How do you think LessWrong does at productive discussion of gender issues (when discussed) compared to other communities you have experience of that have a similar gender ratio (eg the Science Fiction community)?
I think LW mistakes “not a screaming flamewar all or most of the time” for “productive conversation.” It’s certainly true that LW is more civil about things. But that civility seems overrated, too—someone with little or no stake in an issue can often discuss it with far less emotion than someone with a lot of stake in it, precisely because of that differential. That doesn’t mean the former party is more likely to be objective or make the right decision; the norm just acts as a filter for certain kinds of personality, or for the ability to make your feelings and preferences sound smart. If you look at similar discussions that have been going on recently in similar spaces (LW is not alone here; the SF and atheist subcultures have been in the middle of a similar round of topical debate), things are noisier, and often a great deal more vitriolic—but I’m not sure what’s been gained here, that isn’t being gained in those places. I don’t think LW as a community has generated any special insights here.
someone with little or no stake in an issue can often discuss it with far less emotion than someone with a lot of stake in it, precisely because of that differential. That doesn’t mean the former party is more likely to be objective or make the right decision
Really? It seems that keeping yourself in system 2 mode would lead to better reasoning on such matters. Certainly I don’t feel particularly rational when frothing at the screen and TYPING IN CAPS LOCK.
Yeah, no. I’ve watched perfectly calm and reasonable-sounding people sincerely debate whether some group of other people (queer folks and disabled folks come to mind) have a right to exist that should not be overridden in favor of euthanasia to satisfy their own utility functions. I’ve watched this happen in the halls of supposedly respectable institutions while members of the group under discussion protested outside.
The people going “Hey, this is really fucked up that our right to exist can just be casually debated with or without us in a mainstream, powerful institution, and our not raising a fuss about that is apparently more important to people than the actual suggestion” weren’t polite or unemotional, but they did seem to understand the situation for what it was a whole lot better than the folks inside. I’m not sure I want to be around people who can’t perform that kind of sanity check on occasion.
What’s the alternative to rationally debating ideas that violate our moral sensibilities, assuming some people hold them?
Is it to declare with 100% certainty that any idea that violates our moral sensibilities is false? Is it to say that maybe there’s a small chance that ideas violating our moral sensibilities are true, but even so we must never discuss them so if they’re true we’re out of luck and will never reach that true belief? Is it to say we may discuss them, but not rationally—that is, we must let the screaming protesters into the debate so that they can throw eggs and mud onto the debaters because that will improve the quality of discourse?
Also, I bet (and correct me if I’m wrong) that whatever debate you’ve watched was not about “Let’s round up the [Other Folk] and execute them.” My guess is it was either about allowing them voluntary euthanasia, allowing abortion or infanticide on the part of their parents, or ceasing to specifically allocate scarce health resources to them.
That means that what we’re really talking about is “Any idea that can be massaged into sounding like an idea that violates our moral sensibilities is 100% certainly wrong, or should never be discussed, or needs more egg-throwing.”
What’s the alternative to rationally debating ideas that violate our moral sensibilities, assuming some people hold them?
When inviting a guest speaker for an honorarium to hold forth in front of an audience on a subject that affects few or none of them directly, and just giving them that platform without any semblance of discourse apart from taking questions at the end...yeah, I’m gonna say “Rationally debating ideas that violate our moral sensibilities” is not what was going on. Doubly so since in many cases those ideas actually affirm the moral sensibilities of some fair portion of the population.
Also, I bet (and correct me if I’m wrong) that whatever debate you’ve watched was not about “Let’s round up the [Other Folk] and execute them.” My guess is it was either about allowing them voluntary euthanasia, allowing abortion or infanticide on the part of their parents, or ceasing to specifically allocate scarce health resources to them.
Yeah, you’re wrong—we’re talking about folks who honestly and straightforwardly suggested it was an ethical good to terminate the lives of these people which they felt either had no value (usually through “gentle” methods of euthanasia, and I do not mean voluntarily applied), or had such small value in comparison to their suffering that it was worth it. This is not hyperbole—though I find it interesting you found the idea so difficult to believe straight up that your interpretation must be that I’m just flipping my lid over a loose patternmatch and couldn’t have possibly understood that right. It suggests you think it doesn’t happen often enough for rational people to be concerned about.
