I find it strange that people get so irate over the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack.
You strike me as being incredibly charitable towards aa, and more to the point, incredibly uncharitable towards the people who are getting irate.
If you think I’m one of those people, I’d like to make it very clear that I do not think those particular suggestions are bad, and that is not what I’m irate about.
(Actually, I don’t think I was getting irate at aa or his posts. I’m getting irate at you, however.)
Can you really not see the difference between “if your child lacks interpersonal skills, you should help them develop them” and “if girls don’t find your son sexually attractive, he needs some kind of intervention to correct that right away”? Or do you just expect everyone to make the mental effort to read the latter as the former, regardless of the history of the person speaking?
I may be being uncharitable towards you right now, but I really have no conception of how you could be genuinely confused here.
Also, relevant to the thread: I have now been karma-bombed. (Not my most recent few comments, but ~15 of my comments in a row have suddenly been downvoted.)
incredibly uncharitable towards the people who are getting irate.
In general I’m not that sympathetic to people who feel entitled to charity from me, and get irate if they don’t get it.
Can you really not see the difference between “if your child lacks interpersonal skills, you should help them develop them” and “if girls don’t find your son sexually attractive, he needs some kind of intervention to correct that right away”?
I see lots of differences. Instead of me playing detective on the particulars of just what you find so offensive, could you just say it?
I may be being uncharitable towards you right now, but I really have no conception of how you could be genuinely confused here.
I have my theories, but much prefer not to shadow box with my own theories of someone else’s theories. Spell it out, and then we can both see how much and how we agree or disagree.
Or do you just expect everyone to make the mental effort to read the latter as the former, regardless of the history of the person speaking?
What I expect and what I recommend are different things. I recommend that when people read, they try to see what value they can extract from what they read.
If they’re spoiling for a fight against someone with a history, they should pick the battles where they have the clear upper hand based on the text as given. Arguing against supposed dog whistles either leaves you missing the point, or it plays right into any dog whistler’s hands, making you look like a putz to third parties. If he says horrific things, wait for when he does, then shit hammer him.
I recall a similar conversation with a guy I follow on youtube. He had a video attacking someone, which, given enough context, his attack made some sense, because his target was dog whistling up a storm. But I think to third parties, he ended up looking like a bozo, arguing against statements that were perfectly innocuous to the average reader. It’s a loser of a tactic, even when you’re right about the dog whistles. Especially when you’re right about the dog whistles.
I complained that you were uncharitably misrepresenting my position. You say I’m not entitled to charity, but your representation of my position doesn’t come close to anything I ever said. This isn’t merely you not-being-charitable, this is you being either actively uncharitable, or arguing against imagined dog whistles, or something that isn’t engaging with either what I said or what I meant.
(You may say that you never mentioned me, and that’s so. But if you weren’t including me in “people get so irate”, who specifically did you mean?)
I’m not here looking for a fight with aa. I mostly just ignore him. I replied to you, when you said “this seems like good advice”, and I said that the advice you had taken from aa’s post was a much weaker version of what he had actually said, and that aa’s history makes me disinclined to engage with him.
You’re telling me that I should attack aa based on the text he actually wrote, but you’re the one who turned “if girls don’t find your son sexually attractive, he needs some kind of intervention to correct that right away” into “if your child lacks interpersonal skills, you should help them develop them”.
When you say “I find it strange that...”, I want to know if you actually do find it strange. I don’t think it matters what differences I see in the two statements. Suppose it turns out that actually, aa’s advice-as-written is sensible and he was right all along and I’m wrong. Fine. Nevertheless, right now I think his advice-as-written is bad, and you’re telling us that advice he didn’t write is good, and I want to know if you can tell the difference between what he did and didn’t write. You don’t need to see the same differences as I do, you just need to be able to see enough differences that you understand why people might be okay with one and not the other.
Do you actually think that people are getting irate at “the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack”? Because if so, I claim that you are just flat out wrong. That is not what aa suggested, and it’s not what people are getting irate about.
(I don’t want to say exactly what it is that I don’t like about aa’s advice-as-written. I don’t want to put in the time to do it justice, I don’t want to write a not-quite-right version and open myself up to nitpicking, I don’t think it’s a productive avenue of discussion right now, and I’m not convinced that you aren’t just asking as a distraction. This is a can of worms that I decline to open.)
And actually, when I say “I want to know”, that’s a rhetorical flourish. I don’t really care. What I started this post trying to say was: I think you’re being (perhaps deliberately) obtuse, and I don’t think I want to continue engaging with you on this. I’ve put more time and emotional energy into this discussion than I care to admit, and I don’t think it’s paying off. There are probably things you can say in reply that would change my mind, but by default, I’m done here.
Dog-whistle politics: saying things that some subset of your audience will recognize as having a meaning special to their tribe (and of which they approve) but that go straight over the heads of the rest of your audience (which perhaps would be displeased if they noticed you paying special attention to that subset, or if they understood what you were saying to them).
Yes, I noticed that too. It seems to happen most frequently to me shortly after getting into political discussions (in a broad sense that includes e.g. questions of race and gender). The obvious hypotheses are (1) the quality of my comments goes way down when I post about politics, (2) there are trigger-happy downvoters out there of various political leanings, and (3) there are, more specifically, trigger-happy downvoters whose political leanings are opposed to mine. #1 might be true but (as you remark) the downvoting seems to be quite indiscriminate and to affect comments I can see no reasonable objection to. #2 and #3 are both fairly plausible but the clearest-but particular cases of mass-downvoting we’ve had happen to be from a neoreactionary, favouring #3. (And of course my political opponents are, as such, Objectively Evil and therefore that’s just the sort of thing they would do.)
