[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to be explaining and rewording things I have heard from a bunch of other people. Unapologetically America-centric because I’m not informed enough to make it otherwise. Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things.]
I.
In Chesterton’s The Secret of Father Brown, a beloved nobleman who murdered his good-for-nothing brother in a duel thirty years ago returns to his hometown wracked by guilt. All the townspeople want to forgive him immediately, and they mock the titular priest for only being willing to give a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection. They lecture the priest on the virtues of charity and compassion.
Later, it comes out that the beloved nobleman did not in fact kill his good-for-nothing brother. The good-for-nothing brother killed the beloved nobleman (and stole his identity). Now the townspeople want to see him lynched or burned alive, and it is only the priest who – consistently – offers a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection.
The priest tells them:
It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.
He further notes that this is why the townspeople can self-righteously consider themselves more compassionate and forgiving than he is. Actual forgiveness, the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard. The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult and want penance along with it.
After some thought I agree with Chesterton’s point. There are a lot of people who say “I forgive you” when they mean “No harm done”, and a lot of people who say “That was unforgiveable” when they mean “That was genuinely really bad”. Whether or not forgiveness is right is a complicated topic I do not want to get in here. But since forgiveness is generally considered a virtue, and one that many want credit for having, I think it’s fair to say you only earn the right to call yourself ‘forgiving’ if you forgive things that genuinely hurt you.
To borrow Chesterton’s example, if you think divorce is a-ok, then you don’t get to “forgive” people their divorces, you merely ignore them. Someone who thinks divorce is abhorrent can “forgive” divorce. You can forgive theft, or murder, or tax evasion, or something you find abhorrent.
I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee. You can have all the Utility Points you want. All I’m saying is that if you “forgive” something you don’t care about, you don’t earn any Virtue Points.
(by way of illustration: a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points)
Tolerance is also considered a virtue, but it suffers the same sort of dimished expectations forgiveness does.
The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Virtue Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”
Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.
The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why.
Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”
The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”
And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”
II.
If I had to define “tolerance” it would be something like “respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup”.
And today we have an almost unprecedented situation.
We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.
This is really surprising. It’s a total reversal of everything we know about human psychology up to this point. No one did any genetic engineering. No one passed out weird glowing pills in the public schools. And yet suddenly we get an entire group of people who conspicuously promote and defend their outgroups, the outer the better.
What is going on here?
Let’s start by asking what exactly an outgroup is.
There’s a very boring sense in which, assuming the Emperor’s straight, gays are part of his “outgroup” ie a group that he is not a member of. But if the Emperor has curly hair, are straight-haired people part of his outgroup? If the Emperor’s name starts with the letter ‘A’, are people whose names start with the letter ‘B’ part of his outgroup?
Nah. I would differentiate between multiple different meanings of outgroup, where one is “a group you are not a part of” and the other is…something stronger.
I want to avoid a very easy trap, which is saying that outgroups are about how different you are, or how hostile you are. I don’t think that’s quite right.
Compare the Nazis to the German Jews and to the Japanese. The Nazis were very similar to the German Jews: they looked the same, spoke the same language, came from a similar culture. The Nazis were totally different from the Japanese: different race, different language, vast cultural gap. But the Nazis and Japanese mostly got along pretty well. Heck, the Nazis were actually moderately positively disposed to the Chinese, even when they were technically at war. Meanwhile, the conflict between the Nazis and the German Jews – some of whom didn’t even realize they were anything other than German until they checked their grandparents’ birth certificate – is the stuff of history and nightmares. Any theory of outgroupishness that naively assumes the Nazis’ natural outgroup is Japanese or Chinese people will be totally inadequate.
And this isn’t a weird exception. Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other”. Nazis and German Jews. Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics. Hutus and Tutsis. South African whites and South African blacks. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Anyone in the former Yugoslavia and anyone else in the former Yugoslavia.
So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences. If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.
What makes an unexpected in-group? The answer with Germans and Japanese is obvious – a strategic alliance. In fact, the World Wars forged a lot of unexpected temporary pseudo-friendships. A recent article from War Nerd points out that the British, after spending centuries subjugating and despising the Irish and Sikhs, suddenly needed Irish and Sikh soldiers for World Wars I and II respectively. “Crush them beneath our boots” quickly changed to fawning songs about how “there never was a coward where the shamrock grows” and endless paeans to Sikh military prowess.
Sure, scratch the paeans even a little bit and you find condescension as strong as ever. But eight hundred years of the British committing genocide against the Irish and considering them literally subhuman turned into smiles and songs about shamrocks once the Irish started looking like useful cannon fodder for a larger fight. And the Sikhs, dark-skinned people with turbans and beards who pretty much exemplify the European stereotype of “scary foreigner”, were lauded by everyone from the news media all the way up to Winston Churchill.
In other words, outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and scary foreigner types can become the in-group on a moment’s notice when it seems convenient.
III.
There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.
This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.
I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.
And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.
About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.
People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.
I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.
To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.
Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position. He figured he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated user base in the tens of millions.
It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.
There were a bunch of posts saying “I of course support gay marriage but here are some reasons some other people might be against it,” a bunch of others saying “my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn’t be involved in the marriage business at all”, and several more saying “why would you even ask this question, there’s no possible good argument and you’re wasting your time”. About halfway through the thread someone started saying homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one to actually answer the question, but at the end they added “But it’s not my place to decide what is or isn’t natural, I’m still pro-gay marriage.”
In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this…”
But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.
On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.
But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?
When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.
It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed about 90-10 liberal to conservative – and we can bet that, like LW, even those few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n’-guns types. I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the most liberal restaurant in the United States.
I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45 bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.
(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest and it would be canceled.)
IV.
One day I realized that entirely by accident I was fulfilling all the Jewish stereotypes.
I’m nerdy, over-educated, good with words, good with money, weird sense of humor, don’t get outside much, I like deli sandwiches. And I’m a psychiatrist, which is about the most stereotypically Jewish profession short of maybe stand-up comedian or rabbi.
I’m not very religious. And I don’t go to synagogue. But that’s stereotypically Jewish too!
I bring this up because it would be a mistake to think “Well, a Jewish person is by definition someone who is born of a Jewish mother. Or I guess it sort of also means someone who follows the Mosaic Law and goes to synagogue. But I don’t care about Scott’s mother, and I know he doesn’t go to synagogue, so I can’t gain any useful information from knowing Scott is Jewish.”
The defining factors of Judaism – Torah-reading, synagogue-following, mother-having – are the tip of a giant iceberg. Jews sometimes identify as a “tribe”, and even if you don’t attend synagogue, you’re still a member of that tribe and people can still (in a statistical way) infer things about you by knowing your Jewish identity – like how likely they are to be psychiatrists.
The last section raised a question – if people rarely select their friends and associates and customers explicitly for politics, how do we end up with such intense political segregation?
Well, in the same way “going to synagogue” is merely the iceberg-tip of a Jewish tribe with many distinguishing characteristics, so “voting Republican” or “identifying as conservative” or “believing in creationism” is the iceberg-tip of a conservative tribe with many distinguishing characteristics.
A disproportionate number of my friends are Jewish, because I meet them at psychiatry conferences or something – we self-segregate not based on explicit religion but on implicit tribal characteristics. So in the same way, political tribes self-segregate to an impressive extent – a 1/10^45 extent, I will never tire of hammering in – based on their implicit tribal characteristics.
The people who are actually into this sort of thing sketch out a bunch of speculative tribes and subtribes, but to make it easier, let me stick with two and a half.
The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.
The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.
(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)
I think these “tribes” will turn out to be even stronger categories than politics. Harvard might skew 80-20 in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, 90-10 in terms of liberals vs. conservatives, but maybe 99-1 in terms of Blues vs. Reds.
It’s the many, many differences between these tribes that explain the strength of the filter bubble – which have I mentioned segregates people at a strength of 1/10^45? Even in something as seemingly politically uncharged as going to California Pizza Kitchen or Sushi House for dinner, I’m restricting myself to the set of people who like cute artisanal pizzas or sophsticated foreign foods, which are classically Blue Tribe characteristics.
Are these tribes based on geography? Are they based on race, ethnic origin, religion, IQ, what TV channels you watched as a kid? I don’t know.
Some of it is certainly genetic – estimates of the genetic contribution to political association range from 0.4 to 0.6. Heritability of one’s attitudes toward gay rights range from 0.3 to 0.5, which hilariously is a little more heritable than homosexuality itself.
(for an interesting attempt to break these down into more rigorous concepts like “traditionalism”, “authoritarianism”, and “in-group favoritism” and find the genetic loading for each see here. For an attempt to trace the specific genes involved, which mostly turn out to be NMDA receptors, see here)
But I don’t think it’s just genetics. There’s something else going on too. The word “class” seems like the closest analogue, but only if you use it in the sophisticated Paul Fussell Guide Through the American Status System way instead of the boring “another word for how much money you make” way.
For now we can just accept them as a brute fact – as multiple coexisting societies that might as well be made of dark matter for all of the interaction they have with one another – and move on.
V.
The worst reaction I’ve ever gotten to a blog post was when I wrote about the death of Osama bin Laden. I’ve written all sorts of stuff about race and gender and politics and whatever, but that was the worst.
I didn’t come out and say I was happy he was dead. But some people interpreted it that way, and there followed a bunch of comments and emails and Facebook messages about how could I possibly be happy about the death of another human being, even if he was a bad person? Everyone, even Osama, is a human being, and we should never rejoice in the death of a fellow man. One commenter came out and said:
I’m surprised at your reaction. As far as people I casually stalk on the internet (ie, LJ and Facebook), you are the first out of the “intelligent, reasoned and thoughtful” group to be uncomplicatedly happy about this development and not to be, say, disgusted at the reactions of the other 90% or so.
This commenter was right. Of the “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful” people I knew, the overwhelming emotion was conspicuous disgust that other people could be happy about his death. I hastily backtracked and said I wasn’t happy per se, just surprised and relieved that all of this was finally behind us.
And I genuinely believed that day that I had found some unexpected good in people – that everyone I knew was so humane and compassionate that they were unable to rejoice even in the death of someone who hated them and everything they stood for.
Then a few years later, Margaret Thatcher died. And on my Facebook wall – made of these same “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful” people – the most common response was to quote some portion of the song “Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead”. Another popular response was to link the videos of British people spontaneously throwing parties in the street, with comments like “I wish I was there so I could join in”. From this exact same group of people, not a single expression of disgust or a “c’mon, guys, we’re all human beings here.”
I gently pointed this out at the time, and mostly got a bunch of “yeah, so what?”, combined with links to an article claiming that “the demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure’s death is not just misguided but dangerous”.
And that was when something clicked for me.
You can talk all you want about Islamophobia, but my friend’s “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful people” – her name for the Blue Tribe – can’t get together enough energy to really hate Osama, let alone Muslims in general. We understand that what he did was bad, but it didn’t anger us personally. When he died, we were able to very rationally apply our better nature and our Far Mode beliefs about how it’s never right to be happy about anyone else’s death.
On the other hand, that same group absolutely loathed Thatcher. Most of us (though not all) can agree, if the question is posed explicitly, that Osama was a worse person than Thatcher. But in terms of actual gut feeling? Osama provokes a snap judgment of “flawed human being”, Thatcher a snap judgment of “scum”.
I started this essay by pointing out that, despite what geographical and cultural distance would suggest, the Nazis’ outgroup was not the vastly different Japanese, but the almost-identical German Jews.
And my hypothesis, stated plainly, is that if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists – it’s the Red Tribe.
VI.
“But racism and sexism and cissexism and anti-Semitism are these giant all-encompassing social factors that verge upon being human universals! Surely you’re not arguing that mere political differences could ever come close to them!”
One of the ways we know that racism is a giant all-encompassing social factor is the Implicit Association Test. Psychologists ask subjects to quickly identify whether words or photos are members of certain gerrymandered categories, like “either a white person’s face or a positive emotion” or “either a black person’s face and a negative emotion”. Then they compare to a different set of gerrymandered categories, like “either a black person’s face or a positive emotion” or “either a white person’s face or a negative emotion.” If subjects have more trouble (as measured in latency time) connecting white people to negative things than they do white people to positive things, then they probably have subconscious positive associations with white people. You can try it yourself here.
Of course, what the test famously found was that even white people who claimed to have no racist attitudes at all usually had positive associations with white people and negative associations with black people on the test. There are very many claims and counterclaims about the precise meaning of this, but it ended up being a big part of the evidence in favor of the current consensus that all white people are at least a little racist.
Anyway, three months ago, someone finally had the bright idea of doing an Implicit Association Test with political parties, and they found that people’s unconscious partisan biases were half again as strong as their unconscious racial biases (h/t Bloomberg. For example, if you are a white Democrat, your unconscious bias against blacks (as measured by something called a d-score) is 0.16, but your unconscious bias against Republicans will be 0.23. The Cohen’s d for racial bias was 0.61, by the book a “moderate” effect size; for party it was 0.95, a “large” effect size.
Okay, fine, but we know race has real world consequences. Like, there have been several studies where people sent out a bunch of identical resumes except sometimes with a black person’s photo and other times with a white person’s photo, and it was noticed that employers were much more likely to invite the fictional white candidates for interviews. So just some stupid Implicit Association Test results can’t compare to that, right?
Iyengar and Westwood also decided to do the resume test for parties. They asked subjects to decide which of several candidates should get a scholarship (subjects were told this was a genuine decision for the university the researchers were affiliated with). Some resumes had photos of black people, others of white people. And some students listed their experience in Young Democrats of America, others in Young Republicans of America.
Once again, discrimination on the basis of party was much stronger than discrimination on the basis of race. The size of the race effect for white people was only 56-44 (and in the reverse of the expected direction); the size of the party effect was about 80-20 for Democrats and 69-31 for Republicans.
If you want to see their third experiment, which applied yet another classic methodology used to detect racism and once again found partyism to be much stronger, you can read the paper.
I & W did an unusually thorough job, but this sort of thing isn’t new or ground-breaking. People have been studying “belief congruence theory” – the idea that differences in beliefs are more important than demographic factors in forming in-groups and outgroups – for decades. As early as 1967, Smith et al were doing surveys all over the country and finding that people were more likely to accept friendships across racial lines than across beliefs; in the forty years since then, the observation has been replicated scores of times. Insko, Moe, and Nacoste’s 2006 review Belief Congruence And Racial Discrimination concludes that:
. The literature was judged supportive of a weak version of belief congruence theory which states that in those contexts in which social pressure is nonexistent or ineffective, belief is more important than race as a determinant of racial or ethnic discrimination. Evidence for a strong version of belief congruence theory (which states that in those contexts in which social pressure is nonexistent, or ineffective, belief is the only determinant of racial or ethnic discrimination) and was judged much more problematic.
One of the best-known examples of racism is the “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” scenario where parents are scandalized about their child marrying someone of a different race. Pew has done some good work on this and found that only 23% of conservatives and 1% (!) of liberals admit they would be upset in this situation. But Pew also asked how parents would feel about their child marrying someone of a different political party. Now 30% of conservatives and 23% of liberals would get upset. Average them out, and you go from 12% upsetness rate for race to 27% upsetness rate for party – more than double. Yeah, people do lie to pollsters, but a picture is starting to come together here.
(Harvard, by the way, is a tossup. There are more black students – 11.5% – than conservative students – 10% – but there are more conservative faculty than black faculty.)
Since people will delight in misinterpreting me here, let me overemphasize what I am not saying. I’m not saying people of either party have it “worse” than black people, or that partyism is more of a problem than racism, or any of a number of stupid things along those lines which I am sure I will nevertheless be accused of believing. Racism is worse than partyism because the two parties are at least kind of balanced in numbers and in resources, whereas the brunt of an entire country’s racism falls on a few underprivileged people. I am saying that the underlying attitudes that produce partyism are stronger than the underlying attitudes that produce racism, with no necessary implications on their social effects.
But if we want to look at people’s psychology and motivations, partyism and the particular variant of tribalism that it represents are going to be fertile ground.
VII.
Every election cycle like clockwork, conservatives accuse liberals of not being sufficiently pro-America. And every election cycle like clockwork, liberals give extremely unconvincing denials of this.
“It’s not that we’re, like, against America per se. It’s just that…well, did you know Europe has much better health care than we do? And much lower crime rates? I mean, come on, how did they get so awesome? And we’re just sitting here, can’t even get the gay marriage thing sorted out, seriously, what’s wrong with a country that can’t…sorry, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, America. They’re okay. Cesar Chavez was really neat. So were some other people outside the mainstream who became famous precisely by criticizing majority society. That’s sort of like America being great, in that I think the parts of it that point out how bad the rest of it are often make excellent points. Vote for me!”
(sorry, I make fun of you because I love you)
There was a big brouhaha a couple of years ago when, as it first became apparent Obama had a good shot at the Presidency, Michelle Obama said that “for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”
Republicans pounced on the comment, asking why she hadn’t felt proud before, and she backtracked saying of course she was proud all the time and she loves America with the burning fury of a million suns and she was just saying that the Obama campaign was particularly inspiring.
As unconvincing denials go, this one was pretty far up there. But no one really held it against her. Probably most Obama voters felt vaguely the same way. I was an Obama voter, and I have proud memories of spending my Fourth of Julys as a kid debunking people’s heartfelt emotions of patriotism. Aaron Sorkin:
[What makes America the greatest country in the world?] It’s not the greatest country in the world! We’re seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, No. 4 in labor force, and No. 4 in exports. So when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the f*** you’re talking about.
(Another good retort is “We’re number one? Sure – number one in incarceration rates, drone strikes, and making new parents go back to work!”)
All of this is true, of course. But it’s weird that it’s such a classic interest of members of the Blue Tribe, and members of the Red Tribe never seem to bring it up.
(“We’re number one? Sure – number one in levels of sexual degeneracy! Well, I guess probably number two, after the Netherlands, but they’re really small and shouldn’t count.”)
My hunch – both the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe, for whatever reason, identify “America” with the Red Tribe. Ask people for typically “American” things, and you end up with a very Red list of characteristics – guns, religion, barbecues, American football, NASCAR, cowboys, SUVs, unrestrained capitalism.
That means the Red Tribe feels intensely patriotic about “their” country, and the Blue Tribe feels like they’re living in fortified enclaves deep in hostile territory.
Here is a popular piece published on a major media site called America: A Big, Fat, Stupid Nation. Another: America: A Bunch Of Spoiled, Whiny Brats. Americans are ignorant, scientifically illiterate religious fanatics whose “patriotism” is actually just narcissism. You Will Be Shocked At How Ignorant Americans Are, and we should Blame The Childish, Ignorant American People.
Needless to say, every single one of these articles was written by an American and read almost entirely by Americans. Those Americans very likely enjoyed the articles very much and did not feel the least bit insulted.
And look at the sources. HuffPo, Salon, Slate. Might those have anything in common?
On both sides, “American” can be either a normal demonym, or a code word for a member of the Red Tribe.
VIII.
The other day, I logged into OKCupid and found someone who looked cool. I was reading over her profile and found the following sentence:
Don’t message me if you’re a sexist white guy
And my first thought was “Wait, so a sexist black person would be okay? Why?”
(The girl in question was white as snow)
Around the time the Ferguson riots were first starting, there were a host of articles with titles like Why White People Don’t Seem To Understand Ferguson, Why It’s So Hard For Whites To Understand Ferguson, and White Folks Listen Up And Let Me Tell You What Ferguson Is All About, this last of which says:
Social media is full of people on both sides making presumptions, and believing what they want to believe. But it’s the white folks that don’t understand what this is all about. Let me put it as simply as I can for you […]
No matter how wrong you think Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown were, I think we can all agree they didn’t deserve to die over it. I want you white folks to understand that this is where the anger is coming from. You focused on the looting….”
And on a hunch I checked the author photos, and every single one of these articles was written by a white person.
White People Are Ruining America? White. White People Are Still A Disgrace? White. White Guys: We Suck And We’re Sorry? White. Bye Bye, Whiny White Dudes? White. Dear Entitled Straight White Dudes, I’m Evicting You From My Life? White. White Dudes Need To Stop Whitesplaining? White. Reasons Why Americans Suck #1: White People? White.
We’ve all seen articles and comments and articles like this. Some unsavory people try to use them to prove that white people are the real victims or the media is biased against white people or something. Other people who are very nice and optimistic use them to show that some white people have developed some self-awareness and are willing to engage in self-criticism.
But I think the situation with “white” is much the same as the situation with “American” – it can either mean what it says, or be a code word for the Red Tribe.
(except on the blog Stuff White People Like, where it obviously serves as a code word for the Blue tribe. I don’t know, guys. I didn’t do it.)
I realize that’s making a strong claim, but it would hardly be without precedent. When people say things like “gamers are misogynist”, do they mean the 52% of gamers who are women? Do they mean every one of the 59% of Americans from every walk of life who are known to play video or computer games occasionally? No. “Gamer” is a coded reference to the Gray Tribe, the half-branched-off collection of libertarianish tech-savvy nerds, and everyone knows it. As well expect that when people talk about “fedoras”, they mean Indiana Jones. Or when they talk about “urban youth”, they mean freshmen at NYU. Everyone knows exactly who we mean when we say “urban youth”, and them being young people who live in a city has only the most tenuous of relations to the actual concept.
And I’m saying words like “American” and “white” work the same way. Bill Clinton was the “first black President”, but if Herman Cain had won in 2012 he’d have been the 43rd white president. And when an angry white person talks at great length about how much he hates “white dudes”, he is not being humble and self-critical.
IX.
Imagine hearing that a liberal talk show host and comedian was so enraged by the actions of ISIS that he’d recorded and posted a video in which he shouts at them for ten minutes, cursing the “fanatical terrorists” and calling them “utter savages” with “savage values”.
If I heard that, I’d be kind of surprised. It doesn’t fit my model of what liberal talk show hosts do.
But the story I’m actually referring to is liberal talk show host / comedian Russell Brand making that same rant against Fox News for supporting war against the Islamic State, adding at the end that “Fox is worse than ISIS”.
That fits my model perfectly. You wouldn’t celebrate Osama’s death, only Thatcher’s. And you wouldn’t call ISIS savages, only Fox News. Fox is the outgroup, ISIS is just some random people off in a desert. You hate the outgroup, you don’t hate random desert people.
I would go further. Not only does Brand not feel much like hating ISIS, he has a strong incentive not to. That incentive is: the Red Tribe is known to hate ISIS loudly and conspicuously. Hating ISIS would signal Red Tribe membership, would be the equivalent of going into Crips territory with a big Bloods gang sign tattooed on your shoulder.
But this might be unfair. What would Russell Brand answer, if we asked him to justify his decision to be much angrier at Fox than ISIS?
He might say something like “Obviously Fox News is not literally worse than ISIS. But here I am, talking to my audience, who are mostly white British people and Americans. These people already know that ISIS is bad; they don’t need to be told that any further. In fact, at this point being angry about how bad ISIS is, is less likely to genuinely change someone’s mind about ISIS, and more likely to promote Islamophobia. The sort of people in my audience are at zero risk of becoming ISIS supporters, but at a very real risk of Islamophobia. So ranting against ISIS would be counterproductive and dangerous.
On the other hand, my audience of white British people and Americans is very likely to contain many Fox News viewers and supporters. And Fox, while not quite as evil as ISIS, is still pretty bad. So here’s somewhere I have a genuine chance to reach people at risk and change minds. Therefore, I think my decision to rant against Fox News, and maybe hyperbolically say they were ‘worse than ISIS’ is justified under the circumstances.”
I have a lot of sympathy to hypothetical-Brand, especially to the part about Islamophobia. It does seem really possible to denounce ISIS’ atrocities to a population that already hates them in order to weak-man a couple of already-marginalized Muslims. We need to fight terrorism and atrocities – therefore it’s okay to shout at a poor girl ten thousand miles from home for wearing a headscarf in public. Christians are being executed for their faith in Sudan, therefore let’s picket the people trying to build a mosque next door.
But my sympathy with Brand ends when he acts like his audience is likely to be fans of Fox News.
In a world where a negligible number of Redditors oppose gay marriage and 1% of Less Wrongers identify conservative and I know 0/150 creationists, how many of the people who visit the YouTube channel of a well-known liberal activist with a Che-inspired banner, a channel whose episode names are things like “War: What Is It Good For?” and “Sarah Silverman Talks Feminism” – how many of them do you think are big Fox News fans?
In a way, Russell Brand would have been braver taking a stand against ISIS than against Fox. If he attacked ISIS, his viewers would just be a little confused and uncomfortable. Whereas every moment he’s attacking Fox his viewers are like “HA HA! YEAH! GET ‘EM! SHOW THOSE IGNORANT BIGOTS IN THE OUTGROUP WHO’S BOSS!”
Brand acts as if there are just these countries called “Britain” and “America” who are receiving his material. Wrong. There are two parallel universes, and he’s only broadcasting to one of them.
The result is exactly what we predicted would happen in the case of Islam. Bombard people with images of a far-off land they already hate and tell them to hate it more, and the result is ramping up the intolerance on the couple of dazed and marginalized representatives of that culture who have ended up stuck on your half of the divide. Sure enough, if industry or culture or community gets Blue enough, Red Tribe members start getting harassed, fired from their jobs (Brendan Eich being the obvious example) or otherwise shown the door.
Think of Brendan Eich as a member of a tiny religious minority surrounded by people who hate that minority. Suddenly firing him doesn’t seem very noble.
If you mix together Podunk, Texas and Mosul, Iraq, you can prove that Muslims are scary and very powerful people who are executing Christians all the time – and so we have a great excuse for kicking the one remaining Muslim family, random people who never hurt anyone, out of town.
And if you mix together the open-source tech industry and the parallel universe where you can’t wear a FreeBSD t-shirt without risking someone trying to exorcise you, you can prove that Christians are scary and very powerful people who are persecuting everyone else all the time, and you have a great excuse for kicking one of the few people willing to affiliate with the Red Tribe, a guy who never hurt anyone, out of town.
When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn’t see anything wrong with it. “I can tolerate anything except intolerance,” she said.
“Intolerance” is starting to look like another one of those words like “white” and “American”.
“I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?
X.
We started by asking: millions of people are conspicuously praising every outgroup they can think of, while conspicuously condemning their own in-group. This seems contrary to what we know about social psychology. What’s up?
We noted that outgroups are rarely literally “the group most different from you”, and in fact far more likely to be groups very similar to you sharing almost all your characteristics and living in the same area.
We then noted that although liberals and conservatives live in the same area, they might as well be two totally different countries or universe as far as level of interaction were concerned.
Contra the usual idea of them being marked only by voting behavior, we described them as very different tribes with totally different cultures. You can speak of “American culture” only in the same way you can speak of “Asian culture” – that is, with a lot of interior boundaries being pushed under the rug.
The outgroup of the Red Tribe is occasionally blacks and gays and Muslims, more often the Blue Tribe.
The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe.
This is not surprising. Ethnic differences have proven quite tractable in the face of shared strategic aims. Even the Nazis, not known for their ethnic tolerance, were able to get all buddy-buddy with the Japanese when they had a common cause.
Research suggests Blue Tribe / Red Tribe prejudice to be much stronger than better-known types of prejudice like racism. Once the Blue Tribe was able to enlist the blacks and gays and Muslims in their ranks, they became allies of convenience who deserve to be rehabilitated with mildly condescending paeans to their virtue. “There never was a coward where the shamrock grows.”
Spending your entire life insulting the other tribe and talking about how terrible they are makes you look, well, tribalistic. It is definitely not high class. So when members of the Blue Tribe decide to dedicate their entire life to yelling about how terrible the Red Tribe is, they make sure that instead of saying “the Red Tribe”, they say “America”, or “white people”, or “straight white men”. That way it’s humble self-criticism. They are so interested in justice that they are willing to critique their own beloved side, much as it pains them to do so. We know they are not exaggerating, because one might exaggerate the flaws of an enemy, but that anyone would exaggerate their own flaws fails the criterion of embarrassment.
The Blue Tribe always has an excuse at hand to persecute and crush any Red Tribers unfortunate enough to fall into its light-matter-universe by defining them as all-powerful domineering oppressors. They appeal to the fact that this is definitely the way it works in the Red Tribe’s dark-matter-universe, and that’s in the same country so it has to be the same community for all intents and purposes. As a result, every Blue Tribe institution is permanently licensed to take whatever emergency measures are necessary against the Red Tribe, however disturbing they might otherwise seem.
And so how virtuous, how noble the Blue Tribe! Perfectly tolerant of all of the different groups that just so happen to be allied with them, never intolerant unless it happen to be against intolerance itself. Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that awful Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing their own culture and striving to make it better!
Sorry. But I hope this is at least a little convincing. The weird dynamic of outgroup-philia and ingroup-phobia isn’t anything of the sort. It’s just good old-fashioned in-group-favoritism and outgroup bashing, a little more sophisticated and a little more sneaky.
XI.
This essay is bad and I should feel bad.
I should feel bad because I made exactly the mistake I am trying to warn everyone else about, and it wasn’t until I was almost done that I noticed.
How virtuous, how noble I must be! Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that silly Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing my own tribe and striving to make it better.
Yeah. Once I’ve written a ten thousand word essay savagely attacking the Blue Tribe, either I’m a very special person or they’re my outgroup. And I’m not that special.
Just as you can pull a fast one and look humbly self-critical if you make your audience assume there’s just one American culture, so maybe you can trick people by assuming there’s only one Blue Tribe.
I’m pretty sure I’m not Red, but I did talk about the Grey Tribe above, and I show all the risk factors for being one of them. That means that, although my critique of the Blue Tribe may be right or wrong, in terms of motivation it comes from the same place as a Red Tribe member talking about how much they hate al-Qaeda or a Blue Tribe member talking about how much they hate ignorant bigots. And when I boast of being able to tolerate Christians and Southerners whom the Blue Tribe is mean to, I’m not being tolerant at all, just noticing people so far away from me they wouldn’t make a good outgroup anyway.
I had fun writing this article. People do not have fun writing articles savagely criticizing their in-group. People can criticize their in-group, it’s not humanly impossible, but it takes nerves of steel, it makes your blood boil, you should sweat blood. It shouldn’t be fun.
You can bet some white guy on Gawker who week after week churns out “Why White People Are So Terrible” and “Here’s What Dumb White People Don’t Understand” is having fun and not sweating any blood at all. He’s not criticizing his in-group, he’s never even considered criticizing his in-group. I can’t blame him. Criticizing the in-group is a really difficult project I’ve barely begun to build the mental skills necessary to even consider.
I can think of criticisms of my own tribe. Important criticisms, true ones. But the thought of writing them makes my blood boil.
I imagine might I feel like some liberal US Muslim leader, when he goes on the O’Reilly Show, and O’Reilly ambushes him and demands to know why he and other American Muslims haven’t condemned beheadings by ISIS more, demands that he criticize them right there on live TV. And you can see the wheels in the Muslim leader’s head turning, thinking something like “Okay, obviously beheadings are terrible and I hate them as much as anyone. But you don’t care even the slightest bit about the victims of beheadings. You’re just looking for a way to score points against me so you can embarass all Muslims. And I would rather personally behead every single person in the world than give a smug bigot like you a single microgram more stupid self-satisfaction than you’ve already got.”
That is how I feel when asked to criticize my own tribe, even for correct reasons. If you think you’re criticizing your own tribe, and your blood is not at that temperature, consider the possibility that you aren’t.
But if I want Self-Criticism Virtue Points, criticizing the Grey Tribe is the only honest way to get them. And if I want Tolerance Points, my own personal cross to bear right now is tolerating the Blue Tribe. I need to remind myself that when they are bad people, they are merely Osama-level bad people instead of Thatcher-level bad people. And when they are good people, they are powerful and necessary crusaders against the evils of the world.
The worst thing that could happen to this post is to have it be used as convenient feces to fling at the Blue Tribe whenever feces are necessary. Which, given what has happened to my last couple of posts along these lines and the obvious biases of my own subconscious, I already expect it will be.
But the best thing that could happen to this post is that it makes a lot of people, especially myself, figure out how to be more tolerant. Not in the “of course I’m tolerant, why shouldn’t I be?” sense of the Emperor in Part I. But in the sense of “being tolerant makes me see red, makes me sweat blood, but darn it I am going to be tolerant anyway.”
Pingback: Mass Murders, Christianity, LGBTQ, and GamerGate | Evan Todd
Pingback: On how we can end up living in 10^45 bubbles | UNIVERSE IN A POCKY BOX
Pingback: The Rise Of The Grey Tribe | Pax Vobiscum
Pingback: Weekly Links | Anarcho-bohemianism
Pingback: Morning no coffee yet 2014-10-24 – College waste and demonic delusion | Mangy Dog
Pingback: Outside in - Involvements with reality » Blog Archive » Thedes
Pingback: In-group and out-group | Something Fishy
Pingback: Tolerance | A Life Un-Lived
Pingback: Article: I can tolerate anything except the outgroup | Philosophies of a Disenchanted Scholar
Pingback: Miscellaneous interwebs | Arbor Vitae
Pingback: The fair-world fallacy and the creation of nerds | nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst
Pingback: Somewhere else, part 175 | Freakonometrics
Pingback: Strategic Faux Self-Criticism | Among the Poseidonians
Pingback: Behind The Bullying Epidemic | Wild Webmink
>Are these tribes based on geography? Are they based on race, ethnic origin, religion, IQ, what TV channels you watched as a kid? I don’t know.
What? Scott, you are a smart fellow, you should grok this. These are simply based on group pressure and us-them dynamic.
You gravitated towards the Blue Tribe because your upbringing is urban and secular, and you are the kind of guy who values brains more than brawns. Others gravitate towards the Red Tribe because they are rural, had a religious upbringing or buy into the idea of traditional masculinity, basically what I call dominance-positive (anti-egalitarian) values.
The rest of it is simply group pressure. Certainly everybody CAN like fancy pizza, but when a “red” guy tried that and liked that, some of his friends called him jokingly a fag, or asked him if he is going to go vegan now, or just said I don’t need all this sissy food, meat does it. You, on the other hand, I don’t know if you like steak or even are you a carnivore, but there must a certain pressure in your group to at least be a modest carnivore who eats salmon mousse and does not publish Facebook photos with a huge portion of ribs.
So there are basic sorting characterics, but the rest is just group pressure.
The basic sorting characteristic is, I think, intellectualism, Blue being pro-intellectual and Red being anti-intellectual, but this should NOT be seen as Blue being smart and Red being dumb and enjoying being dumb, it is way more complicated than this:
– Kanazawa has this hypothesis that IQ as a general tool tends to suppress other, more specific tools, like common sense or social skills. Reds value those.
– Intellectualism quite often results in the lack of physical exercise, low testosterone, low courage levels, not having that kind of warrior spirit, and so on. Reds value those, too.
To use a Medieval parallel, the Ideal Red would make an excellent knight: he values a warrior spirit, courage, strength, common sense that is way more useful in the hectic of battle than complex thinking, social skills, and his morality is generally that kind of in-group camaraderie that makes him mostly fair with his serfs as long as they behave sufficiently respectfully. The Ideal Blue would make an ideal monk – is primary weapon is intellect and learnedness.
So, Blues are clearly smarter, however, Blues sacrifice a lot of other important things for this smartness that Reds don’t have to. And some of the things sacrificed, like common sense, often leads to a form of educated folly.
One thing that annoys me that even the Blue Tribe on Reddit casually assumes that everybody who can write a comment in acceptable English must be American or at least more or less from the Anglosphere. I don’t think it is consciously marginalizing nationalism, but it is something sort of a privilege-bubble, same way how male is the default gender, if someone asks a question on a website like Reddit like “Do you think it is possible today to live without a car?” and it is not pointed out _where_ exactly, then of course it is assumed the question is about whether it is possible in America.
Frankly, if this happened in any other language, this would be understandable: the vast majority of people who choose the German language to discuss something on the Internet actually live in the DACH area or are from there, the only big exception is language learners who came to practice. So a default location would be acceptable.
But English as such is the No. 1 international language. It is the language used by a Danish businessman to talk to Chinese programmers, because what else should they do? You can work in Germany and still speak English all day because your boss is, say, from Iceland.
From these perspectives, English is NOT a location-dependent language, and as such the default-locationism definitely comes accross as annoying and a bit like privilege-blindness.
Frankly, sometimes I think it should be renamed Globish – we certainly don’t associate it anymore with actually English people, or with an Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. In fact in Europe it is so that a Dane, a Frenchwoman and a Polish man speak with each other in English easily, then an actual Englishman says something in a Scouse or Brummie accent and nobody understands a word. Frankly, it is not an exaggeration to say many English people don’t speak Globish very well.
Pingback: QotD: “I can tolerate anything except intolerance” « Quotulatiousness
Thank you for the insightful post. I stumbled on your blog a few months ago and intend to lurk for a while, if I’ll ever comment.
However, I found a broken link, in the sentence that reads:
“It does seem really possible to denounce ISIS’ atrocities to a population that already hates them in order to weak-man a couple of already-marginalized Muslims. “
should be
Pingback: Lightning Round – 2014/10/08 | Free Northerner
Pingback: QotD: Blue Tribe and Red Tribe media encoding « Quotulatiousness
Brief thought:
Red Tribe – nationalism
Blue Tribe – social justice
Grey Tribe – transhumanism
Have you ever read Pierre Bourdieu’s work on social capital, taste, distinction, and class? I think that might get you closer to what you’re describing in your piece about how we self segregate based on perceived identities. (Or you could just do what I do and call this sort of stuff “identity issues”) 😛
A few days after I initially read this post, I was in a group of friends and the subject of Osama bin Laden came up, and my girlfriend decried people who were happy when he was killed. I think she may have actually used the phrase “I’m not going to celebrate another human being’s death.”
And I said, “What? You wrote a huge long rant on Facebook saying how glad you were when Joan Rivers died.”
GF: “Yeah, but she’s terrible.”
I was reading this article, kind of reflexively recoiling at parts of it, but couldn’t quantify the problem. You start off with that whole noble bit about forgiveness. Hard to disagree with you after that. Same with your self effacing wrap-up. Then it hit me: you completely passed up every opportunity to acknowledge that all in-groups and out-groups are not created equal. You start off with World War II, but you never acknowledge that sometimes, one in-group can be *the actual bad guy.*
So later on you point out, essentially, that the Red tribe depending on their mood hates blacks, foreigners, gays, and the Blue tribe, whereas the Blue tribe, on the other hand, only hates the Red tribe. I just want to ask, could we please entertain the notion that it is right and proper to hate the red tribe, precisely because it is wrong to hate black people, foreign nationals, immigrants, and the lgbtq?
You equate “I can tolerate anything but intolerance” with “I can tolerate anything but the outgroup.” Again with the presumption that all outgroups are equal. It’s all fine and good to say that either we should be respectful when Thatcher dies or we should let people have their party when Bin Laden goes. It’s another thing entirely to say that we shouldn’t consider ourselves tolerant unless we tolerate hatred.
Your comment reads as extremely tribalistic to me and made me recoil in, I suspect, much the same way Scott’s post did to you. First, it’s extremely disingenuous to say that the Red Tribe “hates black people, immigrants and gay people.” Although some of them doubtless do, there’s a large difference between being opposed to (some of) a group’s interests and hating that group. Second, even if the aggregate harm to those groups that their opposition causes is high, and even if it’s right to hate “the Red Tribe” in abstract as a result, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right to hate all Red individuals and try to hound them out of every shared community. Third, presumably even you would say some forms of intolerance of Red Tribe members would be morally wrong, including some legal ones. Unless you have some very good arguments for the morality of your pet intolerant behaviors, I think it’s generally a good idea to err on the side of tolerance. Fourth, every ingroup is inevitably going to claim that its outgroup objectively deserves hatred, so the general algorithm “figure out which groups objectively deserve to be marginalized, then marginalize them to the utmost extent” is going to lead to tons of wrongful marginalization. That at least suggests it would be nice if there were some principles of non-marginalization we could all collectively benefit from adhering to regardless of whose self-righteousness happens to be justified.
You seem to imply there’s some kind of parity between these red and blue teams. If we were to draw up a flow chart, and I think that would be interesting, it would have to depict the blue team as the out group to the red team, the red team as dominant and out group to no-one, and most of the dynamics and the character of the relationships between the dominant (red) and the “other” party (blue) flowing from there — although I also think that as the demographics are changing, a lot of the character of the right wing’s public behavior comes to resemble that of an aging Alpha male seeing himself at greater risk from the younger males. But at any rate, I agree that it’s those values often considered Christian virtues such as humility and forgiveness that most take a beating in this vain struggle for the soul of America, where the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.
You should note that some of the links are broken, they redirect to *your domain*/*link* rather than just *link*.
Pingback: O hai let me wanna-be! pe Trilema - Un blog de Mircea Popescu.
This is one of the best essays I’ve ever read.
You nailed the “Team Gray” description of my Libertarian tribe….
Looking forward to reading more. I wish you could do less psychotherapy and more writing.
Pingback: Outgroups and Intolerance – Jeremiah's Old-School Blog
Pingback: Primary Color Tribalism | A Delay Being Reborn
Oh, and paleoconservatives are “highly educated” far beyond Team Blue – the writers for Chronicles are the sort of people who have read Greek and Latin classics in the original and the subscribers are the sort of people who wish they had.
An example that actually relates to the death of Osama bin Laden –
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/rule-by-assassination/
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/rule-by-assassination-ii/
“But it’s weird that it’s such a classic interest of members of the Blue Tribe, and members of the Red Tribe never seem to bring it up.
(‘We’re number one? Sure – number one in levels of sexual degeneracy! Well, I guess probably number two, after the Netherlands, but they’re really small and shouldn’t count.’)”
You can find conservatives who talk like that if you where to look – i.e., not Fox News, but paleoconservative publications (David Frum’s article on “unpatriotic conservatives” was a despicable slander, but not one wholly disconnected from reality) and to a lesser extent religious publications (as I said, to a lesser extent – a First Things article is more likely to have an overall friendly or optimistic tone than a Chronicles article).
Pingback: QotD: The political tribes of America « Quotulatiousness
I hope times are a changing and writing like this makes me think so.. I personally look forward to Bayesian Analysis on History… But I digress.
We are acting out over 2000 years of history and story. Only war can make peace, us vs. them… It sounds cliche but only in acting against our biases can things change.. and we do want them to change right?
The following quote(?) that comes to mind is (I believe) from Barack Obama… We don’t make peace with our allies, we look to have conversations with our enemies to facilitate communication and peace.
Only when we have common ground can we communicate enough to fight. It’s the differences we crave and recognize, but if the context and distance to understand is too far then there is no feedback loop of communication. We can’t get angry that they get angry at us for what they do… Before we (U.S.) forced trade with China they could give a ripe on what happened outside of their “Kingdom” but we enforced a common ground, perhaps unwisely and definitely in a fashion that pre-sages “blowback” as we know it today…
Enjoyed the article… one of the first things I saw on facebook I have thoroughly enjoyed!
“So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences.”
I would argue that a more fundamental approach is to examine interests in arelativistic fashion, using blood relatives as an easily understandable example. For example, back in the early 1970s, Robert Trivers worked out the math on sibling rivalry. Siblings have very good reasons for helping each other out relative to outside world, but they also have very good reasons for clashing over resources for which they are fiercest natural rivals, such as inheritances and parental time and money.
Rational rivalries and alliances are by no means arbitrary, but they are highly contingent upon circumstances.
Pingback: Tribes | RWCG
I would have thought that the “mixed feelings” about Osama’s death had more to do with a filmed commando style execution in a foreign country posing as “bringing justice”. If he had died from kidney failure (that’s actually what many people believe happened a long time before the “execution”) feelings of relief would probably have dominated.
I am not familiar enough with US politics and social groups. But it seems that the internet does not give a proper impression, because eloquent fringe groups are far more present in the webs than elsewhere. The “official” political spectrum of the Red/Blue parties is far narrower than in most other countries and most other times. Even if one includes the neoreactionary and anarcholibertarian fringe spectrum. There is not really any leftist group. What poses as “leftist” is, viewed from Europe, economically centrist social democracy, adorned with “fighting” for tiny minorities and symbolic PC issues.
Compare this with 1920s Germany (this was not a pleasant time, of course) when you had almost everything imaginable from monarchists, nationalists, catholic social conservatives, classical liberals, social democrats and communists.
Therefore the differences in fringe issues like gay rights have to be blown all out of proportion to get visible differences at all.
Pingback: sustainliberty
I am glad to see a liberal acknowledge how weird the race issue is and how weird it is to see white liberals tear into white males so aggressively.
President Obama and his wife Michelle were both very clearly very anti-white and anti-American before the 2008 election, but so were white liberals, so that was ok. What the white liberals don’t realize, is their version of anti-white differs from the Obamas. The white liberals are anti-segregation and anti-right. The Obamas were actually anti-integration and very black-power, black-separatist. President Obama’s mentor, Reverend Wright, who is mostly white, explains their ideology. If you read Obama’s autobiography, and read Michelle’s college essays, this ideology is clear. Also note how the president’s father, Obama Sr, was a big proponent of black power ethnic confiscation of wealth and property in Africa from both whites and Asians as practiced against the Indians in Uganda. Obama Sr pushed for the same thing in Kenya. I suspect the white liberal Obama supporters would be horrified by that and just tune that out.
New to this blog, love this post, but those caricatures are way off…
The Whole Foods CEO is super right wing politically, but from a food perspective, he is in the arugula camp, and that’s not uncommon. I drive a hybrid, love arugula, am disinterested in football, religiously agnostic, but I am super right wing. I am a Margaret Thatcher fan. I am horrified by liberal politics.
I’m not so convinced that Obama really believes in things. He strikes me as the sort of person who just follows the scent of power. (Then again, he appointed Eric Holder.)
Rod Dreher calls them ‘crunchy cons’.
Pingback: Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week - Page 375 - Ultimate Metal Forum
30 years ago I was compelled by matters of conscience to move from Blue Tribe to Red. My world is still 80% Blue and I am the outsider. Even people who have loved me all my life do not want to hear about it . I have been told by some not to talk about certain things in their presence, though I have to endure hearing every insulting and belittling thing the dominant culture (and yes, Blue is the dominant culture) puts out there. It has been painful but illuminating, and I am not sorry to be out of that fold. If you’re in a bubble, just try stepping out.
Never let Blues muzzle you. Agree to mutual ceasefires, but if they make a passing quip, go 10 rounds.
The Blues have learned to keep their opinions to themselves around me unless they want to open those opinions up to criticism.
Pingback: Odd Lots – Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary
By the way, when people celebrated Thatcher’s death, did anyone scream “misogyny”? Or are the women from the other tribe considered less women (or maybe the whole tribe is considered less human), and thus offending them is not really a transgression?
See also the treatment of Ayn Rand by people who complain that philosophy is dominated by white men. Or recently the #GamerGate protests where the SJW journalists decided that any woman who disagreed with them was secretly a man.
I mean it’s nice that they don’t actually believe “women are always right, you can never offend a woman or it’s misogyny” and they’re just using it as one more piece of ammunition for their side. More reasonable than the alternative! And since they don’t explicitly state the principle, they have deniability against claims of hypocrisy, too.
It’s not obvious to me that there’d be less hostility directed at Rand if she were a man, but I’d be interested to hear alternative views. Competent and authoritative women are seen as less likable in psych studies, so the Thatcher/Rand claims are plausible on priors. Microsexism can act as a hostility multiplier even if it isn’t the hostility’s root cause.
Rand is a bit idiosyncratic to count as Exhibit A here, though. A lot of professional philosophers dismiss her, including philosophers who take seriously scholars like Anscombe, Foot, de Beauvoir, Churchland, Millikan, Korsgaard, Thomson. A lot of people calling for more women in philosophy may be calling for professionals, and categorize Rand more with inspiring pop philosophers like Victor Frankl, Sam Harris, and Robert Pirsig.
I haven’t been following GamerGate closely, but I thought token woman/minority sockpuppetry was happening quite a bit?
It’s not really easy to tell how much sockpuppetry is going on, because the SJWs will assert it without any evidence beyond the opinions expressed. To the extent that GamerGate has a coherent will (where boycotts are being organized on 8chan etc.), they tell their followers not to pretend to be minorities or women if they aren’t, for fear of being discredited. I’m not sure how much this helps though, because people who don’t follow GamerGate closely only hear the accusations of sockpuppetry and don’t see when they’re rebutted.
I started paying attention to GamerGate when a minority gamer I know personally was accused of being white for participating in the protests. Leaving aside the fact that the “anti-racists” think being white is something to accuse someone of, it’s hypocritical of them to erase minority identities when they don’t fall into lockstep with their ideology.
I’ve been following #GamerGate reasonably closely. Every single accusation of “cishet white male sockpuppet” (there’s usually “virgin”/”neckbeard”/”manbaby” in there too) has been disproved with pictures, and in the dozens of livestreams they organize with women and minorities in the #notyourshield tag. I bet I missed some real ones, but this pattern has been dominant in my experience.
The misrepresentation of #GamerGate has been a fascinating phenomenon in itself, especially because it often doesn’t seem to be intentional.
Not everything bad that people say about a woman is misogynist. Only bad things that people say because a woman is a woman are misogynist.
In this case, people are saying bad things because this particular woman was a really awful politician. Why would it even come up?
I would be very surprised if none of Thatcher’s critics said misogynistic things about her. I would also be very surprised if none of her supporters called criticism of her misogynistic without adequate justification.
Maybe things were just really different in the 1980s and by the time she died the lines had already been drawn?
Thatcher was a continent away and largely before my time, but I get the impression that she was perceived as unfeminine on the Left. That’s not something that you can accuse her of in public if you’re a leftist, but it is something you can joke about behind closed doors, or in media aimed at your own tribe.
Condoleeza Rice got similar treatment during the Bush years. Sarah Palin’s a bit different; the jokes about her that I’ve heard cast her (beg pardon) as a dumb redneck bimbo, which you could certainly call sexist — at least on grounds of being a gendered insult — but isn’t a direct attack on gender nonconformity.
Pingback: Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week - Page 375 - Ultimate Metal Forum
“So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences.”
Exactly what Heartiste (and many other people of course) have said: diversity+proximity=war.
“There are very many claims and counterclaims about the precise meaning of this, but it ended up being a big part of the evidence in favor of the current consensus that all white people are at least a little racist.”
The LoLest LoL of the month… You didn’t need to put “white” in the last part – having an in-group bias is present in all human beings. If having an in-group bias means you’re a racist then every single sane human being is a racist… which makes the concept utterly meaningless. And singling out whites in this context proves an increased anti-white racism, a deep-seated belief that there is something innately wrong with whites.
“The size of the race effect for white people was only 56-44 (and in the reverse of the expected direction)”
Whoa, whoa. Everyone has their own in-group bias, but it’s only whites who consciously go against it – and they are seen as weak for it, and punished. It reminds me of the fact that slavery was a universal practice (PoC had white slaves in many parts of history), and it was whites who decided to do away with it – and they are still punished for it by claiming that they were the worst/only offenders. The longer I think about it the more it seems that we whites are the naivest people on earth abused by all the others who are much more pragmatic (expression chosen with politeness in mind). We gave “minorities” an inch, and another, and then some, but nothing seems to satisfy them. On the contrary, they get more and more angry and demanding.
“the size of the party effect was about 80-20 for Democrats and 69-31 for Republicans.”
…which says pretty much everything you need to know about the tolerance (and the integrity) of dem’s and rep’s relative to each other. The fact that it is the dem’s who constantly talk about tolerance make this all the more illuminating. You can call me stupid but it is much harder to shame the data into silence 🙂
“That means the Red Tribe feels intensely patriotic about “their” country, and the Blue Tribe feels like they’re living in fortified enclaves deep in hostile territory. ”
The thing I don’t get is why it is sacrilege to even think about letting people form their own… “colonies”, so to speak, so they can live peacefully surrounded by other people and a culture they like. If proximity + political differences create turmoil, and political differences can’t be resolved, why enforce proximity? It’s just plain stupid; a recipe for constant animosity.
“Some unsavory people try to use them to prove that white people are the real victims or the media is biased against white people or something.”
Fighting for victim status is silly. But the media? Come on, let’s get honest for a second here… It is biased against whites, as evidenced by all the anti-white bullshit you just linked to. Or am I supposed to believe that all this anti-white sentiment coming from white people is somehow balanced by pro-white sentiment coming from PoC? Right around Ferguson a white guy was shot to death by police elsewhere in the US, and the media didn’t give a damn, because it was not proper fodder for the race wars. Let’s not pretend that the media is impartial or white-friendly, please… They consistently called the hispanic Zimmerman “white” just so they could incite some anti-white hatred.
“The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe.”