That means that what we’re really talking about is “Any idea that can be massaged into sounding like an idea that violates our moral sensibilities is 100% certainly wrong, or should never be discussed, or needs more egg-throwing.”
No, you’re not listening to what I’m actually saying, you’re just assuming from the get-go that I’m a screaming mindless chimp flinging feces because The Bad Thing Is Bad.
(although to be fair, you did say you watched “calm and reasonable people sincerely debate this” and that people were objecting to it being “casually debated”, so I don’t think it was my fault for assuming it was a debate rather than one person going on about it unopposed.)
Now I’m very curious what exactly was going on, although I understand if you don’t want to look like you’re pointing fingers at specific people.
(although to be fair, you did say you watched “calm and reasonable people sincerely debate this” and that people were objecting to it being “casually debated”, so I don’t think it was my fault for assuming it was a debate rather than one person going on about it unopposed.)
Yah, I’m not being very clear with that, though it’s at least partly because I’m just generally underslept and sick, and have been for a couple of months now, so it’s hard to “say what I mean” rather than “verbalize something that’s more on-target for what I mean, than not.” (Gotta love autie language brain...)
Some of what I’m referring to is just conferences, symposia, guest speaker talks or, yes, actual debates, usually hosted at an academic institution that I or someone I knew was attending. I was particularly uninclined to take anybody’s word for much of anything at the time, and insisted on looking into it a bit myself before really trying to interpret what they were upset about .
Some of it is just random discussions with other people over the years, both on and off of LW.
Wait. You’ve heard people proposing to gently euthanize queers? Can you say in what country and decade, if you don’t want to give too much information? I can’t see the mercy-killing crowd going against queers, nor the gay-murdering crowd preferring gentle methods to hanging.
I’m also surprised people are still openly supporting involuntary euthanasia after WW2. Forced sterilization isn’t even done on whole groups anymore since the seventies.
US, this decade. They weren’t euthanasia advocates per se, they were various flavors of fundamentalist in some cases—but they were polite, non-frothing, non-raving flavors of fundamentalist.
I think the last actual legally forced sterilization in the US was in the early 80s, in Oregon, although some states did keep the laws on the books after that (they simply didn’t use them thereafter).
I would find that much easier to believe if I saw non-hearsay evidence -of people advocating euthanasia of queers, in the US, this decade) - either texts written by those people, or a video filmed from a cellphone, or a summary of their position from a reputable institution or something.
(unless you’re talking about Wesboro Baptist Church, or anonymous posters on a forum)
According to Largent’s “Breeding Contempt” (following Robitscher), all sterilizations in the US in the 70s were in Virginia and none were in the 80s. There are reasons to believe that these are undercounts and earlier Largent had claimed that Oregon had sterilizations after 1965, but as far as I can tell, the widely reported 1981 date stems from a hospital striking the procedure from its books a couple years before the state changed its laws and has nothing to do with actual sterilizations.
Largent’s story doesn’t accord with testimony from those who were charged with destroying the records of the Oregon Eugenics Board, or the widespread nationwide practice of sterilizing Native American women in BIA hospitals for other procedures (which is barely touched on even in other scholarly treatments of the general phenomenon). The book might sound persuasive to you, but it’s not true.
I’ve watched perfectly calm and reasonable-sounding people sincerely debate whether some group of other people (queer folks and disabled folks come to mind) have a right to exist that should not be overridden in favor of euthanasia to satisfy their own utility functions.
Since Jandila seems to have evaded questions on the claim about euthanasia advocates and the claim about legal forced sterilizations in the eighties, I’m inclined to assume those aren’t exactly true, or at least are somewhat exaggerated or deformed.
(though in this specific case, she’s probably talking about hypothetical anti-gay-rights activists or something that aren’t particularly euthanasia advocates, but are advocating euthanasia of queers or something; so there’s no inherent contradiction, I just suspect it didn’t happen as described)
Sure, system 2 can make mistakes. Though it is not uncontroversial to classify all the instances you point to as mistakes—I’m thinking pro-abortion people, and Peter Singer.
