy edge cases."
Not really, though, they have pretty easy answers.
> And I can't see how maintaining all this additional information on which married status is now contingent (unless it's not!) could be achieved without a massive increase of bureaucracy, with its concomitant cost.
What's the additional information? It's literally "do you have any children? yes/no", which the state already has. You're literally advocating guesswork instead of using one simple and readily available piece of information.
I don't know, these arguments are so bad that I feel like you're trying to avoid recognizing that my solution is clearly superior. It makes me wonder what the real reason for you being against homosexual marriage is.
Civil discourse usually ends by presenting your clearly superior points and letting the weight of their clear superiority carry the day.
Questioning what the real reason for [him] being against homosexual marriage is an "Ad hominem fallacy".
Yeah I feel like you're post-rationalizing a gut feeling, because you didn't think too hard about alternative solutions to the incentives/tax burden problem.
That's actually closer to what I'd consider preferable, which would be no changes to existing marriage rights, but a federal civil union statute with marriage-level financial benefits contingent upon child-rearing. But such a thing would never be taken seriously on either side of the political crevasse - far too much for conservatives, far too little for progressives, thus decried from both sides. Is it too soon to bemoan the equation of nuance with assault in the modern American political environment?
> deny one of humanity's oldest and most important rituals [...] to an entire group of people
An entire group of people who have never in Western history, perhaps not even in human history overall, had access to that ritual, until the Supreme Court last year discovered in the Constitution a right heretofore unknown. It is very hard to overstate the extent to which this represents an upheaval of tradition, and such things don't happen in a vacuum - or, utopianism notwithstanding, without consequence. Being myself a member of that roughly one percent of the population which has been led to believe it may enforce its will upon the whole without fear of backlash, I don't think it is too hard to imagine what kind of "gut feeling" there might be somewhere in the back of my mind as I speak on this subject, as I've so often done over the last few years.
It's possible my analysis lacks accuracy, although that's yet to be demonstrated, and falling back on insinuations of bigotry doesn't really indicate confidence in one's arguments. But if you want to know what motivates me to concern myself with the subject in the first place, you need look no further than fear. I don't want to find myself in a war, and I really don't want to find myself in a war my side is all but guaranteed to lose - and one in a hundred isn't the kind of proportion that's conducive to a win. But some people seem to want to start one, and to put me and mine in it. They say it's for our benefit, but I've been observing and comparing their claims and their actions for some decades now, and I think they are lying. I also see no reason to expect that, when all the heavy things they've so blithely flung into the air start coming down on people's heads, they'll feel any need to stick around and share the horror they've let us in for. That seems to me like an outcome toward which it's eminently reasonable to look with trepidation.
We'd got by this long without being able to marry. We could've been satisfied with Lawrence v. Texas, which is an amazing accomplishment in its own right, and given it another generation or two before we told the rest of America again that it could take its morality and shove it even further this time. No, that's not ideal, but what is? Nobody ever promised us, or anyone else, an easy life. Nobody ever promised us a just world, by our lights or anyone else's. And the whole concept of progressivism revolves around gradualism, or so I'd been given to understand - the idea, I gather, being that of modifying morality over successive generations by a process mainly centered on education and subtle social pressure, rather than forcible reengineering of whole swaths of society at a time. Quibble though I may with the nature of such a process and the purposes to which it might be put, I at least have to admit that it has a reasonable chance of working. Trying to do everything in the space of half a generation like this is liable to get a hell of a lot of us killed, and to leave those who aren't worse off than they were at the start. I guess that's easy to contemplate for people who don't stand to suffer as a result of it. Here on what's liable to be the pointy end, maybe not so much.
I don't know about gradualism. You seem to have a better eye on the strategy than me, so I'll take your word for it -- though I'm struck by your cynicism about allies fleeing you when things get hard... but I can understand where it comes from. The number of people who would put themselves in harms way for someone else's fight is pretty low, so your numbers indeed look bad. Damn. Thanks for taking the time to reply. I hope for all our sake america isn't as dogmatic and lazy as you think it is..
so, according to that principle you declared, the state clearly shouldn't support marriage (no new marriage licenses and no tax benefits to the childless couples with already existing licenses. Shouldn't the state just automatically annul the existing licenses of such couples?) after the age of 50 or 55 - i.e when that likelihood fells below whatever threshold you consider "worthwhile".
This should sate the religious (they can have their marriage rules and do whatever they want they just wont have legal standing, we aren't calling the legal union a marriage anymore). It should also fix your issues.
In any case, the legal advantages are things that make it easier to live together permanently. As far as I'm concerned, if we moved to my proposal you should be able to get a civil union just for that reason.
So, if two best friends or roommates want to have a civil union because it makes their life easier have at it. If irreconcilable difficulties occur, then they can sever the union in court much like today's divorces.
Also you quoted me in your response, but your comments made no argument against my quote. Care to shed light on why people you don't know getting married deprives you of something?
1: http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/marriage-compa...
If it helps any, I hardly more often find myself in agreement with conservatives on most issues than with progressives...
Why is that a legitimate interest of the state?
Cynically you could argue that the state benefits far more from dysfunctional families who are more likely to become dependant. I would rather the government spend money on sex education and contraception for teens than supporting married couples.
Your cynical argument has value as well. The trouble is that the only even temporarily stable state thus produced is a single-party state, and you can't really kick everyone off the dole once you've finished using it to get where you want to go. It's an ongoing cost whose magnitude is only ever likely to grow over time, and the probable economic result is frightening.
And do you really want to equate homosexuality and infertility, which for all intents and purposes is a medical disorder? Is that where you want this conversation to go? It's not where I want this conversation to go. My sexuality is not a medical disorder.
As I've argued at length in this thread and the comments I've linked therein, I don't think it's reasonable to consider that standard met here.
As I've tried, perhaps unsuccessfully, to point out, this isn't the same as arguing that permission to marry should be contingent upon procreative capacity. I can see how it might come across that way, from a starting perspective of weighing one vast change to the status quo vs. another such vast change, and I think I've failed adequately to clarify that I'm approaching the question instead from a perspective of weighing one vast change to the status quo vs. no such vast change. It's a different question.
You're also characterizing this as a "vast" change. What is the vast change here? From a logistical perspective, it doesn't exist: you pass a law allowing same-sex couples to do the exact same thing that opposite-sex couples can...and now they can go do so using exactly the same procedures as opposite-sex couples could before, and obtain thereby exactly the same benefits (tax advantages of joint filing status, visitation rights, and a host of other small preferential treatments given to married couples).
Speaking of those benefits: while they exist, it is categorically impossible to uphold equality of rights and opportunities while opposing same-sex marriage. The only to reconcile these two positions is to either a) pick one or b) redefine marriage such that it confers no civil benefits (which would indeed be a vast change).
> You're also characterizing this as a "vast" change. What is the vast change here?
That marriage should now be an institution open to homosexual couples as well as to heterosexual. Taken in isolation, it doesn't seem like a big deal to me, either. But nothing in society exists in isolation, and quite aside from the historical novelty of it, many millions of people regard this particular change as a very big, and very undesirable, deal indeed.
The impression I have is that those with whom I've argued the point here today see no reason to doubt that they know better than those many millions who share this opinion - so much better, in fact, that there's no point taking very seriously any argument, opinion, or belief, other than that which they themselves advance, espouse, or profess - or at least already agree with on all substantial points.
I was that confident once, too. Sometimes I miss it. But nothing is ever simple, and pretending otherwise can make fools of us all.
One of the core tenants of libertarianism is the nonaggression pact, and with this it is impossible to use the state to "ensure" too many things domestically.
This next part will seem hostile, but think about it logically.
The reality is that people usually want to enforce and others the qualities that they project from their own shadow; for instance, liberals tend to be racist (wanting special privaliges for one race or another, depending on the circumstance), and sexist (wanting to elect a treasonous criminal based on it being a woman alone), and thieving (wanting to levy money from others via taxation, for their own causes), and yet these three qualities are some of the biggest claims that liberals make against libertarians and conservatives, that they are greedy, racist, sexists.
There are really not that many fighting on the internet about who said what about who's sexual identity.
Liberals care about someone who has to work 12 hours a day for minimum wage, has no meaningful time with their children, has to go to work even when sick or risk being fired, is possibly just a broken bone away from homelessness, and is preyed on by the financial industry with fraudulent credits etc. Oh – and when they get home, there's Mit Romney on FOX saying poor people are lazy.
As a liberal I know that these people may have made poor choices. Where's the father? Shoulda finished school! Why do you need a cell phone? I just don't care. I see the willingness to spend money on anything /but/ the basic needs of people: the military, tax cuts to levels last seen in the 1920, etc. Indeed, conservatives seem to enjoy the suffering of others to such a degree that they're willing to spend more on people when they get to throw them in jail, with a bonus if it's a 20-year wait for the electric chair.
There are all sorts of questions about incentivizing people, motivating them and punishing them at the core of all this. The problem is that these questions are discussed only in terms of morality, not practicality. Every single industrialized country can serve as a laboratory, and time and again we see policies that improve lives.
Ridiculous. I can't tell you how many times I've heard those sentiments expressed when they're tapping away on their iPhones. Liberals care about whatever they currently feel the most strongly about. And they see no issues with using the fruits of Chinese laborers working in slave-like conditions while simultaneously agitating for the increase of minimum wages.
I see plenty of issues with Chinese laborers working in slave-like conditions. I'm happy to discuss breaking trade treaties and dealing with the consequences to give these people better lives. I'd say their condition is worse than the American poor - so if anything, we should bias towards them.
But, we have power to fix these things within the bounds of our nation and refuse to do it. We have more influence over our country than any other.
We do not. Increase minimum wages, and we increase inflation and the unemployment rate. You cannot legislate prosperity. You can legislate poverty though, as Venezuela found out.
> We have more influence over our country than any other.
We are the consumers of the world. If we suddenly stopped buying consumer electronics/clothing unless it was responsibly sourced and three times (at minimum) the price they were today, don't you think labor conditions would become suddenly far better?
You cannot legislate morality. You can coerce it through economic pressures and incentives, but just legislating that people have to be nice to each other doesn't work. Hasn't worked throughout history, won't be starting now.
And yet, there are enough to create a terrifying chilling effect for anyone whose beliefs don't fit in to the narrative, especially in hard-left milieus like college campuses or major tech companies, and the rest don't speak up against them.
How? Requiring trans people carry papers just so they can use the restroom doesn't strike you as just as little bit terrible? Trans people already use whichever bathroom they feel more safe and comfortable in: All these bathroom laws do is make life harder for members of what is already a very marginalized group. There's literally no positive aspect to them whatsoever.
I've had discussions with psychologists and trans people.
This illustrates the disconnect we're seeing between the left and the public.
Trans people are a vanishingly small proportion of the population, compared to the people who have lost jobs when their manufacturing jobs moved overseas.
Worrying about their desires (a tiny percentage of the population) and de-prioritizing the desires of a far larger group of people is insulting to the people who have lost jobs and can't find new ones. Talk about skewed priorities.
Also, if you thought you were Napoleon or black (and happened not to be black), you'd be roundly laughed at and diagnosed with a mental illness, and sent to therapy, resources permitting. Similarly, you can argue that Trans people have a mental illness - they think they're something they're not. It's just that the therapy to disabuse them of the notion is more trouble than it's worth.
I'm not asking you to agree with the other side, just to give it a fair shake before putting it down.
Consider the viewpoint of a parent of a young (10-year-old) child. That parent sends their 10-year-old daughter into the women's restroom. If that restroom can be legally entered by any person who is willing to say out loud "I feel like I am a woman", that restroom is open to any number of adult men who prey on children to enter.
Yes, this is the ever-present, sometimes-alarmist "who will think of the children" argument.
But being a tired argument doesn't make it an inaccurate or illegitimate one. If there is no answer given for it, then it remains valid, if eventually tiring to hear.
That's a conservative talking point, not the reality of the situation. In reality, a trans person will have to go far beyond just feeling like a woman to get away with entering a women's room; they will also have to take substantial steps towards looking like a woman.
You don't even have to feel like a woman to enter a woman's room, you just have to say you identify as a woman.
"Substantial steps towards looking like a woman." What does a woman look like? A woman looks like whatever she chooses to look like. Actually, she sort of looks like me after Taco Tuesdays where I have to use the restroom really badly and all the stalls in the men's bathroom are full.
If you are demanding that a "real woman" make herself subservient to what society thinks a real woman should look like, or maybe even get a note from a doctor diagnosing gender dysmorphia, I would advise you to check your cis privilege. /s
I don't really have the stomach to dissect your Napoleon analogy, but instead I will simply note that you have made a false equivalence and suggest that laughing at or trivializing peoples' mental illnesses is not particularly helpful. I think that a comparison to phantom limb syndrome or alien hand syndrome would be more accurate. Most people can rely on their brain telling them accurate information about their bodies. Some of us are not so lucky. I can't begin to describe how difficult it is to have your brain constantly at war with itself. I can promise that therapy isn't going to fix that sort of brain malfunction, any more than "pray away the gay". With rare (and controversial exceptions), the majority of studies agree that HRT/GRS + therapy produces better quality of life than therapy alone. The suicide rate is pretty high for both groups though.
Manufacturing jobs and my body may both make Republicans feel uncomfortable, but are not otherwise linked. You are displaying emotional reasoning, not logic. There is no reason to compare these two things, and the worrying implication of your reasoning is that any injury to a minority can be absolved if the majority can be shown to have suffered some other harm.
There are a number of issues where conservatives have taken a stance against empirical reality (with its well-known liberal bias). It's tough to build a coherent worldview if it's not founded on empiricism. Trump epitomizes this problem. One hopes that the same may not be said of you.
You are missing the main thrust of my argument.
Transgender issues are such a vanishingly small portion of the population of course people who speak about the economy will get more traction. And people who fixate on transgender issues will rightfully be seen as fringe elements who are completely out of touch with most of the country.
Complaining about not being able to use the bathroom you want to use instead of worrying about towns and communities getting hollowed out because of manufacturing jobs leaving and never coming back does not get you votes and does not portray your side of the argument in a flattering light.
It'd be like complaining about grizzly bear attacks while getting drunk and driving home. One is a much more pressing concern.
> There are a number of issues where conservatives have taken a stance against empirical reality (with its well-known liberal bias).
Which are?
The main thrust of your argument was that we must either talk about jobs or trans issues. This is a false dichotomy. I'd say it's a pretty clever way to control public opinion, but we've seen these same rhetorical tactics being used against gay rights for some decades now. It seems to be very effective with the more emotionally driven populace.
This is most certainly not a false dichotomy. Everybody has a certain amount of mind share that they command. If you're talking about Subject A you're not talking about Subject B.
That goes a long way to explaining again why liberals seem so out of touch with most working class folks living in middle america.
They don't care about what rights a tiny portion of Americans have, or what bathrooms they can and cannot use. They care about getting jobs and food and making rent, which are the concerns of a much greater proportion of the populations.
When they hear about politicians ramble on about things that only affect a tiny minority of people, while ignoring things that affect much more people in a larger way, then you have an out-of-touch political party.
Mindshare may or may not be a finite resource but there is nothing suggesting that we are over-budget on that. But if that is a problem, again, your team created it. You are the party of legislating bathrooms and bedrooms. Own it.
Also, you may want to consider different news sources, as you seem to have a problem with repeating talking points instead of supporting your arguments with facts. This "out of touch" rhetoric is being heavily pushed by the right-wing apparatchik, and I am sure that you would rather be able to have your own opinions rather than the ones that the Party thinks you should have.
That is ridiculous. We've had gender separated restrooms for the longest time. It's only until now that social mores weren't enough to enforce the fact that you're just not supposed to use a restroom not of your gender, except for children with their parent under a certain age.
A law is a heavy handed way to solve the discomfort of most people, but it was passed in a state by its elected legislature. Since the Constitution doesn't say anything about sexual relations or orientation at all, it devolves to state rights.
> But if that is a problem, again, your team created it. You are the party of legislating bathrooms and bedrooms. Own it.
We are owning it. We're owning it because people aren't respecting long held social norms because of certain ideas of justice they have. Get over yourself. When a majority of people in a political jurisdiction believe a certain thing, either learn to live with it or move.
> This "out of touch" rhetoric is being heavily pushed by the right-wing apparatchik, and I am sure that you would rather be able to have your own opinions rather than the ones that the Party thinks you should have.
Ad hominem much? I have not attacked you personally at all, and you're insulting my ability to have my own opinions on thin evidence. I repeat points in the media because they make sense. Heck, I repeat facts every day. The mere fact that I repeat them so often doesn't make them less true.