This is not entirely true considering the experiments you mentioned, that found out Blues also had racial biases… They just keep saying they aren’t racists – deep down they are, just like everybody else 🙂
Your article pretty much shows that the blue tribe has no integrity whatsoever. They are an elitist mob held together by pretenses. The red tribe has always denounced them as such, but suddenly it seems that science and logic backs them up on this.
Thing is, red and blue doesn’t mean what they used to, and nowadays it is an engineered conflict to keep the perpetual infighting going. Divide and conquer, divide and conquer. Our most pressing problem is figuring out how to get out of this polarized, tribalist worldview. As long as we see each other as outgroups we’re descending into conflict, poverty, hatred. We need something to unify us, preferably not an outside outgroup but something more… enlightened.
Nice comments you get here, Scott. I never saw anything like this a few years ago. I like the new audience you’ve been attracting. Just let go of the dead-weight liberal leftoid tendencies you have, and this place will be great.
Comment reported for the obvious reasons.
Didn’t we talk about this in the aftermath of the last SJ post? Scott, run screaming in the opposite direction.
I was just assuming that Ballast’s comment was sarcasm, but now I look at his other posts I’m not so sure…
Also, Scott, please don’t stop critiquing the SJW’s, you’re the only person I know who can remain unmindkilled around them. If the influx of low quality instapundit (or whatever) posters are giving you trouble, just ban them or preemptively close the comments.
I don’t think it’s sarcasm, but if it is, that guy’s reeeeally bad at communicating.
I’m also in favor of heavy banning of instapunders or wherever they come from, despite being a borderline HBD/Reactionary myself. Comments like that is why I stopped reading HBD blogs (well, that and the tendency to analyze everything through the same lense).
“despite being a borderline HBD/Reactionary myself.”
Why? 90% of what HBDers claim is probably going to turn out either wrong or exaggerated. A few HBD blogs I used to follow have barely updated in the last few months. One of the more knowledgeable HBDers I know has recently admitted that he’s found lots of anomalies in migrant data and that he’s not expecting genome studies to find large genetic differences between races. Modest ones at best.
George, don’t stoop to Ballast’s level of refusing to name names, give links, and make precise claims.
Obvious troll is obvious.
And i’m surprised you haven’t noticed that Scott IS a borderline “liberal leftoid”.
Seems fairly sincere to me; we had an argument upthread about HBD.
Hey, so your broken-record repetition of HBD stuff sounded familiar, and I checked your IP, and YOU’RE THE PERSON WHO’S BEEN IMPERSONATING ME AND TRYING TO FRAME ME FOR STUFF.
WHY? WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT?
I am not being insincere in my praise of this post. It is refreshing to see such a perspective on a leftist blog. I commend Scott for letting these otherwise silenced and slighted people to have a voice here. Even despite you problematic beliefs, such as your dismissive view of HBD.
Pingback: Da Tech Guy Blog » Blog Archive » The Mystery of the Christian Ebola Doctors Solved!
Pingback: Tolerance: It’s Not For Everyone | The Bartelists
As a wise guy once said:
“A heretic is someone who shares ALMOST all of your beliefs. Kill him.”
So, as a sister piece to this essay, has everyone here read Paul Graham’s Keep Your Identity Small piece? (I am failing at HTML, so I can’t link it, but it’s Googlable easily.) It seems like the best way to avoid the trap of it being extremely difficult (or contrarianly-signaling effective) to criticize a group is for you to try to keep as much mental distance from groups as you can. Remember, the world is under no obligation to fit itself into the categories you sort bits of it into; when you meet and interact with dozens of people at a time, a category that carves reality at the joints with 95% accuracy will hit a lot of bone.
Myself, I really like to follow a bunch of different communities, and see the best and the worst of what they have to offer, so I have mental ammunition to shoot back at the “Defend X! Attack Y!” reflexes I have. And it’s important to really look hard; it’s really easy to gloss over bad behavior with “No, although that person identifies as X, and everyone but my subgroup of X thinks they’re X, they’re really not X, so I don’t have to own that X contains people like that!”, or (as Scott pointed out in a previous post) to simply end up in a bubble where no one talks about certain kinds of behavior, so it’s easy to mentally excuse it as just a few bad apples.
And actually, now that I think of it…is there really an advantage to trying to use group membership to carve reality at the joints? If you know that it’s really hard to get and maintain accurate priors of behavior based on group membership when you’re a member of some groups and that group gives you points for attacking other groups, isn’t there potential gain in saying “I know that this person has given these signs of those tribal values, but I’m going to attempt to ignore them until I’ve interacted with the person directly, because a nice person’s going to look nice whether they fly a red, blue, grey, or irrigo flag.”?, especially when it’s not hard to have those casual interactions?
The problem with the “keep your identity small” piece is that when talking about not identifying with politics it ignores the difference between practical debates and differing goals. For example, I have no especially strong feelings about gun control because that is more a debate over which policy kills the least people, and if someone could convinced me that gun ownership actually reduced death I would support it. However, other issues, like abortion and homosexuality, are more about differences in morality than any debates over facts, and morality is very much part of someone’s identity. Of course the lines can sometimes be blurred, like when people defend gun ownership by saying their right to own guns is more important than others’ right to continue existing, and when neoreactionaries try and claim gay marriage will somehow literally destroy civilization.
But anyways better advice would be to identify with terminal values and not instrumental courses of action.
Saying gun control is primarily about which policy kills less people seems like a very wrong approach. Millions of people get enjoyment out of gun ownership. So in order for increasing gun control to justified it would have to prevent a signifigant amount of deaths. Its immoral and anti-human to curtail people’s freedoms unless you have a strong reason (not just an old weak reason).
As far as I can tell the level of gun control does not make a large difference in the murder rate. Guns seem to neither prevent nor cause a large fraction of murders. Based on this we should not increase gun control (and probably we should decrease it a bit).
Well, I think we’re at the kind of basic problem with sociology as a science, which is that it’s really hard to get everyone to agree to “OK, everyone, we’re going to do 1975-2000 again, only with different gun control laws, and see what happens!”
But in the absence of the ability to do that, you can say “Well, this country is fairly close to us in that time period with law X and they had positive results!”, for an entire spectrum of countries and different policies. Country A had gun control and an increase in home invasion and knife crime, country B had a rifle in every home and extremely low rates of any kind of crime, country C had strict gun control and low violent crime but a high non-gun suicide rate, country D had high personal armament but also got invaded, and so forth.
And, to tie it back to my main point, which of those data sets you are often exposed to and which are dismissed as outliers that aren’t part of a demonstrative social trend is often very heavily weighted based on which group you’re in.
Also, I just realized that there was one other point that Scott made, but didn’t exactly verbalize (although it might have come up in the giant radioactive discussion of doom since): the behavior which Scott identifies as painful and difficult isn’t just criticizing his tribe, it’s doing so in a manner which will give aid and ammunition to the enemy. It seems like the difference between complaining about your family, and going to the police about them.
Link for convenience’s sake: Keep Your Identity Small
On the meta level this is excellent. On the object level I found this rather off-putting although I did appreciate the final section. If you applied the same criteria for discourse to other groups, I think you would find blue tribe to be not significantly worse than other groups such as Catholics, atheists and conservatives.
The most interesting part of this essay to me, was the dark arts tactic of using disguised queries to discretely insult your opponents:
Its uncool to call Conservatives mean names and insult them. But insulting racist or sexist white guys? How could anyone challenge you unless they are secretly a nasty racist or sexist themselves?
This tactic is incredibly common. Its no longer cool to make fun of heathens, atheists, or people of other religions; but it is cool to make fun of fedora wearing neck beards (this is also a subtle way of insulting nerds, a group that has also fallen out of favor to make fun of directly).
This tactic is also very old. Criticizing a woman for having multiple sex partners is unusual. Criticizing her for being a “slut” is very common, though it is being pushed back against.
Criticizing someone for being a virgin in their twenties is bizarre. But you can criticize them for being a “prude who thinks they are so much better than everyone else”.
This is in a pretty much the non-central fallacy applied to types of people. You start off by creating a category with negative connotations including some trait that you want to attack (atheism, being overweight, having too much sex, or not enough) then assert that someone is a central member of that category because they have the trait that you are trying to attack.
Not if that person is male and you’re implying that they’re not a virgin by choice.
Well maybe its not bizarre, but it’s certainly being *Edit: a petty bully*.
(as in the people who make the “criticism” are *edit: petty bullies*, not the target)
Edit: Sorry, wasn’t sure about the standards of language here
Double Edit: Also you probably agree with me anyways.
Just realized you meant bizarre as in rare not as in weird. Ignore my previous comment.
And in case anyone wants to know the phrase I used in my previous post before editing was asshole, because I just realized my editing made it look like it was something else.
Recent citing:
Belle Knox is a Duke student who ran of money to pay for college, so she filled in the gap by being a porn actress. Criticizing someone for being a porn actress because it proves they are “morally depraved” is still acceptable in many circles unfortunately; but rather than criticize her on that front many of the critics jumped on her decision to remain at Duke calling her an “elitist self entitled snob who thinks she’s too good for community college – and will do anything to maintain her sense of superiority”. (rough paraphrase)
That’s rather strange when you think about it. Taking on a job to pay for college makes you “entitled”? (oh how I hate that word)
Dear Mr. Alexander,
Thank you for one of the best pieces on this subject I’ve ever read! (Can this be more broadly distributed or extended to book form – I hope?) My own thinking has been running the same direction for some time and I’ve struggled with a way to describe what I see and hear (and think) in just the same way.
Also, just recently, I had an online conversation regarding an in/out-group love/hate-fest news story with a rare, civil and similarly confused blue tribe/grey tribe waffler (my bias?), who seemed similarly troubled by the same observations you make. Upon completion of our sharp, but good-natured jabs at each other’s dissimilarities in rationales and interpretations, we followed by noting points of agreement and expressing admiration for the others sincerity, passion and desire for “the good” that were somewhat disconcerting, I think, for both of us, as such an exchange would normally end – in my experience – with feces hurling at best, and death/harm wishes at worst. It seemed, I guess, to make me feel hopeful? A feeling I’m not accustomed to having in such “discussions”.
Again, I thank you for sharing your excellent insights in a refreshingly honest and plain-spoken way. And I look forward to hearing more from you.
Very best regards,
Michael Reed
I’ve always been skeptical of the BSD t-shirt story, because …
Native: “And what kind of football team has the devil as a mascot?”
… when I lived on the prairie, I got the impression that half the rural highschools had either Red Devils or Blue Devils.
The professional hockey team that plays home games in New Jersey is called the New Jersey Devils.
Pretty minor team compared to the Duke Blue Devils.
Stray thought: “shit * say” videos have a big difference in tone if they are made by in-group or out-group folks. When “we” make a video mocking ourselves, it is a friendly parody. When we make a video mocking “them,” it’s as vicious as possible.
Those are really two different genres that just happen to have the same name.
Token Red tribe lurker here,
FYI
This post just got linked by Glen Reynolds’ Instapundit Feed. Professor Reynolds is pretty much the internet godfather of the main-stream Red tribe, Senators read his blog. You might have already noticed from watching incoming links, but if you were looking to get the “others” attention you have it, at least to some degree.
Pingback: I can tolerate anything except intolerance. Or the Dutch. | Not So Fast
Maybe it’ll amuse you that I enjoyed reading this.
I s’pose I’m “Red Tribe” (Conservative, Evangelical, and all that), and I gotta tell you, you can aim every last one of these criticisms straight at the Red Tribe and they would be valid. As a Red Triber who runs around Blue regions of the internet and who has both Red and Blue friends on Facebook, there is a particular type of facepalm that goes with seeing anti-outgroup posts from either side right next to each other on my “Friends” feed. I have to remind myself, often, that the most annoying Red Tribers are human; flawed people I care for and who have positive traits, and who could use some love and grace.
‘Cause it has somehow gotten easier to love the Blue Tribe. Go figure.
We’re perverse little creatures, we humans. But this is not a new thing. I come from Mennonite ancestry, where the highest virtue is humility, and it’s amazing how very proud we are of that. *headdesk*
Pingback: Of tolerance and outgroups
Scott, that was easily the best thing I’ve read in months, and I hope you never regret writing it. This is about as honest an essay as I’ve seen–that, or you just happened to place yourself nicely within my in-group of people who are largely disgusted by both Red and Blue, and sometimes Gray, occasionally myself, but mostly everyone else. 🙂 This essay, while long, was well worth the read, even though it ultimately leaves me feeling somewhat uneasy. And I think that was the intention. Nothing you said was surprising, per se. I’ve been suspecting similar things for some time, though you put it into words extraordinarily well. But your final coup de grace was your moment of “Physician, heal thyself”, which implicated me right along with you. Well done. You’re spot on–tolerance should be painful or it’s not tolerance.
I’d be a loyal blue triber, except that they betrayed me and plenty of other people. But I want to talk about the blue and red tribes of other countries. Red tribes in other countries can be very different from America’s red tribe. They might be monarchists, they might favor a feudal system or even a caste system, etc. But throughout the world the blue tribes seem to be much the same. They are the women who want to have careers the same way men do. They are the gays who want to live openly. They are the secularists who don’t want the local red tribe’s religion to suffocate them.
Now after the Shah of Iran was evicted, Iran’s red tribe took over and executed a lot of members of the blue tribe. I had what I thought was a natural, blue tribe reaction: I was horrified and wanted revenge. It wasn’t until after 9/11 that I learned that the other members of the blue tribe here in America identified not with their fellow blue tribers in Iran, but with Iran’s red tribe. Incredible. It was like Jews supporting the Nazis or blacks supporting the KKK.
Ever since then I’ve been trying to get through to America’s blue tribers. No, these people are not your friends, and no, I’m not going to like Muslims (except the very, very moderate ones). They all seem like red tribers to me. And I take it that the message of Karima Bennoune’s book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here is basically, “Hey, blue tribers in the Western world, will you stop supporting the red tribe in the Middle East and start supporting your real friends, the blue tribers in the Middle East?”
Maybe there is a blue triber here who can explain their (to me) mysterious love for people I think of as red tribers and make it seem quite reasonable, but it just looks irrational and even suicidal to me.
Blue tribers are very strongly against seeing third worlders (including middle easterners) oppressed by strong western interests. That sometimes bleeds over into support for anyone who tries to stop that, even though some of those anyones are worse.
There may also be an element of wishful thinking. Last I looked, the middle east had a depressing shortage of genuine good guys.
That can possibly be biological. HBD proves that middle easterners are more greedy when personal and familial gain is considered, so therefore there will always be unrest in the middle east as we see. Nothing we can do.
This is the part where I’d normally ask for a source, but any source you’re likely to provide is unlikely to be one I’d find trustworthy.
Also, I don’t find this comment to be either true or kind. Per Scott’s advice of erring on this side, I’ve reported it.
The sources are the many HBD blogs which draw on mainstream science. [H]bdchick is one of them, Jayman is another. Search for middle east related stuff around the rest of the HBD sphere and you’ll learn that my sources are indeed very trustworthy, unless you have an irrational hatred for HBD.
Unnecessary as well, actually. It wouldn’t really matter to this thread if the conclusion were true.
There is no “if” there anymore, and it is relevant to this whole topic. Scott pays only little lipservice to the HBD view, and it is clear he doesn’t ascribe to it. That is totally fine, but unscientific. The whole thing with tribalism and clannishness is that it is differs between races and subpopulation, and is largely genetic (he refers to this) and has between population differences due to gene-culture coevolution
I looked and didn’t find anything very trustworthy. Anybody can say that their preferred conclusions are backed up by mainstream science; actually demonstrating this is another matter entirely.
Traditionally, the next step in this debate is that I ask for an actual study published in a peer-reviewed journal that directly supports your claims, and then you assert that of course no such study exists because academia would never allow it to be published (which is true) but of course the HBD people are drawing obvious commonsense conclusions from mainstream science and only someone who had been mindkilled by progressive politics could fail to acknowledge their truth. To which I respond that most smart people I’ve heard from don’t seem to think much of those conclusions and I have no evidence that the HBD people aren’t themselves victims of their own political biases. And pretty soon we run smack into the Hard Problem of Figuring Out Which Purported Experts Should Actually Be Listened To.
Is this a fair assessment?
You are right that academics are disallowed due to cultural Marxism and political correctness from publishing anything that rails against the dominant paradigm (even if the paradigm is demonstrably wrong.) The rest of your assessment is incorrect, HBD is just science, and the conclusions that are derived from it. No more, no less. The truth can’t be “racist” or anything, because science, and HBD, is inherently apolitical and value-free. These truths are affirmed by people like Nicholas Wade, Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending, the many HBDers, etc. So you are wrong in saying that “smart people” are against HBD.
You seem to have redefined “smart people” as “HDB bloggers”.
To be clear, my claim wasn’t that no smart people buy into HBD, only that most of them don’t.
In any case, do you in fact have any studies to cite?
The sources are all on the various HBD blogs which you neglect to read. I can only conclude that your opposition to HBD is irrational.
I searched to find what HBD Chick had to say on the Middle East, and this post, for example, isn’t science in any meaningful sense.
Ironically, “I can’t be bothered to cite sources, but I’m totally right; go read my side’s blogs until you’ve indoctrinated yourself” is one of the attitudes that ticks me off about SJ.
Ladies and gentlemen, horseshoe theory in action!
I used to read HBD blogs somewhat regularly, but reading too much stupid stuff and lazy thinking about the middle east was one of the things that annoyed me and drove me away.
Yes, okay, it’s pretty likely that some group differences in intellectual abilities have genetic causes, even if it’s not very nice to mention it; that doesn’t mean *any* difference between *any* group has to have genetic causes!
So you people can just disregard Ballast, reading HBD blogs would probably be a waste of your time.
As far as I understand it, the HBD argument about Middle East instability is:
1) Virtually all behavioral traits are substantially heritable. (Extremely well established).
2) This includes the pattern of traits that can be dubbed “clannishness” – favoring kin over non-kin, distrust of outsiders, et cetera. Everyone is clannish to some extent, but the degree to which we are is substantially genetic. (Probable in light of 1), but I don’t remember seeing any direct studies on this).
3) a) In many Middle Eastern countries, first-cousin marriage is very common. (Well-established).
4) Kin selection operates strongly on consanguineous families, so the selective pressure in favor of clannishness is much higher than in other societies. (Plausible given 2) and 3), though I haven’t seen any papers directly modeling this and I’m not sure of the mathematics here).
5. High clannishness leads to nepotism and corruption, distrust in liberal institutions and the rule of law generally (why should outsiders have a say over your family?), and a high propensity for tribal violence. (This is the most speculative part, though it’s hardly implausible).
This argument isn’t conclusive, and clearly a lot more research is needed. I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss it out of hand, though.
Yep. Not only middle east, but in all other populations there is selection for such behaviors. Criminality in blacks, Slavs, Hispanics, probably has a genetic origin. I think Scott is an idiot if he doesn’t take HBD seriously, its been thus far the strongest force that answers all questions about humanity. Since every behavior is heritable (not quite genetic causation per set, but whatever) HBD is right in saying everything about human societies has an innate, evolutionary origin. This is the perspective of mainstream science.
Blue vs Red is as much a cultural thing as a political one, so using blue to mean liberals and leftists, gray to mean libertarians and red to mean conservatives is not really accurate.
But yes I noticed this also. It seems to have something to do with the rise of the “new left” over the “old” one, and the rise of postmodernism. Also, when Westerners try to criticize other societies for illiberal and unleft practices (i.e pretty much everything about Islam) they are accused of being bigots.
This, the reactionary-masquerading-as-leftwing environmental movement, increasing hostility to rationality and science, the gleeful, willful collateral damage ignorance of much of the popular “social-justice” movement, unwillingness to ever use military intervention (yes i see the irony), and the near-total abandonment of caring about material goods allocation* has caused me to become highly dissilusioned with the new left.
*indeed, some seem to have adopted a hostility towards the very idea of material goods being important. It should be noted that only the rich can afford to reject materialism.
(Note: I’m actually more gray than blue culturally and personality-wise, but have left-ish rather than libertarian economic views. I also have weird positions that go off in completely different directions, like thinking cryonics should be part of universal healthcare and that there should be a government agency dedicated to anti-aging research, and being somewhat hostile to democracy)
Edit: I think the point about “social justice” may have actually been unfair, that’s more just people being typical jerks than anything ideological and similar rhetoric probably shows up in any ideology. though it does seem to be unique in its frequency of trying to make up elaborate justifications for it’s bullying of people who have done nothing wrong (sometimes even by it’s own standards).
Oh wow reading this to myself I sound… I don’t know exactly how to put it, but if someone else wrote like that I would assume either English is not their first language or they had some sort of learning disability. It’s not the actual content of the post but the way it’s written. My other comments sometimes look this way to myself also. I wonder why this is…
I think it’s a combination of attempted-high-register-sounding stock phrases (“indeed”, “it should be noted that…”), punctuation, and questionable handling of tense/aspect. Putting on my editor hat, I’d first-pass the first two paragraphs as follows:
The Blues you describe are as utterly absent from my (diverse, but skewing blue) experience as Reds are for Scott. Literally, I have never met anyone in my ~80% blue social circle who believes what you just claimed is true of all blues.
I take it, Matthew, you were replying to me. So there are blues out there who are angry about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, angry about the murder of Theo van Gogh, angry about Obama’s support for the Iranian regime against the protesters, angry about his support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the list goes on and on. It feels as though the blue tribers in America are trying to turn us into Saudi Arabia. Certainly, Karima Bennoune, whom I mentioned in my last post, feels as I do. Her book details many atrocities and death threats against blues in the Muslim world, all of whom feel that no blue in the West is on their side.
Who are these mythical people you speak of?
Yes. Disapproval of this fatwa is universal among anyone I have ever met of any political stripe.
Again, I don’t know anyone of any political stripe who approves of murdering people for expressing unpopular opinions, regardless of who is doing the murdering.
I think this is the example that gives away the game, frankly. At no point did Obama support the Iranian regime. He pointedly did not BOMB them, which many reds clearly think would be a good idea, because blues think this would be stupid and counterproductive, not because they approve of Iran’s theocracy.
As opposed to those paragons of blue-ism in the Egyptian military? This example suggests ignorance of both blues and Egypt.
This is a fact about your mindset, not about the blue tribe.
I have to disagree with all of this. My wife is a college professor, and I have an email account with that college. Over the last dozen years, there have been many, many mass emails of the Islamophilic type: speakers talking about this or that wonderful aspect of Islam, announcements of courses on Islam showing how much they have given to the world, etc. There has never been a single email that hints that Islam has victims (generally women and gays). Not one. Will we get speakers talking about Rotherham, for example? No way (unless they blame it all on white males).
If there is so much anger at things Muslims have done, why are they so silent about it? Where are the demonstrations in the street? Are you reviving Nixon’s idea of a silent majority, but blues in this case?
Incidentally, all I want is for Obama to show some support for blue tribers in the Muslim world, but instead he leans very strongly for supporting the reds. He simply did not have to show support for either the Muslim Brotherhood or the military in Egypt.
Everyone already knows that. Why harp on it?
(Especially when Islamic culture in antiquity is so damn interesting. Seriously, look it up.)
(And are you sure you didn’t manage to miss emails about, say, Malala Yousafzai, a victim of Islamic extremism who is very popular among the left?)
He… didn’t show support for either?
The mainstream Blue reaction to the Muslim Brotherhood was “oh, great, it’s a Muslim theocratic party… but maintaining the Schelling fence around banning political parties is important, and Egyptian democracy is fragile enough as it is, so let’s just see how this ends,” and the mainstream Blue reaction to the military booting out the Muslim Brotherhood was “okay, after a long string of Muslim Brotherhood abuses, democracy was just not going to happen in Egypt, and we prefer a stable military dictatorship to an unstable theocratic one.”
Neither of those is support, nor even close to it, but could be misconstrued as support by an intellectually dishonest opposition.
FWIW, that’s a 100% accurate rendition of my feelings on the matter, as a card-carrying blue.
“and we prefer a stable military dictatorship to an unstable theocratic one.””
If this is the case, why did you bother deposing Mubarak or Gaddafi or (attempted to) Assad in the first place?
Mubarak was overthrown, not deposed. Blues supported the revolution, however, because there was a very real chance that it would result in democracy, as happened successfully in Tunisia and Yemen, and may still happen in Libya.
Syria has largely become as bad as it is because Red opposition prevented the US from effectively intervening in the conflict. Islamist groups stepped in to fill the power vacuum, resulting in ISIS.
No, I didn’t miss any emails about Malala. Nor were there any emails about the murder of Theo van Gogh or the recent disclosures of sexual abuse in Rotherham or a zillion other possible incidents on which there could have been emails.
I’ve read books by Nick Cohen and Paul Berman, both of them left-of-center and both making the same assumptions I am making about the blue tribe, namely that they are perfectly happy with the leftist alliance with the Muslim right. Bassim Tibi, a (genuinely) moderate Muslim, wrote a book sharing that assumption, also, and condemning them for it.
The same is true for books by the Norwegian feminist Hege Storhaug and the Algerian feminist Karmia Bennoune. They are both protesting against leftists who seem clueless about how their own policies are harming women.
Bruce Bawer, a gay writer, and Phyllis Chesler, a feminist, have both moved to the right in frustration at the failure of the left to condemn the sexism and homophobia of Muslim immigrants.
On the other hand, Martha Nussbaum wrote a book condemning Islamophobia while saying almost nothing about Muslim abuses of women. She even mentioned Salman Rushdie without mentioning the fatwa, which I take was due to her not wanting to offend anyone.
And now various anonymous people claiming to be of the blue tribe are telling me that all along they have agreed with me but apparently have never said anything about it in public. Yeah, right.
Maybe you could mention a book or two that (1) expresses your beliefs and (2) condemns the beliefs of those liberals and leftists who are soft on Muslim abuses.
First, I don’t think any of the genuine blues here are actually agreeing with you. You’ve been making an isolated demand for rigor where Muslims are involved, doing the “why haven’t you condemned Islam” dance whenever Muslims do something wrong. How many e-mails did you get condemning Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism as a whole when extremist adherents of those religions did something wrong? The actual blue position is that religious extremism is bad, not that there is something uniquely awful about Islam.
But even if that objection weren’t available, your observations still aren’t evidence for what you think they are. As both the current post and All Debates are Bravery Debates imply, all that is required for your e-mail to skew in favor of Islam is for your university colleagues to perceive Islamophobia to be a bigger problem than excessive tolerance of intolerance (an impression that encountering you is likely to cement).
Dear Matthew,
My original request was for blue tribers to explain why they supported those Muslims who were red-tribers. You and a few others insisted that they hadn’t been doing that, but now you are saying the exact opposite (“First, I don’t think any of the genuine blues here are actually agreeing with you.”)
So, it seems that we are back to my original request. However, you have managed to misrepresent my position in your last response. I am not “doing the ‘why haven’t you condemned Islam’ dance whenever Muslims do something wrong,” as you describe it. Just for the record, I don’t have anything against blue-tribe Muslims like, say, Bassam Tibi (author of Islamism and Islam), and since there are Muslims I rather like, I’m not interested in a general condemnation of Islam.
What I want is a condemnation of specific abuses done by Muslims. The situation in Rotherham is exactly the sort of thing I don’t want. The sexual abuses went on for so long partly because people who knew about the problem were afraid of being called racist, and so they remained silent.
Let’s say one of the victims from Rotherham confronted you and demanded to know what you had done to protect them, what you had done to prevent those abuses. If they were to ask me, I could honestly say that I had many arguments over the last dozen years with liberals and leftists in which I pointed out the dangers to women and others of siding so completely with Muslims, but every time I raised my voice, I was called racist. (You yourself practically said the same thing in your last sentence.) What would you say to her? What did you do during the last dozen years to protect her? Did you issue any warnings that women might become victims of the left’s policies?
What I want is for the left to be neutral with respect to Islam. I want it to be between Islamophobia and Islamophilia. (The left I grew up with didn’t even like religion.) There are abuses that will emerge if either prevails, so the best policy is one that is neutral and is on the lookout for both types of abuse. I want the left to say, “Yes, we know that Muslims have been victims, but some are also likely to be victimizers, and we can’t have that.”
If people like you don’t agree with me on that, I’d like to know why.
John P: I think perhaps your particular email-list-head has a peculiar bias that doesn’t generalize well to all blues. I’m blue/gray, and what you ascribe to blues seems to me like yellow.
They are definitely a majority in the leftist circle.
Scott, it’s time to close the comments on this thread. The occasional insight that might show up is not worth the amount of bullshit (in the technical sense) that one would have to wade through to find it.
Brandeis’ treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the controversy over segregation in British schools and the use of hate speech laws against criticism of Islam are all examples of the attitude John P describes.
Interestingly most of these sorts of incidents are in Europe. I have noticed similar attitudes in America, but they are less powerful due to differences in laws and policies.
The key bit is that “red” tribers don’t oppose the blue tribe primarily. Conservatives tend to be concentric in their loyalty. The muslims have a proverb that illustrates this perfectly: “Me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the infidel”. For conservatives, it’s “fight the liberals, fight with liberals against europeans, with europeans against Russia, with Russia against muslim crazies”. Republicans might hate Obama, but they lined right up to help him bomb Iraq again, many of them pushed him to be harder on Putin and Syria.
The “blue” tribe on the other hand opposes the red tribe primarily, and hence supports anyone, anywhere that the red tribe dislikes. So they are on the side of terrorists, ultra-nationalist dictators, communists, anything they can find to annoy the reds. It is confusing until you realize that the blues really do think that the reds are the worst thing in the whole world.
This was absurdly divorced from reality when he claimed it, and it’s still absurdly divorced from reality when you claim it. In the rare instances where this isn’t simply caricature, the offending blues get excoriated by other blues.
I disagree. One need only look at the vast torrent of left-wing hate for Israel and support for Palestinians. Why? Israel is the most gay-friendly country on earth, is the only country I know of with a completely gender-integrated military, is hugely left-wing politically, was founded by socialists. The Palestinians, and Hamas in particular, are somewhere to the right of Gengis Khan. They stone women, hang gays, and have waged a terror campaign that has lasted half a century. But Reds like the Israelis and hate islamists, so off they go.
Oh, and the LGM blog is pretty solidly Grey, so holding it up as an avatar of blue-on-blue criticism is pretty far removed from reality.
Saying “blues are for terrorists” is just unredeemably stupid. Not sure where else to go on that point; it’s not the sort of thing that actually warrants a considered response.
If you look at data, blues are very mixed on Isreal – Scott recently had a post that talked a bit about this (I think one of the recent links posts). This is definitely significantly different from red support of Israel, but it’s far from a concerted “vast torrent of hate”.
Now, I do hate Israel’s actions. I think trying to carve out a jewish area in the middle of culturally muslim areas was a bad idea in the first place, and Israel hasn’t done great since then, continually antagonizing and bullying Palestine, which resulted in the sort of response they get now. (Similar to how the US being jerks to Iraqis was significant in the creation of today’s ISIS.)
Further, the government of Israel over the last decade or two has begun shifting hard-theocratic, with a lot more sympathy for oppression of women and arabs. It’s pretty hard to sympathize with that, personally.
Tab, thank you for illustrating the point so well. It’s not that you are “for” terrorism, you are just more against liberal western democracies more than you are against terrorism. You find it quite easy to come up with a host of reasons why Israel (and I notice you couldn’t help tossing the US into the pot) have the moral short end of the stick against people who literally stab babies. You see the issue? “Yes yes, terrorists are bad mmkay, but the REAL PROBLEM is the fact that all terrorism is really the fault of the US!”.
And Israel is the group going “hard theocratic”?
You compare Israel and Hamas, and the issue you see is that Israel is “too theocratic”?
Hamas literally, in its constitution (when not calling for the eradication of Israel and the genocide of every Jew on earth) demands the return of parts of Spain and the Balkans to muslim rulership, because land that was ever under muslim control is forever theirs. They stone women for “impiety”. Theocratic?
> For conservatives, it’s “fight the liberals, fight with liberals against europeans, with europeans against Russia, with Russia against muslim crazies”
Your characterization seems a lot more apt if it refers to the politics of 1980-1990. Since then, there has been a total inversion in the relative adaptibility of the two sides.
I’d like to interject into Scott’s first major point, which was the paucity of real “diversity” in most of our lives. I may be a huge exception to this rule, and the key was (the traditionally liberal trait of) seeking out new and interesting experiences. My group of close friends and family encompasses all political areas I am aware of in the US. I am in academia these days, so my work group is much like those described by Scott. I’m a vet, so my closest brothers in the world are mostly the sort of rabid red-meat conservatives that scare the pants off people in blogs like this. Fun note, not a one of those guys has anything but contempt for creationism. My family are mostly deeply religious, faith-healing young earth creationist types. And as I’ve tipped past thirty, my social circle has been decimated of breeders, leaving me with a predominately gay social group.
I have two members of my groups that I use as avatars to keep me honest when thinking about the politics of the two major groups in our society.
1: Red – My parent’s pastor. Ex-amish, thirteen kids, creationist and faith healer, has an eighth-grade education and an accent since his first language is Pennsylvania Dutch, not English. It would be easy to mock him based on this overview, but look closely. Despite the lack of formal education, he is intensely smart, started several businesses and would be a many-multi-millionaire except for the fact he gives well over ninety percent of his income to charity. He lives in the same house he grew up in, simply. He is the most unrelentingly charitable, kind and humble person I have ever met. And if there was ever a way to measure the greatness of a man, it’s the quality of his children. Of all of them, I have never heard a one of them, ever, express antipathy toward any other human being. E.W. is one of the finest people I know, and I disagree with everything he believes.
2: Blue – T.S., middle-aged gay minority female, deeply involved with LBGT activism, feminism, crazy hippie, believes in crystal healing, auras, alternative medicine and a host of conspiracy theories. Once more, the pastiche is easy to mock. She’s a business owner and despite the stereotype of the lasy pothead hippie, is one of the hardest working people I know. The level of warmth and love she spreads to everyone she meets is must be seen to be believed. My parents and grandparents (completely opposite in every significant belief) love her, and she them. She is the hub and the heart of our entire oldtown district.
I use these to remind me that there are good people on both sides. And living in this space between these groups sharpens one’s political beliefs, one is always being challenged by people one respects. It isn’t always comfortable, but it is interesting. The ingroup-outgroup antipathy seems to be rising in pitch, largely because there is no outside outgroup anymore. We only have each other.
I think you have really hit the “heart” of this, so to speak.
In the end, it’s about your own heart. As soon as you start wagging your fingers, blaming others because they do not share your own personal snowflake belief system of how to make the world a perfect place, then you are guilty of the sin of intolerance.
Advocating others show kindness and goodness and charity is all well and good, but becomes meaningless when your idea of advocating for kindness and goodness and charity is wagging your fingers and tsk-tsking at the out-groups for their lack of it.
You can find hypocrites and venomous individuals in any group – no matter how large or small you divide it, because you can even find it in yourself. Once you stop asking others to change their behavior to make the world a better place and start asking yourself to do it…the world becomes a better place.
It’s not about fixing the hearts of others, it’s about fixing your own heart.
Sweet jebus, 852 comments!? What the heck am I supposed to do with that?
…I’ll award Cyan Points to good summaries and links to the most insightful commentary.
Search for “Sacred Cow”‘s comment.
Eh, not too bad. I award you one Cyan Point.
Start with the more recent and work backwards? Cf reading philosophy backwards.
You’re not missing too much. Sometimes the comment threads around here add insights that make the original post that much better, but here we all seem to be trying to do that and not succeeding very well. (Truth be told, I don’t usually participate in SSC comment threads that are this big and hairy; I’m making an exception for this one because the post itself was on such an important topic.)
EDIT: Except for these comments by Brendan Eich, which are worth reading if you have any interest in that whole series of events.
Seconding the impression that the comments to this post are unusually unhelpful.
EDIT: However, Brendan Eich showing up twice to comment was pretty interesting; you may want to search for that.
Yes, I agree – the comments aren’t great this time (including my own of course). Not sure why.
Hypothesis: Although Scott’s post made heavy use of American politics as an example, most of the actual insights he collected aren’t about American politics at all; they’re facts about ingroup–outgroup dynamics which are relatively uncontroversial but still greatly underappreciated, and which can help us understand politics better.
Meanwhile, most of us in the comments have been busy saying things about American politics, and most nontrivial things that anybody has to say about such a complex and bias-fraught subject are wrong. (This is especially true of anybody saying anything along the lines of “blues tend to approach politics this way, while reds approach it that way”.)
I think this is the real rationale behind Less Wrong’s ban on politics. Of course, as the main post demonstrates, many topics related to politics can and should be discussed productively from a rationalist perspective.
Like the last giant thread, it’s falling apart here at the end with typical internet blabbering.
I don’t think anyone would lose much if these enormous threads were automatically closed after X-hundred comments. 600 or 800, maybe.
I’m not sure things were much better early on.
Brendan Eich — that’s certainly a perspective I won’t find anywhere else. I award you and Matthew 5 Cyan Points each.
“To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.”
There you go. You simply won’t find social and political conservatives in significant numbers on social media fora that don’t explicitly promote their views. The Daily Mail worked this out years ago and has been unprecedentedly successful in tapping this rich vein of reactionaries.
However, there is also the argument that conservatives have much better things to do with their time than reading long diatribes by lefty humanities graduates from former polytechnics. Such as making and spending large amounts of cash and finding complicated schemes to avoid paying punitive taxes on aforementioned piles of cash.
Working as a busy surgeon between the glorious workers’ collective that is the NHS and the red-in-tooth-and-claw private sector gives a fascinating insight into how the two sectors fail to overlap. My private colleagues have neither the time nor inclination to spend their pitiful leisure time reading (self-evidently excellent) blogs such as this, which is a pity. I quite enjoy dipping my toe into in, if only to observe the astonishing levels of bile and bigotry reserved for people with my views and those lower down the social scale.
Oh, and there are excellent arguments against gay marriage if you can be bothered to reflect for a moment. They may well become clearer with time.
toodle pip, and keep up the good work.
Having reflected for some time, the best arguments I can see against gay marriage are very speculative and long-term, and even if applicable there are countervailing factors. Asserting that there are excellent ones readily available, without a hint, is obnoxious.
And the mome raths outgrupe.
The way of involvement of Yugoslavia wartime into the discussion, is what I call the “Stockholm School” of historiography, by derisive allusion to both the Royal Bank of Sweden “Nobel” prize in economics and the famed Stockholm syndrome.
“The worst thing that could happen to this post is to have it be used as convenient feces to fling at the Blue Tribe whenever feces are necessary.”
It would be great if some read this when it wasn’t a poo flinging occasion.
ISIS is another good example of this “outgroup” phenomenon. They talk a great game about killing all us Jews, Christians, Atheists, Americans, etc., but at least 90% of their victims are Arabs who practice a slightly different form of Islam.
Actually, they don’t talk about killing Christians and Jews, they talk about forcing them to pay jiziya. But they do talk a lot about killing apostates, so they look to be quite consistent.
The most confusing and wordy piece I have read in a very long time. I really wish you had tied it up at the end with a real point. Rambling with a few interesting points but in the end I have no idea what you are trying to say. I have bookmarked to read a third time. Maybe I will gain enlightenment. This was linked as part of a conversation on my post on Google+. I am not sure of the rules for linking but if you want to read it you can see it near the top of my public profile on that social network. It’s about the lesbian who got black sperm by mistake.
You have made progress. Fabulous progress, considering your point of origin. You still probably have a way to go.
Every member of the Blue Tribe–I shall use your terms–imagines himself a free-thinker: it is his totem of membership. But a modern Blue Man–since the Sixties–must be the polar opposite: a group-thinker.
There is always the hazard that the odd Blue Man will believe his propaganda and actually think freely. Unless he can be inhumanly silent, this will gradually offend his friends, lovers, and employers–if he persists. Usually he will not persist.
And so you have come as far as the Grey Tribe–before the Blues threw you out, I presume. Hearty congratulations!
But that is not usually a stable resting point. You will have noticed most Greys are young.
Enjoy the journey. I omit any spoilers.
Argh, of course conservatives are coming here and saying “yes, the blue tribe are evil, they should totally be an outgroup.” I can see why Scott didn’t want this linked from reddit.
Pingback: I Cant Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup « Attack the System
As a blue-tribe apostate, I found your article very interesting and insightful. But here is a test to your own capacity to consider something that requires you to step outside your comfort zone:
Your article describes the reason that Jesus Christ was crucified.
Your thoughts are in line with other great thinkers whose ideas have long withstood the test of time:
Prov 24:17 (NAS) Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles.
Mat 5:44-45 (NEB) “But what I tell you is this: love your enemies and pray for your persecutors; only so can you be like children of your heavenly Father, who makes his sun rise on good and bad alike, and sends the rain on the honest and the dishonest. If you love only those who love you, what reward can you expect? Surely the tax-gatherers do as much as that. And if you greet only your brothers, what is there extraordinary about that? Even the heathen do as much. There must be no limit to your goodness, as your heavenly Father’s goodness knows no bounds.”
And here is another blue/grey head-bender: If you want to see diverse blue/red/GOP/Dem/black/white/rich/poor individuals coming together, not just locally, but globally, go into a Christian church – anywhere in the world. It’s not at all like the imagined stereotypes.
I really enjoyed this piece. Good writing and good stuff.
I’m glad to hear how good the Christians, and only the Christians, are at bringing people together.
You are asserting facts not in evidence. She did not say “only” Christians were bringing people together. Rather, she observed that, in actual fact, Christian churches often contained members of multiple tribes/ethnicities/classes working together. This is in contrast to the meme that being Christian is specifically a red tribe thing.
My understanding is there are quite a few blue-tribe Christians, who are pretty quiet about it, and are somewhat embarrassed by the media constantly reinforcing the alleged link between the red tribe and the church.
Whew. To sum up:
I’m frequently introduced as “the Republican friend” like a dog that walks on two legs.
It never occurs to me to introduce anyone as “my Democrat friend”. “Progressives” are the opposite of tolerant.
“Conservatives think liberals are stupid, Liberals think Conservatives are evil.” Krauthammer
Pingback: A study in self-delusion | Law of Markets
Maybe the tag should not be “things I will regret writing,” but “things I will regret being posted on social media.”
It is possible to make it hard to link from social media, such as redirecting based on ‘referer.’
Well, bless your heart. Great article. This is what many in the experienced Red Tribe might call a “Lessons Learned Analysis”; wherein you take a hard, hard look in the mirror and understand and admit just what it was you did or did not do that got your men killed, or bankrupted your company, or lost you your family … Not a comfortable chair to sit in. You sound close. And that’s how you grow.
… A new, Red reader.
Out of curiosity, what lessons do you think were learned about what should or should not have been done?
Excellent article overall. But I think there is one main part that I believe you missed.
The blue tribe tribe often uses the term “tolerance”. But when you press them what they are actually describing is “acceptance”. And when you discuss “acceptance” with them it generally seems to be defined as “advocacy for”.
Which seems to go along well with another observation about both sides. The blue side also tends to place a higher value on the “intent” behind language than about what is actually being said. Where as the red side tends to more adhere to literal interpretations of things.
In many ways it makes any discussions between sides difficult there is very little middle ground to be found between these interpretations of language use.
One of the interesting things touched upon in this post is the mutual belief of both Red and Blue that America is, at its core, Red. This is what underlies the reflexive support of the United States in Red America, and the reflective hostility in Blue. But is this really true? After all, Obama was reelected, in various parts of the country the Blue party is firmly entrenched without hope of dislodgement. And of course, abortion continues without cursease. This may be creating a generation of conservatives who hate America…..
a huge part of team blue’s self identity is the belief that they are an embattled minority bravely standing against a world full of bigots and war mongers. 80 years into the new deal state and they’ll still swear up and down that they’re just barely holding back the dark forces of reaction.
This a very odd phrasing. The New Deal was only able to secure a Congressional majority by denying blacks access to most of its benefits (at the time of original passage). If you’d said the “Great Society” instead of the “New Deal,” this would make (slightly) more sense. But the New Deal was about protecting old and poor white people, and had nothing to do with fighting bigotry.
Edit: And the “Great Society” project at home could only be enacted at the blood price of appeasing the war-mongers abroad.
who said anything about bigotry? I said the forces of reaction, the vagueness of the subject is essential to the long life of the meme. Sure since the 60s it’s meant fighting racism, but in the 30s they were using the same narrative, just substitute malefactors of great wealth for racists. As for the idea that the great society was somehow paid for with the war in vietnam, that’s sheer nonsense.
cassander, now:
cassander, 8:47 pm:
You’re being willfully dense. I didn’t say it was paid for that way. The tacit bargain that kept the loyalty of conservative southern Democrats in Congress for Medicare etc. was pursuing their preferred foreign policy course.
sorry, my bad. At one point that first comment mentioned forces of reaction not bigots and warmongers.
On the broader point, though, I don’t see how the point matters. with the sole exception of 64, every presidential election from 48-72 was won by the candidate who was most vociferous about being tougher on the commies, regardless of party. this has nothing to do with the broader progressive insistence that they are a marginal minority. hell, it’s even older than progressivism. take the abolitionists. They actually were an embattled minority before the civil war, but this wasn’t enough for them. they insisted on concocting vast conspiracies about “slave power” trying to conquer the north and impose slavery there. Sure, the targets and causes of the puritan crusades change over time. they have to, because by and large the puritan crusades have achieved their goals. but the method and psychological ticks around them change surprisingly little.
with the sole exception of 64, every presidential election from 48-72 was won by the candidate who was most vociferous about being tougher on the commies, regardless of party.
You have seven data points. That’s not enough to be so casual about throwing one of them out. Generally presidential elections are too few and far between to do much rigorous analysis of them based on the outside view.
not 7 data points, 14. every candidate for both parties for nearly a quarter century promised to stick it to the commies. it doesn’t take rigorous analysis for that to be strong evidence that anti communism was extremely popular.
Seven data points. The relevant observation to your initial claim is the choice between candidate A and candidate B, which happens 7 times, not the characteristics of each individual candidate. If you do not even understand this, your analysis is surely not to be trusted in this matter.
(Further a little lol at the idea that both parties supporting a particular policy proves the policy is popular with the people. What do you think this is, some sort of democracy?)
I think it has to do with how Reds generally make more noise. E.g. American-Football, “Merica, Fuck Yeah”, the Tea Party Coalition, etc. I think this is because they’re ideologically more cohesive than Blues (think farmers vs foragers). This makes them proud and more likely to boast about how great their culture/nation is. Not that Blues are exempt from stoking their ego, but I feel like Blues tend to be more subtle about it.
As a result, I think the face of the U.S. that foreigners tend to see is primarily the Red face. After foreigners label all of the U.S. as Red, the Blues naturally begin to distance themselves from the “Murica!” meme (a la Robber Cave).
I’m not sure they’re actually louder. The media gave far more attention to Tea Party protests than much larger protests for immigration reform in 2010 or climate change action this year. This would tend to give foreigners a misleading impression, but it’s a fact about the media, not about the underlying volume.
I just want to applaud this essay. While I may disagree with parts of it, much of it was utterly spot on, especially the Blue Tribe on OBL, vs Thatch. Thank you for penning this very perceptive essay.
Easily the best thing on a liberal blog I have read in a long, long time. There is one thing you do not note and I’d love to see it. What about conservatives who work in the professions and come from the East Coast, particularly NY, Philly and Boston. Unlike you or the “Redstaters” they have to spend almost all their time with the other side. We then are the most tolerant of all! (my quotes on “redstaters” is that the color of the Right, is and always has been Blue. The Left is Red. Never heard of Grey before will look to see if it becomes a meme.
Also, no one I know wants to “ban” same sex marriage they merely believe that any rational person does not think same sex unions whether recognized by the state or not should change the definition of what marriage is. We believe that the state recognizing such things as marriages so changes the mearning of the institution so as to ban real marriage for everybody else.
Such is the nature of “progress”. Several decades ago, the very concept of same sex “marriage” would have been incomprehensible. Several years ago, the question was whether or not it should be legalized. Today, the debate is framed in terms of conservative bigots who want to “ban” it. Imagine where things will be tomorrow.
Mind you, I very much doubt Scott used that phrasing as part of an intentional memetic assault on his readership. More likely, he was just caught up in the zeitgeist.
Realistically, I imagine that sometime in the future, gay marriage will be treated the same way as interracial marriage is today, and will be thought of simply as “marriage”. There’s a somewhat lower probability that, instead, it will re-acquire its stigma as a horrific perversion and will thus be banned. But the current situation is unstable, so it’s got to tip one way or the other.
You left out Catholics, ethnics, ordinary Hispanics, the middle class blacks, and African and Asian immigrants. We don’t fit into either group, and to liberals, we are Chesterton’s invisible man…
I am against homosexual marriage and I am anti macro-evolution, which I would describe more precisely as anti-abiogenesis. I have good reasons for both of these positions. I like guns, but I do eat and like arugula. I basically only watch TV for sports like baseball, american, football, and UFC, although I do have the TV on when I exercise, but I listen to podcasts at the same time. I listen to blues mostly, except for my church music. I must be a very rare person. So dark matter does exist.
Ah quoting Chesterton a great way to start figuring it all out.
I’m reminded of the line from Peanuts “I love humanity it’s people I can’t stand.”
It’s easy to love a “group” because loving a “group” is something in the abstract, loving an individual involves risk and wanting good for them even if you don’t agree or care for their beliefs. That’s what love your neighbor as yourself means
It’s like keying a car, if you see people as an individual even if they have a bumper sticker that you hate you you might rail against that point when you see it but you won’t key their car because you know it costs an individual money time and expense.
But if you see people not as individuals but as a group then the person of the outgroup being evil deserves to have their car keyed because they are advancing that evil cause. The idea that a person is going to have to make an insurance claim, pay a deductible, lose time money and effort, things they might not have in abundance is not important, you demonstrated moral superiority.
I don’t know who said it, but whoever first said “the liberal loves humanity but hates humans, while conservatives hate humanity and love humans.” was a clever man.
So is your claim that liberals are more likely than conservatives to, say, key cars of people they don’t like? What evidence do you have for this?
i make no such claim.
I don’t usually comment on blog posts. But I had to. This was thought provoking, interesting, challenging, and long without being padded. Thank you.
I notice that I am confused by this post, because previously Scott mentioned having many pro-life Christian friends, which is a position I would expect to be pretty rare and unacceptable in a Blue/Grey bubble.
How do I find my outgroup? I can’t not have one, right?
It’s not the reds; people who oppose gay marriage are in my Osama category, and I actually get a bit annoyed when people deprecate morally-neutral red behaviors.
It’s definitely not the greys; that’s the closest thing I have to an in-group among the major tribes.
It sort of used to be the blues, but there wasn’t ever really any hatred, just a hipsterish sense of superiority at being a bit different. I’ve also gotten steadily bluer (from grey) politically over the last several years, which takes away the main thing I used to object to.
It’s not SJ either. I’ve never felt hurt by SJ, and though I do often find the criticisms around here persuasive, I don’t find it emotionally hard to side with SJ on any of them.
It could be that I’m unusually devoid of hate as a consequence of having never really been threatened by anything, as a result of being straight, cis, white, male, wealthy, naturally happy, and ridiculously lucky.
I’m in a similar position. I suspect that how a person reacts to the ingroup vs. the outgroup depends on a bunch of other factors, particularly how much you see them as an actual threat to you.
My guess is that affecting not to have an outgroup you hate/actually not having an outgroup you hate is a Grey signifier.
‘The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!” And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”’
Exactly so! Thus, the Catholic Church, while considering homosexual acts gravely sinful (Catechism 2357), since it nevertheless teaches that homosexuals “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” and that “Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided” (Catechism 2358), is being truly tolerant.
Pingback: Outside in - Involvements with reality » Blog Archive » Moron bites (#1)
Something this reminded me of and a story you might find interesting: “Sans Farine,” by Jim Sheperd, from his collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway.
The story is told from the perspective of an executioner during the French Revolution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, being an executioner was not the most respectable job one could have; the narrator was quite limited in terms of who he could marry and whom him and his kids could freely socialize with.
But then consider the social position of soldiers, who didn’t (and still don’t) face nearly the same sort of social opprobrium.
As the narrator muses, executioners are killing people who have been deemed guilty by the judicial system of some sort of capital crime; soldiers are (generally) killing other young people who are guilty of no crime whatsoever, especially during the time in which this story was set. And yet we view executioners as pariahs and soldiers as heroes. Why?
> And yet we view executioners as pariahs and soldiers as heroes. Why?
because tribes of humans who saw warriors as murderers got murdered by tribes who saw them as heros.
I’d also add that soldiers kill foreigners, and that the very careful, deliberate killing feels much worse to people – compare the stigma against snipers in the fading days of martial splendor.
I think that is also behind some of the hatred for drone warfare in a world that romanticizes fighter pilots who still presumably run ground attack.
The comparison between drones and executioners is a good one. I’ve had the same thoughts about them, but never explicitly connected them.
