I was hoping to avoid getting into the definitions debate, but that looks inescapable now. We seem to understand aggression differently.
First, let me point to tension in your position. On the one hand you say that “It seems clear to me that some of the comments VoiceOfRa has made are aggression” and “When he suggests that it’s unreasonable to treat those “delusions or hallucinations” any more generously than those of someone who thinks he’s simultaneously Jesus and John Lennon, that seems pretty aggressive to me.” On the other hand, you strongly deny that the exposition of one’s views (presumably, even on controversial topics) is aggression, saying that “I certainly don’t intend anything of the kind, and I gravely doubt that anyone seriously thinks what you say they do.”
I see problems in this position of yours. You might be able construct a definition of “aggression” which twists and turns enough to accommodate you, but I suspect it will be neither a good nor a robust definition.
For example, you think that considering transsexuals to be mentally ill is “aggression”. Or is it aggression only if you call them crazy (a “needlessly pejorative term”), but if you, following DSM-IV, diagnose them with a Gender Identity Disorder that’s not aggression any more?
I can’t make sense of your position, it does not look consistent to me.
Re women’s IQ:
The case with the lab manager’s resume has a lot of confounding factors (other than IQ) in play. Hiring managers are often more concerned with whether the new hire will get pregnant and go on maternity leave than with IQ, for example. And, well, this is an empirical question, there is a lot of data about the IQ of men and women.
Re LW tilts:
You say that “I think that LW currently leans right” but that critically depends on where you zero point is :-) I suspect that LW actually doesn’t tilt anywhere politically—most people here don’t care (some “naturally” and some explicitly to avoid mindkills). It is not a useful exercise to assign a political tilt to LW—that’s not what this place is about.
Re “Do you think my comments in this thread are stupid?”:
LOL. I have actually been upvoting your comments in this subthread back to zero because we are having a very nice polite conversation and ideological downvotes are not welcome in it (and are quite silly, anyway).
But to be explicit—no, I don’t think so at all. If if did, this conversation wouldn’t exist.
What I strongly disagreed with is the following claim (your description of an allegedly “fashionable approach” which you may or may not have been ascribing to me)
that the exposition of views you don’t agree with constitutes aggression
It sometimes happens that an exposition of some view or other constitutes aggression-as-I-understand it. It sometimes happens that it doesn’t. Whether I agree with the view has nothing to do with whether a given exposition of it constitutes aggression.
If you’d instead said that some people think “that sometimes an exposition of a particular view can constitute aggression” then I wouldn’t have disagreed with it. Perhaps that’s what you actually meant to say some people think—but in that case I suggest that you said it very badly. (Perhaps from a desire to make those people sound sillier?)
you think that considering transsexuals to be mentally ill is “aggression”
No, I don’t, and I respectfully suggest that you retrace whatever mental steps led you to think I think that looking for errors.
I think that calling them (not merely considering them) delusional and hallucinating (not merely mentally ill) is “aggression”. You can consider anyone you like anything you like and it will not constitute aggression; how could it. And “mentally ill” is a very broad category, covering e.g. things like depression and anxiety as well as outright craziness.
And: yes, words like “crazy” and “delusional” and “hallucinating” are pejorative in ways in which e.g. “suffering from gender identity disorder” is not, which makes statements that use the former terms more aggressive than otherwise similar ones that use the latter.
So I think the tension and inconsistency you perceive in my position is the result of misunderstanding it. (There might of course be tensions or inconsistencies even when it’s correctly understood; maybe we’ll find out.)
confounding factors (other than IQ)
True. I’m sure hiring managers are rarely concerned with IQ as such at all. But they do care about competence in the job, and that’s the scale on which they rated applicants called “Jennifer” 0.7 points lower (out of 5) than otherwise identical applicants called “John”. I personally would not classify “unlikelihood of disappearing on maternity leave” under the heading of competence; would you expect university science faculty hiring a lab manager to do so?
that critically depends on where your zero point is
Yup. That’s a large part of why I am not bothered by LW (in my perception) leaning right.
It is not a useful exercise to assign a political tilt to LW—that’s not what this place is about.
You may recall that I was only talking about this because I thought you were implying that politlcally-motivated aggression on LW tends to come from “the left”. I don’t at all mind LW’s tilting rightward (if indeed it really does).