But in any case, the question is whether it is in general more prone to them than system 1, a questions which requires data rather than anecdotes. However, I’m willing to bet the angels of our better nature show through more when we’re thinking than when we’re not.
I think that change is a long process. It’s probably not yet possible to see whether the more overt conflict in other venues pays off better than the more polite style at LW, or vice versa.
Also, rationality might be a confounding factor. It’s possible—not guaranteed—that the group norm of paying attention and updating will have good results, even if it’s much slower for highly emotionally fraught issues than for procrastination.
I think that change is a long process. It’s probably not yet possible to see whether the more overt conflict in other venues pays off better than the more polite style at LW, or vice versa.
It’s certainly perilous to make too much of an analogy, but when I look at the broader history of social justice movements (at least in the US), it’s not obvious to me at all that keeping to a majority idea of polite gets much done. It’s fashionable for white people who didn’t live through, say, the black Civil Rights movement to talk about MLK vs Malcolm X, as polite vs confrontational (hell, that conception of them has become a mass media archetype—see Professor X vs Magneto in the X-Men franchise, or virtually anything else that deals in discrimination against fantastics), forgetting how much confrontation King and his followers actually engaged in.
it’s not obvious to me at all that keeping to a majority idea of polite gets much done.
The idea of observing norms of behaviour isn’t to “get things done”, it’s to reduce the damage when what you want is the wrong thing. I’d much prefer both my communists and my liberals be peaceful than both be violent. Yes, maybe it might be better if the good guys were confrontational and the bad guys meek; but for the good of the tribe, we should avoid killing for the sake of the tribe. You cannot run an algorithm “violate social norms when I’m right”—you can only run “violate social norms when I think I’m right”.
Personal advances should constrained by social mores and individual rights so as to reduce damage when the subject doesn’t appreciate them. Even if you’re sure you’re right you should still ask for premission; even if it were the case that not obeying social rules (e.g. being creepy) got more done.
Yeah, see, part of the problem here is that you appear to consider making noise a really good indicator of being willing to kill for the sake of the tribe.
No (though it obveously constitutes at least weak bayesian evidence), that wasn’t my point at all. My point was that the reason you should obey social norms in controversial situations applies in both cases.
Equally, “making noise” is to minimise that which I am objecting too. Talking politely, quietly, slowly, with a smile makes noise, but is normally fine. I do object to Malcolm X, though.
Equally, “making noise” is to minimise that which I am objecting too. Talking politely, quietly, slowly, with a smile makes noise, but is normally fine. I do object to Malcolm X, though.
Yeah, see, the discussion you were replying to was about whether it would be useful to have confrontational or non-calm comments in discussions, one reason being that listening only to calm people might mean hearing only one side of the story, because it’s easier to be calm if you have little to lose (because you’re on the more powerful side), and another reason being that the truth may be confrontational, so hearing only non-confrontational comments may lead you to miss it.
In the comment you were originally replying to, Jandila was arguing that MLK tends to be cast as non-confrontational, vs. Malcolm X as confrontational, in young white people’s discourse today, but that in fact MLK and his followers were quite confrontational. Thus, looking at history, non-calm confrontational speech seems like a reasonable tool if you want things to change something for the better, even if the people who would be the target of that confrontational speech misremember the actually-society-changing civil rights movement as being less confrontational than it was.
Both of your comments seem to consider only the extremes of “talk politely with a smile” and something in the space between black nationalism and actually killing people who disagree with you (I’m not sure what exactly you’re objecting to in saying you “object to Malcolm X”). This seems unhelpful in a discussion about whether or not it would be useful to also have people participate in discussions who talk confrontationally with angry raised voices.
Both of your comments seem to consider only the extremes of “talk politely with a smile” and something in the space between black nationalism and actually killing people who disagree with you
No, I was just pointing out that the same argument applies to both violence and impoliteness. Making an analogy between X and Y does not mean that one thinks that X and Y are the same in other respects.
(also how can the truth be confrontational? maybe we’re using the word ‘confrontational’ in different senses (or, god forbid, using the word ‘truth’ in different senses) but it seems like only agents or utterances can be confrontational.)