My policy when I notice this sort of thing is to post more. Posting a comment has positive expected karma for me even when I’m being mass-downvoted, and my interpretation of mass-downvoting is that it’s meant to be intimidatory; for those who can afford it, the best response to attempted intimidation is to refuse to be intimidated.
For what it’s worth, I think those comments of yours were probably downvoted “honestly”—by which I mean not that I agree with the downvoters, but that I think each comment was downvoted by someone who specifically didn’t like that comment, rather than by someone who disliked something else you’d written and wanted to punish you harder than they could by downvoting just the thing they didn’t like.
(I do have the impression—to which your examples are relevant—that left-leaning comments get downvoted by right-leaning users here more often than the other way around, even though we have rather more left-leaning than right-leaning users. I don’t trust that impression very much since it’s easy to see how it could be wrong.)
Frequency is variable. Every few months, perhaps. I haven’t noticed multiple people (or sockpuppets) doing it concurrently—each downvoted comment just gets −1.
This is the theory. In reality, it’s mostly ideological opponents who accuse the speaker of using dog-whistles, whereas supporters understand the words at face values, which is precisely the opposite of what the theory would predict. So, for example, Democrats often say that Republican policies to restrain welfare spending are racist dog-whistles—but how would they know? Surely the very theory of dog-whistles should predict that Democrats wouldn’t recognise that these are racist claims. Whereas Republicans swear up and down that they really do believe in low government spending and not rewarding sloth. In the end, if you can hear the dog-whistle, you are the dog.
I think the real meaning of “dog-whistle politics” is trying to ascribe an unpleasant secret meaning to your ideological opponents’ straightforward positions, and therefore avoid the unpleasant task of having to consider whether their ideas may have merit.
For the avoidance of doubt, I was not endorsing any claim that anyone is dog-whistling, I was explaining what the term means. Having said which:
supporters understand the words at face value
I don’t think we know this is true. (It may be true that supporters generally say they understand the words at face value, but since dog-whistling accusations often concern things one is Not Supposed To Say it wouldn’t be surprising if supporters claim to take the words at face value even if they hear the whistling loud and clear.)
the very theory of dog-whistles should predict that Democrats wouldn’t recognise that these are racist claims
No, I don’t think that’s the claim—I think you’re taking the metaphor too literally. What it predicts is that these claims should have an innocent face-value meaning but also be understandable by their intended audience as saying something else that the speaker doesn’t want to say explicitly; that’s all.
I think the real meaning [...] is [...]
I think it is most likely that (1) it sometimes does happen that politicians and others say things intended to convey a message to some listeners while, at least, maintaining plausible deniability and/or avoiding overt offence to others, and (2) it sometimes does happen that politicians and others get accused of doing this when in fact they had no such intention. Because both of those seem like things that would obviously often serve the purposes of the people in question, and I can’t see what would stop them happening.
(In some cases the speaker may expect the implicit meaning to be clearly understood by both supporters and opponents, but just want to avoid saying something dangerous too explicitly. Maybe those cases shouldn’t be categorized as dog-whistling, but I think there’s a continuum from there to the cases where the message is intended not to be heard by everyone.)
When you say “In reality” and “the real meaning [...] is”, are you claiming that the phenomenon described on (e.g.) that Wikipedia page never, or scarcely ever, actually happens? To take a couple of prominent examples, would you really want to claim that
or that they don’t also intend “family values” to sound more warm-and-fuzzy-and-positive than, say, “opposition to same-sex marriage, treating transgender people as belonging to whatever gender they were assigned at birth, opposition to abortion”, and all the other specific things that actually distinguish those organizations dedicated to “family” and “values” from their ideological opponents?
during the US Democratic primaries in 2008, nothing Hillary Clinton’s campaign said and did was intended to highlight Barack Obama’s race in ways that would make him less appealing to white voters, and nothing Obama’s campaign said and did was intended to highlight his race in ways that would make him more appealing to black voters?
OK, that’s fair. It’s possible that the sympathetic hear the alleged dog-whistle but deny it, although I still think our default assumption should be to believe the supporters unless we have specific evidence otherwise. But we are still left with the puzzle of why opponents can hear the allegedly inaudible whistle.
What it predicts is that these claims should have an innocent face-value meaning but also be understandable by their intended audience as saying something else that the speaker doesn’t want to say explicitly; that’s all.
No. Let’s look at what wikipedia says:
Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup.
You’re now trying to water down dog-whistling to a mere ‘plausible deniablity.’ These are two distinct theories:
When I say ‘aqueducts are bad’ most people think I’m arguing about the government’s aqueduct-building. But members of the Anti-Bristol Society understand this to mean that I really want to persecute Bristolians, and so will vote for me. (Dog-whistling).
When I say ‘aqueducts are bad’ everyone understands that I really mean that I want to persecute Bristolians, and that I’m reaching out to the Anti-Bristol Society. But because I didn’t say I want to persecute Bristolians, I have just enough plausible deniability to not get thrown out of polite society. (Plausible deniability).
Note that these two ideas are essentially opposites.