Also, the left has been the political leaning that has clamped down heavily on thought crime and dissent. Note that Milo Yiannopoulos is far right, as he found the left far too stifling intellectually.
Actually that's pretty modern, historically. And thanks for telling me what my gender is, I really needed the guidance.
> Since the Constitution doesn't say anything about sexual relations or orientation at all, it devolves to state rights.
State rights and the People. I don't feel the need to make a moral argument about human rights on this issue, but I am sure one could be made. > Get over yourself. When a majority of people in a political jurisdiction believe a certain thing, either learn to live with it or move.
The majority is not always right, and democracy does not mean "majority rules". Also appeal to tradition is a fallacy, not a valid argument.
> I repeat points in the media because they make sense.
The triumph of rationalization over empiricism is nearly complete.
> Ad hominem much? I have not attacked you personally at all
Right, that thing where you said all trans people are insane or faking it was not in any sense a personal reflection. You do seem to be persisting in that belief though, which again does not reflect empirical reality. You are insisting that laws be made on the basis of your feelings -- and then blaming your opponents for it.
I am not American, but I must say on the level of politicians, Obama repeatedly tried to be bipartisan and was repeatedly rebuffed by the GOP who seemed intent on grinding the government to a halt. Frankly, and it made the Dems look like a pathetic 'hanger-on', IMO.
"Considering the merits of the other side" is a losing strategy in game theory when the other side always defects.
Consider the conservative position, and what strategy would work for conserving what is important to them. Any sort of compromise is a long term losing strategy, so of course they'll block progressive moves if they're capable. I'm not aware of any real trade ever being offered, something like: we want full on no joke equality of outcome for every flavor of the rainbow, and in exchange we'll give you the abolition of federal income tax.
Imagine if someone demanded you eat a sandwich made of human waste, and then they got upset when you refused to compromise and only eat half of it.
I would also add that the media-portrayal of conservative perspectives if in multiple instances further to the right than that of the electorate. I'm happy to go into examples if you care (one example would be people wanting healthcare before the ACA became associated with the 'evil' Democrats).
I don't agree with you on the media-portrayal point, because I think your premise is way off. There is no unified conservative perspective in the way that there is with progressives. This last election has made it very clear that the old conservative guard, the ones most similar to progressives, who called for universal healthcare before Obama, are in a minority position.
I'm not likely to be the one you want to discuss this with though, as I'm an anarchist.
The ACA is not "health care." It's an insurance regulation. The conflating of the two is a useful narrative but it is not accurate in any way.
In the pre-ACA insurance marketplace, pre-existing conditions either precluded individuals from coverage or forced them to pay for more expensive plans. Self-employed individuals were in a similar position.
Without insurance, health care, ranging from the mundane to emergency room coverage, was/is exorbitantly expensive. What rhetorical clarity, then, do we gain by explaining that the ACA is not health care?
That doesn't explain the other 6 years pure obstruction.
The financial world was crumbling, and both parties recognized that drastic economic action was required.
Later, when Obama undertook healthcare reform - a project he had won both EC and popular support for - Republicans initially supported him. The Tea Party and the coming midterm elections pulled them to the right, and their success in 2010 left us with the obstructionism that we continue to see.
Related to the 'political showmanship' - if you recall the Boehner-Obama negotiations, I could hardly characterize that as showmanship. Representative Boehner risked his position as leader to try to demonstrate Republican cooperation but was ultimately drawn back by his party.
Overall, I read your comment as one that is supporting the 'Republican party line' without the context of following the events occurring during the Obama presidency. I would be keen to read any evidence you have in contradiction to the points I have raised.
[1] Here's an article describing the orchestrated obstructionism from the lens of 2012:
[2] First, I should say that the individual mandate in Obamacare is fundamentally a 'Republican' (vs conservative) idea, having been implemented in Massachusetts and appeared in 'Republican'-leaning journals.Second, there was Republican support for the ACA. You'll say 'no one' voted for the bill but the bill's signing was delayed as additions were continually made to appease Republicans who were on, the fence but eventually decided not to vote for the ACA. One Republican Representative did support the bill after it was clear it would pass. Indeed, there had been bipartisan efforts to create an ACA-like bill before the Tea Party pulled the Republicans to the right; see the third link.
As for the party moving right, that's basically what I was referring to. Having been excluded from negotiations on legislation early on, with the stimulus bill and such, the Republicans became a unified opposition when many were initially willing and politically able to compromise. This is what made room for the tea party in 2010, which has been a big obstacle for them afterwards in my opinion. It's all sort of a lose-lose situation.
I still disagree with your second assertion. The Tea Party forcing the Republicans to the right happened outside Washington and didn't seem directly related to anything Obama or the Democrats had done.
About the Boehner-Obama moment: while (if I recall correctly) it ultimately led to another budget, in the thick of their negotiations, they would have changed tax law as well. [1] I agree that there are fewer easily memorable moments of bipartisanship after 2010 but I do not agree that the Democratic supermajority (which really only lasted a year, due to Scott Brown's election in Massachusetts) played an important role in promoting obstructionism.
Rather, the Tea Party and the ACA fight provided cover for the Republican leadership to do what they had already been planning (see the Washington Post link from above for an unattributed source who claims the same).
EDIT:I was incorrect about the reason the Boehner-Obama negotiations began - it was the federal borrowing limit [2]. Reports at the time, and since, suggested that this fight was totally unnecessary, as the all expenditures accounted for by the borrowing limit would already have been approved by Congress.
Yes, but now people are going for an immediate overcorrection.
Tossing Brandon Eich out of Mozilla is the type of behavior that liberals probably should reconsider. I do think he was wrong, but is he really an evil man who deserved get kicked out of his company. I don't believe so.
Is the University of Toronto professor who is fighting to not use preferred gender pronouns a terrible person who liberals should hate? No, I don't think so. Especially when his argument is that it's compelled speech and violation of his charter rights.
Are the white supremacists and other racists who have come out of the woodwork to support trump bad people. Yes. They are. They need to be opposed.
> the conservatives have a point that it is also killing babies
It's not killing babies.
That being said, it's completely understandable that it is a moral issue for people. They believe it is wrong. That's not a viewpoint that makes you a bad person.
> there are some good arguments to the other side, too
Oh really? What are they? I've yet to hear a single one.
History has by and large been a march towards these ideals. Freedom, equal chances, some organized support isolating you from the raw&random powers of markets&nature.
That believe isn't new, by the way. The first progressive would have said: "We believe these truths to be self-evident".
My understanding of how Americans use the word "liberal" is that it's an alternative way of saying "left wing". In that case history has not been a march towards left wing views, surely the fall of the USSR, the rise of Reagan and Thatcher ... it's been the opposite.
And aren't "liberals" now pitching for unequal chances? Like, HRC should be President because she's a woman, affirmative action, get women into tech funds etc?
It looks like you just picked a few things that are widely regarded as good, and labelled them liberal.
Your scope of the playing field is limited. Affirmative action is indeed unfair when you consider only the choice at hand. You have to back up and take in a larger scope. Minorities are frequently disadvantaged in many areas of their lives: they are born into poverty at a larger percentage than whites; they are policed with much less forgiveness; they are killed by police at a much higher rate, and must live with that fear at all times; their fathers are incarcerated at a much higher rate. The list goes on and on. Affirmative action is an attempt to give an advantage in important employment and education opportunities to make up for those disadvantages.
Saying this reveals a dire mis-understanding of access and opportunity in society. The reason those initiatives are needed is because of the extreme amount of inequality that currently exists.
Women would not need to be put into tech if they were already well there. Affirmative action would have no purpose if minority groups were properly represented.
These are initiatives fighting the status quo, which has an extreme bias towards men and white people. It is exactly the opposite of giving "unequal chances."
History is the past as it is described in written documents. In other words, a narrative.
You're over-estimating the appeal of the liberal movement on younger people. If some college kids can't openly talk about their inclination to right wing politics that doesn't make them 'liberals'.
I think you're missing some perspective on this; a small % of activists on the left (mostly on college campuses) do not represent the trends of liberals in the USA. I can't think of a mainstream Democrat who considers these serious causes (including liberal ones like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren).
The reality is the left has been making huge inroads on social causes in the last eight years - in fact, this may be the primary enduring legacy of the Obama years. The public perception of gay marriage, police violence against blacks, and marijuana use have all drastically shifted and led to very real changes that won't be undone. I wouldn't call this overplaying their hands.
Also, I wouldn't extrapolate much from this election. Obama is a fair bit more liberal than Hillary and is extremely popular compared to her.
A vocal minority + rapid societal change + social media echo chambers = reactionary backlash = Donald Trump presidency
>I wouldn't extrapolate much from this election
I would. 60+ million people voting for a man as odious and unprepared as Donald Trump says a whole lot to me. That and pretty much total Republican domination on the state level. The GOP is one state house away from being able to call a new constitutional convention[1].
1: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a50672/st...
Let me rephrase: you are extrapolating the wrong thing when you say the "liberals drastically overplayed their hand" and then use this election as evidence.
Obama almost certainly would have annihilated Trump (his support in rural swing states is much stronger than Hillary's), and he's more liberal than Hillary. For all we know, Bernie could have done decently. Hillary's downfall is that she's seen as an out-of-touch corrupt establishment politician, which Trump (and Obama) were not.
Obama got people excited. He had a message he got out to people and they responded in a huge way. I'm really not sure what Hillary's was.
Trump got a different set excited. Sure some are deplorable. A lot are just republicans. A lot are people who just want their lives to be as good as they used to be, or their parents were.
Considering how dumb/immature the average product of an American high school is at 18, I'm not surprised they think like that (and are aggressive about their beliefs) Also, considering how some choose to treat college like an extended party, they carry over the same traits to 22.
But hopefully, the job market hitting them in the face after graduation beats some liberal bullshit out of them.
Also, class warfare and money will always trump identity politics and all that social justice BS. If there's anything the US can get behind it's their hatred of the poor (yes, well-off left are just as guilty of this, just more implicitly)
I'm black and I wish folks realized that stuff like that needs to kept behind closed doors. I'm not one of those black folks that tries to twist the definition of racism such that it can never be applied to us. It's ironic that lots of the same folks who talk about "micro-aggressions" are purveyors of them.
This is just a personal anecdote. I'm 23, also live in Ohio, and went to a very liberal private school. I have never met a single person who has un-ironically said these things.
Although Obama was opposed to gay marriage when elected, I will say that this is an issue that the progressives have driven into the public consciousness.
But Trump will be the first elected President to support gay marriage when entering office.
> police violence against blacks
There are far more protests about police violence against blacks now.
I've been saying this to my HRC-supporter friends, many are horrified that I could vote for Trump. A few are no longer friends (by their choice, screaming at me from the top of their lungs that I voted for Hitler).
The manner in which we discuss our differences matters.
For this election, for me (a moderate in a left-leaning city), the left was worse. I genuinely hope they can change.
Regardless of intent, they are ultimately part of the problem, not the solution. I understand that the latter are responses to the first, but they all serve to paint every member of society with an us-vs-them brush.
In the end, dialogue is a necessity to reform your broken society. Segregating off each subgroup into their own community, whether by choice or government policy, only increases distance and polarization and makes it harder for everyone to engage with other parts of society.
Jobs. Jobs jobs.
You'll/us/we lost the election because the candidate didn't motivate people.
For the past 8years republicans stalled all your legislative attempts.
Before that they created wars and before that they created Fox News.
Along the way people created global warming deniers, creationism and vaccine denial.
America is at the forefront of figuring out ways to packages and deliver emotions to leverage policy and votes.
Communication had already failed for the past decades.
Memes/Facebook/fake news are red herrings - symptoms, not the diseases.
The American legislature has become more contentious and partisan - iirc voting across party lines is seen as a sign of disloyalty.
The issue is that the strategies applied and improved here are studied and applied elsewhere.
A massive wall of propaganda and emotions.
How can communication happen when even straight up Adoption of GOP programs (iirc mitt Romney launched the predecessor to Medicare.)is cause to Reject it.
Basically how can you talk when people are rarely going to hear you?
?? I suppose the question is how can signal be sent over lossy/noisy(hostile?) channel without degradation or subversion
As for "smug liberalism" where if only uneducated people were given the facts, they'd make the right conclusion and be liberal, is probably a real thing; i.e. there are educated people who are still ignorant and there isn't a lot you can about it. A major factor in getting along with each other is living among each other, and that really doesn't happen in rural areas of the country. There's no real effective way to impart city dormitory life, not just social tolerance but diversity appreciation, to people who don't live in cities.
The election is really not that big of a surprise. The country is this divided. It is very difficult for the same party to win three election cycles in a row. And, key Democratic party demographics didn't show up to vote in sufficient numbers that it affected the outcome of the election.
This is not "tore our heads off" territory, that's hyperbole.
They still champion equality.
Unfortunately, it's now the equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity.
Yeah – or to put it another way, they champion social equality instead of equality under the law.
It's the difference between Classical Liberalism and the Social Liberalism which is currently in vogue.
The message of black lives matter is not that they matter more than other lives, it's that they _also_ matter, in a world where it seemed that non-black lives were valued, but black lives were not. It took steps to try to ensue that blacks were treated the same as others.
The All Lives Matter movement took no steps to protect all lives. If it did, it would be a great cause. But it existed solely so that racist assholes could slam the BLM movement with bullshit rhetoric. It's a garbage movement cited solely by garbage people.
Those in the Black Lives Matter movement say black people are in immediate danger and need immediate attention, like the broken bone or house on fire.
Saying “All Lives Matter” in response would suggest to them that all people are in equal danger, invalidating the specific concerns of black people.
“You’re watering the house that’s not burning, but you’re choosing to leave the house that’s burning unattended,” said Allen Kwabena Frimpong, an organizer for the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter. “It’s irresponsible.”
More to the point: It is a given that all lives matter, said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an assistant professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University.
“That has always been an assumption,” she said. “The entire point of Black Lives Matter is to illustrate the extent to which black lives have not mattered in this country.”
“if we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, ‘all lives matter,’ then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of ‘all lives.’ ”
Also watch "The 13th" if you haven't.
The idea of equality is not some abstract mathematical notion. The left's treatment of social issues, including affirmative action, stems from decades of serious empirical study of society, rather than from an imagined "spherical-cow" sociology. That does not mean that the policy is the right one -- either ethically or the best means of achieving its goals -- but I think that the debate should be carried out based on all we know about our real society, though history, anthropology, sociology and psychology, rather than by deliberately ignoring them in favor of an idealized model that bears no resemblance to reality. You can disagree with leftist policies on many fronts, but you cannot say that the left has abandoned the idea of equality based on your observations unless you choose that imagined model.
For example, if you substitute "Swedish" or "German" or something more specific than "European," you get something that doesn't set off alarm bells, just as with "African" (or "Eritrean" or "Egyptian" - although you might set off alarm bells with "Hutu" or "Tutsi.") Why?
I would wager at reasonable odds that a randomly selected American organization promoting the "heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent" will actually have an agenda dedicated to marginalizing or removing "undesirable" elements of the population (they will have an explicitly racist agenda, and support - if not directly participate in - hateful, illegal behavior).
I would take the opposite side of that bet for the corresponding group with "African" or "Irish" substituted in.
Words and symbols need to be understood against the cultural backdrop in which they appear. It means a very different thing to fly a giant national flag in the United States vs. in Germany (during anything other than a soccer match). The composition of a sentence is not sufficient to derive its significance, or its level of moral acceptability.
And of course, it's perfectly conceivable to have a non-racist group in America with the description you provided. It almost certainly has happened. It's just not what actually happens in the real world most of the time, for "lots of reasons."
It's uncomfortable to get down in the muck and deal with ambiguity and complexity. Evaluating whether or not a statement or group or personality is racist and worthy of approbation is generally really difficult. That doesn't mean it's impossible, especially at the extremes, and especially if you're willing to tolerate a false-positive rate.
The reason is that it places our government (or Twitter, in this case) in a situation of making impossible judgment calls. A person who is "proud of their European heritage" could be anything from a docile recent Polish immigrant to a rabid neo-Nazi. Yes, you can make probabilistic determinations as to which account or individual is truly racist and who is not, but to what end?
Speaking very broadly, we live in a democracy. And the underlying "faith" that is necessary to believe in a democracy is to believe that voters can distinguish between true and false, right and wrong. If we don't have that, we are completely lost.
So I choose to believe that voters are mature enough to see alt-right posts on the Internet and, on average, consider the reasoning and reject it. What's the harm of letting voters see the alt-right's arguments and decide for themselves? Either we believe the median voter can come to rational and ethical conclusion or we don't. If we don't, we have much bigger problems than deciding what Twitter's specific censorship policy should be.
In a literal sense, but the latter is a pretty good example of a white nationalist dog whistle.