I don’t think [that gjm’s comments are stupid] at all
I’m pleased to hear it! But you will find that in any political thread my comments (which I’m fairly sure are not generally any stupider than they are in this one) attract more than averagely many downvotes even when (as it seems to my of-course-perfectly-unbiased judgement) they are conspicuously reasonable and not-stupid. So do comments from other people with political leanings resembling mine. And that’s part of what I mean by saying that LW has a conservative, not merely and anti-stupid, tilt.
I think that particular phenomenon is due to a very small number of users—in my less charitable moments I suspect one with intermittent sockpuppets. But it’s there, and I think it affects the overall flavour of discussion on LW, even if that’s not what LW should be about. And, more generally, I think the left and the right have their characteristic unpleasantnesses, and those of the left are (1) largely absent and (2) heavily criticized and downvoted when they show up, whereas those of the right are (1) distinctly more common and (2) generally approved by the LW community, so far as one can tell from replies and karma.
(Again: I’m not saying there’s anything very terrible about that. And LW is indeed distinctly less unpleasantly political than many other venues.)
That would have been fairly useless. The phrase “some people think..” can be followed by pretty much anything at all and still be true.
I am still confused by your understanding of aggression—right now it seems to me that it means just being impolite. Let’s take Alice who may or may not have some issues. Bob says “She is mentally ill”. Charlie says “She is delusional and hallucinating”. Duncan says “Man, she’s just batshit crazy”. Is it you position that Bob is fine, Charlie is mildly aggressive, and Duncan is highly aggressive?
I find it strange that you pay so much attention to the form and relatively little to the content.
that’s part of what I mean by saying that LW has a conservative, not merely and anti-stupid, tilt.
Let’s get a bit more precise. Does LW as a whole have such a tilt, or does your karma have such a tilt? I think you’re extrapolating your personal situation a bit too much.
whereas those of the right are (1) distinctly more common and (2) generally approved by the LW community
Think of LW as a place of refuge, a “safe zone” to use an SJ term :-D A neo-reactionary who wanders into a wrong Tumblr neighbourhood will get a lot of detailed descriptions of how exactly he should die in a fire :-/
From my perspective, the dilemma you face is that you could say “a lot of people think that expressing opinions that disagree with theirs constitutes aggression”, which would be non-content-free but ridiculous, or you could say “some people think that some expressions of opinion constitute aggression”, which would be true but almost content-free; I’m having trouble figuring out what you could have meant that would be contentful but in any way plausible.
it seems to me that [aggression] means [to gjm[ just being impolite.
They’re closely related. Aggression is (among other things) one variety of impoliteness. (In ordinary social contexts. If you’re facing an opponent in a boxing ring, aggression isn’t impolite.)
Alice [...] Bob [...] Charlie [...] Duncan
Is A listening to B, C, and D? Or are they saying this in some venue that records what they say, where A might come across it later? Or perhaps not A but some of her friends and family?
If not, I don’t think I’d call their comments aggressive at all. So let’s suppose B, C, and D know that their comments are likely to be heard by A. Then yeah, all else being equal I would say B<C<D in aggression.
I find it strange that you pay so much attention to the form and relatively little to the content.
I find it strange that you say that, for two reasons. Firstly, there most certainly is a difference in content between what B, C, and D are saying. (And, referring back to the original discussion, between “Transgender people suffer from gender identity disorder, which I classify as a mental illness” and “Transgender people are delusional and hallucinating”.) Just as there is a difference between “Lumifer has some unusual political opinions” and “Lumifer is a fascist”. (Note for the avoidance of doubt: I do not think you are a fascist and have no idea how usual your political opinions are.)
Secondly, there’s a lot of information in the form. The difference between “Joe has difficulty understanding some things” and “Joe is a fucking moron” is largely one of form, and mostly what it indicates is hostility. Similarly, it’s easy enough to see how someone could express opinions about transgender people quite similar to VoiceOfRa’s with a much less hostile tone. That would (as I use the word) be less aggressive. It would be less likely to make any trans people reading LW feel attacked; less likely to make them expect that if their trans-ness became known they’d be met with hostility and contempt.
LW as a whole [...] or your karma [...]?
I tried to make it clear that I’m well aware of the difference (acknowledging that my judgement of my own comments is far from impartial; citing what happens to other leftish-leaning comments; “part of what I mean”. Did I really fail so badly? (Or: did I succeed but do you think I’m disastrously self-deceiving or something?)