But shouldn’t the analogy be between executioners and drone operators? Executioners were pariahs, but no one thinks about drone operators. Condemning drone warfare is logically parallel to condemning the death penalty or the judicial system. People condemn nuking Hiroshima or the firebombing of Dresden, but people don’t shun the bomber pilots.
I’ve heard some condemnation of drone operators but I think they aren’t very visible. I think bomber pilots are offered more “just following orders” leeway, partly due to history.
Killing foreigners is important – less likely to be people you knew, more likely to be people outside your empathy sphere.
But I think the thing with snipers and drones (which also apply to executioners) is killing from a position of safety, while other warriors put their lives at risk. Bravery looks like the most important factor in hero worship.
And yet we view executioners as pariahs and soldiers as heroes. Why?
Because soldiers incur tremendous physical risk to themselves in pursuit of their task. Executioners don’t. Executioners get opprobrium; soldiers get killed
Victoria – you will understand if trucks full of ISIS soldiers drive into your town and start killing the men and collecting the women and children as sex-slaves.
I think ancient and recent history has answered your bumper-sticker musing of “what would happen if we have a war and no one showed up”. The answer is genocide.
Pingback: Socially Enforced Thought Boundaries | Carcinisation
The British fought the Napoleonic wars with a disproportionately Irish army too. I don’t think there’s ever been HATE from England to Ireland though there has been understandable amount the other way. Condescension certainly. But little hate, for that you must go North, to the Ulster Scots (which sort of makes your point…).
This must be one of the most insightful blogs I have ever read.
It is good, stick around.
(These are the kind of comments I type, realize add nothing and delete. Occasionally I figure Scott might like to hear it. I am more Red than not, though, so maybe I should have saved it for elsewhere, give comments above. Please consider the above recommendation to be general and not specific to this post.
I’m not american enough to make any qualified judement regarding the existence of tribes in America, but there seem to be some tribal characteristics that are more connected to class than to any sort of belief, and also appear to be class stereotypes rather than actual class traits. For instance, I can’t imagine gay rights advocates being uniformly disgusted at the idea of consuming large quantities of steak, coke and tv, unless they have, besides their lgbt advocacy, also reached that peculiar step of the social ladder where you’re far enough above lots of others to notice the difference in height, but not far enough to feel the confidence to indulge in lower-class activities anyway.
Also, you seem to suggest that even the most liberal muslims consider ISIS part of their ingroup, which is probably the most islamophobic thing anyone could say, as it would negate even the possibility of a genuinely liberal muslim.
I think Scott was saying that outsiders group ISIS and liberal Muslims together, not that liberal Muslims do so. That’s all you need to make a weak-man argument work. A German doesn’t need to have any affection for Nazis in order to find it troubling if most media depictions of Germans are depictions of Nazis.
Also, I do think people naturally feel tribal affiliation with people of their religion/sect if they are under attack by outsiders. See the British Christian above in the comments feeling embarrassed and defensive towards leftist attacks on the Bible Belt Christians. Same principle.
Compare it to a white blue-triber being confronted with the typical blue-tribe criticism of ‚white people‘, aka reds. Even if it is directed at him personaly, (you white people, white guys like you etc) he’ll hardly feel attacked, because he wholeheartedly agrees that all that stuff is what is wrong with white people. So he won’t get defensive, but instead try to prove that he doesn’t actually fall into that category of white people by joining into the condemnation of that kind. If liberal muslims and ISIS are different groups, which I sincerely hope and believe they are, you’d expect the same sort of behaviour from the former, (from the latter, too, when confronted with criticism of liberal islam btw).
And as a german, your comparison puzzles me a bit, because by now, it has become an integral part of german identity to secretly consider ourselves Vergangenheitsbewältigungsweltmeister (world champions of coming to terms with the past) to the point where we’ll derive an air of moral superiority (over backwards chauvinist places like the US or Israel) from distancing ourselves from the third reich.
Look at their behaviour: do they rush to vociferously criticize ISIS’s actions and beliefs, or do they do so half-heartedly and try to reframe the discussion in terms of “islamophobia”?
Well, obviously and sadly, it’s the latter. I wouldn’t put this down to liberal muslims considering ISIS part of teir ingroup though, but rather to all of Islam suffering from a massive tendency towards supremacism, especially towards the western world, no matter how “liberal” anyone proclaiming to represent the religion says they are.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-29362370 – there’s some of both. If the article is correct, there’s a bunch busy shouting “Not In My Name!” to distance themselves from IS(I[SL])? and a second bunch busy misrepresenting the first.
>Also, you seem to suggest that even the most liberal muslims consider ISIS part of their ingroup, which is probably the most islamophobic thing anyone could say, as it would negate even the possibility of a genuinely liberal muslim.
I suspect Scott may be using the heuristics he formed for Osama, who AFAICT got a much less affronted reaction from liberal Muslims.
I really don’t think I have problems criticizing my “in groups.” The five people I am closest to are myself, my sister and three friends of mine. Of the 5 people I find it very easy to criticize myself and one friend. We both have alot of obvious flaws (though our flaws are almost disjoint sets as it turns out). My sister and the other 2 of my best friends aren’t as easy to criticize but I could easily give a long descriptions of their problems (as I see them) too. I don’t see anything wrong with this. I love these people (and myself) despite the fact we have issues.
I am pretty sure I enjoy, depending on the circumstances, explaining my best counterarguments to any political philosophy/position that comes up. If I don;t say anything its usually because I don’t know enough or I want to hear out someone’s position without arguing at them. Usually I pick sides in debates when someone makes an unfair, ignorant and inuslting argument. Then I jump in on the other side. At one point I was a libertarian and now I have no problems attacking libertarianism.
I think this advice applies even if we end up fighting the value war with words and laws instead of cannons and bayonets.
If you are the kind of person who believes that silencing one’s political opponents is a-ok, and you encourage everyone to do that (for the Greater Good, naturally), and you are not a member of one of those privileged oppressive groups — then eventually you’re going to end up getting silenced for sure. They’ve got all that privilege and power on their side, after all, and you don’t.
I wrote a Tumblr post relating to this, with respect to the same-sex marriage question, a few days ago. People are less likely to tolerate opposition to same-sex marriage if they’re in a social environment where nobody opposes it.
Really? I would have predicted the opposite.
If I were in a space where almost everyone agrees about same sex marriage, but one person is speaking out against it, my natural contrarian pro-underdog instincts make me side with that one guy (see: Eich).
If I were in a space where it was actually a big issue, then I would get really mad that there were people actually trying to prevent gays from getting married which is a very harmful thing to do, and I’d probably be more motivated to fight for the pro-gay side.
Every so often when people attack transgender people, I get a short burst of motivation to work on a half-finished essay defending them, but then it becomes clear that my community is like 90% pro-trans and I get bored and do something else.
I think not everyone is as principled as you. If only one person in your social environment is against same-sex marriage then you can win easy Ingroup Points by attacking them. If your social environment is divided then the easiest position to hold is tolerance towards all views.
See Eich, indeed. He got fired. Your natural instincts are not typical.
You’re assuming liberals see people-who-fund-initiatives-to-limit-gay-rights (or generally people-who-oppose-gay-rights) as rare, powerless, hounded, and isolated. If liberals instead see Eich’s reference class as reasonably powerful, widespread, and influential — powerful enough on expectation to block some people’s ability to get married, or to intimidate some of his employees into concealing their sexuality — then their behavior is consistent with accepting Scott’s instincts.
And of course all sides are guilty of committing the fallacy wherein you see a social phenomenon that’s widespread in a particular highly visible context and assume that it’s widespread in all contexts. Remember, Proposition 8 did end up passing.
If anyone on Team Gray thinks they have more in common with Team Red than Team Blue, try going to a Team Red event. You will be treated like a Blue. Unless the event is both Gray and Red friendly, but that never seems to happen without mad bitching.
Both Red and Blue think Gray is playing for the other team, and dislike us waving either of their banners. Meanwhile, it seems like most of the tech industry is Gray. So what is the problem?
Big players in the tech industry choosing Red or Blue.
If Elon Musk did some Libertarian campaign ad for Tesla, I actually think “we” could take “power” overnight. Those tech journalists pretending to be Blue would quit the act. Yet of course “we” hate each other too. Gray is full of more factions than any other color.
I’m curious about what a Gray-Red event would look like.
http://media.oregonlive.com/ent_impact_tvfilm/photo/robot-combat-leaguejpg-bcf961a1b15ec07a.jpg
True in general, but if certain spaces are something like 40% Grey, 45% Blue, 15% Red, then there’s obvious strategic potential between the Grey and Red tribes, especially since the Blue Tribe and Red Tribe are total natural enemies and have a hard time allying even when it’s to their own advantage.
We both probably are secretly dripping with contempt for each other, but the British and Irish fighting together in WWI probably felt the same way.
One example might be protecting home schooling, which the Red Tribe wants to do for religious indoctrination reasons and the Grey Tribe wants to do because school is horrible.
So we need to start shallow mythologizing of each other?
“Oh, there never was a coward where the Gray Flag flies!”
Kinda like it, actually.
Red tribe also thinks school is horrible. Also, is there any evidence that red tribe homeschooling is anymore indoctrination than public schooling, however such a thing would be measured (ideological turing test, perhaps)?
There’s some evidence from survivors of homeschooling, in which the purpose of homeschooling seems to explicitly have been indoctrination. Indoctrination can happen in any type of school (e.g., the Pledge), but it’s often not so deliberate.
The designers of modern school were very explicit that their goal was indoctrination. The difference is that they have had a hundred years to polish it. And a hundred years to be forgotten.
Anonymous, do you have any sources about this? Because if so I would very much like to read them.
For example, John Dewey. Some googling suggests “Education and social change,” here or here
Perhaps he is actually saying: there will be indoctrination, so I might as well control it.
Thanks a lot Anon, I’ll get stuck in.
no high school level math or science, inaccurate history, etc
Survivors of this kind of home-schooling may have more time to write about their home-school experiences, than those who received better in-home education, so have more things to write about, and less time.
ETA: Woops, this should have appeared below
Hainish October 3, 2014 at 2:28 pm
@Houseboatonastyx, yes, I agree, and I didn’t mean to imply that homeschooling is categorically bad (I plan to homeschool, so I certainly don’t oppose it). In the context of my response to Randy, I was pointing out that some parents do homeschool with the explicit purpose of indoctrination. (I support school choice generally.)
Most homeschoolers are Reds, and most homeschooled kids do very well.
Blue Tribe disdain for homeschooling or just non-Blue homeschooling is one of its more indefensible prejudices.
The numbers I’ve seen is that homeschooling is evenly split between Red and Blue.
Blue Tribe disdain for homeschooling is specific to those who keep their children ignorant for the sake of religion (as in, no high school level math or science, inaccurate history, etc.).
This paper cites several surveys from the late Eighties to late Nineties, generally finding religious motivations in between 40% and 65% of homeschooling households. Older surveys and surveys in redder states tend to find more religious motivation, as one might expect.
A distaste for the peer groups available at public schools is also commonly cited; that could mean a lot of things, but some of them do run counter to the Blue worldview.
By the numbers, though, homeschooled students seem to do well. The Blue meme that it leads to academic weakness seems wrong, at least by comparison with the generally poor US public school system; on the other hand I do have some sympathy with the Blue distaste for backdoor “creation science”, but high-school biology is such a joke that it probably doesn’t much matter.
Blue Tribe disdain for homeschooling or just non-Blue homeschooling is one of its more indefensible prejudices.
What bothers me is when they argue that middle class parents should send children to public schools in order to _improve_ the public schools. Um…children aren’t pawns?
Asking someone to cooperate in a Prisoner’s Dilemma is not the same as making them a pawn.
Think of it like a tax, a child tax.
What would be an appropriate example of making someone a pawn, and why is this [sending a child to a school to improve the school] a non-example?
[Maybe agent-principle problem works better?]
Anon – a child tax? Can you explain?
I know this is absolutely the *wrong* reaction, but this post really made me want to wave the Gray Tribe flag.
I’m surprised nobody has included the Neoreactionary terms for the Blue and Red groups here.
(From Moldbug, it’s Brahmin for the mainstream Blue and Vaisya for lower + middle class Red plus their left-wing counterparts who nonetheless don’t think the way Blues think. There are also terms for the Red upper class, underclasses that have a much more direct connection to leftism, and to a few groups that don’t fit in like the Grays.
Shhhhhhh!
This response is really not going to help quell the crypto-reactionary hypothesizing.
A lot of this is inspired by things Nydwracu says, which are themselves inspired by Moldbug.
Moldbug’s Brahmins are sort of the Blue Tribe, and his other castes are sort of the Red Tribe, but there’s not a perfect correspondence.
I did use this as one of several inspirations, but I deliberately played it down both because I am trying to do something subtly different from Moldbug, and because mentioning him never helps.
And here I thought it was all David Brooks.
This was one of my first thoughts as well. Blue = Brahmin and Red = Vaisya; the other castes are much less relevant to most NRx discussion, with the possible exception of the Dalits, which Scott doesn’t talk about at all in his analysis. (Dalits are the actual underclass, which form part of the Democratic political coalition but are not in any sense culturally Blue/Brahmin.)
It’s worth pointing out here that NRx itself is very much Blue/Brahmin in its sensibility and culture, and very much not Red/Vaisya, even though it’s object-level assertions are horrifying to the mainstream Blues.
There’s a good match between Blue and Brahmin but not so much of one between Red and Vaisya. Many Vaisyas aren’t creationists, don’t own guns, don’t care about same-sex marriage, and aren’t particularly patriotic. They’re not Blue Tribe, but they’re not Red Tribe either. Red Tribe seems to be a subtype of Vaisya (sometimes intersecting with white Dalits) – one could call it “Low Vaisya”, where “Middle Vaisya” is the kind of people talked about here, and “High Vaisya” is the Mitt Romney types.
Your link just links to this post; did you mean it to link to a particular comment?
Fixed. Apparently the Chrome extension Linkification doesn’t play nice with URLs in text boxes.
I’m familiar with Voldemort’s American castes and I’d really have to say SA’s tribes are going to serve one better for understanding and predicting how people will behave and react to stimuli. So for example the Red/Blue divide cuts right through the Vaishya caste. It’s debatable whether the Optimate caste even exists. There are a minority of Red Brahmins and a larger minority of Red Helots. About the only 1:1 relationship is that all Dalits are Blues.
For a more specific example relating to the Vaishya caste, is it so hard to imagine a successful cardiologist who thinks welfare makes people lazy?
So my takeaway on Voldemort’s castes is that the categories of Brahmni, Helot and Dalit are useful, they describe real and important groups who will think and behave similarly to each other. But the Vaishya and Optimate castes don’t map well. As above I suspect Optimates don’t exist and as Voldy himself admitted, Vaishya really isn’t more than “everyone else.”
Red, Blue and Gray, though, they all seem to map very well. Everyone knows or could spot a Blue or a Red in a crowd. And Gray, while a bit vague, corresponds very well to the alt-right corner of the internet. I mean this in the sense of “when SA introduced the concept, didn’t you know exactly what he was talking about?”
For anyone curious about the context, a google search for the following will likely direct you to Voldemort’s lair:
2007/05/castes-of-united-states.html
Have your wand ready.
Assuming for the sake of argument that all of Scott’s and Moldbug’s categories are coherent: Scott is defining his tribes according to cultural signifiers, not political coalitions; Dalits are not remotely Blue in this sense, even though Moldbug would say Dalits and Blues are part of the same coalition. (Blue is something like B, definitely not BDH.) Most Grays are not alt-rightists, and many if not most alt-rightists are not Grays. (Central-tendency Grays are liberal in the non-American sense, socially liberal even if anti-SJ, anti-religious, and anti-nationalistic.)
OK I think you are definitely right here. So I’m having trouble with the following:
Dalits definitely exist in serious numbers and they don’t map onto tribes Red, Blue or Gray. It’s going to be difficult to give them a color code without violating the “don’t be an ass hole” rule. And it’s also going to be difficult to describe them in terms of cultural signifiers without breaking the no ass hole rule.
I’m of the theory that Grays and alt-rightists are for the most part disaffected Blues who kind of stopped buying into it at some point (if you’re not a socialist at 20 you have no heart, if you’re still a socialist at 30 you have no brain – I don’t really mean it Blues, I just love Bismarck quotes).
So some split Liberal (euro sense) and others Torie, but I can’t fathom any reason why.
I didn’t understand Moldbug’s caste analysis until I read somewhere that he’s San Franciscan. Then it all came together.
Did you wonder why he spends half his essay discussing Brahmin, Helots, and Dalit, then glosses over Vaishya — a highly polyphyletic grouping as he describes it, who make up at least half the population of the US and form the core demographic of both major parties — and can only manage a half-assed handwavey stereotyped impression of American old money? It’s because SF is a Brahmin town with a Helot service sector and a highly visible Dalit underclass, but all the Vaishya have been priced out, and NorCal upper-class sensibilities preclude being identifiable from the outside as upper class. (Tech is conspicuous by its absence, though; I’m not sure what’s up with that.)
Of course, SF’s social dynamics are way out on the bell curve, grossly distorted and totally unsustainable. (I wouldn’t say this for anywhere else I’ve lived, but I might nominate Elon Musk as Evil Overlord of San Francisco and Protector of the Peninsula. It’s that bad.) Drive three hours east — or even just cross the Bay Bridge — and you’ll get a very different idea of how these things work.
(Scott’s taxonomy looks a lot more generally applicable to me, if a bit stereotyped and Internet-centric.)
I think you found the head of the nail. It reminds me of something I read a few years back, “The big problem with psychology is that what we think we know about the psychology of human beings is actually what we know about the psychology of American college students.”
The WEIRDos as they put it.
That does help! It perhaps also explains why his characterization of the Brahmin is so extreme/particular. Like half the time he’s describing the Brahmin I’m like “Yes you are describing my caste” and half the time I’m like “No you are describing a very specific subset of my caste that does not include me”.
(Wondering how all this interacts with this sort of thing, or, without necessarily accepting that, geographic things more generally — is West Coast Brahmin vs. East Coast Brahmin a meaningful distinction to draw, e.g.?)
This seems like a good time to bring up this old blog post. (Warning: Michael O. Church 😛 ; also the whole “the future” section should be ignored, probably also “analysis of current conflict”.) The system it presents seems roughly similar to Moldbug’s castes (Dalit ~ underclass; Vaisya ~ L; Brahmin ~ G; Optimate (or “post-Optimate”) ~ E — and Helot ~ L as well, I guess, maybe? I don’t have a good sense of what the Helot class is supposed to represent. Also Optimate ~ E is maybe not a great match, but as you’ve said, his description of the Optimacy is pretty weak, and E, or at least E3, seems closer to what’s actually out there). But it “rings truer” to me… OK, maybe that’s just because it sort of repeats standard liberal ideas! Obviously all sorts of ways common sense can be wrong here. But, hey, it’s not like Moldbug has any more to go on. 😛
(Tangent: I went to Wikipedia to look up what academics think of social class, and, ugh, these people all need to learn to name their classes descriptively. They’ve got all these different models but many of the names in there are just like “lower class”, “upper middle class”, etc. — these are not very helpful names! They’re too hard to distinguish. The same is true of the names in Paul Fussell’s system. (Tangentially, his book “Class” was retitled “Caste Marks” in the UK.) 🙂 )
I liked that until it got to the E1 bit. Actually the whole E line is pretty speculative, but how on earth could the author know that (a) the world has 60,000 secret masters, (b) they constitute a social class, and (c) they’re all evil, if the rest of what he says about them is true?
Hitler, Stalin, and Henry Kissinger, incidentally, all came from decidedly non-elite backgrounds. Erik Prince’s family was new money, if Wikipedia’s not lying to me. Osama bin Laden was elite, but old-school aristocratic elite, not the kind you get here.
There are other holes, too; I feel like immigrant laborers (Moldbug’s helot class, modulo a bit) are different from low-wage American-born labor in ways that this hierarchy doesn’t capture. Though that grades very fine, really; an itinerant agricultural laborer is very different from a janitor on a green card is very different from a maid who immigrated illegally and is getting paid under the table.
Yeah, the whole E1 bit also seemed a pretty, uh, bold claim. I honestly had not thought to check the claim about the particular people, though I probably should have noticed when he mentioned Stalin.
Largely I liked the fact that he was willing to say openly that us G’s think of ourselves as the deserving elite. 🙂
Do you have links to extended versions of this? I’ve seen the basics, but nothing including “a few groups that don’t fit in like the Grays”.
The Emperor pauses for a minute, deep in thought. Then he frowns and asks the Bodhidarma “But wait, doesn’t that incentivize bigotry?”
The Bodhidarma is silent.
The Bodhidarma is a virtue ethicist. Consequentialist arguments don’t work on him.
God deliberately and without necessity creates and sustains the universe.
I’m a creationist. Debate me.
Deism is not the view connotationally referenced by “creationist.” The connotation is “created life in its current form without evolution.”
Specifically, creationists are nearly always reactionary, Abrahamic Protestants.
OP’s original statement cannot be considered deism in the usual sense, as deism asserts that Gods involvement ceases after the moment of creation, beyond which the world continues according to natural (but God-created) laws.
What utopia has given is in fact the classical theist position, in which creation is sustained and continues in existence only by the moment-to-moment will of God, and natural laws do not exist except as contingent manifestations of God’s will.
You note correctly that this is not incompatible with evolution. (I too am a creationist in this sense.)
Well, why do you think that’s true? (Or no less reasonable than the alternatives, or whatever.)
Basically, I feel that a Spinoza-like argument can be made for my particular brand of theism, but that his pantheism is a bridge too far.
God is the “one substance”, to use the unfortunately Aristotelian language that was prevalent in Spinoza’s day. I don’t actually exclude the existence of other substances like he does, but if they exist they have to be unreachable and are therefore irrelevant. The universe that we see is a timeless action caused by God.
Unfortunately, I have aesthetic reasons for believing in a theistic God rather than a pantheistic ultimate substance, which probably won’t satisfy anyone here.
I sometimes read your blog. I’m opposed to gay marriage. But my political views are odd. They might be neoreactionary–if I didn’t happen to think that neoreaction was crazy.
This is the closest thing I’ve ever found to articulating why I don’t favor it:
http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ362/hallam/NewspaperArticles/GayMarriage.pdf
Abandon hope, mortal. The Blue-Race has no need of kin!
Yes, but we all need someone to ridicule….its human nature to look for a scapegoat to take out our frustrations on and delineate in/out groups. Personally, I think as far as this rationalist community is concerned, ‘neo-reactionaries’ in general are great targets for ridicule 😀 Lets face it, the idea of being ruled by kings (Anissimov) or CEO-dictators (Moldburg) sucks monkey eggs – worst ideas of all time. If neo-reactionaries are going to advocate for authoritarianism and want a ‘strong-man’ to rule the world, at least pick one of us for the job- rule by technocrat for example…. hackers or “programmers-at-arms”. Nominating Kings or CEO-dictators is just beyond stupid and has moved into the realms of parody.
Incidentally, yesterday I read an article in the Guardian that had me laughing out loud and still has me laughing a day later….the writer advocates fixing all the problems in the middle east by bombing everyone in the region…..so the whole middle east is defined as the ‘out-group’:
“Why stop at Isis when we could bomb the whole Muslim world?
Humanitarian arguments, if consistently applied, could be used to flatten the entire Middle East”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/30/isis-bomb-muslim-world-air-strikes-saudi-arabia
“Pakistan is crying out for friendly bombs….Is there not an urgent duty to blow up Saudi Arabia?…..”
I realize the writer was being ironic, but some readers seriously thought it was a marvellous idea.
I know someone who has something akin to this attitude about the Middle East. I think that part of the idea is that having rules of engagement, etc means that anyone who doesn’t can stomp all over you. But if you actually were to try to out-Vietcong the Vietcong, then your greater resources mean you just win, enemy doesn’t try to fight.
I’m more than a little surprised about the *power* of that bubble; but when I think about it, I don’t really better Scott’s ratio. Still, I can’t quite accept that I’m co-existing with an outgroup of equal size to my ingroup and simply never actually noticed. That’s…
Well, I suppose that’s not truly that unlikely. The two sides posited above share pretty much nothing in common. If ingroups are analogous to class, then there would naturally be powerful social dividers keeping you from being in the same activities very often.
I wonder how this works for politicians? Many people in politics are directly elected (and there’s an obvious split between Blue and Red team), but I know a lot of Democrats and Republican politicians who have pretty strong friendships. Is that because they don’t have the same conceptions of the outgroup? Is it because one can make exceptions?* If two groups are forced to work with each other, does that change anything? Or is it just because politicians often share a lot of class-features across party lines and are likely to have more in common with another party representative than a randomly-chosen supporter?
*Hitler famously directed that his commanding officer, who was Jewish, be spared.
I think that many politicians are a socially different group, as you said. It’s sort of like how, say, the Eastern European nobility might know each other from school while they try to keep their nationalist followers from massacring each other.
One proposed explanation for the increasing polarization between the parties is that the politicians in Congress are spending less time with each other outside of work. Politicians now spend more time in their home districts, where they interact with mostly people of their own group, and less in DC, where they form these friendships.
It might be interesting to check if this matches up with a possible shift from a singular politician group into having just Red and Blue politicians.
Hypothesis: social bubbles will be more prominent for blues than reds. I don’t have a demographic citation handy, but my recollection is that blue areas tend to be very blue while red areas tend to be moderately red. For example, big cities skew heavily blue, leaving relatively few blues to spread across all the red rural areas. Scott is in metro Detroit, the blue part of Michigan. If Detroit is ~95% blue but there is no similar concentration of red, you have one area that is 95:5 blue:red and most of the state closer to 25:75. It gets worse when the blue spread is even “lumpier” because of concentrations in other cities. Most blues will be exposed to almost entirely blue ideas, while most reds will be familiar with a blue minority. (Also, if you accept that the media skews blue, everyone has blue exposure, while you need to go to Fox to get red-skewed news.)
If you have ever wondered why legislatures skew red, this is a major factor. Gerrymandering, sure, but you don’t need to gerry many manders to get a lot of safe 60-40 districts if you have a few 5-95 districts.
This should also contribute to blue in-fighting. Humans fight, and it is hard to find anyone non-blue to argue with once the red 5% has learned to be quiet about it (see Cassander up-thread). Maybe that explains a bit of the red cohesion we briefly discussed in a recent thread: reds almost always have visible blues to see as an outgroup, while within a blue bubble you need to keep defining people as the wrong shade of blue.
My impression is that the media is Red on policy but Blue on how they talk about policy.
I’d say the media is, more than anything, pro-establishment, pro-conventional wisdom. It sort of has to be, for a number of reasons. The CW being largely, though far from entirely, blue, and the vast majority members of team blue themselves, the result is that things look very blue, though rarely radically so.
I feel like foreign policy is an area where the typology starts falling apart. US elites have always been more interventionist than the public at large, and the media reflect this strongly. On the other hand, the most ardent anti-(military) interventionism has been coming from liberals as much as Red tribe libertarians for some time now.
the media is pretty much pro-intervention on all topics, sounding the cry to “do something!” The cynical explanation for this is that intervention always generates more headlines and sells more papers than non-intervention. I think there is some truth to that, but it isn’t the whole story.
Don’t beat yourself up man. If the grey tribe looks at the red tribe and the blue tribe, and they see the blue tribe is really powerful and doing awful shit to the red tribe, then you should be upset with them. Or, if that’s not enough, note the blue tribe is slowly waking up to the existence of the grey tribe, starting to understand it’s an off shoot of the red tribe, and you are going to be in trouble eventually.
And there’s also a matter of pragmatic knowledge which comes with proper understanding of reality. So, for example, if a student puts on their college application that they are in the JROTC, 4H club, or highly active in their church, it about completely tanks any chance they’ll be accepted into an Ivy Leage or other elite school. It would be good for Red children to know they need to conceal facts like that to get by in the Blue world. Or for a different example, a friend of mine grew up in one of what he called “three openly Jewish families in Beaumont.” There were several others, they just had the good sense to say they were Christians in a town full of Reds.
Understand that you are a Grey, make unapologetic judgments of the Reds and the Blues, and then act pragmatically when among them. God or evolution blessed you with a brain capable of it, don’t squander the gift.
Except that Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Stanford, and others only recently invited ROTC programs back on campus.
Most people who do ROTC didn’t do JROTC. It is probably not true that mentioning JROTC hurts an application to MIT. Harvard doesn’t really have ROTC, but just an arrangement that Harvard students can do it at MIT. It did recently establish a campus presence.
Ryan is referring to the book “No longer separate, not yet equal: Race and class in elite college admission and campus life,” by Espenshade and Radford, page 126.
That’s the reference. Many thanks.
I never heard of MIT being blue. If I were to guess, I would guess that it’s gray, though I have no evidence for that other than it has tech-types and those are more likely to be grey.
Original claim was “Ivy League or other elite school,” not “Blue campus.”
The MIT undergrad student body is typified by socially liberal political beliefs right up until the liberal says something against nuclear power (at which point it turns into “You’ll take my reactor away over my– wait, no, over YOUR dead body!”), a vague awareness when pressed that economic political issues exist, seriously analyzed religious beliefs or lack thereof, supporting gay rights as a special case of supporting everyone’s rights, yearning to own guns (and swords, and crossbows, and claymores (both kinds), and glaive-guisarmes, etc.) but settling for Leatherman multi-tools instead, eating Chinese food and pizza when they can’t find free leftovers from campus catering, drinking caffeine or alcohol as appropriate to induce the desired mental state for intended activities, not driving because *Boston*, reading lots of internets, being highly educated, ignoring the existence of sports other than Ultimate Frisbee, and earnestly exploring alternatives to traditional marriage. Musical tastes are all over the map, but everyone listens to That Guy Who Practices Bagpipes Early Saturday Morning whether they want to or not.
Which tribe do you think that maps most closely on to?
http://loki-zen.tumblr.com/post/98918816335/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup
My comment was too long so I made it into a Tumblr post.
Mostly it is about how to apply this to the UK.
I’m not sure I know enough Britain to understand your post. Americans traditionally map Democrats = Labor and Republicans = Tories, with the LibDems just being a darker shade of blue. Do you think that’s wrong or incomplete?
The Liberal Democrats are a fusion of the Liberals and the Social Democrats. The Liberals started off as classical liberals (thus to the right of Labor), but the Social Democrats were a left-splinter off of Labor when Labor moved toward the center, so the LibDems ended up sometimes to the left of Labor. That was (relatively) recent history, but it looks like the LibDems have probably hemorrhaged those leftist voters since the coalition with the Tories basically got them nothing.
(I’m not British, but possibly have followed this a bit more closely than you have.)
_Left_ splinter? I thought the SDP were a bunch of moderates who abandoned Labour (note the “u”, they’re a British party) because at the time Labour were getting too far to the left. Shortly after the SDP-Labour split, Labour produced an election manifesto known as “The longest suicide note in history”, famous for being far too left wing for much of the electorate to stomach.
Later on, Labour made their own move rightwards while the LibDems stayed in place, and in many eyes this left the LibDems as the Most Leftwing Mainstream Party… if you didn’t count the Greens as mainstream, and were in England. This move to the right caused people to derive great amusement from anagramming “Tony Blair MP” as “I’m Tory Plan B” and mixing cherry brandy and blue curacao to make a “New Labour” (maybe that last one was just me).
No you’re right, the Social Democrats abandoned the extremely left-wing ’80s Labour.
Ah, crap, got it backwards. Mea culpa.
Well, British opinions tend to be to the left of American ones. I don’t think the Democrats ever claimed to be socialists, for a start – even these days, Labour maintains links with international organizations with “socialist” in the name. It’s often said that the Democrats are to the right of the Tories. LibDems… there’s the “Orange Book” faction that’s economically like the Tories but more socially liberal, and there’s the other lot which are more to the left.
There’s a fair bunch of people who will either vote Labour or LibDem, depending on which one looks most leftmost (and likely to get in in their constituency), but who would never vote Tory, certainly not after Thatcher. A lot of those were very shocked by how the coalition turned out.
The left-right mapping doesn’t _quite_ work – I think one classic counterexample is that affirmative action seems to be much more an American thing, although this is so far just my observation.
I think a large part of why there is no affirmative action and racial identity politics in Britain is that until the end of the war, and only really ramping up during Labour’s rule in the last decade, we have had relatively little immigration, and a lot of what we have had is of reasonably successful groups who could assimilate into mainstream British society.
Britain is still about 80% white, more if we count the Irish and eastern European immigrants like Poles. Until recently, most of our immigrants, even those from the commonwealth have been selected for intelligence, conscientiousness and so on which has enabled them to assimilate relatively well into society. Large urban ghettoes of under-performing minorities of the sort that fan racial-grievance politics and require affirmative action are quite a recent invention, only going back a few decades at most, and only then in the largest cities such as Birmingham and London.
With increasing immigration, however, especially of less-favourable groups, we are slowly moving towards the American model. Labour is trying very hard to recreate the democratic coalition of champagne socialists and a minority ghetto class and to do this they are throwing working class whites under the bus. In more diverse areas the working class whites are slowly switching to either Tory or UKIP, while in the less diverse areas such as the North and Scotland Labour still gets the working class white vote, mostly due to tribal loyalties and an enduring hatred of Thatcher.
Leftwing newspapers like the Guardian occasionally import a bunch of American-style racial rhetoric so there is clearly a ready supply of support for affirmative action from the chattering classes, their only problem is that there is not yet enough demand for it. This will slowly change as we import more underperforming immigrants so in about 30-50 years I predict that we will be in the same state as America is in today with regards to racial politics. Economically and socially however, we are still far to the left of America.
My good sir, I strongly urge you to abandon this perilous conceit! Indeed, if we allow these prognathous brutes to be counted among whites like honest Anglo-Saxon men, soon enough they will aspire (if such a lofty verb can be applied to these low creatures) to marry our fair daughters and pollute illustrious family lines with their abominable Cromagnon genes.
Har har. Was that necessary, come on.
I guess I became overexcited upon meeting a real time-traveler from 19th century Britain. I promise not to mock any other remarks in this thread, no matter how startling.
It took me years to realize that the Guardian is not an American paper.
The Lib Dems are the policy and tribal equivalent of the Democratic party in the US. They have their DNC wing (Orange book) and their SJW wing. What they don’t have is union, working-class or ethnic minority support (hence why they are not a contending political party), but that’s not really what you’re talking about with your “blue” tribe. Peter, below, is correct that they were a merger of modern (“high”) liberals with the slightly more market-oriented wing of the Labour party. I wouldn’t say they are deep blue; they are just standard blue, but with very little power which means they don’t have to tack their policies to the prevailing winds quite as much.
The red tribe doesn’t exist in the UK, and the parallel between the Republicans and the Conservatives is shaky at best. The Conservative heartland voter is the “Mitt Romney Republican” you describe as not really a red-triber. The UK is a lot smaller, and a lot more urban, than the US. Similarly, there is no US parallel to the Labour party.
I think you’ll find that for appropriate values of football , we do indeed have patriotic, beer swillimg, football loving knuckle draggers and plenty of them.
The group you’re talking about match Scott’s description on 5 of 15 criteria, and that’s being very generous. They are apolitical (or vaguely left-wing), areligious, not creationist, no particular position on gay marriage, no guns, may eat steak but not particularly so, drink Coke, don’t drive SUVs, do watch TV, do watch football, don’t get upset about terrorists or communists, don’t get married much at all, don’t get divorced early, are patriotic, don’t listen to country music. To be clear: the archetypal Red Tribe member is Hank Hill (13/15). That show could not be set in this country, because people like that don’t exist here, let alone whole communities of them.
But your description of those people as knuckle-draggers makes it clear that they are similar in the way that matters most to you; they are handy targets for you to condemn and define yourself against.
There’s a bunch of differences that don’t make a difference
Essex Man , for it is he of whom we speak, is apolitical or vaguely right wing, or very right wing,
He is pretty irreligious along with everyone else …he is not less religious than some other group.
He has no specific position on gay marriage, but happily uses “poof” as an insult.
He is unlikely to own guns, along with everyone else,
He drives a white van instead of a pickup.up
He gets very upset about terrorists.
Not getting divorced because you never got married isn’t exactly going for long term relationships.
In short, nearly all the differences you mention are differences between the US and UK as countries: more urban, fewer guns.
UK blue or US blue? Actually, they are orange.
I’ve been mulling over the definition of “tolerance” and apparently intolerant actions of many self-proclaimed “tolerant” people for some time now. As usual, this post sums up and helps to resolve a lot of vague ideas I had on the matter, which I had never gotten around to organizing in a deliberate fashion. And as usual, kudos for doing such a great job of that. Some points, especially from the last section, I need to continue to mull over before I can come to a good conclusion about them.
My relatively minor criticism is that some observations are presented as more surprising/appalling than I think they actually should be. For example, it seems to me that the fact that prejudice is more pronounced across party lines than race is not only unsurprising but exactly as it should be. Political and religious affiliations are, at least on some level, reflections of one’s personal values, whereas race is not. (To exactly what extent they should be treated as reflections of one’s personal values is a question on which I’ve been debating with myself a lot and hope someday to be able to be able to present in writing.)
I see that as only one reason racism is worse; the other main reason is that, at the end of the day, it’s always worse to discriminate based on characteristics that are not choices and in no way reflect on one’s personal values. (I noticed a variant of this oversight in A Response To Apophemi On Triggers, in the comparisons between using racial slurs to insult out-group members vs. branding them “racists”.)
Then there is the issue of why so many white males seem willing to write articles which are scathing about white/male ignorance of racism/sexism. I think I mostly agree with the hypothesis that they are attacking an out-group rather than an in-group. But that explanation feels unnecessary to me here, because other hypotheses seem to be easily at hand (some of which have already been mentioned in comments above).
For example, consider the fact that many white cis males who have at least some moderate level of interaction with the SJ blogosphere probably feel constantly under threat from it, which may motivate them to loudly proclaim the SJ platform on no uncertain terms. At the same time, consider the fact that, while SJ ideology is pervasive in most internet forums on social issues, it is not so powerful that many SJ advocates feel safe to critique the behavior white cis males with completely unchecked vitriol. It still seems safest for actual white cis males to write the strongest-worded articles criticizing white cis males. These articles, due to being particularly strongly worded, are more likely to gain attention, which might help explain why the articles one runs across which harshly criticize white cis males are so often written by them.
Great article, but one quibble. You conflate heritabiliy figures as “genetic,” and conclude that heritability necessarily leads to the conclusion of part genetic causation. According to molecular genetics findings and study of behavior genetics, proving genetic causation requires genetic evidence. For elaboration, I recommend you to read some HBD blogs that elaborate on distinctions between genetic causation from heritability.
Could you point to such blog posts?
Jayman’s and hbdchick’s blogs are two such sources. Just search for heritability on the blogs. You can also read papers by Plomin et all. which cogently explain what heritability is and isn’t.
I don’t see any posts on hbdchick about heritability at all. Jayman has some, but they don’t suggest Scott has made any mistakes or clarify what you meant.
Click on the sources jayman cites, or if not, read Plomin’s papers on heritability. Just search google scholar for “heritability” and you’ll find some papers that will explain the distinctions for laymen. None of the scientific sources and most rigorous HBDers will conflate heritability for genetic causation outright, so that’s just a minor issue with Scott’s post.
He writes genetic in he first sentence on genetics. Should be changed to heritable since genetic in the scientific literature is shorthand for causation usually.
I feel like I’m pretty up to date on genetics, and I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
JayMan comes by here every so often. If he agrees with you, I’ll investigate further.
The studies you cite don’t do something like GCTA or GWAS, thus concluding that it shows genetic causation is incorrect. That’s just the problem, Jayman will be able to tell you that heritability figures by themselves don’t prove genetic causation but gives clues towards it. So instead of saying that particular traits are “genetic,” it would serve you better to call it “heritable.” And indeed, that’s what your particularly cited studiy show, like all traits, that it is partly heritable. To prove genetic causative outright would require GWAS and further evidence of biogenetic pathways that would prove how the genes work on a molecular level and affect behavioral traits.
A source on what I am talking about:
http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_Heritability_rejoinder.pdf
The papers Scott cited call it genetic causation. Scott is citing them exactly as they want to be cited. You may not like the standards of evidence that are universal in the scientific community, but don’t blame Scott.
Scott linked to PDFs that don’t work for me. But I gave a link above that shows what I am talking about. Scott himself conflated heritability figures with genetic causation in the first part, which according to the paper I cited is not directly the case. His use of “genetic contribution” is more accurate as heritability is an estimate of that. I don’t think you know about standards of evidence. Please cite me any paper which conflates heritability figures with genetic causation. Genetic conclusions require genetic evidence, not something we have yet, but I’m certain is there. Like how we know the genetic causation of IQ and how it differs by group (race, sex, SES etc.)
A Slate article? What are you talking about? He links to Slate in VIII (totally unrelated), but heritability is in IV, with links to four papers. Since those links are broken, I’ll correct them: estimates of see here see here.
If you want to make a subtle distinction between “genetic causation” and “genetic contribution,” you’ll have to say what you mean by those, rather than pretending that other people use those phrases. That paper you link sure doesn’t.
By Slate I meant this blog initially, but edited for obv. reasons. None of the papers conflate heritability and genetic causation. Only the GWAS link associates genes with traits, they don’t use the term genetic causation either.
Genetic causation implies knowledge of how genes work to cause behavior traits on a molecular level. Genetic contribution is what heritability is an estimate of when it comes to variation in traits between cohorts. I also think that the GWAS is inconclusive because n is pretty small. Not like IQ, which is conclusively 80% genetic. My link was only to explain that heritability by itself isn’t genetic causation.
And Scott doesn’t use the phrase “genetic causation” either, so what’s your problem?
*comment deleted*
Can anyone explain the tribe politics of Steven Pinker opinions? Lefty types really hate him, and LW types really love him, and neither makes that much sense to me.
Gray?
While clearly not red, he pokes around underexamined sacred values of the left, and does it rationally, reasonably, and interestingly, which should explain the effects on both groups you mention.
(I have him as “libertarianish” in my mental file, but I’m not sure how much evidence I’m basing that on)
SJW types hate him, and some academics in the humanities aren’t huge fans either, but the Democratic establishment doesn’t have a problem with him. He’s been published a lot in mainstream-left organs like The New Republic, Slate and the NYT.
> (except on the blog Stuff White People Like, where it obviously serves as a code word for the Blue tribe. I don’t know, guys. I didn’t do it.)
You shouldn’t be surprised by this, the name is a *pretty deliberate* attack on the anti-racist bona-fides of the blue tribe. The intended implication is that even though “inclusiveness towards PoC” is a blue tribal aspiration, many, perhaps most actual PoC do not display blue tribal markers and probably wouldn’t feel comfortable in blue tribal spaces.
I am not sure if this is deliberate, but I suspect it is:
That, and also that for the correct subset of Blues, being described racially, or at all, is insulting when not done as recognizable mockery.
As a member of the Blue Tribe, I find this uncomfortable and a bit embarrassing and obviously correct. Thank you.
Bonus points for the final section.
Pingback: I Can Tolerate Anything Except People I Hate | Junior Ganymede
This might already be mentioned upthread, but I think there might be at least one other small group akin to Gray, and I think I’m part of it, along with Leah Libresco, Ross Douthat, and the people at The American Conservative magazine. Basically, culturally Blue people who intellectually identify as conservative and religious and may have a few other Red affinities. We seem to spend most of our online time a) criticizing our fellow conservatives for being blockheads (i.e., not subtle [i.e., not culturally Blue enough]), and getting into discussions with atheists in which we try to defend our religions (often Catholicism or Orthodoxy) from accusations of being blockheaded (i.e., I’m just as culturally Blue (or in Leah’s case, Gray) as you are, please stop dismissing me as a yokel who believes in a Sky Fairy! Why won’t Richard Dawkins give us credit for driving Priuses to church and stop being so mean?! Well, he doesn’t understand sophisticated theology anyway, so there. He’s the yokel.) [Not pretty stuff, I admit.]
It’s an awkward terrain to inhabit. Analogizing in/outgroups to races, it’s kind of like being multiracial or multiethnic in a Yugoslav-type situation. (Loosely analogizing. Please don’t yell at me! [See, there’s that cringe.]) It certainly makes for more of a mix of Red and Blue friends than Scott described.
I’ll call this group “Violet.” I do wonder if the Violet tendency to harp on the failures of the mainstream GOP is kind of like the Gray tendency Scott diagnosed to train fire on the Blue. I’m not sure, though, because a lot of us Violets spend a lot of time kvetching about how oppressed we are (we’re not, comparatively–I know!) because we have Red beliefs but work, live, shop, and eat in SWPL Blue enclaves for the most part. I think we’re purple enough that both Red and Blue are close enough to attract our intemperate ire. So we can’t really criticize either big tribe without the near occasion of the sin of self-righteous choir-preaching b.s.
I’m from New England, grew up Blue, and that “real America” stuff used to drive me NUTS. (How can Lexington and Concord not be part of the real America, cowboy? How American were you in 1776? Weren’t you people part of New Spain or something? We were American first, Palin! It’s our word!) Now I live in Texas and have more Red beliefs than I did growing up, and that kind of rhetoric doesn’t bug me nearly as much anymore, even though I think it still should, objectively.
I think the ire I had at Palin’s “real America” then, and the admittedly intemperate ire I occasionally have at New Atheists now, is that both felt/feel like they’re trying to erase me and mine from the accepted world picture–to say that patriotic New Englanders don’t exist (or that dissent isn’t patriotic) in Palin’s case, or to say that religious traditionalists (e.g., orthodox Biblical Christians, not Unitarians or something) who are also culturally Blue people with cosmopolitan sympathies can’t have a coherent identity and are really just yokel terrorists who don’t know it. Maybe it’s that sense of “erasure” that drives Scott’s Gray horror of Blue social justice attempts to deploy conceptual superweapons against his white male self. It is kinda scary.
[EDIT 2: Brown swapped with White throughout per Multiheaded’s great suggestion. Then I realized that the phrase “us Whites” sounded racial. But I like Multiheaded’s idea of using shades like Crimson for some groups, instead of just primaries. I’ll say Violet for us, since it’s the version of purple that’s a liturgical color.]
[EDIT 3: It occurs to me that maybe New Atheists are also sometimes Violets’ near-neighboring hated outgroup: fellow nerds who are interested in abstract questions like religion, but who are Wrong on the Internet and Must Be Destroyed. It also occurs to me that criticizing my own Violet group is also presumably some kind of ridiculous level of meta-hipster status signalling as mentioned upthread. Seems unavoidable.]
White.
(Also add Crimson for people like Matthias-senpai, and Black for the politically aware among the underclasses and the really actually highly oppressed.)
*comment deleted*
[because this is not the right place to try to score points against my outgroup].
History lesson: Garibaldi’s redshirts → Mussolini’s blackshirts → Hitler’s brownshirts
*comment deleted*
Whatever my politics and even vicious signaling of hatred towards grey, I am culturally blue-gray by this schema. (But perhaps my habitus here is different, I don’t know. I’m not sure identities are stable enough across contexts for this to really predicate persons as such.)
Who’s Matthias-Senpai? Also have they noticed you? What are the characteristics of the crimson group?
If you search for Senpai in older threads, I think you’ll find it. I suspect he wasn’t supposed to out his name here, though; I’ve never seen it before.
I think Multi’s been severely infected with the senpai noticed me meme and is not necessarily referring to the same person every time he says “senpai”.
No, it’s always the same person. He used to link to his blog, which had his name.
I’m an actual sempai in my dojo, so it’s always momentarily confusing when he does this.
S.J.W./Oligopsony
I’m from Massachusetts, and pleased to get independent confirmation that I wasn’t imagining this.
I actually wish Scott had started with a good thorough taxonomy this time so he could mention groups like yours (well, ours, really, although I’m more Grey than I am Blue). I like the practice of starting with a few good recognizable things and drawing some grand theory out of them and all, it makes for great posts and discussion, but I feel that we’re a little past thinking in terms of just two or maybe three major groups. But maybe it’s the absurdly high bubble value that Scott got that had him thinking there had to be very few and very large, comprehensive groups.
Incidentally, which part of Texas? You’re one of my favorite Internet commenters, so on the chance you’re near the Austin metro, I’ll totally buy you a beer in exchange for conversation.
And, after reading this post, I saw this in a friend’s facebook feed, in response to that rhino being declared extinct:
“I […] wish for a speedy extinction of the human species.”
I think you’re right that ‘America’ as used by blue tribe is code for ‘red tribe’ and so on. But, also that there’s more to it – I think the blue tribe actually accords high status to self-criticism, or things that look like it anyway.
Or maybe to making more and more far-out things your in-group while making more and more close to home things your out-group, going of course till yourself. Which, now that I’ve written it, just looks to me like self-criticism by another name.
And, for the pro-blue bit, I’ll just note that – like that ‘pretending to really try’ argument about EA – self-criticising for status often gets to actual self-criticism.*
Recently, for example, I ran into a defunct feminist tumblr that just had an apology for having acted horribly to various people. I later read that she honestly believed that men should all become trans or something like that. It’s non-trivial that someone at the far-out edges of crazy was able to pull back and see it. Of course, this may just be a property of her, but same way your brain is probably going ‘this wouldn’t have happened if she was in the LW community’ my brain is going ‘this happened faster in the blue side than it would have in the red.’
* To be honest, status games nearly always seem to take the form of adaptation-execution rather than status-maximisation. But my understanding for status games is vague.
I’m not sure if it’s just status about self-critcism.
Let’s split the Blue thede into Blue and ur-Blue. Neither shall include those who have genuinely hoisted the red flag of revolution, but lets say that the ur-Blue is typically found in a university campus and a Blue in a job requiring university education, that a Blue tries not to see race and that an ur-Blue is consumed by race in the most un-volkish way possible.
Blues definitely do the criticism thing, but I don’t think they would generally write something like that. If they did, it would be in frustrated, fatalistic terms about paying the price for our misdeeds. ur-Blues take it seriously, for very low levels of seriously.
Maybe phrasing it as status was a mistake. I understand it rather poorly.
I think the main thing I was saying, that look self-criticism is a thing blues do and they’re actually not just using America as a code-word for reds (even if they are mostly doing that), holds.
For example, the stuff white people like blog is beloved of many blue writers (can I just say liberal now?), even though it’s clearly aimed at liberals – that’s how I first came across it.
The SWPL blog is aimed, I think, at liberals who are perceived as trying too hard or not doing it well enough.
That’s the same thing as “hipsters”, right? SWPL basically uses “white people” to mean “hipsters”.
I disagree with your assumption that the trying-too-hard liberals and good liberals are cleanly delineated. This sort of making fun of straw/weak man is very much an epistemic immune response.
Actual liberals are scared that they’ll try too hard and become like the target of swpl. And they honestly believe that being that way is bad. This is a constant reminder of a failure mode.
An absolutely fantastic post! I would add one small thing with respect to the “narcissism of small differences”. I think that’s a real dynamic, but I don’t believe narcissism explains the scale of tension between your example pairs: Jews/Nazis, Red/Blue, Protestant/Catholic, etc. I think the intense power of those tensions is due to utterly pragmatic causes. Specifically, each of those pairs are/were locked in real competition for power and resources. Those competitions create frequent opportunities to experience frustration or failure at the hands of the “other”.
For instance, I suspect some Blue tribe folks hated Thatcher more than Bin Laden because they personally experienced more frustration and defeat at the hands of Thatcher (and her idealogical allies) than they did from Bin Laden. Likewise, Nazis were in direct competition with German Jews and benefited directly (in a ruthless sense) from their displacement. Red tribe folks and Blue tribe folks don’t despise one another due to bits of narcissism such as Priuses vs SUVs. Those are just the identifiers. The real animosity springs from the daily zero-sum competitions on issues such as income distribution, abortion, gun rights, environmental regulation, etc.
This matters a lot, and I’d say it accounts for the difference between “similar groups living it peace, while diversity makes a huge mess” and “similar groups hating each other”.
Meta-level status seeking (among individuals that I shall call Red+, Blue+, Grey+):
“I am fully aware of the hypocrisies of my own tribe. I recognize that these are effects of within-group status-seeking. I recognize that status-seeking out-group persecution can cause real harm, and I condemn such persecution. I recognize my own complicity in this and my own within-group status seeking, and I condemn myself. I find the people it hurts to criticize and criticize them, relishing the purifying pain. I simultaneously recognise that — when wedded to true tolerance and approached with sufficient willingness to dissent when it hurts — the refined and buttressed versions of [Red/Blue/Grey] beliefs represent our best hope of achieving a flourishing human world.”