One thing I seem to notice is that the more confrontational people are used by the less confrontatioanl ones to intimidate their opponents while they offer acceptable terms.
There’s confrontation, and then there’s confrontation. I see a difference between “We will make it emotionally and/or financially expensive for you to not change” and describing people as white devils. One sort of confrontation is based on the premise that people can change, and the other is based on the premise that they won’t and/or can’t.
The problem I’m seeing, broadly, is that white people can’t necessarily always tell the difference between the two. Even when it’s couched in positively obsequious language there’s a decent chance of that. I’m not exaggerating here; some white people now think it’s racist to even mention racism. Most white people (certainly a lot of them here in this site) are highly resistant to the idea that racism even exists in this day and age, or that it’s anything other than a strictly defined “paying attention to racial differences.”
You can’t meet everyone halfway here, because they’re either unable or unwilling to reciprocate. It’s not about reaching out to people and persuading and convincing them, at that point—it’s about not letting the fact that you can’t stop you from addressing your actual situation.
I don’t think people can reliably tell the difference between the two, probably especially when they feel they have higher status than the person being addressed. At the moment, we’re getting a variant of the problem in regards to gender.
Who decides the emotional significance of a statement? What tool can you use? Emotions are a rubber ruler, but what else could be available?
This being said, I don’t think the problem is completely unsolvable. Social justice as currently practiced is probably not going to be the last experiment in working on it.
I don’t think people can reliably tell the difference between the two, probably especially when they feel they have higher status than the person being addressed. At the moment, we’re getting a variant of the problem in regards to gender.
I’m looking at what you said here, and the paragraph I wrote whose format it echoes, and I can’t help but think we’re talking about two very different things.
Who decides the emotional significance of a statement?
The person whose emotions were touched off by it. Easy, right?
The question I’d be tempted to derive from your connotation here is more like: “Who gets to decide which interpretations of those reports-of-emotional-significance are being proposed as the priority for the purposes of conflict resolution and communication?”
(My answer to that is “the question is slightly broken”, but I’m about to head out so can’t give you the preferred reframing right this moment).
Social justice as currently practiced is probably not going to be the last experiment in working on it.
Oh, definitely not. It has plenty of its discontents, even within the movement, who aren’t satisfied with the tools and methodologies available, its failure modes, and so on. That’s being actively discussed in many spaces, I’ve observed.
Depends who you’re speaking to, and why. To a significant extent, the “confrontational” approach wasn’t about asking for change, it was about “consciousness raising”—debiasing the self concepts of black people, fixing learned helplessness, constructing the conceptual framework to experience white supremacy as racism rather than having internalized it as legitimate.
And, to my mind, the assumption white people “won’t and/or can’t” change was well calibrated. Political anti-racism succeeded somewhat in shoving the Overton window off avowed racism and completely off avowed segregationism. Every variety of disavowed racism remains politically viable (examples: border fences, “illegals”, voter suppression laws) or even politically unassailable (examples: the drug war and its disproportionate criminalization of black people, police casual violence against black people, felon disenfranchisement coupled with the above, lack of reparations). “Color blindness” has been shown to be a cause of / form of racism, but it remains the default “liberal” position in white dominated culture.
The war on drugs is a tricky one—I’m against it myself, but I’ve seen black people be in favor of it, and in favor of closed borders. too.
Neither the war on drugs nor severe border restrictions (which I’m also against) are overtly racist the way Jim Crow was, and that makes them harder to fight. It’s much easier to frame the war on drugs and border restrictions as the sorts of thing a normal government ought to do—some combination of help and punishment and keeping people who don’t use drugs safe for the war on drugs, and safety and control for border restrictions.
Something got accomplished to lower the racism level in the US, even though much less was accomplished than either of us want. I’m inclined to think that the real problem is that we have no idea how to reliably get people to be less prejudiced, and institutional problems will get re-established as long as a lot of people want them to persist.
This isn’t a counsel of despair—it’s a recommendation to keep trying to figure out what might work.
