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...
Fair enough. How would you characterize that statement? As a pejorative? An insult? Perhaps so, and I can agree with that. The intent was more incredulity at the totality of the piece. This idea of Jan 6 as being worse than another act of terrorism is absurd. One death (too many at all - but a Trump supporter at that) compared to 9/11? And the point of my question was just that, clarification. The FBI possibly using paid informants to plan and instigate a riot blamed on 74 million voters deserves some real truth.
>Fair enough. How would you characterize that statement? As a pejorative? An insult?
Sneering is the word I would pick. Enough to ban you over, depending on the blog and the norms there. If I were the sort to host an online space, I wouldn't have people around sneering at me. Life's too short to host people who don't like you.
Of course, I'm not that sort, and controversy spurs engagement, so maybe it's a bad call on his part. I don't know.
>The intent was more incredulity at the totality of the piece. This idea of Jan 6 as being worse than another act of terrorism is absurd.
Didn't read the piece, can't speak to the merits. Just, in general, the tone and the shocked, "just asking simple questions" left me both doubtful enough and curious enough to "see for myself".
Broadly speaking, at least on the metric of post action unity, 1/6 is worse than 9/11, but on the other hand the 9/11 terrorists got 3,000 of us, dramatically curtailed our personal freedoms and worsened relations between us and the Arab world, and cost us trillions of dollars. Certainly you have to strain to make any case the other way.
1st thing, thanks for the thoughtful comment and links. And for the record, I don't "canonize" any human beings, because we are all flawed. 2nd - Just read the Intelligencer piece, not sure I agree with it. The point of my piece was that merely asking questions now is enough to get one banned. And the authors I mentioned ask a lot of questions. As does Freddie. The empty wheel is going to take some time, but I see there is a trove of anti-Greenwald posts. I see a pattern after reading just two. How do you feel abut Taibbi and Tracey. They are asking the same questions, and Sullivan too. But I write about Tribal Identity Intersection, and how members of Greenwald's tribe have been sacrificed on the alter of Identity https://riclexel.substack.com/p/tribal-intersectionality
Ric, I confess that I was unable to finish reading your linked article because it seemed part of an ongoing conversation with which I am unfamiliar and, perhaps for that reason, found difficult to follow.
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 don't think it's offensive, and I can't see why anyone else might either. And yes, nutpicking is exactly the reverse problem, invariably made worse by "journalists" who try to present "here's two people saying some kooky shit I read on Twitter" into a broader "people are saying"piece.
Nope. Nutpicking is when someone picks out the nuts on the other side and asserts that's really the other side's position. Classical signs of nutpicking include a single twitter user with less than 500 followers being used as the example of some supposed trend.
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.
I don't think that's good enough, though. I shouldn't have to translate "No one is saying" to "Some people are saying it but I don't think they matter." I think the person who is arguing that "No one is saying" should instead be making the affirmative argument that, "Yes, you see that around, but in the real world such views aren't likely to gain a foothold anytime soon."
But that of course doesn't play as well.
Besides, it _definitely_ doesn't work for the Simone Biles situation, where everyone was indeed calling her a hero in my day-to-day life.
You're ignoring the examples of high profile people. It's not just that someone, somewhere is saying it, it's that people in positions of influence are saying the things that supposedly "no one is saying."
What part of the article - it covered a lot of ground? I have certainly read pieces by groups that want to abolish prisons and the police. They believe that if we just provide sufficient social services there won't be any crime or criminals. It's nonsense. But the only people proposing it are fringe lunatics.
As I said - like Marjorie Taylor Green - fringe lunatics. Fringe lunatics can get elected to congress. It doesn't mean their ideas are mainstream. What it means is they are newsworthy.
There is a problem with the "only fringe lunatics" narrative:
excerpt:
The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom).
The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules.
I mean, in 2011-2015 I was telling anyone who would listen "hey the illiberalism on college campuses is really concerning." And I was told "that will never leave campus." Now it's colonized huge swaths of media and industry and government.
Another way of thinking about the power of "fringe lunatics"
(Freddie references this in an old blog entry years ago)
The Iron Law of Institutions is: the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.
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.
That's actually one of the few cognitive biases that I think has been well replicated – losses really DO feel worse than wins of the same magnitude feel good.