Scott, you and I* both move in circles in which this ascetic activity of painful self-criticism is proof of enlightenment and therefore very high-status. That doesn’t make such pious self-criticism wrong or useless, of course.**
*Example: I nearly posted the fact that I attend a highly-ranked, generally very left-wing university and know several creationists.
**(A “[Red+/Blue+/Gray+]+” claim)
EDIT: Joseph Hertzlinger appears to be thinking along similar lines.
I agree that Red-bashing is very stupid and pointless even for tactical reasons, and that they should be allowed a peaceful and comfortable extinction, as long as all the groups that we do actually care about can make themselves safe from them. I also think that a much subtler, less reactive and more proactive approach is needed against the Grey threat.
as long as?
What happens when that fails?
(Given the standards of “safe” applied nowadays, it will fail.)
The most straightforward way is, continue the beatings until morale improves, and empower (preferrably non-state) organizations to intervene on a case-by-case basis. It’s not some horrible all-or-nothing thing, it’s business as usual, after all. I simply tried to outline a conditional surrender, so that we wouldn’t have to carry on/double down.
So your meta virtue is “being virtuous is only as virtuous as it is hard”? Seems a little extreme.
I’d say it’s closer to “Uncommon virtue isn’t doing what you were trained to do from birth, its still Uncommon.”
For all intents and purposes virtue is a positional good. Competition for virtue is zero sum among the competitors, but has large positive externalities, which is why we want to encourage it.
You can think of the Red tribe as people signalling they’re Americans. The Blue tribe is counter-signalling. The Grey tribe is counter-counter-signalling. The Royal Purple tribe is counter-counter-counter-signalling…
Someone who is above all the levels of n-counter-signaling would be ω-counter-signaling… and someone who is better than that is ω+1-counter-signaling…
Can we get to ε0?
If the Red Tribe didn’t signal, would anyone doubt that they’re American? Probably not. If the Grey Tribe were countersignaling, they’d have more Red behaviors than the Blues do, but Greys are even less likely to go to church or community events than the Blues are – if anything, they’re extreme Blues by many of their behaviors.
If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be Red {Blue, Grey, …}
I think you have to make it worse with a graph
We went from arguing about American red-vs.-blue politics to references to Gödel, Escher, Bach. I love this community.
Can we get to ε0?
Wouldn’t that be, simply, non-Americans? 😀
“I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee.”
Not really on-topic: are we certain of this? One argument I hear from those on the right is that shaming divorce will result in more people being happier with their marriages, resulting in 1) more happiness in general, 2) more children growing up in relatively happy two-parent households. Given that some people really need to get out of terrible situations, this isn’t an argument for banning divorce, but it could easily be an argument for shaming people for getting a divorce.
How exactly would that work? Weekly mean gossip sessions to feed the ego? Public divorcee shaming as a bonding activity for still-married couples?
Humans have a weird psychological quirk where often, if you remove some of their options, they are happier with the remainder.
Oh, no, sorry. I meant things like people trying harder, compromising with their SOs more, and things like that. Just consequences of divorce being more personally expensive.
There’s also the possibility, as Anonymous mentions in a sibling, of increasing relationship happiness as untaken options are reduced.
One thing I heard an anti-divorce person claim is that when divorce is acceptable but still bad, people don’t have the motive to make things work regardless so they prepare for divorce, making it even more possible.
Unfortunately, Scott is right: It’s really hard to target advice at exactly the people who need it.
In this case, the people who have already internalized the idea that divorce is horrible sin will be easier to shame, while flighty celebrities on their sixth marriage will feel free to roll their eyes at you.
End result: (ex-)Christians in abusive or mutually destructive relationships are even more reluctant to get out, others expand their outgroup to include divorce-shamers.
Yet back in the past when divorce was shamed by society, it did indeed prevent there from being lots of flighty celebrities on their sixth marriage.
Well, to be honest, I don’t care how often celebrities get married. And even if I did, making other people stay in horrible relationships certainly doesn’t seem worth it.
Ken: yeah, so they had six mistresses instead?
Probably. Although it’s noted that the problem might be the imbalance due to sexism (penalty for women cheating being much worse, even when paternity security is not harmed) than the hypocrisy.
“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”
Tangent: For some reason I thought that was an Oscar Wilde quote. It’s a Frenchman whose name I don’t remotely recognize.
I now hypothesize that I have a general historical figure for each time period, guess about when a quote was said, and ascribe it to the figure from that period.
If I think something rustic and early American? Franklin, Lincoln, or Twain.
Something witty, vaguely early modern? Probably Oscar Wilde. etc.
Everyone attributes everything to Twain, Wilde, and Churchill. Some stuff to Franklin. Lincoln, not so much.
Doesn’t sound homespun or cynical enough to be Twain. I would have bought Franklin, though.
“One of Wilde’s, one of Wilde’s.”
This is a awesome post where you can discover so much about yourself. Thank you very much for that! I hope you will never regret writing it.
A lot of this post rings very true to me. But there is a point I just can’t let slide:
When you compare believing in creationism vs evolution, one of those is actually correct.
When you look at sexism and racism, those are actually morally wrong.
When you look at whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there is an actual fact of the matter.
When you look at driving gay people to suicide, it is actually morally wrong. (Nice strawman there self!)
When you look at climate change there is an actual fact of the matter.
And Miller Lite is actually a shitty beer
____
Its easy to look at any disagreement between groups of people as tribalism. And certainly those who are losing any particular disagreement on the object level would want to look at tribalism as a meta level to move focus away from the object level. But THE OBJECT LEVEL IS REAL.
Real people get arrested for minor offenses and rot in jail. Real people die when bombs get dropped on their heads. Feeding antibiotics to animals may create a real risk of disease. People in low lying countries may become really actually homeless refugees.
Can you imagine a world in which there are thoughtful, intelligent people who disagree with your assertion that sexism and racism (or at least, forms that differ from your caricatures of them) are wrong?
People who disagree with Blue positions often have object level concerns they’re worried about, too. (I could make a list, but it’s an easy exercise, and might start a debate about the object level stuff that I for one am in no mood for here.)
I think the pragmatic takeaway from the OP is that trying to root out one’s own tribalism and be more civil is worthwhile, if it’s at all possible without betraying one’s admittedly quite consequential object-level goals.
Doesn’t this go back to the priest in Chesterton’s story Scott refers to? The priest thought the supposed nobleman had done wrong and penance was needed for forgiveness, but was also willing to extend forgiveness under similar conditions when the truth came out.
Racism and sexism are intrinsically pejorative. They describe ‘bad’ or ‘unjust’ differences in treatment. And I think you’re pulling a bit of a bait-and-switch with exactly whose standard we’re using.
The infinitely defensible Motte is, “X-ism: support for policies that the listener thinks are unjust”.
Everyone will agree that [things they see as] unjust are unjust. Use that definition and your objection becomes trivial. There just aren’t any Motte-Racists.
The impossible-to-hold Bailey is: “Xism = support for policies that the speaker think are unjust.”
Use that definition and you can find some Bailey-Racists to condemn. The objection could matter.
The problem is that the speaker’s position devolves to the nearly-tautological: “People who disagree with me about Justice are supporting [what I see as] Injustice.” That’s true for everyone.
If we round ‘disagreement about morality’ up to ‘immorality’ then it applies to so many people that it really loses any sting.
Well….yeah? But then I’d expect the speaker to put forth a case for a particular policy being unjust (even if I might not agree that it is initially). It’s not impossible to hold the bailey, it just requires work.
Sorry, that was me.
> Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things.
Already posted to /r/KotakuInAction, /r/TumblrAtRest and /r/AgainstFeminism. Should we all go downvote?
Interestingly it seems to be OK there.
I really appreciated the insight of ingroups and outgroups, but I have to say that you fell into a logical self-recursion trap as the text went on, especially in the last part. “Being intolerant of intolerance” is cliched and horribly misused since, as you pointed out, the meaning of “intolerant” is twisted in order to fit the speaker’s prejudices. However, taken at face value, it’s a(n objectively correct?) fine statement. Tolerating one’s opinions is not necessarily the same as tolerating one’s actions.
I used to wonder why people called for the Justice League to have more diversity. Its original lineup included three white people, two space aliens, a member of a race of aquatic humanoids, and a woman from an isolated tribe who is made from enchanted clay. That seems awfully diverse.
But when people say diverse they mean “diverse groups near me,” not any possible diverse group.
In politics-speak “diverse” means approved victim class so that a group composed solely of black women is 100% “diverse”. Space aliens and the like are not an approved victim class, so they are not “diverse.”
While in general I’m in favour of blowing up victim-status-mongering behaviour, I’m afraid this isn’t really what “diversity” in this context means.
The argument made regarding the problem of diversity in media is that non-majority individuals have nothing to associate with in majority media. Black people aren’t going to find it any easier to get along with a “diverse” group containing white people, aliens and robots than they are a group containing only white people; it still contains only people that are Not Like Them.
For all that it’s presented as a Moral Imperative, I don’t think that this is particularly bad reasoning; it’s not exactly difficult to see how an all-white team would alienate non-white people. My argument against it is more straightforward: comics have had black and female characters for quite a long time and while gay and trans characters are not generally presented as such, sexuality and gender-conformity are not generally central to character portrayal in comics at all, at least until SJ-driven demands made it so very recently; in that any given character not portrayed as being in a straight relationship could be gay and even the ones portrayed as being in a straight romantic relationship could easily be bisexual, and there were numerous discussions in fandom regarding this. Once sexuality becomes an issue, though, everyone becomes straight-unless-distinguished-otherwise. A rather ironic form of heteronormativity-reinforcement.
So the core premise of the “diversity in comics” argument is rather faulty in that it’s not actually reflective of the media in question. Same thing applies to race and gender in games, for that matter. But it’s not as though the people making this argument don’t have a history of making up absolutes where they don’t exist.
(B)y way of illustration: a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points
I think that Catholic hospital may be having some strange effect on you, because did you just use the example of the Widow’s Mite? 🙂
I was sure that I recognised Scott’s example from somewhere – Catholic primary school was where I heard it first I think!
Anecdote related to this and the “pits of suffering” post: I heard of a philosophy student who realised that as a utilitarian he should forsake his dreams of becoming a philosopher, go into finance and donate his earnings to charity. Then it struck him that more Utility Points would be won if he became a philosopher and told all of his students to go into finance and donate their earnings.
This sounds like a pyramid scheme 😀
Motivated reasoning. How much difference is he actually going to make at the margin in each case?
Initial evidence suggests that evangelizing may well be the most resource-efficient approach:
ChrisHallquist LW post
Utilitarians had it first, Jesus just plagiarized us!
So you’ve never actually heard the Urban Archipelago hypothesis of American politics? There’s actually another conflict layered in here: most actual citizens of America life in the Urban Archipelago, but most of the government and media are controlled by and catered toward the rural minority who hold most of the land area. Some of this problem is systemic to the American Constitution: it was designed for a republic of farmers. Some is also, indeed, a matter of hegemonic cultural bias in which the Red Tribe from the rural areas holds that rural Red Tribe things are more “American” than urban Blue Tribe things.
On the other hand, considering rural culture more “volkish” than urban culture is a fairly common cultural feature throughout the planet, to my dismay.
Can you give an example of media orientated towards rural land owners?
That strikes me as very implausible. There is an effect where rural areas are overrepresented in the US Senate, and you can plausibly blame that for a few pro-rural distortions (like the hated corn ethanol quota). But as a practical matter, most centers of government and most centers of media and culture are located in urban areas. This means that most bureaucrats and most media workers are urban folks rather than rural folks, and so on a low level they will be more sympathetic to urban culture than to rural culture.
On a high level, it seems difficult to argue that urban environments are underrepresented in fictional media, or that urban news is being neglected in favor of reporting on the problems of farmers.
I find myself obligated to point out that this is just a restatement of heartiste’s formula “diversity + proximity = war.”
No, it isn’t. Heartiste’s theory predicts that if you put together a bunch of 99% similar people, there will be no war. Scott’s theory predicts that if you put a lot of 99% similar people together, they will feud viciously over on the 1%. Once again, Heartiste perpetuates pretty lies about human nature.
those 99% people will most definitely feud viciously over the 1%, but beer vs. wine probably won’t rise to the level of actual shooting war. degree of conflict matters.
This seems a bit overly optimistic, or at least does not model behavior within MMORPGs and online FPSes, which have seen SWAT called in despite overwhelmingly similar people on most sides. There might conceivably be differences so trivial that people won’t get into knock-down dragout fights over them, but I’m hard-pressed to imagine them.
I’m not familiar with this theory of Heartiste but if it’s meant to prove something negative about multiculturalism them it seems like Scott’s post affirms it. Scott seems to be supporting the idea that if you have two very distinct groups of people who rarely intermingle and hold distinct values but occupy the same space and are fighting over the same resources, they will grow to hate each other. The parallel to multiculturalism is obvious.
There’s got to be more to it than that, or the prediction would be that families would get along worst of all. And while family members certainly do fight, this is very different from the blue-red hate.
This also put me in mind of the following passage from Dune:
I think they are both right; the key point isn’t the degree of difference, the key point is the proximity; there will always be conflict and factions that squabble over shared resources (even if the resources in question are just the mindspace of the people). Doesn’t matter if it is 1% difference or 99%.
However, if you have 1% difference, there is less likely to be sharp and discernable distinction between the groups and more likely to be overlapping factions–one supposes, although that may not be enough to make conflict evitable.
I dunno, I feel like Heartiste is predicting that eg black people and white people can’t live together without war, which is the opposite of what I’m predicting.
empirically he is more correct than you are
People sure are happy to throw around words like “empirical” in this thread without pointing to any empirical findings. Wonder why that is?
That seems like a correct hypothesis to me insofar as all data is considered.
Basic tribalism theory would posit that black and white people can live together just fine, as long as they belong to the same ingroup and have a common outgroup to hate together. See: Cold War. It’s no accident the civil rights movement got traction when it did, and that the preceding Jim Crow regimes got traction when they did.
Absent an outside threat however, I think there is an inherent conflict, but not an irrepressible one.
“See: Cold War. It’s no accident the civil rights movement got traction when it did”
I’m not sure I understand here. The civil rights movement was in the middle of the cold war.
Tarrou’s saying that black and white people were able to make common cause because they had a highly salient outgroup to jointly hate, the Commies.
This seems like a claim that could and should be substantiated with historical data. My uninformed impression is that this isn’t accurate in any obvious way. Martin Luther King, for example, had a lot of sympathy for socialism / anti-capitalism, and might have had sympathy for communism if political realities hadn’t forced him to strongly distance himself from communists. My impression is that civil rights people were unusually likely to be skeptical of anti-communist propaganda (the Right and the FBI certainly perceived them that way, to the point of hysteric paranoia), whereas the ‘common enemy’ model seems to predict that civil rights people will be unusually strident anti-communists. Or is it only white support for civil rights that was stoked by anti-communism?
@Rob
Ah, I see. I never thought of the civil rights movement as blacks and whites coming together against a common enemy, but rather as factional warfare between blues (allied with blacks) and reds.
Also, I have to say I’m not convinced about the thesis that an outside threat necessarily forces people together. There have been far more examples in history of one faction enlisting a powerful outside enemy to intervene against their opposing faction than of factions coordinating against a common enemy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all.
The civil rights era goes back to the very beginning of the cold war. For example, Truman integrated the military in 1948. That triggered Strom Thurman to threaten to leave the Democrat Party. He ran a third party campaign that year, but returned to the fold and only left in 1964, the year of another third party campaign.
Many people claim that Blues were shamed into supporting civil right by Soviet taunting. It was a battle for the moral high ground. I think this is compatible with but rather different from what Rob says. I have no idea what Tarrou means, but at first glance, this appears opposite.
Relevant.
I never thought of the civil rights movement as blacks and whites coming together against a common enemy, but rather as factional warfare between blues (allied with blacks) and reds.
Yes. The Cold War immediately followed the hot WWII, which had seen some coming together (partly forced, as by Truman integrating the troops) against the Nazis. The Cold War was a cooling from that, and the Blues did not fear the Communists (many Blues were sympathetic to them). So the Blues had energy to go after their usual enemies (the Conservatives), by rhetoric, and by encouraging situations conducive to warm conflict (riot guns vs rocks) between White Conservatives and Blacks. And some Whites, now out of the integrated military and with no Nazis to unite against, resumed hostility toward Blacks.
@houseboatonstyx — I might be misreading this, but the military wasn’t integrated until 1948. Americans in WWII still fought in segregated units, with most black soldiers working as drivers or laborers away from the front lines.
Blue eyes / brown eyes and the Robbers Cave experiment suggests that it’s extraordinarily easy to spark tribal conflict. On the other hand, it’s also extraordinarily easy to spark tribal alliance and trust, and working together on common goals can achieve that end even if there’s no literal human Common Enemy.
Most kinds of human variation don’t produce large amounts of violence and conflict; e.g., 5’9″ people aren’t at constant war with 5’8″ people, and people with thick eyebrows aren’t constantly bad-mouthing people with thin eyebrows, or bombing the residences of thin-eyebrowed folks. Establishing a common project for the relevant groups is useful; not having cultural tropes that draw attention to the differences is useful; and making it obvious that the groups blend together in a continuum (e.g., having more mixed-race people than black or white people) probably also helps, though it’s not completely decisive.
There’s an HTML error in the paragraph beginning “And if you mix together the open-source tech industry and the parallel universe…” that is causing most of the paragraph to be hidden. My browser thinks everything starting with “where you can’t wear a FreeBSD t-shirt” to the end of the paragraph is part of the link.
Scott, you’re making *so much* more sense than anyone else in the culture wars that it feels like a serious loss to the world to “keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things”… I do understand the worry, though.
Also, you should probably prepare a little better against quote mining. Things like “I need to remind myself that when they are bad people, they are merely Osama-level bad people instead of Thatcher-level bad people” is just gold for people looking for it.
Yeah, it’s too bad he doesn’t want this reposted on Reddit, a lot of people there would be interested in seeing it.
For the record, I think Scott’s classification of this post in “Things I Will Regret Writing” will turn out to be empirically wrong. It reads much more like evenhanded analysis and much less like attacking the outgroup than any of the other posts in that category.
Ah, don’t worry, I’m looking at my incoming links and they already posted it on two subreddits.
A related concept in sports:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_derby
Often the rivalry between two groups is born not of differences, but out of habit, out of frequecy of fights between the groups. When you read e.g. a history of crusades, you notice that (at first) local muslim leaders paid more attention to their old wars and tried to make this new group of people (crusaders) their allies against their old (muslim) enemies, rather than trying to unite all muslim groups against them.
This was a major dynamic in the conquest of the Americas. Tribe A lives on the seashore and fights with inland Tribe B. Europeans come, Tribe A is exposed to their diseases and gets hurt bad. So Tribe A allies with the Europeans, because Tribe A now feels very vulnerable to those evil Tribe Bs. Eventually the Europeans take over Tribe A territory and Tribe A isn’t significant any more, and its Tribe B that is getting hit with disease, alcohol, social disruption, and feels very vulnerable to even more inland Tribe C. Wash, rinse, repeat. There are obviously nuances and complications, but the basic model is pretty robust.
The reasons why some groups (with small differences) are considered ingroup and some – outgoup, usually are endogenous (and not exogenous) to the history of conflict itself. At first, all new groups are divided into potential allies and potential enemies within the context of already existing conflict.
If you look at 19th/early 20th century Teutonists, the British ones are heavy on their superiority to the dreamy, impractical Celts.
Now, the German ones, including significant ones in the first half of the 20th century, there’s nothing wrong with the Celts, who are of one of the superior breeds if not quite German. It’s those horrible Slavs that one contrasts with.
Geography is influential.
These days I am starting to apreciate this argument more and more.
This is a great video if your friends want to know why some ppl are against gay marriage. Poke around at the link for a good Q/A. Also more disscussion of tolerance.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YWIhZ5xJJaQ
This was brilliant. Thank you. I’m adding it to my list of good arguments against same sex marriage.
No problem, don’t forget to share the Q&A. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWC22S8FtJs
Gay “marriage”?
If marriage has any meaning at all, then gay ‘marriage’ is an oxymoron. Gay ‘marriage’ has not ever occurred in the history of mankind. It is biologically absurd.
The union of the opposite halves of humanity with the possibility of procreation is at the center of the only meaning of marriage that makes sense.
Gay ‘sex’ is not even sex, biologically speaking. Sex is not the correct word for what happens. Even cases where gay couples use artificial means, there is in 100% of cases a third party that is biological mother or father. No exceptions.
Procreation is not some antiquated value either. In the long run it is almost the only thing that matters.
In any case, the groups that are actually reproducing at above replacement (see Afghanistan, Africa, India, orthodox Jews) all view gay ‘marriage’ as utterly absurd. If evolution has any truth at all, then procreation is the central thing, above every other thing.
Nature will gladly toss aside whole civilizations if they believe absurd things.
If you really want to brutalistically biological, you must view gay marriage as the absurdity that it is.
Otherwise you are no better than the young Earth creationists you scorn.
‘Progressives’ proudly imagine that they are so clever because they ‘get’ evolution but they completely miss the main message. The main message of evolution is that procreators are the winners. The end.
I deliver this message with no pleasure. My own tribe is being wiped out, evolutionarily speaking, because it views sex as something other than procreation. My tribe has an awesome history. Lots of accomplishments. This sucks. The end.
http://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution.html
Submitting to natural selection will not save you. It will destroy you and everything you care about, unless all you care about IS short term reproductive success.
Evolution sacrifices individuals for their genes. The only way to stop this is to coordinate against it, and eliminate harmful selective pressure.
There are no more “winners” in evolution than there are “winners” in a global nuclear war.
“Submitting to natural selection will not save you. It will destroy you and everything you care about, unless all you care about IS short term reproductive success. ”
That is like saying I should not care about my country’s future because no country lasts forever. Indeed, in the long term the sun will swallow the Earth, but there quite a lot between here and there.
While it may be true, this kind of perspective is totally nihilistic and pointless. If that is your view, why argue about anything? Why even be sober?
I’m not sure you understood my point. The tyranny of nature can, to some extent, be defeated, via technology and civilization.
I may have gone a little grandiose in the language there and been rather unclear in what I was saying. I tend to do that.
I was sort of echoing Scott’s Moloch post, but I’m not as good at it as he is.
I thought it was pretty good. A link to Scott’s Moloch post would have helped.
So marriage between infertile or elderly couples isn’t marriage?
Quick: tell me how you can actually tell whether a given heterosexual couple can produce children?
Bear in mind that passionate refusal to bear a child and medically certifying the sterility of both is not enough, because couples for whom that was true — have produced children.
If the woman has had a full hysterectomy.
So the government ought to confiscate your medical records, eh?
So the government ought to confiscate your medical records, eh?
Huh? No. Where did that come from? I am pro gay marriage & basically pro any consenting adult marrying any other consenting adult regardless of fertility/intent to have children. I was just pointing out that it is possible for an individual couple to show that they are not able to poroduce children.
Sure, but the question is generally concerning government action w.r.t. a request for a marriage license. I imagine “looking at the ‘sex’ field of your already-submitted official documentation” and “confiscating your medical records” are two different types of things.
Infertility is regarded as an acceptable reason to divorce in some religious traditions.
Infertility is to gay marriage, as a malfunctioning car is to an imaginary car.
There’s two essays against gay marriage that I have appreciated. I still have a hard time organizing my thoughts on the topic. A good exercise would be for someone to make the ideas in these essays more explicit and steel-manned.
One is Meg McArdle’s post, linked elsewhere on this thread, which argues against it using a Chesterton’s fence argument:
http://www.rightwingnews.com/uncategorized/a-really-really-really-long-post-about-gay-marriage-that-does-not-in-the-end-support-one-side-or-the-other-by-jane-galt/
The other is this post in The Weekly Standard about the kinship system. Along the way, it explains a lot of our social mores around sex and marriage.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/533narty.asp?page=1
Want to thank you for that second link. It was deeply uncomfortable and moderately repulsive reading, and for that reason quite enlightening.
This might also gross you out but educate you a bit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWC22S8FtJs
One of the few factual references from that Weekly Standard post:
Which should be obvious to everyone as a piece of muddled thinking. There’s an obvious reason for participants in same-sex weddings to be much older that is not that they’re not interested in monogamy and a lifetime bond: same-sex weddings haven’t been allowed until recently, so there will be people who would have had them at a younger age if they could, but weren’t permitted to until they got older.
Reminds me of of the factoid about Colorado car-crash victims showing more detectable THC metabolites following the legalization of marijuana in that state.
(Inactive THC metabolites remain detectable for weeks after smoking. The study wasn’t picking up near-term intoxication, it was picking up long-term use.)
Hello, token Red Triber!
I actually agree, kind of: I don’t think that “marriage” in its present form is a useful idea at all. Some sort of a long-term contract involving mutual ownership rights and responsibilities, with hefty penalties for early termination, might be a good idea… but that’s not what “marriage” currently is.
Wait, why? Isn’t late termination way more harmful, what with both people having wasted the proverbial best years of their life, and being in a much worse position to find a better partner?
Their problem. After all, they walked in with open eyes.
The termination penalties are to recompense the children, who didn’t ask to get into it, and if the divorce is not by mutual consent, the spouse who’s getting dumped. (Welcome to the wonderful world of contracts, where the person who wants out has to recompense the person who doesn’t.)
Oh, so “early” means “before the youngest child gets married” or something along those lines? I took it to mean “within the first couple of years, before kids”, so that explains my surprise.
Yes, I meant something close to what Anonymous said.
I also tend think of it this way: when you sign up for a cellphone plan, you can usually get a new cellphone along with it for free (or, at least, at a hefty discount). The reason for this is that your promise to stick to the contract for the next two years is worth the price of a new cellphone to the cell company. Naturally, if you break the promise, you should compensate them at the very least.
Marriage works (or, rather, could probably work) kind of in the same way; except that it’s a four-way contract between you, your spouse, the government, and your (future) children.
The identification of the “grey tribe” is interesting. It is very convenient to postulate oneself into a small select group when criticizing the group one would otherwise seem to belong to.
Hypothesis: one perceives the grey tribe as a meaningful third group because one belongs to it, and needs a place to stand while criticizing the blues. A person in a different area of the blues who wrote this article might perceive the third group as being their own extra little group that allows them to feel smarter/distinct. A person you would see as red might perceive all the blues and greys as the same, but be happy to criticize the reds because they view themselves as part of a special Good splinter.
Thoughts?
I think the instance of implicit association test you linked is broken. I have done this kind of test before, but this one looked like it was wrongly ordered. The expected implicit association was displayed at the very end after 3-4 runs trying to establish different association. It didn’t look like scientific method of trying to disprove you bias, but rather confirm it.
It is common for participants in IAT to feel that the order in which the blocks are presented affects the outcome. It may, a little, and there’s no single ordering of blocks that can be called without bias, so individual IAT-for-fun results should be taken with a grain of salt.
Of course, experimenters collecting data in a study are well aware that order may affect performance, so they always show half their participants the blocks in one order, and the other half of their participants the other order, and also randomize the response keys and so on. And IAT findings at the study level are robust to this randomization across subjects.
(I have a contrarian notion that IAT doesn’t measure associations really, but rather markedness, but the IAT methodology is sound and definitely measures something interesting.)
Yeah, I’ve been known to say “definitely measuring something” about the IAT before. As a bit of pure cognitive psychology, it’s really fascinating. As a piece of applied cognitive psychology, IMO the results need to be taken with a large scoop of salt, at least until people have spent a lot more effort disentangling what exactly it is that the IAT is measuring.
The South will not rise again. And if it does, that will be a great victory indeed for team Blue… You talk about the 16th and 17th century wars of religion. A far more relevant example can be found less than two centuries back in our own country’s history. The Reds lost. And the strengths of team Red back then were the same as their strengths now – far greater practical knowledge, far greater competence with weapons of war – and they amounted to naught back then, when they mattered far more than now.
Brains (and money) beat brawn. When the Blues decide to turn their attention to war, run fast and far.
Next time it won’t be 2g warfare. It will be 4G, Somalia style. Worse for everybody.
The sides have since splintered and polarized far more.
For instance, as has been noted, most every police officer and military officer or serviceman, below the level where both tend to be political appointees rather than the native elite of the relevant institution, are culturally Red. There is, of course, a strong norm of loyalty to the higher authority among such groups, which has the chance of binding them to a Blue faction if said faction has some formal legitimacy. But are you confident that this will happen everywhere? Or even in the majority of cases? When the most militant Blues, the ones who are most avidly salivating for further escalation, are also the ones with the greatest tendency to deride and mock all servicemen or policemen? What happens when the military itself splits over this? And, in the greater area, in a major breakdown of civil order, which of civilian Blues or civilian Reds are going to come out better?
This is not necessarily an argument that Reds would win an open conflict. I don’t know what would happen there, and I pray I never learn from experience. But the devastation from any such conflict, to all sides, would be enormous. The greatest danger of igniting such a conflict are those on either side who are so confident in their side’s victory that they think the damage to their own side would be small, and so caught up in outgroup-hatred that they are willing to take such small damage in order to do greater damage to the enemy. And that’s an attitude I see far more among Blues than Reds. (The equivalent Red attitude seems to be plain secessionism, which, whether approved of or not, can’t really be conceived of as “I hate the Blues and want to hurt them”.)
If there’s any attitude that’s dangerous here, it’s that.
Don’t know about cops, but I come from a (grayish) Blue family that’s produced a lot of military officers. They own more guns than the rest of the family, and seem likely to be less far out on the spectrum of lapsed Catholic to outright atheist, but they still vote Democratic and drink a lot of wine.
Since the brains are now in Grey corner…
Wait a moment…. Maybe I have a sore rotator cuff from patting myself on the back too hard.
If the South rose again, there’s no way the North would start a second Civil War to invade.
We can’t even get the energy together to invade tiny little countries where invasion costs the average American nothing except slightly higher taxes and unpleasant images on the nightly news. Let alone something that would inevitably mean a draft and bombs falling on NYC.
And most liberals would be pretty happy that the most conservative region of the country was gone and now Democrats will win Presidential elections forever.
While I think the first half of this is correct, the actual current reaction of liberals to one-party rule suggests the second half is a caricature.
On the other hand, consider Detroit, Chicago, or California.
Problem is, it would never work out with a nice clean separation. Red Tribe-dominated regions tend to be net consumers of taxes, and Blue Tribe regions tend to be net contributors. Since presumably at least some of the Red Tribe leaders would recognize this, they’d naturally attempt to glom onto all the Blue areas they could in order to mooch off of them.
That this would undoubtedly come with a “death to moochers” ideology on top just makes it funny.
(Also, your contention regarding the likelihood of war is kind of absurd. The American Left still reliably backs wars even when their sole effect is to be a nuisance to people thousands of miles away.)
(Unrelated: Scott, your server’s clock appears to be desperately off. See if you can get someone to run ntpdate on the thing?)
The idea that the reds are net consumers is yet another of those deceptive statistics that the blues like to quote. Counting tax money that goes to a state counts transfers made to anything the government runs within a state. For obvious reasons, there are more of those in red states. It’s not really fair to claim that your region is a net consumer of taxes just because you have an army base there; the government is basically paying the tax money to itself. (Of course, they do hire people as well, but the amount of money that is spent on salaries is a small portion of all the money spent on the base.)
Regardless of whose benefit they serve, military bases still need to be paid for. And the states that would comprise Redtopia currently do not and cannot pay for them.
… Or do you think Redtopia will spend less money on their military bases than the regular old United States of America did? Novel argument, if that’s what you’re thinking of.
>Red Tribe-dominated regions tend to be net consumers of taxes, and Blue Tribe regions tend to be net contributors.
the money being sucked up by red states tends to go to the blue members of those states, not the red members. admittedly the geography of untangling those connections would be impossible convoluted, but it goes a long way to explaining red attitudes. tribe red bears an oversized share of the burden for a welfare that that usually doesn’t help it much and is sometimes actively harmful to their interests.
You appear to be asserting the near-opposite of the well-known piece of data I’m referring to. Do you have a citation for this?
Red Tribe-dominated regions tend to be net consumers of taxes, and Blue Tribe regions tend to be net contributors.
About half of federal spending is Social Security, Medicare, and Defense, and these are not well-accounted for in the studies you’re referring to.
Social Security and Medicare are life-stage transfers from workers to retirees, justified based on the theory that over the course of a lifetime, the transfers net out to the equivalent of forced savings. It’s very common for people to spend their working lives in commerce/industry hubs (often in the Northeast, Great Lakes region, or West Coast), then retire to warmer regions with low cost-of-living (the South and Southwest, especially Florida and Arizona). During their working lives, they’re counted as paying taxes in NY or Illinois, but upon retirement, they’re counted as consuming benefits in Florida or Arizona.
Defense is awkward to apportion because it’s a Public Good in the technical economic sense (i.e. we can’t turn off national defense to just your house if you don’t pay your army bill on time; in the broader sense, the same national defense establishment that stops the Canadian Hordes from sacking Minneapolis also keeps Commie Paratroopers out of Nebraska and deters the Bermudan Corsairs from raiding the coast of the Carolinas). For purposes of analyzing taxes vs benefits, it’s unclear whether it’s fairest to apportion the benefit of it by population, by economic activity, etc. Naively tracing where they dollars go leads to defense contractors and members of the military, who disproportionately come from and are stationed in the South.
But why are so many of these poor, assistance-requiring blue-tribers located in red states?
Less money than what? I expect them to spend proportionately to their share of the population. I also expect them to receive benefits proportionately to their share in the population, since the military base helps the country as a whole, not the individual state in which it is located.
Counting the military base as red spending instead of country spending just because it is physically located in a red area is an accounting trick designed to make the reds look bad.
(And of course, that’s not the *only* accounting trick involved.)
… Oh, wow, you really do think Redtopia, unhindered by Blues, would cut back on military spending in its territory. I’m not sure how to argue with that, except to note that you clearly haven’t been paying attention.
Do you honestly think that military apportionment is devoid of pork? That it just happens to go to Red territories as a complete accident, entirely divorced from their political alignment?
It’s not really fair to claim that your region is a net consumer of taxes just because you have an army base there; the government is basically paying the tax money to itself. (Of course, they do hire people as well, but the amount of money that is spent on salaries is a small portion of all the money spent on the base.)
I suppose you mean the salaries of local civilians who work on the base. But the salaries paid to the military personnel also go into the local economy where the personnel spend their salaries. Also, the base buys food and supplies, utilities, etc from local sources. Having a military base is an important financial resource for a town: a pool of customers who get paid on time and do not get laid off.
Of course. But it is a financial resource at a local value which is smaller than the total dollars spent on the base.
It’s still not correct to count 100% of the spending of the base as spending on reds just because it’s located in a red state. You’d need to figure out some factor, which takes into account both the local benefit and the non-local benefit and counts part of it as blue spending depending on the magnitude of the non-local effect.
Furthermore, this applies to government institutions other than military bases.
You’d need to figure out some factor, which takes into account both the local benefit and the non-local benefit and counts part of it as blue spending depending on the magnitude of the non-local effect.
Furthermore, this applies to government institutions other than military bases.
Nor can the base spending be considered 100% non-red. A reasonable figure should be suggested before writing off the government spending with “the government is basically paying the tax money to itself.” And that figure would be different for other government institutions.
Of course part of the salaries, military and non-military, go to businesses incorporated in the state of Delaware, which I’ll lazily assume is blue.
It’s very common for people to spend their working lives in commerce/industry hubs (often in the Northeast, Great Lakes region, or West Coast), then retire to warmer regions with low cost-of-living (the South and Southwest, especially Florida and Arizona). During their working lives, they’re counted as paying taxes in NY or Illinois, but upon retirement, they’re counted as consuming benefits in Florida or Arizona.
In any case, the money was earned by their work in the blue hubs.
“We can’t even get the energy together to invade tiny little countries where invasion costs the average American nothing except slightly higher taxes and unpleasant images on the nightly news. Let alone something that would inevitably mean a draft and bombs falling on NYC.”
You’re reading this very, very badly. We can get the energy to invade countries *even* on absurd pretexts, this is an incredibly *strong* metric when we’re trying to measure a country’s willingness to fight. We’re the most willing to fight country in the world, by far. This is absolutely clear from our recent actions. We invaded countries halfway across the world, failed utterly to meet our objectives, and are still willing and even eager to spend millions in missiles attacking targets in that same area of operation. This is not an indication that we would be willing to tolerate treason in our own backyard.
“And most liberals would be pretty happy that the most conservative region of the country was gone”
Take a look at detailed geographic maps of the last few elections. Almost everywhere in this country, the most densely populated areas are blue and the less densely populated areas are red. There’s hardly a big city red center *anywhere* in this country. The only way an insurrection could even start is through the suppression of those who are against insurrection in the relevant areas – indeed, this happened when the South rose last time. This time there would be a far, far larger population to suppress.
And if you think the blue US high command would tolerate the mass killing/incarceration of blues in a treasonous red uprising, when they won’t even tolerate one executed American in a far off land without responding with millions of dollars in cruise missiles, I marvel at how warped the lens through which you’re viewing this country is.
The officer class of the U.S. military is overwhelmingly Red and know that elite Harvard-like Blues have contempt for them. A U.S. Red/Blue civil war would be horrible and I think is unlikely but the Reds would easily win if the military entered the fight.
Wasn’t this also approximately true in 1860?
The main difference I see between then and now is that with the speed of modern technology, there’d be no time to raise another army, so what would actually matter would be who most of the soldiers obeyed.
The enlisted military is overwhelmingly red. the officer ranks much less so, and they get bluer the higher you rise.
I want to applaud your self-awareness in the last section, and encourage you to actually write that criticism. You don’t have to post it, but it may change you for the better to have organized those thoughts.
Seconding this! I’d love to see Scott write a criticism of the Gray Tribe. My motivation is way less altruistic than “it may help him to organize his thoughts” though — I want to steal his insights to fortify myself against unnoticed failure modes. I’m a bit shaken up because I’ve had my faith in utilitarianism as the best way to model human morality seriously eroded by a series of conversations with a non-LW friend recently, and I’m curious what other LW-consensuses (and less concretely, LW-life-attitudes) I’ve taken for granted without properly examining.
So please do write this criticism, whether of the Gray Tribe or LW specifically or both, and do post it!
First of all, I think I’ve been criticizing utilitarianism, or at least thinking about alternatives to it , quite a lot lately.
But second, I think “let’s come up with conservative, ad hoc values that will lead to a nicer world” is solving a VERY different problem than the one utilitarianism is trying to solve. I see utilitarianism as especially useful for two BIG problems that can’t be avoided:
1. If someone needs to program Friendly AI, how should it think about ethics? If you’re familiar with the field at all, you know why “ad hoc” would be a disaster – otherwise, I recommend the “Superintelligence” book on the sidebar of this blog.
2. Assume we have a modern liberal pluralistic democratic state in which everybody hates each other or at least has very different values, but we still want to get things done on the government level in a way more principled than “whoever can grab 51% of the vote shoves stuff down everyone else’s throat”. We would need to have something math-y so that we could have either objectivity or at least the illusion of objectivity so that it is as hard as possible for special interests to hijack the decision-making process.
Everyone means different things by “rationalism”, but I bet whatever you mean by it is covered by those kinds of issues too.
I also think utilitarianism deserves extraordinary credit for starting the effective altruism movement, but that’s another story.
Effective Altruism is dangerous to the survival of the human species and what we care about because of its short-term focus on increasing the number of human lives (lives saved per dollar being the objective function). A world with 4 billion Africans (UN projection for 2100) is likely to be a lot worse than a world with 1 billion. At least the African megafauna will be gone and there will be big externalities on ocean and atmospheric health, as well as human suffering in war bread by the greater density.
To the extent that the more populated Africa doesn’t collapse into the most hellacious warzone + famine that the world has ever seen, it will depend on western arms and aid to maintain political stability, public health, and food stocks.
The technology to deal with a greater world population will not come from the areas with increasing population. In the past it has mostly come from the slowly dwindling West. Even the rich countries of Asia produce little in the way of frontier science. So it is unreasonable to expect Africa to contribute to the technology necessary for its own survival.
But I suppose that the utility also matters that arises from smart geeks feeling superior over their fellows by maximizing the population of Africa per dollar spent.
Rationalists need to join neoreactionaries in considering the fate of the human project as a whole before we sink billions of dollars into causes that make us feel good.
The notion that effective altruists don’t think about larger-scale issues, or consider the possibility that interventions might have negative consequences, is just plain wrong. Of course, we can disagree about what the larger consequences of saving a bunch of lives in Africa are likely to be. As I’ve mentioned more than once before on this blog, I believe that they are likely to be positive, due to flow-through effects, the demographic transition, etc.
So far it looks like African fertility is falling slower than expected. Let’s hope for demographic transition to save us all, but let’s not count on it.
Obviously this is something that all parties should pay close attention to as time goes on. But the prospect of a Malthusian collapse is speculative and always has been; in the absence of a more definite threat, it’s worth being concerned about, but not worth letting real people die over.
The problem with real people is that they can produce infinite amounts of other real people. Once you allow a universal moral claim on yourself there are no limits to the size of that claim in absence of controlled reproduction.
The difference between you and me is that I judge Malthusian collapse to be much more likely/possible. Absent Norman Borlaug, we would have already hit one. Panglossianism is no way to secure the survival of a species.
Supporting as many Africans as possible living in miserable conditions in Africa also strikes me as an odd end goal for Western Civilization. I’d rather see us raise our capabilities as a species than use our present capabilities to feed as many mouths as possible. I’d rather those effective altruists spent their money on curing death, on making us an interplanetary species, on eliminating existential risks, on new methods of computing and travel, and etc.
As a member of the Gray Tribe (at least, I think I am one, maybe), I heartily concur. That said, I don’t think that utilitarianism is all that great, so I’d prefer Scott to focus on some other aspects of Grayism.
When I read the bit about self-criticizing the Grey Tribe, I immediately thought of the Non-Libertarian FAQ and the Anti-Reactionary FAQ.
Honestly, I think I’m even more politically alienated than you are. I find the grey tribe to be nearly as reprehensible as the blue tribe and the red tribe, and that’s entirely because I have different values.
Nearly every member of the grey tribe that I’ve spoken to has had stronger political beliefs than either of the other two, because they actually DO hold political beliefs. With the rare exception of those who hold a ‘liberal archipelago’ view, this leads to conflict even more often.
You’ve also got a problem where people are fighting for signalling and counter signalling and counter counter signalling status point, which has always irritated me. From early on in my internet days I always branded myself as a bad person (and somewhat in real life as well)-I extol the virtues of some great sin (generally greed, conquest, and lust) and let that drive away the people it will drive away. I don’t do this in my professional life, of course. When people think you’re a bad person they stop trying to judge you.
I find the grey tribe far too trusting of people for having rational arguments, before they make predictions that are born true, uniquely. I find them all too unwilling to use violence to defend civilization, and generally willing to dismiss everyone else–and this is coming from someone who believes in at least one view each of the tribes would want me executed for.
But I also sympathize to your filter, though mine has been much more by design. My social group is filled with transhumanist consequentialists–and that’s a much smaller group than ‘gray tribe’. Maybe I’m just wool gathering here.
What are you talking about?
Someone else who quotes J.S. Mills!
I thought reactionaries were meant to be above making populist (demotist) threats like this and instead be trying to convert the elites. Although I do admit I am pretty shocked at the ease at which self-described liberals here and elsewhere are willing to renounce their tolerance when it suits them. Especially as one of the bases of their pretensions to moral superiority over their opponents comes from their “tolerance” and, just from a tactical perspective, you would expect general norms of tolerance to be disproportionately more beneficial to the oppressed classes that they support than their enemies.
I suppose that if jim et al are right about the left singularity, I will soon become a far-right extremist for thinking that even people who disagree with the liberal line should have a right to free speech and not be summarily harassed out of polite society. But at least I will have the satisfaction of knowing that it is the world that has gone crazy, not me.
It’s not a threat. Do you really think all the Reds are unprepared for the collapse of the shams between here and war?
If this Gray Tribe idea is to become a thing, it needs a different color. I’d suggest white (for clarity, neutrality and for being the third color on the flag), but of course the racial politics of your weird country prohibit that.
So maybe Green?
maybe Gold?
The LP does often use gold as the party color.
The US’ awful nonstandard political color associations, like its awful term for provinces, use of “liberalism,” and so on and so on is not worth preserving. Wikipedia uses blue for conservatism, yellow for liberalism, and red for socialism, which is Correct.
The republicans being red always seems super weird to me as a British person.
Blame the Bush/Gore election. Before that, the TV news would flip colors every election. Alas, that one was talked about for so long that the names stuck.
I’ve also heard it said that applying the color red to the more leftist of the two parties during the Cold War would have carried unfortunate implications.
I’m pretty sure the Red/Blue identifiers for American political tendencies postdate the Cold War by a decade or so. At least, I never heard them when Clinton was in office.
Taymon, almost every country in Europe has standardized colors for their parties. One of those parties is always Red. Usually it’s the leftmost major party, though the standards for which party is major enough vary.
And the same was true in America: the Democrats were Red 80% of the time before 2000.
the Democrats were Red 80% of the time before 2000.
Incorrect. There was a formal system of alternation every four years in place.
The very same sources that claim that there was a formal alternation agree that the Democrats were red 85% of the time. But there are a lot of sources that deny a formal system.
The provincial naming thing comes from when the USA was actually just a union of states. The use of the word “state” stuck around even as the union morphed into a state and the states morphed into provinces.
Linguistic prescriptivists are my outgroup.
YES. Can we form a new tribe which is defined by the defense of singular “they” and ritual burning of Strunk and White?
Can we form a new tribe which is defined by the defense of singular “they”
Please do, so I can more readily avoid you. 😉
I’ll join this.
[strange creature] is X; they are also Y.
What is the possible defence for monstrous constructions of this form, needing different declensions of to be for the same subject? Or do you recommend “they is”? Chilling in either case.
Yes! We will tow the descriptivist line.
This was interesting.
Canada Codes Right=Blue, Center=Red, Left=Orange
The Greens are already a political party supporting Ralph Nader, the welfare state, consumers, and the environment.
I personally think that a non-insane (read: non-teaparty) version of the Libertarians vs. the Greens as the primary US political dichotomy would be REALLY interesting, at least for a few decades.
So? Are they compatible with the Gray Tribe?
If not, even yellow (the colour most commonly associated with liberalism) is more sexy than Gray.
I feel that a party should be identified by the colour out of space.
That’s my favorite colour ! I second the motion.
Tolerance as a virtue; if I understand correctly, I think matters whether you apply a Kantian or Aristotelian notion of virtue; in the story of Bodhidharma and the Emperor, I see the Kantian one. Doing the right thing through self-control, an exercise of will, that has moral worth, according to Kant, doing the right thing through inclination… no.
The Emperor could riposte: “Sure, I don’t have anything about gay people, but I had to work hard to get there”, or even “sure… but _we_ had to work hard to get there”. AFAICT this is the Aristotelian idea of virtue. Aristotle sees what Kant calls virtue, and says, “that’s not virtue, it’s just continence; sure, it’s better than incontinence, but if you’re having to apply it all the time that’s hardly the good life now is it?”
(Off to one side there’s a utilitarian looking bemused and saying, “whatever works, man, whatever works”.)
I read a book that discussed this sort of thing a few years ago, I think it was by Jacob Bronowsky, but I can’t find it right now.
He came up with the term “noyau” to describe these sub groupings, talked about animal psychology, how groups of monkeys define themselves in opposition to other identical bands of monkeys whose territory borders theirs. I also recall some amusingly british musing about Italy not being a real nation, rather a collection of noyaus mushed together.
Also I think your link for the criterion of embarrassment swallowed part of the post text
Is that where Moldbug got “kernel” from?
I think the 10^45 number you keep quoting is a deeply misleading description of the strength of the filter bubble. You only get that if you assume that each of your friends are completely independent, when of course your friends are going to be pretty correlated both with you and with each other. Even postulating a small amount of correlation makes this number get drastically smaller; most of what makes that number large is the ludicrously strong independence assumption.
For example, let’s suppose that, despite the fact that 50% of Americans are creationists, whenever you make a friend there’s a 10% chance of them being a creationist. That’s only a factor of 5 difference in how selective you’re being, but it raises the probability of none of your 150 friends being creationists up to one in 7 x 10^6. Replacing 10% by 5% raises it even further to one in 2200. And of course I’m still assuming that your friends are independent of each other, but I don’t know an easy way of dropping this assumption while still getting a model where it’s easy to compute things by hand.
In particular, I think “[i]t’s the many, many differences between these tribes that explain the strength of the filter bubble” is too strong a claim.
Relevant (I think you’ll particularly like this): Schelling introduced a simple model of segregation in which almost complete segregation can occur between two groups provided only that people have a slight preference to be around members of the same group (link).
Okay, here’s a relatively straightforward model that introduces a pretty small amount of correlation between your friends. Flip 152 coins. Your friends correspond to the 150 possible sequences of 3 consecutive coin flips, and each one is a creationist if the majority of the corresponding coins flip heads. The probability that each friend has the same status as the previous friend is 75%.
(More evocatively, there are 3 memes, which can each be set to one of two possible alleles, that determine whether you’re a creationist. Each of your friends passes on two of his memes to the next friend, but not randomly.)
In any case, the probability that none of your friends are creationists is now the probability that in a sequence of 152 coin flips you never flip heads twice in a row. This probability turns out to be exactly F_154 / 2^152, where F_n is the nth Fibonacci number, for cool reasons. This is about one in 8.3 x 10^13.
I’d like to further adjust the underlying probability that a particular one of your friends is creationist a bit but I should be getting some sleep. I still don’t know a simple way to introduce “long-range correlations” (e.g. in this model there’s no correlation between your first 50 and last 50 friends) which should also drive up the final probability even further without having to be particularly strong.
I could be wrong, but I think that’s exactly the point I’m trying to make.
I interpreted your point to be something like “10^45 is a really big number, so the filter bubble must be outrageously strong, and here are some thoughts on why it’s so outrageously strong,” but my point is that the 10^45 number is a very misleading indicator of the strength of the filter bubble. You don’t need a lot of correlation among your friend group to make that number go much lower.
“Outrageously strong” can mean (1) “the result of outrageously strong selection” or (2) “outrageously effective in shielding Scott from views atypical of his circle”.
I think Scott is saying his bubble is strong in sense 2, not necessarily in sense 1.
I think whichever sense Scott means, 10^45 is the wrong number to quote to describe it.
The 10^45 number tells you that you’re very certain there is some effect making you less likely to encounter creationist, it’s sort-of correlated with the strength of the effect, but it’s not the best measure of it. Statistical significance is not effect size; the 10^45 could mean a strong effect in a small sample or a weaker effect in a larger sample.
For real “fun”, come up with prior probabilities for “1% of the sorts of people I meet are creationists”, “2%… etc.”, work out posterior probabilities given you see no creationists, then calculate the expectation (as in weighted average) of the percentage of creationists amongst your “encounter pool”.
> The 10^45 number tells you that you’re very certain there is some effect making you less likely to encounter creationist
This isn’t doing justice to the space of possible hypotheses. As a dumb example, you can assume perfect correlation between your friends (but none between you and your friends): whether or not your first friend is a creationist, all of your subsequent friends have the same status as your first friend. Then the probability that none of your friends are creationists is just 1/2.
The 10^45 number tells you that complete independence is a very bad hypothesis, and that’s nearly the only thing it tells you.
Very interesting. Thanks.
So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences.
This is also evident in the tendency to define one’s in-group down. Christianity/Islam/Marxism/feminism/NRx starts by meaning X and then adopts qualities of Y and Z. This is necessary as a means of adapting to experiences but it can also be evidence that membership of the tribe is a positional good. Also:
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”
He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”
Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.
Thanks for bringing the “Die, heretic!” – very apropos.
I’m impressed with this post, because I didn’t realize that you noticed your recent-ish skew towards being (imo) disproportionately uncharitable to liberals in general, social justice liberals in particular. That’s cool.
I’m trying to think of a group that it makes my blood boil to criticize, and it’s surprisingly situation specific. When hanging out with LW – style Gray Tribe members, that group is feminists. When hanging out with the typical classmate at my college (Harvard), that group is the Gray Tribe. Unless it’s my one friend here who’s reliably more conservative than me, who hates feminists and rather scorns LW – types, in which case it’s… classical liberals as a group, which to me is defined by a small-l libertarian aesthetic that includes flexibility of gender roles, but isn’t identified with any specific people I know except myself. So basically my ingroup is defined reactively in a way that maximizes my time spent sweating blood. But I actually sweat blood way less than when I hung out with only one tribe (feminists) and identified them as my ingroup, so this must actually have an inoculating effect.