> I feel that if this election has taught us anything, it should be that suppression of "undesirable" views only makes them stronger
That's your takeaway? Not that having a presidential candidate on TV giving his implicit approval to these ideas makes them stronger?
To quote Ray Davies: "Paranoia - brain destroyer."
To parody "The Sixth Sense": "I hear dog whistles."
100%. Throwing around "white supremacy" and "racist" is strengthening the actual KKK/Nazi types.
> It's almost as if the Founders foresaw this somehow,
I am amazed that the Founding Fathers seemed to have such foresight.
Its hard to see anyone who would be a "Founding Father"-type figure today.
The context at the moment is that there are many rabid, racist, some violent, followers of these sites out there who have recently felt validated.
If your gentle website "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world." had a similar atmosphere of whipped up feeling around it, potentially leading to abuse/violence, I'd expect exactly the same response, or at least the need for response.
Whether the response is correct or not, as you suggest, is another matter, but your comparison doesn't accept the context of current events.
"Equality
Twitter demonstrates the SJW commitment to one of the five fundamental pillars of their social justice ideology.
I fucking hate white people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Trump. Fuck you! 1:57 AM 9 Nov 2016
Twitter, in response to a complaint about the above tweet:
Thank you for reporting this issue to us. Our goal is to create a safe environment for everyone on Twitter to express themselves freely. We reviewed your report carefully and found that there was no violation of Twitter's Rules regarding abusive behavior.
I fucking hate black people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Clinton. Fuck you! 4:08 AM 16 Nov 2016
Twitter, in response to a complaint about the above tweet:
We've investigated and suspended the account you reported as it was found to be participating in abusive behavior."
from http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/11/equality.html?m=1
Edit: Why do I even bother. That same blog has the following snippet in another post:
The white nations of Europe are, collectively and historically speaking, humanity's golden geese. It is to the long-term benefit of all Mankind to avoid killing them, or even adulterating them, through immigration, invasion, or assimilation.
Sigh.
And by biased source, I mean a racist idiot promoting his shitty ideas.
What I always find amusing is how conservatives get mad that liberals are so sensitive to "taking offense", when the exact opposite is true. It's just that conservatives apply their own ethical perspective (where intent and feeling matter a lot) on the liberal view, and then think that the conclusion does not follow or is unfair. But the conclusions are a consequence of a completely different ethical framework, where they do make sense precisely because to liberals, the intent to harm and the feeling of being hurt don't matter as much as they do to conservatives, and what matters is the global effect actions have.
To a conservative, being racist means feeling negatively about other races or intending to harm them. To a liberal, being racist means taking any action that increases or perpetuates the actual harm done to certain races regardless of feelings or intentions.
Social scientists use the definition I attributed to liberals, because those of them who study racism are not ethicists and don't attempt to determine which ethical perspective is more "correct"; instead, they care about actual changes in society, and the truth is that the social effect of white people (we're always talking statistics -- again this is social science, not ethics -- so it's white people one average or as a group) discriminating against blacks is far more detrimental than the other way around (because whites possess more power), and therefore more racist. It is more "wrong" if your ethical perspective is not subjective but objective, and judges not intent but outcome.
this is gold, seriously
I think you're attacking a strawman image of social science that's been constructed by people who really have no clue. That's not to say that the social sciences aren't plagued by many methodological problems, but we actually do know quite a lot.
Racism used to be something you did if you were white; now it's just "who you are".
Since the civil right movement 50 years ago, white Americans have agreed to a racial compact:
- whites are banned from doing anything overtly racist
- whites are banned from engaging in identity politics (that is, favoring white/Western culture and people over others)
- whites will accept a double-standard that allows other groups to engage in both of these behaviors (and not deem them "racist")
In exchange, blacks and others wouldn't call whites racist unless that compact was explicitly broken. When they did, whites agreed to make the charge stick—you'd lose your job, career, etc. A charge of "racism" was very, very difficult to undo.
IMO, this was all a good thing and worked pretty well.
Basically, that's all changed now—at least on the right, now that all whites are "racist" by definition. The alt-right in particular has agreed not to make charges of racism a deal killer, and in particular, is no longer enforcing that compact. Under the old compact, the alt-right is definitely racist.
Apparently, though, so is half the country now because by the old definition, absolutely, Trump is a racist with his comment about the judge's Mexican heritage, and whites should have made the charge "stick". As Speaker Paul Ryan said "textbook racism". Trump's comment should have—and would have—been disqualifying under the old compact.
IMO some whites have dropped the racial compact because of the development of privilege theory and systemic racism and the frankly "original sin"-like notion that all whites are racist. Who wants that?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_(social_inequality)
What you call "systemic racism" has been known simply as "racism" in academic circles for the past few decades. Put succinctly, in research circles, racism is the property of a society that results in grossly unequal distribution of power among social groups viewed as different races; sexism is analogous. There is no assumption of ill intent or negative feelings, as those associated with xenophobia (or misogyny). There are very good reasons why this definition is much more useful to study this phenomenon.
The only thing that's changed in recent years is that the public at large has been exposed to those well accepted, well studied academic terms, while misinterpreting them to mean something else. Here's a recent article about this: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
It's not that all whites are racist by the academic definition, but that our society is racist, and so people in it who intentionally or not further the racist social dynamics can be said to carry out racism. Those people are both black and white, but as it's mostly whites who have more power in society, it is statistically correct to say that whites are more racist. It's just that "racist" doesn't necessarily mean what you think it does.
First, social scientists are overwhelmingly liberal. Normally, I don't have a problem with an appeal to "academic circles" as I'm in them. But this is a legitimate reason, I think, for conservatives to be skeptical of the motivations and reasoning here in such a politically-fraught topic.
Secondly, redefining words with existing meanings is a bad idea that only leads to confusion. A crude analogy: imagine I redefine the word "moron" to mean "an uninformed consumer of news". Then, I go around calling people "moron", and am surprised when they are offended, and are not placated when I tell them the word's new meaning. They might wonder: might I not have chosen that particular word to make uninformed consumers of news appear worse than they really are?
I think it is disingenuous to blame the public for "misinterpreting" what is meant by "racism" in this context, even though all you say about its academic meaning is true.
It is a legitimate reason to be skeptical, but not a very interesting starting point for a discussion if one side isn't even interested in rigorously studying the subject at all. There's a vast knowledge gap between the two sides.
> Secondly, redefining words with existing meanings is a bad idea that only leads to confusion.
In the case of racism it's not clear which definition came first. In the case of sexism, the situation is clearer: the academic, feminist definition came first, and has indeed been continually misinterpreted.
> I think it is disingenuous to blame the public for "misinterpreting" what is meant by "racism" in this context
I'm not blaming the public for the misunderstanding at all, but many people are actively hostile to even trying to understand the more well-researched point of view, so I'm not sure you can blame the academics, either.
After all, people who have not studied psychology, sociology, anthropology or history find it hard to accept how social dynamics and prejudice work through them without them being aware of it, just as it took 300 years for people to accept that some disease is caused by invisible microbes. Sadly, we do not yet have a simple, self-evident experiment like Pasteur's to demonstrate the existence of racism (and even after Pasteur's experiments, it took a couple of more decades for most people to become convinced). So you cannot deny the active resistance to the idea.
"Sexism" was coined by analogy to "racism" in the 1960s, within an academic context, but had not yet acquired the additional connotation you're talking about (the "systemic" part). The first occurrence in print defines it thusly: "Sexism is judging people by their sex when sex doesn't matter." No apparent mention of institutional or systemic effects; those probably came later.
So what we have here is a word, "racism", which acquired a well-known public meaning c. WWII that meant what we would now call "extreme, overt racism", and a word, "sexism" defined by analogy to it in the 1960s. It seems plain to me that much of the public is still going by these older definitions.
The fundamental problem is that, under the old definitions, calling someone "racist" (and probably "sexist"), is a very serious accusation. There is a reason Nazis seemingly come up in every discussion about racism: they are the ones who gave the word its modern, common meaning. In some ways, calling someone "racist" is therefore a direct, linguistic analogy comparing someone to a Nazi.
Academics later refined and repurposed these words. If they, and media surrogates explaining their ideas to the public, had stuck to terms like "(institutional) bias/prejudice", we wouldn't have nearly the degree of problems we have. Certainly it is important to distinguish between implicit, explicit, and systemic biases, which is exactly why we shouldn't use the same word for all of them. And if the goal is progress and understanding, we probably shouldn't use an emotionally charged word that gained its modern definitions from the Nazis.
We cannot realistically expect the public to read academic publications before voting. I'm in biology, and it would surely be nice if voters would read my papers so that they understand issues in medicine better (maybe they would increase NIH funding!), but that's completely unrealistic. No, it is up to academics and media to communicate clearly with the public, and I am arguing sociologists have failed miserably in this regard.
No, but we can hope that people would at least listen to those who dedicate their lives to a rigorous study of society rather than dismiss their views based on nothing of the sort. Academics (and journalists) don't explain those terms and the reasoning behind them only in academic publications.
Think of controversial topics such as tobacco, climate change, anti-vaccination, GMOs. Skepticism is great, healthy, and necessary. When those who are honest about the role of skepticism, what "theory" means, and the limits of what they're able to show meet with those who are willing to politicize the debate and speak in absolutes, or at least disingenuously widen the gaps of doubt beyond what's reasonable, who's likely to win that argument in a television sound bite?
Couple this with false balance in reporting, and you have a culture of people who don't know who to believe, and understandably may default to believing evidence that confirms what they already do.
This of course is not a criticism of your comment. This is a situation that I see playing out every day, and it honestly scares me. I don't know how we come back from this.
People believe (mostly) in modern medicine not because of our fancy jargon, or our explained logic about why the cell does this or that, but because it obviously works.
I am a liberal living in a conservative state, with many conservative friends and family. I can assure you that many of them have never heard the reasoning and arguments you're referring to. Sure, you can find it on Slate. But they don't read Slate.
But if and when these conservatives are confronted with these arguments, they will mostly agree that implicit bias exists, and accept data about unconscious associations, police profiling, etc.
But they do NOT accept the conclusion drawn from it -- that we are all therefore "racist". Because to them that term is as much or more a political tool for moral condemnation as it is a description of objective reality. And we liberals (I assume) would be kidding ourselves if we didn't admit it has been used this way frequently.
And they also tend to resist the conclusion that we ought to do this or that about it -- because science, if sociology claims to be one, never does or can tell us what we ought to do, only what is reality (the is-ought problem). Once we start talking about what we should do, we are completely outside the realm of science.
Yes, and even then you should expect a few decades or centuries for people to be convinced. I think the evidence is here, but sufficient time hasn't passed.
> And they also tend to resist the conclusion that we ought to do this or that about it
I have absolutely no problem with that. People are free to have different views about the goals, and even if the goals are shared, about the best means of achieving them. I'm just not so happy about the denial of facts, but I'm well aware that it takes a long time for facts to sink in.
> Once we start talking about what we should do, we are completely outside the realm of science.
Absolutely, and I don't think social research is about telling us what to do, but classifying actions as racist isn't prescriptive but descriptive, and is certainly under the purview of science.
> Because to them that term is as much or more a political tool for moral condemnation
Right, but there's a problem here. First, saying that the term is just a tool for moral condemnation serves their interest of resisting the facts behind it. Second, in addition to being an academic classification, it is used a (rather weak) tool for condemnation that serves as a very weak defense much stronger opposing forces of marginalization. I mean, in the end, politics is a struggle over the distribution of power. One group yells "women belong in the kitchen; blacks are inferior" or whatever. What tools do you suggest the other side use to fight back? Present evidence? They do, but you just said that the intended audience don't read Slate. So moral condemnation is such (rather ineffective) means.
> One group yells "women belong in the kitchen; blacks are inferior" or whatever.
I, and even most conservatives, would have absolutely no problem calling that racism or sexism. Those are overt, direct statements meeting the popular definitions of those terms.
I am assuming we are debating the more expansive definitions that are more under public dispute.
> saying that the term is just a tool for moral condemnation serves their interest of resisting the facts behind it
I agree, as long as it can be established that it does indeed have a useful purpose as a descriptive term.
> classifying actions as racist isn't prescriptive but descriptive, and is certainly under the purview of science.
I find the assertion that it isn't prescriptive, especially when you later admit that it does serve at least partially as a tool for moral condemnation, unconvincing.
But it could be both prescriptive and descriptive, so how about that?
You are surely aware that one fashionable definition of racism, with some academic support, is that it is equivalent to power or privilege, and therefore no member of a disadvantaged group can be racist, and all members of a privileged group are by definition racist.
In addition to being needlessly provocative and drawing attention away from "real", intentional racism, this kind of definition is utterly useless from a descriptive standpoint. After all, if it is completely equivalent to power/privilege, why not use those words?
And if racism occurs completely without choice on the part of the accused, is it not paradoxical to use it as a term of moral condemnation, since morality presumably requires choice?
Another common usage is the idea that racism is a set of power structures in society that promote unequal outcomes. If abstract, nonhuman entities (societies, governments, etc) can be racist, apart from the racism of their constituent members, how can the same term be used as a term of moral condemnation?
Note that I am not objecting to the idea that privilege, implicit bias, or self-perpetuating power structures exist. They certainly do.
But I am arguing that conflating these things with overt racism (or anything involving conscious choice, and therefore subject to moral condemnation) is intellectually muddled, counterproductive, and is at the heart of why conservatives are so angry about this issue.
But it does. The definition has become more refined in order to be more useful. This is commonly done in science.
> You are surely aware that one fashionable definition of racism, with some academic support, is that it is equivalent to power or privilege, and therefore no member of a disadvantaged group can be racist, and all members of a privileged group are by definition racist.
This is very inaccurate. The "fashionable definition" you're is really a very simplified, catch-phrasy shorthand for something much more subtle, which is this: Racism is the property of a society or social dynamics that create and perpetuate an unfair distribution of power between groups viewed as races. It is this definition that is shortened to be "discrimination plus power". Obviously, groups that are powerless in a society cannot shape it to withdraw power from themselves, which is why we say, as shorthand, "blacks can't be racist". But it is important to understand that in either case the word does not refer to individuals and certainly not to their sentiments, but to the way they are a vessel for social dynamics. Blacks, by being less powerful, are not as strong conduits for social dynamics, and hence they are not the mechanism for the perpetuation of racism, and hence "they" "are" not racist.
> In addition to being needlessly provocative and drawing attention away from "real", intentional racism, this kind of definition is utterly useless from a descriptive standpoint. After all, if it is completely equivalent to power/privilege, why not use those words?
This is perhaps better called xenophobia, just as "intentional sexism" is better called misogyny. I don't think it is more or less real than the academic definition, but it's not as useful because research has shown that the main mechanism by which racism is perpetuated has little to do with people's conscious intentions. You want to use the description of the main effect, not secondary ones that are perhaps more emotionally obvious but far less influential in practice.
> And if racism occurs completely without choice on the part of the accused, is it not paradoxical to use it as a term of moral condemnation, since morality presumably requires choice?
Without intent does not mean without choice. When I smoke a cigarette I don't intend to make myself sick, but if I know that is the likely outcome, then by smoking I choose to increase my likelihood of getting sick even though it is not my intent. The "moral condemnation" of smoking is effective in reducing smoking by drawing attention to this unintentional choice.
> If abstract, nonhuman entities (societies, governments, etc) can be racist, apart from the racism of their constituent members, how can the same term be used as a term of moral condemnation?
This is related to my smoking analogy. Once you know that your actions are part of an unwanted social dynamics, you can choose to change them.
> But I am arguing that conflating these things with overt racism (or anything involving conscious choice, and therefore subject to moral condemnation) is intellectually muddled, counterproductive, and is at the heart of why conservatives are so angry about this issue.
Right, but as in my reply to 794CD01[1], the difference is what you view as the main issue. Conservatives may view the issue as merely ethical, and when it comes to ethics, intentions matter a lot. The left cares a lot more about the result, and it turns out that what you call "overt racism" has very little effect on the result, and it is racism in the broader sense that is much more important. The left wants to draw attention to what it views as the bigger problem.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i...
> But it is important to understand that in either case the word does not refer to individuals and certainly not to their sentiments, but to the way they are a vessel for social dynamics.
> the main mechanism by which racism is perpetuated has little to do with people's conscious intentions.
Yep, I understand this, and this is key to the disconnect between academia and the public. Academia is saying, "it's not individuals, it's institutions, social habits, etc". That's a perfectly legitimate and important point to make.
But the public hears "you're racist" (by which academia and their surrogates mean, "you're a participant in these phenomena"), and understands it to mean "xenophobia" (implying intentionality). And you cannot fault the public for this misunderstanding because that is the common and historical meaning of the word.