When you say “In reality” and “the real meaning [...] is”, are you claiming that the phenomenon described on (e.g.) that Wikipedia page never, or scarcely ever, actually happens?
Scarcely ever. Consider the example from the UK—how on earth is that dog-whistling? Both the Conservative manifesto at the last election and the official policy of the Coalition government explicitly state the goal of limiting immigration. These policies have been criticised as, inter alia, racist. So they run adverts arguing that “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration.” Where’s the dog whistle? Isn’t the simpler story that they’re trying to defend their stated policies? If this is a dog-whistle, what is the content of the dog-whistle, over and above their policies? What’s the payoff? It doesn’t really make sense.
Regarding your specific examples:
I have no idea how those specific organisations, with which I have no particular familiarity, react to an individual phrase.
Republicans certainly intend “family values” to sound more warm-and-fuzzy and positive than “heteronormativity.” But there is a world of difference between using the most positive language to describe your own position and the most negative to describe the opposition (pro-choice vs pro-death, death tax vs estate tax, Obamacare vs Affordable Care Act, etc) and dog-whistling, or even plausible deniability. Social conservatives are not hiding anything by saying they favour “family values.” They are perfectly willing to defend each and every one of the policy planks, but they want one phrase to sum it all up.
I’ll never be able to prove that nothing they did was intended like that. But I certainly don’t believe that the most-remarked-on incident (Bill Clinton comparing Obama’s win in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson’s win in the South Carolina primary) was in any way a dog-whistle, and I certainly do believe that what really happened there was that an innocuous comment was seized upon by people as a stick with which to beat Clinton, with the convenient excuse that the very innocuousness of the comment is the evidence for its malignity, because the evil is somehow hidden.
You’re now trying to water down dog-whistling to a mere ‘plausible deniability’
Actually, I said a couple of paragraphs later: “Maybe those cases shouldn’t be categorized as dog-whistling, but I think there’s a continuum from there to the cases where the message is intended not to be heard by everyone.” I disagree with your statement that these cases “are essentially opposites”; they have in common (1) an innocuous face-value meaning and (2) a less-innocuous meaning intended to appeal to a subset of the audience. In cases of either type I would expect the speaker to prefer the less-innocuous meaning not to be apparent to most listeners. The only difference is in how hard they’ve tried to achieve that, and with what success.
(And if a politician is sending not-too-explicit messages of affiliation to people whose views I detest, actually I don’t care all that much how hard he’s trying to have me not notice.)
we are still left with the puzzle of why opponents can hear the allegedly inaudible whistle.
Leaving aside (since I agree that it’s doubtful that they should be classified as dog-whistling, though I disagree that they’re “essentially opposite”) cases where the goal is merely plausible deniability: this is puzzling only if opponents in general can easily hear it, but I think what’s being claimed by those who claim to discover “dog-whistling” is that they’ve noticed someone sending messages that are clearly audible to (whoever) but discernible by the rest of the population only when they listen extra-carefully, have inside information, etc. (Of course once it’s been pointed out, the inside information is more widely available and people are prepared to listen more carefully—so fairly soon after an alleged dog-whistle is publicized it becomes less dog-whistle-y. If someone says now what Reagan said earlier about welfare abusers, their political opponents would notice instantly and flood them with accusations of covert racism; but when Reagan actually said those things before, they weren’t immediately seen that way. Note that I am making no comment here about whether he actually was dog-whistling, just pointing out that what’s relevant is how the comments were perceived before the fuss about dog-whistling began.)
Consider the example from the UK
An advertisement saying “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration” isn’t dog-whistling, and I don’t think anyone claims it is. (Some people might claim it’s lying, but that’s a different accusation entirely.) But if there are a lot of people around who are (but wouldn’t admit that they are) anti-immigration because they don’t want more black people in the UK, then vocal opposition to immigration may convey to those people the message “we prefer white people too”, and some of what a political party says about immigration may be designed to help the racists feel that way.
Whether any of what the Conservatives say about immigration would rightly be classified that way, I don’t know. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to what they’ve said about immigration. (I’m pretty sure they’re happy enough to get a slice of the racist vote, but that on its own isn’t dog-whistling.)
The payoff, if they are deliberately courting the racist vote, would be that racists in the UK feel that the Conservatives aren’t merely cautious about immigration in general but will pursue policies that tend to keep black people out of the UK (that would be the content of the dog-whistle over and above their explicit policies), and accordingly are more inclined to vote for them rather than turning to (say) the BNP or UKIP than they would have been without that reassurance.
“family values”
It seems likely to me that at least some social conservatives some of the time are intending this to suggest more than they would be happy defending explicitly—e.g., a willingness to get Roe v Wade overturned if it looks politically feasible, or to obstruct the teaching of evolution as fact in school science lessons, or to restrict the rights of same-sex couples.
(Imagine that you are a socially conservative politician. A substantial fraction of the votes you get are going to come from conservative Christians. If you have a choice of two ways to express yourself, no different in their explicit commitments, little different in their impact on people who will be voting against you anyway—but one of them makes it that bit more likely that your conservative Christian listeners will see you as one of them and turn out to vote for you … wouldn’t you be inclined to choose that one? And isn’t that exactly what’s meant by “dog-whistling”?)
An advertisement saying “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration” isn’t dog-whistling, and I don’t think anyone claims it is.