Think of LW as a place of refuge
See, this is why I find it odd that you say LW doesn’t lean right. Because providing a “safe place” for neoreactionaries would, I think, generally be regarded—even by people who consider themselves right-wing—as evidence of either (1) rightishness or (2) fanatical refusal to make anyone unwelcome on account of their sociopolitical views. And if you think it’s #2, then I invite you to imagine the roasting that the residents of that “wrong Tumblr neighbourhood” would get if they turned up on LW.
And if you think it’s #2, then I invite you to imagine the roasting that the residents of that “wrong Tumblr neighbourhood” would get if they turned up on LW.
Well this tumblr-style struggle session against gwen’s “transphobia” has rather disturbingly many upvotes for the PC-brigade.
Three years ago. I wonder how many of the people who upvoted those comments have since left LW because it’s an unpleasant place to be for anyone with “progressive” social opinions.
(FWIW, I have no recollection of that particular incident and I hope I didn’t upvote the boo-isn’t-gwern-awful comments. I think they were obnoxious, but I don’t see any reason why the right treatment for being obnoxious on IRC should be being crucified on LW.)
That particular thread was actually surprisingly civil and even occasionally productive, it seems to me on skimming through it now. I can’t help thinking a similar thread today would be more acrimonious.
FWIW, I have no recollection of that particular incident and I hope I didn’t upvote the boo-isn’t-gwern-awful comments.
You do realize you can check by looking at whether the thumbs up is colored green. Also, how about the “gwen must repent of his crimethink and confess his sins” comments?
That particular thread was actually surprisingly civil and even occasionally productive,
You have a very bizarre notion of civil.
I can’t help thinking a similar thread today would be more acrimonious.
To use your “speech as violence” analogy, it would only be more acrimonious in the sense that a mass beating where the target doesn’t even bother to defend himself is “less acrimonious” than a fight where he does. [Edit: fixed last sentence.]
D’oh, so I can. … It would appear that I neither upvoted nor downvoted anything in that thread (although I haven’t followed any of the “continue this thread” links on very deeply nested comments). My guess is that I never saw it.
how about the “gwern must repent of his crimethink and confess his sins” comments?
I’m not sure what you mean by “how about”, but if you mean did I upvote them: no, as I say, I don’t appear to have upvoted or downvoted anything in that discussion.
You have a very bizarre notion of civil.
Perhaps. (But note that “surprisingly civil” doesn’t mean “perfectly civil”.)
it would only be more acrimonious in the sense that [...]
I either don’t understand what you’re saying, or don’t have any idea on what grounds you say what you’re saying. (The latter if you mean that nowadays LW is so supersaturated with progressivism that gwern wouldn’t bother to defend himself. The former if you mean something else.)
I either don’t understand what you’re saying, or don’t have any idea on what grounds you say what you’re saying. (The latter if you mean that nowadays LW is so supersaturated with progressivism that gwern wouldn’t bother to defend himself. The former if you mean something else.)
He didn’t “beg for mercy”. He (1) criticized the person who reported what he’d done for breaking IRC norms by posting bits of logs; (2) agreed that what he said was unpleasant and rude; (3) explained why he thought he shouldn’t be expected to ensure that he doesn’t do it again.
I’m sure you’d prefer him to have said that it’s perfectly reasonable and correct to describe trans people in the way he (jokingly) did, but if we take him at face value (which I see no good reason not to) then he doesn’t think it is (or at least didn’t at the time). None the less, I don’t see how his response can be categorized as “begging for mercy”.
(In particular, I don’t think anyone threatened him with anything and I don’t think he made any kind of request for such threats not to be carried out. In which case, he certainly didn’t literally beg for mercy or even ask for it. I suppose it’s possible that you’re using the term extremely broadly, to cover any response more temperate than “I am completely in the right and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves”, but I don’t think that’s how the rest of the world uses “beg for mercy”.)
See, this is why I find it odd that you say LW doesn’t lean right. Because providing a “safe place” for neoreactionaries would, I think, generally be regarded—even by people who consider themselves right-wing—as evidence of either (1) rightishness or (2) fanatical refusal to make anyone unwelcome on account of their sociopolitical views.
I would like to point out the asymmetry hidden by the word “safe space”. A space is Neoreactionary-hostile if it actively censors their posts and deletes their accounts, a space is SJW-hostile if it fails to censor and delete the accounts of all other view points.