> The left cares a lot more about the result, and it turns out that what you call "overt racism" has very little effect on the result, and it is racism in the broader sense that is much more important. The left wants to draw attention to what it views as the bigger problem.
As they should. I think we agree on just about everything except the question of whether repurposing an existing word is an unhelpful confusion-causing conflation or not. I do not question the motives of academia or the left on this issue, only their linguistic methods. They are the ones trying to make the change, so they are the ones responsible for clear communication.
More concretely, I am arguing that this confusion has cost the left dearly in this election on the very goals they claim to be working towards.
> Once you know that your actions are part of an unwanted social dynamics, you can choose to change them.
Just to be clear then, it is possible for a person, even a white person, not to be racist assuming they take appropriate actions? If so, I think we are very close to resolving our disagreement.
> Without intent does not mean without choice. When I smoke a cigarette I don't intend to make myself sick...
A decent analogy. I think however when we shift from the popular to the academic definition of racism, we have made a crucial shift from a "negative ethical obligation" (an obligation not to do direct harm to another) to a positive one (an obligation to take direct action to fix problems you didn't directly cause). Generally positive obligations are weaker and more dubious than negative ones, so this could be seen by conservatives as a bit of a bait-and-switch.
Thank you, and that's OK. I have more than enough karma points here.
> And you cannot fault the public for this misunderstanding because that is the common and historical meaning of the word.
I don't know if the public is faulted for the misunderstanding or simply racism itself. But it is possible that it's a strategic mistake politically to call people racist and have it taken as a stronger insult than it is meant to be. I think this is certainly a good question for the left to figure out for itself.
> it is possible for a person, even a white person, not to be racist assuming they take appropriate actions? If so, I think we are very close to resolving our disagreement.
The thing is that I'm not sure how much a person can "be racist" individually more than be a part of a group that causes racism. But anyway, it is definitely possible for people to work against racism and make "themselves" (as a group) less racist, and ideally not racist at all. I certainly wouldn't call a person who works towards inclusion and fairness in their community or place of work racist.
> we have made a crucial shift from a "negative ethical obligation" (an obligation not to do direct harm to another) to a positive one (an obligation to take direct action to fix problems you didn't directly cause)
Not exactly because harm is still perpetuated (even if I wasn't the one who dunked you in the swimming pool, if I'm keeping your head under water I'm still causing you harm) but obviously we're talking about less personally caused harm, and you're right that there's an aspect of a call for help here. In terms of political strategy, the question is this: if I turn out to be keeping your head under water unintentionally (say because I just want to lie on my floating mattress), which is more effective for you -- to say that I'm perpetuating the harm done to you, or to beg me for help? The latter may be more effective if it's just me and you, but I don't know which is more effective when entire social groups are concerned.
The top 1% is general perceived as having most power in society as a single group, and much more than white skinned people counted as one group. Individuals of the top 1% has significant more power than the average individual of people with white skin.
Then we have politicians and CEO's, which as a group has power somewhere in the middle between the previous two when counted as one group, but as individuals might very much have more power in average than anyone of the top 1%.
We also got convicted criminals that by law, are made powerless and removed from the voting pool. Surely they as a group holds no power to perpetuate an unfair distribution of power.
If we want to keep the definition of "discrimination plus power", what amount of power and how do we measure it? How do we measure a groups ability to be vessels for social dynamics? Do we only count the quantity of power, or the average power per individual?
It seemed to me that he was clarifying what those who believe A) mean, but personally goes with B) more. Which is good, because for the reasons you mention, A) is more extreme.
Not exactly, because the academic definition does not apply directly to individuals anyway (as opposed to xenophobia, which is a personal trait). Racism, like every social dynamics, is a statistical phenomenon. Also note that even even within the bottom, say, 5%, white people still have more power than blacks. But you are correct that racism generally works through people with more power.
> The top 1% is general perceived as having most power in society as a single group
First of all, we are not interested in quantifying exactly what share of racism does every individual or a slice of society hold. It is implied that racism works through power, so you can do the math.
Second, you mentioned "a single group", so I'll raise a point I find interesting. In social research, there are several kinds of groups we're interested in. Groups that are merely statistical set (how much money does the 1% have etc.), groups that have cohesion and common interests, and groups that are perceived to have cohesion and common interests whether they do or don't. The top 1% are certainly a group in the first sense, possibly a group in the second sense, but probably not a group in the third sense, although that may be changing as some politicians and political groups are trying to make people view them as such.
> Surely they as a group holds no power to perpetuate an unfair distribution of power.
That's true (although they may hold some power in their local communities).
> If we want to keep the definition of "discrimination plus power", what amount of power and how do we measure it? How do we measure a groups ability to be vessels for social dynamics?
It's not very easy and it's not very precise, but it doesn't have to be. We're trying to understand the basic mechanics; predictions are impossible anyway due to intractability. You can measure power in several ways. One is to measure it through proxies like money or positions (e.g. average income, or how many women CEOs there are). Another is to measure its effects, like whose groups interests are best served by legislation (at the various legislative levels).
> Do we only count the quantity of power, or the average power per individual?
Whichever is more useful for whatever it is we're discussing, but when we talk about groups, it is often the total power, rather than "power per capita" that counts.
It reminds me of a dilemma regarding to voting power. Germany has the most seats of any country with a total of 13%, while Luxembourg has 0.8%. Clearly Germany has more power, and when it comes to influence power in EU, one should go there to cause change. However, a Luxembourg citizen vote counts as 10x more than a german vote as a result of degressive proportionality, which mean by efficiency, any campaign would gain more influence per unity of work going after Luxembourg citizen. So where should the effort go to cause social change in the EU, and whose citizens deserve being blamed for faults?
> That's true (although they may hold some power in their local communities).
During the time of the Black Panther Party, one could easily see how they held a lot of power in local communities, caused by the massive race segregation that existed and still exist to some degree. If we also drag into this discussion some psychology, almost every person in the world has a local space for which they are in control and got highest power. Its a survivability trait in order to regulating stress levels against an otherwise threatening environment.
Looking at the local level seems as a poor method to study the mechanics of racism, and even worse for making predictions. Reductionism is a popular academic method, but it also widely criticized for lacking the ability to make predicts from a theory and thus verified the validity of said theory. The lack of verification is where science normally leaves and cultural, religious or political believes begin.
> even within the bottom, say, 5%, white people still have more power than blacks
Do you have data that shows that homeless people with black skin have less power than homeless people with white skin? I find it generally implausible that people who can't fulfill the lowest level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs has any distinguishable level of power in their subgroups. My best guess would be a proxy like police policy, but then we are entering the area of people being "acted on", and that is generally not considered as an aspect of power. Left politics is quite active in advocating that "acted on" is the opposite of power, regardless of the benefits that the acted on gets.
First you need to explain whether by "use" you mean in social science (as an explanation) or in politics (as a strategy). I think that either case doesn't work well. Obviously, all sorts of trivial sets are the causes of everything, but a useful model must be more refined to provide insight on the mechanics of the process (and as a strategy, that's just hard).
> So where should the effort go to cause social change in the EU, and whose citizens deserve being blamed for faults?
I don't know. I'm not a political strategist (I'm not a social scientist, either, but I studied some).
> it also widely criticized for lacking the ability to make predicts from a theory and thus verified the validity of said theory. The lack of verification is where science normally leaves and cultural, religious or political believes begin.
That's not quite true. Social science, as well as biology and computer science to some degree, deal with intractable dynamical systems. On a large scale, it is a mathematical impossibility to make predictions about biological systems, computer programs and social dynamics. Biologists can't predict evolution -- only explain it retroactively -- but that doesn't mean they don't understand the mechanics. Likewise, social science can only make predictions in very constrained conditions, like those studied in social psychology. If science were restricted to studying only tractable processes, we wouldn't get very far. Also, the word "science" may not be the best word to describe social research, anyway, but that doesn't mean that the knowledge gathered there is religious or political.
> Do you have data that shows that homeless people with black skin have less power than homeless people with white skin?
I wasn't quite talking about homeless people. Unless a homeless person denies access to food and shelter to people of other races, I won't call them racist. But as to data, how about this[1]. In the US, blacks are more likely to be incarcerated than whites of even much higher economic status:
What's more, even young black people who follow the rules and are never incarcerated are less likely than similar white people to accumulate wealth as they get older. As of 2012, the median household wealth of black participants in the study who had never been incarcerated at some point in their lives was $16,200. Those who had been incarcerated had zero wealth at the median.
Among white participants who had never been incarcerated, however, median household wealth was $192,000 by 2012. The median white participant who had been incarcerated reported wealth of $5,000.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/23/poor-...
To take a few examples, female and male identity is defined by the same culture. A man will apply male identity as defined by culture, but also be expected (and enforced) to do so by both men and women in that culture. When we look at groups and define men as having more power as a group, it doesn't address if they have more power to change the cultural rules. The power a man has to voluntarily wear women clothing should be a hint towards that aspect, and if they have more power to do so than a woman wearing men clothing.
Similar, in the caste system, people from all castes shared and enforced the culture. People of high caste supported it, and people of low caste supported it as that meant that they themselves were not at fault. In the end it took a common effort to remove it from law in places like India, but as a cultural values it is yet to fully be eradicated.
> In the US, blacks are more likely to be incarcerated than whites of even much higher economic status:
Well, I did ask this before. Is "acted on", even if beneficial, a power? A lot of feminism theory when looking at movies and story telling criticize that being "acted on" diminish a person identity and power. Even if its a beneficial outcome in the case of incarceration, the person involved can't affect it or control it.
Looking at it from a cultural (and using the trivial set), we can easily see how such outcome can happen. I recall a test where actors, a white man, a white woman, a black man, and a black woman acted as if they stole a bike in broad daylight. The outcome matches perfectly the cultural expectation, with only the men drawing negative attention. The black man got the worst, while the white women got positive attention in that bystanders went and actually helped her to cut the protective chain of the bike. From a cultural perspective, society collectively define thieves as white women < black women < white men < black men, as least to most likely.
If we tried to predict this result using perceived power of each group, we would get something like W/M < W/F < B/M < B/F, with the potential to switch W/F and B/M depending if we regard race or gender as the more powerful sub group. Regardless, neither provide an accurate prediction, as white males end up second to worst when looking at the actual result.
From a cultural perspective, where we define it as controlling what power each group has, it does make sense that not all groups have the same power in all situations. It also make sense to define that the group that culture defines as having power, are themselves not able to control culture. At most, the group can proportionally affect culture, similar to that of a large sub group of citizens can affect the election result without the group having a majority.
If you're talking about political strategy, then there's not much I can say, as I have no idea what is the best strategy to dismantle a caste system. But if you're talking about a descriptive model, then I don't think cooperation is the same thing as support. The definition of power is exactly the ability to get others to serve your interests. The fact that a group with less power (the influenced) cooperates with a power structure that serves the powerful (or the influencers) is no indication that the interests originate there, too.
> If we tried to predict this result using perceived power of each group, we would get something like W/M < W/F < B/M < B/F
I think that you're assuming that power (or lack thereof) manifests itself in precisely the same way in every situation (male/female or while/black). It is, I believe, an incorrect assumption. Because men are dependent on women in many ways, it is not in their best interests to have women incarcerated more. My expectation would be that in every scenario, the outcome would be the one that best serves the interests of the group with power, regardless if they happen to coincide with the interests of the less powerful group in that particular scenario. Also, social dynamics that shape social perception are, of course, statistical and work globally. Locally we can get behavior that doesn't tell the whole picture. For example, if you only considered how men and women behave on dates, you may wrongly conclude that women have more power because men pay for them and open the door for them.
> it does make sense that not all groups have the same power in all situations
That may be true, but on the scale any researcher who studies social structures who isn't a psychologist is interested in, the more powerful group gets its way in almost every case. It's just that social dynamics that perpetuate such large-scale power are usually not visible on a small scale.
And if we allowed such concept to enter the calculations, every other power indication must be put into questioning. Social science commonly make a point of gender distribution in the work environment. We naturally conclude that since more men are in CEO/higher pay position, that must be a result of power. However, a Chinese study showed that >80% of women won't consider dating a man if he doesn't own his own apartment and earn above a cultural set amount. 50% even consider it wrong for man to be outside if not earning that amount, as he should stay inside and work until he has increase his earning. Does this mean that women in such culture are the one in power, and that they just happen to give up power in the work force since its in their best interest to have men with high income?
If we are to include such relations, and from my perspective, results that are not Nash equilibrium, we end up with an impossible high burden of proof on social science. The researcher would basically have to prove the non-existence of such relationships.
> if you only considered how men and women behave on dates, you may wrongly conclude that women have more power
Its not easy comparing two asymmetrical reproductive strategies and asking which one are in more control, but a general consensus seems to be that whoever invest most are the party that are more discriminative and more selective. Where humans end up depend generally on the one studying it, and the methodology used, and local extremes.
> the more powerful group gets its way in almost every case
Depend on the time scale. If we look at an elected party, they will by definition get their way in almost every case until next election. At that point, their power, which was given by society as a whole, can be removed. The question is then, where that power ever part of the group or was it just granted?
Going back to cultural values, it doesn't change as rapidly. By allowing groups to have different power in different situation, it is also less rigid in its predictions. If the same cultural values are kept over time, you also get the effect that groups gets their way consistently over time as per the culture. The thing that would disprove culture as the culprit of power, is if a group had power to change such culture. Do you know of any such case?
I don't understand what you're referring to.
> However, a Chinese study showed that >80% of women won't consider dating a man if he doesn't own his own apartment and earn above a cultural set amount... Does this mean that women in such culture are the one in power, and that they just happen to give up power in the work force since its in their best interest to have men with high income?
But that is the whole point of the power discourse. Power shapes social norms.
> Its not easy comparing two asymmetrical reproductive strategies and asking which one are in more control
I think it is fairly obvious that men have more power in most cultures.
> The question is then, where that power ever part of the group or was it just granted?
The power is "a part of the group", but it ebbs and flows. Government is a mechanism that interacts with power (like all social mechanisms). If the government structure is binary, i.e. only one party can be in control at any one time, then this will naturally amplify power fluctuations because that's how binary mechanisms work.
> it is also less rigid in its predictions.
It's very hard (or even impossible) to make predictions in an intractable dynamical systems. That's just a mathematical reality. That's why social science doesn't try to make predictions on a large scale and over long durations, because that's just mathematically impossible. Similarly, biologists are unable to make predictions about evolution. They have no choice but to be content with retroactively explaining the dynamics.
> The thing that would disprove culture as the culprit of power, is if a group had power to change such culture. Do you know of any such case?
Plenty. The French revolution has dramatically changed cultural perception of aristocracy and hereditary power. More recently, feminism has changed cultural norms dramatically. It was once believed that women don't have the (biological) mental faculties to be good doctors or lawyers. The deeper and more internalized cultural norms are, the longer the process. There is an amazing book called The Civilizing Process[1] by Norbert Elias that chronicles the gradual social development of disgust. It shows how things we perceive to be visceral are actually the product of social processes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_Process
The swirling mustached man who in western culture symbolize evil and criminality. If men as a group has all the power, why would men as a group allow men to be incarcerated in higher rate than women? We have similar situation with the phrase "women and children first". Why would the group with power sacrifice their life for members of a less powerful group?
> I think it is fairly obvious that men have more power in most cultures.
In the context of dating? Social science looks at outcomes, and women are more discriminative and have more decision of the outcome. Outside of some extreme local situation where some elderly religious male leader decides whom a woman will form a religious bond with, which in my country is highly illegal and carry prison sentence, I can't say there is much signs that men decide the outcome of dating. Looking at proxies for dating culture (ie romantic movies), that impression is further reinforced that women decide the out come of dates and men only have the option to try date enough women until one will accept him.
But any conclusion must come with the consideration that men and women has asymmetrical strategies when it comes to dating.
> Power shapes social norms.
Or social norms shapes power. If men must be bread earners in order to be successful in reproduction rituals, those who are more inclined to do so will reproduce at an evolutionary higher rate than others. Such incentives should, through not guarantied, impact the power balance in the work force. In cultures that do not have such culture should as a result have a distinct different power distribution in the work force. I would guess (since I don't have the data) that Chinese society has a more extreme gender segregation in the work force than countries where income has a lower impact on dating.
> Government is a mechanism that interacts with power
One could easily think that it is the citizens that control the government that votes a party into power. The common phrase, S/He who pays the piper calls the tune, implies a power relation. Naturally, a political party has power, but revolutions general happens to parties that travels too far from the cultural structure. Somewhat ironically, cultural changes often happen in the turmoil.
> Plenty. The French revolution has dramatically changed cultural perception of aristocracy and hereditary power.