I think LW mistakes “not a screaming flamewar all or most of the time” for “productive conversation.” It’s certainly true that LW is more civil about things. But that civility seems overrated, too—someone with little or no stake in an issue can often discuss it with far less emotion than someone with a lot of stake in it, precisely because of that differential. That doesn’t mean the former party is more likely to be objective or make the right decision; the norm just acts as a filter for certain kinds of personality, or for the ability to make your feelings and preferences sound smart. If you look at similar discussions that have been going on recently in similar spaces (LW is not alone here; the SF and atheist subcultures have been in the middle of a similar round of topical debate), things are noisier, and often a great deal more vitriolic—but I’m not sure what’s been gained here, that isn’t being gained in those places. I don’t think LW as a community has generated any special insights here.
Really? It seems that keeping yourself in system 2 mode would lead to better reasoning on such matters. Certainly I don’t feel particularly rational when frothing at the screen and TYPING IN CAPS LOCK.
Yeah, no. I’ve watched perfectly calm and reasonable-sounding people sincerely debate whether some group of other people (queer folks and disabled folks come to mind) have a right to exist that should not be overridden in favor of euthanasia to satisfy their own utility functions. I’ve watched this happen in the halls of supposedly respectable institutions while members of the group under discussion protested outside.
The people going “Hey, this is really fucked up that our right to exist can just be casually debated with or without us in a mainstream, powerful institution, and our not raising a fuss about that is apparently more important to people than the actual suggestion” weren’t polite or unemotional, but they did seem to understand the situation for what it was a whole lot better than the folks inside. I’m not sure I want to be around people who can’t perform that kind of sanity check on occasion.
What’s the alternative to rationally debating ideas that violate our moral sensibilities, assuming some people hold them?
Is it to declare with 100% certainty that any idea that violates our moral sensibilities is false? Is it to say that maybe there’s a small chance that ideas violating our moral sensibilities are true, but even so we must never discuss them so if they’re true we’re out of luck and will never reach that true belief? Is it to say we may discuss them, but not rationally—that is, we must let the screaming protesters into the debate so that they can throw eggs and mud onto the debaters because that will improve the quality of discourse?
Also, I bet (and correct me if I’m wrong) that whatever debate you’ve watched was not about “Let’s round up the [Other Folk] and execute them.” My guess is it was either about allowing them voluntary euthanasia, allowing abortion or infanticide on the part of their parents, or ceasing to specifically allocate scarce health resources to them.
That means that what we’re really talking about is “Any idea that can be massaged into sounding like an idea that violates our moral sensibilities is 100% certainly wrong, or should never be discussed, or needs more egg-throwing.”
When inviting a guest speaker for an honorarium to hold forth in front of an audience on a subject that affects few or none of them directly, and just giving them that platform without any semblance of discourse apart from taking questions at the end...yeah, I’m gonna say “Rationally debating ideas that violate our moral sensibilities” is not what was going on. Doubly so since in many cases those ideas actually affirm the moral sensibilities of some fair portion of the population.
Yeah, you’re wrong—we’re talking about folks who honestly and straightforwardly suggested it was an ethical good to terminate the lives of these people which they felt either had no value (usually through “gentle” methods of euthanasia, and I do not mean voluntarily applied), or had such small value in comparison to their suffering that it was worth it. This is not hyperbole—though I find it interesting you found the idea so difficult to believe straight up that your interpretation must be that I’m just flipping my lid over a loose patternmatch and couldn’t have possibly understood that right. It suggests you think it doesn’t happen often enough for rational people to be concerned about.
No, you’re not listening to what I’m actually saying, you’re just assuming from the get-go that I’m a screaming mindless chimp flinging feces because The Bad Thing Is Bad.
You’re right, I apologize.
(although to be fair, you did say you watched “calm and reasonable people sincerely debate this” and that people were objecting to it being “casually debated”, so I don’t think it was my fault for assuming it was a debate rather than one person going on about it unopposed.)
Now I’m very curious what exactly was going on, although I understand if you don’t want to look like you’re pointing fingers at specific people.
Upvoted for owning up to it.
Yah, I’m not being very clear with that, though it’s at least partly because I’m just generally underslept and sick, and have been for a couple of months now, so it’s hard to “say what I mean” rather than “verbalize something that’s more on-target for what I mean, than not.” (Gotta love autie language brain...)