This reminds me of the old Cold War era joke:
An American and a Russian are discussing their respective countries. The American says “In America there is free speech, anyone can go up to the White House, yell ‘down with Reagan’ and everything will be OK”. The Russian replies “Well in Russia we also have free speech, anyone can go up to the Kremlin, yell ‘down with Reagan’ and everything will be OK”.
you could say “a lot of people think that expressing opinions that disagree with theirs constitutes aggression”, which would be non-content-free but ridiculous
How about “a lot of people alieve that expressing opinions that disagree with theirs constitutes aggression”?
Yes, “alieve” is certainly much more credible than “believe” here, and I bet it’s close to what I think Lumifer meant. It rather makes nonsense of his description of doing so as a “somewhat fashionable approach”, though.
(I in fact suspect that Lumifer knows perfectly well that that description is not reasonable, but found it rhetorically convenient. Which is one reason why I’ve been slightly bloody-mindedly querying what he meant on the assumption that the description is reasonable :-).)
Or are they saying this in some venue that records what they say, where A might come across it later?
Well, they are saying this on the ’net. That qualifies, right? But they are not addressing Alice directly. It’s third-person, not second. Alice might or might not stumble on their remarks.
B<C<D in aggression
Yes, but will you call Charlie “aggresive”? Duncan?
And let’s throw in a parallel example. As you well know, Christians expect atheists to burn in hell forever. Would there be an “aggressive” and a “non-aggressive” way of pointing this out on the ’net? Still talking in third person, not saying “you”.
there most certainly is a difference
It’s a difference is specificity. “Delusional and hallucinating” is a specific kind of “mentally ill”. Unless you are talking metaphorically, I don’t see why a specific description would be more aggressive than general. If I believe, for example, that Alice is a schizophrenic, both sentences—“Alice is mentally ill” and “Alice is a schizophrenic” sound very similar to me from aggression point of view.
and mostly what it indicates is hostility
Is “hostile” necessarily “aggressive”? These are somewhat different things to me.
I also notice that you haven’t mentioned the word “intent” yet. Do you think intent matters?
I invite you to imagine the roasting that the residents of that “wrong Tumblr neighbourhood” would get if they turned up on LW
Ah, but that’s the consequence of a the anti-stupid tilt :-) Neo-reactionaries, by and large, are not stupid at all. You may object to their value system, but they are capable of reason. Most of the inhabitants of the relevant Tumblr neighbourhoods are stupid and prone to form large screaming lynch mobs. There are good reasons why LW would reroute them to the woodchipper :-)
Christians expect atheists to burn in hell for ever.
Some Christians do. I know some [EDITED: previous word was “one” before; don’t know why I did that] who don’t. Anyway: yes, there are more and less aggressive ways for someone who believes that to say it. Of course however you say it it’s a much much nastier thing than anything VoR has ever said about transgender people (“these guys are likely to suffer worse torture than a million Auschwitzes, and it will be exactly what they deserve”), and contrariwise in many cases the person saying it will only half-believe it and will be deliberately avoiding thinking about it too much. But yeah, there’s a huge difference between “unfortunately temporal sin has eternal consequences, and the only way to escape eternal damnation is to put one’s faith in Christ” and “those godless suckers are going to burn in hell, and I look forward to watching them do it”, and again a large part of the difference is that the latter seems hostile and the former (if sincere) doesn’t.
Is “hostile” necessarily “aggressive”?
The two aren’t quite equivalent (e.g., I think you can be hostile purely inwardly, whereas aggression is necessarily an outward action) but they’re closely related.
I don’t see why a specific description would be more aggressive than general.
It wouldn’t be. If someone is acting oddly, then “Alice is suffering from depression” would be not at all aggressive and “Alice is fucking crazy” would be (if expected to reach Alice’s ears) quite aggressive.
you haven’t mentioned the word “intent” yet
Should I have? Yes, in general intent matters; to take an extreme example, if I am a speaker of a foreign language and some perfectly innocuous sentence in that languge happens to sound exactly the same as “I’m going to kill Lumifer and eat his brains” then there’s nothing aggressive about my saying that (unless e.g. I know full well how it sounds and say it with the intention that you should hear it and be intimidated, while preserving plausible deniability for me).
(Hostility implies intent, doesn’t it? It’s not as if nothing I have said so far addresses the question of whether intent is relevant.)
I’m pretty sure there are circumstances where it doesn’t matter whether something was intended aggressively but only whether its effect is the same as if it had been. But for the purposes of determining, e.g., whether “the left is the aggressor” here on LW, the actual intent is more important. Of course the effect may be easier to determine than the intent.