I might be mistaken, but it wasn't aristocracy and hereditary power that was in control of the French revolution. It seems that the group in power did not get their way, and the cultural changes came from the less powerful groups working together.
Old style feminism did change cultural norms, and most what I have read and seen was caused by the goal to create change by targeting cultural values. They were not the group with power, and the change was not cause by getting the most powerful group to change culture. Instead culture was changed from within by changing gender norms and expectations. There is plenty of old Swedish movies that illustrated 1980s parents that attempted to eliminate gender identity as a concept, switching or removing gendered clothing and toys.
New feminism, which is a style of feminism I strongly oppose, is the idea that men and women have different strengths, perspectives, and roles in society. Difference feminism success seem to mostly be about pinning groups against groups and causing what people call the gender war. Old feminism advocated that everyone are human and differences in society is caused by a harmful culture, one that they had a good track record in fixing. Since everyone are human, they even managed to make the word feminism to be a synonym to the word equal, which seems quite hijacked by new feminism.
The Civilizing Process sounds interesting and valuable read, but not sure how it links back to the concept that a powerful group shapes society and culture. Going back to racism, the initial proposition was that the group with mos...
I'm not sure I understand the premise. The fact that a group is powerful (and therefore serves itself) does not imply that the members of the group are necessarily allies. Even shared interests do not imply alliance. In fact, the more powerful each member of the group is, the less reason there is for them to be allies. Powerful groups usually become allegiant to one another only when threatened by a large accumulation of less powerful groups (that together have a lot of power).
> In the context of dating?
Maybe not, but this is getting into very specific contexts. I'm generally talking about social, or political power, in the context of distribution of resources. This is what most social scientists mean when they say "power" and don't qualify the context. Dating is quite special anyway in that the dynamics usually involves a very small number of people, so there can't be interesting alliances.
> Or social norms shapes power.
It's not either or. Nearly all dynamical systems involve feedback. But from a political point of view, what matters is that social norms are malleable. I won't go so far as to say that biology plays no role in social norms, but I don't think we have any reason to believe that our society today is anywhere near the boundary of biological forces.
> If men must be bread earners in order to be successful in reproduction rituals, those who are more inclined to do so will reproduce at an evolutionary higher rate than others.
Regardless of my previous statement (feedback etc.), I should warn against relying too much on behaviors attributed to a prehistoric past, which is largely unknown. We're not sure exactly about the different roles men and women had in prehistoric society.
> One could easily think that it is the citizens that control the government that votes a party into power.
Yes, but one citizen does not vote a party into power. Lots of citizens have lots of power.
> It seems that the group in power did not get their way, and the cultural changes came from the less powerful groups working together.
Less powerful groups working together is precisely a way to gather power. That's why capitalists hate unions. A worker alone has far less power than the capitalist. But combined, they are quite fearsome. It is a very crude and simplistic description, but the power of the rich is in their money, and the power of the poor is in their numbers. It's just that it's much easier for a rich man to yield his power than for a large group of poor people, because they must coordinate.
> New feminism,
I don't like this distinction. Feminism is simply the ideology of having women attain the same power as men. Feminists simply have different strategies of attaining those goals. When people start talking about "new" vs. "old" feminism, I get the sense that they really cherry pick some feminist strategies that they like and some that they don't.
> The Civilizing Process sounds interesting and valuable read, but not sure how it links back to the concept that a powerful group shapes society and culture.
Only indirectly. The thesis is that the top echelons of society want to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi by adopting behavior that is more refined. Eventually, the lower classes want to resemble the high classes, and mimic the same behavior, and the cycle starts again. What is interesting is how internalized things have become that we can literally throw up when seeing behavior that was once common place. I mentioned it as an example of social dynamics shaping norms.
> and you can't do so by only addressing the most powerful group.
Ah, maybe that's the source of the misunderstanding. The most powerful "group" does not necessarily hold most of the power. Power is spread, just not equally. To give a simple example, to chang...
> Powerful groups usually become allegiant to one another only when threatened by a large accumulation of less powerful groups
Such groups are very temporarily in coherency, and don't seem to match the concept of "white men" when described as a cause for ism's. If anything, grouping people based on race or gender without a very specific context seems to loose all the attributes of a allied group with aligned interests and goals.
> Nearly all dynamical systems involve feedback ... Eventually, the lower classes want to resemble the high classes, and mimic the same behavior
I think studies done by Robert Sapolsky on social ranking in baboons to be quite enlightening on this. He showed that if you group individuals by ranking, number 3 competes with 2 and 4 but not with 1 and 5. To theorize, I think that when individuals of a class mimics the behavior of whoever is at top, they do so in order to primarily compete with the nearest ranking members of the same class. The power relation between the top and those at the bottom becomes very indirect and largely unintended through this mechanism.
> I should warn against relying too much on behaviors attributed to a prehistoric past
Fully agree, and mostly bring it up as a point where we tend to view men as powerful because some nation forbids unmarried women to be outside, while we have similar situation in nations where unwealthy men are also not allowed outside. The variation in culture has a much bigger impact on power distribution and liberty than gender has on a global scale.
> [New feminism]. I don't like this distinction. Feminism is simply the ideology of having women attain the same power as men. Feminists simply have different strategies of attaining those goals.
If we look at the left and right politics, both strive to attain economical progress and prosperity. The distinction is in the strategies of attaining those goals, the values behind it, and from that a lot of effort and energy is expended to fighting each other. A think a major factor in this is when two strategies conflict with each other, you end up with two opposing ideologies with the same goal.
To take a few example, Difference feminism encourage and promotes diversity, and have a large undertone of biology in their message. A company should strive 50% women and 50% men because men and women are different and brings different values. The older feminism movement want to eliminate the defining aspect of diversity, and have companies only see the humans behind the applicants for which the natural result should be, spread over enough companies, 50/50.
To bring a second area of conflicting strategies, lets bring up domestic violence. A key statistics that new feminism commonly brings up is that 80% of reported perpetrators are men and 20% are women, often witch explicit implication of testosterone as a biological cause for violence. A common phrase used by feminist is "men violence against women". However, if we look for supporting evidence in homes where there is two men living together, or two women, we don't get the expected result of higher and lower violence based on gender. What we find is that regardless of the genders, the amount of domestic violence is identical.
New feminism reaction to that data can be read in several papers and reports, released in the last 20 years. The full title, often cut in half, is now days "Mens violence against women and violence by people in same-sex relationships", perfectly matching the data and (in my view) completely missing the point. ...
Just click on any of the comments to make them the root.
> If anything, grouping people based on race or gender without a very specific context seems to loose all the attributes of a allied group with aligned interests and goals.
But "allied group" and "aligned interests" are very different things. When we study groups, we don't always care what one person in the group feels towards others in the group, or whether person X and person Y are business competitors. X may really want Y to fail, but even the opposite outcome is better to X than a communist revolution. Anyway, it is a fact that white men have been more powerful than white women or black men in the West, at least for the past few hundreds of years.
> The distinction is in the strategies of attaining those goals, the values behind it
I think that different values result in very different goals, and I think that conservative and white Americans have very different notions of how they want the world to look. Jonathan Haidt has a nice talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b86dzTFJbkc
> often witch explicit implication of testosterone as a biological cause for violence
I don't think that's the implication at all. It's unlikely that feminists would emphasize a biological cause, and besides, I don't thing they (should or do) care what the cause is.
> I would even go as to say that the strategies should simply focus on reducing the human behavior of turning verbal arguments into physical confrontations, rather than focus on gender.
I don't know.
> if we want to stop racism we can't only talk about white men.
Again, I don't know how to stop racism, and I must admit that I haven't closely followed the political messaging by different advocacy groups, so I'm perfectly willing to accept that the messaging was wrong.
So how do we define power in this context. If members of the group has conflicting goals and conflicting interests, how do the group as a whole "get their way most of the time"?
We could use a proxy like wealth and work position, but that leaves us with the problem that quite explicit in the Chinese culture. If men are culturally forced to seek wealth and profession, is that power? When there such major incentive for men to seek wealth, which I will emphasize by cite OkCupid (West data) statistics blog: "If you're 23 or older [male] and don't make much money, go die in a fire". The effect of wealth for men is as correlating and explicit as looks are for women.
Comparing white men with black men works better using that proxy, through there is additional factors. The most powerful factor for wealth is being born by wealthy parents (per any article I have read on the subject of wealth). Unless a nation has an immigration that matches the wealth of people currently living there, those people are going to be at a major statistical disadvantage in their ability to gather new wealth.
Politics is however a nice proxy for checking if a group is getting their way most of the time, since plenty of political decision intentionally impacts group of people. When balanced in respect to wealth, do schools in black areas get less funding/focus then schools in white areas? Do parks get more built/funded in white areas than black areas? If so, is it because of the political representation (ie, since black population in the US is 8%, the 92% will carry a majority in all decision and in theory dominate any decision). This is part of the problem why most nation aren't rule by popularity vote, since high population density of cities would dominate the lower population of the rural area and carry a majority in all political decisions. However, the cost to such system is that all votes don't counts as equal, and all system that I know of is based on land and not on race.
> It's unlikely that feminists would emphasize a biological cause
A common comment I see is that new feminism is extremism, and they don't represent the mass movement that view everyone as humans. While I do hope that is true, key note speakers on tech conferences is heavily weighted in the new feminism camp, and when it comes to political activism, there seem few who represent the view that cultural roles and values in gender and race is harmful.
I think you're making the mistake of confusing intent with outcome. Power, like pressure, is a statistical property. Gas particles don't need intent in order to have communal properties. Also, I think you're associating judgment with power, as if someone is saying that having power is bad. I think it's important to first understand what power is as a neutral attribute, and only then understand the criticism (which, BTW, boils done to "with power comes responsibility").
> If men are culturally forced to seek wealth and profession, is that power?
Yes. Again, power is not about how you feel and what you want, but what you have. I know nothing of Chinese culture, but Chinese men may suffer terribly from stress and depression, but they still have power.
> since plenty of political decision intentionally impacts group of people.
Right, but, again, we're talking statistics here. If some decisions affect me negatively and some affect me positively, but overall, 80% are positive for me and 80% are bad for you for, say, the past 50 years, then, obviously, there's something going on here.
> the 92% will carry a majority in all decision and in theory dominate any decision
Being a majority is a great source of power. If the majority doesn't treat the minority equally, that's discrimination.
> and they don't represent the mass movement that view everyone as humans.
You may be more sensitive to these things than me, but I don't think you're being fair. "Black lives matter" isn't about white lives. It points out that blacks are discriminated against and that should stop. Feminism, old as new, points out the discrimination and unfair distribution of power between men and women. It's not about men's problems. If I'm getting mugged and I yell, "help, someone is mugging me", I don't think it's fair to say, "why aren't you also yelling for the woman getting raped two blocks over?!" Advocacy groups are supposed to focus on one problem, or one kind of problems. Simply saying "everybody has problems" may be absolutely true, but would terrible advocacy. Also, distinction between new and old advocacy is pretty much a constant. People always say, we were fine letting you have what you asked for yesterday (even though they really weren't fine), but now you're asking for too much or stepping out of line.
Knowing the source is critical to solve a problem. If cultural pressure is the source, shouldn't it be solved? Seems a bit to me like blaming black people for being in prison, demanding that they should fix the issue of being jailed more than white people.
A key feature of science is to figure out and understand how a system works and what affects it. How successful has efforts in the past been in trying to get people that are forced into a situation to also fix the problem of being forced?
> If some decisions affect me negatively and some affect me positively
This was part of what I was wondering about. Could you define in what way 80% of decisions have been positive for say, men in general in the last 30 years? In order for things to be positive for the group as a whole, the decision can't be significant contradicting within the group. I can't think of any interest that is that exclusively an interests to men but the opposite for women, and carries a significant majority.
> If the majority doesn't treat the minority equally, that's discrimination.
Should 8% get equal 50% influence? With winner take all decision, majority will always dominate the minority. In an election, the winning 51% get 100% representation, while the loosing 49% get 0%. That is not equal, and many nation solve this in a imperfect way by having more than 2 party system, through practically all retain some limits.
A problem with the word discrimination in this context is that intent is lost. 92% voting what they want and 8% voting for something else is generally not considered discrimination since the 92% don't intentionally try to miss treat the 8%. You need intent for discrimination, which is by its nature create before the end result.
> Advocacy groups are supposed to focus on one problem, or one kind of problems.
A common reply I get, but there is three major issues with it. First, feminism proclaims to be about gender equality, and over half its existence the movement stood for that. Its only in the last 30 years that the movement changed course.
Second, having an alternative movement that focus on Mens Right is bad for everyone. Equality don't need to have competition between two polar movements. If your house on fire, the fix is not to use fans and try to cool it down. Having two polar movements with the same goal is only causing less understanding, more fighting, and less empathy, and shouldn't a movement about equality stand for more than that?
Third, it should be said that sex segregation has only gotten worse in the last 30 years, a trend that many people are surprisingly surprised about. Difference feminism is sometimes, rather hushed, accused of this, and I don't disagree.
> we were fine letting you have what you asked for yesterday
Except when that what people asked yesterday, and what people are asking tomorrow, is polar opposites. One side want people to be treated equally regardless of gender and race. The other side want people to be treated different based on gender and race, but demand that the outcome to be equal. You can only fulfill the later demand by taking back the earlier and reversing progress.
> "Black lives matter"
I always found that adding the word "too" transforms the message. I also think it is way too early to evaluate the movement, as it could go as black panther movement and be about guns and violence, or it could be about reducing murder caused by racial tensions. The later has general support in society.
As a side note: Thanks for the link to Jonathan Haidt talk. Very interesting, through I have heard some exception to the left politics being pro-science and pro-lenience with crime. In particular, feminist (assuming left) groups successfully lobbied to prevent medical research on causes for rape, with statements that such research could result in lower jail sentences and people avoiding justice with insanit...
Right, but I think it's important to separate social science from politics, even though the two are related, just as we separate science from technology.
> If cultural pressure is the source, shouldn't it be solved?
I don't think social pressure is the source of power, but just the form it takes, but I agree that in order to change society, those who work to change it would eventually need to address such social pressure. It's just that these things tend to change on their own once material conditions have changed -- but it takes time. It's a little like those who claimed that soldiers would never be able to accept integrated units in the military. Instead of sending psychologists to treat the white soldiers' anxiety, they just integrated the units. After a while, everybody got used to it, and the social pressure and norms changed. Social norms almost invariable (history shows) follow practice, rather than the other way around. Social action therefore strives to change practice, and the norms follow. I am not aware of cases where action can first directly change norms. Sometimes norms change "naturally", due to technological or material changes that are not a result of social action.
> How successful has efforts in the past been in trying to get people that are forced into a situation to also fix the problem of being forced?
Isn't that what revolts are? Revolts fix the problem for both sides.
> Could you define in what way 80% of decisions have been positive for say, men in general in the last 30 years?
First let me say that things have gotten better for women. But the lack of social-security-paid maternity leave and subsidy of child care, still work against women in the US.
You could say that social norms demand that this be the case, but, like I wrote above, I think history shows that social norms are usually reflections of material conditions rather than something deeply ingrained, and also nobody said that power doesn't have any downsides. It's like a king who feels lonely at the top; lonely he may be, but he's still the king.
> Should 8% get equal 50% influence?
No, but it should get 8%.
> In an election, the winning 51% get 100% representation
I'm not interested in fixing the system or in whining about it; just in describing it.
> since the 92% don't intentionally try to mistreat the 8%.
I'm not sure. E.g., in America, the Republican party has been working for years to curtail the voting power of blacks below their share in the population.
> You need intent for discrimination
I don't think so. I can invite people to a party on the roof of my building, which has no elevator. I discriminate against handicapped people without intending to.
> Its only in the last 30 years that the movement changed course.
I strongly disagree with that.
> shouldn't a movement about equality stand for more than that?
I don't know; I know absolutely nothing about political strategy.
> The other side want people to be treated different based on gender and race, but demand that the outcome to be equal.
I disagree; that's not what that side wants at all. That side wants everyone to be treated in a way that recognizes that people are different, but doesn't want the outcome to be the same for every person individually. Nobody is asking that a single, uneducated black mother from Philadelphia be granted a Harvard diploma or get a job as a New York lawyer. They just want the statistical power distribution to be fair. I see no contradiction between this and any previous demands.
If you don't recognize the politics in science, you end up with eugenics and bias in the data.
If you separate science from politics, you get decision not anchored in reality. The biggest improvement to government process (a field rarely talk about) in the last 200 years was the cost-benefit analyses. Scientific methods are a core part of government.