One of my favorite bloggers – John Nerst – blogs a LOT about 'disagreement' generally and one thing he's pointed out is that people's natural 'category cognition' is more along the lines of 'types' than (logical) 'sets'. He discusses it in his most recent post:
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.
Sure? I'm not exactly sure what you are saying, but what I was trying to say, is that if you come in talking about apples, but the other person only cares about oranges, you don't get anywhere. We keep talking about logic, facts, and history, and its just irrelevant to the goals of the wokerati that we are addressing.
Epistemic indeterminacy is more or less the opposite of absolutism/totalitarianism.
Absolutism can be either mythic (explicitly "religious" or just ideological) or scientific.
"Rationalism" (non-belief) is just as prone to absolutism (and cognitive bias) as is religious thinking, even if it claims otherwise.
The actual practice of objectivity and systematic rationalism is different from holding to an ideology of rationalism. There might be an overlap in some cases, but not others.
Human consciousness is mostly about subjective experience, meaning, collective purpose, social bonding-cooperation because that was a survival adaptation.
Learning how to set that aside an actually be skeptical, including being skeptical of skepticism, is incredibly difficult for most people. It may not be reasonable to expect people to be capable of objectivity most of the time.
That was ok in the old days of the "Blue Church", when hierarchies of curated expertise were normal, but we are now in a postmodern era were social conditions are different and there is a glut of information on the internet that flow around, or in opposition to, the old curated hierarchies of expertise. The result is a "crisis of meaning" (John Vervaeke) as the old collective sense making system disintegrates, and a vacuum is created, and filled with junk-think, such as regressive tribalistic ideologies.
Just saying "religion is bad" verges on being a cheap slogan, and is not adequate to solve the crisis of meaning in postmodern culture.
Systematic rationalism is necessary, but not sufficient. Meta-rationalism (which includes construct-awareness) is needed.
There is currently no institutional process for people to learn meta-rationalism, it only happens in marginal groups in mostly informal settings.
Epistemic indeterminacy is more or less the opposite of absolutism/totalitarianism, the opposite of dogmatic or doctrinaire thinking of any kind, including dogmas of "non-belief".
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'm sympathetic to anti-statism (because the state existed historically to create social order on the basis that people are impure and in need of salvation), but NAP and similar constructs seem to go against what is known in evolutionary psychology: the most important evolutionary adaptation of the human species was the development of kinship group altruism and intense social cooperation (eusociality).
A system of social cooperation can't exist without punishment of non-cooperators.
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.
Yes, but the reason that is exists, ideological tribalism, is the same reason it won't go away. It is just another way collective biases are reinforced.
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?
In the Before Times, simply saying "I don't know", "no opinion", or "I'm not into politics" on these kinds of questions was generally allowed. The pressure to have opinions, even ones hurriedly taken off the shelf to match one's tribe, is the problem in of itself.
And yes, I know it was never perfect. But it hasn't always been this bad.
This is the problem I have with “silence is violence” and related rhetoric. I understand the sentiment, but when taken literally it becomes a form of tyrannical thought manipulation.
Yes, and part of the problem is even worse: systemic failure of the consensus collective sense making system, which Jordan Hall (systems theorist, futurist) calls the "Blue Church" due to disruption.
To paraphrase Felix Biederman and Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House, Game of Thrones was the last (and probably final) consensus reality event in the US.
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).
But as Freddie points out, the "no one says" arguments are typically – almost always? – disingenuous and "combatting" them doesn't typically – ever? – result in the person lobbing "no one says" in anything like 'Huh – my bad. I guess some people really DO say that.'.
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.
Part of being an elite competitor is dealing with the pressure. The whole point is that in almost everything quitting is easy while persevering is not.
I agree. I think I took the robust response from high level athletes saying that it is harder to say “enough” at that point that made me consider my previous thinking.
I had the opposite reaction quite frankly. Naomi Osaka just purchased a multimillion dollar house that used to belong to a rock star. I don't mind confessing that I find her attitude galling.
With gymnastics in particular, the culture seems to be so toxic and manipulative of kids by people in power from a very young age -- from the sexual abuse to the eating disorders to the injuries that fuck up your body for the rest of your life -- that saying "no" seems a lot harder than saying "yes." However, it's much easier for Simone Biles, who has the benefit of already being a decorated Olympian behind her; it'd be braver for a younger, less established gymnast who was a medal favourite to choose "not risking breaking my neck" over "capitulating to the incredible pressure of every adult around me."
