Hey Freddie, the step-brother to "No One is sayin" is "Others are saying" so they can advance an argument they secretly agree with but don't want to publicly admit. I love reading your stuff on the hell of culture wars. I got caught up in it last week, getting banned for asking simple questions.
And as a father of a college-softball student-athlete, I don't believe she and her teammates regard someone who quits on her team as a "hero" I am jus sayin...
And then of course there's the reverse problem of nutpicking, which gets ever easier as more people get online. Technical question here, is nutpicking an offensive term?
I’m going to have to disagree. I don’t know if you ever go over to Rod Dreher’s blog but his commenters often tease him about dreherbait. Someone will send him a story about some Berkeley school board meeting where someone will suggest mandatory drag show classes for 6 year olds and Rod will have a conniption. He’ll start screeching that this is exactly what mainstream democrats want to do in every school in America.
If someone somewhere is saying something online that doesn’t make it real. You can find someone online saying literally anything.
And that’s the danger for Very Online People - I saw it on Twitter so it must be so! When people say no one is saying that, what they mean is no one in anyone’s day to day offline reality.
Remember in Moneyball (the book or the move, take your pick), where Oakland A's GM Billy Beane says he hates losing so much that it outweighs the thrill of winning? That's the culture war in a nutshell.
There's nothing hyperpartisans hate more than seeing their own side look bad. So they either defend dumb ideas or lie that they're not being made.
Yesterday you wrote about about how a lot of things happening in culture look like Calvinism. I think this is just another offshoot of religious thinking. You, Freddie, think you are having a logical argument, and that facts matter. You think information will help us determine the best course of action. In many cases, the other side is engaging in some sort of secular hermeneutics. They are creating and discussing schemas that prop up their beliefs so that the beliefs will never be challenged.
Its like talking to Christians about how there is no evidence for a world wide flood and thus the Noah story can't be real. You brought facts to the table? That's not the point! Except then Christians will turn around and avidly watch biblical archaeology shows on the History Channel, which have about as much truth to them as a Yeti show. As a non believer, I will never be able to wrap my head around these religious mental gymnastic routines. They are playing with a different set of rules.
The slavecatcher-police thing also annoys me because even if it were true...so what? Medicine has a 2,000-ish year history of incompetently murdering its patients. Does that mean we shouldn't go to the hospital if we break our arm or that we should reject vaccines because bloodletting killed sick people? Obviously not. Noting historical information (when accurate) can be useful to see where certain ideas came from and where there might still be blind spots in the field, as well as just being interesting. But those articles about slavecatching police weren't doing that; they were saying "since this profession was once allegedly racist, it should go away" as if nothing has changed. It's been a common trick with the BLM crowd: bring up a historical atrocity that happened 50+ years ago in a way that implies these events still happen today (without ever explaining why, if this is the "daily reality" for black Americans, they have to go 50+ years into the past to find an example).
From experience, I'd say that, when i was into facebook, I'd post "no one is saying," in arguments, per the pattern. Looking back, what I actually meant was one of two things.
1) None of the people currently arguing with you in this exact thread are saying this. In retrospect, this is silly. Arguments aren't only limited to the exact people in them, especially on facebook, where they are public. I'd start saying it out of frustration with someone who keeps quoting other people rather than engaging with the exact points being made in the thread. What I really meant was "don't change the subject." But people change the subject on facebook all the time and there's nothing you can do about it.
2) Since I assume that everyone on "my side" of the debate agrees with me, I assume that they wouldn't say something that I can't defend. Therefore, if you tell me that someone on "my side" said something I can't defend, I assume you're lying. I remember feeling anxious about that.
I can't believe, as a crusty old anarchist who actually does believe in abolishing the police, that I have these "no one says" arguments with former fellow travelers who used to literally fucking say exactly that. My beef is that ACAB and "defund the police" are slogans, not strategies. You can't pull the legs out from underneath a society that's built on policing without carnage, but saying that makes me a racist now apparently.
I repeat myself from elsewhere, verbatim: it should be a law of the internet that one should never, ever start a sentence with "no one is saying". Not only is it a wretched cliché, it's a sure-fire way to hobble an argument. This is the internet, there's always somebody who is saying it. Whatever it is. "No one is saying" is a sign of critical and rhetorical weakness, and deserves to be treated as such.
Is there any chance this culture war/sorting shit is just a shortcut for a population too tired and frazzled to actually deduce their way into having well-informed, appropriate opinions about every single current event? How many people really have the time, let alone the interest, in having a coherent theory about Simone Biles and mental health, standardized testing, police reform, Uighurs, climate change, Gaza, vaccination sociology, CRT, immigration policy, and all the other shit everybody on Twitter pretends to be an expert on? Is paying obeisance to one's corner of the Internet Culture War consensus blob serve as a time-saving convenience so folks can get back to livetweeting Fboy Island and internet memes and whatever else they actually want to spend their precious time on?