> It's just that these things tend to change on their own once material conditions have changed
Lets structure this a bit, since we have two different theories: is it social values that leads to material conditions, or is it material conditions that leads to social values.
If its the first case is true, we should see signs of social values being changed while material conditions lagging behind. The opposite should be true for the second case.
I would claim that the case of the solider lacks to mention a critical third-party. Its not that the soldiers themselves that decided to integrated the units. Its an outer force, in this case the military leadership who do not share the same cultural values of the soldiers, and that outer force is what forces a material change for which later results in a cultural acceptance by the soldiers.
Take Japan after WW2. Its was not that the Japanese suddenly decided to change their cultural views about Imperial rule. The allies, who did not share the cultural views of those in Japan, imposed a material change (ie, the forced surrender and statement from the emperor). After a time, citizens of japan accepted the new reality and cultural values and norms changed.
An other case would be to look at the revolution that created the Soviet Union. People didn't just suddenly decide to create a revolution, and then after a few years have cultural values changed. The cultural values changed much earlier, primarily because of lost wars, which cause people to loose faith in the tsarist autocracy. The process was very slow, and took somewhere between 100 and 50 years, ending with the revolution. At that point, Social norms had already changed, a fact that the Tsar Nicholas II where very aware of.
To ground this into current situation with men being more pressured into taking higher paying jobs than women, the government as a third-party would need to basically go in and decide who works where and how much people should get paid, and the government would need to have a different cultural view than the rest of the population. I doubt either requirement could happen, the first because communism had already tried it, the later because a government with different cultural views than the population is unlikely to get voted in.
> But the lack of social-security-paid maternity leave and subsidy of child care, still work against women in the US.
Is that a positive decision for men? I know that where I live, Sweden, both those things exist and our work market is even more gender segregated that the US work market.
If we consider the extreme pressure that the dating site data shows, how much will a few months/year of paid leave change things. Will men start to seek women who can support a family, thus sending social pressure for women to seek higher paying jobs? Will women change their cultural values of seeking men with higher paying jobs?
Looking at Sweden, what it did is to silence the false myth that women are a bigger risk to employ than men. It did not change the cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles in society.
> the Republican party has been working for years to curtail the voting power of blacks
There is indeed political efforts to win at all costs and to try prevent voters from voting rather than win them over. I would not go and claim it is anything supported by white men as a group, but rather a fringe behavior by people whose income is based on being an politician. A other word for it would be corruption, buts its not commonly used word for describing such behavior.
> I can invite people to a pa...
That's not what I meant. I meant let's separate the science (i.e., what the reality is) from the technology (i.e., how to apply what we've learned about reality). Both are important and intertwined, but I need to know when you're talking about the science and when you're talking about the technology.
> I would claim that the case of the solider lacks to mention a critical third-party. Its not that the soldiers themselves that decided to integrated the units.
Of course. That's how social action usually takes place: by forcing those who oppose it after obtaining a coalition with enough power to do that.
> The process was very slow
That's exactly what I said in my previous comment. Social norms can change in two ways: quickly after a material change (sometimes due to social action and sometimes due to a sudden technological or environmental change), or slowly and "naturally". But social action almost invariably changes conditions first (by shoving them down people's throats).
> I know that where I live, Sweden, both those things exist and our work market is even more gender segregated that the US work market.
Indeed, that is a very interesting phenomenon and one that is currently being studied. I don't know if we have a good explanation for it yet. But again, this is mixing science with technology. That certain laws work in favor of men doesn't mean that removing them would shift the balance in favor of women (as there may be other forces in play). If I have a noose around my neck and am slowly suffocating, there is no question that this is bad. But that doesn't mean that cutting the noose is better, as I may be hanging over an abyss. So this is why it is crucial to separate observation and description from prescriptions. We can discuss them both (although I know little about political action) but they are not the same thing.
> It did not change the cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles in society.
1. Not yet (in the US, it took the south over 100 years to get over blacks' perception as subhuman; in fact it may not even be complete). 2. See above.
> I would not go and claim it is anything supported by white men as a group
You're using that word again: support. When talking about power we don't care what you think, feel or support. We care about the power you have. Those actions work to increase the power of whites. Whether all, some or a tiny minority of whites actually support those actions is irrelevant to this descriptive analysis.
> Its a meaningless term if everything everyone do is unintentionally discrimination towards someone.
That's why social scientists take great care to explain what kind of discrimination they're talking about. But your example of the elevator isn't completely artificial. Look at all the laws enacted to make public places accessible to disabled people.
> Before it, the trend where going towards less segregation. After it, to more.
Sorry, I don't see it.
> Recognizing peoples similarity is more important than to recognizes the minute way people are different, and it just happen that I prefer a society that focus on similarities than a society that focus on differences.
But we're not talking about individial differences. In America, blacks and whites aren't different in some minute way. One group has been enslaved for two centuries, and then forcibly put down for another two centuries. We're talking about major, catastrophic differences in the way society has treated different groups for centuries. We can't just say, alright, from now on we're all the same, because centuries of gross discrimination and exploitation have already made significant material marks that should be addressed.
Could you be a bit more explicit. A lack of social-security-paid maternity is not technically a law, and as I mentioned, where I live it exist and is gender neutral.
A few years ago I did an experiment and made a few data searches through the Swedish law, looking at what laws explicit mention gender. Recalling right, there were six laws that explicitly mentioned women, and zero laws that mentioned men. Out of the six, four where identical written laws which guaranties that women can request a female employee in certain situation (like when arrested and searched). Personally I don't see why the law don't just grant this to everyone, which is how the medical system works (you can always request a doctor of your own gender).
Of the remaining two, one is an oddly from of insanity clause for infanticide. Not sure why pregnancy induced depression isn't just include in the practice that deals with insanity clauses, but for some reason the law writers just decided to add it under the murder section and there explicitly write that women can be given a lower punishment for infanticide in such situations.
The last law is one that I find quite sexist and lumps together women and children as incapable of contacting the victim of crime support agency after being a victim of a crime, and thus forces the police to do it for them. The effect is that statistically 7 times more funds is used when a woman is a victim of a crime then a man. I have very little understanding for why the law can't just provide this service for everyone regardless of gender, except that government funding for victim of crimes support would have to be significant increased.
> it took the south over 100 years to get over blacks' perception as subhuman
This is true, but I would assume there where a trackable trend over that time span with decreased racism. Would you say there is currently a identifiable trend in changing cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles? If so, where would you say it points to?
> You're using that word again: support. When talking about power we don't care what you think, feel or support. We care about the power you have.
A major issue with using a single method in analyzing the world is that simplifications tend to give the occasional wrong conclusion. If we where to use the same method for power in assessing which farm land is benefiting from global warming, it would not say anything about causes. The group that causes global warming, and the entities that would benefit from a few degree hotter climate are not connected. When assessing the cause of voter suppression, the group not being suppressed is unlikely to hold an significant insight to the cause.
> laws enacted to make public places accessible to disabled people.
Yes, laws tend to be discriminative in what group they want to protect and what solutions are considered acceptable. This was very clear during the burka controversy last summer in Europe. Everyone was busy talking how laws that dictate what to wear on beaches was discrimination, completely ignoring that the existence of nude beaches shows that such laws already exist in public beaches. Society has just agreed that discrimination against nudists are acceptable and people who disagree should just create their own beaches out of sight.
> One group has been enslaved for two centuries, and then forcibly put down for another two centuries
Trying to repay bad blood from over 400 years is a recipe for war. Those perceiving themselves as a victim for things that happen centuries before they were born have increased stress and fight-or-flight responses, if I recall right.
> We can't just say, alright, from now on we're all the same
This just might be a bit socialistic comment, but yes we can. Those that have significant material marks, be that from being born to parents that got discriminated against or who randomly happen to end up on the lower end of the social ladder, sh...
What do you mean? It is a property of the legal system.
> looking at what laws explicit mention gender.
BTW, that's not a very good way to find legal discrimination. For example, suppose there was a country with no laws against rape (some Arab countries are not far from that). It doesn't mention sex, but women are raped by men far more than the other way around, or even (grown) men by other men. Such an absence is a clear legal discrimination against women (and probably children).
> Personally I don't see why the law don't just grant this to everyone
I don't know, as I'm not familiar with those laws and their goals, but you should always keep thinking about power. It's OK to treat men and women differently if it doesn't create a power disparity. The goal isn't to make women and men identical, but to allow them to have equal power.
> I have very little understanding for why the law can't just provide this service for everyone regardless of gender, except that government funding for victim of crimes support would have to be significant increased.
Again, I'm not sure, but my guess is that this is a "black lives matter" point, aimed to fix a discrepancy in reality. Laws are not written in a vacuum, and sometimes laws are aimed at specific people who are discriminated against at the time the law is written. One of the first things you learn when you study history is that a new law tells you a lot about changes in society, because people don't legislate against things that don't happen or they don't perceive as threats (the threats can be imaginary). The law is not the code for a simulation program; it is a set of steps for using the collective power of the stat to interact with social reality.
> Would you say there is currently a identifiable trend in changing cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles? If so, where would you say it points to?
Of course, and it seems pretty obvious to me. As recently as a few decades ago, women who put having children on hold to have careers were viewed as freaks. Just watch Mad Men.
> Society has just agreed that discrimination against nudists is acceptable
Nudists are not a social group just as chess players aren't, and it isn't a religion, either. It's OK to argue whether forbidding nude beaches is right or wrong, but it has nothing to do with the issue of burkas on the beach.
> Trying to repay bad blood from over 400 years is a recipe for war.
It's not "bad blood". Those are real effects, which are a major cause for current conditions. And where did you get 400 years? As recently as 50 years ago, there was a legal separation of blacks and whites in the US as well as overt economic discrimination.
> The historical cause is of lesser importance than the present need.
I agree. Fixing the wrongs isn't about the past, but about fixing the current effects of past deeds. If I steal your car so you can't get to work, giving it back isn't a matter of settling past issues, but correcting the problem of you not having a car because I stole it.
> Do you find that compatible with the successful abolishment of gender segregation in buses that the feminist movement fought for?
I am not familiar with that experiment or its goals.
A lack of something is not a property. The legal system lacks infinite number of things. Its not a meaningful definition if infinity is included.
> It's OK to treat men and women differently
And there we got a key disagreement. It is not OK to treat people different based on gender. Any such treatment will cause local power disparities, like bias that cause real harm.
>> why the law can't just provide this service for everyone > my guess is that this is a "black lives matter" point
The reason why the law treat women as incapable to pick up the phone and contact the agency is rather obvious. Cultural views and values. The problem is the result of power disparities for victims, where gender has a seven time factor in dictating who gets support and who doesn't. As a group, victims of crimes is one that should also be discriminated against because of their gender.
> As recently as a few decades ago, women who put having children on hold to have careers were viewed as freaks.
One of the theories behind that "interesting phenomenon" that is gender segregation in nations like Sweden, it describe how women after world war 2 started to have more time to spend on a career rather than spending all time on raising children. Men however are still stuck with the same expectation to support the raising of children, so their role in the work market has been static. Neither is a cultural change away from women being solely valued for their ability to raise children, nor men being valued solely for their ability to support the raising of children.
> Nudists are not a social group just as chess players aren't
Unsure if you are aware, but I find that comment highly offensive. Lets just start by quoting the lead in the wikipedia article on Naturism. "Naturism, or nudism, is a cultural and political movement practising, advocating and defending personal and social nudity". There exist a long history of nudism philosophy, culture, and values. I find your comment similar to someone saying that black people are not a social group, just as people wearing glasses aren't.
People who believe that clothing is constraining their identity is equally discriminated by a law that require specific form of clothing on beaches. All the effect of discrimination, like being hurt and feeling rejected is current reality of those people. The stigma of "being the wrong kind of person" and having that discrimination not even acknowledged is very harmful.
> And where did you get 400 years? >> One group has been enslaved for two centuries, and then forcibly put down for another two centuries
Two centuries, plus two more centuries, is four centuries.
And what material marks has been created for which black people exclusively can have? Is there a reason why the solution to those problems should not be used on society as a whole for anyone with the same material situation? It sound to me like you want solution to only go to people of black people because they deserve it more because of past injustice?
> I am not familiar with that experiment or its goals.
http://www.thelocal.de/20160329/is-germany-introducing-sex-s...
My question stand: Is it compatible with the successful abolishment of gender segregation in buses that the feminist movement fought for?
Of course it is! In math, the subset of the reals that includes all non-rational numbers less than or equal to five, has the very clear, very meaningful property of not containing the infinity of numbers greater than five. It also has the very meaningful property of not including the infinity of rationals. Whether you want to define a set by what it includes or what it excludes is merely a matter of convenience, and each can be more or less meaningful depending on context. Infinity poses no problems, because things can be put into meaningful sets.
> It is not OK to treat people different based on gender.
That is your moral viewpoint. There have been many ethical discussions on this. Let me just give a quick outline of why this may be perfectly OK. If the current conditions of the population are the result of negatively discriminating against women, a very reasonable way to correct the social discrimination is by having the law give special treatment to women. There's no point debating this at length here, though, as ethical values are deeply ingrained and are very personal. I just want to point out that there are several ways of looking at this, and several reasonable ethics.
Like I said before, social sciences study the society that we have, not an imaginary model of society made of spherical cows. Similarly, I assume that activists are interested in changing the society we have by enacting laws for this society. Questions of what's fair in an ideal society may serve as inspiration for writing a constitution that should last forever, but simple laws are like a steering wheel. If the car has a flat tire and swerves to the right, a law dictates that the wheel should be held turned to the left, even if it doesn't make any sense to drive an unharmed car in this way and may even spell disaster. If the reality is that the car has a flat tire, then the law should address that reality.
So, when you see a law, don't ask "is it fair in an ideal society?" but try to see what conditions in real society the law is trying to address, and whether or not you think that would help.
> Any such treatment will cause local power disparities, like bias that cause real harm.
I think that's an empirical question. If your goal is to minimize harm (and that is a liberal goal, but not always a conservative goal, so I'm not saying that must be your goal), you just need to see which causes more harm: taking corrective action against existing discrimination or not.
> As a group, victims of crimes is one that should also be discriminated against because of their gender.
Victims of crimes are not a social group. It's a very different form of discrimination.
> Neither is a cultural change away from women being solely valued for their ability to raise children, nor men being valued solely for their ability to support the raising of children.
I think we have a strong disagreement over facts here.
> There exist a long history of nudism philosophy, culture, and values.
That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how nudists consider themselves; what matters is how they are perceived by society. Society views nudism as a practice, not as an identity (similarly, BTW, to how homosexuality was perceived in classical times, just to show you how things change). In addition, I don't think nudists' power is curtailed by society, which is the main idea here. Whether or not naked bathing is allowed on certain beaches has no effect on the power (influence) of the nudists in society.
> All the effect of discrimination, like being hurt and feeling rejected is current reality of those people.
Like I said in an earlier comment, feelings of hurt and rejection are usually what conservatives attribute to liberal goals because that is a feature of conservative thought. Liberal thought is about power. Sim...
It can be if they have meaningful attributes to differential themselves. To anchor that to social-security-paid maternity, it only relevant as an attribute if it has been considered but then rejected. Such qualification would distinguish it from any arbitrary element of the infinite set, and the qualification can be supported by facts.
> I just want to point out that there are several ways of looking at this, and several reasonable ethics.
This is why I earlier mentioned that difference feminism and Egalitarianism to be like the left and right. Both claim to have the same goal but significant different in values and ethics. Acknowledging the similarities is important, but also understand why most focus is on the differences.
> not an imaginary model of society made of spherical cows
No one has been talking about theoretical society. I could interpret it as an attempt to devalue ethics based on equality, but there we would just hit a wall of disagreement.
> try to see what conditions in real society the law is trying to address, and whether or not you think that would help.
So the law in question clump together women and children and define them as incapable to ask for support. The conditions that brought that law is ridden with cultural values of women, and caused by values that defines women as helpless victims. The local power disparity is very clear, as is the harm.
> If your goal is to minimize harm ... you just need to see which causes more harm: taking corrective action against existing discrimination or not.
Or let me put the same question. What causes more harm: Taking actions that treat people equally, or take discriminate action in order to save money.
> Victims of crimes are not a social group.
This is the second time you define what is and isn't a social group, and I don't find it fact based. To reference Robert Sapolsky, a special skill of human behavior is its ability to be part of multiple social groups at the same time. Victims of crimes is a group that deserve societys protection and understanding. Its not a place where gender should have a seven times impact. Its the other side of the coin that lets race and gender be the most significant factor in determining punishment for criminals.
> I think we have a strong disagreement over facts here.
The good thing with science is that science change when the facts change or when people provide better theories (often praised as the difference between science and religion).