Scott’s been thinking about this for a while. He frequently notes that he has a hard time writing about social justice in an even-handed way — though it’s consistent to believe you’re better at thinking about social justice than other people are, while believing you’re worse at thinking about social justice than at thinking about other topics. He’s also written blog posts like ‘Right is the New Left‘ trying to figure out why he’s so viscerally squicked by bad Leftism.
That said, I’m also surprised by the reflective conclusion. I’m usually surprised in the opposite direction, by the lack of LessWronger self-awareness — e.g., not noticing that the ‘motte-and-bailey’ concept is itself a motte-and-bailey (or a schema for such).
I sort of feel as though SJ types are becoming the outgroup in the rationality community. I am relatively new to the community, and TBH I really want rationalists to approve of me. I find saying pro-SJ things or criticising anti-SJ stuff quite stressful, whereas I find it really easy to criticise SJ.
[It’s not nearly as bad as in my pro-SJ friendship group, where I seem to get jumped on for even the mildest criticism of SJ].
I also feel this. I’m trying to figure out how to avoid outgrouping them, without having to resort to “never criticizing them at all”.
My impression is that I am making reasonable criticisms and everyone else is like “Ha ha, you have never been more right, this times a million, take that you stupid out-group”.
But impressions where I am in the right and everyone else is wrong are naturally suspect.
This is an important thing to investigate and talk about, but investigating it and talking about it is sort of a form of participating in it.
Right now I feel like I am successfully venting some anger in a way that will make each successive post on the issue less angry and more productive, but again, naturally suspect.
FWIW, feminists and SJ types in general are definitely my out-group, and I agree with what you’re saying about them most of the time. Assuming that one of your goals is to avoid out-grouping them, this is probably not a good thing 🙁
Perhaps the problem here is that you have a very clear yet evocative writing style; so when you point out some failure mode of the SJ movement, you end up skewering them. All you want to do is to shine some light on the subject, but you don’t have a flashlight — instead, what you’ve got is an X-ray laser.
I’m not sure if there’s a good solution for this problem though… “Write more poorly” doesn’t seem like it fits.
Meanwhile, feminists and SJ types are my in-group (even though we have our differences), and I have found most of Scott’s writing on those subjects (basically everything in “Things I Will Regret Writing” except for this post, which is awesome) to be substantially less charitable and more attacking-the-outgroup than his writing in general. There’s a marked stylistic difference in how he approaches it.
And I think I understand why this is so, thanks to his writings on game-theoretic interpretations of niceness and charity. The way he sees it, to be nice and charitable is to cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the social justice movement has put up a giant sign out front saying “We will never cooperate with you because you are evil and it’s wrong to cooperate with evil”. The game-theoretically correct thing to do in that situation is to defect.
Hopefully his future writing on these subjects will be more like this post. In my experience, social justice people are more willing to cooperate than it might initially seem.
You know, this is actually one of my top problems with the SJ movement. The thing is, I’m not sure what else I can do in such a situation, other than to either defect or walk away; and walking away is not always an option (though, admittedly, it often is). Matthew (below) suggests asking the SJ people to be more charitable, but that can’t possibly work, because extending charity to evil is tantamount to condoning the evil itself. It would in fact be irrational for the SJ people to acquiesce to such a request.
I’m a gen X feminist who was targeted by millennial SJWs; you’re helping me. (So does the work of Will Shetterly, the baby boomer antiracist who…was targeted by millennial SJWs.)
So thanks.
>when you point out some failure mode of the SJ movement, you end up skewering them.
>I’m not sure if there’s a good solution for this problem though… “Write more poorly” doesn’t seem like it fits.
Skewer the “in-group” more often?
“>I’m not sure if there’s a good solution for this problem though… “Write more poorly” doesn’t seem like it fits.
Skewer the “in-group” more often?”
Or you could skewer another outgroup more who are also opposed by the SJW’s, like the neoreactionaries. The anti-reactionary FAQ could do with updating as as I think it misses some of neoreaction’s strongest points (even on the object level) and although your meditations on Moloch were a good start on critiquing their meta (in part), it was hardly a definitive takedown.
Alternately, you could always just keep doing what you are doing as it seems to be working out pretty well for you and, although I’m sympathetic to the SJW’s aims, I increasingly think that their outgroup status here is well-deserved as they seem to be one of the few groups that interact with the lw-sphere which have institutionalised antirational norms.
@Scott Alexander FWIW this post did seem less angry than previous posts on SJ.
It appears to me that you are indeed getting less angry and more productive as you go along.
At least, I’m pretty sure my beliefs haven’t been significantly changing, but your posts have provoked less and less sputtering from me while reading. All your ones lately get maybe a sad head-shake at times, which is a great improvement.
——–
There’s an old post of yours [[thanks for the link, Sniffnoy!]] about the Jew dealing with a bunch of negative characterizations in media/etc that were *technically correct* in the narrowest sense, but were indicative of a greater trend in the culture to discriminate against him, until he was outright out-grouped, describes precisely the reasons I comment here. Even when you’re precisely right, or at least are making well-reasoned and defendable points, many of the points made generalize into larger and more drastically wrong positions. The supporters you get on some of these kinds of posts often illustrate this problem, as they take your points further into the crazy side.
As you’re getting less angry, and spending time banning the ruder of the commenters, this is getting much, much better, and drastically reducing my feeling of needing to comment defensively just to resist a trend. Thanks!
I believe this is the post you’re thinking of: http://squid314.livejournal.com/329171.html
Is this unreasonable? The two activities seem fundamentally incompatible.
Rationalist discussion tries to explore all sides of an idea. There’s a heavy focus on finding ‘good’ arguments for ‘bad’ ideas. A Blue-Triber who writes a clever defense of a Red position is doing rationalism really well.
SJ discussion wants to promote a particular position. The focus is on advocacy. A Blue-Triber who writes a clever defense of a Red position is doing SJ very poorly.
An individual could enjoy both sorts of discussion. But any sort of activity overlap seems to go really badly.
I don’t think the issue is advocacy per se. Rationalists might be advocates for a lot of things. The issue is that the “safe space” mentality is terrible for epistemic hygiene. The SJWs destroyed their own epistemic hygiene in this way, and now they seem to be on a mission to destroy everyone else’s by making the entire world “safe space.”
It’s not consciously malicious, but the effects are pernicious anyway. I’m not sure what to do about this. As per Taymon A. Beal’s 1:04am prisoner’s dilemma comment, I suppose the SJ could signal a desire to cooperate by retreating to a position of keeping their own “safe” spaces but not trying to conquer others. Unfortunately, there’s every reason to expect the process to repeat itself.
(Unlike TAB,I think it’s SJ who need to make the gesture of good faith, not Scott et al.)
@Matthew: I agree that toxicity and sloppy thinking drive a lot of the current conflict.
SJW attempts to get people fired for being wrong on the internet make discussions worse. I hope things improve.
But even if we fixed the current problems, we’d still have one group trying to promote an idea, and the other trying to pick it apart.
Even if everyone had the best intentions, SJ and Rationalism will mesh about as well as a drum line and a book club.
I thought about this for several minutes and was unable to get at how it was supposed to work. How does a meta-analysis of object-level arguments itself fall into that category of object-level argument? I’d be quite sincerely interested in more elaboration.
I saw this on Scott’s Tumblr:
Ironically, that works both ways.
The motte of that response is that a diverse range of opinions can be invalidated by a motte-and-bailey reaction.
The bailey of that response is that the use of bait-and-switch tactics can be excused by appealing to the invalidation of said opinions.
I suspect this entire argument chain is meaningless.
Isn’t the whole point of the motte and bailey to invalidate those opinions of the group that are indefensible by pointing out that fact that they are retreating away from their bailey to their backup motte?
Zorgon, it’s mottes and baileys all the way down.
Anonymous, It’s been common in my experience for people claiming to have identified a motte and bailey tactic to point at one person for the motte and another for the bailey. fnordism isn’t invalidated when you notice that two different fnordists have differing opinions about something.
Properly, pointing out the existence of a motte and a bailey neither disproves the motte nor disproves the bailey. It’s a tool to help you talk about either the motte or the bailey and not both.
Of course, proper usage is the minority.
I’m realizing that I can form a 2×2 matrix for how I react when people say political things.
* Ingroup says something that feels right: Yay! Cheer! Warm fuzzies!
* Ingroup says something that feels wrong: Cringe, and think about maybe trying to object in a way that makes clear I’m still on their side, but more often than not just silently curse coalition politics. (I’m rather conflict-averse.)
* Outgroup says something that feels right: Try to put it in terms that make it sound like an ingroup thing. This often works. If it doesn’t (i.e., because the thing directly opposes ingroup ideals), feel guilty.
* Outgroup says something that feels wrong: Roll my eyes and ignore them. Don’t argue because all the ingroup members who aren’t as conflict-averse as I am are going to do that, so why bother?
My political ingroups: Progressives. Social justice advocates. Grays whose relationship with traditional politics consists of evenhandedly analyzing all sides and saying objective-sounding smart things about them.
My political outgroups: Conservatives. Radical leftists. Dogmatic libertarians. Grays whose relationship with traditional politics consists of denouncing the whole thing as a sham. (The latter two groups have heavy overlap.)
If a group keeps saying things that sound right, then I’ll start to associate with them more and eventually start to consider them an ingroup. (This has happened over the past year with the kind of grayism Scott advocates on this blog.) But that’s not the only factor that can make something an ingroup. Social justice people routinely say things that sound wrong to me, but because of the background I come from and the makeup of my social circles, they’re still an ingroup.
Premise granted.
But what’s to be done about the fact that this really often does describe the way it feels from the inside? I recognize that the situation shows all the trappings of intolerance due to typical in-group/out-group dynamics, but that doesn’t make me stop feeling, honestly and deeply, that gay marriage and gun control are clearly right and evangelism and terrorist fear-mongering clearly wrong; from the inside, intolerance feels like the correct response.
So untainted by in/out-group dynamics, what are you suggesting is the correct attitude a Blue Tribe member ought to adopt toward the Red Tribe?
There are different kinds of intolerance. There’s intolerance of incorrect views – if someone is wrong, you engage them and try to change their mind. There’s intolerance of disagreement – if someone voices an incorrect view, they should be stopped to punish them and/or to prevent them from spreading it, even if it’s done in an underhanded manner. There’s intolerance about beliefs – even if someone doesn’t actively voice a view you disagree with, as long as you’re aware that they hold that view, you punish them for it. It’s important to distinguish between different points on this spectrum. The first kind of intolerance is completely fine, the latter two are injurious to truth-seeking discourse.
It’s unclear how you differentiate “intolerance of views” and “intolerance of beliefs” which seem synonyms to me, but I gather they could be restated as “intolerance of views themselves” and “intolerance of a person’s holding a belief”?
Although honestly even the first kind can be counter-productive and obnoxious if one is not judicious in exercising it.
Yes, that is more accurate terminology, thanks. It’s the difference between “X is a terrible and wrong belief and I’ll fight against it” and “You’re a bad person for believing X, and I’m going to punish you for it”.
This advice may not generalize to less sophisticated Blues, but for a Slate Star Codex reader, the right approach might be to spend time meditating on the possibility that you’re wrong on those topics. Consider times you’ve been similarly convinced and turned out to be wrong; visualize a world where you’re wrong on these issues; and try to imagine (or better yet discover) people you respect arguing for the opposite of your position.
This is relatively difficult to do for evangelism and gay marriage — it would require a rather lengthy excursion down some theological or reactionary rabbit-holes — but writers like Sam Harris could plausibly help you make headway on gun control (‘The Riddle of the Gun‘) and counterterrorism (‘The End of Liberalism‘). Or you can try to imagine Scott making arguments along those lines (cf. ‘Military Strikes are an Extremely Cheap Way to Help Foreigners‘).
It may also help to meditate on the possibility that politics is the mind-killer on a much deeper level than you’ve considered, and that the effort spent diminishing the power of the Reds may cause more harm than good if it proportionally increases the prominence of Politics Itself.
Shifting object-level and trying to expose yourself to specific data that goes against (or rather, tests) your assumptions tends to be more useful than trying to abstractly or indirectly trick yourself into becoming less partisan. If you get enough good object-level examples of topics where you were wrong or overconfident in favor of the Blues, or at least get a better sense of how an intelligent person could disagree with you, that should make it easier to spot errors like confirmation bias in your future reasoning.
Gay marriage
http://www.rightwingnews.com/uncategorized/a-really-really-really-long-post-about-gay-marriage-that-does-not-in-the-end-support-one-side-or-the-other-by-jane-galt/
Reading the parts about marriage and support for single motherhood from Eastern Europe specifically has always annoyed me so much…
Like, here we all got two of these unquestionable and rational improvements to society after the war. And those crazy foreign barbarians who look down on us all the time… would turn around and torment their own citizens after superstitiously ascribing something bad to things that we never even doubt being right about?
The concept of marriage being applied to gay marriage makes a traditionalist feel very similarly to how a person of an ethnic group might be made feel by so called cultural appropriation.
If you think that marriage is sacred and has a meaning beyond being simply a contract to make things easier, then observing legalization of gay marriage might feel like they are doing it without understanding of cultural significance of marriage and without interest to try to understand it. Just like wearing a religious symbol without actually having a belief. Or like hipster trying to feel authenticity without actually being authentic.
Firstly, I would find that argument more persuasive if they applied the same logic to heterosexual non-traditionalists. As it is, even if we assume that traditionalists used to own “marriage” like a trademark, they have already lost it due to non-enforcement.
And secondly, many gay people also consider marriage sacred and meaningful, some for very “traditional” reasons.
So, the no-marriage-for-gays sentiment doesn’t seem to cut society along the proposed spiritual line.
I don’t know which exact heterosexual non-traditionalists you mean, but a great many traditionalists would agree with you about the broader conservative movement shutting the door after most of the cows are gone.
I assume you’re playing devil’s advocate here… I think your argument is extremely poor.
The logic of “cultural appropriation” wouldn’t work if 10% of the children of parents within a given culture randomly (or at least, owing to unknown biological causes) turned out to be members of a different culture. Like if 10% of children of (culturally) Japanese parents were, because of some mysterious biological quirk, actually cultural Jews.
It’s also a bit silly to suggest that a gay child does not grow up understanding the traditional significance of marriage in exactly the same way as a straight child. They understand it the same way, and still want it for themselves.
” that gay marriage and gun control are clearly right and evangelism and terrorist fear-mongering clearly wrong; from the inside, intolerance feels like the correct response.”
Read J.S. Mills’ Chapter 2 of On Liberty and convince yourself of the merits of engaging with ideas, even ideas that are wrong?
To quote:
If they’re wrong, the same attitude the people I described adopted toward Osama and ISIS – bad people who need to be stopped, but who you don’t feel some driving emotional desire to kick again and again and party at their deaths.
This is my cached thought, but I’m not actually sure it’s right. The same emotional energy that drives real hatred might also drive being able to fight bad things. I’m not sure. But I’d like people to be more conscious of the question.
Something odd happened to Section XI, somewhere around ‘criterion of embarrassment’.
Yes, a huge chunk of text is missing because of a broken smart quote. Here it is:
And if you mix together the open-source tech industry and the parallel universe where you can’t wear a FreeBSD t-shirt without risking someone trying to exorcise you, you can prove that Christians are scary and very powerful people who are persecuting everyone else all the time, and you have a great excuse for kicking one of the few people willing to affiliate with the Red Tribe, a guy who never hurt anyone, out of town.
When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn’t see anything wrong with it. “I can tolerate anything except intolerance,” she said.
“Intolerance” is starting to look like another one of those words like “white” and “American”.
“I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?
XI.
We started by asking: millions of people are conspicuously praising every outgroup they can think of, while conspicuously condemning their own in-group. This seems contrary to what we know about social psychology. What’s up?
We noted that outgroups are rarely literally “the group most different from you”, and in fact far more likely to be groups very similar to you sharing almost all your characteristics and living in the same area.
We then noted that although liberals and conservatives live in the same area, they might as well be two totally different countries or universe as far as level of interaction were concerned.
Contra the usual idea of them being marked only by voting behavior, we described them as very different tribes with totally different cultures. You can speak of “American culture” only in the same way you can speak of “Asian culture” – that is, with a lot of interior boundaries being pushed under the rug.
The outgroup of the Red Tribe is occasionally blacks and gays and Muslims, more often the Blue Tribe.
The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe.
This is not surprising. Ethnic differences have proven quite tractable in the face of shared strategic aims. Even the Nazis, not known for their ethnic tolerance, were able to get all buddy-buddy with the Japanese when they had a common cause.
Research suggests Blue Tribe / Red Tribe prejudice to be much stronger than better-known types of prejudice like racism. Once the Blue Tribe was able to enlist the blacks and gays and Muslims in their ranks, they became allies of convenience who deserve to be rehabilitated with mildly condescending paeans to their virtue. “There never was a coward where the shamrock grows.”
Spending your entire life insulting the other tribe and talking about how terrible they are makes you look, well, tribalistic. It is definitely not high class. So when members of the Blue Tribe decide to dedicate their entire life to yelling about how terrible the Red Tribe is, they make sure that instead of saying “the Red Tribe”, they say “America”, or “white people”, or “straight white men”. That way it’s humble self-criticism. They are so interested in justice that they are willing to critique their own beloved side, much as it pains them to do so. We know they are not exaggerating, because one might exaggerate the flaws of an enemy, but that anyone would exaggerate their own flaws fails the criterion of embarrassment.
Pingback: Outside in - Involvements with reality » Blog Archive » Quote note (#114)
HTML error in the past about the FreeBSD daemon t-shirt.
I thought the idea was that it was ok to discriminate on political views because they’re a choice, I mean, that’s right up there with discriminating on moral judgement or job ability. But I guess maybe when you’re part of a tribe your party affiliation isn’t actually such a free choice.
Since so many people in the comments seem to suggest that your bubble is atypical and you are generalizing from one example, I wanted to be a data-point of positive reinforcement. Your dark-matter conservatives analogy perfectly captures a feeling I have had many times without nearly so eloquent a way of expressing it. (To the point where I read only the first sentence of section IV before rejoicing that you were about to put it into words.) I hear about various poll numbers or election results and I think, who are these people and how can there possibly be 150 million of them in the country?
So at least if this does turn out to be a bizarre and idiosyncratic viewpoint, you’re now generalizing from two examples.
I’d like to add a third similar data point. While I used to know conservatives back when I lived in the South (difficult not to know them then), at college and later I never encountered any except one Mitt Romney-type. No Young Earth Creationists, certainly. But I’ve seen where these other people live – they’re in their own enclaves, equally unaware of the other side. And indeed, there is a significant amount of similarity in being a Blue among Reds and a Grey among Blues.
If you’re at a college, the number of young earth creationists will be reduced, because the argument “if they’re educated, they’re less likely to be X” is actually true for young earth creationism. As an example of a red belief, young earth creationism is an outlier in that it directly addresses a purely factual matter; it’s not a question of values or speculation about consequences, at least not the way it’s normally presented. (though of course those other considerations can affect one’s bias in evaluating the facts)
Try picking almost any red belief other than creationism.
Also: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
I’d also like to add my personal data point to this.
And my axe. My social circle includes people who bristle at the first sign of red, and they very rarely bristle.
Human social psychology is torn between inter- and intra-group competition. Members of the Red Tribe are specialists at inter-group competition, with an emphasis on order, loyalty, and authority. Members of the Blue Tribe are specialists at intra-group competition, with an emphasis on anarchy, rebellion, and revolution. The Red Tribe builds social capital, but it has a tendency to fossilise norms and institutions. The Blue Tribe dismantles norms and institutions, but it has a tendency to destroy social capital. A healthy civilisation preserves a balance between inter- and intra-group competition, but this requires that members of the Red and Blue tribe actually tolerate and compromise with each other.
Members of the Blue Tribe are mostly concerned with intra-group competition, so they celebrate Thatcher’s death. The Red Tribe is mostly concerned with inter-group competition, so they celebrate Bin Laden’s death. Indeed, the Blues used Bin Laden’s death to score virtue points against the Red Tribe, while the Red Tribe used Thatcher’s death to affirm loyalty and authority (note the emphasis on the Falklands War).
The reason you are turning against the Blue Tribe is precisely because you’re so far removed from the Red Tribe. They are no longer the competition. You can no longer gain status by demeaning the Red Tribe, because they seem so marginal, uninfluential, and distant to you. To gain status, you have to pull down high status people, and the Blue Tribe has proven itself so good at intra-group competition that it now occupies most positions of influence, power, and status. Therefore, you have to attack your own Tribe.
Good stuff.
I want to form a new tribe. Hm, how about having a Yellow tribe typified by libertarian-communist political beliefs, strong Alain de Botton-style atheist religious beliefs, pushing polyamory norms, owning kirpan-like non-lethal guns, eating nutritionally complete GMO veggies and vat-meat steaks, drinking tea made with flouridated and lithiated tap water, driving motorcycles, listening to lots of podcasts, enjoying a cross between rugby and the board game Go, getting conspicuously upset about coordination failures and uncalibrated predictions, marrying early and often, constantly pointing out how much more civilized fictional countries are than America, and listening to playlists of all the world’s recorded music filtered for emotional valence and otherwise randomized.
I don’t currently fit into any of those categories, but if the tribe actually coalesced I’d happily gravitate into it.
You could start practicing the “upset about coordination failures” part. Create a blog promoting all these vales, and the potential tribe members can coordinate around it.
OK. No guarantees I won’t change my mind, though!
Everything there except “marrying early and often” there sounds pretty Gray to me. (Well, not each individual thing — rather, the whole thing seems Gray, and everything there except “marrying early and often” sounds pretty Gray-compatible.)
Before reading this I thought I would get especially upset with SJs because it bothered me more to see the in group (blue tribe) do stupid annoying stuff, because I expected better from them.
After reading this, I think that maybe the red tribe are the people so far away from me to not even be considered out group, and that SJs in the blue tribe are my actual out group.
I think it is accurate to consider the grey tribe as part of the blue tribe, and I think that what is happening here is that for some blue tribe people, the red tribe starts to feel so distant that they are no longer really the out group, and so the new out group becomes whichever side of the grey/non-grey split they do not fall on.
I think that happens in both directions. There are also many non-grey blues who get more upset with the grey tribe than the red tribe. I also would not be surprised if there is a similar split in the red tribe, but I do not know nearly enough about them to know.
I wonder if maybe there are some Blues who interact with Reds enough to consider them the out group, and the people who do not interact with Reds very much are the people who start to fight within the Blue tribe. Scott and I seem like two examples of people who feel like we have never met a Red, and we both seem to get especially upset other Blues. Any thoughts/anecdotal evidence on this theory?
Scott classifies libertarians as greys and blues, but in the U.S. libertarian politicians are mostly Republicans. So you see greys attacking the blue coalition and trying to form a coalition of their own with the ‘traditionalist’ reds. LW libertarians and LW liberals may work differently, but I’m less confident saying very much about them, because they’re small, quickly-changing groups that haven’t been studied much.
I think that it is important to remember that your tribe is not just your political beliefs.
I think libertarian and Grey tribe are far from synonymous. For example I think that LW is primarily grey tribe (even though many of them avoid labels like that), in spite of the fact that LW is only about 1/3 libertarian. I think that I am closest to this grey tribe, and I am not a libertarian. I also think that there is a large difference between libertarian republican politicians and libertarian LW people.
This is not to say that I think that Grey tribe only refers to LW. I think most but not all of the “skeptics” and angry atheists fall in the Grey tribe, as well as some groups that have nothing to do with rationality, like the men’s rights movement. I might even say that Reddit looks more like the Grey tribe than the non-grey Blue tribe. Basically, all those people who are obviously way closer to the liberals in the Blue tribe than the religious right int the red tribe, but still somehow manage to get into fights all the time with the SJs and other mainstream Blues.
I might be identifying a different Grey cluster than the one Scott had in mind, but I do not think so.
It might be that the split in the Red tribe that I do not know about is also between the libertarians and the non-libertarians, but I think that is coincidence, and the Red libertarians are very far from the Greys, even though they might vote the same way sometimes.
Along those lines, it’s important to remember that parties *in general* are coalitions.
When Scott points out that LW doesn’t have many conservatives who are non-libertarian types, he could equally point out that it doesn’t have many liberals who are X, where X is any of a number of groups that are part of the coalition, but distinct. (I don’t think there are many outright Marxists on LW). If you’re going to divide the reds into subgroups, you really ought to be dividing the groups into subgroups too; they’re coalitions just like the reds.
Of course, if Scott divides up both the blues and the reds, he no longer gets to say that the reds are excluded but the blues aren’t. Rather, subgroups of both are excluded. It just seems like only reds are excluded because he’s splitting up the reds but not the blues.
I think the size of the subgroup is what matters, Ken. There are a lot more creationists and (non-monarchist) social conservatives in the U.S. than Marxists. We’re not talking about tiny gerrymandered slivers of U.S. political coalitions.
//And if you mix together the open-source tech industry and the parallel universe where you can’t wear a FreeBSD t-shirt without risking someone trying to exorcise you, //
This link is malformed – it goes to https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/%E2%80%9Dhttp:/rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html%E2%80%9D , not http:/rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html%E2%80%9D
edit: by the time I posted, a bunch of people had already pointed out the smart quotes, just ignore this comment
Great post.
I’m one of the few Republicans around these parts. I’m not a Libertarian. I’m irreligious, and probably identify with Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy best of public Republicans.
I am in a different situation: I am a member of several groups of friends in which I am the only Republican. (I was a newspaper reporter 25 years ago; I was the only non-Libertarian Republican there, too.) Some of my friends work for the government, and they still have only me to ask about What Republicans Think. (I am sure this would make the party regretful if I were the actual spokescritter.)
I find the people I want to talk to are willing to talk about the flaws of both sides. If you’re just arguing your point, you’re not interesting.
And you have to care about the actual truth. The people defending Neil Tyson on his made-a-bunch-of-quotes-up problem are not interesting to me. (And the Tyson thing makes me sad.) The people who defended Alberto Gonzales on my side made me sad, too.
I get into discussions with Libertarians who do not care about the truth *at all* too often. But I also, long ago, had a friend who gave me Harry Browne’s position papers. It included obviously false statements about crime. I pointed these out to my friend. He asked the Browne campaign for comment. They gave some mealy-mouthed statement, and he publicly quit supporting Browne.
I still have good feelings for that dude.
Your post helped me recognize why it’s easy for me to grump at Republicans, because there is a group of Republicans that is not my in-group, as I am not religious. I’ll take care to recognize that. I think it’s important.
Finally, a story from a San Francisco Jonathan Coulton concert. Paul and Storm were opening.
At some point they asked:
“Are there any Republican nerds?” or somesuch. The crown groaned. I cheered. My wife cringed. We were not hanged in the public square. (The lesbian couple nearby glared at us slightly.) So it went better than she thought it would.
Sure, there are Red nerds. Back when I spent more time administering MUDs than just writing them, I had to deal with one kid who divided his time more or less evenly between denouncing evolution on public chat and submitting player content plagiarized from Star Trek monsters-of-the-week — a tricky thing for me to to catch since I am not and have never been a Trekkie, though I think I ended up rejecting a lot of it on quality grounds. As to the evolution stuff, the best thing I can say about it is that it indirectly taught me a lot about stratigraphy.
Probably aren’t as many of them as Blues or Grays, though, and I get a vague sense that this is truer now than it was twenty, thirty years ago. (I think most of the people that would have been Red then are now Gray.)
There are vast numbers of red nerds, but they’re nerdy in different ways.
The quiet, devout, bookish kid who loves Sunday school, volunteers (reluctantly) in the Scouts and can quote any Bible passage to you is most definitely a nerd, even if he doesn’t go to a Jonathon Coulton concert in San Francisco.
Smart Reds are probably less likely to become nerds than smart Blues are.
I suspect this is because Reds don’t pull the Jante-law horseshit Blues do — and in my experience, the belief that intelligent people are completely different with anyone else and the two groups can never interact is very specifically Blue. The one Blue in my family is convinced that literally all smart people are autistic.
The fallacious belief that the world must be fair is trivially easy to see in Blues — how many think that the intelligence gap doesn’t exist? (No, I don’t mean “think there’s no genetic difference in intelligence between the races”; I mean “think that, as a matter of actually-existing empirical fact, there is no difference in the average intelligence of the races”.) And who’s the target market for Howard Gardner’s not-even-pseudoscience?
That fair-world fallacy probably does great harm, Harrison Bergeron-style, to anyone genuinely good at anything, especially the innately intelligent: common beliefs create social expectations, and social expectations create roles. (I am very conscious of the fact that, whenever the one Blue in my family is around, I have to act in accordance with a certain role, there is nothing I can do about it, and there is no way I can escape it. Then again, this is true of most people; the difference is in whether the roles are useful or harmful. The only Blues I can stand are the ones who can see through the vast, steaming mounds of bullshit that are inseparable from orthodox Blueism.)
I think you might be suffering from a little outgroup homogeneity here.
Sure, I’ve run into that attitude; a Howard Gardner disciple in my family once tried to convince me that I was an Asperger case, for example, fortunately after I was old enough to identify it as bullshit. And it does seem to correlate with a particular strain of Blue: true believers in equality, the sort for whom there’s no such thing as a natural advantage, only various forms of fraud, malice, and unearned cultural favoritism.
But there’s a lot more shades of Blue than that, and you’re describing a very deep one. I wouldn’t call that sort of thing a consensus at your average Blue university, let alone among the rank and file out in the real world.
I mostly agree, though your link doesn’t address the issue of high-V people born into red families. (My guess: They often do well in school and grow into “blues who don’t realize how hostile blues are to undeniably-intellectually-different children,” since when they were kids, their red families insulated them from this.)
(Yes, even you to an extent. I’d written a reply on this to your comment about your educational history, but I sat on it and then Scott locked the old posts, and it’s really too long to repost here where it’s OT. BTW…I’d *much* rather put this under your original comment referencing your experiences at Can’t Tell You and asking other attendees to speak up, but since Scott did lock the old posts…I went too, and since your other posts suggest you’re a SET member too, so am I.)
How familiar are you with the educationists (researchers, teachers, school psychologists and administrators) on this issue? There’s *a lot* of social pressure to “just give in and admit they’re just all autistic”–in defiance of the common sense articulated by, for example, Linda Silverman, that you’d *expect* someone who is (for example) mentally 9 not to fit in with 6-year-olds.
(LessWrongers for some reason also often seem to resist this commonsense attitude. I think it may be IQ worship, in both cases. Both groups often seem to project the attitude that, “If you’re not autistic then a high IQ should make you *perfect*! A high IQ can never cause any problems or ever have any downside whatsoever!”)
But the other reason for the pressure was just that an “Asperger’s” label *got help* (an IEP can easily include “advanced work” as well as “tolerance for apparent poor social skills”), while a “gifted” label…often doesn’t (in the US, for example, IDEA doesn’t apply) and on top of that is politically incorrect.
Gayle Dallaston has been writing on this topic since the ’90s. For example, this post (and her blog in general).
That’s exactly what it is. For all its (commendable) devotion to the growth mindset and focus on building practical thinking skills, LW is still a product of the American geek culture; and if I had to pick a single defining trait of that culture, it’d be a single-minded focus on intelligence (and signaling thereof) to the exclusion and even to the detriment of everything else.
Which is not to say that IQ isn’t important; a look over the psychometry literature shows that it is, very much so. But its importance doesn’t come out in the ways you’d think it would if all you had to go by was, say, Methods of Rationality. Or, unfortunately, the way gifted pupils’ programs in the US are structured.
@Nornagest — For me the realization happened maybe eight or ten years ago. I do not now remember just what the catalyst was — lots of stuff going on in my life at the time — but I recall thinking, you know, being smart is maybe overrated and there is other stuff that matters a lot.
Such as being kind.
It probably had to do with reading Impro. A sample:
I still think intelligence is enormously valuable. I’m a math geek after all. But it can become a trap.
For all its (commendable) devotion to the growth mindset and focus on building practical thinking skills, LW is still a product of the American geek culture; and if I had to pick a single defining trait of that culture, it’d be a single-minded focus on intelligence (and signaling thereof) to the exclusion and even to the detriment of everything else.
You made me think. I started writing a disagreeing comment, but then I realized I probably still see LW as… the Sequences… while the reality is probably more like what you describe. Gradually, LW is becoming just another Mensa.
🙁
I still hope such fate can be avoided, but I am not sure how. (I am sure there are at least two tribes who believe the solution is to give their tribe more power, and then everything will magically become great. I am specifically not interested in this kind of advice. Because if it worked, then the other places where your tribe has more power, would already be awesome.)
Lizardbreath: I’m not familiar with the research at all. I’m just basing it on my own experiences and what my parents have told me. This is probably relevant to the diagnosis thing. (If you want to email me, throw a comment on my blog — ‘asdf’ on the about page, whatever.)
——
veronica d: Is there a publicly-traded company that sells heaters in hell? Because I (almost) completely agree.
——
Not necessarily. If your tribe perceives itself to be threatened everywhere, it’s going to respond to that in predictable ways, including all sorts of overreactions deemed necessary by the perceived state of emergency — and this uneasiness will likely persist for long after a truce, in the unlikely event that one ever comes.
Nitpicking…
That’s awfully specific and doesn’t seem to match the cited article. The article is mainly about the Irish and I guess it says WWI. But the Sikhs were never despised and were recruited as soldiers immediately after being conquered, not with a century delay. That’s pretty typical – the Empire didn’t last long enough to have an about face on many peoples.
Also the Irish – even pre-Famine, around 25% of the British Army’s personnel were Irish, and that is *outside* the Irish Regiments. Recruiting the Irish to the British Army was hardly a new thing, it has been going on for almost as long as there has been a British Army – (nor was the British Army the only one to recruit Irishmen, view the “Wild Geese” of the late C17th for an example).
One neat thing that you see at the fringes – at least, this is true for neoreaction and Marxism – is that there are only a few people around, so they have to interact with each other, but they’re also divided into camps that despise each other. And this is excellent for intellectual development! (Also if you’re on the fringes you spend most of your time interacting with liberals of one sort or another, so there’s that.)
Scott, the last part of this essay was one of the most brilliant things you’ve ever written. And the rest of the essay was brilliant too, for having hid the “a-ha” moment from me (and, I suppose, from you) until the very end.
Bill Whittle Covered this fairly well in one of his videos. Calling it Oikophobia, and covering it in the context of the Red vs Blue culture war. Obviously, this comes from a Blue-turned-Red tribe member, and the othering you expect.
But he covers the self-segregation, and one of the potential sources historical sources of this other-love, self-hatred is cultural marxism, which seeks to undermine the west by launching seemingly unconnected attacks at the root morality of the country via critical theory (culminating in SJW), waging a culture war since they lost the economic one. Though, also, while he claims it the source this time, he sees it as a basic flaw in humans, and regardless of whatever catalyzes it, it’s the same feeling that brings down every empire in history, driven mad with guilt by their opulence, and their need to other themselves from their own culture.
Oikophobia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqNVpACRLaI
(only relavent watching until ~5:00 after which it becomes a “politics is downstream of culture” plug)
Critical Theory & the Narrative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6c_dinY3fM
Evan Sayet also covers a potential mental source, in a much longer video. The first 20min seem fairly insubstantial – he’s just rattling off ideas and generalizations, othering the heck out of the blue group (mentality of 5 year olds). But the second half comes around and the examples he provides are very general, and seem to hit spot on the nose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaE98w1KZ-c
His theory is that many people take it as a moral imperative to be anti-discriminatory. Multiculturally-pure in thought. These people then, looking at huge discrepancies in wealth, success, and happiness between different cultures – having ruled out that any culture can be more valid or effective than the other – comes to the only conclusion left, which is that the successful cultures must’ve gotten lucky. Then they look and see that those cultures have been more successful for over a century, and conclude that it can’t be luck – it must be deliberate evil cheating. The larger the success, the more evil they must have been. So they tear down everything good, and elevate everything that’s evil. The greater the good and success, the worse it must be. Teenage abstinence, capitalism, Jews, etc. Anyway, another potential source of this oikophobia.
And I say they describe ‘sources’, because I personally, (as a blue-behaving but politically red) I think it is interesting the way that the two groups other each-other. I largely notice my blue-group friends other the red group by calling them “evil, racist, bigoted” etc. They other the Reds by claiming that they are evil – that they know everything they do hurts others and they do it anyway. It’s an attack on their character and humanity.
The Red group calls people “Socialist/communist/marxist, eco-weenies, scare-mongers, stupid, childish etc.”. They don’t seem to think the other group is evil. They think they’re misguided or stupid – or in the cases where they obviously DO consider them evil, they use labels that don’t claim the person is evil, but their plans for how to run a country are evil. Notwithstanding claims of whatever demo-gouge of the week being the “anti-Christ”, of course.
But in short, I notice this self-othering a LOT more in the blue group than the red. The older red-group members are often converts from the Blue group, so that might have something to do with it. But it seems like the red group others institutions and politics and their leaders, while wanting to convert blue group members, and the blue group just others red-group members and consider them all lost-causes that just need to be suppressed. It seems to me at least, that the Blue group considers the Red Group others much more than the red group does. Or at least, considering the relative degree of self-censorship, the Blues have been much more effective at it. So it’s worth looking at potential things which have catalyzed this shift to attacking the other group so directly, as members, rather than their policies as a group.
Feel free to provide counter-examples. Happy to hear them. Same goes for the videos, but there’s a bit too much content there for me to discuss details – I don’t agree with everything said, just that the messages are interesting and seem to contain some fraction of the truth.
Bill Whittle was also the first I’ve seen to identify with a grey tribe.
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000129.html
I had completely forgotten about that essay. Thanks for linking it!
I get the impression that back in the days of the wars of religion, this was “solved” by the idea of religious tolerance, because at that time “religion” was the best way to refer to this kind of group difference. Unfortunately the group boundaries shifted a bit, and while everybody agrees that religious tolerance and “separation of church and state” are good things, that doesn’t help them get along with the outgroup any better.
Which is why I often find militant atheism a bit misguided – sure, some forms of group identification include incorrect beliefs among their banners, but focusing on those incorrect beliefs makes you miss the useful attributes of groups (in terms of getting organized to Get Shit Done), as well as the bad aspects of your own group.
Sometimes atheism feels a bit like analysing 20th century European History by looking at which flag designs had harmonious colour combinations.
Modern Americans have absorbed the language of religious tolerance and “separation of church and state” without the substance. The trouble is that Blues think their beliefs are not, in every way that matters, religious, while Reds’ are. Therefore, it’s ok to push Blue beliefs through the state, and Red beliefs must be a priori excluded. So we’re back where we started.
There is no surer way to produce incoherence from a lefty than to cite Martin Luther King Jr.’s criterion for choosing legislators.
Which was?
“Let us march on ballot boxes until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress, men who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.”
That’s a Biblical allusion, too, which, as we all know, means that the political cause to which it is affiliated is irrevocably tainted with religiosity.
I ask them why they think there are few conservatives at the top of academia, and when they say something like “oh, they prefer to go and
murder poor peoplemake money” I respond “oh, then I assume that’s why you think there aren’t many women/blacks/whatever there as well.” Yours is shorter, however, which makes it better. Today you will often hear king referred to as Dr. King, very rarely as Dr. Reverend or Reverend Dr. King. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him referred to Reverend King in the modern age (except by other religious figures), though it was quite common when he was alive.So, umm, he was religious, and thought that was important? I’m not sure what the problem was. Carter is Born-Again.
Hmm. Maybe you’re objecting to people choosing to base their policies on religion? Reverend King’s quote seems to me rather more to be a judgement of character than a list of positions. In that, I would disagree with him.
If you fail to find this incoherent, I guess I’m no true lefty.
Good observation!
Sometimes I think you’re a crypto-NRx with the mission of taking NRx insights and concepts and spreading them to the larger rationalist/atheist/skeptic community with your excellent writing skills and relatively high status in said community.
essential moldbug:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.ca/2010/07/actual-letter-to-liberal-friend.html
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.ca/2010/11/democracy-cis-and-trans-maines-law.html
The only NRx influence I recognize in SSC is some infatuation with simplistic biological explanations. I see a hell of a lot of Christian influence, though, and obviously I like it.
I don’t think Scott’s biodeterminist beliefs come from his engagement with neoreaction. He’s been writing about the former for much longer, and generally treats the two as separate things.
No, if anything it is the other way around.
What is one example of this? It should be considered that biological determinism is correct because it is parsimonious.
A Neo-reactionary prefers formalism in a lot of matters. He would actually have very little to object if Blue America formally adopted progress as a state religion and became an official theocracy. NRx would prefer that Blue America gave some time for the others to leave of course, nobody likes violence.
If NRx stands for anything, it stands for exit over empire. Scott believes that a singleton has a non-negligible chance of taking over the world, hence clarification of values is extremely important(my interpretation). A singleton is the ultimate example of empire. Scott is not NRx. He’s attempting to articulate human values in a clear manner so that one day, if an AI were to scan the net seeking to understand human values, it would understand them better and try to fulfill them better. If you had to slot him, you might slot him in with the theocrats, but of a different god, Elua, not Yahweh.
Quite a lot of this commentary seems rather speculative.
Actually, I’ll go further and say that nearly every statement in this comment is either outright wrong or misleading.
I admit that a lot of that was speculative. But I don’t think I intended to mislead, in any way.
NRx prefers formalism. NRx prefers exit. Scott believes in the possibility of a singleton, and hence it is more important for him to clarify values compared to a hardcore NRx who would’ve just said “you go your way and I go mine”. The problem when anyone believes in the possibility of an intelligence explosion and the “hostile takeover” of the universe, is that you simply cannot let anyone “go their own way”
Is any of this outright wrong? If so, point out the flaws please..
I think the “Nerdalf the Grey” job’s been taken. Patri Friedman was going for a kinder, gentler NRx, wasn’t he?
Friedman strikes me as the quintessential hyper-smart person with a mix of actually strong convictions, and trying to achieve his goals by fashionable opportunism[1], so he’s a much better salesman than OGH here anyway.
But yeah, this post was mirror universe Moldbug to the extreme. I wonder who of them has the goatee. How else will we know who’s the evil Spock?
[1] Grey tribe alert: Much like Rothbard.
[2] Full disclosure: I’d classify myself as adherent of post-libertarian “dark enlightenment” ideas, but I don’t really have an ingroup, unless booze counts. Gentle, but pretty much total, despair is about as fun as it sounds BTW.
I’ll admit to being a fairly comfortable and sort-of-stereotypical member of the blue tribe. (I’m even an academic-in-training, and thus a member of their priesthood.) My experiences confirm what you say– that Blue Tribe members hate Red Tribers more than members of any other outgroup.
But I also want to point out that we have some pretty strong reasons to hate members of the red tribe. Only a small fraction of us are straight Christian white men, since and those of us who are tend to have plenty of respected close friends who aren’t. People with red tribe politics usually favor policies which directly harm or limit the well-being of people who are gay, non-Christian, non-white, or non-male. I think it’s totally reasonable that I not tolerate people who would favor banning me from running for public office (I’m an atheist), would prevent me from marrying some significant chunk of my possible romantic partners (I’m bisexual), deny my girlfriend the ability to get the birth control that she needs to enjoy her sex life, or encourage police to subject my black friends to special harassment because of their race. So basically, I know that people with red-tribe political beliefs want to directly harm me and my friends. I see no virtue in tolerating them.
(My reasoning here probably relates to the reason why my views on ISIS diverge a lot from those of my peers– because of my academic specialization, I spend a lot of my time reading and thinking about Middle Eastern people. I don’t actually know any Yazidis or Kurds or Assyrian Christians, but I think about and identify with them enough to consider committing genocide against them pretty heinous, and something that anybody who can stop has a moral duty to stop.)
Of course, I should note, a lot of people in my tribe will tend to hate or discriminate people because they have non-directly-political red tribe traits. I definitely don’t think that it’s okay to hate people because they like NASCAR or drink Budweiser or listen to country music or speak in a Southern accent.
> Only a small fraction of us are straight Christian white men
this statement is made true only by the inclusion of the term “Christian”
Depends on what he considers a small fraction. Straight white men are probably around 20-25% of team blue, despite being more like 36% or so of the general US population.
That’s only true if you’re using “Team Blue” to mean “Democratic Party.” Scott’s using the term to refer to liberal elites (by education and status, if not necessarily by wealth). Elites skew heavily white, and while Team Blue is perhaps 55-60% female, that still leaves it ~40% white male (of which ~90% are straight)
You’re wrong about this. Only half of the overall US population is male– and given the way that voting dynamics skew by gender, less than half of the Blue Tribe is male. Only about 65% or so of the US population is non-Hispanic white (which you have to be to be considered white by most other Americans). In practice, people support the Democratic party are disproportionately non-white. If the Blue Tribe had the same sex and race demographics as the US, white men would only be 32% of the group– a respectable minority fraction, but still way outnumbered by other groups. In practice, the number is smaller than that.
Voting democrat does not make you a member of the blue tribe, reread part V
Do you sincerely believe that these people: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/ are the same tribe as these people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpAOwJvTOio (oops wrong link -edited)
My best guess considering that I don’t have any real statistics on the fuzzy concept of tribe, is that the blue tribe is about 90+% white, 95+% straight and 50% male. That’s not a small fraction, its a minority but most likely a plurality.
Why do you think it’s half male? And straights are 95% of the entire population, so they’re almost certainly a lower percentage of this one.
I wonder if maybe the most central examples of the “tribes” exclude people who are voting for obvious self-interest reasons, i.e. poor people voting blue and rich CEOs voting red. In this way, the tribal designations capture the ideological spirit of the tribe by looking at where it is most intense, in people who really care despite not having a reason to.
I don’t think tolerating people implies condoning their views. “I think you are wrong about [x,y,z] and I’m going to reiterate that when it seems germane, but I still enjoy your company” is distinct from both “everybody’s entitled to their opinion” and “get thee from my sight, heretic!”
Oh, I totally get that. What I’m saying is that I consider it reasonable to treat people who want to actively harm me or my friends as enemies.
And likewise from the other side. Saying that you only hate the other tribe because they threaten you and they started it doesn’t make your tribalism different. It’s bog standard tribalism.
But even enemies can be treated differently. Consider the differences of treatments of POWs in WWII – the Germans and Western countries mostly kept to the Geneva convention between them while the Germans and Soviets both ignored it in treating their respective POWs.
Or Nelson Mandela’s efforts to promote harmony with whites once he was Presideny of South Africa.
There’s a difference between “you’re my enemy and I’m going to win then destroy you utterly” and “you’re my enemy now but I can see how we could work together once I’ve won.”
> People with red tribe politics usually favor policies which directly harm or limit the well-being of people who are gay, non-Christian, non-white, or non-male.
You think that is what their policies will do. It is also what they think your policies will do. Very few people consciously want to harm others, but we disagree a lot on what will or won’t cause harm.
I don’t think that I should have to be kind to somebody who tells me that they want to deny me a number of rights and privileges which they comfortably afford to themselves just because they say they believe it’s for my own good.
EDIT: Also, members of the Red Tribe generally tend to justify their measures harming all of those groups except for women in terms of their effects on what Red Tribe people consider their in-groups: They oppose gay marriage because they believe it will somehow destroy traditional marriage between heterosexuals, harrass atheists and Muslims in the name of defending the US as a Christian polity, and favor using racial profiling to impose a significant cost to minority groups in the name of small marginal benefits to the population as a whole (which is mostly white).
> favor using racial profiling to impose a significant cost to minority groups in the name of small marginal benefits to the population as a whole (which is mostly white).
Most victims of black criminals are black. Blacks are thus the largest beneficiaries of policies that reduce black crime.
Except that a great deal of said “crime” is, notoriously enough, victimless or near-victimless, yet enforced with more eagerness and savagery than lesser violent crimes.
Table 9
There are other kinds of repressive enforcement, like stop-and-frisk. In addition, of course lighter sentences lead to less prison population per amount of convictions, because ten different one-year sentences in a row can fill a prison bunk next to a single ten-year sentence… isn’t that how statistics work?
>harrass atheists and Muslims in the name of defending the US as a Christian polity,
because they think that there is utilitarian virtue in a christian polity.
>and favor using racial profiling to impose a significant cost to minority groups in the name of small marginal benefits to the population as a whole (which is mostly white).
the people who would benefit most from more lower crime rates are black, who suffer from much higher crime victimization rates than whites.
Certainly they think there are utilitarian benefits to having a Christian polity. But because? That seems like a bolder claim. With the halo effect going on I expect it’d be quite hard to untangle causes here, but utilitarianism — explicit or tacit — definitely wouldn’t be the first place I’d look.
@Nornagest
For exactly the same reasons you think that there are utilitarian benefits to diversity.
For most people, it is just recieved wisdom. For the small percentage of people who care enough to look into it or argue about it on the internet, they can provide a wealth of evidence, none of which you would find convincing. If you show them evidence to the contrary, they will respond to it the way you will respond to me bringing up Robert Putnam, with a lot of motivated reasoning and looking for more bias confirming evidence.
Now, I want to be clear, I’m not trying to attack you personally or say that the right is free from these cognitive defects. And I don’t want to argue about whether or not there is virtue in christian society. I’m just trying to explain that what you feel about diversity (or equality or tolerance, whatever your personal ism is) they feel about christianity.
Who this “you”, kemosabe?
Bizarre assumptions about my beliefs aside, I’m not seeing anything there that’s inconsistent with what I wrote.
My point was that advocating your culture’s sacred values is not, fundamentally, a utilitarian motive; if you pin your average leftist down and ask them why they support, say, affirmative action, they might come up with some utilitarian-sounding claims, but those claims aren’t in any way central to their advocacy. The whole point of a sacred value is that it’s treated as good-in-itself, not as a means to utilitarian ends.
How would you like to be treated by them, if on some policy issue they won and you lost?
I’m not entirely sure I understand this question – the policy question here was how he was to be treated, so the answer is clearly to reverse the outcome of the policy debate…
One huge benefit to the non-white population of strict crime policies (including racial profiling) is that it helps convince the middle-class not to abandon the city for the suburbs.
One might argue that a city might be better off with more residents even if a fraction of the city’s residents feel oppressed by the laws required to keep the rest of the taxable population from fleeing.
I really think people examining this in the abstract should talk to some actual urban minorities about just how invasive and constant the police harrassment is.
Matthew: You are changing the goalposts in the argument:
“Hating the red tribe is different from hating the blue tribe because the red tribe justifies their policies by benefits to themselves, not to the people they affect.”
“Here’s an example of how a red policy can be justified as benefiting the people it affects.”
“Oh, that doesn’t count because you’re not talking to the people affected.”
@Ken.
I may have expressed this with insufficient clarity, so rephrasing:
Only someone who does not have firsthand experience of the pervasiveness and extremity of the harassment could possibly think that the benefits outweigh the costs to blacks themselves.
This might be relevant for choosing an approach if you want to persuade someone in the other tribe to change their mind, but if you are a consequentialist, it’s not really relevant to whether you should assume an adversarial posture.
ETA: If you put aside “non-white” and “non-male,” your argument gets a lot less tenable anyway. Red policies on gays are not meant to benefit gays, except in the sense that some Reds hold the (absurd) view that already-gay people could choose to be otherwise, and the privileging of Christianity is clearly not meant to benefit atheists, Jews, Hindus, etc.
Let me see if I can reflect this back…
As a member of the Red tribe, I also want to point out that we have some pretty strong reasons to ‘hate’ members of the blue tribe. For one, few of them are white christian males, the demographic that established much of the civilization, and thus Blues are eager to upend traditions and values sacred to our people. They proclaim their glee at indoctrinating our children at state educational facilities, turning them against everything we hold dear. They encourage alternate lifestyles with increased risk of poverty and disease, devaluing the role of marriage which traditionally brought stability especially to the underclasses. They are against freedom of enterprise, association, and, increasingly even speech, even though these were instrumental in establishing the most advanced and prosperous society on earth. They favor policies that would undo due process against me (I’m a man), and encourage harassment of people who do what is necessary to protect themselves from violent offenders if the offenders happen to be an adopted part of the blue tribe. Culture is increasingly sexualized through a liberal dominated media and educational complex, and the barbarous act of dismembering nascent human life is hidden in the lying euphemism of giving women control of their health–even as they are ready willing and able to wrest an array of health decisions of much less moral weight away from men and women alike. They’ve even spoken–jokingly at first, but with repeated with more seriousness–punishment or reeducation for people insufficiently convinced by their solutions to global warming. So, basically I know that blue tribe people seek to directly harm myself and those I care about. Tolerating them is no virtue.
Of course, some red tribe people dislike those merely with blue tribe superficial tendencies, like latte drinking or speaking French. That’s not okay, we need to find out if they really have badthink before we hate them.
I leave pointing out why tolerance is a virtue in a deeply entwined society with irreconcilable differences as an exercise for the reader. If there was some trace of straw there, I do think it is recycled (and the assertions could be backed by links).