Yet according to the Wikipedia article you linked, that was claimed to be “the classic case of dog-whistling.” So I find this discussion frustrating because you don’t seem willing to come to terms with how the phrase is actually used.
What the page says was called the classic case of dog-whistling is a whole advertising campaign.
I checked what Goodin’s book (cited at that point in the Wikipedia article) actually says. It doesn’t reference any specific advertisements in the campaign, and in particular doesn’t describe the specific one you picked out as dog-whistling. It does, however, say this:
The fact that the practice is noticed, that it has acquired a name and a bad press, suggests that the message is not literally inaudible to others beyond its intended target. They have noticed it. And by identifying the trick and giving it a name, they have (after a fashion) worked out a way around it.
all of which seems to be in line with what I’ve been saying.
[EDITED to fix a spelling and add: I don’t have a copy of Goodin’s book; I checked it using Amazon’s “look inside” feature. This means that while I was able to look up the bit quoted in Wikipedia and the bit I quoted above, I couldn’t see the whole chapter. I did, however, search for “not racist” (two key words from the specific advertisement you mentioned) and get no hits, which I think genuinely means they don’t appear—it searches the whole book even though it will only show you a small fraction.]
Surely the very theory of dog-whistles should predict that Democrats wouldn’t recognise that these are racist claims.
That shows that they wouldn’t recognize a well done dog-whistle, but they may still recognize a poorly done one where the Republicans attempt to make it something only racists understand, but do not succeed at doing so.
I think the real meaning of “dog-whistle politics” is trying to ascribe an unpleasant secret meaning to your ideological opponents’ straightforward positions
You describe the flip side of dog whistle politics, which are false accusations of dog whistle politics. I think both happen.
Sometimes the accusations are justified, but it is an extremely poisonous tactic to the discussion, and even to your own thinking. It’s easy to project secret evil intent where you already have some fundamental disagreement with a person, and it relieves you of actually having to confront the argument as given. “He really means...”
As I noted before, in forums like these, where people come in and out of threads, and haven’t read all that goes on, I think the accusations are an extra loser, as you just end up looking like a putz, objecting to the unobjectionable.
Argue against posts as given.
if you can hear the dog-whistle, you are the dog
That’s a catchy comeback on the less than perfect metaphor, but not literally true. Sometimes people really do dog whistle, and sometimes you can hear it even if you’re not the dog (the intended audience).
I find it strange that people get so irate over the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack.
In our society I think there’s a belief that most instances where parents try to interfere with dating choices of their children it doesn’t help.
A lot of liberal minded parents don’t think that attempts by their parents to intervene in their dating lives were positive, so they don’t try to intervene for their children.
The choice to use an abbreviation for AWSS is also worth noting. People with normal social skills usually don’t speak about AWSS. Using language that produces emotional detachment is typical PUA-thing.
In our society I think there’s a belief that most instances where parents try to interfere with dating choices of their children it doesn’t help.
I think people children tend not to want their parents to try to choose their partners, but at least in my social circles, I think it was quite rare for parents to try to impart relationship/dating skills into their children.
People with normal social skills usually don’t speak about AWSS. Using language that produces emotional detachment is typical PUA-thing.
Specialized in group jargon and acronyms show up in a lot of places. One nearby that I can think of.
Specialized in group jargon and acronyms show up in a lot of places.
I’m not criticizing it for being jargon.
A word like “steelmanning” is also jargon. But it’s not in the same category emotional distancing as “AMSS”.
There are also times where intellectual distance is useful. In academia you don’t want emotions to interfere with your reasoning. In the case of PUA, the language allows suppression of approach anxiety. Intellectual distance allows a PUA to run his routine without interferes of his emotions. At the same time prevents real emotional connection to see interactions with the goal of maximizing the amount of k-close, n-closes and f-closes.
In our society I think there’s a belief that most instances where parents try to interfere with dating choices of their children it doesn’t help.
An excellent point, although I think this belief is much more widespread among liberals than conservatives. And I think it’s part of a larger point, which is that liberals seem to be far more negative across the board towards parental involvement in their children’s lives. I vividly remember my own shock and incomprehension when I first encountered this attitude—that young people need to challenge, overturn, or break free from parental authority. I still have to remind myself that some people think like this, because it’s so alien to my understanding of the world. For me it is completely natural that I would want my parents to intervene in my dating life—whether to set me up with someone they considered suitable, to warn me against someone unsuitable, to advise me that I am lacking, or whatever else—because they know me better than anyone else, and they can only have my best interests at heart. Of course I should try and adopt and carry on my parents values as best I can. And so on. I don’t think it’s purely a liberal/conservative thing, but I do think it’s part of it.
Examples: I recently saw this article cited as an example of unfit parenting because they see their kids as “raw materials for their culture cloning project,” and I saw this post heavily upvoted. My reactions were exactly opposite—my reaction was to applaud the Christians’ attempts to pass down their values (although I do not personally share them) and to sigh at what seemed like the narcissism of the Lesswrong poster.
Predictions (Because any theory is worthless if it doesn’t make them): I predict that conservatives would be much more willing than liberals to support statements like “Parents should make sure their sons grow up with manly skills” and “Parents should intervene when they see their children making bad choices in their romantic lives.”
I vividly remember my own shock and incomprehension when I first encountered this attitude—that young people need to challenge, overturn, or break free from parental authority. I still have to remind myself that some people think like this, because it’s so alien to my understanding of the world.