Some of what I’m referring to is just conferences, symposia, guest speaker talks or, yes, actual debates, usually hosted at an academic institution that I or someone I knew was attending. I was particularly uninclined to take anybody’s word for much of anything at the time, and insisted on looking into it a bit myself before really trying to interpret what they were upset about .
Some of it is just random discussions with other people over the years, both on and off of LW.
Wait. You’ve heard people proposing to gently euthanize queers? Can you say in what country and decade, if you don’t want to give too much information? I can’t see the mercy-killing crowd going against queers, nor the gay-murdering crowd preferring gentle methods to hanging.
I’m also surprised people are still openly supporting involuntary euthanasia after WW2. Forced sterilization isn’t even done on whole groups anymore since the seventies.
US, this decade. They weren’t euthanasia advocates per se, they were various flavors of fundamentalist in some cases—but they were polite, non-frothing, non-raving flavors of fundamentalist.
I think the last actual legally forced sterilization in the US was in the early 80s, in Oregon, although some states did keep the laws on the books after that (they simply didn’t use them thereafter).
I would find that much easier to believe if I saw non-hearsay evidence -of people advocating euthanasia of queers, in the US, this decade) - either texts written by those people, or a video filmed from a cellphone, or a summary of their position from a reputable institution or something.
(unless you’re talking about Wesboro Baptist Church, or anonymous posters on a forum)
According to Largent’s “Breeding Contempt” (following Robitscher), all sterilizations in the US in the 70s were in Virginia and none were in the 80s. There are reasons to believe that these are undercounts and earlier Largent had claimed that Oregon had sterilizations after 1965, but as far as I can tell, the widely reported 1981 date stems from a hospital striking the procedure from its books a couple years before the state changed its laws and has nothing to do with actual sterilizations.
Largent’s story doesn’t accord with testimony from those who were charged with destroying the records of the Oregon Eugenics Board, or the widespread nationwide practice of sterilizing Native American women in BIA hospitals for other procedures (which is barely touched on even in other scholarly treatments of the general phenomenon). The book might sound persuasive to you, but it’s not true.
Could you give a more specific citation about Oregon?
Very tricky due to internet sources aging, but here’s a snapshot of an article discussing that testimony.
http://web.archive.org/web/20021026095240/http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/news/1028030290179750.xml
I don’t see where that supports
(unless your disagreement with Douglas_Knight is about something else now)
What do you mean by “testimony”?
I don’t believe anyone was charged with destroying records.
The term “testimony” doesn’t only refer to legal proceedings.
...
I am confused.
Since Jandila seems to have evaded questions on the claim about euthanasia advocates and the claim about legal forced sterilizations in the eighties, I’m inclined to assume those aren’t exactly true, or at least are somewhat exaggerated or deformed.
(though in this specific case, she’s probably talking about hypothetical anti-gay-rights activists or something that aren’t particularly euthanasia advocates, but are advocating euthanasia of queers or something; so there’s no inherent contradiction, I just suspect it didn’t happen as described)
Are you familiar with Not Dead Yet?
[Off-topic discussion taken offline.]
Sure, system 2 can make mistakes. Though it is not uncontroversial to classify all the instances you point to as mistakes—I’m thinking pro-abortion people, and Peter Singer.
But in any case, the question is whether it is in general more prone to them than system 1, a questions which requires data rather than anecdotes. However, I’m willing to bet the angels of our better nature show through more when we’re thinking than when we’re not.
I think that change is a long process. It’s probably not yet possible to see whether the more overt conflict in other venues pays off better than the more polite style at LW, or vice versa.
Also, rationality might be a confounding factor. It’s possible—not guaranteed—that the group norm of paying attention and updating will have good results, even if it’s much slower for highly emotionally fraught issues than for procrastination.
It’s certainly perilous to make too much of an analogy, but when I look at the broader history of social justice movements (at least in the US), it’s not obvious to me at all that keeping to a majority idea of polite gets much done. It’s fashionable for white people who didn’t live through, say, the black Civil Rights movement to talk about MLK vs Malcolm X, as polite vs confrontational (hell, that conception of them has become a mass media archetype—see Professor X vs Magneto in the X-Men franchise, or virtually anything else that deals in discrimination against fantastics), forgetting how much confrontation King and his followers actually engaged in.