Good sir, your straw is not recycled. I pointed out specific policies which harmed members of the group I discussed in very immediate, specific ways. With the exception of the due process thing (which I, and plenty of other Blue Tribe members actually oppose– there’s not really consensus on this), your list is a bunch of vague, speculative allegations.
EDIT: As to your final point, I’m not advocating say, killing, imprisoning, or even job-discriminating against conservatives who hold positions like the ones I described. I’m pretty sure that would be wrong by both the virtue-ethics and utilitarian standards that I try to live by. I’m just saying that a person holding those views makes me feel disinclined to want to be friendly to them, and I think that lack of friendliness is totally reasonable.
I thought abortion was pretty specific.
Ah, okay, that’s fair.
But I do have another issue with Randy’s line of discussion on abortion. “The unborn” isn’t a group that one can be a member of or be friends with– it’s categorically quite different.
Right, and I’m saying, we even tolerate people with opinions like that.
I’m trying to skirt the object-level debate here as well, but I gather that it was offered as an example of a liberal issue which conservatives find loathsome on account of the harms it renders, on their telling.
Whether abortion constitutes a harm, and if so whether that harm is permissible, gets hashed out in the object-level debate.
But if Team Blue is wrong and Team Red is right, then Team Blue has not only permitted but in some sense endorsed multiple holocausts’ worth of human death. Hence Team Red might feel as coldly toward Team Blue as vice versa.
What that has to do with membership in a category or friendship isn’t quite clear to me. I will never be Yazidi and don’t know any, but I don’t see how that prevents me from rendering the correct moral judgment about the religious violence currently underway, for example.
For that matter, I thought moral universalism resonated more with the left than the right, but I may be unwittingly braiding together too many different strands there.
*“The unborn” isn’t a group that one can be a member of or be friends with– it’s categorically quite different.*
From a Blue perspective. Us Red tribers think the unborn are people, and frequently make the point that all of us were unborn at some point. In fact, pointing out that we all used to be unborn is a huge part of Red pro-life rhetoric; if you weren’t so intellectually blinkered, you would know this.
I believe that you believe this, but why do I never hear anyone who believes it say that the 20%–50% miscarriage rate is a public health catastrophe?
‘ but why do I never hear anyone who believes it say that the 20%-50% miscarriage rate is a public health catastrophe?”
For the same reason you never hear that the 100% death rate among the born is a public health catastrophe among people who think that that born are people.
Leaving aside that there’s no telling how accurate your figure is. Witness that your own stated margin is larger than the smaller side of range and an appreciable fraction of the larger.
“I believe that you believe this, but why do I never hear anyone who believes it say that the 20%-50% miscarriage rate is a public health catastrophe?”
Maybe for the same reason nobody thinks death from old age is a public health catastrophe?
EDIT: Beaten to it.
@Mary and Abolition
Is that the correct reference class? Embryos/fetuses are usually compared to children, not the elderly. A 30-50% infant mortality rate would probably have people up in arms.
Hey, we’re just explaining psychology.
“Us Red tribers think the unborn are people, and frequently make the point that all of us were unborn at some point.”
I know I was unborn at one point, and would prefer to leave the decision as to whether I’d be born to the woman gestating me. (I think you might be underestimating the extent to which blue tribers have considered this line of reasoning.)
That’s an incredibly easy position to preen from after the fact.
That’s different from saying that pro-choicers ignore the fact that we were all once unborn (though I’m not sure what positions can be taken that aren’t “after the fact”).
If you said that you didn’t think someone on unemployment should be able to vote while you yourself were taking it, that would not be after the fact.
Saying that as a former unborn person, you don’t think they matter is, because you are no longer a member of that group and never can be again, you can only benefit from this ruling (assuming you see the death of your kin as a benefit, of course).
If you said that you didn’t think someone on unemployment should be able to vote while you yourself were taking it, that would not be after the fact.
OK, so is there *any* way to talk about the unborn that is *not* after the fact? (That’s what I was trying to get at.)
Saying that as a former unborn person, you don’t think they matter
Nope, I’m not saying they don’t matter. I’m saying that I cannot ascribe to the unborn a preference that they be gestated and birthed by any means necessary.
is, because you are no longer a member of that group and never can be again, you can only benefit from this ruling
I can’t benefit. I’m already here. Being pro-choice or pro-life isn’t going to change that one way or the other. (Also, it’s weird to think of my existence as a benefit. The universe is under no obligation to forge me from its atoms.)
(assuming you see the death of your kin as a benefit, of course).
This statement is extremely silly. I’m not looking for a charitable interpretation here, just a minimally honest one.
@hainish,
You’re switching debates. The fact that Red tribe people consider the unborn to be people and have a frequent trope where they rhetorically point out their prior unborn status is evidence that Lemminkainen is wrong when he says ““The unborn” isn’t a group that one can be a member of or be friends with”.
Abortion is a mindkiller, so you need to read very carefully when abortion gets mentioned, included paying close attention to the argument that is being replied to.
I thought the intended meaning was this:
Out of all the people who debate or think about this issue, no one is unborn, and no one is friends with an unborn person.
And rhetoric can’t really change that.
@Lesser Bull
You’re switching debates.
I realize, but I was also replying to Randy M, who went on a slightly different track with this.
The fact that Red tribe people consider the unborn to be people and have a frequent trope where they rhetorically point out their prior unborn status
Specifically, unborn people *who must be gestated and birthed* (that’s the point of disagreement, not whether they’re called people).
is evidence that Lemminkainen is wrong when he says ““The unborn” isn’t a group that one can be a member of or be friends with”.
What Nita said.
Abortion is a mindkiller, so you need to read very carefully when abortion gets mentioned, included paying close attention to the argument that is being replied to.
See above. Also, it might not be the worst idea to fork this thread.
I’ll spell it out here, without getting into further object level debate.
Liberal/Progressive/Blue generally support:
No fault divorce
No limit abortion
Hate speech laws and/or policies
More regulation, even in situations apart from tragedy of the commons scenarios.
Compulsory education with central control of curriculum, standards, etc.
De-norming male/female as a relationship status (removing “mother” and “father” in lieu of “parent 1” and “parent 2” being one banal example
Destigmatizing single parenthood, including deliberately chosen single parenthood; making “Family” a broader definition (which results in more children being raised without a mother and a father, in as much as cultural battles are efficacious at all)
Regulating behaviors such as what insurance plans can offer, how much unhealthy food one can easily obtain–futile, but illuminating of a paternalism that extends to every realm but the sexual
Your list contains many elements I can’t recall ever being advocated by a conservative (though I haven’t read everything, it isn’t a consensus by any means), such as:
– “banning me from running for public office (I’m an atheist)”
-“deny my girlfriend the ability to get the birth control that she needs to enjoy her sex life”
(Unless her sex life is predicated on morning after pills or by deny you mean simply not pay for)
-“encourage police to subject my black friends to special harassment because of their race”
(Wait, is New York Red now?)
Again, though, I’m not going to get into further object level debate here and now. Just pointing out that you see harm to your ingroup as a result of opposing tribes policies being enacted; Red does likewise. You think yours are just; Red does likewise. You think Red is wrong and foolish for having the opinion of your ideas that you do of theirs. Obviously. Tolerance isn’t principally about getting to the truth, though; it is about, in my day to day interactions, what exactly is the pay-off for treating opponents as enemies?
Thanks for expanding. I disagree with you about the obviousness of the harmful effects of a lot of these things, but that’s probably just to be expected. I understand why a person who holds those position would be hostile to leftists.
I do object to your characterization of my points, though. There are laws against an atheist like me running for office on the books in several states, including the one where I live, I do think that denying the morning after pill and refusing to pay for it count, and New York is far from the only place with racial profiling, and even though the policy has some blue supporters, support is negatively correlated with blueness (ie: Bill deBlasio, who is widely identified as more progressive than Michael Bloomberg, opposes it).
“and refusing to pay for it count”
I find this fascinating, but will leave it at that.
After some quick research, I acknowledge you have a point about the running for office, and although most of those laws are on the books from the writing of the state constitution and superceded by the 14th, I can’t say it is inconceivable you’d have conservatives against changing it, though not universally.
Your portrayal of racial profiling upthread as “impose a significant cost to minority groups in the name of small marginal benefits to the population as a whole”
edit: Okay, I’ve found some people who argue that it saves police time and money, rather than having a better chance of preventing violent crime, so I’ll amend what I said before, although I guess a utilitarian may argue those are the same.
Decreasing the incidence of violent crime is, in fact, a small marginal benefit, since the rates of these crimes were never all that high in the US during the 20th century, and none of them except for murder, assaults that main people, and maybe rape are as harmful to people as forcibly imprisoning them for a long time. Of course, nobody would justify mass incarceration as being for “a relatively small small benefit,” because that’s not how most humans use language when justifying their political views. But that is, in fact, what it is, and I don’t think that I was strawmanning anybody by putting it in those terms.
Even the juxtaposing the “significant cost” to minority groups with “small marginal benefits” to wider society?
I’m not going to say that “if it saves one life, it is worth X” where X is anything and everything, but I wonder about what your costs are that they are more significant that deaths and assaults.
Again, I don’t think conservatives will argue that any and every burden must be paid by a minority community if it has any broader benefit; I think that they disagree with you about the relative magnitudes. In a perfect hypothetical where the additional burden on the minority really is small compared to the gains, would you support some inequality? If so, your argument is on where to draw the line and what the evidence says about the real-world costs and benefits.
(Personally I am agnostic because I don’t know what all the specific techniques included under that term are, and don’t want to be ensnare myself defending something I am ignorant of the particulars of.)
@Lemminkainen: “(ie: Bill deBlasio, who is widely identified as more progressive than Michael Bloomberg, opposes it).”
Michael Bloomberg is a Republican, later running as an Independent. Bill deBlasio is a Democrat. You’ve basically just said water’s wet.
(Related, @Randy M: “how much unhealthy food one can easily obtain” appears to be another reference to Bloomberg, who is, again, a Republican. That would be your tribe.)
Remember that these tribes are not geographies. There is some geographic correlation, but my observation is that many police locally (I’m in Southern California, Bluest of the Blue) are some shade of Red Tribe by a combination of memetic pull factors to the job (guns, cars, authority, machismo, not needing a Master’s degree) and push factors that keep Blue tribers from joining (ACAB and the like).
So I would expect that many street cops ,the people actually making decisions to pull over and harass black people, are in fact Red tribesmen in a mostly-Blue geography.
” I do think that denying the morning after pill and refusing to pay for it count,”
Says someone denying me my First Amendment rights! You’re not paying for my books and Internet access!
That is not denying anyone’s rights. It’s saying that you have to pay for your own routine expenses, like an adult.
Wow, I must say that this is not nearly as evil and dangerous as my personal stereotype of the Greys, but this is still pretty mean and stupid.
Don’t worry, though, I’m all for stopping the harrassment of individual Reds; the Greys are the future, and we should focus all resources on dealing with them somehow.
P.S.: through such policies as outlined above, Reds have historically sponsored both adultery (gasp!) and spousal abuse; back-alley abortions; war on the labour movement; deliberately shitty education; and finally de facto eliminationism towards people like me. This game of “Corruption! Unintended consequences!”, etc, etc can be played by either side.
(I agree that speech laws invariably suck except for very special historically contingent circumstances.)
Intrism, it is not so simple as to say Bloomberg is a Republican. He was a lifelong member of the Democratic Party, until he ran in the Republican primary because it was convenient. Yes, that says something about him, but it also says something about the Republican Party of New York.
“(Related, @Randy M: “how much unhealthy food one can easily obtain” appears to be another reference to Bloomberg, who is, again, a Republican. That would be your tribe.)”
I could find countless red commentators mocking him for it, and many blues defending his right to enact it. I don’t buy that there is no more to categorizing a specimen than noting the letter it runs under.
Yes, tribes are intermixed within a geographic area, but if a generally blue area generally supports a policy, it is likely more blue than red.
Hello Multi. I’m not particularly chastised by your denouncing my bog-standard and off-the cuff conservative positions as mean and stupid; I would have put rather harsher words in your mouth to describe it initially, and now I must fear I am going soft. Anyhow…:
“through such policies as outlined above, Reds have historically sponsored both adultery (gasp!) and spousal abuse; back-alley abortions; war on the labour movement; deliberately shitty education; and finally de facto eliminationism towards people like me. ”
Which policies are you referring, simply the inverse of the ones that I said I opposed? There’s more angles in a circle than two, and I’m not claiming that reds are brilliant at achieving their goals, just that I doubt blues want the same goals.
So I can’t argue all your points because they aren’t really spelled out, but accepting something as a trade-off isn’t the same as sponsoring it; for example, I will accept a small number of back alley abortions instead of a much greater number of clinic abortions; I will accept occasional adultery over much more frequent and more public divorce, etc.
In each case I will prefer policies that eliminate them, if that needs saying.
Bloomberg is pretty obviously Blue Tribe. He’s a Republican only in the very special New York sense.
Outside New York, Bloomberg is mainly known for being a gungrabber and a nannystate scold, neither of which are meant as Red Tribe praise.
This is in fact a super-common belief in my experience, among all the evangelical friends I had back in Texas. After all, depending on who you ask, atheists are either completely lacking in a moral compass and capable of doing whatever evil pops into their heads at any time (and thus not capable of justly leading), or liars and actually worship Satan, and are thus self-evidently not fit to lead.
These kind of opinions are definitely not universal, but they’re definitely common, especially the first one. I had to deal with sort of thing a *lot* when I first came out as atheist.
You appear to be unfamiliar with how many conservatives consider all birth control immoral, sometimes including condoms but *often* including hormone pills.
In my own experience, I wouldn’t peg this sort of thing near a majority, but it’s a significant minority. Look up discussions surrounding any time a pharmacist gets in trouble for trying to avoid handing out birth control; there’s always a lot of rhetoric supporting this and advocating the right to go further.
Yeah, this isn’t a conservative position per se, but just racism, which is commonly attributed more to conservatives than to liberals, plus a strain of authoritarianism that is more conversative-associated than liberal-associated.
And New York City isn’t red at all, but *police* are strongly red, and the stronger police-support contingent tend to be as well.
Abolition – “Maybe for the same reason nobody thinks death from old age is a public health catastrophe?”
It is, and you are on (or at least near) territory where this is widely recognized.
The question was why death from old age being a public health catastrophe isn’t a mainstream belief of either major tribe, given that nobody likes death very much even if they don’t profess the belief that it’s a bad thing in general.
We are few. We are not nobody.
Fair enough; I read “nobody believes X” non-literally, to mean “the number of people who believe X is so small as to have no significant impact on the question being discussed”. (Which is also how I used it in my last post.)
I really, really want to challenge/denounce this at some point, along the lines of “marriage” and “stability” being used with ahistorical definitions and loaded implications – but I don’t yet know enough about gender history to have formed more than a vague impression that something’s up with this argument.
Even the neoreactionaries would probably agree that the Silent Majority style of this rhetoric is old and busted; at least Catholics can bash feminism in style! These sentences read like they’ve been left in a dusty closet for 40 years. “Alternate lifestyles”? “Increasingly sexualized”?
Ew.
I’m not sure why this particular kind of status-claim response is quite so nauseating, but… Ew.
You might as well have pulled faces and made monkey noises at him.
{quining joke}
I don’t know if you think I am beyond the pale or insufficiently exorcised? I was aiming for somewhat detached. Would you prefer I dip into the well of such terms as “perversions” and “sluttery?” I really didn’t find it necessary at this venue.
Anyhow, I was trying to make a somewhat broad, over-generalized and certainly over-hyped list of grievances similar to the parent comment.
To be fair, if anyone can be said to “establish civilization”, it would probably be the ancient Sumerians/Babylonians. Among other things, they invented law, cities, and math. Christianity wasn’t even on the table back then, in ~5500 BC.
I’m all for being fair to ‘ol Hammurabi, but I don’t recall saying Christians invented civilization, and I believe that long term human pair bonding for the purposes of child provision even predates him.
And of course, Greys can and do also object to the blues trying to use government as an instrument of coersion, in order to force individuals and companies to conform to the Blue ‘dogma’.
(See ESR, MZW etc.)
What do you mean when you say that you don’t tolerate someone? You obviously can’t stop them from favouring banning you running from public office, lobbying for laws you disagree with, etc.
Do you think that they should be banned from favouring/lobbying/etc for those things, even though you don’t have the political power to ban them from doing so?
Do you mean that you would kick guests out of your house if they started saying any of those things?
I’m an academic red/grey economist and truly believe that the Blues inflict massive amounts of harm on poor blacks. You should at least be open to the possibility that what your tribe claims to support and the consequences of its actions are inconsistent.
Debates over economic policy are a good object-level example of a meta-level failure mode. “A claims to believe B on the grounds of principled or empirical arguments X, Y, and Z. If we’re charitable, we may even grant that they perceive their own conviction to be sincere. But we know that the real reason A believes B is malevolence or naked self-interest, so we don’t need to engage with X, Y and Z as if they were legitimate arguments.”
I don’t mean that “the real reason A believes B is malevolence” rather “A thinks B is good but really B is bad” For example, blues think that minimum wage laws, rent control, and strong teachers unions help poor blacks whereas in fact they on average harm them.
Strongly disagree on rent control. Remember that Blue != Democrat in Scott’s framework. Blues are well aware that rent control creates perverse incentives.
Teacher’s unions is hard to say; education is probably the most divisive issue in the Democratic coalition right now, but are the reformers really Blues, or just Democratic-voting Grays? (It would be strange if the Democratic POTUS is not actually a Blue, though, and he’s clearly been on the reformers’ side.)
Effects of minimum wage policies in the real world are contentious, a fact of which you as an academic economist are presumably well aware. I’d agree that Blues think what you say they do on this one, though not with your characterization that they are obviously incorrect.
Judging by your twitter, I’d say you’re like if one of the reactionary-bashing internet leninists that Nydwracu complains about wanted to impersonate a Grey. Signaling loose association with LW ideas is just a part of their disturbingly accurate stereotype of you. Misandry! Coloreds! Political correctness gone mad! Just playing le devil’s advocate, kind sirs!
I don’t understand?
I think you’re unlikeable, a little ridiculous, and there’s even a recent offensive stereotype that you fit rather well.
To Multiheaded:
Thanks for your honesty. Can you give me another hint about the stereotype.
Multiheaded, why do you think these two comments were useful?
Come on, Multi. Do you really think these comments meet the level of discourse expected here?
I’ve been trying really hard to give you second, third, and five hundredth chances, but yeah, banned for one month
Would you be willing to provide some good citations for any of this? Being a Blue myself, I would naturally be quite distressed if any of my preferred policies were not effectively achieving their intended results. I tend not to accept assertions like this at face value, though, because I’ve heard them before, and upon further research they invariably turn out to be poorly-supported fringe theories distributed by folks with past histories of wishing harm on black people.
Here is a starting point:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-11_15_05_TS.html
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/california-teachers-tenure-vergara-ruling-unions-107656.html
Also ask why San Francisco has so few black and Hispanic citizens compared to the rest of California. Rent control, minimum wage laws, and building restrictions are the only plausible reasons.
Teachers’ unions and anti-gentrification policies are both divisive issues amongst Blues and therefore bad examples. (And I personally don’t support either.)
The minimum wage argument is interesting but still suspicious. It uses relatively distant historical examples, and attempts to generalize to the US from France, where employment law is far stricter than American Blues support. When I get home from work, I’ll scatter plot minimum wage vs. racial unemployment gap in the 50 states, which I strongly suspect will show no or negative correlation and thereby reduce my belief in your argument below the point where I’m interested in following up on it.
As promised: Charts! Data! Citations! Minimum wage on the Y axis and in the rightmost data column, percentage employment gap on the X axis and in the middle data column.
It appears that most of the states with high minimum wage fall somewhere in the middle on racial employment gap. (The data point on the upper right is Washington, D.C., which is weird.) There’s extremely low correlation between minimum wage and racial employment gap. Therefore, I conclude that your argument is likely false.
Some states were omitted because they didn’t have entries for black people on my list of racial unemployment stats. This is likely because those states have very low black populations. I doubt that makes a big difference, but if you want to find stats elsewhere for them you can go ahead.
Intrism: thanks for looking at the data. Empirically testing the effects of the minimum wage is really hard, however, in part because a high minimum wage might be part of a strategy that a city like San Francisco uses to reduce the number of poor people living within its borders.
Pretty amazing! I’ve never heard a member of a tribe try to explain why their tribe’s prejudices are different because they’re justified before.
Really? Have you never read anything by tumblr SJWs? Their entire meta is basically just a bunch of reasons why their prejudices are okay, while their opponents’ are worse than hitler. That, and abusing the noncentral fallacy to create memetic superweapons to hurl at their enemies.
They were being sarcastic.
Oops, sorry. It’s hard on the internet sometimes. But then again, in retrospect, it was kind of obvious.
Yes, what a novelty!
You know almost literally nothing about the people you hate. Really, you should try just interacting with some ordinary conservative folks. You will find they don’t match the stereotypes you’ve been fed.
Leftist problem. The further left you are, the worse you are at knowing your opponents’ thoughts. This is Science. It’s been proven in the lab.
However, it’s unlikely to get fixed because the typical leftist response to that info is to cook up Just So Stories that mean they really do understand the right without no evidence behind them. Like — the conservatives are all lying! The liberals who answer differently are merely intuiting the truth of what the conservatives really think!
[citation needed]
http://www.american.com/archive/2012/april/liberals-or-conservatives-who2019s-really-close-minded
Ok, I haven’t read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind but I know that a bunch of commenters around here have. Can someone who’s read it tell me if it really says that “The further left you are, the worse you are at knowing your opponents’ thoughts”, or is that just the result of myside bias from conservatives?
As I remember it, he does say that, but in a very specific way.
His initial point was that liberals’ moral responses were based on the harm and fairness moral foundations, while conservatives had those but added loyalty, authority and sanctity. So conservatives understood liberals’ moral reactions, but not vice versa.
But he has revised his position. See my comment above.
However, I also seem to recall reading somewhere that liberals do worse than conservatives at Ideological Turing Tests, but I don’t remember details.
(edit: much better, thanks)
I’d be interested to see that research on ideological Turing tests.
You can link using HTML. Typing
<a href="https://slatestarcodex.com">link text</a>in the comment box renders as link text.Googling around a bit, it’s entirely possible that my memory was of people describing results from Haidt’s research (although I just Ctrl+F’d my copy on Kindle, and he doesn’t use the words “Turing test”). Scott, for instance.
“As I remember it, he does say that, but in a very specific way.”
He’s said more than that. He’s had liberals and conservatives come to his lab, handed them the test, and said, “Fill this out as if you belonged to the other group.”
The correlation between how badly they did and how far left they were was direct.
The further left you are, the worse you are at knowing your opponents’ thoughts.
So. . . why do I keep encountering commenters here who seem to not know how leftists think?
Just because far leftists are bad at modelling how their opponents think does not mean that their opponents are good at modelling how they think. In general, I would suspect that the further from the mainstream you are, the worse you are at understanding what others think and the worse others are at understanding what you think.
“In general, I would suspect that the further from the mainstream you are, ”
Then Haidt would have found that the farther from the center you are, the worst you would do.
in fact, he found that strong conservatives did best.
This is, of course, why we have Science. Because our suspicions often are wrong.
No, Mary, he did not find that strong conservatives did the best.
Whoops — all right there’s a little more noise in the conservative side than I had thought.
But the strong conservatives still do better than liberals of every stripe.
@Mary
I’m pretty sure Haidt’s research does not say what you just said. According to your version, Marxists should be less able to model conservatives than liberals. I’m not sure most actual conservatives would claim that.
Yes, his research has only seven buckets, going as far as “strong liberals.”
misplaced
It seems that the role of libertarianism in grey tribe is not like liberalism in blue or conservatism in red. For one thing, reactionaries seem to be grey.
And I doubt writing either the anti-libertarian or anti-reactionary faq “took nerves of steel, and made your blood boil, you sweat blood”.
Perhaps grey politics are, to quote ESR, “to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day”
My interpretation is that neoreactionaries are to the Grey tribe as Anton LaVey is to atheism.
As someone of similar age and background to you (I even grew up in the bay area) I’m going to say that you actually do know some of those creationists and what not. You don’t notice them because they’re all smart enough to have learned that no good will come from admitting that they are outgroup.
I remember this one incident back in one of my first college classes. this was 2003, right as the iraq invasion was starting, and sitting in the classroom before class started the people discussing the war next me said something about how how Saddam was none of our business. I mentioned offhand to these people that, well actually, we have sort of supported Saddam over the years, and that we’ve been involved with him continuously for 2 decades now, so while you can say a lot of things about the war, you can’t really say that it isn’t our business. By the time I had finished, every head in the room was staring at me. No one said anything, but the feeling of the room was clear, and I say this as someone very bad at taking social temperature. Most people, if that happens to them once or twice, they learn to shut up.
This.
At my factory job in rural Wisconsin, despite all the deer hunting and snowmobiles, you’d occasionally find a true-blue Rachel-Maddow-watching liberal, you’d just never know unless you struck up casual conversation or took breaks together. I think Scott’s over-stereotyping his circle because he thinks they’re good people, so they must hold good views. People aren’t consistent, so there are probably people out there supporting gay marriage while also being young-earth creationists, but they never brought up the second.
That doesn’t really explain the Reddit thread, though, especially since there’s no shortage of people expressing (much much much more) terrible things on Reddit and even AskReddit.
Well, as a conservative on Reddit I will say that I never bother with threads like that as A) I am almost certain no one is actually coming into that thread willing to listen and B) Having lots of self righteous people insult me is not my idea of fun. With that going against the idea of posting anything it becomes really hard to get up the energy to do so.
So you’re confident the OP is a liar? I can understand expecting it of everyone else.
+1. I have a Red background and some Red cultural/ideological markers and beliefs. I work in software for a large tech employer in the Bay Area and pass for Blue with most acquaintances. I’ve even done a bit of sanitization of public info about me that reveals Red ideas. Your bubble may only *appear* to be pristine.
This sounds extremely impressive, and seems worthy of more attention.
It also sounds false.
I think we need to start speaking not in terms of “tolerance” but in terms of “pluralism”. Pluralism is a loftier goal than tolerance, because it says that rather than merely putting up with your existence, we recognize that you’re actually contributing something valuable to our rich cultural tapestry/marketplace of ideas. But it’s also a more down-to-earth goal, because you don’t need to stop hating the outgroup, or pretend to stop hating the outgroup. You can still view the Outgroup as pure evil, which let’s be honest you were going to do anyway, all you have to do is recognize that the goal of maintaining a tradition of pluralism is more important than crushing this particular pure evil.
I think the protection of pluralism is one of the best things about the US Constitution, and that’s why it makes me said when private actors gleefully silence other private actors.
This is an important point. “Tolerance” is supposed to be a general framework whereby A and B have different goals/values/habits but live alongside each other because they both agree to live and let live. “Pluralism” suggests that A and B should instead actively value the existence of the other, even if they continue to disagree.
If tolerance is the official social ideal, politics ends up being about who is really failing to live and let live, but most issues of importance can’t be resolved in that way without assuming that either A or B has the correct view. Consider as an example the same-sex marriage dispute, in which both sides like to claim that the other is trying to “impose” its view on others. Both, in a sense, are correct. This is why Libertarianism is not just wrong but ultimately incoherent as a political philosophy, despite being correct about many substantive American political questions as a movement.
If pluralism is the official social ideal, no pretense is made that society as a whole can be fully neutral between A and B. But it provides a reason for B to continue to exist even if A is right and B is wrong. Even if A wins, A should continue not just to tolerate but to welcome B, within limits. A should offer carve-outs and exceptions so that B can live out its Bness, though with the understanding that A’s values provide a limit to what B can do (so maybe arranged marriage is ok, for example, but no honor killings).
A good example is how American society treats the Amish. That’s pluralism in action. “Tolerance,” by contrast, is what happened to Brendan Eich.
Well considering the Blue Tribe defines tolerance as acceptance. And the EP and Commerce Clauses have combined to gut the Freedom of Association, you don’t need to worry too much about forcing people to live together since the framework is already there.
However, I must warn that there is no time in history that has worked long term without metal clanging/flying. The observation that Conservatives are now saying Liberals aren’t just naive but evil is a step away from peaceful coexistence.
Relevant, though admittedly badly written. Marcuse’s line about how there can be no tolerance of intolerance is completely right — and that demonstrates that ‘tolerance’ doesn’t mean anything. You’re not tolerating anything if you assume that all things share your values, or at least will once they’re ‘liberated’, and that there can never be any substantive difference, and that culture is just about food and music — a mentality described well in Moldbug’s comment here.
As a Brit living in America, I’m always curious when Americans spell “grey” the British way (as you did three times) instead of “gray” (which you did once). Is this indicative (for example, of Blue Europhile tendencies either in yourself or imputed to the Grey Tribe), or merely ordinary general orthographic influence?
I think it’s Tolkien’s influence. Gandalf *owns* the color grey.
Maybe Scott drinks a lot of tea…
My natural urge was to spell it “gray”, I vaguely remembered this was wrong, so I “corrected” myself.
Maybe from living in Ireland, I dunno.
Whenever I have to type gray/grey I try to remember which way is correct, remember seeing it both ways, and think “Is there another meaning to this?” I think I usually write it off to one being the spelling of a name versus the color before looking it up.
The way I’ve always remembered it is that in England we always spell it “grey”, but in America, it’s instead spelled “gray”, of course.
This is the kind of mnemonic that actively sticks in your mind, and pops up whenever you see the word. You’re never going to have to look it up again.
Sadly, here in Scotland, we don’t spell it ‘grsy’ 😛
Thanks!
For some reason I waver back and forth between spelling it both ways. It might be that I read a lot of books written by British authors (Terry Pratchett, Iain M. Banks, etc.)
I tend to use them interchangeably, but I read a lot of British fiction when I was younger.
Out of curiosity, are libertarians grey because anarchists are black? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbolism#Black_flag
Libertarians and their gray allies (like Scott) are the most prominent group approaching American politics from a non-red-vs.-blue perspective, and there’s something of a tradition in American political iconography of using the color gray to mean neither red nor blue (as with political candidates who are registered independents, for example). I don’t think it has anything to do with anarchism.
Here I was thinking that techno-libertarians were gray because they are robots.
Toaster 2016!
IIRC, in Urbit Moldbug’s banner system was
red – socialist
blue – vanilla left
orange – vanilla conservative
black – reactionary/traditionalist
white – apolitical
I am terrified of this kind of intolerance.
I think we’re on the verge of losing the internet itself.
It’s something you don’t even see happening. It doesn’t trigger any alarms that Reddit is missing half the political population. Why is that not horrifying? The things that the “bastions of freedom” of the internet are quietly banning people for are shocking in their mundanity. You don’t even realize a population is driven away until it’s already gone.
I see a grim future of an internet of bubbles. Sites like this are the least safe of all, because it’s present and looks enough like the enemy to both ends. Charity and outreach are getting torn apart. Tolerance itself is dying on the internet.
I realize it doesn’t explain all of it, but I think the role of “opposition to gay marriage correlates strongly with age, even among self-described conservatives” is getting underplayed here. Reddit skews young.
Reddit has subreddits covering basically all views. It even has a (somewhat inactive) reactionary sub r/darkenlightenment. Maybe the central hub of the pua movement is r/redpill. And the two pillars of the MRM are r/mensrights and A voice for men. Reddit does not seem like it has been lost to SJ.
Those subreddits are all outposts of the Gray Tribe, not the Blue Tribe. Reddit is generally considered to be a Gray Tribe thing, so the Red Tribe is barely aware of its existence and the Blue Tribe sees it as a threat.
Come on. Greys are bad and dangerous, but they are intelligent and occasionally respectable. Those, ahem, communities are more in the ISIS corner.
All tribes have nice people and nasty people. Those communities are very much culturally gray, whether we like it or not. They’re composed of people who have a lot in common with other grays and much less in common with reds or blues.
These days im less interested in what you see posted and more in what you dont. Reddit is at risk because of a hugely vulnerable “front page” community largely dictated by a few mods of those subs. Undesirable subs are indirectly kept in check by an easy control of the content 99% of users see. It curbs their power if you keep anyone who might sympathize off the site as a whole.
This is an excellent article. Thanks for writing it dude. Really clarified some stuff for me.
I think your ingroup is WAY more selected than normal. I’m Grey Tribe, but my friends have included two people who think The Gays are sinful and Evolution is a lie, one of whom was an Honest-to-God unreconstructed Young Earth Creationist and the other, more shocking still, thought the Phantom Menace was the best Star Wars movie and would dispute that racism still exists. My other best friend had a Tumblr, identified as genderqueer, and got really upset about Nice Guys, pronouns, and cultural appropriation.
I guess these people are technically part of my ingroup, being that they all read fanfic and had opinions about Star Wars and Star Trek though.
*the other, more shocking still, thought the Phantom Menace was the best Star Wars movie and would dispute that racism still exists.*
I feel like you could replace “and would dispute that racism still exists” with anything and the statement would still be true
I’m not sure who my tribe is.
Possibly related — when Brendan Eich was fired, I found myself in the exceedingly lonely position of being ambivalent about it. A bunch of the people I follow on the Internet thought it was great; some thought it was horrible; everyone thought it was bloody obvious that one side or the other was correct. Except me. I could see strong and weak points on both sides. This is not a pleasant place to be. Humans expect you to take sides. “It’s complicated” is a position that just makes everybody assume you’re untrustworthy.
I see some persuasive arguments for there being strong points on both sides, but on the other hand, there are also persuasive arguments that one side or the other is right.
I couldn’t agree more. I find that I assume the “it’s complicated” stance far more frequently than those around me seem to, on personal issues as well as political ones. The result is that I usually wind up caught in the middle of interpersonal conflicts, and this is the primary source of my disagreements with the people in my life. They each choose one side while I adopt the “it’s complicated” stance, and each party thinks the other’s strategy is in some sense a cop-out.
I was pretty with you on that. My basic opinion was that a) It was unfair and unreasonable, but also not at all surprising; and b) people like Eich are already wealthy enough that they have the economic capability to take this in stride, so it’s not really something worth getting that upset over.
I doubt too many people were concerned with the particular. It was the precedent that people were reacting to. I’m sure Eich can retire in peace, or start a new company, etc.
(@Zooko referred me to Scott’s piece, which I enjoyed.)
FWIW, I was at a non-profit for 11 years, my last startup was Netscape (joined April 1995), where I was late enough I didn’t get a lot of stock, so I’m not able to retire — so why do so many on the Web assume I’m “rich” or “filthy rich”? Try google search rich-guy-dar: see what “Brendan Eich n” autocompletes to. You won’t find numbers.
(It turns out that I’m also blackballed at one valley bigco, according to a VP-level inside source. This is not surprising.)
Not that I’m complaining — probably most of us reading and commenting here are fabulously wealthy by world and historical standards. But a few may be poor in meaningful ways; the chance of this makes me want to shut up right now. I know people who grew up dirt-poor, I’ve never faced that myself, so again: not complaining, but please don’t assume I’m “wealthy” or can retire. I’m not; I can’t. Current plan is to hope to create or get a job that supports my family, and work till they cart me out in a box ;-).
Lots of people in the US who used to count on a stable job and pension or retirement fund are finding out they can’t count on either job or retirement. This is a social problem. We haven’t seen the last of the concealed fraud-fueled insolvencies that came to light in 2008, so I expect it will get worse for many.
Which gives me a closing point: I’m a SJW in my own way, even though I’m not Blue or Red Tribe (more Purple). I care about social justice, but I don’t share the axioms or tactics of the loud/left/cultural-Marxist SJWs. I don’t like that acronym, even though it has “stuck”. More people care about social justice, and want to wage just war against social ills, than just that one noisy “side”.
Scott, thanks for the post and chance to comment. My not being Red Tribe (except for eating steak and a couple of other items on your list) doesn’t affect your main point.
/be
“Boy, if life were only like this.”
Apologies if I was unacquainted with the particulars.
Wow. Now I feel like an asshole. Sorry for making assumptions as to your socioeconomic position. Like I mention elsewhere, I know some people from Mozilla who were ranked under you, and I have a pretty good idea of their wealth/income, so I assumed and made an ass out of u and me. Well, me, in any case.
FWIW I think it was pretty shitty that you were dismissed. However, like I said above, it is hard to imagine the bay area reacting in any other way. This is why I stay waaaaay out of politics
You’re not quite alone there; I had about the same feeling about it. I was torn between the sense that, as a member of the group he was targeting, Eich’s position would have made me feel unsafe about, e.g. taking a job reporting to him (and I’m also in the open source hacker demographic that Mozilla hires from and know people who work there) and aversion to the proliferation of such situations in communities I participate in on the one hand, and on the other a sense of unfairness at targeting someone for opinions on the fear of how he might act on them, and a total lack of confidence that the SJ bazooka will only ever be pointed at ‘legitimate’ dangers even if one is comfortable with the preemptive nature of the target seletion.
When it was all happening I spent a bit of time pondering how the scenario could have been tweaked to make me come down more unambiguously on it, and made one interesting observation: that Eich, AFAIK, never clearly stated *any* opinions, bigoted or otherwise, on the matter in public – the whole controversy started over a donation to the prop 8 campaign. The fact that he actually took action seeking to promote state coercion like that made me less sympathetic to him than I would have been if he’d merely expressed hateful opinions, and raised my estimate of the risk that he’d act in harmful ways given a managerial position.
His specific position within the organization also seemed very relevant, in that the CEO has a high potential to influence wider policy shifts and is perceived as a public representative of the organization; I’m quite sure I would have been clearly against the fire-Eich campaign if he had been in any other role.
Finally, I think there are ways to change the *target* of Eich’s anti-marriage campaign that leave the situation isomorphic and don’t change my analysis much (but do affect the emotional salience and shift my attitude in a more detached direction), but which I believe would drastically alter the level of public support for firing him:
1.) Suppose he had been campaigning to overturn Loving v. Virginia and re-criminalize mixed-race marriages. I’m not sure how the number of affected couples would shift relative to the gay marriage case, but I do suspect the level of public support for firing would have been much higher.
2.) Suppose he had been opposing consensual adult incest. The number of affected couples becomes very small, but thus they also become more vulnerable. It’s hard to exactly translate the *campaigning* aspect to this scenario, since there’s no visible, organized opposition to laws targeting this group. Indeed, the position is so default it’s hard to imagine he’d bother explicitly stating it – much less that anyone would try to get him fired him for doing so. Just look at the level of prohibitionism seen in the comments on the matter in even the rather SJW Salon.
Not that it matters, but this, rather than eqdw and Randy’s replies, is more or less accurately describing my thoughts.
(Also, I chewed people out on Facebook for making fun of Germany over the incest thing.)
Wait, are you only against ‘bigots’ who are superior to you?
I assume Veronica is more *threatened* by bigots superior to themself, which seems like a very reasonable position. One can tolerate people more easily when they have no power over you; when the ones above you dislike your kind, it greatly increases the chance (or at least the fear) that you’ll suffer for their opinions.
“Superior”?
Well, gosh, that word sure has multiple meanings in this context. I wonder why you chose that word instead of another?
It’s puzzling.
As in “superior officer” – above you in rank and with power over you. Didn’t think that would be unclear, sorry.
Oh, I understood your point. I am wondering what @Lambert meant by the term.
Oops, meant to reply to Veronica.
I feel similarly. I am an LGBT person. Had I been a Mozilla employee, and on knowing that my new CEO wan an anti-gay bigot, I would have begun quietly filling out my resume with plans to change jobs.
Note I would not feel this way about “Joe in the server room” or even “The head of info-sec.” (At my last job our head of info-sec seemed rather reactionary. But that was fine. He was not above me in the org chart. And he was not CEO.)
So it goes. CEO is a pretty notable position, and I don’t want to work for an employer who holds the feelings of LGBT employees in such low regard.
Should Eich have been fired? I dunno. If I worked there I think I would have been glad.
If you like the slatestarcodex article about outgroup intolerance (I do!) *and* you have opinions about Brendan Eich’s firing, then you definitely need to read this well-written personal blog post by a then-Mozillian: http://patrickfinch.com/2014/03/31/the-most-important-decisions-we-make/
I didn’t really see anything in that article that changed my mind on much. To me it just reads as straight dude sees both sides, with the predictable gesture toward understanding by bringing up his sick wife. It is a template article that makes all the expected points.
>I am an LGBT person. Had I been a Mozilla employee, and on knowing that my new CEO wan an anti-gay bigot, I would have begun quietly filling out my resume with plans to change jobs.
I have to admit – as a cishet dude? – this seems pretty strange to me.
Could you maybe elaborate a bit?
I don’t want to work for someone who hates me, who hates people like me, who has worked to undermine our lives, our capacity to thrive.
This is hard to understand?
Veronica: I might do the same in an analogous position, but — things that disadvantage someone can have motives other than hating them. Automatically confidently inferring hate with no more reason than that is usually unjustified and bad for discourse.
This makes me wonder how much of the wage gap/employment gap/glass ceiling is self-imposed by minorities freaking out at perceived slights and leaving good jobs for worse ones every time some gossip blog decides to tarnish a CEO’s reputation.
@dublin — I doubt that plays any significant role at all. Why would you think so?
dublin: Probably not very much. If that were true then we’d expect the gap to be nonexistent among those new to the workforce and increase rapidly as experience goes up, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Plus, I expect almost everyone who quit over Brendan Eich or similar was in a position where they could easily get a good job somewhere else; that kind of politics (which is mostly perpetuated through upper-middle-class social norms) rarely trumps economic self-interest among the economically insecure.
If you’re sensitive enough quit your job because of a political donation your boss’s boss made several years ago that you only found out about because someone was muckraking, that can’t help you in the job market.
LGBT handholding is a “culture perk”, like having ping-pong tables. The hope is that the employees will say “wow, this is a company that really gets it!” and not notice that they’re being paid less.
“LGBT handholding”? Really?
veronica: The person you’re arguing with (who must not be named lest my comment be swallowed up in the spam filter) isn’t going to be responding anymore, because Scott banned him.
Of course, being explicitly super LGBT-friendly is something that employers advertise in order to make (certain groups of) people want to work for them. But I find the idea that LGBT-friendliness substitutes for monetary compensation to be ridiculous.
@Taymon A. Beal — No doubt being LGBT-friendly is a big selling point, which in fact is central to my point. I was wondering, however, about calling it “hand holding.” What purpose does such a characterization serve?
(To me the answer seems pretty obvious.)
“I dunno. If I worked there, I think I would have been glad.”
Pretty funny how all the ‘ambivalent’ people pretty clearly support firing him without much nuance about it. But they’re still conflicted, they say.
It’s almost like firing Eich and saying you are conflicted are both tribal values.
Well, I’d feel conflicted about it, but I would have kept him… so your 2×2 table doesn’t have an empty cell.
Hi Andrea, I hope you don’t mind me replying here. I admire your work and feel that I owe you a response.
(Scott, I hope you’re ok with my comments too. I’m sorry to take so much space. I feel what’s below fits in the flow and context here. I’ll stop when you say to.)
Independent of me in particular, but specific to Mozilla: anyone in my position there, whether founder, CTO, or CEO, does not have practical ability to oppress anyone as you fear — not for long anyway. There’s no prior restraint system to prevent the worst case from happening out of initial (over)sight, but it would be caught.
The board, HR, other managers, and numerous employees (LGBT-identified and others) would notice, and the exec acting badly would be in big trouble. Both California and the U.S. Federal Government make statutory and case-law requirements of employers that require scrutiny of protected classes. Companies flout these requirements at their peril.
This is true of anyone in C-level position trying to enact some biased benefits or management agenda, however subtle, that targets people as members of a class. Unconscious or conscious, whatever the motivation or origin, any pattern would stand out and be a red flag at Mozilla. It’s routine in American companies to have in-house HR and legal counsel raise such flags. While I was at Mozilla, I participated in decision-making meetings about what to do when flags went up.
For example, I was not happy with the 2012 blog-abuse/death-threat case involving @christi3k. HR and Mozilla’s CEO of that era failed to do the right thing, in my view, by not taking action based on (non-company-owned, but solid) computer forensics identifying the abuser who left hostile comments, who was not necessarily the same person who ultimately left the TOR-masked death threat.
The failure to take action then was a black mark against Mozilla, and if I were CEO I would have done differently. At the time, I was CTO without reports and not yet even managing engineering. (I regret not getting into management sooner.)
That incident makes clear that Mozilla’s leadership is fallible and needs to be held to account by everyone involved in it. But Mozilla was and is far from “unsafe” in a way that would enable a CEO to oppress anyone. My co-founder Mitchell Baker would not have put up with any such rogue CEO, and neither would I. Much lesser malfeasance would cause us to act against a bad CEO, at whatever cost to ourselves, by acting in concert with the board.
I write this acknowledging that there are SJWs who assert that Mozilla was unsafe because of the blog incidents and lack of a code of conduct in 2012, but that’s a different degree and kind of unsafety from the CEO oppressing employees. It’s not all the same level, or of one piece.
The @christi3k case also gets to the question of me in particular, vs. any executive or past CEO at Mozilla, so I’ll make a general statement that I hope you will believe:
I don’t think it’s right to push my own beliefs about morality into benefits or other company policies, in any way that’s exclusive or based on my private judgments. Of course here I’m supposing that there is such a thing as private vs. public judgment. This may be controversial, but I can defend it if need be.
As a colleague and manager, I have not and I would never oppress anyone based on their gender identity, sexual orientation, or a great many other characteristics. I didn’t and I won’t. That’s not who I am.
Moral reasoning in corporate settings is challenging in general, since companies do have an obligation in my opinion to go beyond the minimum required by law, to uphold a more maximal but still consensus-based morality (e.g., regarding benefits or environmental policy, or against doing business with other companies that act badly but get away with it). Yet companies are often under competitive and fiduciary pressure to be lax and to do the minimum. Non-competitive companies die, so it’s both tempting and inevitable to compromise, but I think it’s critical that truly progressive companies resist compromise and try to find better ways.
Mozilla while a non-profit is not immune to competitive and business pressure. It also has had generally very thoughtful employees, who up to exec level do aspire to go beyond the minimum the law requires. But such steps must be taken in concert with other execs and larger groups, and even with board approval depending on the policy. A CEO can’t make unilateral policy decisions. I’m fully in agreement with this set of conditions, for myself or any CEO. So again, there’s no way I could or would be the rogue CEO you fear.
When I was under fire at Mozilla, you’re right that I didn’t defend myself or try to argue for my beliefs. I was trying to follow the code of conduct (Mozilla’s Community Participation Guidelines), and keep all exclusionary beliefs out of Mozilla. Also I was under heavy-handed “crisis communications” management, not always by choice (CEOs are not dictators, they answer to the board). So people who don’t know me may just assume the worst about me.
It would be easy from a distance to stereotype me as a hater or secret WBC member, as some SJWs on twitter did, but I think that an accurate [*] public record and the testimony of colleagues over the decades demonstrate that’s not who I am. Like a lot of people (mostly Red Tribe, but not exclusively, and not necessarily for the same reasons), I simply do not agree with the Blue Tribe on important axioms or conclusions reached from them. In response to your closing paragraphs, I don’t agree that the “target changes” you list there preserve isomorphism.
But I don’t mean to be disagreeable, and I’m out of Mozilla anyway. I just wanted to write a few things about myself and Mozilla that I hope shed light on the past, and on me. Thanks for reading this far, if you got here.
/be
[*] Killing the Messenger at Mozilla makes some good points about tech culture, but it ends with a clever yet false juxtaposition: “The person who told me during my internship that I would get the permanent job I wanted if he had anything to say about it is the same person who paid to air TV commercials saying I rape children.” Tim Chevalier was sloppy there in writing about me: I never paid for any such TV commercial. See the “Update, April 23, 2014” at the bottom of this Slate piece, where Mark Joseph Stern had to correct his original text. It looks like Tim read only the original copy, or heard an echo of it elsewhere, and did not fact-check.
I agree. I am confused by your political beliefs, but they wouldn’t make me feel unsafe at all.
(I really question queer people who said they would have feel “unsafe” working at Mozilla under you. It’s like they were whipping themselves up into fear in order to crush political opposition.)
As a queer Gray Tribe member, being able to hold private beliefs and engage in private behavior outside work is mega important. The Blue attack on freedom of conscience and freedom of speech in the workplace is what makes me feel unsafe.
I’m sure that the whole mess has been very hard for you. You have my sympathies, even if your views do not.
No problem; sorry for the long delay replying. E-mail notifications don’t seem to be working here any longer.
Fair enough – those are some pretty high transaction cost defenses, though, and my ethical comfort level with using the state as a means of defense is nonexistent. I strongly tilt toward not getting into risky situations in the first place, and it can be rather hard to assess such things from outside an organization.
That much is good to hear you say. I’m generally supportive of the private vs. public split you make, but I also probably draw it in different places.
I’m not sure exactly what assumptions you’re making about me, but for the record, you’re wrong if you think I’m a member of Scott’s ‘Blue tribe’. I’m more like something way past the horizon in the direction of his ‘Gray tribe’, if I fit into his scheme at all. I’m pro-gay marriage, but as a meliorist position only. I’d rather abolish legal recognition of marriage altogether – I do not wish to cooperate with the state forcibly colonizing the space of socially constructed entities like that.
I don’t think you’re a WBC-level hater, but I do, on the basis of your willingness to donate to a marriage-restriction campaign, believe (held quite weakly given the lack of other public statements) you’re probably taking something like a softer version of Orson Scott Card’s advocacy of keeping criminal laws against homosexuality on the books and just rarely enforcing them. Both involve upholding cultural symbolism by threat or fact of violence, and strike me as ethically objectionable to a degree considerably stronger than merely privately holding prejudiced opinions.
In case it isn’t clear how I link the anti-gay marriage position to use of force, it is that legal marriage involves a number of exceptions carved out in legal restrictions imposed under threat of force by the state, notably in the areas of tax and immigration law. To oppose gay marriage, in the present context, is to support continuing this pattern of systematic aggression applied in a prejudicial way. There are considerable numbers of real people who have suffered significantly and engaged in multi-decade legal struggles over this.
Anyway, thank you for the long and thoughtful response.
I apologize for anything I wrote that seemed to assume things about you. I aspire never to do that. I don’t fit in one tribe of the blue/red/gray scheme myself, so try to keep in mind the possibility that others don’t fit either.
No, I’m not aligned with Card that way (or other ways, e.g., I’m not LDS; also not a fan of his writing). I don’t support rarely enforced laws of any kind either, and I’m pretty hard gray-tribe against unenforceable laws about sexual acts among consenting adults.
In California by 2008, up to the limit of state power, Domestic Partnership law matched Marriage law. The tax and immigration problems were federal rather than state level, precisely due to DOMA.
For what it’s worth, DOMA in my view was unconstitutional on its face (on different grounds from the one used in Windsor — Tenth Amendment rather, as found in Massachussets v. US DHHS).
Thanks for writing back, and again please accept my apology for assuming anything about your position.
/be
Scott, why are you making me question my values? It’s uncomfortable. Please stop.
Though one of the functions of vociferously hating on outgroups is to reinforce ingroup identity, it seem to me that it also reinforces outgroup identity. If an identifiable group of people are hating on you, it might make you less likely to want to affiliate with them. Would it be fair to say that your “partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe” is getting a boost from the aggressive SJ wing of the Blue Tribe?
In the last thread I said that “All Debates Are Bravery Debates” was the most useful thing you had ever written. I think it may have just been dethroned. I hope you don’t mind too much if I link this from other places, because I think people really need to see it (and that you’ve managed to avoid coming across as too threatening to any particular ingroup, so there shouldn’t be too much danger in doing so).
Scott, where do these insights come from? I ask this in all seriousness because I envy you in the same way you envy Scott Aaronson.
P.S. How do you think the Blue vs Red dynamic maps onto Hanson’s Forager vs Farmer dynamic?
If your question is simply what corresponds to what, then foragers are blue and farmers are red.
If your question is whether such a mapping makes sense at all…well, that’s a lot more complicated.
You’re right, I guess I should have been more specific. I was wondering whether such a mapping makes sense at all, given there’s no good place for the Grays. The best rationalization I can come up with is that libertarians are lone-wolves who go their own way because they’re dissatisfied with their old tribe.
E.g. there’s no need for a God of the Old Testament to make society conform, since there’s not much to conform to in a tribe of one (atheism). They seek novelty (tech). They hate submitting to authority (minimal government). They don’t mind homosexuality and like the idea of paleo (because they’re nomadic at heart). But they avoid fighting for gay rights (et al) because they don’t want to get involved.
This explanation feels forced. I imagine there’s a better one. On the other hand, maybe my optimism is my confirmation bias speaking. All I know is that the Grays confuse me because they don’t seem to fit the model.