Anyway, Simone Biles is a hero: not because she got the twisties, but because she put up with USA Gymnastics' bullshit for another 4 years in order to attempt to get some accountability from them for the years of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse and protect future generations, instead of retiring and comfortably living off Instagram influencer money.
I don't know, "heroism" to me implies some level of personal risk. I can't imagine a scenario where Biles doesn't end up rich from her endorsements and lauded in the popular media regardless of what she does.
I feel that willingly putting yourself in close contact with the same people who covered up your sexual abuse for years in the pursuit of justice is heroic and a form of personal sacrifice.
Where's the personal risk? Somebody like Tara Reid risked the destruction of her personal life and career by leveling accusations against Joe Biden. By contrast Biles is only going to be applauded by media elite for her "courageous" stand. And at the end of the day she's going to go home to wealth that somebody like Reid can only dream of.
If you don't think that continuing to put yourself in regular close contact with the people who covered up for your serial rapist is a personal risk -- not to her wealth, sure, but in terms of re-traumatization -- then perhaps we are just not operating on the same definitions and won't ever come to a consensus. Just like how a friend of mine believes that volunteer firefighters are heroes but paid firefighters are not, simply because to him, heroes do not receive any money for what they do.
And yeah, I don't think Biles needs $6 million or however much she's worth, and excessive wealth is unethical etc etc, but money doesn't protect you from everything, including suffering.
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 understanding was she was being called heroic for telling the truth and admitting she was withdrawing due to the twisties. Many in her situation would have just faked a physical injury. I don't know if that's more heroic or ballsy or what term would best describe it. But her honesty is admirable.
If she had been the fourth-best gymnast on the Canadian team, she could have made the same decision for the exact same reasons, and would have received literally zero public praise for doing so.
Well, to begin with, I very specifically objected to the use of the word "hero," then provided multiple links demonstrating that people were doing that.
Second, the point is that people are saying she "changed sports forever." But she only had the juice to get that kind of attention BECAUSE SHE WAS THE BEST AT SPORTS. You're praising as a virtue something that anyone can do and using as your avatar a person you admire precisely because no one else can do what she does. It's all very odd.
"But she only had the juice to get that kind of attention BECAUSE SHE WAS THE BEST AT SPORTS."
Yes, that is how the world works. Little Billy dropping out of travel soccer to focus on his mental health is less newsworthy than one of the greatest athletes in history doing the same thing.
Cuomo resigning due to accusations of sexual harassment is more newsworthy than Bob the regional VP of a pool noodle manufacture doing the same thing.
I think you're on to something there and I often see that pattern. T from Champagne Sharks has talked about this to some extent. Essentially there is a way that people engage with celebrities where they focus in on the things that they have in common with the celebrity. "This person gets sad like me," rather than "This person gets sad like me but also is a way better athlete than I could be, needless to say."
It's clearer to see it with influencers... I'm not sure I 100% agree, but T from CS thinks that celebs who are less talented are often the most loved by fans, especially the type of fans who are online seeking attention all the time, and it's because when you look at a celeb who's not that talented, you think "They're not doing better than me because of their talent and/or connections, it's because they do average stuff and watch average movies and do basic "rise and grind" stuff, just like me.
Agreed, but are we such a fallen race that honesty is now heroic? Simone Biles (full name because after the fact I felt my calling her "Biles" was itself kinda dismissive) has earned our admiration in countless ways, but I still think that the whole hero thing is a cop out. Better to list the attributes that we admire than to use "hero" as a short cut - takes a bit more effort/thinking, but is conveys more meaning and reinforces our admiration for those qualities. Does anyone know what a "hero" is anymore?
"Agreed, but are we such a fallen race that honesty is now heroic?"
When it comes to the stigma of mental health issues? I think pushing back against unwarranted stigma is at least praiseworthy, if not specifically heroic.
Okay, but .... First, I must admit that I have not read extensively on this topic, so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. But I understood that she withdrew primarily because of the "twisties" thing, not because of "mental health." Granted, the pressure placed on her going into the competition and the gnawing echoes of sexual abuse may have contributed to her experiencing "twisties." Nonetheless, I concluded that she probably would have competed - "worked through" - the mental health aspects. But risking injury or paralysis was too much.
Admirable, yes. Brave, sure. But calling her heroic just seems like Instagram hyperbole. It's a way to market her further, to get as many clicks out of her as if she had won more gold.