Most of the inhabitants of the relevant Tumblr neighbourhoods are stupid
I think you’re probably right that neoreactionaries tend to be intelligent. I don’t think Tumblr-SJWs are at all uniformly stupid, though (in fact my guess is that they’re less stupid than the population average in terms of raw brainpower), and I know some people who are both very clever and quite Tumblr-SJW-y. I think LW would probably route them to the woodchipper almost as directly as it would the stupid ones.
I know some people who are both very clever and quite Tumblr-SJW-y. I think LW would probably route them to the woodchipper almost as directly as it would the stupid ones.
And why do you think this would be the case? Purely because of the ideological bias?
I think one of the defining characteristics of Tumblr-SJW-y people is that they are highly aggressive, both by your and my definitions. I suspect that it is their intolerance which would make them not welcome here.
Some are highly aggressive and would get flayed for that here. Some are not at all aggressive … and would also be made very unwelcome here, I think. Still, at this point we’re just trading conjectures...
On aggression (with apologies to Konrad Lorenz):
I was hoping to avoid getting into the definitions debate, but that looks inescapable now. We seem to understand aggression differently.
First, let me point to tension in your position. On the one hand you say that “It seems clear to me that some of the comments VoiceOfRa has made are aggression” and “When he suggests that it’s unreasonable to treat those “delusions or hallucinations” any more generously than those of someone who thinks he’s simultaneously Jesus and John Lennon, that seems pretty aggressive to me.” On the other hand, you strongly deny that the exposition of one’s views (presumably, even on controversial topics) is aggression, saying that “I certainly don’t intend anything of the kind, and I gravely doubt that anyone seriously thinks what you say they do.”
I see problems in this position of yours. You might be able construct a definition of “aggression” which twists and turns enough to accommodate you, but I suspect it will be neither a good nor a robust definition.
For example, you think that considering transsexuals to be mentally ill is “aggression”. Or is it aggression only if you call them crazy (a “needlessly pejorative term”), but if you, following DSM-IV, diagnose them with a Gender Identity Disorder that’s not aggression any more?
I can’t make sense of your position, it does not look consistent to me.
Re women’s IQ:
The case with the lab manager’s resume has a lot of confounding factors (other than IQ) in play. Hiring managers are often more concerned with whether the new hire will get pregnant and go on maternity leave than with IQ, for example. And, well, this is an empirical question, there is a lot of data about the IQ of men and women.
Re LW tilts:
You say that “I think that LW currently leans right” but that critically depends on where you zero point is :-) I suspect that LW actually doesn’t tilt anywhere politically—most people here don’t care (some “naturally” and some explicitly to avoid mindkills). It is not a useful exercise to assign a political tilt to LW—that’s not what this place is about.
Re “Do you think my comments in this thread are stupid?”:
LOL. I have actually been upvoting your comments in this subthread back to zero because we are having a very nice polite conversation and ideological downvotes are not welcome in it (and are quite silly, anyway).
But to be explicit—no, I don’t think so at all. If if did, this conversation wouldn’t exist.
What I strongly disagreed with is the following claim (your description of an allegedly “fashionable approach” which you may or may not have been ascribing to me)
It sometimes happens that an exposition of some view or other constitutes aggression-as-I-understand it. It sometimes happens that it doesn’t. Whether I agree with the view has nothing to do with whether a given exposition of it constitutes aggression.
If you’d instead said that some people think “that sometimes an exposition of a particular view can constitute aggression” then I wouldn’t have disagreed with it. Perhaps that’s what you actually meant to say some people think—but in that case I suggest that you said it very badly. (Perhaps from a desire to make those people sound sillier?)
No, I don’t, and I respectfully suggest that you retrace whatever mental steps led you to think I think that looking for errors.
I think that calling them (not merely considering them) delusional and hallucinating (not merely mentally ill) is “aggression”. You can consider anyone you like anything you like and it will not constitute aggression; how could it. And “mentally ill” is a very broad category, covering e.g. things like depression and anxiety as well as outright craziness.
And: yes, words like “crazy” and “delusional” and “hallucinating” are pejorative in ways in which e.g. “suffering from gender identity disorder” is not, which makes statements that use the former terms more aggressive than otherwise similar ones that use the latter.
So I think the tension and inconsistency you perceive in my position is the result of misunderstanding it. (There might of course be tensions or inconsistencies even when it’s correctly understood; maybe we’ll find out.)