Grays don’t “map onto” anything because they’re a very new and culture-specific phenomenon, as opposed to forager vs. farmer values which are very old and (in theory) human universals. (The details of the blue and red tribes are also culture-specific, but analogous tribes have existed in many cultures.) Grays in general seem to embrace forager values more than farmer ones, which is consistent with grays mostly being blue if you look from the outside.
Note that I harbor doubts as to whether Hanson’s forager vs. farmer values dynamic is even a real thing.
B̶o̶w̶d̶l̶e̶r̶i̶z̶e̶d̶ ̶M̶o̶l̶d̶b̶u̶g̶ What’s your take on the presentation of rigorous thought vs persuasive thought? And this has not been revealed vis a vis your cultivation of the charitable garden- there are many issues orthogonal to that and even within a framework of respectful debate there is what you think is the strongest/most true reason/argument and the reason/argument that can be more persuasive while still being true.
(To give a concrete parallel (although not what I am asking) think about what you say when asked why you would be a good employee versus the reasons you believe.)
Still too Moldbug. Can’t figure out what you’re asking.
Should you argue based on the truth, or based on the consequences of your argument? Was counterfactual Russell Brand justified, if he was trying to oppose Islamophobia?
My personal preference would be for everyone to boycott the sort of media that prevent you from making the extended/explicit form of the argument.
I’ve pointed this out before, but I’ve got to say it again because you’ve set it up so nicely this time – your “bubble” isn’t normal, and actually explains a lot of things about you.
My friend group is at least 30% God-n-gun’s conservatives. My high school was 70% conservatives. My parents didn’t like the gays until recently. My girlfriend is a Catholic. My cousins think the Muslims are vaguely bad and have always sort of been ruining India.
I think your thesis is wrong. It’s not that everyone yells at the out-group – Conservatives really *do* prefer the in group and Liberals really *do* yell at the in-group – across cultures, actually (I have indian politics for reference). You’re actually standard liberal (except, you know, super-smart), it’s just that your in-group is so incredibly liberal that the people and viewpoints that inspire you to start yelling are all liberal.
As my social circle gradually shifts left (as a result of increasing education levels) I find myself gradually becoming more like you – yelling at liberals more than yelling at conservatives. It’s not because my viewpoints have shifted, it’s because I, like all liberals, yell at the in-group. The reason you don’t yell at God n’ Gun’s conservatives is that they’re practically a fascinating Amazon tribe as far as you’re concerned. The minute you leave the bubble, you’ll see the “Gray tribe” as merely a slightly muted shade of blue – very similar to the subtle ethnic differences you described. Blue is easier for Gray to hate because Red is just so incredibly weird that it doesn’t make sense to waste breath hating them. (Analogously, it becomes obvious that Blue is just a slightly different shade of Red as soon as ISIS enters the picture…which causes Blue to criticize Red because Red is more in-group than ISIS. ISIS is just obviously bad and Blue doesn’t waste breath criticizing it. Red, for their part, tends to wish Blue would shut up with their clever arguments and start helping fight the common enemy… just like the hyper-Blues wish Gray would shut up and apply that intellectual firepower against Red.)
“Hyper-blues” are people in liberal social groups who *still* manage to yell at conservatives, rather than at liberals. Personality wise, they are similar to people raised in Red culture who continue to stay Red – they are only Blue because they are raised that way, and they have the “stick with your in-group” personality. Tomorrow, when Cthulhu swims Left, they’ll probably be the conservatives. (contrary to the fears of neoreaction, I suspect “left” will look more like “gray” than it will “hyper-blue”)
But in the big picture, outside the bubble, where the majority of people live… being Blue really does mean criticizing *your own* in-group most of the time (as in, your own highly respected family and friends, people who you would fight and die for.) For the 70% of people who are outside of the hyperbubble, it means criticizing values you were raised with and once cherished.
Which means the “charity” you speak of is more more blue than red (charity is also more gray than blue I think, although grays are such a rare group for me to run into that it’s hard for me to say that confidently.)
(Since explanations of why people who hold viewpoints are sometimes interpreted as criticisms (I think there is a logical fallacy about that written somewhere), I feel the need to say that this isn’t a criticism of you- I enjoy it when you yell at liberals and I agree with 90% of what you write. I’ve identified as Blue all my life because I exist in a Red-Blue context, but when it comes to the Blue-Gray context that I glimpse from behind a computer screen I’m pretty sure I’m Gray)
Here’s the post I’d enjoy seeing: what steps does Scott plan to take to pop the hyperbubble he’s built around himself? Doing so is an intellectual imperative!
(Plus, then he might know enough conservatives to have the opportunity to get mad at them for stuff.)
How do I pop my own bubble(s)? That’s what I’d want to see. Nice and practical for the reader.
Go to a monster truck rally. Pretty darn entertaining.
Find someone to teach you how to shoot a gun.
Ride a quad. Drink a Budweiser. Go to a church.
Monster truck rally suggestion seems reasonable. The others less so.
Quad — dangerous; not really worth risking physical harm just to widen your social circle.
Generic beer, guns — Buying into a stereotype that I doubt the evidence supports; there are plenty of Blues who drink this and or shoot, and plenty of Reds who don’t.
Church — Choosing a venue that is going to raise the salience of the things you really disagree about to the forefront is not a great way to make new friends.
Interesting, especially since the Budweiser was the only one I thought about backspacing. I’m a Coors guy. 🙂
I’m (more or less) Blue, and the only thing I’ll drink is bourbon. I can’t stand wine or beer.
The most easily found gun teachers are grey.
Perhaps for Scott, but the task presented was to get /out/ of one’s bubble.
Drink a Budweiser.
In Praise of Budweiser.
I think immersing oneself in the lowest common denominator aspects of outgroups bears the risk of defining them according to stereotypes. Going to indie wrestling shows and evangelical rallies offers one a perspective of the red states, for example, but reading Wendell Berry, Walker Percy and Richard Weaver might be a good idea as well.
He still wouldn’t get mad at them, unless he really starts living with them and loving them and caring about them. It would be like getting mad as people who hate the Irish … simply having access to a world in which they are ridiculous makes them no longer upsetting. I’m sure he already gets casual exposure to broad swathes of life via being a doctor who sees patients.
(Alternatively, he could out himself as asexual and poly in a Red community and then try to find local jobs, but that would be a genuine “I’m enraged by this out-group” sort of anger rather than “I’m hyper-critical of my in-group” anger, and by virtue of his tolerance and alignment with Cthulhu he wouldn’t really experience that sort of anger easily)
Honestly, I’d rather know how *I* may broaden my circle to include Scott’s hyper-bubble. (I don’t want to actually be in a bubble, but I’d at least like to have the bubble within me, if that makes sense…).
I find the more time on the internet I spend, the more everyone else’s views tend to take on the “your viewpoints are so simplistic and un-analyzed that I can’t even work up indignation to object over something so quaint” quality. Which I suppose helps my “tolerance”, even as it polarizes my perspective.
I mean, I’m sure he at least gets exposure via patients.
“simply having access to a world in which they are ridiculous makes them no longer upsetting”
This phrase is crucial. I find that for the people who really anger me, the question that determines it is exactly that: whether I can go somewhere where I can ignore them.
I can go to a place where I can ignore Osama bin Laden. I live in a world where, I feel, he doesn’t matter. Despite living in a part of town dominated by non-western immigrants. Islam dot net, a radical muslim group (but by no means terrorist), have posters all over the place up here. But I’ve never been threatened by them. (I have been openly threatened by anti-muslim reactionaries. After ABB went on his murder spree, I was very, very angry at those people.)
It’s not so easy to feel that I live in a world where Margaret Thatcher doesn’t matter. She wasn’t hounded from cave to cave in a distant country. She pushed some very bad policies and seemed to show a callous disregard for poor people in her country. My little cousins grow up somewhere she shaped with her policies. I can stay somewhere she doesn’t matter – in fact, I live in Norway. If there’s anyway Thatcher’s politics look ridiculous, it’s here. Yet, I have to leave a part of my family behind if I should just stay here and laugh at them.
On the internet, I can’t ignore antitheists. Not unless I want to isolate myself from many of the groups I belong to. It’s not easy to tolerate someone who calls you dumb and weak for believing in what you do (sometimes consciously embraces the tactic of calling you dumb and weak, since “it works”). I’ve marched with the Pirate party for the right to privacy, but I eventually got fed up with Falkvinge’s antitheistic condescension on twitter and unfollowed him.
On the other hand, Thatcher managed to start the process of shutting down many of Britain’s coal mines, saving the lives of innumerable coal miners and future coal miners, and saving the UK money it could spend on something that actually benefited the public, like the NHS.
The Thatcher/coal is the weirdest example of group-identification I know of. People who rail against oil companies and polluting businesses and are properly scared of climate change and are all in favour of paternalistic regulation suddenly switch around and criticise Thatcher for shutting down coal mining. Apparently some coal miners committed suicide when the mines shut down and that outweighs all those who died and would continue to die of industrial accidents or respiratory diseases.
It wasn’t that she shut down the coal mines. It’s that she botched the transition away from that kind of economy, creating hopeless communities where everyone scraped by on humiliating handouts. And her party didn’t seem to care, since those people deserved punishment anyway for being politically organized against her politics.
It didn’t have to be done that way. Other countries made similar transitions without similar levels of social immiseration. They couldn’t blame the economy either: the UK had a huge windfall from oil they could have used to fund a more responsible transition.
Which are those countries that you think managed such social transitions much better? Please name names.
My viewpoint is that on the internet nothing anyone ever says really matters unless they somehow manage to target your real-world social interactions. You can *always* look away.
(Which is also why I have a little trouble taking it seriously when Scott says he’s “triggered” by social justice, since there are very few places you can find that particular brand of social justice other than the internet.)
Of course, I know this isn’t true for other people, and that some people actually commit suicide over the net. I guess I feel that it is normatively correct for people who use the internet as a social platform beyond facebook to grow a thick skin?
I totally sympathize if you encounter anti-theists in real life, of course. No one likes to be called stupid, and anyone who lives in a Western nation does not have access to a world where anti-theists are ridiculous. (That’s not to say that anti-theists are wrong or that theists are right, only that it makes sense for each to feel bad about the actions of the other)
The problem with this is that, for an increasing number of people, social interaction is mediated primarily via the Internet. Even if you’re interacting with people you know in person, “looking away” long and determinedly enough can be equivalent to writing off the relationship — and that sounds like a bit much to ask.
I don’t know Scott well enough to say for sure, but it seems plausible that he may be one of these people.
Scott’s stated that his triggering by SJ issues was primarily caused by IRL exposure (I don’t want to say “vicimization”, even though it’s probably the right word) while in academia, and academia does strike me as the most likely place to encounter real-world SJW behaviour.
In addition to what Nornagest said: My meatspace friends all read a lot of things on the Internet, and I can’t and wouldn’t want to make them look away, so it’s easy for even things on the Internet that aren’t specifically about me to work their way into my offline social interactions.
@Tracy W
I’d say it’s a perfect example of tribal politics at its purest. tribe blue, to be extremely anachronistic, does not like coal, but it HATES thatcher because thatcher was not only attacking their interests and beliefs, but outright bragging about doing so and mocking them. Worse than that, though, her doing so was POPULAR! for the first time in nearly half a century someone was openly questioning socialism (and labor, at least in its early days, openly called what they were doing socialism). These were dire circumstances, allies were desperately needed, so so blue seized on a group they’d normally detest (though you’ll note they have typical blue reasons for doing so) and used them as an example of thatcher’s barbarism, enemy of my enemy is my friend style. Philosophical consistency never entered into it.
Personally I think it’s the result of wistful thinking. Harald K doesn’t actually know any countries that managed this transition better, but he’d like to imagine that there are some.
@Anonymous:
“(Which is also why I have a little trouble taking it seriously when Scott says he’s “triggered” by social justice, since there are very few places you can find that particular brand of social justice other than the internet.)”
My experience with “social justice” is, I was just going about my everyday life, discussing a book with other fans (online, to be clear)…and then one day out of the blue appeared this group of intensely hostile people issuing rape and death threats.
Will Shetterly is correct that even online, mobbing has severe longterm psychological effects. I too am triggered by SJW behavior.
I consider myself lucky (others may consider me unlucky ;)) that my feminism vastly predates this experience.
Also, what Nornagest said.
I used to hate Thatcher, but after I watched tenured leftists not care about the plight of adjuncts, I stopped hating her.
Given that iirc Scott is on the record as saying
* He is very introverted
* He doesn’t make attempts to hang out with people who he works with
* He hadn’t found a group of people he felt comfortable with until he found the Bay Area rationalists
I doubt this will happen
Move to Texas?
I also find Scott’s reported level of bubblyness surprising and wonder if it’s exaggerated– reading about how nobody like, actually knows any young-earth creationists, obvs, feels to me as false as when the nrx guys say how self-evidently no one wants to live near lots of black people, because scary. Maybe it’s just because I went to a large and trashy public university (Florida State), and have worked prole jobs like public school teacher and home health aide, and married into a working-class-on-a-good-day family, and huh, actually this is a lot of things.
I think I might be common as dirt, y’all. Oh well: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
His bubble sure sounds pretty familiar to me. I don’t see any reason to think he’s exaggerating. I don’t quite live in that anymore, but I easily could have.
Edit: this started out as a reply to the post was above, and then I walked away, came back, forgot it wasn’t a top level comment, and rewrote it.
I am a grey, who grew in a blue family, in a suburb of San Fransisco, and now live in liberal a college town. Allow me to say from experience that reds are only foreign and exotic when they stay at their football games and NASCAR races; they’re creepy and threatening when your alone in a car with one on the highway and he starts into a detailed rant about wanting to murder Jane Fonda.
Huh, you too? That must be a pretty common fantasy among Reds of a certain age, for some reason.
Yeah, as I was writing the comment I gradually became aware that my intimacy with the various Those People is probably a contingent fact about me. I recommend it, though, at least up to a point. People are an education. (Giving serious side eye to the “reds are creepy and threatening when they’re not at their NASCAR races” below; that’s my in-laws you’re talking about.)
I also find the lack of tribal diversity in Scott’s bubble to be not particularly surprising. My own social bubble (which to a large extent coincides with my workplace bubble) is almost exclusively socially liberal, mostly fiscally liberal, and atheist or very weakly religious, with a large vegetarian/vegan constituency. In other words, I am pretty much immersed among the Blue Tribe. No, I have not consciously tried to exclude conservatives from my social life just for being conservative. But in math academic circles, and to a lesser extent other academic circles, conservatives and/or very religious people tend to be a small minority (it’s not hard to guess why math people would tend to be pretty atheistic). At any given time, there have been several religious conservatives in the department, and they are generally on warm terms with the rest, but they tend to socialize exclusively among themselves. Some of this may be due to an atmosphere of mild verbal oppression and hostility towards religious conservatism (which I have observed at times and gone out of my way to work against). But I think much more of it is simply due to the fact that our secular liberal social crowd tends to tolerate foul language, very raunchy humor, and heavy drinking at social events, and (in the absence of church involvement) has no problem with arranging things late including on Saturday nights. In other words, differences that arise intrinsically from the characteristics of the tribes themselves make it natural that the tribes seldom intersect socially.
*it’s not hard to guess why math people would tend to be pretty atheistic*
And yet I am unable to. Please explain.
Math has always seemed the most platonic field possible.
Same here. It’s always been my sorta-naive understanding that mathy folks were far more likely to be theistic than sciency folks, and I think for the reason you state: a kind of gesture toward Platonism.
Which is to say, it takes a certain sort of mind to ponder the Continuum Hypothesis.
There’s a huge difference between “platonic” and “traditionally religious”. The Platonic Reality thing might lend itself to deism, but no major religion is deistic. It’s definitely strongly opposed to the “friendly grandpa wizard in the sky who Has An Eternal Plan For Everything but can be swayed by people asking nicely” kind of religion.
For what it’s worth, I live in Berkeley (same place Scott was for most of the last 5 years), and his bubble seemed spot on exactly my experience.
Of the almost 200 people on my Facebook list, only two of them are openly creationist. Both are people I know from where I used to live, before moving here.
In my day to day life, I don’t see, talk to, or interact with *anyone* who is stereotypically Christian and/or conservative. In fact, San Francisco is so Blue Tribe to me, that it’s always surprising when I find out that one of my coworkers is religious. It almost feels to me like they actively try to hide the fact that they’re religious, and I’m virtually certain that they’d get mocked for it if this was open knowledge.
I don’t think this is typical. I definitely think that California is worse than the average for this type of bubble-ness. But it does exist, and I find it pretty distressing.
The last paragraph was really heartwarming. Great post.
That opening paragraph from Chesterton is some of the finest persuasive writing I’ve ever seen.
Really bad thinkers hate people who aren’t part of their tribe.
Better thinkers realize that they shouldn’t be hateful towards people not of their tribe and try being forgiving towards everyone.
*Really* good thinkers take each group on a case-by-case basis and actually figure out which one should be hated.
When Scott points out that what he said is also an example of hating other tribes, he’s confused by the fact that the first group and the third group sometimes sound pretty similar. But they’re not the same. If you hate X because you’ve actually figured out specific reasons to hate them and you apply those reasons in a relatively fair way, you’re in the third group, not in the first group, even though your statement that you hate X pattern-matches to something the first group would say, and even if you enjoy it.
So hating people in group 1 doesn’t necessarily mean that you have put yourself in group 1.
>Really bad thinkers hate people who aren’t part of their tribe. Better thinkers realize that they shouldn’t be hateful towards people not of their tribe and try being forgiving towards everyone. *Really* good thinkers take each group on a case-by-case basis and actually figure out which one should be hated.
This oversimplifies things. I’ve definitely known people who can be perfectly introspective and insightful on some topics, and utterly banal and tribalistic on others. Obviously, some people are more able to separate themselves from this sort of thinking than others, but at the very least, quantity of thought on the subject matters along with quality.
> *Really* good thinkers take each group on a case-by-case basis and actually figure out which one should be hated.
I don’t see why that would be a good idea. Hating tribes is part of tribal politics. It signals your group loyalty. It doesn’t make the other tribe stop being evil. If you want to do that, you have to be accepted, or at least respected, by them, and hating them is inimical to that.
You shouldn’t always be forgiving and tolerant. You should be respectful. You treat them as a PC as opposed to an NPC, and they will do the same for you.
You shouldn’t be tolerant of them. If you have the power, go ahead and force them to stop doing things you’re intolerant of. Go ahead and draw the line for things you’re not willing to let them do. Just respect their line for things they won’t let you do.
You definitely shouldn’t be forgiving. Forgiving someone doesn’t mean accepting them despite not liking what they do. It means accepting that they no longer do something that they once did. If you hate another group, and a member of that group leaves it and enters your group, being forgiving means recognizing that they have cut all ties with their old group and are no longer loyal to it. That is not something you should be hoping for.
I don’t follow. I think hate (or at least anger) can be a useful driving motivation to force certain people to stop doing some actively detrimental things. For example, I’m very angry with some big oil corporations for taking actions that seem rather likely to result in runaway catastrophic climate change; I try to use that anger to motivate me to organise people to campaign against them.
And I really can’t see why your description of forgiving is bad. If someone has been a member of a tribe that does silly things, or nasty things, and then leaves that tribe and enters my group, why wouldn’t I forgive them? Why wouldn’t I be glad that they’ve cut ties to their old nasty group and are no longer loyal to it?
“For example, I’m very angry with some big oil corporations for taking actions that seem rather likely to result in runaway catastrophic climate change…”
Which is why, even to this day, corporations never pollute the environment.
>*Really* good thinkers take each group on a case-by-case basis and actually figure out which one should be hated.
Pretty sure that’s what the “really bad thinkers” are doing as well.
Most tribes don’t hate their allies, no matter how far outside the tribe they are – see Scott’s examples of the Nazis/Japan and the English/Ireland+Sikhs.
(For the record, hate is a bias. It can be rational to oppose a group, but never to hate it.)
It can be instrumentally rational to hate a group if it motivates you to oppose them more. But epistemically, no, it’s not rational to hate anything really.
All cognitive biases are instrumentally rational in some contexts. Evolution wouldn’t have built them into our brains if they weren’t.
This has the potential to be misleading. Evolution didn’t really “build in” in a positive sense biases that are the result of computational limitations (like the conjunction fallacy), or that are side effects of an architecture it adopted (like priming effects or framing effects might be; these aren’t necessarily instrumentally rational, either).
I do think that “cishet males” who are active in SJ do actually pay a cost. And so in some sense should be admired. For an example there exist dorms on many campuses that are open to anyone but cishet men. Even the thought of such a dorm makes me a mixture of sick and angry. I don’t even know how I would feel if I wasn’t allowed in.
Good liberal men are supposed to support the existence of groups they and their white/male/cis/etc friends are openly barred from entering. This either requires a mindset totally different from mine or alot of humility.
Treating any person differently on the basis of sex/gender/etc makes me queasy. But I find it hard to think anyone doesn’t find legitimate discrimination against themselves and their family/friends upsetting. Even in the cases where I decide the discrimination is worth it (some affirmative action, maybe those no cishet-men dorms, etc) the whole thing makes me feel a little disgusted. Presumably the white people writing those articles need to suppress their disgust at least?
Related semi-alternate hypothesis to this and alternate hypothesis to Scott: attacking or supporting things that disadvantage a group that nominally includes you is costly signaling (of the strength and security to do so, or of the virtue to do so, or of your loyalty to the ideology that says to do so).
Maybe costly signalling mixed with overconfidence.
As in: “I can safely get points by increasing hate against white male cis het people, despite being one of them, because my being-on-the-correct-side cred is so strong that there is no way this could ever backfire on me personally.”
Or maybe instead of overconfidence it’s more like: when you are riding a tiger, you have to continue, you can’t jump off. When there is too much hate against people like you, the safest bet may be to join the haters, hoping that this provides you at least some shield against the hate.
For example, when some male feminists claim that there is no such thing as a false rape accusation, I wonder what they think about a possibility that someone could make a false accusation against them (if merely to prove them their hypothesis is wrong). Is it more like “no, that could never happen to me”, or is it more like “well, that could happen, but if I have a strong feminist cred, it is less likely to happen, and it is more likely that other feminists would defend me”. The difference is, if they would later change their mind and start believing that false rape accusations are actually rather frequent, in the former case it would be a reason to stop professing the old belief, while in the latter case it would be a reason to profess the belief even more strongly.
I have never seen the claim that there are no false rape accusations.
I have frequently seen the claim that false rape accusations are rare by comparison with real rapes.
I’ll start by analogy. My Catholic friends tell me that according to their faith, only the Pope is infallible, and even that only in specific situations (announcing a new dogma “ex cathedra”). Otherwise, everyone can be wrong. Even a pastor. Even the Pope. So, in theory, everyone can be wrong. But in practice, when we are debating a specific thing that some Pope said, I don’t get much argument power by pointing out that even the Pope can be wrong. Yes, he can be wrong, in abstract, in far mode; but he certainly isn’t wrong in this specific case, in near mode. The Pope can be “wrong”, but he cannot be “wrong about X” for any specific value of X, it seems. (Not all Catholics, etc.)
Analogically, I suspect that feminists believe that rape accusations could be false, but you shouldn’t try using this in a debate about any specific accusation. It is a different thing to admit that false rape accusations exist, in general, and to suggest that accusation X could be false, for some specific value of X. (Not all feminists, etc.)
Should I take Viliam Búr’s comment seriously? After all, he could be wrong.
Impossible to tell what your case with the Catholics are. You do not tell us what actually you were arguing about, or even if you offered any actual arguments — from the comment, you seem to be just saying that he could be, not giving any reason why.
As for the feminists, yes, there are those who deny false rape accusations. After all, accusing a man of rape is so hellish that no woman would do it voluntarily. Eliding the question of whether women always consider in a cool and rational manner the accusation beforehand, when they don’t in other matters and the way they include in the hellishness things that would not be hard for a liar, such as “reliving the ordeal” — that didn’t happen.
I am a feminist and I actually sat on a jury that decided that a rape claim was false.
So I am a feminist who says
1. False rape claims exist
2. That a particular claim was false.
That said, my position as a feminist is this: it is very hard for rape victims to come forward due to social stigma, and thus it is important that rape victims have advocates who will believe them.
This does not mean the jury must believe them.
Data point: Viliam’s comment has just now crystallized a pattern I’ve seen in many conversations with Catholics (and, interestingly, at least one ex-Catholic.)
OH YES! This is my exact fucking problem with (#NotAll) male feminists!
Thoughtless people with little understanding of, or love for, feminism complain about them being “misandrist” “gender traitors” who “hate everything masculine”. Nothing could be further from the truth! All too often they just signal machismo, bravado, toughness, stoicism, chivalry and willingness to protect, and one-upping other men, and judging any who are perceived to fail or decline the challenge.
Not only is this a generally mean behaviour, this is the exact same toxic masculinity that feminists rightly extort men to resist, only painted an occasionally very convincing Blue.
I like your analysis, with one objection:
The social acceptance of kicking the loser (as long as the loser is male) is a part of what is called “misandry”. Both by those who kick, and by those who cheer.
I’d argue that it just reduces to misogyny, because the more hypermasculine and competitive the culture, the more the loser and loserdom as such tend to get branded as feminine. (Compare to what trans women report.) Men can, individually, be “oppressed” for being men, but “inferior/loser/victim/submissive” and “masculine” are coded as opposites; we invariably seek to deny masculinity to the men we try to take down.
Multiheaded: By your reasoning, insulting a woman by claiming she’s too masculine would be misandrist. Yet somehow I doubt you believe that.
Ken: this is called “oppositional sexism”. My theory on it is… are you aware of the distinction between Social Dominance Orientation and Right-Wing Authoritarianism? Well, I think that straight-up misogyny is the primary factor in all sexism, and it’s akin to SDO (exploiting and abusing the “weak”), while oppositional sexism is more RWA-like (control obsession, everything has to be in its right place).
And we can clearly see that gender-non-conforming men get more shit for it than gender-non-conforming women, down to how gays vs. lesbians get treated. Or look how much less biting words like “butch” and “dyke” are compared to “bitch” (aimed at a man) or “faggot”.
I suggest defining or tabooing mis*ist.
So Multi, let me try to sketch your causal structure:
1) SDO leads (some) people to mistreat those they consider ‘weak’
2) RWA leads (some) people to oppose those who defy normal associations
3) Societal beliefs associate weakness and femininity
4) By 1 and 3, SDO people mistreat the feminine
5) By 2 and 3, RWA people oppose women who try not to be feminine/weak
6) Male losers are associated with femininity (by 3) and then get opposed by RWA people (by 5), making them extra screwed
Is 3 what you mean by misogyny and 6 what you mean by ‘kicking male losers’ reducing to misogyny?
Pretty much, yeah.
>extort
exhort.
>Not only is this a generally mean behaviour, this is the exact same toxic masculinity that feminists rightly extort men to resist
Feminists only encourage men who *aren’t on their side* to eschew their quintessentially male willingness to sacrifice themselves. Men who are on their side are, of course, encouraged to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. This is characteristic of women in general, not just feminist women.
Among the reasons for me to continue being an SJW: this kind of motherfucking woman-hating bullshit tolerated in Grey spaces.
It’s a fair criticism of male gender roles, but implies the wrong causal structure. Women’s expectations of male roles do affect men’s behavior insofar as women wield social and sexual power over men, but average men, like average women, are mainly socialized by interactions with people of their own sex. By implication, then, men are likely to be the primary carriers of these memes.
It’s reasonable to call out feminism for not getting this, and for exploiting it, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to blame it for the existence of the pattern.
(I feel a symmetrical analysis applies, incidentally, to many aspects of female gender roles.)
“Not only is this a generally mean behaviour, this is the exact same toxic masculinity that feminists rightly [exhort] men to resist, only painted an occasionally very convincing Blue.”
and
“I’d argue that it just reduces to misogyny, because the more hypermasculine and competitive the culture, the more the loser and loserdom as such tend to get branded as feminine.”
Exactly.
We (feminists) used to all know and frequently say this, before Those Dern Kids (millennials; get off my lawn!) came along. 😉
So this (from Viliam Bur):
“The social acceptance of kicking the loser (as long as the loser is male) is a part of what is called “misandry”. Both by those who kick, and by those who cheer.”
Makes me sad. Because *I was there* back when “everybody knew” this was called “misogyny.”
@ADifferentAnonymous:
Exactly…and that used to be “feminism 101.”
Guess I’m old. :shrug:
Hmmmm. I’ve seen macho male feminists a little, but I’ve seen a lot more regular-old-guy male feminists. Even among the loud ones.
>For an example there exist dorms on many campuses that are open to anyone but cishet men. Even the thought of such a dorm makes me a mixture of sick and angry
Ironically, as a cishet man with no love for SJWs … I don’t really care, except in a very intellectual kinda-a-bad-precedent way. No sense of “sick and angry” around this issue at all – even though I’m the target, and there’s no way this could possibly benefit me even obliquely!
Congratulations, you are looking at male privilege.
Wouldn’t it only be privilege if he assumed other groups could tolerate similar discrimination with similar ease?
(Though your usage makes more sense with the pre-SJ meaning of the word. sigh)
I think it is “privilege” in the sense that MugaSofer is in a position to stand outside the conflict, which is to say the broad culture is a reasonably comfortable place for him. This is the same dynamic that lets a white person say, “I don’t care about race.” Perhaps they do not, but that is only because race seldom is in issue in their life.
The ability to walk away from an issue is a privilege.
We only disagree on what the word ‘privilege’ means (and you’re more likely to be correct). I was under the impression that the definition was not just having an advantage but also making an error in reasoning or understanding as a result. Maybe it’s ambiguous between those?
The white person in your example is saying something true. We don’t know if the next sentence is “So I don’t see why you have to make such a big deal of it” or “But I understand why those with different experiences do”. Either way they have an advantage, but only in the former case have they actually made an error.
Well, I don’t feel like typing a long theoretical post, so I’ll try for some highlights.
Privilege is about being on the powerful side of some social divide. It has all kinds of characteristics. One notable characteristic is simply the ability to walk away. A black person cannot ignore racism. A white person (often) can. There is a reason for this: society as a whole centers white voices, white viewpoints, etc. Blacks are “marked” by their race in a way that whites are not. Blacks carry that mark with them most everywhere in our broad culture.
Another characteristic of privilege is this: very often the more privileged are rather ignorant of the lives of the less privileged, and in a way unlike how the less privileged understand the privileged. For example, a transgender person likely has a very good idea what cis people think about, what they have to say, how they view the world. How could a trans person not? Virtually everything in our social space centers the voices of cis people.
The reverse is not true. Cis people are famously ignorant of trans lives. This is perhaps not a law of nature. Presumably a sufficiently empathetic cis person could come to understand trans lives — at least some of them, in some context — but in practice this seems really hard to do. It requires a lot of reading, thinking, and listening. Plus humility.
(I think there are good cognitive reasons for this, but perhaps another post for another time.)
But there is more. Power relationships exacerbate this difference. For example, if a poor Mexican woman does not understand white people, she actually has very little power to hurt them, certainly not when averaged out over many poor Mexican women versus many whites. And if she spreads dumb ideas about whites among her friends, how does that work out for her and them? Who in the end gets hurt?
There is a strong motive for such a woman to understand white people very well.
The opposite is not true for many whites. Whites can often believe completely daft things about poor Mexican women, things completely unattached to reality, and face no penalty. Likewise they can spread these ideas, speak loudly, hold forth, and many other whites will hear them, believe them, and face little social costs. In fact, Fox News might offer such a person a job.
Because of social power, their map can diverge from the territory quite a bit.
But worse, these ideas have consequences. Bad things happen when people are wrong about the world. But a person from a privileged group will pay a lesser cost for their ignorance. When the differences in social power are very strong, they can pay almost no cost at all.
Veronica: thank you.
@Veronica
Although I agree with most cases, I think it’s more a case of minorities being better able to model the majorities they’re surrounded by than the relatively oppressed being better able to model the relatively powerful.
I mean, men are relatively more powerful than women, but I think we’ve seen ample evidence on this blog and elsewhere that men and women are both terrible at modelling how the other thinks.
I’m an old feminist, so I’m obviously familiar with this argument, and I still mostly agree with it. Thank you for posting it here.
Recently, though, I’ve come to believe that people in the “less-privileged” group often think they/we understand the “privileged” group better than they/we do. Because the pressure they/we experience isn’t so much to *understand* the “privileged” group as to *predict their behavior*. And that can be done without real or full understanding. It can be done while still interpreting, and judging, their behavior through the lens of our norms.
Which is also what I think PUAs do. PUA seems to often work to predict the behavior of (at least a subset of) women…but I think the theories are often inaccurate, and in exactly this way. In what educationrealist called a “lacking empathy” way–and if by that she meant they display a lack of understanding of *what the world looks like* from a “typical woman’s” POV, then I agree with her.
PUAs complain about “female solipsism,” but they engage in a similar “male solipsism”…to put it in a more old-fashioned way, “centering the male POV.” They assume that their perceptions and opinions are reality and that if “women as a group” tend to disagree, then “women as a group” must be wrong and crazy. They never really “put themselves in the shoes of” women.
Yet they can still (somewhat) predict (some) women’s behavior.
I conclude that people can do this. People can develop entire theories of “why this group we feel has power over us does what they do,” theories that work for protecting themselves and advancing their interests and predicting the behavior of members of that group…all while not really “understanding” members of that group.
Just something I’ve recently been thinking about.
(Since I can’t edit from here: that was a reply to veronica d.)
@Matthew — Male privilege seems to work somewhat differently from other types of privilege, which perhaps arises from a couple factors. One is that women are not a minority. Another is people very often live quite close to the opposite sex. In fact, they often share intimate lives. And finally, I think that gender-stuff is baked into our brains in a way different from race-stuff. This probably shapes the whole sex/gender-thing in different ways than other forms of privilege.
Perhaps. Obviously these are vague ideas.
=====
@Lizardbreath — That sounds totally right to me.
LizardBreath: That makes so much sense! If it’s true, it may be a significant source of trouble in persuading well-meaning privileged folks of SJ ideas.
I used to be kinda firmly in the SJ-skeptic camp, and I think that was reinforced whenever the arguments used premises about me that I knew were false.
Like, I’d read an essay against offensive jokes that said they were a deliberate effort to harass, and think, “Well, I know I’m not trying to harass anyone, so that doesn’t apply to me.”
Some guys I knew at university tried to get a men’s hall created in their dorm to counterbalance the existing women’s hall; ordinary halls were mixed-gender, though generally skewing female since the student body did. They sold the idea to the housing bureaucracy without much difficulty, but had trouble finding enough men to fill the hall. I’ll leave what this says about gender roles as an exercise for the reader.
(I should probably mention that this predated a substantial MRA movement by several years; I suspect it came not out of ideological convictions but rather some sort of lizard-brain urge to look contrarian. Trans people were allowed in the women’s hall. Sexual orientation never came up as an issue while I was in school, though it may have since.)
Such a great post. BTW the link to midas.wisc.edu (Haidt presumably?) gets me “connection refused”.
In academia, even in the sciences, it’s pretty remarkable to hear what people are more than willing to say amongst themselves about conservatives. In my experience, conservatives are the only group about which it is possible to say something disparaging and earnestly mean it. I always feel awkward within earshot of it, despite my blue/gray cultural affiliation.
Apparently this prejudice is not merely idle talk, either: disturbingly large minorities of academics admit willingness to take petty steps to sabotage their conservative colleagues’ careers (and consider the social desirability bias at stake in answering truthfullly).
If you ask a liberal academic why there are hardly any conservatives in academia, you typically get a reply alluding to lack of interest or lack of brains. The question I always want to follow with is: “just how many other under-represented groups in academia do you suppose that applies to?”
Now we get to link Megan McArdle for two posts in a row!
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/02/unbiasing-academia/70955/
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/02/what-does-bias-look-like/71153/
Ah yes. There have been too many Adams, and they have argued everything 🙂
There are a few broken links here due to use of smart quotes (“estimates of the genetic contribution”, “in order to weak-man”, FreeBSD link).
Also, not saying anything new, just supplying relevant old links, but Robin Hanson on tolerance.
Also I think the distinction between “not the ingroup” and “the outgroup” is part of why the NRxers say “elthede” instead.
Some years back, I noticed (and it was not an original observation, though I arrived at it independently) that liberals talk about conservatives like they’re evil, and conservatives talk about liberals like they’re stupid/malinformed.
I’ve noticed that change in recent years, though; conservatives really seem to be coming around to the idea that liberals are evil. I have my theories on why (the IRS scandal is a big piece), but that is the sense I get.
I have seen several (invariably from the right) people make this claim now, and I disagree. I think this is one of those things where everybody (at least in the post-Enlightenment context) thinks their own tribe believes the other side is ill-informed and thinks their enemies believe that they are evil.
Your first and second sentences are somewhat at odds with each other. Don’t you find it odd that it is invariably the right that says this? (Especially when you consider that conservatives do way better at ideological Turing tests than liberals, so they’re more likely to actually know how the other side thinks of them.)
I formed this view from a sustained campaign of consuming equal quantities blue and red news. But like I said, it’s changing: more and more Reds consider Blues evil.
First and second sentences not at odds, because I’ve seen Blues claim the opposite.
Nah. American leftists don’t believe the other side is ill-informed. They believe most of the other side is ignorant, and mildly evil in a banality-of kind of way, but that the people calling its shots are seriously, deliberately, maliciously evil. (They do think that conservatives think they’re evil, though.)
For that matter, the sort of conservative that believes in divine command theory doesn’t think so, either. If you buy that ethical theory, then your ideological opponents are by definition evil, because evil is defined purely in terms of ignorance/rejection of your worldview. Or akrasia relative to it, but that’s a lesser kind of evil and can be forgiven.
I think it’s just the libertarian wing of American conservatism that’s as described. Not the Gray Tribe, though; that’s a little more complicated.
Also probably not an original observation, but:
The progressive tendency is confidence in the ability to correct a fallen world. (Often correct, IMO.) If you think a plan to improve the world won’t work, you look on its advocates as naive/misguided, but you might sympathize even as you oppose them. If it’s your plan to improve the world being blocked by the other team, though, what’s the only self-consistent theory of their motivations left open to you?
This is a good insight.
“They have a different diagnosis of the situation and/or a different assessment of the likelihood of our plans even working” IS self-consistent with any given plan.
I do think what you point out is at least a big part of why it happens, but that’s a Theory of Mind failure.
But isn’t this true of everybody? Progressives think passing obamacare will improve the world; conservatives think repealing obamacare will improve the world; libertarians think repealing everything will improve the world; and neoreactionaries think getting a king and/or splitting the US up into a bunch of competing citystates will improve the world etc.
It somehow takes quite a bit of sofistication to realize this is true of everybody.
People around me (Brazil) tend to just assume their opponents *outright pretend to believe what they say they believe*, for reasons.
But then this doesn’t explain why conservatives often only view liberals as misguided while liberals view conservatives as evil, as I doubt that the average conservative is much more sophisticated than their liberal counterpart.
I am in favour of a Haidtian explanation myself in that as liberals only have the harm, fairness, and liberty foundations while conservatives have all six this means that in policies where a tradeoff between all the moral foundations is required, liberals will naturally just maximise harm/fairness/liberty and completely ignore authority/sanctity/loyalty, which is understandable, if wrong. While the conservatives tradeoff among all the foundations so that they are willing to tradeoff some liberty or fairness to increase sanctity or whatever, which to a liberal who doesn’t recognise the existence or legitimacy of the sanctity foundation feels like the conservatives are just throwing away utility for no reason, and think the only reason why they would do that is because they are evil.
The difference might be simply historical accident…
Here’s Bryan Caplan’s challenge to Haidt’s original application of his moral foundations theory to red/blue politics:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/03/do_liberals_use.html
And Haidt’s response:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/03/haidt_responds.html
He seems to defend a considerably more nuanced position nowadays, compared to his original “liberals use A and B, conservatives use all of them”.
I thought just the opposite. I’ve heard people spout stereotypes of backwards, uneducated rednecks and intelligent, euphoric atheists.
I’d be surprised to hear anyone call anyone else evil without some act (Pol Pot for instance) to justify it. It just seems like a strong word, the kind of word you’d apply to your neo-Nazi puppy-kicking neighbor and not the neighbor who votes Red.
Now, “ignorant” and “brainwashed,” that gets tossed around ALL. THE. TIME.
For a general sense of “improve the world”, yes, but there’s also a meaningful sense in which progressives want to improve the world in which the others don’t, i.e. progressives want to pass laws and enact policies that directly improve the world, conservatives want policies that inoculate virtue and punish vice and otherwise leave the world to improve itself through “natural” processes to the extent that it can be improved (as they’re not as great believers in progress as progressives and libertarians are), libertarians want to let people associate freely so they can engage in mutually beneficial exchanges and improve the world according to their own preferences, and reactionaries think there need to be strong constraints on optimization processes to improve the world. Or, to put it more succinctly:
Progressives want to improve the world by passing laws that improve it directly.
Conservatives want to improve the world by encouraging traditional virtues.
Libertarians want to improve the world by setting up a framework in which optimization processes improve the world.
Reactionaries want to improve the world by setting up a framework in which optimization processes don’t run wild and destroy the world.
Your stated goal for reactionaries seems like of subgoal of your stated goal for libertarians. Surely “not running wild” is a subset of “improve the word.”
Also, it seems like a lot of progressive programs are designed to stop optimization processes from running wild. For instance, strengthening labor unions has the stated goal of stopping runaway competition between workers from creating a “race to the bottom.”
Superficially, yes, but their approaches are very different. Libertarians think that if we can set up a few “rules of the game”, we can let optimization processes discover optimal tradeoffs and drive growth to create a better world. Ancaps even think that the “rules of the game” can themselves arise out of spontaneous order. In contrast, reactionaries think that the optimization process is dangerous, and that the most important thing is to prevent it from being able to do too much damage, and the libertarian approach lets it run wild. Some progressives take a similar approach to neo-reactionaries (though with obvious differences on object-level issues), but most don’t think about the optimization processes at all, they focus on the non-spontaneous mandates for improvement.
>”In contrast, reactionaries think that the optimization process is dangerous, and that the most important thing is to prevent it from being able to do too much damage,”
I don’t know, Michael Anissimov seems pretty keen on letting optimisation processes run wild even (perhaps especially) if they result in the extinction of humanity.
” If it’s your plan to improve the world being blocked by the other team, though, what’s the only self-consistent theory of their motivations left open to you?”
There are two. They are evil, and they disagree with you. You have not blocked off the second, which requires that you believe that the goodness of both your aim and your plan are self-evident, and the effectiveness of the plan is, too.
But in modern American politics, even boring moderate conservatives often attempt to cast themselves as reactionary revolutionaries with grand plans to Make America America again.
The quarter century old joke about Republicans being the Stupid Party and Democrats the Evil Party suggests the opposite view.
This has never been my experience. The running stereotype I’ve always encountered was that the Red tribe is hardhearted, the Blue tribe softheaded.
Or the common variant, along the lines of “If you aren’t a [Blue tribemember] when you’re 20, you don’t have a heart; if you aren’t a [Red tribemember] when you’re 40, you don’t have a head.”
I believe the “Evil Party, Stupid Party” joke is most current among conservatives/libertarians/reactionaries who have noticed some form of the Inner Party/Outer Party dynamic, but not quite realized that the ineffectualness of the Outer Party is by design. It’s a characterization I’ve only seen among people who view themselves as being further right than the mainstream Republican Party.
that is a joke told for a quarter century by republicans, not democrats.
Yes, Republicans telling this joke are explicitly saying that they consider Democrats evil. It is not a reliable source for how Democrats view Republicans, so maybe I shouldn’t have said “opposite.”
eh, it’s a bit more complicated than that. I have a fairly republican family. now, they live in the san francisco area and are all highly educated, so republican does not mean what it might mean in utah or mississippi. Every one of them thinks that progressives are well motivated but wrong. most republicans I have met seem to feel the same. they don’t tell the stupid party joke.
that joke, which in its original form runs “A republican staffer was talking to a visiting soviet delegation and he says ‘I hear in Russia that you only have one party. In the US, we have two, the stupid party and the evil party. I am proud to be a member of the stupid party. Periodically, the two parties get together and do something that is both stupid and evil. This is called bipartisanship.'” seems to be much more a creature of the beltway and people who take politics seriously. Before 1994, it was at least as much a quip on the near permanent minority status of the republicans (a majority in 4 of the previous 62 years) as anything else.
> The quarter century old joke about Republicans being the Stupid Party and Democrats the Evil Party suggests the opposite view.
Most versions of that joke don’t specify which is which but as a 40ish libertarian I had always assumed (and used) the reverse intended mapping. To wit: Republicans have been the Evil Party because they tend to favor DELIBERATELY hurting people – things like sending the nation to war, giving police more power to torture suspects, denying asylum to immigrants. Democrats have been the Stupid Party because they tend to favor ACCIDENTALLY hurting people – passing higher minimum wage laws, rent control, various other programs that hurt the most the exact people they’re allegedly intended to help.
You’re wrong. Type it into google and see.
Funny, the opposite stereotype is used for the two main parties in the UK, the Conservatives (right of centre) are evil but competent, Labour (and Liberal Democrats when people remember them) are well meaning but inept.
I’ve seen the Tories described as both stupid AND evil.
AFAIK, the first person to label Conservatives the “Stupid Party” was Lord Palmerston while he was still a Tory:
During Charles Darwin’s time, the general assumption among Whigs such as himself was that the Tories were cold-hearted as well, particularly with regard towards their stance on chattel slavery:
Interestingly, my view is the other way around. Maybe it’s because I’m exposed to the religious right more than other conservatives, but maybe not.
My experience is that the Left views the Right as the Defective Left, while the Right views the Left as the Anti-Right.
That is, my lefty buddies think the right wants the same things as them, and is just incredibly shitty as implementing it. The great mystery to them is why the right can’t see that the way to the left’s goals is by the left’s means. Call it the What’s The Matter With Kansas effect, or the Tigana effect, or what have you. John Oliver’s recent speech on the estate tax was as perfect an example of this as you’ll ever see.
By contrast, my righty buddies simply round off the left as the anti-right. So if they are Pro Life and the left opposes them then the left must be Pro Death. If they oppose Big Government then the left must be Pro Big Government (not pro things Big Government can do, but explicitly Pro Big Government).
Thus you get the following sort of talking past each other on, let’s take affirmative action.
L: I cant understand why you don’t see that AA increases the number of minorities in schools. I’ve proven this over and over.
R: Nice try, Anti-Merit man! You won’t trick me. I’m for everyone being judged on their merits, and you hate that.
L: No preferences, less minorities, why would you think removing the AA policy will get us more minorities in colleges? Obviously if we add SAT points to how we rate them more minorities will get in.
R: You won’t thwart fairness that way! I won’t ever let you increase the unfairness quota, your dark masters will be so disappointed when fairness increases instead!
L: I’ll be charitable, maybe you doubt that we’ll get more minorities if we use AA. Look at these studies, where it was actually tried and actually resulted in more minorities attending!
L: Reminders of your past triumphs will not daunt me! Everyone will be judged on their own merits if I have anything to say about it.
And on and on. R is talking to his own dark reflection, L is proving something R doesn’t care about.
>My experience is that the Left views the Right as the Defective Left, while the Right views the Left as the Anti-Right.
I like that a lot. I’m definitely going to steal it.
Very interesting. This implies that the left veiw certain values as universal but think people disagree on matters of fact, and the right think people genuinely disagree on values.
Wonder how this relates to the moral foundations studies (by Haidt and others) where it seems conservatives use more different values for assessing things than liberals (who mainly care about care/harm and fairness/reciprocity). http://projectimplicit.net/nosek/papers/GHN2009.pdf
“Diversity” was a bad example, I think, or at least non-generalizable.
If you use “raising the standards of living for the poor”, for instance, you get the reds thinking the blues are going the wrong way about it, but the blues think the reds simply don’t want it.
Hmm. It’s more complicated.
I think your typical Democrat, either at the elite pundit level or at the mass level, talks about social conservatives like they’re stupid bigots (e.g., Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum), and libertarian and neocon conservatives (e.g., the Kochs, Dick Cheney) like they’re evil conspirators. Sometimes it flips, though. “War on Women” makes socons sound evil, and a lot of liberal pundits think economic conservatives in the U.S. House are just stupid goldbugs who don’t understand Keynesian macro 101 and don’t realize that Austrian or supply side economics is “derp.”
Plenty of libertarian conservatives and neocons think liberals and doves are just sincere but ignorant dopes. And a few chin-stroking Douthat types think social liberals are making analytical errors. In those rarified, Bill Buckleyish precincts, the self-flattering Republican “they think we’re the evil party; we think they’re the stupid party” joke probably has its origin. But I think outside of policy elites and pundits, most FOX News type conservatives just think socialists (as they see it) and social liberals are straight up evil, or at least immoral.
So I think both groups, to varying degrees, think the other is BOTH stupid and evil. Which is more or less what Scott’s post would lead one to expect.
EDIT: J.S. Mill’s remark about not all conservatives being stupid but all stupid people being conservatives seems pretty popular in dKos type precincts of the Democratic party. I think it’s the left version of the GOP’s “stupid party” joke. Most people think they KNOW they’re not evil, so it’s being called stupid that’s actually threatening.
It depends on the issue, doesn’t it? Abortion and taxation seem to stick out me as cases where the reverse applies.
Slatestarcodex has ruined my ability to get really upset with conservatives. After so much exposure to reactionaries, my reaction to ordinary Republicans is something like, “Awww, you think you’re right-wing? That’s adoooooorable.”
Mine too. Also, the science fiction universe slowly fermenting in the back of my brain taking a militant monarchy/aristocracy with tinges of a corporate state and making it super duper progressive.
Want to join up? Infantry and dropship pilots are urgently needed.
Unless you have giant robots and LGBT equality, not interested.
…wait, I need a job after I graduate, do you need a mapmaker?
We have both! The Theban Mechanical Regiment is a most distinguished unit!
If they were more of the authority figures in your life, I think you would find it quite easy to be upset with them.
Queer in Russia, can confirm.
Matthew, how is that attitude any more sensible than a conservative observing that communists are are further to the left than the American “blue” community? Aw, you think you’re on the left? That’s really adorable. I know Stalinists.
Both are, in fact, entirely sensible. 21st century American liberals and 21st century American conservatives have beliefs that are basically identical when you consider them in the context of pretty much anything else; it’s just that they dominate 21st century American politics and so their areas of disagreement (whether tax rates should be 35% or 37%, the appropriateness of the latte salute, &c.) are what maintains salience.
There’s your narcissism of small differences right there.
By the way Scott, this blog post may be the most honest and thoughtful thing I’ve read in months. Very well done.
The differences are a bit bigger than THAT.
If you zoom out enough, we all seem identical to the Nazis.
Where are all of these reactionaries ? I am relatively new to SSC, and I’ve never seen them. I have read Scott’s FAQ on them, but that’s not the same thing. I’ve also tried reading Moldbug, but found him incoherent. He might have brilliant ideas for all I know, but I couldn’t figure out what they are just based on his writing.
“Map of the Dark Enlightenment” – http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5227
Biggest voices other than Moldbug seem to be Mike Anissimov (More Right), James Donald, and Nick Land. Most of them are pretty incoherent by the way.
Before Scott wrote his faq attacking neoreaction, he wrote this piece outlining what he felt were its strongest arguments: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
If you want a good primary source entry point, I liked Moldbug’s Open Letter (linking to Moldbug triggers the spam filter and I’m too lazy to bitly, but it’s easily googled). I felt he did a good job making sense to a progressive reader and not being too gratuitously offensive. If, like me, your real motivation in reading these things is enjoyment of reading them, I certainly recommend it. Just be warned that it’s fourteen very long posts, and also full of broken links.
Thanks, I’ve actually read Scott’s “nutshell” post before, but seeing as it was written by someone who is vehemently opposed to NR, I figured that it wouldn’t be all that representative of the true beliefs of modern neoreactionaries. Granted, if anyone could properly steel-man his opponents’ position, Scott can, but still, he’s only human…
And Moldbug’s Open Letter is one of the articles I had in mind when I called him “incoherent”. It starts out pretty well (though it only explains what NRs believe, not why they believe it), but it very quickly devolves into some sort of a historical morass that is of tangential relevance to the discussion at best.
But I’ll keep an eye out for more NR-oriented comments, now that I sort of know whom I can expect to post them. I admit that I am kind of fascinated by NR. The notion that we should cede total control of ours society to (as Moldbug puts it) a zombie clone of King James II is… just not something you’d normally encounter in political discourse.
I can’t remember which historical morass he goes into in that particular series, but in general, they’re definitely relevant: history is the easiest place to drive home the point that received information (and, more importantly, received value-judgments) will be systematically politically biased in ways convenient to the ruling structure.