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.
That depends on where you live. The NY Times ran an article last year that pointed out that the real divide in US politics isn't between liberals and conservatives, it's between the committed and the indifferent. Only about a third of the country is heavily invested in politics, the majority does their best to ignore it. At a guess the committed third is heavily concentrated in big cities. Everywhere else, in middle America, the excesses of the political class are viewed as craziness when it's even discussed at all.
" At a guess the committed third is heavily concentrated in big cities."
I'd say it's pretty even based on nothing more than the demographics of the people I've blocked on Facebook. Urban, suburban, rural you get people into politics to a very unhealthy degree everywhere. There numbers are low but they are VERY vocal.
They are a minority but at 33% not a tiny one. And what do you want to bet that if you work in media that they are overrepresented among your coworkers as compared to, for example, engineering?
Do you fight to win or do you fight for the truth? I think that is what Freddie is saying.
I'd like to think truth, but my writing will be the judge of that. I hope you check it out. thanks Ric
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
Your simple questions post starts: "Wow, that's a lot of Kool-Aid, man, this early in the morning." Might have something to do with it.
Fair enough. How would you characterize that statement? As a pejorative? An insult? Perhaps so, and I can agree with that. The intent was more incredulity at the totality of the piece. This idea of Jan 6 as being worse than another act of terrorism is absurd. One death (too many at all - but a Trump supporter at that) compared to 9/11? And the point of my question was just that, clarification. The FBI possibly using paid informants to plan and instigate a riot blamed on 74 million voters deserves some real truth.
thanks again
Ric
>Fair enough. How would you characterize that statement? As a pejorative? An insult?
Sneering is the word I would pick. Enough to ban you over, depending on the blog and the norms there. If I were the sort to host an online space, I wouldn't have people around sneering at me. Life's too short to host people who don't like you.
Of course, I'm not that sort, and controversy spurs engagement, so maybe it's a bad call on his part. I don't know.
>The intent was more incredulity at the totality of the piece. This idea of Jan 6 as being worse than another act of terrorism is absurd.
Didn't read the piece, can't speak to the merits. Just, in general, the tone and the shocked, "just asking simple questions" left me both doubtful enough and curious enough to "see for myself".
Broadly speaking, at least on the metric of post action unity, 1/6 is worse than 9/11, but on the other hand the 9/11 terrorists got 3,000 of us, dramatically curtailed our personal freedoms and worsened relations between us and the Arab world, and cost us trillions of dollars. Certainly you have to strain to make any case the other way.
I followed your link. Before you canonize Glenn Greenwald, I suggest you read, for example, Marcy Wheeler, https://www.emptywheel.net/ and @emptywheel. And you might consider Greenwald's characterization (defense?) of Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and at least the 2016 version of Donald Trump as socialists, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/why-glenn-greenwald-says-tucker-carlson-is-a-true-socialist.html
1st thing, thanks for the thoughtful comment and links. And for the record, I don't "canonize" any human beings, because we are all flawed. 2nd - Just read the Intelligencer piece, not sure I agree with it. The point of my piece was that merely asking questions now is enough to get one banned. And the authors I mentioned ask a lot of questions. As does Freddie. The empty wheel is going to take some time, but I see there is a trove of anti-Greenwald posts. I see a pattern after reading just two. How do you feel abut Taibbi and Tracey. They are asking the same questions, and Sullivan too. But I write about Tribal Identity Intersection, and how members of Greenwald's tribe have been sacrificed on the alter of Identity https://riclexel.substack.com/p/tribal-intersectionality
thanks again - Ric
Ric, I confess that I was unable to finish reading your linked article because it seemed part of an ongoing conversation with which I am unfamiliar and, perhaps for that reason, found difficult to follow.
I agree, but I hope you check out my other posts, I write about a variety of topics, all revolving around food +music +art + craft + history
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 don't think it's offensive, and I can't see why anyone else might either. And yes, nutpicking is exactly the reverse problem, invariably made worse by "journalists" who try to present "here's two people saying some kooky shit I read on Twitter" into a broader "people are saying"piece.
Not to nitpick, but do you mean nitpicking?
"Nutpicking" means finding the craziest argument on one side - one voiced by a nut, ergo the name - and focusing on that to discredit that side.
Gotcha. Wordplay!