That’s interesting. I come from the entirely opposite side—it’s not really comprehensible to me how and why parents feel the need to run their childrens’ lives past late teens. And here you are, in the bit-flesh :-)
Being an adult is partly about taking responsibility for one’s own life.
The man who talks to a woman because his mother told him to do so, might lack qualities of manly social interaction.
Predictions (Because any theory is worthless if it doesn’t make them): I predict that conservatives would be much more willing than liberals to support statements like “Parents should make sure their sons grow up with manly skills” and “Parents should intervene when they see their children making bad choices in their romantic lives.”
That sounds like good advice too.
I find it strange that people get so irate over the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack.
You strike me as being incredibly charitable towards aa, and more to the point, incredibly uncharitable towards the people who are getting irate.
If you think I’m one of those people, I’d like to make it very clear that I do not think those particular suggestions are bad, and that is not what I’m irate about.
(Actually, I don’t think I was getting irate at aa or his posts. I’m getting irate at you, however.)
Can you really not see the difference between “if your child lacks interpersonal skills, you should help them develop them” and “if girls don’t find your son sexually attractive, he needs some kind of intervention to correct that right away”? Or do you just expect everyone to make the mental effort to read the latter as the former, regardless of the history of the person speaking?
I may be being uncharitable towards you right now, but I really have no conception of how you could be genuinely confused here.
Also, relevant to the thread: I have now been karma-bombed. (Not my most recent few comments, but ~15 of my comments in a row have suddenly been downvoted.)
In general I’m not that sympathetic to people who feel entitled to charity from me, and get irate if they don’t get it.
I see lots of differences. Instead of me playing detective on the particulars of just what you find so offensive, could you just say it?
I have my theories, but much prefer not to shadow box with my own theories of someone else’s theories. Spell it out, and then we can both see how much and how we agree or disagree.
What I expect and what I recommend are different things. I recommend that when people read, they try to see what value they can extract from what they read.
If they’re spoiling for a fight against someone with a history, they should pick the battles where they have the clear upper hand based on the text as given. Arguing against supposed dog whistles either leaves you missing the point, or it plays right into any dog whistler’s hands, making you look like a putz to third parties. If he says horrific things, wait for when he does, then shit hammer him.
I recall a similar conversation with a guy I follow on youtube. He had a video attacking someone, which, given enough context, his attack made some sense, because his target was dog whistling up a storm. But I think to third parties, he ended up looking like a bozo, arguing against statements that were perfectly innocuous to the average reader. It’s a loser of a tactic, even when you’re right about the dog whistles. Especially when you’re right about the dog whistles.
I’m not sure how that’s a reply to me.
I complained that you were uncharitably misrepresenting my position. You say I’m not entitled to charity, but your representation of my position doesn’t come close to anything I ever said. This isn’t merely you not-being-charitable, this is you being either actively uncharitable, or arguing against imagined dog whistles, or something that isn’t engaging with either what I said or what I meant.
(You may say that you never mentioned me, and that’s so. But if you weren’t including me in “people get so irate”, who specifically did you mean?)
I’m not here looking for a fight with aa. I mostly just ignore him. I replied to you, when you said “this seems like good advice”, and I said that the advice you had taken from aa’s post was a much weaker version of what he had actually said, and that aa’s history makes me disinclined to engage with him.
You’re telling me that I should attack aa based on the text he actually wrote, but you’re the one who turned “if girls don’t find your son sexually attractive, he needs some kind of intervention to correct that right away” into “if your child lacks interpersonal skills, you should help them develop them”.
When you say “I find it strange that...”, I want to know if you actually do find it strange. I don’t think it matters what differences I see in the two statements. Suppose it turns out that actually, aa’s advice-as-written is sensible and he was right all along and I’m wrong. Fine. Nevertheless, right now I think his advice-as-written is bad, and you’re telling us that advice he didn’t write is good, and I want to know if you can tell the difference between what he did and didn’t write. You don’t need to see the same differences as I do, you just need to be able to see enough differences that you understand why people might be okay with one and not the other.
Do you actually think that people are getting irate at “the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack”? Because if so, I claim that you are just flat out wrong. That is not what aa suggested, and it’s not what people are getting irate about.
(I don’t want to say exactly what it is that I don’t like about aa’s advice-as-written. I don’t want to put in the time to do it justice, I don’t want to write a not-quite-right version and open myself up to nitpicking, I don’t think it’s a productive avenue of discussion right now, and I’m not convinced that you aren’t just asking as a distraction. This is a can of worms that I decline to open.)
And actually, when I say “I want to know”, that’s a rhetorical flourish. I don’t really care. What I started this post trying to say was: I think you’re being (perhaps deliberately) obtuse, and I don’t think I want to continue engaging with you on this. I’ve put more time and emotional energy into this discussion than I care to admit, and I don’t think it’s paying off. There are probably things you can say in reply that would change my mind, but by default, I’m done here.
You’re irate, but refuse to lay your cards on the table. That’s your prerogative.
Yes, people often don’t want to do that. A less flattering way of phrasing that is that you don’t want to open your opinions to scrutiny.
I’m not shy about my opinions, and I wasn’t going to play psychic detective with yours.
“Dog whistling”?
Dog-whistle politics: saying things that some subset of your audience will recognize as having a meaning special to their tribe (and of which they approve) but that go straight over the heads of the rest of your audience (which perhaps would be displeased if they noticed you paying special attention to that subset, or if they understood what you were saying to them).