True. I’m sure hiring managers are rarely concerned with IQ as such at all. But they do care about competence in the job, and that’s the scale on which they rated applicants called “Jennifer” 0.7 points lower (out of 5) than otherwise identical applicants called “John”. I personally would not classify “unlikelihood of disappearing on maternity leave” under the heading of competence; would you expect university science faculty hiring a lab manager to do so?
Yup. That’s a large part of why I am not bothered by LW (in my perception) leaning right.
You may recall that I was only talking about this because I thought you were implying that politlcally-motivated aggression on LW tends to come from “the left”. I don’t at all mind LW’s tilting rightward (if indeed it really does).
I’m pleased to hear it! But you will find that in any political thread my comments (which I’m fairly sure are not generally any stupider than they are in this one) attract more than averagely many downvotes even when (as it seems to my of-course-perfectly-unbiased judgement) they are conspicuously reasonable and not-stupid. So do comments from other people with political leanings resembling mine. And that’s part of what I mean by saying that LW has a conservative, not merely and anti-stupid, tilt.
I think that particular phenomenon is due to a very small number of users—in my less charitable moments I suspect one with intermittent sockpuppets. But it’s there, and I think it affects the overall flavour of discussion on LW, even if that’s not what LW should be about. And, more generally, I think the left and the right have their characteristic unpleasantnesses, and those of the left are (1) largely absent and (2) heavily criticized and downvoted when they show up, whereas those of the right are (1) distinctly more common and (2) generally approved by the LW community, so far as one can tell from replies and karma.
(Again: I’m not saying there’s anything very terrible about that. And LW is indeed distinctly less unpleasantly political than many other venues.)
That would have been fairly useless. The phrase “some people think..” can be followed by pretty much anything at all and still be true.
I am still confused by your understanding of aggression—right now it seems to me that it means just being impolite. Let’s take Alice who may or may not have some issues. Bob says “She is mentally ill”. Charlie says “She is delusional and hallucinating”. Duncan says “Man, she’s just batshit crazy”. Is it you position that Bob is fine, Charlie is mildly aggressive, and Duncan is highly aggressive?
I find it strange that you pay so much attention to the form and relatively little to the content.
Let’s get a bit more precise. Does LW as a whole have such a tilt, or does your karma have such a tilt? I think you’re extrapolating your personal situation a bit too much.
Think of LW as a place of refuge, a “safe zone” to use an SJ term :-D A neo-reactionary who wanders into a wrong Tumblr neighbourhood will get a lot of detailed descriptions of how exactly he should die in a fire :-/
From my perspective, the dilemma you face is that you could say “a lot of people think that expressing opinions that disagree with theirs constitutes aggression”, which would be non-content-free but ridiculous, or you could say “some people think that some expressions of opinion constitute aggression”, which would be true but almost content-free; I’m having trouble figuring out what you could have meant that would be contentful but in any way plausible.
They’re closely related. Aggression is (among other things) one variety of impoliteness. (In ordinary social contexts. If you’re facing an opponent in a boxing ring, aggression isn’t impolite.)
Is A listening to B, C, and D? Or are they saying this in some venue that records what they say, where A might come across it later? Or perhaps not A but some of her friends and family?
If not, I don’t think I’d call their comments aggressive at all. So let’s suppose B, C, and D know that their comments are likely to be heard by A. Then yeah, all else being equal I would say B<C<D in aggression.
I find it strange that you say that, for two reasons. Firstly, there most certainly is a difference in content between what B, C, and D are saying. (And, referring back to the original discussion, between “Transgender people suffer from gender identity disorder, which I classify as a mental illness” and “Transgender people are delusional and hallucinating”.) Just as there is a difference between “Lumifer has some unusual political opinions” and “Lumifer is a fascist”. (Note for the avoidance of doubt: I do not think you are a fascist and have no idea how usual your political opinions are.)
Secondly, there’s a lot of information in the form. The difference between “Joe has difficulty understanding some things” and “Joe is a fucking moron” is largely one of form, and mostly what it indicates is hostility. Similarly, it’s easy enough to see how someone could express opinions about transgender people quite similar to VoiceOfRa’s with a much less hostile tone. That would (as I use the word) be less aggressive. It would be less likely to make any trans people reading LW feel attacked; less likely to make them expect that if their trans-ness became known they’d be met with hostility and contempt.