Nope. Nutpicking is when someone picks out the nuts on the other side and asserts that's really the other side's position. Classical signs of nutpicking include a single twitter user with less than 500 followers being used as the example of some supposed trend.
Sorry, just saw Freddie beat me to it.
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.
I don't think that's good enough, though. I shouldn't have to translate "No one is saying" to "Some people are saying it but I don't think they matter." I think the person who is arguing that "No one is saying" should instead be making the affirmative argument that, "Yes, you see that around, but in the real world such views aren't likely to gain a foothold anytime soon."
But that of course doesn't play as well.
Besides, it _definitely_ doesn't work for the Simone Biles situation, where everyone was indeed calling her a hero in my day-to-day life.
You're ignoring the examples of high profile people. It's not just that someone, somewhere is saying it, it's that people in positions of influence are saying the things that supposedly "no one is saying."
Like who? Majorie Taylor Green or AOC?
Try reading the article again.
What part of the article - it covered a lot of ground? I have certainly read pieces by groups that want to abolish prisons and the police. They believe that if we just provide sufficient social services there won't be any crime or criminals. It's nonsense. But the only people proposing it are fringe lunatics.
No it's not! Several sitting members of the US House of Representatives explicitly support that goal!
As I said - like Marjorie Taylor Green - fringe lunatics. Fringe lunatics can get elected to congress. It doesn't mean their ideas are mainstream. What it means is they are newsworthy.
Are there no fringe lunatics in Congress? Or, does being elected wash away the fringiness?
There is a problem with the "only fringe lunatics" narrative:
excerpt:
The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom).
The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules.
...
https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship-small-minority/
I mean, in 2011-2015 I was telling anyone who would listen "hey the illiberalism on college campuses is really concerning." And I was told "that will never leave campus." Now it's colonized huge swaths of media and industry and government.
Do you want me to come up with a litany of crazy statements by lunatic congressman over the last 50 years that never went anywhere?
Another way of thinking about the power of "fringe lunatics"
(Freddie references this in an old blog entry years ago)
The Iron Law of Institutions is: the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001705.html
“No one is REALLY saying No One is Saying”
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.
That's actually one of the few cognitive biases that I think has been well replicated – losses really DO feel worse than wins of the same magnitude feel good.
One of my favorite bloggers – John Nerst – blogs a LOT about 'disagreement' generally and one thing he's pointed out is that people's natural 'category cognition' is more along the lines of 'types' than (logical) 'sets'. He discusses it in his most recent post:
- https://everythingstudies.com/2021/07/18/cat-couplings-revisited/
That seems pretty pertinent with respect to (the most visible examples of) 'hyper-partisanship'.
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
Being epistemically indeterminate seems better than being either a "believer" or "non-believer".
"Beliefs" are part of cultural evolution and how people seek and create meaning and purpose.
Sure? I'm not exactly sure what you are saying, but what I was trying to say, is that if you come in talking about apples, but the other person only cares about oranges, you don't get anywhere. We keep talking about logic, facts, and history, and its just irrelevant to the goals of the wokerati that we are addressing.
Epistemic indeterminacy is more or less the opposite of absolutism/totalitarianism.
Absolutism can be either mythic (explicitly "religious" or just ideological) or scientific.
"Rationalism" (non-belief) is just as prone to absolutism (and cognitive bias) as is religious thinking, even if it claims otherwise.
The actual practice of objectivity and systematic rationalism is different from holding to an ideology of rationalism. There might be an overlap in some cases, but not others.
Human consciousness is mostly about subjective experience, meaning, collective purpose, social bonding-cooperation because that was a survival adaptation.
Learning how to set that aside an actually be skeptical, including being skeptical of skepticism, is incredibly difficult for most people. It may not be reasonable to expect people to be capable of objectivity most of the time.
That was ok in the old days of the "Blue Church", when hierarchies of curated expertise were normal, but we are now in a postmodern era were social conditions are different and there is a glut of information on the internet that flow around, or in opposition to, the old curated hierarchies of expertise. The result is a "crisis of meaning" (John Vervaeke) as the old collective sense making system disintegrates, and a vacuum is created, and filled with junk-think, such as regressive tribalistic ideologies.
Just saying "religion is bad" verges on being a cheap slogan, and is not adequate to solve the crisis of meaning in postmodern culture.
Systematic rationalism is necessary, but not sufficient. Meta-rationalism (which includes construct-awareness) is needed.