> It doesn't matter how nudists consider themselves; what matters is how they are perceived by society
This is also why not all religions are treated equal. A Muslim friend once said that smaller religions that didn't have 20% global followers in the world should not have their believes respected in the same way. From egalitarianism view I disagree, and its a poor method for harm reduction.
> Whether or not naked bathing is allowed on certain beaches has no effect on the power (influence) of the nudists in society.
Since nudism is generally banned and made illegal in practically all societies except when done in excluded areas, I would say it has a very direct and explicit power effect on them as a group. We could of course say that beaches are minor thing, but so we could also say about burka wearers being denied access to beaches has no effect on the power of the Muslims in society. Just because nudists are a popular group to discriminate against doesn't make it less of a discrimination nor ethical.
Clothing is a central part of practically every culture that exist, similar to gender identity. Native culture is easiest distinguished by what they chose to wear. It is rooted deep in signaling, and can be easily identified in the most common religions to the smallest of sub cultures. Looking at nudists and transgenders, its questionable which group causes more reaction from people who defends their cultural views by denying others.
> sociologists are...
They are. Perhaps I wasn't making myself clear: they are not a social group in the sense studied by sociologists and historians who study power, racism etc..
> I would say it has a very direct and explicit power effect on them as a group.
It does not. Power is basically influence. Whether or not nudists are allowed to take their clothes off in public beaches bears zero impact on their influence in society (e.g. the money they can acquire, the high-position jobs they can get, the political office they can be elected to etc.)
> but so we could also say about burka wearers being denied access to beaches has no effect on the power of the Muslims in society.
No, because Muslims are discriminated against outside beaches because they're Muslim. Nudists are not. Therefore, like segregating buses, this sends a signal.
> Looking at nudists and transgenders, its questionable which group causes more reaction from people who defends their cultural views by denying others.
Again with reactions :) This is not about reactions, not about feelings, and not about identity. I am talking only about power. The reaction to the way transgenders dress is only relevant in this context based on their existing status in society. If I (not a transgender) would walk outside wearing women's clothes on Halloween and would get laughed at, it is completely different -- in this context of power -- from a transgender who gets laughed at, because of the transgender's existing status. Same goes for Muslims.
> punishing injustice than fairness
It is not about punishing past injustice. It is about correcting (stopping) an ongoing injustice. You don't have a car because I am currently still holding on to it.
> Just because difference feminism believes that its for the greater good doesn't make it less of a contradiction.
I think you're obsessing too much about the details, and I can't help you because my value system is not disturbed by the same things that disturb yours. Unless I were a veteran feminist activist considering a certain political tactic, I just wouldn't worry about the differences between "difference feminism" and other forms of feminism. The differences between different feminist activities are much more subtle than you make them out to be.
I care about politics in the large -- who wins, who loses -- and not so much about the ethics of every single law. I have never studied the philosophy of law or ethics, so I can't contribute much there.
> No one want to see signals that some groups they identify with are worth less all day long. Its harmful.
Right, but sociologists -- again -- don't study what's right or wrong, and are not concerned with how people feel. If men were actually made significantly less powerful than women in society, or if whites were actually made significantly less powerful than whites, then that would be something that's very interesting to historians and sociologists. As this is currently far from reality, these things you talk about are simply outside the scope of most of social science. I guess they're in the realm of ethics.
If transgender people were not allowed to wear clothing of their choice, or act outside their born gender, no discrimination could happen (in the context of power). Same with Muslims. Identification is required for the form of discrimination you are talking about, and that which is illegal is not done in the open.
But here I would say that the definition being presented here do clash with reality. Making the act of doing identifiable faith, transgender, or other self-identity illegal in order to protect those groups from discrimination is not exactly how society in general view discrimination. The closest we get is the argument behind uniforms, where the idea is to hide peoples social group identity and strengthen the new social group. While partial effective, I have also heard that humans are quite good at identifying social groups even when hidden. It would imply that nudists are not so blessed from discrimination as you describe, and as a minor note I also recall quite a few movies where a nudist family is found out inside a gated community.
> You don't have a car because I am currently still holding on to it.
In that example society will provide cars to anyone that needs it. I have a car, and you have one.
The stated moral question was if society should fix material situations for everyone rather than exclusively those that are in a material situation because of past discrimination.
I will also remind that in this made up example, the suggestion solution was to treat everyone equal from this point on. Any existing discrimination are to be stopped, be those positive or negative.
> if men were actually made significantly less powerful than women in society ... As this is currently far from reality
A fact I disagree with, especially in local context but also on a global scale. Money and work positions are useful proxies for power, but they are an imperfect representation and devalues all other form of influence that exist. For example, living 10 more years in average is a quite power property, and extends influence of the social group.
The race situation is more clear in the local context of US, but less so on a wider scale. Money is again used here as a proxy, but comparing money in one nation to money in a other nation is imperfect. Mots nations are not ruled by the richest person in that nation. Its also very questionable to compare a poor farmer influence in one nation with a poor farmer influence in an other. Influence at international politics tend to be limited to a small number of people.
To take a trivial example from game theory, a seller and a buyer discussing price. In the classic example, the agreed price represent the result of sellers power vs the buyer power. Since its trivial, control, influence and cause-effect reflects the same values, so if the price is low it means the buy both has higher power and more control over the price.
But then we add a second seller. The position of the buyer has increase and we would say that the buyers power has increased. Inter-group competition influence the result, but the buyer aren't in control over how that competition plays out.
Then we add an government entity that adds regulation which incidentally limits supply. This increase the sellers power, but is completely outside the control of the buyer and the seller. This entity has no stake in the outcome of the transaction, derive no power from it, but got full control.
When talking about power disparity, we need to define what resource the groups are competing over, but also acknowledge that it won't tell us anything about who controls the outcome. To do that we need to define cause and effect, and that require more than just looking at the result. As a political matter, I believe that government intervention should focus on power disparity when it impacts the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and it should do so by addressing each individuals need. It should focus on control disparity for everything else.
> I believe that government intervention should ...
That's politics, and is really not my thing. But even if you are interested in social science solely from the political perspective (like an engineer who's interested in science just so they can build what they always wanted to), I think you should separate the more descriptive elements (the science) from the prescriptive ones (technology), as the latter do not always directly flow from the former, and also require a good dose of ethics, which is may be very personal.
You say that the social science concentrate on areas where it is meaningful, but much of what we have discussed is focused on the end result. Do the property owners have, in the average, the upper hand in negotiations and do they get their way most of the time. Its an odd place to stop asking further question and not ask the question that really matter, which is what model can predict the price tomorrow.
The big benefit of such model is that such theories can be tested, and later used in prescribing ways to influence the outcome.
But even if we had a good explanatory mathematical model, it could not be used to predict anything because of a technical reason, although one that seems to be -- as far as we know -- limited by theoretical constraints: our mathematical techniques simply do not allow us to predict the behaviors of systems with so many variables and so many interactions. Even numerical simulations (the kind used in weather forecasting) would diverge very quickly. In fact, measurement alone would likely take more time than the validity duration of the prediction.
The problem is not unique to the social sciences. Even if biologists could understand the evolutionary mechanism in its entirety, it seems like prediction is beyond our means. All we can do is work back from results to causes, and figure out which evolutionary pressures were more powerful. Computer science is limited by similar constraints: we can explain how a bug came to be, but working forward in time and preventing all bugs requires a computational effort that is probably out of our reach. So the social sciences -- except for very special cases in psychology, where the number of variables is kept artificially low -- is content, like biology and computer science, to provide historical explanations only.
But we don't need perfect models. Sometimes its enough just to get a idea over what influence the outcome. The popular science book freakonomics has a famous example where its describe crime and what influenced the outcome. Interestingly, it involved neither actions done to the criminals nor victims.
In the case of race we are both in agreement that there exist a power difference, ie that the outcome is not identical. What we have not talked about it what influence it. For example, is it the material starting point that causes ripple effects and influencing the outcome? If so there should be some validating data from isolated local areas where the material starting point is smaller or greater, result in a detectable effect. If we can't find such support, it would strongly hint towards invalidating such theory.
Sure, this is very common in the social science.
> there should be some validating data from isolated local areas where the material starting point is smaller or greater, result in a detectable effect
Absolutely. What do you think sociology/history/anthropology journals publish? They're full of such studies.
> In particular, feminist (assuming left) groups successfully lobbied to prevent medical research on causes for rape, with statements that such research could result in lower jail sentences and people avoiding justice with insanity pleas.
Do you have a source for this? This sounds like fake news or a gross distortion.
The context is rather simple, scientific, and the time Sapolsky spent on it very short as it was just a brief mentioning.
Studies has shown that one particular part of the brain lights up on both situation involving arousal and situations involving threat. The theory suggested from this is that part of those committing sexual assault do so because their brain confuses signals of arousal with signal of threats.
As a side note to the above, he shortly mentioned that the researchers of the study wanted to create a official medical criteria/condition/wordIdon'tremember from this theory in order to raise funds for further research. However, politicians got involved and blocked it because of lobbying from feminist groups on the argument that doing this could lower jail sentences for convinced rapists.
The end result being that the feminist groups blocked this research on rape. It also match perfectly with the political rethric when it comes to rape, as I often see feminist group putting weight on the "fact" that those who commit sexual assault are completely healthy and "do not have a higher rate of Schizophrenia than anyone else", as if all mental conditions were linked to Schizophrenia.
This is the part I find hard to believe. I couldn't find any mention of such an event occurring.
> as I often see feminist group putting weight on the "fact" that those who commit sexual assault are completely healthy and "do not have a higher rate of Schizophrenia than anyone else", as if all mental conditions were linked to Schizophrenia.
I have never encountered the feminist position you're referring to.
Could be a fringe view, which would be great.
> trying to understand the more well-researched point of view
Sokal affair demonstrated full rigor of humanities 'research' quite well, I believe
> trying to understand the more well-researched point of view
Sokal affair demonstrated full rigor of humanities 'research' quite well, I believe
It "appears" this way only to someone who is completely uninterested in anything more than a cursory look. After getting my bachelor's degree in mathematics, I went to grad school to study history (which entails studying some sociology), and I can tell you first hand that it is no such thing. Even a shallow overview of the social sciences and the rigorous methodologies they employ will convince you of that. Obviously, those are not exact sciences, and social researchers are well aware of that. But the rigor of their methods is not much different from those employed in, say, medicine. Does every social science result deserve the same degree of epistemological confidence as a mathematical theorem or a physics experiment? Of course not! Are there false or even ridiculous "results"? Certainly, although the field as a whole eventually rejects them. But it is far, far, more rigorous and valid than the beliefs of people based on personal observation and gut feeling. And I hope this is obvious: even an ancient Greek who looked up at the skies and took notes of stars' positions but knew nothing about gravity or Copernicus, knew more about astronomy that a person who isn't even interested in studying the skies and recording observations, regardless of how incomplete the Greek's knowledge was.
Using the method is nice, but let me know when they learn to reliably predict anything, such as election outcomes.
I'm not saying you should consider every social research result valid, but you cannot dismiss a discipline that employs rigorous observation and the scientific method by employing nothing of even remotely similar rigor. The burden of proof is on social researchers, but they have carried it as much as mathematically possible at present. What you cannot do is ignore the evidence by closing your eyes and saying it doesn't exist, or by picking bad apples as example. It's like an evolution denier saying that evolution is bogus because there are no fossils or whatever, and citing as evidence some cases of fake fossils.
Contrast that with loud aggressive types who will call someone racist and demand that we agree unequivocally, because they know better. That is, until someone higher in their pecking order comes up with even more ridiculous redefinition of dictionary words.
In that case, social scientists are real scientists. I don't think you've been reading social science. Social science papers in some disciplines are often filled with so many p-values that they come out of your nose. In fact, I think you have a grudge against something that you have no idea what it really is.
> Contrast that with loud aggressive types who will call someone racist and demand that we agree unequivocally, because they know better. That is, until someone higher in their pecking order comes up with even more ridiculous redefinition of dictionary words.
Again, I think you're ranting against windmills here, but I don't know how you decide how ridiculous definitions are. Scientists change definitions rather regularly as they learn more about the subject. Are you studying society? What qualifies you to judge academic definitions of academic terms? The fact that energy has been a "dictionary word" centuries before physicists have "redefined" it does not make their definition ridiculous.
Academics don't demand that you agree to call someone racist. They have a very clear definition of racism, and they tell you when something matches that definition. Your agreement is irrelevant. Choosing to use a different definition is your prerogative, but it is also irrelevant.
In the long term, ~20 years, it probably doesn't matter what Twitter does today. It's a way for them to connect, now, with their primary demographics by making something of a political stance.
Nazis didn't start deciding to post on Twitter because liberals were reading an insufficient amount of Nazi propaganda.
Almost all would probably decline. Not just because we wouldn't enjoy the work, but also because it is something that, by definition, would help them and support their goals (according to their judgement – otherwise they wouldn't hire you).
Should people working at twitter not be allowed to make similar decisions? It's not hyperbole – look at reddit, and how it has devolved to something like a lowest common denominator. I'd leave as fast as I could instead of lending support to the toxic community.
Do they have a right that overrides mine? No. Private entities are more or less free to decline any customers, exceptions only where they have monopoly power (telecom, water).
Is fighting them out in the open the more valiant thing to do? No – I don't argue about chemtrails, or religion, or flat earth or evolution. Because it doesn't work. The chance of them convincing me that evolution isn't real is 0. Unfortunately, even though I'm right, my chance to convince them is about the same. Because none of this has anything to do with facts – it's red tribe vs blue tribe, and the right's search for a sense of belonging that Reagan sold to the highest bidder.
Is it going to empower the extremists to ignore them? Considering the ideas aren't new, I can only conclude that the internet has given them increased visibility and therefore helped their rise. If reasonable people decide to curtail their options for propaganda – by hiding them from Facebook, Twitter, Google the way conspiracy theories were ignored by reasonable people in the past, they may just shrink back to their appropriate size of plus or minus 0.
Personally, I'm okay with kicking Nazis to the curb. Their ideas are regressive, harmful, and absolutely counterproductive to the future of the nation. And to those crying out "oh but civic discourse, let's build bridges"...have you ever talked to these people? They aren't trying to talk, they are trying to put a boot in your face if you're not white.
Twitter has a history of banning right-wing accounts for petty tweets, and leaving alone left-wing accounts that spread hashtags like #KillAllMen, and post sexist tweets against men, or racist tweets against white people. Twitter also is notorious for banning anti-muslim tweets, or even accounts ran by activists fighting for women rights in islamic countries.
It’s in their right to do this, but don’t talk about this like Twitter’s doing something warranting a discussion.
Influential people who think the government is intentionally making gay frogs, that media needs to be under strict control, that climate change is a Chinese hoax, and that everything is us vs (((Them))) just got a candidate that represents their views into the White House. There's nothing alt about it. It's just straight up mainstream now. Referring to it as such takes away from the rebel factor and reveals that this is, in fact, just the new system, as bad as the old one.
You're a programmer, right?
NewNewClass ...
The Black Panthers are also racist, but I would not call them alt-right or neo-nazis.
I generally vote for the Labour party, but that doesn't mean I and my fellow Labour voters (Corbyn aside) support Mao/Chavez/PolPot-style murdering of our enemies.
The Alt Right ideology relies on the principle that White culture is the "true" culture of the nation, and that other contributions simply do not count. They cast an illegitimacy to the history of minorities in the US.
The debate about protecting the culture is irrelevant because they do not want to protect the nation's culture. They want to protect White culture.
Want to preserve Oakland or the Mission as is? That's fine.
Don't like seeing women forced to walk around in burkas and girls having their genitals cut (I live in London where these re both issues)? That's racist. Obviously Islam isn't a race, and this makes no sense, but it's something people still claim.
Either preserving existing cultures is OK or it isn't.
One of the reasons FGM goes on in the UK is precisely that people don't want to be seen as judging a culture, even for something which is statistically more likely to happen in a culture: ie, the problem could be addressed with medical inspections in schools but this won't happen for fear of being called Islamophobic (oddly enough I learnt most of this from reading Bridget Christie's book, and she's pretty damn left). A similar situation occurred in the systemic rape cases in Rotherham.
And yes, of course people can voluntarily submit to something, it doesn't change that others are forced.
I'm not even sure if Mao should be directly compared to Pol Pot. Probably not.
Second, the Labour party has been social democratic for at least 30 years. It cannot be compared to communist parties at all.
Edit: you edited your post to add:
> "Pol Pot is responsible for killing 1.6 million people. He ran labor camps, etc. Please name how many people were killed on purpose on orders of Chavez. Please name a labor camp."