Here's a pro tip for combatting "no one says" arguments. Twitter allows you to search for tweets from verified accounts only. So for example you can type this in the search bar.
"abolish the police" filter:verified
Then you can make a list of all the academics and journalists who have said "abolish the police." It's not just random accounts with five followers.
Here's another one, related to yesterday's post:
"all white people" racist filter:verified
This quickly turned up an Assistant Dean at Brandeis, and also Marc Lamont Hill, saying those exact words -- and that's just recently (the search favors recent tweets, unless you specify a date range).
I understand your argument here. I understood the Biles-as-hero stuff as her being heroic for not pushing through when that pushing through has been the culture among athletes and the “sports fan” for a long time.
So, it wasn’t so much “quitting is heroic now” but her being the one to say that it all was too much pressure and being willing to not “power through” and all those other clichés.
Not the whole point of your post, I understand, but "hero" is a trigger for me. The word has become meaningless, a fast way to pat someone on the head dismissively and sigh in self-congratulation, "Good. Done with that." I came to loathe the word as we Americans applied it to all GWOT soldiers. Most of us never gave a damn about our wars in the Afghanistan and Iraq - or about our fellow citizens who fought in them, so rather than weigh whether ours was a just cause worth imperiling their lives and limbs, we just called them heroes. "Good. Done with that."
As other comments have noted, we are an unthinking people, often too distracted by the umpteen next-things coming down the pike to allocate more than a few minutes - seconds? - to what are very complex issues. Rather than think about Biles' decision more fully, people take a short cut and label her (the person, not the decision) heroic if they are a member of one tribe and a coward, if of another tribe. Fundamentally, is one heroic for making a rational decision in one's own self-interest? Knowing that "twisties" can result in mistakes leading to serious injury, Biles made a rational choice, especially given that, as articles about this stated, she had nothing to prove, having already demonstrated that she was an extraordinary gymnast. Such decisions - and the people who make them - are neither heroic nor cowardly, but rational (smart) or irrational (foolish). Maybe what's needed in these discussions is a more extensive vocabulary ....
My sense is that the "Biles is a hero" nonsense was either said as a reaction to, or in anticipation of, other people saying that Biles "let her team down" or "is a quitter", etc. People seem to rush to extremes these days; they don't know how to give a sensible, balanced response anymore.
Do you fight to win or do you fight for the truth? I think that is what Freddie is saying.
Hey Freddie, the step-brother to "No One is sayin" is "Others are saying" so they can advance an argument they secretly agree with but don't want to publicly admit. I love reading your stuff on the hell of culture wars. I got caught up in it last week, getting banned for asking simple questions.
And as a father of a college-softball student-athlete, I don't believe she and her teammates regard someone who quits on her team as a "hero" I am jus sayin...
please check it out here https://riclexel.substack.com/p/steven-beschloss-banned-me-from-commenting
It is exhausting, but a healthy spleen vent now and again helps, and incidentally, still makes for a good read for your subscribers.
And then of course there's the reverse problem of nutpicking, which gets ever easier as more people get online. Technical question here, is nutpicking an offensive term?
I’m going to have to disagree. I don’t know if you ever go over to Rod Dreher’s blog but his commenters often tease him about dreherbait. Someone will send him a story about some Berkeley school board meeting where someone will suggest mandatory drag show classes for 6 year olds and Rod will have a conniption. He’ll start screeching that this is exactly what mainstream democrats want to do in every school in America.
If someone somewhere is saying something online that doesn’t make it real. You can find someone online saying literally anything.
And that’s the danger for Very Online People - I saw it on Twitter so it must be so! When people say no one is saying that, what they mean is no one in anyone’s day to day offline reality.
Remember in Moneyball (the book or the move, take your pick), where Oakland A's GM Billy Beane says he hates losing so much that it outweighs the thrill of winning? That's the culture war in a nutshell.
There's nothing hyperpartisans hate more than seeing their own side look bad. So they either defend dumb ideas or lie that they're not being made.
Thanks for writing, you make me feel sane.
Yesterday you wrote about about how a lot of things happening in culture look like Calvinism. I think this is just another offshoot of religious thinking. You, Freddie, think you are having a logical argument, and that facts matter. You think information will help us determine the best course of action. In many cases, the other side is engaging in some sort of secular hermeneutics. They are creating and discussing schemas that prop up their beliefs so that the beliefs will never be challenged.
Its like talking to Christians about how there is no evidence for a world wide flood and thus the Noah story can't be real. You brought facts to the table? That's not the point! Except then Christians will turn around and avidly watch biblical archaeology shows on the History Channel, which have about as much truth to them as a Yeti show. As a non believer, I will never be able to wrap my head around these religious mental gymnastic routines. They are playing with a different set of rules.