I tried to make it clear that I’m well aware of the difference (acknowledging that my judgement of my own comments is far from impartial; citing what happens to other leftish-leaning comments; “part of what I mean”. Did I really fail so badly? (Or: did I succeed but do you think I’m disastrously self-deceiving or something?)
See, this is why I find it odd that you say LW doesn’t lean right. Because providing a “safe place” for neoreactionaries would, I think, generally be regarded—even by people who consider themselves right-wing—as evidence of either (1) rightishness or (2) fanatical refusal to make anyone unwelcome on account of their sociopolitical views. And if you think it’s #2, then I invite you to imagine the roasting that the residents of that “wrong Tumblr neighbourhood” would get if they turned up on LW.
Well this tumblr-style struggle session against gwen’s “transphobia” has rather disturbingly many upvotes for the PC-brigade.
Three years ago. I wonder how many of the people who upvoted those comments have since left LW because it’s an unpleasant place to be for anyone with “progressive” social opinions.
(FWIW, I have no recollection of that particular incident and I hope I didn’t upvote the boo-isn’t-gwern-awful comments. I think they were obnoxious, but I don’t see any reason why the right treatment for being obnoxious on IRC should be being crucified on LW.)
That particular thread was actually surprisingly civil and even occasionally productive, it seems to me on skimming through it now. I can’t help thinking a similar thread today would be more acrimonious.
You do realize you can check by looking at whether the thumbs up is colored green. Also, how about the “gwen must repent of his crimethink and confess his sins” comments?
You have a very bizarre notion of civil.
To use your “speech as violence” analogy, it would only be more acrimonious in the sense that a mass beating where the target doesn’t even bother to defend himself is “less acrimonious” than a fight where he does. [Edit: fixed last sentence.]
D’oh, so I can. … It would appear that I neither upvoted nor downvoted anything in that thread (although I haven’t followed any of the “continue this thread” links on very deeply nested comments). My guess is that I never saw it.
I’m not sure what you mean by “how about”, but if you mean did I upvote them: no, as I say, I don’t appear to have upvoted or downvoted anything in that discussion.
Perhaps. (But note that “surprisingly civil” doesn’t mean “perfectly civil”.)
I either don’t understand what you’re saying, or don’t have any idea on what grounds you say what you’re saying. (The latter if you mean that nowadays LW is so supersaturated with progressivism that gwern wouldn’t bother to defend himself. The former if you mean something else.)
I made a typo. See the edited version.
OK, that makes more sense, but still not very much. gwern did defend himself. Maybe not in the way you’d prefer, but he did defend himself.
He begged for mercy, that’s very different than defending oneself.
He didn’t “beg for mercy”. He (1) criticized the person who reported what he’d done for breaking IRC norms by posting bits of logs; (2) agreed that what he said was unpleasant and rude; (3) explained why he thought he shouldn’t be expected to ensure that he doesn’t do it again.
I’m sure you’d prefer him to have said that it’s perfectly reasonable and correct to describe trans people in the way he (jokingly) did, but if we take him at face value (which I see no good reason not to) then he doesn’t think it is (or at least didn’t at the time). None the less, I don’t see how his response can be categorized as “begging for mercy”.
(In particular, I don’t think anyone threatened him with anything and I don’t think he made any kind of request for such threats not to be carried out. In which case, he certainly didn’t literally beg for mercy or even ask for it. I suppose it’s possible that you’re using the term extremely broadly, to cover any response more temperate than “I am completely in the right and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves”, but I don’t think that’s how the rest of the world uses “beg for mercy”.)
I would like to point out the asymmetry hidden by the word “safe space”. A space is Neoreactionary-hostile if it actively censors their posts and deletes their accounts, a space is SJW-hostile if it fails to censor and delete the accounts of all other view points.
This reminds me of the old Cold War era joke:
An American and a Russian are discussing their respective countries. The American says “In America there is free speech, anyone can go up to the White House, yell ‘down with Reagan’ and everything will be OK”. The Russian replies “Well in Russia we also have free speech, anyone can go up to the Kremlin, yell ‘down with Reagan’ and everything will be OK”.
That would indeed be an amusing and silly asymmetry. However, you just made it up; it is neither what I said nor what I meant.
How about “a lot of people alieve that expressing opinions that disagree with theirs constitutes aggression”?
Yes, “alieve” is certainly much more credible than “believe” here, and I bet it’s close to what I think Lumifer meant. It rather makes nonsense of his description of doing so as a “somewhat fashionable approach”, though.