There is currently no institutional process for people to learn meta-rationalism, it only happens in marginal groups in mostly informal settings.
Short version:
Epistemic indeterminacy is more or less the opposite of absolutism/totalitarianism, the opposite of dogmatic or doctrinaire thinking of any kind, including dogmas of "non-belief".
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).
Gun control in America really does have explicitly racist roots, but it's still all the rage among the "police were slavecatchers" set.
The minimum wage also has racist roots. The correct response is: “so?” The typical response is: “no it didn’t!!”
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'm sympathetic to anti-statism (because the state existed historically to create social order on the basis that people are impure and in need of salvation), but NAP and similar constructs seem to go against what is known in evolutionary psychology: the most important evolutionary adaptation of the human species was the development of kinship group altruism and intense social cooperation (eusociality).
A system of social cooperation can't exist without punishment of non-cooperators.
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.
Yes, but the reason that is exists, ideological tribalism, is the same reason it won't go away. It is just another way collective biases are reinforced.
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?
In the Before Times, simply saying "I don't know", "no opinion", or "I'm not into politics" on these kinds of questions was generally allowed. The pressure to have opinions, even ones hurriedly taken off the shelf to match one's tribe, is the problem in of itself.
And yes, I know it was never perfect. But it hasn't always been this bad.
This is the problem I have with “silence is violence” and related rhetoric. I understand the sentiment, but when taken literally it becomes a form of tyrannical thought manipulation.
Yes, and part of the problem is even worse: systemic failure of the consensus collective sense making system, which Jordan Hall (systems theorist, futurist) calls the "Blue Church" due to disruption.
To paraphrase Felix Biederman and Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House, Game of Thrones was the last (and probably final) consensus reality event in the US.
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).
But as Freddie points out, the "no one says" arguments are typically – almost always? – disingenuous and "combatting" them doesn't typically – ever? – result in the person lobbing "no one says" in anything like 'Huh – my bad. I guess some people really DO say that.'.
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.
Part of being an elite competitor is dealing with the pressure. The whole point is that in almost everything quitting is easy while persevering is not.
I'm sure she'll cry about it in her mansion.
Mansions have a way of buffering trauma.
I agree. I think I took the robust response from high level athletes saying that it is harder to say “enough” at that point that made me consider my previous thinking.
I had the opposite reaction quite frankly. Naomi Osaka just purchased a multimillion dollar house that used to belong to a rock star. I don't mind confessing that I find her attitude galling.
With gymnastics in particular, the culture seems to be so toxic and manipulative of kids by people in power from a very young age -- from the sexual abuse to the eating disorders to the injuries that fuck up your body for the rest of your life -- that saying "no" seems a lot harder than saying "yes." However, it's much easier for Simone Biles, who has the benefit of already being a decorated Olympian behind her; it'd be braver for a younger, less established gymnast who was a medal favourite to choose "not risking breaking my neck" over "capitulating to the incredible pressure of every adult around me."
Anyway, Simone Biles is a hero: not because she got the twisties, but because she put up with USA Gymnastics' bullshit for another 4 years in order to attempt to get some accountability from them for the years of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse and protect future generations, instead of retiring and comfortably living off Instagram influencer money.
I don't know, "heroism" to me implies some level of personal risk. I can't imagine a scenario where Biles doesn't end up rich from her endorsements and lauded in the popular media regardless of what she does.
I feel that willingly putting yourself in close contact with the same people who covered up your sexual abuse for years in the pursuit of justice is heroic and a form of personal sacrifice.
Where's the personal risk? Somebody like Tara Reid risked the destruction of her personal life and career by leveling accusations against Joe Biden. By contrast Biles is only going to be applauded by media elite for her "courageous" stand. And at the end of the day she's going to go home to wealth that somebody like Reid can only dream of.
If you don't think that continuing to put yourself in regular close contact with the people who covered up for your serial rapist is a personal risk -- not to her wealth, sure, but in terms of re-traumatization -- then perhaps we are just not operating on the same definitions and won't ever come to a consensus. Just like how a friend of mine believes that volunteer firefighters are heroes but paid firefighters are not, simply because to him, heroes do not receive any money for what they do.
And yeah, I don't think Biles needs $6 million or however much she's worth, and excessive wealth is unethical etc etc, but money doesn't protect you from everything, including suffering.