I note that you’re downvoted when supplying the definition of a term that was specifically requested.
Not that the downvoter even read your post, as I see a trail of −1s.
Yes, I noticed that too. It seems to happen most frequently to me shortly after getting into political discussions (in a broad sense that includes e.g. questions of race and gender). The obvious hypotheses are (1) the quality of my comments goes way down when I post about politics, (2) there are trigger-happy downvoters out there of various political leanings, and (3) there are, more specifically, trigger-happy downvoters whose political leanings are opposed to mine. #1 might be true but (as you remark) the downvoting seems to be quite indiscriminate and to affect comments I can see no reasonable objection to. #2 and #3 are both fairly plausible but the clearest-but particular cases of mass-downvoting we’ve had happen to be from a neoreactionary, favouring #3. (And of course my political opponents are, as such, Objectively Evil and therefore that’s just the sort of thing they would do.)
My policy when I notice this sort of thing is to post more. Posting a comment has positive expected karma for me even when I’m being mass-downvoted, and my interpretation of mass-downvoting is that it’s meant to be intimidatory; for those who can afford it, the best response to attempted intimidation is to refuse to be intimidated.
I got a −1 for posting in the same discussion here, which suggests 3). I also got a −1 for answering a question that specifically asked to explain criticism, and lost a lot of karma for [trying to defend an opinion which is popular in the outside world but is unpopular here. (I got modded down for most of that, it’s just that several of them were counterbalanced by people moderating up. The last ones did not have anyone moderating them up and left me in the negatives.)
For what it’s worth, I think those comments of yours were probably downvoted “honestly”—by which I mean not that I agree with the downvoters, but that I think each comment was downvoted by someone who specifically didn’t like that comment, rather than by someone who disliked something else you’d written and wanted to punish you harder than they could by downvoting just the thing they didn’t like.
(I do have the impression—to which your examples are relevant—that left-leaning comments get downvoted by right-leaning users here more often than the other way around, even though we have rather more left-leaning than right-leaning users. I don’t trust that impression very much since it’s easy to see how it could be wrong.)
You didn’t defend an opinion. You just stated an opinion.
Does it happen that often? Is it, like in this case, −1? Or more negative tallies?
That’s the spirit!
I post harder. I take downvotes as a sign that there are readers are in need of my gentle tutelage. So many crosses to bear.
Frequency is variable. Every few months, perhaps. I haven’t noticed multiple people (or sockpuppets) doing it concurrently—each downvoted comment just gets −1.
This is the theory. In reality, it’s mostly ideological opponents who accuse the speaker of using dog-whistles, whereas supporters understand the words at face values, which is precisely the opposite of what the theory would predict. So, for example, Democrats often say that Republican policies to restrain welfare spending are racist dog-whistles—but how would they know? Surely the very theory of dog-whistles should predict that Democrats wouldn’t recognise that these are racist claims. Whereas Republicans swear up and down that they really do believe in low government spending and not rewarding sloth. In the end, if you can hear the dog-whistle, you are the dog.
I think the real meaning of “dog-whistle politics” is trying to ascribe an unpleasant secret meaning to your ideological opponents’ straightforward positions, and therefore avoid the unpleasant task of having to consider whether their ideas may have merit.
For the avoidance of doubt, I was not endorsing any claim that anyone is dog-whistling, I was explaining what the term means. Having said which:
I don’t think we know this is true. (It may be true that supporters generally say they understand the words at face value, but since dog-whistling accusations often concern things one is Not Supposed To Say it wouldn’t be surprising if supporters claim to take the words at face value even if they hear the whistling loud and clear.)
No, I don’t think that’s the claim—I think you’re taking the metaphor too literally. What it predicts is that these claims should have an innocent face-value meaning but also be understandable by their intended audience as saying something else that the speaker doesn’t want to say explicitly; that’s all.
I think it is most likely that (1) it sometimes does happen that politicians and others say things intended to convey a message to some listeners while, at least, maintaining plausible deniability and/or avoiding overt offence to others, and (2) it sometimes does happen that politicians and others get accused of doing this when in fact they had no such intention. Because both of those seem like things that would obviously often serve the purposes of the people in question, and I can’t see what would stop them happening.
(In some cases the speaker may expect the implicit meaning to be clearly understood by both supporters and opponents, but just want to avoid saying something dangerous too explicitly. Maybe those cases shouldn’t be categorized as dog-whistling, but I think there’s a continuum from there to the cases where the message is intended not to be heard by everyone.)
When you say “In reality” and “the real meaning [...] is”, are you claiming that the phenomenon described on (e.g.) that Wikipedia page never, or scarcely ever, actually happens? To take a couple of prominent examples, would you really want to claim that
when a US politician speaks of “family values”, they scarcely ever intend this to be understood as (at least) a friendly gesture by, e.g., supporters of organizations like the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, the Family Research Institute, the Traditional Values Coalition, the Values Voter Summit, etc.?
or that they don’t also intend “family values” to sound more warm-and-fuzzy-and-positive than, say, “opposition to same-sex marriage, treating transgender people as belonging to whatever gender they were assigned at birth, opposition to abortion”, and all the other specific things that actually distinguish those organizations dedicated to “family” and “values” from their ideological opponents?
during the US Democratic primaries in 2008, nothing Hillary Clinton’s campaign said and did was intended to highlight Barack Obama’s race in ways that would make him less appealing to white voters, and nothing Obama’s campaign said and did was intended to highlight his race in ways that would make him more appealing to black voters?