Also see: sanewashing, no true Scotsman
The slavecatcher-police thing also annoys me because even if it were true...so what? Medicine has a 2,000-ish year history of incompetently murdering its patients. Does that mean we shouldn't go to the hospital if we break our arm or that we should reject vaccines because bloodletting killed sick people? Obviously not. Noting historical information (when accurate) can be useful to see where certain ideas came from and where there might still be blind spots in the field, as well as just being interesting. But those articles about slavecatching police weren't doing that; they were saying "since this profession was once allegedly racist, it should go away" as if nothing has changed. It's been a common trick with the BLM crowd: bring up a historical atrocity that happened 50+ years ago in a way that implies these events still happen today (without ever explaining why, if this is the "daily reality" for black Americans, they have to go 50+ years into the past to find an example).
From experience, I'd say that, when i was into facebook, I'd post "no one is saying," in arguments, per the pattern. Looking back, what I actually meant was one of two things.
1) None of the people currently arguing with you in this exact thread are saying this. In retrospect, this is silly. Arguments aren't only limited to the exact people in them, especially on facebook, where they are public. I'd start saying it out of frustration with someone who keeps quoting other people rather than engaging with the exact points being made in the thread. What I really meant was "don't change the subject." But people change the subject on facebook all the time and there's nothing you can do about it.
2) Since I assume that everyone on "my side" of the debate agrees with me, I assume that they wouldn't say something that I can't defend. Therefore, if you tell me that someone on "my side" said something I can't defend, I assume you're lying. I remember feeling anxious about that.
I can't believe, as a crusty old anarchist who actually does believe in abolishing the police, that I have these "no one says" arguments with former fellow travelers who used to literally fucking say exactly that. My beef is that ACAB and "defund the police" are slogans, not strategies. You can't pull the legs out from underneath a society that's built on policing without carnage, but saying that makes me a racist now apparently.
I repeat myself from elsewhere, verbatim: it should be a law of the internet that one should never, ever start a sentence with "no one is saying". Not only is it a wretched cliché, it's a sure-fire way to hobble an argument. This is the internet, there's always somebody who is saying it. Whatever it is. "No one is saying" is a sign of critical and rhetorical weakness, and deserves to be treated as such.
Is there any chance this culture war/sorting shit is just a shortcut for a population too tired and frazzled to actually deduce their way into having well-informed, appropriate opinions about every single current event? How many people really have the time, let alone the interest, in having a coherent theory about Simone Biles and mental health, standardized testing, police reform, Uighurs, climate change, Gaza, vaccination sociology, CRT, immigration policy, and all the other shit everybody on Twitter pretends to be an expert on? Is paying obeisance to one's corner of the Internet Culture War consensus blob serve as a time-saving convenience so folks can get back to livetweeting Fboy Island and internet memes and whatever else they actually want to spend their precious time on?
Here's a pro tip for combatting "no one says" arguments. Twitter allows you to search for tweets from verified accounts only. So for example you can type this in the search bar.
"abolish the police" filter:verified
Then you can make a list of all the academics and journalists who have said "abolish the police." It's not just random accounts with five followers.
Here's another one, related to yesterday's post:
"all white people" racist filter:verified
This quickly turned up an Assistant Dean at Brandeis, and also Marc Lamont Hill, saying those exact words -- and that's just recently (the search favors recent tweets, unless you specify a date range).
I understand your argument here. I understood the Biles-as-hero stuff as her being heroic for not pushing through when that pushing through has been the culture among athletes and the “sports fan” for a long time.
So, it wasn’t so much “quitting is heroic now” but her being the one to say that it all was too much pressure and being willing to not “power through” and all those other clichés.
Not the whole point of your post, I understand, but "hero" is a trigger for me. The word has become meaningless, a fast way to pat someone on the head dismissively and sigh in self-congratulation, "Good. Done with that." I came to loathe the word as we Americans applied it to all GWOT soldiers. Most of us never gave a damn about our wars in the Afghanistan and Iraq - or about our fellow citizens who fought in them, so rather than weigh whether ours was a just cause worth imperiling their lives and limbs, we just called them heroes. "Good. Done with that."
As other comments have noted, we are an unthinking people, often too distracted by the umpteen next-things coming down the pike to allocate more than a few minutes - seconds? - to what are very complex issues. Rather than think about Biles' decision more fully, people take a short cut and label her (the person, not the decision) heroic if they are a member of one tribe and a coward, if of another tribe. Fundamentally, is one heroic for making a rational decision in one's own self-interest? Knowing that "twisties" can result in mistakes leading to serious injury, Biles made a rational choice, especially given that, as articles about this stated, she had nothing to prove, having already demonstrated that she was an extraordinary gymnast. Such decisions - and the people who make them - are neither heroic nor cowardly, but rational (smart) or irrational (foolish). Maybe what's needed in these discussions is a more extensive vocabulary ....
My sense is that the "Biles is a hero" nonsense was either said as a reaction to, or in anticipation of, other people saying that Biles "let her team down" or "is a quitter", etc. People seem to rush to extremes these days; they don't know how to give a sensible, balanced response anymore.