Also, this is probably a better introduction.
Thanks, I’m reading the Dark Enlightenment series now, and so far it’s definitely a better introduction… For a certain value of “better”. I could list some of the issues I have with it (in terms of methodology, not conclusions), but maybe this thread is not the place to do that ?
Would be best to start a blog.
That’s a great idea! I love liveblogs and let’s plays; reading another person’s first impressions of a work you have already consumed is lots of fun.
(Apologies for so much nitpicking….)
I’m a Jewish atheist (or Reconstructionist Jew) who has never voted for a Republican. This is a list of my close friends’ religious and political identities, in no particular order (except the first one, for shock value). These are all people I’ve met in meatspace, not Internet friends.
1. Evangelical Baptist, almost certainly creationist, active in local Republican politics before moving abroad
2. Atheist, very liberal
3. Nondenominational Protestant, very liberal
4. Devout Catholic, moderately liberal to centrist
5. Devout Greek Orthodox (by conversion, I think), Ron Paul fan
6. Pentecostal, (unsure of politics)
7. *Atheist, very liberal
8. Atheist (raised in extremely conservative Christian family), libertarian
9 . (unsure of religion), centrist
10. *Atheist, centrist/mixed
*Grew up behind the Iron Curtain
1 is definitely Red; 5 is arguably Red though it’s hard to tell when someone is that softspoken; 4 usually votes Democratic but is working class midwestern and Red culturally; 8 was raised Red but is unquestionably Blue now.
I’m neither a programmer nor an academic. This probably goes a long way to explaining why my experience diverges so sharply from yours.
I may have written that in an unclear fashion. Friends 7 and 10 are from Ukraine and Lithuania, so their atheism isn’t necessarily a Blue signal in and of itself. I speak Russian but I was born in the United States.
Why is tolerance a virtue? Chesterton’s Christian context explains why he values forgiveness, but outside that context…
Also, Scott, I’m sorry to hear some intolerant person is impersonating you.
I’m thinking of Bryan Caplan: “America’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.” http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/03/my_beautiful_bu.html
There is Canada…
That was my thought too. Judging fairly is an important virtue. Tolerance is a second line of defence to limit the damage if you botch your judging, and is sometimes tactically useful, but I don’t see much more.
The other options seem to be (1) organized violence, (2) applying a painful social sanction or (3) angry disagreement.
Option 1 has obvious problems. Option 2 is infeasible. There’s just not enough social overlap for social sanctions to work.
Option 3 often gets rounded up to ‘intolerance’, but I think this is conflating ‘tolerate’ and ‘accept’. Senator Sanders might vehemently disagree with Senator Cruz. But, short of a duel on the Senate floor, the two are tolerating one another.
Option 2 is perfectly feasible, at least if one thede controls some high-status institutions and can apply known social sanctions there and has the ability to throw someone up against the wall every once in a while so everyone in the elthede gets the message.
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do” is already a set phrase; making it known what happens to people who don’t do as the Romans do drives the point home further. The purge of Brendan Eich wasn’t just about Brendan Eich, and it wasn’t just about gay marriage either: it was a clear signal that Mozilla (and by extension, anything the media decides to focus on; there were plenty of Mozilla employees who supported Eich, even if they opposed gay marriage, but that was downplayed — ignored completely, I think — by a lot of the media) is Blue territory, and Reds will have to hide themselves.
Now, the same thing can happen in Red territory: I knew someone in college who had a rainbow flag bumper sticker, got glared at once when she parked at Walmart, and complained to me — I can pass for a Blue when necessary, of course — about “those fucking townies”. But that college had a history of Blue-initiated symbolic aggression against townies: long before I went there, there was a First Amendment case that concerned Maryland colleges with a formal religious affiliation. This place was Methodist, and had a chapel on the highest point in the town. Most of the other colleges fought it; they didn’t, and instead brought in a crane to rip the cross off the top of the chapel in the middle of the day.
(This was told to me by a very anti-Red professor, who otherwise seemed to be under the impression that Reds hated Blues because they were backwards and racist.)
It’s not as if the Blues have a monopoly on everyday social enforcement of thede-signaling norms; Blues have to hide in Red areas just as Reds have to hide in Blue areas. (Blue areas, however, include most colleges, and much more so the more prestigious and useful ones, so this is not at all symmetrical.) And both of them are acting reasonably, which is something that seems to have been missed downthread. One side can’t ask the other to unilaterally disarm.
Actually, I’ve heard rumors that Eich’s forced outing (PFI) had a lot to do with the “WebDRM” debacle: He was resisting, so had to be removed for Netflix etc’s sake.
No idea whether that’s actually true (timing seems plausible, but no concrete evidence has been presented publicly, AFAIK).
I don’t know what that would prove, in any case, besides a mildly ironic point that for all the anti-capitalism they profess, the Blues’ ideals can be made to serve the money god just as well as any moron in a megachurch.
Doesn’t look like it.
@nydwracu: I see your link as fairly orthogonal to the claim and remain agnostic as to the original question.
Are any of these rumors available on the open web?
Friend of mine was a mid level product manager on Firefox. What she told me is that Eich’s dismissal was entirely due to politics.
Specifically, Mozilla is this interesting hybrid organization that relies on it’s global open source community in order to Get Stuff Done, and they couldn’t risk alienating all the volunteers and contributors who make Mozilla possible.
In a sense, the problem wasn’t even Eich or his views. The problem was explicitly the negative publicity from the media harping on his views.
My friend’s point of view is that Eich was extremely professional at work, she did not think his dismissal was fair, and was sad to see a smart, talented engineer go. But given Mozilla’s situation, it was unsalvageable
@ Anon: E.g., http://voxday.blogspot.co.at/2014/05/why-brendan-eich-had-to-go.html
@ eqdw: That is also a very reasonable explanation from the org perspective, but it’s notable that e.g. Bob O’Callahan probably will not consider it a friendlier workplace because of the reaction, and O’Callahan has probably done more for Moz and web typography than any given set of SJWs. So, turns out all the mobbed are equal, but some are just more equal than others. http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/04/fighting-media-narratives.html
@B This was the thing that surprised, and then upset, me the most about this: my friend revealing that an overwhelming majority of the Firefox employees personally wanted him to stay. As far as I’m concerned, this is a direct example of online bullying and clickbait media directly ending someone’s career, and that sucks. Hard.
Clickbait internet lynch mobs are a creation of Moloch; you shouldn’t expect decent human feeling out of them. “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
If Senator Sanders’ and Senator Cruz’s votes are both needed to pass a budget then disagreements that fall short of open duelling can still be very bad for the country in question. I think tolerance is a scalar virtue, not a binary one.
A good part of the things that were considered “intolerable” historically are now viewed as totally fine. The prior on something that feels “wrong” actually being wrong is low. At least unless the sanction against this activity is almost absolute across cultures.
People who are in a minority have no choice but to cultivate tolerance if they want to excel in mainstream society. I personally think jailing people for drug use is kidnapping and depending on the conditions extended torture. The vast majority of people support what I view as a hellish mistake. Unless I cultivate tolerance how can I function in society? The same goes for conservative muslims, many ethical vegans etc. To a greater or lesser extent.
At the first level : because we’ve been told that tolerating other people is Good, at least for values of “we” that are less than thirty.
At a second level : because treating a small subgroup of society very badly has high costs, most obviously to that subgroup, but also to everyone else. The UK treating Indians terribly was obviously pretty bad for the Indians, and also came with a bonus chance to be shot in a turf war.
At a first meta-level : because we might be the out-group. Actually, we almost /certainly/ will be the out-group for at least the largest circles like Blue Tribe versus Red Tribe versus Grey Tribe. But we might even be the more specialized sort of out-group that lacks its own Parallel Dimension to safely gawk at the Other from. If the Blue Tribe decides that outspoken atheism is gauche, that ends up being a big problem for those individuals.
At the second meta-level : because we might be wrong when we act against an out-group. If you’re over thirty, the statistical you were against gay marriage, if you’re over fifty, the statistical you was against gay people. Worse, even the most politically-apt people of the time could not predict the speed or rate in which these matters changed. A lotta Red Tribe like to joke about what’ll become necessary to support next, but it’s honestly hard to believe all of your values and information /now/ is correct or that you’ll be the first to correct those values.
>Why is tolerance a virtue? Chesterton’s Christian context explains why he values forgiveness, but outside that context…
Scott has a pretty in-depth answer to this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
I really hate the blue tribe and the gray tribe, both of which I have ties to, and I find the red tribe sort of humorous and adorable despite disagreeing with most of their positions and having no ties to them. I wonder what this makes me. Probably just an asshole.
Also I really don’t think criticizing your in-group is as difficult as you make it out to be, as long as it’s a fairly non-central characteristic and not something like “almost everyone in this group are pieces of shit”. And if someone did have that criticism, then they probably would not choose that group to begin with. People on LW criticize LW all the time. I can think of criticisms of all of my own in-groups that I’m able identify. I feel like you, Scott, are especially unwilling to criticize your in-group because you are a prominent voice for a group that you feel is under attack. I imagine e.g. feminist activists feel the same way.
EDIT: Just for fun I’m going to try to criticize all my ingroups even though probably no one cares
Men – are too angry, have unhealthy desires for competition and domination, like sports too much
White people – Aren’t as hardworking as Asians, have worse music than black people
Rationalists – Don’t understand art, are unwilling to engage with ideas that can’t be precisely expressed in analytical terms, have weird off-putting community norms like the cuddling stuff that they tend to think are the One True Way
People at the school I go to – Are boring, have bad taste in music
Frat bros – Often misogynistic, perpetuate hookup culture which imho is bad, certain fraternities (though absolutely not mine) seem to actually have rape culture like the recent story about TKE at University of Wisconson-Milwaukee which is beyond appalling and reprehensible
The people I hang out with – Don’t take anything seriously, don’t know how to have fun without drinking, take “friendly teasing” too far sometimes
Art students – Often don’t have any plans for their future realistic or otherwise which they wrongly see as a virtue, often resort to a stance of “oh, well whatever you say is true to you” or something like that
CS students – Are awkward, lack imagination
Atheists – A lot of them are self-righteous and overly convinced of their own intelligence, a lot of them fail to see the good sides and certain truths of religion
Buddhists or people who find Buddhism interesting – Often don’t take the effort to actually study the religion, often resort to a stance of “oh, well whatever you say is true to you” or something like that
Fans of rap music – Won’t acknowledge the flaws of a genre that in reality is very fucked up in many ways
Hispters (some people call me this) – Generally are egotistical assholes who try to be better than everyone, this isn’t really controversial even among hipsters
People who spend to much time on the internet – Have no impulse control, aren’t living their lives to the fullest
Clearly your real ingroup is people who make lists of bad things about people! I notice you didn’t say anything bad about them.
Believe it or not I was about to make the last one that, but then I decided not to because imho meta-jokes are played out. I’ll write it here anyway:
People who can say bad things about all their ingroups – assholes, contrarians, are unable to properly integrate into their surroundings
I forgot that Scott hates meta-jokes. My bad.
Why do you think hookup culture is bad? The criticisms I can think of would not be valid if we lived in a world where everybody used condoms for all casual sex, and that world’s probably easier to approach, e.g. by making condoms VERY available on campus.
Nonsense. It’s perfectly valid right, when condoms ARE very available on campus.
You assume risk compensation doesn’t exist.
And that’s even joining in your assumption that the only problems are disease and babies.
Hookup culture is bad because it has deleterious psychological consequences for all involved. (Leaving aside deontological/sacredness arguments, which I also believe but which are unlikely to carry much weight here.) The ability to handle this is, of course, a quantity that varies on a distribution, and some people deal with it better than others. However, for the majority it’s really not a good thing; the consequences are bad individually, and worse societally when it’s widespread. (It also tends to hurt women worse than men, which makes me mystified and irritated when supporting it is touted as a ‘feminist’ position. But what else is new.)
I can demystify it for you. In “purity” cultures, women tend to be held responsible for men’s thoughts and behaviour, harshly punished (sometimes for the rest of their life) when the rules are broken, and severely restricted by their own families (e.g., no education, no financial independence, no freedom of movement) in order to “protect” them from the possibility of such punishment.
So, the anti-hookup way has been tried, the implementation turned out pretty bad for women, now we’re trying the alternative.
I note that a lot of the anti-hookup culture was enforced by women who exactly wanted to stigmatize acts that would make it harder for them to get and hang onto their husbands.
Nita, that’s a strong point about purity cultures. However, I don’t think all of us anti-hookup trad types are advocating a return to patriarchal purity cultures. (At least, we don’t think we are.) IOW, I don’t think it’s a question of “the” anti-hookup culture, so much as a project of synthesizing an anti-hookup culture that incorporates at least some of the insights of feminist critique of purity culture.
“I can demystify it for you. In “purity” cultures, women tend to be held responsible for men’s thoughts and behaviour”
As are those men… Note that adulterers are often stoned together.
“in order to “protect” them from the possibility of such punishment.”
It’s not to protect them from punishment. It’s to protect them from *men.* There’s a huge misandric streak running through those cultures, where it is assumed that men are foul and dangerous and so women must be covered and cloistered to avoid defilement.
(Think this got caught in the spam filter, removing all links…)
“So, the anti-hookup way has been tried, the implementation turned out pretty bad for women, now we’re trying the alternative.”
*An* anti-hookup way was tried.
Then a pro-hookup way was tried, instigated by young baby boomer women.
Its failure led to: Baby boomer feminism.
A baby boomer feminist reminisces:
IMO she was right. I recall millennials showing up to feminism en masse around 2003 having apparently never heard of any of this; I disagree with these millennials’ apparently widespread belief that somehow “free love” will work better this time than when the boomers tried it.
:is old:
😉
There’s another baby boomer feminist who made a similar argument under the title, “Date a geek today.” (link removed, but it’s the second non-ad result on duckduckgo)
@Irenist:
I know, *you’re* “trad”–but I just want to point out that there’s no requirement to *be* at all “trad” to be anti-hookup culture.
AFAIC all feminists like me really wanted was fairness. It’s also getting pretty clear that hookup culture AKA “‘free love’ for all” has been tried and does not work.
The obvious solution–preserving fairness while rejecting something that’s just been tried and found wanting–is “sexual self-control for all.” Which, after all, is all depression-and-WWII-baby feminists (like my mom) wanted anyway.
We just need to blame men rather than women for any lack of self-control shown by men.
I’m sure flaws in this approach will become clear after it’s been tried for a while. I’m also sure it’ll be an improvement over today. People often assume the goal is to create The Perfect Culture That Will Work For Everyone Always. It usually doesn’t turn out that way, though. We’re better off just trying to create a culture that works better than today’s.
It’s perfectly possible to be a normal, decent atheist and/or secular humanist 😉 (can you tell I was raised atheist? :D) and still oppose hookup culture; no religion or other “trad” attitude is required.
…just, uh, saying. 😉
@Lizardbreath
It was–for the girls–a dream of being less female in a world less male; an eroticization of sibling equality, not the traditional male dominance…
Worked fine for me, and the guy I eventually settled down with. Never were in communes, though.
: is still a baby boomer feminist :
PS . Someone elsewhere described red trad customs as “Marry early, marry often.”
“Hookup culture is bad because it has deleterious psychological consequences for all involved. (Leaving aside deontological/sacredness arguments, which I also believe but which are unlikely to carry much weight here.)”
I don’t think I’m along in strongly suspecting that the deontological/sacredness arguments are the motivating factors for you finding deleterious psychological consequences. When your System 1 is strongly opposed to something, you should be suspicious when your System 2 comes up with reasons to justify that.
You are arguing with his motivation for presenting you with evidence. This does not, actually, dispute the evidence. That a starving man is motivated to eat does not actually disprove that the food is tasty or nourishing, even if it isn’t as strong evidence as it would be if a satiated man was eating it.
I can chime in as someone with strong anti-sacredness, anti-traditionalist leanings, who has a strong aversive reaction to hookup culture. I can’t trust any particular argument I have against hookup culture to be grounded in genuine consequentialism rather than that aversive instinct, but I’m pretty sure that my reaction is grounded in introversion and romanticism. I do not form close bonds with others easily, but I take very seriously those bonds that I do form, and this tends to be true of people I get along with. I don’t feel comfortable getting physically intimate with people I lack emotional bonds with, so hookup culture is very uncomfortable for me to operate in.
– In hookup culture, sex comes first, then emotional attachment. In dating culture, it’s the other way around. This means that people in hookup culture are selecting their partners for sex-value (looks, status) instead of love-value (personality). This leads to a much poorer optimization algorithm in terms of finding a life partner, which is of course much more important to the individual and society than having lots of casual sex.
– Additionally, if everyone is selecting partners for sex-value it leads to people having insecurity and anxiety about their attractiveness, which can lead to e.g. depression, eating disorders.
– In theory it’s less complicated than dating, but in reality it is vastly more complicated and operates under a series of very subtle rules that no one will ever tell you about.
– Generally involves drunk people having sex with people they barely know, which leads to rape (and weird gray area “she thinks she was raped but he thought they just hooked up” which is arguably even worse given that two lives are ruined instead of just one).
– Is a lot harder for people with a degree of sexual dysfunction, e.g. find sex scary, erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation. The standard advice for these things is “talk it over with your partner, go slow, and have open communication”. But if you don’t have a partner then you can’t do this, and in hookup culture if you can’t have sex then it’ll be very hard to find a partner.
Wait, so apparently “hookup culture” means that no one is allowed to find partners in any other way now? Because that means I’ve been doing it wrong all my life o_O
More seriously — as far as I know, people don’t use hookups to find a life partner (sure, it can happen occasionally, but it’s not the intention).
Also, it sounds like you’re saying that looks don’t matter in dating, which is, um, not true.
Good point about the drunk sex and rape, though. We need a lot more good education about consent and a healthier attitude to alcohol.
It means that everyone, man and woman, who participates is making it harder for everyone else to find a partner.
This is my experience, I don’t know anyone who asks people out on dates and it seems to me like doing so would be incredibly weird. (Then again it might not be, there’s obviously no official rulebook to these things and everyone including me is just kind of guessing.) I don’t know how old you are, I’m a college student and I think this is a very recent development.
I’ve never had casual sex and I’ve never officially “dated”, either — both seem very anxiety-inducing and error-prone compared to my friendship-first style.
Anyway, in my experience, people are different, so it’s nice to see a variety of options, including “hookups”. I definitely don’t approve of any one style taking over the whole landscape.
*twitch* Please don’t casually propagate the false and harmful idea that being raped necessarily ruins someone’s life. (Neither does being accused of rape, for that matter.)
As a Catholic, I really WANT to agree with this critique of hookup culture, because I disapprove of that culture for other reasons.
But I don’t think it works. It’s too easy to argue the converse: In a dating culture, people marry too young just so they can sleep with someone, whereas in a hookup culture, they sleep around all they want, and don’t settle down until they find deep emotional compatibility later in life. That’s pretty much the standard “Blue yuppie marriage is strong, Red high school sweetheart marriag is a disaster” argument that’s pretty well supported by the stats.
So I think we trads have to do better.
I don’t really see dating culture as “wait until marriage”, more like “wait until the third date or so, and don’t talk about it too much”.
It seems like Irenist’s “dating” is closer to what some people call “courtship”. Here’s an interesting comparison of these two styles, with a brief mention of hookups: http://www.thomasumstattd.com/2014/08/courtship-fundamentally-flawed/. It’s written by someone raised in a modern purity culture.
“That’s pretty much the standard ‘Blue yuppie marriage is strong, Red high school sweetheart marriag is a disaster’ argument that’s pretty well supported by the stats.”
Don’t the stats also suggest that love marriages work out at a much lower rate than other kinds of marriage? Just because Red love marriages are worse than Blue love marriages doesn’t make those Blue love marriages The Right Way.
I was indeed using dating = courtship, which was confusing. Sorry about that.
@haishan
“Don’t the stats also suggest that love marriages work out at a much lower rate than other kinds of marriage?”
How are you defining “work out”?
I completely agree with all of these. (BTW, I’m an atheist. And, as I’ve said elsewhere, a gen-X feminist.)
And (IMX) if you argue #1, especially if you don’t make it very very clear you’re a woman, then (even if you are a woman) you’ll be labeled (by “social justice warrior” millennials)
(a) a Nice Guy(tm);
(b) evil.
I received rape threats. Which was at least amusingly ironic. (Also death threats, but w/e.)
Lizardbreath — I can’t tell you what an unexpected pleasure it was to find you on this thread (I am a SSC lurker). And I think I agree 100% with everything you’ve written here
(Also: really, death threats? What is wrong with people?)
I’m in my 30s and have never experienced hookup culture, but I really can’t see any way it could possibly be more complicated than dating culture, which I have considerably more experience with.
The thing is, humans aren’t always looking for life partners.
It’s well known that humans run both short-term and long-term mating strategies. But historically, short-term mating strategies were prohibited, especially for women. During the sexual revolution, women became free to pursue short-term mating strategies and they increasingly entered the workforce. It’s not surprising at all that a large segment of women is running short-term mating strategies while they are young.
Thanks to hookup culture, young women have basically a buffet of short-term, medium-term, and long-term options. This is Hannah Rosin’s argument:
Yes, there may be less long-term mates available, because young men are rationally switching to short-term mating strategies. But in exchange, people (at least, attractive middle/upper class young women) have a lot more choices about what relationship types and durations they have, making it easier to fit their hookups and relationships around their other responsibilities. Whether this development is a good thing or not is another question, but hookup culture is not bad in an unmitigated way.
Are these criticisms *really* criticisms though? You criticise ‘self-righteous’ atheists or Bhuddists who haven’t taken the time to study the religion, but I don’t think you would agree you belong to either of those groups. Nobody introduces themselves as “A self-righteous atheist who is overly convinced of my own intelligence” or “I’m a Bhuddist, but I really don’t understand the religion and rely on mostly vague and empty epithets to form my world view”.
I think you’re doing exactly what Scott says people do; criticising people who are just similar enough to you that they can form an out-group, but ignoring people who are actually your in-group. For example it is cheap and easy to criticise the internet-brand atheist for being loud and obnoxious, but much harder to criticise the brand of atheism I think you or I would identify with.
This also seems fundamental to hipsters. A hipster is always a member of a similar out-group, but virtually never functions as an in-group identity. Like obnoxious internet atheists, hipsters are basically similar people who are seen as “doing it wrong”.
Froolow:
I did consider that when making that list, and I tried to avoid putting in criticisms that could be seen as a “few bad eggs”. The only exception is for frat bros simply because the bad eggs are too egregiously bad to be ignored.
But when you restrict ingroup criticisms to “things that only apply to you”, then you basically restrict your ingroup to “people exactly like me” which I feel kind of destroys the definition of the word ingroup and would make the list just a list of self-criticisms, which would be a different beast entirely.
I also tried to avoid criticisms that are things people can’t really help or are trying to change. For example I could have written that rationalists have poor social skills, but I didn’t because unlike most nerds rationalists tend to consider this a failure on their part and something that should be changed, so it hardly seems fair to criticize them for that. I tried to limit my criticisms to failures of understanding or wrong-headed attitudes.
But all of my self-criticisms necessarily are things I can’t really help or am trying to change, otherwise I would have changed them already. The ones that are failures of understanding or wrong-headed attitudes are invisible to me.
And as far as atheists go, it’s only the obnoxious ones who make atheism a huge part of their identity and are vocal about it, so it’s very difficult for me to even identify characteristics of “the good kind of atheist”, good or bad. That would be like identifying negative characteristics of people whose names start with the letter A.
Clockwork Marx:
Hipsters get a lot of flack for refusing to identify as such, but imho it’s kind of unfair to expect people to self-identify with a word that has near-universally become a pejorative. (Yeah, I know, nerds manage to do it, and gay people with “queers”, as well as a bunch of other examples. Still.) I think if you asked hipsters if they identified with “the group of twenty-somethings who tend to be nonconformist, like alternative music and art, closely follow cultural developments, and lean left politically” they would say that they did. Similarly, I think if you showed them pictures of hipster icons or other hipsters and asked them if they identified with them, they would say that they would.
” I feel like you, Scott, are especially unwilling to criticize your in-group because you are a prominent voice for a group that you feel is under attack. I imagine e.g. feminist activists feel the same way.”
Not sure whether that’s a valid criticism, or if that’s part of what it means to say “in-group” rather than just “a group you happen to belong to like curly-haired people or people whose names begin with A”.
I realize I am at risk of No-True-Scotsmanning “it is difficult to criticize the in-group”
Well, I don’t believe that the groups I listed as ingroups in this comment are under attack, and I still feel bad about criticizing them. So it’s not a universal thing.
A nitpick from someone who sitting 10 feet from box-set DVD copies of all 7 seasons of the West Wing, and binge-watches it on a regular basis:
This ain’t the West Wing, it’s the Newsroom.
I can see why you’d make the mistake; Aaron Sorkin does not have a lot of variability in the tone of his work.
Also, the quote’s wrong. First sentence should be “There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world.”
I don’t think the first bit is intended to be a quote; it’s providing some context — the question to which the rest is part of the answer. Hence the square brackets.
>Aaron Sorkin does not have a lot of variability in the tone of his work.
indeed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S78RzZr3IwI
I tried to think of examples of groups which it would make my blood boil to criticize. Tried the obvious targets, including neoreactionaries, conservatives, libertarians, white people, Christians. Realized that I don’t really have that reaction to any of them. I have yet been unable to find a group which I would be unwilling to criticize due to that sort of feeling. (Some, e.g. “white people”, I would be unwilling to criticize because the categories are not sufficiently closely bound that any criticism is likely to be useful over the entire set. But then, I feel the same about any so all-encompassing category, including “black people”, “Asian people”, “men”, “women”, &c. Not really sure if this counts.)
I don’t know if this makes me really really rational or just vaguely autistic. Presumably the latter. But it was interesting to find out.
I think some people just don’t naturally gravitate towards in group membership. Maybe we should form our own non-in-group in-group.
Sign me up! When are you printing the T-shirts? “I wouldn’t want to join any group that would allow more than 1 member” – no, that’s not it.
Groucho Marx tribe.
Then criticise non-ingroup members!
It might depend on the group who would hear the criticism. For example, you might criticize your romantic partner or your child to a trusted friend and feel fine about it, but sweat bullets if you did it in public.
“It might depend on the group who would hear the criticism.” Very true ! Especially if you are facing a majority of people you know they will disagree. I for instance identify myself with proponents of “natural birth”. Well, I identify with them to a reasonable extent to perceive them as allies. However, I was sweating blood last time on facebook, while trying to tell the group, that chemical induction of birth (while unpleasant and not to be abused) does not increase the rate of cesarean sections. I was trying to say, that randomised trials show this, and randomised trials are higher evidence than observational studies. I sayed that, otherwise, I am a loyal member of the group and doctors need oversight, because they ignore randomised trials in other questions. It was just a minor disagreement, not a real criticism, but my blood pressure went up. I probably would not dare to post on their forum a lengthy article about what I dislike about that movent. But here at SSC I can complain about them, knowing this audience will praise me for scientific thinking.
I get the same sensation criticizing some LessWrong (I’ll use a word loosely) dogmas: computationalism, VNM utility.
How about criticizing the “niceness and civilization” itself?
I am just not sure how to do that properly. The first idea was something like “people trying to be nice predictably leads to some horrible results”, but that would be arguing against object-level niceness from the point of view of some meta-niceness.
As an analogy, imagine someone criticizing racists by saying that their overly racist behavior will actually backfire against their own race, so to win against other races in long term, it is strategically better to become sincerely tolerant to other races. That doesn’t feel sufficiently anti-racist to me. Analogically, saying that less niceness may bring more niceness in long term, doesn’t feel sufficiently anti-nice. I’d have to find something like “niceness is completely stupid and evil” because of… uhm… something not nice.
And I don’t feel able to do that.
Even if I try something along “niceness could make people stupid, and I value non-stupidity more than niceness”, I am still aware that stupidity causes human suffering, so being against stupidity still feels like being against suffering, which is a nice value.
Perhaps in some imaginary inconvenient world, where a Friendly AI governs the whole universe and no harm could ever be done to anyone… and the humanity decides to split into “nice but less intelligent” and “more intelligent but nasty” groups (note that the latter group will still never be able to actually harm anyone), and for some reasons it is not possible to have both… I could write an argument for the less nice group. Though I am not sure, in this specific situation, which group I would choose, so maybe I am again merely criticizing an outgroup.
I think the in-group we’re looking for here is “people who make reasoned arguments about things, enjoy constructing verbal-conceptual models, etc.” Scientists, philosophers, etc.
Try criticizing the “cogitators” – try criticizing thinking about things – and see how that makes you feel.
To borrow Kahneman’s terminology, system 1 (‘intuitive’ non-conscious thought) is faster and often more accurate than system 2. Cogitators prioritise system 2 to an insane degree and that has lots of harmful consequences. Hows that as a criticism?
Define ‘Actually harm’
Does emotional harm/verbal abuse count?
Such a universe would not contain humanity as we know it. For real people, being both nice and smart is 100% possible. Disdain for the less-educated is just a class-signaling move for some tribes.
The traditional thing-outside-niceness to criticise “niceness & civilization” with is “self-interest”.
I think I could simulate that position well enough to argue for it.
As a Christian, I find it somewhat painful to criticise other Christians. Unfortunately in this world it’s frequently necessary. Over here in the UK we evangelical Christians do a lot of distancing ourselves from American Republican evangelicals, a lot of apologising for what the Bible belt do and say. They’re still part of the worldwide family of Christians, but they’re like the embarrassing uncles and aunts who turn up at the family gathering making raucous racist comments.
Notwithstanding your first sentence, your message doesn’t exactly exude a charitable attitude toward your American Republican siblings in Christ. You paint with a broad brush, using exactly the stereotypical formulations we’re all familiar with. It’s probable that your information about American Republican evangelicals is filtered through sources that only spotlight weak or embarrassing things. Any large community will produce a fair number of embarrassing statements and actions and this provides fodder for anyone who wants to cherry-pick these instances and make the group in question look like the embarrassing uncles and aunts. But hey, you obviously have made your judgments and I fully recognize that those are not often changed by comments on a web page.
No, you make a good point, and you’re right.
My statement used some stereotypes, because I was trying to condense down a larger nuanced view into a smallish comment, because personally I find huge long comments hard/unpleasant to read.
I find myself in the tricky situation of being an evangelical Christian (in the UK sense) while also having left-wing politics. Most of what I read on the internet is more influenced by left-wing politics than evangelical Christianity. This means that a lot of what I pick up about what happens in the USA is filtered by left-wing news sources, and so USA Bible-belt evangelicalism comes across very badly.
And though I do find the pronouncements of some US evangelicals painful and embarrassing, they’re still family. I care about them not just because I care how Jesus is being presented to the watching world – though that’s a significant aspects – but also because these are brothers and sisters, dealing with similar issues to those I deal with over here, but in a somewhat different culture which makes some traps easier to fall into. (And others harder: I’m sure my politics are influenced by my culture and coloured by anti-Christian thoughts in a variety of ways I haven’t realised yet.)
Thank you. I’m sure I’m more defensive about this sort of thing than I otherwise would be precisely because it’s so frequently expressed. It’s no secret to us how we’re caricatured around most of the world, and particularly in Britain, so I may have expressed myself more forcefully than I would have in the case of a one-off.
Best regards,
CT
This sub-thread warms my heart.
Very mature comment. Kudos.
For me, it was an interesting experience to go from a western congregation of my faith (hella rightwing) to spend some time in a European congregation where the leading elder was secretary of that city’s communist party branch.
It is not a “stereotype” to say that the majority of Bible belt, evangelical Republican Christians are horribly bigoted and either actively engaged in oppressing others, or at the very least have an attitude of depraved indifference towards oppression. If you find examples of Bible belt, evangelical Republican Christians who are not an embarrassment, then you are the one engaging in cherry-picking.
Right, it’s not a stereotype. Stereotypes are true.
I’m sorry but this last post exactly epitomizes the broad brush the CThomas mentioned. If I pointed out that evangelical Christians in the US give to charity at a rate higher than any other group or subset, you’d most likely reply that their donations to X charity don’t diminish their bigotry and don’t excuse their awful positions. Thus justifying in your own mind the level of bigotry you express towards their group with vehemence. If i were to point out how many Christians (in disproportionate numbers to their % in the country at large) volunteer at soup kitchens and homeless shelters to help their fellow man (of every creed and race mind you), you would most likely reply that said help is only being meted out to salve their own consciences for holding other horrible beliefs. Again giving yourself wiggle room to say “I’m extremely tolerant! But THESE people are unworthy of my tolerance because they believe X and I don’t. And ALL right thinking people know that X is absolutely abhorrent.”
Either you’re horribly myopic and incapable of self reflection or your simply trolling for responses. And MAN do i hope it’s the latter rather than the former.
@Tigger
I actually agree with the rest of your post, but this is questionable on at least two levels:
1 — Mormons (who are wealthier) definitely give more in absolute terms, and may give more as a percent of income, than Evangelicals.
2 — Charitable giving statistics are really, really contentious, because the largest share of charitable giving in the United States is given to churches/synagogues/temples, and a substantial portion of that money is spent on things that non-religious observers would not agree is altruistic. When donations to specifically religious organizations are excluded, New England launches ahead of the Bible Belt in charitable giving.
And you’re familiar enough with the majority of “Bible belt, evangelical Republican Christians” to be sure they’re all “horribly bigoted”?
I work in the south. I work with evangelical Republican Christians. I don’t share their beliefs but the vast majority of those I personally know are kind, charitable, honest people.
Good grief.
I notice that you are othering as hard and as fast as you can.
“When donations to specifically religious organizations are excluded,”
because of course giving money to Catholic Relief Services to save children from dying of cholera is not really charitable, but giving money to a private school that your children are attending at the time so it can have a soccer field, that’s real charity.
You are filtering by religion not because that’s a reliable filter for altruism but because it lets you assert the leftists are more charitable when in reality they are spending money on their own institutions that happen to be non-profits. Not just schools, too, all the cultural non-profits that rich people attend but poor don’t, too.
@Anonymous
I did not make any claim about who was more generous (except for the “Mormons give more than Evangelicals” claim, which I stand by). I also don’t think “donating to the opera” type giving should count; my point was that the statistics are weak evidence for anyone being more generous.
If you thought of to criticizing people who cannot find anyone to criticize, how would that make you feel ? 🙂
Try climatologists.
This might bother me in the specific context of talking to an audience of climate-deniers, but it doesn’t have any special salience otherwise.
“Tried the obvious targets, including neoreactionaries, conservatives, libertarians, white people, Christians.”
Either you are a neoractionary conservative libertarian white Christian, or you didn’t try the rather obvious tact of criticizing a group that you are a member of.
In case you aren’t aware, “Can people of color be racist?” is an actual (presumably SJW user-generated) question on OKCupid’s Q+A section.
Well, at least the minefield is clearly marked.
Remind me to tell you sometime about the time I tried to hit on the (astonishingly beautiful) woman whose favorite books list was… more than a bit heavy on Austrian economics. Had an extended discussion in which all I was arguing for was “niceness, community, and civilization” rather than liberalism per se, and I still got branded a liar for accurately limning the differences in perspective that underlie conservative-liberal political fights.
I don’t think even the intersectionalists claim that racism is quite the same thing as sexism.
It seems like “yes” answers to that question would fall into two clusters:
“Yes, POC can be racist. They can be racist against white people!”
“Yes, POC can be racist. Just as gay people can have internalized homophobia and oppressed proletarians can nonetheless defend capitalism, POC can perpetuate racism.”
Also POC can be and often are racist against other types of POC. There’s a stereotype, for example, that blacks and Asians don’t get along.
Not exactly a stereotype. 45% of property damage during the Rodney King riots was in Koreatown.
Stereotypes exist for a reason.
Yes indeed, but stereotypes are *called* “stereotypes” to deny that very reason.
I mentioned the last time stereotypes came up on SSC that it’s not that hard to come up with previously ubiquitous stereotypes that have been proven false. Rather than rehash those examples, I’ll give one current one:
“The LW/SSC community is a bunch of autistic people.”
Are any of you wiling to dispute either that a)this stereotype exists or b)a member of the community chosen at random will not be autistic with p > 0.5 ?
here’s what matthew said last time, for anyone who thinks he’s capable of producing interesting examples.
I found those examples to be interesting enough.
Are any of you wiling to dispute either that a)this stereotype exists or b)a member of the community chosen at random will not be autistic with p > 0.5 ?
True, but the percentage of Autistic people in this community is undoubtedly far greater than average. (I’m probably mildly Autistic myself). So the stereotype undoubtedly has a degree of truth to it.
Except that property damage stopped quickly when the Korean shopkeepers started defending their stores with guns. and look what happened to two supposed red groups, blacks and Hispanics, in Treyvon Martin, when the Hispanic Zimmerman got turned into a white Hispanic, so he was safe to hate. And Jews are mostly blue, but blacks and Jews don’t get along that well.
>Stereotypes exist for a reason.
What a trivial statement. Of course things exist for reasons.
Could you be a bit more precise?
@Matthew
“a member of the community chosen at random will not be autistic with p > 0.5 ?”
What does this mean? Less than 5% of LWers are autistic?
@anonymous:
>>Stereotypes exist for a reason.
>What a trivial statement. Of course things exist for reasons.
>Could you be a bit more precise?
When “a person” said there was a stereotype that blacks and Asians don’t get along, RFC said “Not exactly a stereotype. 45% of property damage during the Rodney King riots was in Koreatown.”
In other words, it’s not a stereotype… because there is some truth to it? I found that strange. There usually is (or was) some truth to a stereotype, that’s why it becomes a stereotype in the first place.
@RCF
P > 0.5, not P >0.05. In other words, a majority are not autistic.
“Yes, POC can be racist. Just as gay people can have internalized homophobia and oppressed proletarians can nonetheless defend capitalism, POC can perpetuate racism.”
This justification confuses me. Do they think that white people somehow created racial prejudice?
Short answer: yes. There’s an idea floating around in SJW circles that racism (in the sense of institutionalized systems of oppression linked to phenotype blah blah blah words) is basically a product of rationalizations surrounding European colonialism of the 17th to 19th centuries.
As far as I can tell it’s not totally wrong, though it’s pretty US-centric — the idea of there being three (later four) Races of Man each with its own traits is of course much older (see: sons of Noah), but the caste associations we now see in the US can be traced to 18th and 19th-century America, with an inflection point during the cultural realignments following the Civil War. That being said, the simpler and IMO much more central sense of “racism” as “ethnic prejudice, full stop” shows up in all times and places, and among all peoples I know anything about.
The justification is that racism is the institutionalized system of prejudice against a minority race. Since white men are the ones in power, females cant be sexists and poc cant be racist.
I dont agree with it, but that is where sjw s are coming from.
Yes, and it is even defensible: race is a grouping of ethnies. Which group of people traveled so much around the world to feel the need to group European ethnies into a white category, African ones into a black one etc. ? My bet would be the British.
The whole idea is hardly even known in Eastern Europe for example, when a Serb looks at a Croat the last thing he would ever think is “hello, fellow white person”. Here this grouping was unnecessary, because they just did not travel much, so they could just work on the ethnic level.
Ok, that’s the second time I’m catching a West Coast-centric phenomenon. Ask a bunch of New England liberals some time how they feel about the media associating “real America” with the conservative parts of the Midwest and the South.
Well, it wouldn’t be West Coast, would it, for Scott? But I do think you’re right that he is probably over-generalizing a bit from some kind of local characteristics of the blue team people he’s personally associated with. On the other hand, I found the data on how people are more biased on the basis of party than race to be fascinating, and very much worth further thought.
As a blue with feet of Texas red who calls herself a “citizen of the world” (and voted for one for president), I’m kind of pleased when reds who feel “intensely patriotic” about America* say I’m not a “real American”.
Perhaps the key is ‘patriotism’, which I think of as othering: contrasting one’s native country with all other countries every day in every way, to their discredit. Iirc New England c. 1776 othered themselves from old England, with excellent results: our own (brilliant) Constitution etc. But now that England is who we have a special relationship with, I haven’t seen many N.E. blues othering other current countries in the same way that the people who call themselves “real Americans” do.
When blues judge the US Constitution and similar things as the best in the world by blue standards, they don’t call it patriotism, sfiak. It’s not good simply because it’s American, it’s good by world standards, for objective reasons.
* ‘America’ as in the United States of. Other nations in this hemisphere need not apply it to themselves.
Forget the “Muslims in general” part, but as for Usama — I really think you’d get a different impression if you sampled more of the (overwhelmingly Blue Tribe) New York City and Washington D.C. and less of California.
Yeah. I’m a native New Yorker. The towers were apart of my life experience growing up in NYC until I left to join the military; I took field trips in elementary school to the WTC. Some members of my family work(ed) within 3 or 4 blocks of the WTC on 9/11.
I was pretty glad when bin Laden was killed. I actually don’t think I would feel that way for any Red Tribe people, like how many Blue Tribe people were happy about Thatcher’s passing. Even though I check off every marker of Blue Tribe description (well, except for eating arugula and drinking fancy bottled water… though I probably make up for that by listening to some of the whitest music possible) according to Scott’s definition.
I literally worked for the blue team (the DNC), and I felt good about that death (though I feel guilty about that feeling). Also felt slightly sad about Thatcher.
Yes. For example, Jon Stewart’s unabashed glee on the first Daily Show episode after Osama’s execution.
I agree with the sentiment here vis-a-vis “Blue Tribe” in NYC vs CA. However, I don’t think it detracts from his main point. You could consider the NYC Blue Tribe vs CA Blue Tribe divide as essentially sub-tribes. They are in general members of the same main tribe, but have subtle differences.
Members of one subgroup may feel that the other subgroup are somewhat less-pure, but, hey, they’re not Red. The Bed/Blue divide being as wide as it is, serves to allow some deviation from purity in the main groups, because the divide is so much larger than internecine differences.
Incidentally, you can see a similar internecine divide on the Blue side between Labor and Tech. On the Red side you can see differences between, say Mormons and Southern Baptists. They don’t really like each other, but recognize that they’re both Red – so if a Blue shows up, they’ll be on the same side.
This is a real phenomenon which I’ve observed as well.
Which leads me to the question: what conditions cause this dynamic to happen, rather than what Scott devotes the post to, in which the people who are just a bit unlike you are the hated outgroup and the people who are very unlike you are the “meh” people? That is clearly also a real phenomenon.
I think a lot of it is to do with the degree of danger that groups perceive themselves to be in from outer-outgroups. i.e. if a rogue paperclipper attacked the US, I think democrats and republicans would stop arguing about abortion and obamacare and start kicking paperclip ass, while if all republicans disappeared overnight, the grand democratic coalition would probably fracture within a couple of days.
I think it’s frustration. Especially if you aren’t in danger from the outgroup, they’re people whose premises and intuitions are so different from yours that there’s no point in talking to them, while the people who are more or less similar to you are *infuriating*. If they’d just agree with you completely, they’d be just great allies, but they persist in being wrong for no good reason.
Some things I noticed about my friends, regarding Osama and Margaret Thatcher:
– Some members of the Blue Tribe cheered when Margaret Thatcher died. All of these people were (1) male and (2) not originally from the Bay Area.
– Some members of the Blue Tribe tribe were upset that people cheered when Osama Bin Laden died. All of these people were (1) female and (2) born and raised in the Bay Area.
And, by definition, there was no overlap between the two groups.
I can imagine various reasons for that patterns (1) and (2) held, but they would be baseless speculation, so instead I’ll just point out that there may less hypocrisy here than there superficially appears to be, and more differences among tribal subgroups.
Another big red divide at the moment is between tea party and non tea party, or between libertarian conservatives and religious conservatives. All would consider themselves conservatives, and all would intensly dislike leftists and liberals, but they also have some pretty big arguments with each other.
It is notable that, in the famous Robber’s Cave experiment (Where boys on summer camp were randomly divided into 2 groups and everything went quite Lord of The Flies (the text’s acuracy or lack thereof notwithstanding) spontaneously.), The groups readily put aside their differences to fix a water tank, IIRC supposedly vandalised (introducing an external threat).
Tolerance is, indeed, a pretty stupid thing to value. Tolerate what is tolerable and intolerate what is intolerable.
The class markers in this conception (however popular it is) are the complete opposite of reality. It might describe urban vs. rural whites, which I guess is what you’re trying to get at.
Of course you shouldn’t tolerate the “intolerable” What I would advocate is trying to expand one’s definition of tolerable. Spending one’s effort in a fight, either political or a literal war, is not usually a good way to increase utility. There is always an extremely high chance you are on the wrong side of the conflict and are accidentally making things worse. At equilibrium half the resources are being spent on the evil team.
A much better strategy is to try to make things marginally better. This requires tolerating alot of horrible situations. For example I think everyone for jail on drug charges is a victim of prolonged kidnapping and depending on conditions torture. What good option do I have but to tolerate this horror and the many people I know who support it. Yelling at the vast majority of people that they are supporting a horrific tragedy doesn’t help anyone.
There is also the historical angle. In many cases things that seemed intolerable (heresy, witchcraft, etc) were in fact very tolerable. I am not suggesting non resistance to evil. But I am suggesting being very open minded.
Is tolerance merely an observational quality? A synonym for forbearance. Do you tolerate things on the assumption that inaction may resolve the problem or reveal a solution? It seems to me that people only genuinely tolerate things that could be potentially dangerous but then switch to attack mode when their suspicions are confirmed/ feel validated for their prudence when they aren’t.
As I am understanding things the opposite of tolerating something is trying to change it. This is dangerous and difficult. Trying to change other people’s behavior always has high costs (summed over you, the people you are trying to change and any bystanders who get involved). Your efforts will frequently fail or cause unindented conseuqences that make things worse. On top of this the prior probability that you are the wrong one is close to 50%.
In many cases I might change things if I had an effective method. And I was suffiently confident my changes were good despite my brain running on defective hardware (as elizier puts it). But I usually I do not. What I usually can do to help people is make them more comfortable, even if I should not try to fix serious problems.
To which “class markers” are you referring? (I don’t understand your comment)
I was confused as well. My guess is that they were suggesting that conservatives are actually rich and progressives are poor, despite what the lines about arugula and bottled water would tell you about their incomes. But that doesn’t sound quite right.
Well, a lot of poor people are progressive, and quite a few rich people are conservative. The problem is that liberal/conservative isn’t a single sliding scale, and “the poor” and “the rich” aren’t unified groups.
It’s worth noting that the “red/blue” divide is significantly geographical in basis. First, it’s strongly an urban (and suburban) / rural divide. Here’s a test: if you walk out your door to the street and look around, do you see any farms? If you can, you’re probably red, if you can’t, you’re probably blue.
In America, this IS a class divide: rural is a different social class than urban.
(Secondly, of course, it has a strong north-south component.)
I, (not being American), was rather surprised that it was the Republicans as opposed to the Democrats who were instrumental in the emancipation of the slaves.
There was a pretty massive shift in the 1950s and 1960s when northern Democrats starting supporting the civil rights movement (among other things). This alienated the conservative Southern Democrats, who defected to the Republican party (making it more conservative in the process).
Edit to say: I think this is a very good illustration of Blue/Democrat/Liberal and Red/Republican/Conservative not perfectly mapping, tribe-wise.
No there wasn’t. Carter won the South in 1976, and Reagan did worse in the South in 1980 than his national average.
@Will Best: The transition of white Southern voters from “always vote D” to “always vote R” didn’t happen overnight. 1976 and 1980 were, essentially, “transition elections”. 1984’s hard to say ’cause Reagan won so big, but Reagan got higher percentages than his nation-wide percentage in all “Southern” states except TN and WV. Bush improved on that in 1988, getting higher-than-nationwide in all Southern states but WV. By the time Clinton won in 1992 (winning only 4 Southern states), the transition was pretty much complete.
I’ve seen a lot of people claim that they won’t ‘tolerate intolerance’ or something to that effect. It’s a good slogan. But what, specifically, does this entail?
Blue team can’t really impose any sort of strong social penalty, for exactly the reasons Scott lays out in his post. The worlds are just too separate for that to sting.
Blue team people could block Red Team on Twitter or something. But that’s perfectly tolerant. So is engaging in a debate.
So, what options left to express this intolerance and differentiate it from grudgingly (or even angrily) tolerating the existence of the other side?
“I’ve seen a lot of people claim that they won’t ‘tolerate intolerance’ or something to that effect. It’s a good slogan. But what, specifically, does this entail?”
Being “intolerant of intolerance” is a cached defence people use to defend against charges of hypocrisy when they both try to claim moral superiority for being tolerant (of their allies) and try to viciously destroy their enemies, often using the exact same tactics that they would denounce as intolerant if used against their allies.
“Blue team can’t really impose any sort of strong social penalty, for exactly the reasons Scott lays out in his post. The worlds are just too separate for that to sting.”
They really can. Just look at all the periodic controversies when the SJW’s unite to try to get some person fired for some random tweet or something.
Sometimes “intolerance” is just a code word for “my enemies”. (Well, they don’t like the same things as I do, right?) So being “intolerant of intolerance” is pretty much what everyone does by default.
Only when you look at details, different people differ in their selection of which kinds of intolerance they realy hate (outgroups intolerant to ingroups), and which kinds of intolerance are okay or even useful for some greater good (ingroups intolerant to outgroups).
It’s a terrible slogan, is my point, I think, which is why it only gets employed sotto voice, by conservatives. Any Blueteamer who uses it unironically deserves the mockery she gets; it’s a blatant contradiction.
Actually specifying what sort of tolerance you’re talking about makes this problem go away. Making a principle of killing people who kill people leads to problems in a way that a principle of killing people who kill children does not, &c. “You’re not tolerant of my beliefs” is exactly as dumb as response as “how can you be pro-life and pro-death???”
(In practice I would recommend being tolerant of most things, getting cut off in traffic, etc., at least as an individual-level strategy for hedons. This leads to collective action problems which virtue-signaling helps to solve.)
Nonsense. I have myself seen people who post the most vile stereotypes of right-wingers, starting with rednecks, and then loftily return that it’s not intolerance to point out that these groups really are horrible.
Indeed, I knew one who maintained, repeatedly, that he had meet Southerners and therefore could call them all hate-mongering racist monsters because it’s based on experience.
It’s /very/ widely used, to the point where I’ve seen a fairly large site where that chain of logic went generally unquestioned by the moderation team. ((Not singling out the site or its moderators, who, my personal dislike aside, at least try to do a somewhat decent job. Just a large, generally-liberal example that I’d followed.))
Wow, that’s a horrible use of logic on that site. It’s okay to fire anyone who demands equal rights for men, because we support equal rights for women and won’t tolerate any incompatible ideas.
Welcome to the tech industry in 2014.
Yes, equal rights for women are incompatible with equal rights for men. Nobody has any illusions about what we mean when we say “equal rights”. “Equal” is another way of saying “fair” which is another way of saying “just” which is another way of saying “give me stuff”.
When Martin Luther King Jr. said he wanted his children judged by the “content of their character” he meant he wanted them judged by the color of their skin, but positively. I think everyone would agree that black skin contains a lot more character than white skin.
Poster “dublin” is annoying and is banned. They have the same IP as a much less annoying poster. I will give the other poster the benefit of the doubt for now, but if there is another annoying person with the same IP I will stop giving them the benefit of the doubt and IP ban as well.
And, of course, there are the libertarians/Greys who fear and loathe the Left (although often point out that the Right are often bigoted too).
The only thing left to work out is which ideology is used to justify intolerance of the Grey/libertarians.
>Blue team people could block Red Team on Twitter or something. But that’s perfectly tolerant.
Eh? How so?
Red Team blocking gays and Muslims from Twitter doesn’t strike me as “perfectly tolerant”. Everyone blocking, (say) pedophiles isn’t “tolerating pedophilia” – quite the opposite.
It seems to me that blocking Red Team on Twitter is indeed a form of refusing to tolerate them. As would Red Team blocking Blue Team on Twitter.
One way blue people could really express tolerance for red people would be in cases where red people try to enter blue turf, the biggest example being academia, which as this author said is almost 90% blue. How about trying to find conservative students and scholars, and sponsoring them for academic positions. How about encouraging conservative speakers to appear on campus, or looking for conservative schoolteachers or text books. That would definitely be expressing viewpoint tolerance.
it would be silly to trust this part of the post very much.
Scott: “I never interact with Reds.”
Scott: *lists the qualities of reds*
I very rarely interact with reds, outside of my family. But that’s a small sample so I don’t really know what reds are like either.
But even aside from not describing my family at all, I just have no reason to trust a description of Reds given by Scott. Where could his knowledge of them come from?
Wherever his knowledge of Reds comes from, it matches my firsthand experience with them.