OK, that’s fair. It’s possible that the sympathetic hear the alleged dog-whistle but deny it, although I still think our default assumption should be to believe the supporters unless we have specific evidence otherwise. But we are still left with the puzzle of why opponents can hear the allegedly inaudible whistle.
No. Let’s look at what wikipedia says:
You’re now trying to water down dog-whistling to a mere ‘plausible deniablity.’ These are two distinct theories:
When I say ‘aqueducts are bad’ most people think I’m arguing about the government’s aqueduct-building. But members of the Anti-Bristol Society understand this to mean that I really want to persecute Bristolians, and so will vote for me. (Dog-whistling).
When I say ‘aqueducts are bad’ everyone understands that I really mean that I want to persecute Bristolians, and that I’m reaching out to the Anti-Bristol Society. But because I didn’t say I want to persecute Bristolians, I have just enough plausible deniability to not get thrown out of polite society. (Plausible deniability).
Note that these two ideas are essentially opposites.
Scarcely ever. Consider the example from the UK—how on earth is that dog-whistling? Both the Conservative manifesto at the last election and the official policy of the Coalition government explicitly state the goal of limiting immigration. These policies have been criticised as, inter alia, racist. So they run adverts arguing that “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration.” Where’s the dog whistle? Isn’t the simpler story that they’re trying to defend their stated policies? If this is a dog-whistle, what is the content of the dog-whistle, over and above their policies? What’s the payoff? It doesn’t really make sense.
Regarding your specific examples:
I have no idea how those specific organisations, with which I have no particular familiarity, react to an individual phrase.
Republicans certainly intend “family values” to sound more warm-and-fuzzy and positive than “heteronormativity.” But there is a world of difference between using the most positive language to describe your own position and the most negative to describe the opposition (pro-choice vs pro-death, death tax vs estate tax, Obamacare vs Affordable Care Act, etc) and dog-whistling, or even plausible deniability. Social conservatives are not hiding anything by saying they favour “family values.” They are perfectly willing to defend each and every one of the policy planks, but they want one phrase to sum it all up.
I’ll never be able to prove that nothing they did was intended like that. But I certainly don’t believe that the most-remarked-on incident (Bill Clinton comparing Obama’s win in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson’s win in the South Carolina primary) was in any way a dog-whistle, and I certainly do believe that what really happened there was that an innocuous comment was seized upon by people as a stick with which to beat Clinton, with the convenient excuse that the very innocuousness of the comment is the evidence for its malignity, because the evil is somehow hidden.
There’s a continuum between the two forms of equivocation according to the percentage of the out group that can hear the dog whistle.
Actually, I said a couple of paragraphs later: “Maybe those cases shouldn’t be categorized as dog-whistling, but I think there’s a continuum from there to the cases where the message is intended not to be heard by everyone.” I disagree with your statement that these cases “are essentially opposites”; they have in common (1) an innocuous face-value meaning and (2) a less-innocuous meaning intended to appeal to a subset of the audience. In cases of either type I would expect the speaker to prefer the less-innocuous meaning not to be apparent to most listeners. The only difference is in how hard they’ve tried to achieve that, and with what success.
(And if a politician is sending not-too-explicit messages of affiliation to people whose views I detest, actually I don’t care all that much how hard he’s trying to have me not notice.)
Leaving aside (since I agree that it’s doubtful that they should be classified as dog-whistling, though I disagree that they’re “essentially opposite”) cases where the goal is merely plausible deniability: this is puzzling only if opponents in general can easily hear it, but I think what’s being claimed by those who claim to discover “dog-whistling” is that they’ve noticed someone sending messages that are clearly audible to (whoever) but discernible by the rest of the population only when they listen extra-carefully, have inside information, etc. (Of course once it’s been pointed out, the inside information is more widely available and people are prepared to listen more carefully—so fairly soon after an alleged dog-whistle is publicized it becomes less dog-whistle-y. If someone says now what Reagan said earlier about welfare abusers, their political opponents would notice instantly and flood them with accusations of covert racism; but when Reagan actually said those things before, they weren’t immediately seen that way. Note that I am making no comment here about whether he actually was dog-whistling, just pointing out that what’s relevant is how the comments were perceived before the fuss about dog-whistling began.)
An advertisement saying “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration” isn’t dog-whistling, and I don’t think anyone claims it is. (Some people might claim it’s lying, but that’s a different accusation entirely.) But if there are a lot of people around who are (but wouldn’t admit that they are) anti-immigration because they don’t want more black people in the UK, then vocal opposition to immigration may convey to those people the message “we prefer white people too”, and some of what a political party says about immigration may be designed to help the racists feel that way.
Whether any of what the Conservatives say about immigration would rightly be classified that way, I don’t know. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to what they’ve said about immigration. (I’m pretty sure they’re happy enough to get a slice of the racist vote, but that on its own isn’t dog-whistling.)
The payoff, if they are deliberately courting the racist vote, would be that racists in the UK feel that the Conservatives aren’t merely cautious about immigration in general but will pursue policies that tend to keep black people out of the UK (that would be the content of the dog-whistle over and above their explicit policies), and accordingly are more inclined to vote for them rather than turning to (say) the BNP or UKIP than they would have been without that reassurance.