...after I added multiple sources showing Chavez using torture and other forms violence. Nobody claims Chavez was as violent as the others - in fact, I specifically claimed the opposite in my reply before you edited your post. Merely that he used violence including torture.
edit: I did not edit my post after you provided any sources! From the start it contained "Pol Pot is responsible for killing 1.6 million people. He ran labor camps, etc. Please name how many people were killed on purpose on orders of Chavez. Please name a labor camp."
I have actually made an effort and checked, for example Amnesty International for the time that Chavez was in power. I don't find evidence that he tortured most of his opponents, sorry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Venezuela#2000...
and read up this from Amnesty https://web.archive.org/web/20070922230635/http://web.amnest... :
> The security forces have reportedly used excessive force, and detained large numbers of opposition supporters, during nationwide street protests against the government of President Hugo Chavez. At least nine people have died and scores of others have been injured, including a number of police officers. Amnesty International is concerned that there may be further politically motivated violence, and disproportionate police response.
or http://www.weeklystandard.com/horror-in-venezuela/article/34... (I haven't heard of Weekly Standard before though)
> At the hospital he was detained by the DISIP, Chavez's secret police, and taken to their headquarters for questioning.
> During his interrogation, fingernails in his left hand were torn out. After being further tortured and injected with drugs, the secret police took him into the bowels of the building and placed him in a cell.
Or this from the BBC (I have heard of these):
> Venezuela troops 'used torture'
> Troops are accused of beating and kicking detainees Venezuelan ombudsman German Mundarain has said security forces tortured some protesters who were detained during recent anti-government demonstrations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3571383.stm
Are you seriously claiming Chavez isn't a well known human rights abuser or are you debating what constitututes 'most' or 'an opponent' like whether that changes my point that Chavez used violence just as Mao and Pol Pot did and that most normal humans think that's a bad thing?
Reports about occasional police violence (can even happen in the US) and single cases of torture (not from a reputable source) are not enough for such a broad claim.
Are you saying that Chavez isn't a torturer or that the BBC isn't a reliable source? If so I think I'll end this conversation here.
Great observation and you hint at a simple solution - call them by their conventional moniker: the far-right. There's nothing new about their ideologies and "the far-right" elicit a different response from people than the newer and unfamiliar "alt-right".
As an aside, there are likely plenty of people on the left that feel similarly.
The far-left/left/center-left etc and right side counterparts are defined by policy and ideology, so whether they feel the GOP was in touch doesn't really make a difference.
You wouldn't call the Republicans "right" if they started handing out generous welfare packages to the masses.
Like their pre-Obama universal healthcare proposals? The one dimensional political spectrum, with n-right vs n-left, doesn't work at all.
It's not a good way of accurately gauging the political spectrum but I'm not sure I'd say it doesn't work at all. A better method would be to add two more axes so you have x, y and z which would allow you to measure social policy (services, infrastructure), fiscal policy (an increase or decrease in state assets, taxation) and international relations (trade, alliances). The end result would be a kind of tetrahedron that represents the shape of a party's policy (that's not the point of it - it's just an interesting feature of having a three dimensional gauge).
As it fails in such a modest charge, I'm comfortable saying that it doesn't work. The only variable that it would come close to measuring is individual freedom vs collective comfort. A multidimensional representation would do a better job, but it would quickly become so complex that it would be useless - as most people hold contradictory ideas.
That is why far-right does not accurately describe alt-right, think of it as a second dimension on the traditional spectrum.
Maybe I'm missing something but in this thread I haven't seen anything that shows how the alt-right is fundamentally different to, despite the flawed labeling system, what is standard fare for the far-right. What sits in this second dimension, and does the rule apply to the left? Is it consistent?
The alt-left, if it is presently a thing, is even less defined than the alt-right. But in the interest of maintaining symmetry, I'd say that it would have a progressive agenda by way of individualist means. Emergence?
Is that really an alt-right position? I lost interest in politics a long time ago, but the last time I heard that sentiment was from the left - calling for the Fairness Doctrine to be brought back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine
The alt-right probably wants free speech above all, to the point where hate speech is permitted in much the same way that safe spaces are today.
Also alt with the lower case a carries with it some techy payload as well which together with people like Thiel makes it look like its some expression of ideas about the future when it's mostly about nostalgia for the past.
I can't believe how easily this has been swallowed by everyone particularly the media.
I've seen all of this and more on Twitter and these accounts have not been touched.
It's childish for Twitter to use its power to silence political opponents.
Some of these alt-right accounts deserved to get banned. Others were just people expressing their political beliefs and not directly attack anyone.
This election has really opened my eyes to the amount of childish, immature, and mentally unstable people we have in the United States.
It so strange as an American expat living under a military dictatorship where any improper speech is harshly dealt with to see American slowly but steadily moving in the same direction. What's weird is it's starting with restrictions on speech in the private sector and education. I'm wondering how long before laws and the courts get behind the restrictions.
I've become convinced that the American left is now totally post liberal, in the sense that they consider classical liberalism -- à la John Stuart Mill -- highly offensive.
1.) https://www.thefire.org/spotlight-on-speech-codes-2016/
I don't think this will ever happen, but it's an interesting hypothetical.
There are a lot of things businesses can do to increase profits: They can get more users, they can cut employees, they can move their offices to cheaper areas, they can pursue important business deals, and more.
If a plane is off-course, you wouldn't go to the cockpit and start flipping levers and pressing buttons at random. But you could make the same arguments you've made against a person opposing that idea.
If they don't curb the hate speech and racism they are even closer to being cut entirely out of my life - I would think this is what they as a company has to balance vs people that are into those things and appreciate having a platform for such behavior. As of right now - I personally - would never work for a Twitter/Facebook, due to the online presences that they actively support, albeit I'm sure that talent pool is not #1 priority.
It's definitely not an easy position, and I guess it kinda shows that touting yourself as a tech company when you are really a platform for good/bad/medium ideas comes with its own set of challenges.
It is good all these ideas are out there even if you don't agree with them. Shrouding them will only encourage it.
Strict absolutist and authoritative law/parenting almost always leads to acting out, while passive law/parenting let's knowledge decide individual choice.
Putting a stranglehold on knowledge that is bad will give people more desire to find confirmation biases in it. Let them naturally learn it is bad themselves.
This is just the Streisand effect and way too similar to what they do in China, like the censoring of Kim Jong Un fat memes[1]. Twitter just got political and that is not wise in business.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/16/502312268/...
Twitter is under no obligation to partake in this too.
I'm with you. Its very difficult to find people like you who think practically and consider side-effects, etc.
I'm curious as to whether this has changed over time. And how could the founding fathers have such foresight.
Where have all the thinkers gone?
Isn't it obvious? They've been censored. Matt Lauer can't even ask legitimate questions about Clinton's private email server without being publicly censured for being a "bad" journalist.
What a joke.
everyone's shouting past each other.
For those readers of such material who are rational critical thinkers, then yes they will see it as bad for themselves and it will leave a bad taste in their mouths, and it will also waste their time
For those with irrational hateful right-wing ideology, it will reinforce their existing miserable attitudes
I agree that censorship is bad. But all publications select their messages. For example, scientific publications don't publish articles on homeopathy or communication with the dead. Are they censoring such material ? Shouldn't they be committed to fair and balanced presentation of ideas ? Aren't they _biased_ towards genuine evidence-based science ?
The reason scientific publications select real science rather than crank bullshit, is that their readers are trying to get real work done, and they rely on peer-review to filter the shit
You have to filter-out the noise in any communication channel. The problem we have with FB & Twitter is that the low signal-to-noise ratio is impeding our decision-making processes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqQrT84kjc4
This is consistent with the ban on ISIS propaganda accounts, which was also a positive step towards combatting online extremism.
Just because you call a group you don't like a Nazi, doesn't make it true.
Practically, one of those three groups were widely successful among many millions of people. So you'll find a great sensitivity to that one.
Rejecting a culture seems a little different than wanting to kill people from a culture, but maybe in the social media age speaking out against something is as bad as physical violence, because of the hurt feelings.
That's just simply untrue. Hyperbole and lies don't help in these conversations. (And I say this as someone who thinks that Facebook and Twitter have no place being arbiters of "truth").
Downvoted to -4 on HN for saying that Twitter doesn't allow liberals special privileges to threaten violence on Twitter. Gotta just love this place sometimes, and by love, I mean that it's full of shit.
https://twitter.com/_g3orgia/status/796263284282454017
https://twitter.com/cervines/status/795679114673852416
https://twitter.com/_mr_parker25/status/796521044492349440
"If you voted third party in a swing state you should kill yourself."
"Kill yourself"
"Kill yourself. Honestly kill yourself. You wouldn't be missed"
"To everyone who voted for trump as a joke kys. To everyone who voted for Harambe kys. To everyone who voted for Hennessy kys."
10 seconds with this search: https://twitter.com/search?q=kill%20yourself& or variations.
Untrue, huh?
Besides, the first three pages of that search have zero tweets that involve someone telling someone else to kill themselves. They're all mock conversations, or memes, or literally a discussion of the fact that the punishment for attempted suicide is death. Or people encouraging others to call suicide hotlines, or a joke about killing yourself to get insurance money. I'm literally looking for a threatening tweet in that search and can't find one.
Why haven't the posters of every single one of the above tweets I linked been banned? Yet we're only hearing about the "alt right" boogeyman.
I have no idea how you would've come to that conclusion, I certainly don't think it and didn't imply it.
Is this really the game we're playing? Really? I have to go find three tweets of Trump supporters telling HRC supporters to kill themselves? Do you really think that can't be trivially found?
https://twitter.com/h0elooks/status/796337658549202945
"Please kill yourself racist piece of shit" (seconds ago as of time of writing)
https://twitter.com/braaaaiiinnns/status/799113146602573825
5-6, actually.
Go ahead, I'll wait. Yes, I really think you can't find that, unless we're getting different search results for some reason. I'm not doing some cherry picking of the results here, these are literally the first tweets I can find where "kill yourself" is directed at a person or group and not obviously humorous.
That last one came up in the search while I had the search open, even.
I stand by my original statement and believe I've proven it.
https://twitter.com/LK4Csjsharks20/status/795128062941675520
https://twitter.com/Sundance_44/status/794595588822155264
https://twitter.com/gr1zzly/status/794184499491782657
https://twitter.com/WYLTK13/status/798922065399070720
https://twitter.com/Wolf_Gang_Tears/status/79871237999133081...
https://twitter.com/TonyTehTowel/status/797860571882389504
I won't replying in this thread again. Whatever point you're trying to make, you're doing a poor job of it.
Filter bubble shenanigans?
There is no need whatsoever for these theatrics over a simple disagreement, for crying out loud. If I had my druthers, the owners of every single tweet linked in this thread, yours as well, would be banned from Twitter, if not brought up on harassment charges.
You will note that I said Twitter has no issues with those with leftist political leanings telling others to kill themselves. That statement is still true, but misleading in the light of what you linked here. Twitter apparently has no issue with anyone telling others to kill themselves.
And people wonder why their stock price is falling off a cliff...
Oh I dunno, it might have something to do with you implying that I support the idea of any person telling any other person to kill themselves.
>You will note that I said Twitter has no issues with those with leftist political leanings telling others to kill themselves. That statement is still true, but misleading in the light of what you linked here. Twitter apparently has no issue with anyone telling others to kill themselves.
That was an awfully artful way of saying you were full of shit without having to actually admit you were wrong. Nice.
Ironically, I was actually remarking, just hours ago, about Twitter's horrible moderation and response to abuse before even seeing this thread. I would have readily agreed that they suck at handling abuse, but instead you went with "a liberal conspiracy to allow threats towards conservatives" despite the incredible ease of finding counter examples.
!? Holy shit dude, if that's what I implied, I apologize, because that was absolutely not my intent whatsoever. That statement was directed at Twitter, not you.
That was an awfully artful way of saying you were full of shit without having to actually admit you were wrong.
I was wrong. Better? I was more interested in trying to figure out how and why I was wrong.
but instead you went with "a liberal conspiracy to allow threats towards conservatives" despite the incredible ease of finding counter examples.
Fine, we'll instead go with "a liberal conspiracy to to place angry conservative tweets as more important than terrorist propaganda", something for which there is plenty of evidence of.
And someone already addressed that alternative flavor of absurdity yesterday too. Twitter has purged hundreds of thousands of terrorism-related accounts and continues to do so. (I'm sure you'll counter with the Hamas account, but you already know why that's a poor counter example when faced with hundreds of thousands of accounts being purged).
BTW, this is called "moving the goalposts". Are you now asserting that Twitter intentionally allows terrorism accounts to proliferate? Or are you implying that they have an account banning quota and they use it all up on conservatives and have none left over for terrorists? God damn, the mental gymnastics here are just something else.
Did the CEO get off his ass and talk to someone from the State dept? No, but he sure got off his ass to talk to some random Hollywood celeb who was getting mean tweets.
As I said earlier, and you apparently missed in your angry rant, 235k accounts is nothing. It's utter child's play, given how disposable Twitter accounts are. Twitter has a "trust and safety" team that's entirely far too concerned about feminist's feelings and not concerned near enough with terrorists using their platform. If that makes me this terrible monster, sign me up.
And the 235K thing? I could've said a million, or a billion and you'd just spit out the same cop-out answer that "it's not enough". You've created an argument that carries no weight, requires no evidence or actual numbers. You just keep handwaving and yelling "what about all those terrorist accounts", all whilst only clinging to your single, knowingly flawed example. Never mind the fact that this is all still a distraction to cover up how wrong you were at the outset of this conversation.
And of course you've moved the goal posts even further by again inventing yet another evidence-less claim that Twitter is somehow bogged down with "feminists' feelings". You didn't even try to qualify that assertion. You just made up some new bullshit claim to try and throw out there and see if it sticks without any support whatsoever.
Besides, if you think Twitter is unable to handle any other abuse because they're bogged down with "feminist's feelings"... I don't even know what to say other than are you freaking kidding me? One, I see dozens of posts saying far more disgusting things aimed at women than 'kill yourself' every week on Twitter. Two, Twitter can do more than one thing at one time and continutes to take down new accounts linked to terror groups constantly.
And of course you're the type of person to classify mob harassment of women, death threats and sexual harassment as "feminist's feeling" because you're a jerk with an agenda who doesn't care about reality, facts, or discourse.
It's also painfully obvious that you skirted my explicit questions from the last post because they exemplify how completely nonsensical your characterization of Twitter is.
It's like I'm talking to a delusional, angry GamerGater who pulls "feminism" out of nowhere as some sort of wildcard to distract from the absurd claims in this thread.
I look forward to your next post where you again ignore everything I wrote, repeat your unsubstantiated nonsense again and probably move the goal posts for a third time.
But first: Yes, such posts are abhorrent and unacceptable and come from people who're very childish, emotional and lack self control.
That said, it helps to understand where this comes from. Many of these people (particularly the one responding to 2) feel that thanks to the policies of Trump and the people he surrounds himself with, they or their friends are being indirectly already being told to die. (LGBTQ, Obamacare recipients, others)
I am not making excuses for these reprehensible tweets, but i feel it is valuable to understand where the causes for them lie.
..I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to make, or how it is useful for discussion. Irrationality that ends in violence is irrationality that ends in violence.
Our values of free speech and free expression are far more important than the cringeworthy and extremely stupid things some people choose to say.
Twitter should not ban these accounts, or should it ban ISIS accounts or anything else. Twitter is a platform, not a curation service or thoughtcrime police force.
Can you give me a definition of this that can be consistently applied to all tweets?
The issue is that you can say something is "neo-Nazi propaganda" and it will shut down the discussion and publicly shame the person because the phrase is so powerful.
Less day by day, thanks to the liberals
It's hard to see how 140 character snipes, provocations and occasional calls to hostility fall into that category. But maybe.
Is it censorship to remove random stickers from telephone poles? To erase graffiti?
Freedom of speech runs headlong into freedom of association.
“We need a conservative Facebook, a conservative Google, a conservative Twitter” - Steve Malzberg
I wonder if any uncloseted conservatives or republicans are in the room, or even the building, when these things are decided?
You're not better than the people you're suspending. In fact, you're a lot like them.
Ideally we have a free market of ideas fostered by tolerance and respect for different points views. Not being willing to expose yourself to different points of view creates ignorance.
Corporate censorship like this sends a signal that Twitter is not willing to be that communication platform for free speech.
Clearly a lot of people were faking their world views on the social media in order to appear "politically correct" and avoid being shunned and attacked from people that see themselves as politically correct and informed.
And then, on the ballot without anyone looking, they, of course, voted against that and we got Trump, Brexit, etc...
And now, people are expecting that the answer to on how to actually get these people back, inform them, make them more open and try to show them a better view of the world, is to censor their thoughts even more?