(I in fact suspect that Lumifer knows perfectly well that that description is not reasonable, but found it rhetorically convenient. Which is one reason why I’ve been slightly bloody-mindedly querying what he meant on the assumption that the description is reasonable :-).)
Well, they are saying this on the ’net. That qualifies, right? But they are not addressing Alice directly. It’s third-person, not second. Alice might or might not stumble on their remarks.
Yes, but will you call Charlie “aggresive”? Duncan?
And let’s throw in a parallel example. As you well know, Christians expect atheists to burn in hell forever. Would there be an “aggressive” and a “non-aggressive” way of pointing this out on the ’net? Still talking in third person, not saying “you”.
It’s a difference is specificity. “Delusional and hallucinating” is a specific kind of “mentally ill”. Unless you are talking metaphorically, I don’t see why a specific description would be more aggressive than general. If I believe, for example, that Alice is a schizophrenic, both sentences—“Alice is mentally ill” and “Alice is a schizophrenic” sound very similar to me from aggression point of view.
Is “hostile” necessarily “aggressive”? These are somewhat different things to me.
I also notice that you haven’t mentioned the word “intent” yet. Do you think intent matters?
Ah, but that’s the consequence of a the anti-stupid tilt :-) Neo-reactionaries, by and large, are not stupid at all. You may object to their value system, but they are capable of reason. Most of the inhabitants of the relevant Tumblr neighbourhoods are stupid and prone to form large screaming lynch mobs. There are good reasons why LW would reroute them to the woodchipper :-)
Some Christians do. I know some [EDITED: previous word was “one” before; don’t know why I did that] who don’t. Anyway: yes, there are more and less aggressive ways for someone who believes that to say it. Of course however you say it it’s a much much nastier thing than anything VoR has ever said about transgender people (“these guys are likely to suffer worse torture than a million Auschwitzes, and it will be exactly what they deserve”), and contrariwise in many cases the person saying it will only half-believe it and will be deliberately avoiding thinking about it too much. But yeah, there’s a huge difference between “unfortunately temporal sin has eternal consequences, and the only way to escape eternal damnation is to put one’s faith in Christ” and “those godless suckers are going to burn in hell, and I look forward to watching them do it”, and again a large part of the difference is that the latter seems hostile and the former (if sincere) doesn’t.
The two aren’t quite equivalent (e.g., I think you can be hostile purely inwardly, whereas aggression is necessarily an outward action) but they’re closely related.
It wouldn’t be. If someone is acting oddly, then “Alice is suffering from depression” would be not at all aggressive and “Alice is fucking crazy” would be (if expected to reach Alice’s ears) quite aggressive.
Should I have? Yes, in general intent matters; to take an extreme example, if I am a speaker of a foreign language and some perfectly innocuous sentence in that languge happens to sound exactly the same as “I’m going to kill Lumifer and eat his brains” then there’s nothing aggressive about my saying that (unless e.g. I know full well how it sounds and say it with the intention that you should hear it and be intimidated, while preserving plausible deniability for me).
(Hostility implies intent, doesn’t it? It’s not as if nothing I have said so far addresses the question of whether intent is relevant.)
I’m pretty sure there are circumstances where it doesn’t matter whether something was intended aggressively but only whether its effect is the same as if it had been. But for the purposes of determining, e.g., whether “the left is the aggressor” here on LW, the actual intent is more important. Of course the effect may be easier to determine than the intent.
I think you’re probably right that neoreactionaries tend to be intelligent. I don’t think Tumblr-SJWs are at all uniformly stupid, though (in fact my guess is that they’re less stupid than the population average in terms of raw brainpower), and I know some people who are both very clever and quite Tumblr-SJW-y. I think LW would probably route them to the woodchipper almost as directly as it would the stupid ones.
And why do you think this would be the case? Purely because of the ideological bias?
I think one of the defining characteristics of Tumblr-SJW-y people is that they are highly aggressive, both by your and my definitions. I suspect that it is their intolerance which would make them not welcome here.
Not just that. It’s their intolerance backed by no rational arguments and lots of anti-epistemology.
It’s a veritable embarras de richesses as to why they wouldn’t do well here :-D
Some are highly aggressive and would get flayed for that here. Some are not at all aggressive … and would also be made very unwelcome here, I think. Still, at this point we’re just trading conjectures...