It seems likely to me that at least some social conservatives some of the time are intending this to suggest more than they would be happy defending explicitly—e.g., a willingness to get Roe v Wade overturned if it looks politically feasible, or to obstruct the teaching of evolution as fact in school science lessons, or to restrict the rights of same-sex couples.
(Imagine that you are a socially conservative politician. A substantial fraction of the votes you get are going to come from conservative Christians. If you have a choice of two ways to express yourself, no different in their explicit commitments, little different in their impact on people who will be voting against you anyway—but one of them makes it that bit more likely that your conservative Christian listeners will see you as one of them and turn out to vote for you … wouldn’t you be inclined to choose that one? And isn’t that exactly what’s meant by “dog-whistling”?)
Yet according to the Wikipedia article you linked, that was claimed to be “the classic case of dog-whistling.” So I find this discussion frustrating because you don’t seem willing to come to terms with how the phrase is actually used.
What the page says was called the classic case of dog-whistling is a whole advertising campaign.
I checked what Goodin’s book (cited at that point in the Wikipedia article) actually says. It doesn’t reference any specific advertisements in the campaign, and in particular doesn’t describe the specific one you picked out as dog-whistling. It does, however, say this:
all of which seems to be in line with what I’ve been saying.
[EDITED to fix a spelling and add: I don’t have a copy of Goodin’s book; I checked it using Amazon’s “look inside” feature. This means that while I was able to look up the bit quoted in Wikipedia and the bit I quoted above, I couldn’t see the whole chapter. I did, however, search for “not racist” (two key words from the specific advertisement you mentioned) and get no hits, which I think genuinely means they don’t appear—it searches the whole book even though it will only show you a small fraction.]
That shows that they wouldn’t recognize a well done dog-whistle, but they may still recognize a poorly done one where the Republicans attempt to make it something only racists understand, but do not succeed at doing so.
You describe the flip side of dog whistle politics, which are false accusations of dog whistle politics. I think both happen.
Sometimes the accusations are justified, but it is an extremely poisonous tactic to the discussion, and even to your own thinking. It’s easy to project secret evil intent where you already have some fundamental disagreement with a person, and it relieves you of actually having to confront the argument as given. “He really means...”
As I noted before, in forums like these, where people come in and out of threads, and haven’t read all that goes on, I think the accusations are an extra loser, as you just end up looking like a putz, objecting to the unobjectionable.
Argue against posts as given.
That’s a catchy comeback on the less than perfect metaphor, but not literally true. Sometimes people really do dog whistle, and sometimes you can hear it even if you’re not the dog (the intended audience).
In our society I think there’s a belief that most instances where parents try to interfere with dating choices of their children it doesn’t help.
A lot of liberal minded parents don’t think that attempts by their parents to intervene in their dating lives were positive, so they don’t try to intervene for their children.
The choice to use an abbreviation for AWSS is also worth noting. People with normal social skills usually don’t speak about AWSS. Using language that produces emotional detachment is typical PUA-thing.
I think people children tend not to want their parents to try to choose their partners, but at least in my social circles, I think it was quite rare for parents to try to impart relationship/dating skills into their children.
Specialized in group jargon and acronyms show up in a lot of places. One nearby that I can think of.
I’m not criticizing it for being jargon. A word like “steelmanning” is also jargon. But it’s not in the same category emotional distancing as “AMSS”.
There are also times where intellectual distance is useful. In academia you don’t want emotions to interfere with your reasoning. In the case of PUA, the language allows suppression of approach anxiety. Intellectual distance allows a PUA to run his routine without interferes of his emotions. At the same time prevents real emotional connection to see interactions with the goal of maximizing the amount of k-close, n-closes and f-closes.
An excellent point, although I think this belief is much more widespread among liberals than conservatives. And I think it’s part of a larger point, which is that liberals seem to be far more negative across the board towards parental involvement in their children’s lives. I vividly remember my own shock and incomprehension when I first encountered this attitude—that young people need to challenge, overturn, or break free from parental authority. I still have to remind myself that some people think like this, because it’s so alien to my understanding of the world. For me it is completely natural that I would want my parents to intervene in my dating life—whether to set me up with someone they considered suitable, to warn me against someone unsuitable, to advise me that I am lacking, or whatever else—because they know me better than anyone else, and they can only have my best interests at heart. Of course I should try and adopt and carry on my parents values as best I can. And so on. I don’t think it’s purely a liberal/conservative thing, but I do think it’s part of it.
Examples: I recently saw this article cited as an example of unfit parenting because they see their kids as “raw materials for their culture cloning project,” and I saw this post heavily upvoted. My reactions were exactly opposite—my reaction was to applaud the Christians’ attempts to pass down their values (although I do not personally share them) and to sigh at what seemed like the narcissism of the Lesswrong poster.
Predictions (Because any theory is worthless if it doesn’t make them): I predict that conservatives would be much more willing than liberals to support statements like “Parents should make sure their sons grow up with manly skills” and “Parents should intervene when they see their children making bad choices in their romantic lives.”
That’s interesting. I come from the entirely opposite side—it’s not really comprehensible to me how and why parents feel the need to run their childrens’ lives past late teens. And here you are, in the bit-flesh :-)
Being an adult is partly about taking responsibility for one’s own life. The man who talks to a woman because his mother told him to do so, might lack qualities of manly social interaction.
I agree, that’s likely true.