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 understanding was she was being called heroic for telling the truth and admitting she was withdrawing due to the twisties. Many in her situation would have just faked a physical injury. I don't know if that's more heroic or ballsy or what term would best describe it. But her honesty is admirable.
If she had been the fourth-best gymnast on the Canadian team, she could have made the same decision for the exact same reasons, and would have received literally zero public praise for doing so.
A GOAT withdrawing is more newsworthy than a nobody withdrawing. OK...obviously. What does that have to do with admiring her for being honest?
Well, to begin with, I very specifically objected to the use of the word "hero," then provided multiple links demonstrating that people were doing that.
Second, the point is that people are saying she "changed sports forever." But she only had the juice to get that kind of attention BECAUSE SHE WAS THE BEST AT SPORTS. You're praising as a virtue something that anyone can do and using as your avatar a person you admire precisely because no one else can do what she does. It's all very odd.
"But she only had the juice to get that kind of attention BECAUSE SHE WAS THE BEST AT SPORTS."
Yes, that is how the world works. Little Billy dropping out of travel soccer to focus on his mental health is less newsworthy than one of the greatest athletes in history doing the same thing.
Cuomo resigning due to accusations of sexual harassment is more newsworthy than Bob the regional VP of a pool noodle manufacture doing the same thing.
I think you're on to something there and I often see that pattern. T from Champagne Sharks has talked about this to some extent. Essentially there is a way that people engage with celebrities where they focus in on the things that they have in common with the celebrity. "This person gets sad like me," rather than "This person gets sad like me but also is a way better athlete than I could be, needless to say."
It's clearer to see it with influencers... I'm not sure I 100% agree, but T from CS thinks that celebs who are less talented are often the most loved by fans, especially the type of fans who are online seeking attention all the time, and it's because when you look at a celeb who's not that talented, you think "They're not doing better than me because of their talent and/or connections, it's because they do average stuff and watch average movies and do basic "rise and grind" stuff, just like me.
Agreed, but are we such a fallen race that honesty is now heroic? Simone Biles (full name because after the fact I felt my calling her "Biles" was itself kinda dismissive) has earned our admiration in countless ways, but I still think that the whole hero thing is a cop out. Better to list the attributes that we admire than to use "hero" as a short cut - takes a bit more effort/thinking, but is conveys more meaning and reinforces our admiration for those qualities. Does anyone know what a "hero" is anymore?
"Agreed, but are we such a fallen race that honesty is now heroic?"
When it comes to the stigma of mental health issues? I think pushing back against unwarranted stigma is at least praiseworthy, if not specifically heroic.
I agree she's praiseworthy! I praised her! I don't think she's a hero.
Eh it comes across as a little pedantic to parse it so closely.
Pedantic? Isn't the whole point that we don't "parse" things fully enough?
Okay, but .... First, I must admit that I have not read extensively on this topic, so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. But I understood that she withdrew primarily because of the "twisties" thing, not because of "mental health." Granted, the pressure placed on her going into the competition and the gnawing echoes of sexual abuse may have contributed to her experiencing "twisties." Nonetheless, I concluded that she probably would have competed - "worked through" - the mental health aspects. But risking injury or paralysis was too much.
Admirable, yes. Brave, sure. But calling her heroic just seems like Instagram hyperbole. It's a way to market her further, to get as many clicks out of her as if she had won more gold.
Did a bit of Googling and, yes, we're definitely on a Hero upswing. Can't insert an image here, so here's the link: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hero&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=7&case_insensitive=true#
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.
People seem to rush to extremes these days....on Twitter. In reality - not so much.
That depends on where you live. The NY Times ran an article last year that pointed out that the real divide in US politics isn't between liberals and conservatives, it's between the committed and the indifferent. Only about a third of the country is heavily invested in politics, the majority does their best to ignore it. At a guess the committed third is heavily concentrated in big cities. Everywhere else, in middle America, the excesses of the political class are viewed as craziness when it's even discussed at all.
" At a guess the committed third is heavily concentrated in big cities."
I'd say it's pretty even based on nothing more than the demographics of the people I've blocked on Facebook. Urban, suburban, rural you get people into politics to a very unhealthy degree everywhere. There numbers are low but they are VERY vocal.
They are a minority but at 33% not a tiny one. And what do you want to bet that if you work in media that they are overrepresented among your coworkers as compared to, for example, engineering?