The idea of observing norms of behaviour isn’t to “get things done”, it’s to reduce the damage when what you want is the wrong thing. I’d much prefer both my communists and my liberals be peaceful than both be violent. Yes, maybe it might be better if the good guys were confrontational and the bad guys meek; but for the good of the tribe, we should avoid killing for the sake of the tribe. You cannot run an algorithm “violate social norms when I’m right”—you can only run “violate social norms when I think I’m right”.
Personal advances should constrained by social mores and individual rights so as to reduce damage when the subject doesn’t appreciate them. Even if you’re sure you’re right you should still ask for premission; even if it were the case that not obeying social rules (e.g. being creepy) got more done.
Yeah, see, part of the problem here is that you appear to consider making noise a really good indicator of being willing to kill for the sake of the tribe.
No (though it obveously constitutes at least weak bayesian evidence), that wasn’t my point at all. My point was that the reason you should obey social norms in controversial situations applies in both cases.
Equally, “making noise” is to minimise that which I am objecting too. Talking politely, quietly, slowly, with a smile makes noise, but is normally fine. I do object to Malcolm X, though.
Yeah, see, the discussion you were replying to was about whether it would be useful to have confrontational or non-calm comments in discussions, one reason being that listening only to calm people might mean hearing only one side of the story, because it’s easier to be calm if you have little to lose (because you’re on the more powerful side), and another reason being that the truth may be confrontational, so hearing only non-confrontational comments may lead you to miss it.
In the comment you were originally replying to, Jandila was arguing that MLK tends to be cast as non-confrontational, vs. Malcolm X as confrontational, in young white people’s discourse today, but that in fact MLK and his followers were quite confrontational. Thus, looking at history, non-calm confrontational speech seems like a reasonable tool if you want things to change something for the better, even if the people who would be the target of that confrontational speech misremember the actually-society-changing civil rights movement as being less confrontational than it was.
Both of your comments seem to consider only the extremes of “talk politely with a smile” and something in the space between black nationalism and actually killing people who disagree with you (I’m not sure what exactly you’re objecting to in saying you “object to Malcolm X”). This seems unhelpful in a discussion about whether or not it would be useful to also have people participate in discussions who talk confrontationally with angry raised voices.
No, I was just pointing out that the same argument applies to both violence and impoliteness. Making an analogy between X and Y does not mean that one thinks that X and Y are the same in other respects.
(also how can the truth be confrontational? maybe we’re using the word ‘confrontational’ in different senses (or, god forbid, using the word ‘truth’ in different senses) but it seems like only agents or utterances can be confrontational.)
One thing I seem to notice is that the more confrontational people are used by the less confrontatioanl ones to intimidate their opponents while they offer acceptable terms.
There’s confrontation, and then there’s confrontation. I see a difference between “We will make it emotionally and/or financially expensive for you to not change” and describing people as white devils. One sort of confrontation is based on the premise that people can change, and the other is based on the premise that they won’t and/or can’t.
The problem I’m seeing, broadly, is that white people can’t necessarily always tell the difference between the two. Even when it’s couched in positively obsequious language there’s a decent chance of that. I’m not exaggerating here; some white people now think it’s racist to even mention racism. Most white people (certainly a lot of them here in this site) are highly resistant to the idea that racism even exists in this day and age, or that it’s anything other than a strictly defined “paying attention to racial differences.”
You can’t meet everyone halfway here, because they’re either unable or unwilling to reciprocate. It’s not about reaching out to people and persuading and convincing them, at that point—it’s about not letting the fact that you can’t stop you from addressing your actual situation.
I don’t think people can reliably tell the difference between the two, probably especially when they feel they have higher status than the person being addressed. At the moment, we’re getting a variant of the problem in regards to gender.
Who decides the emotional significance of a statement? What tool can you use? Emotions are a rubber ruler, but what else could be available?
This being said, I don’t think the problem is completely unsolvable. Social justice as currently practiced is probably not going to be the last experiment in working on it.
What do you mean by “actual situation”?
I’m looking at what you said here, and the paragraph I wrote whose format it echoes, and I can’t help but think we’re talking about two very different things.
The person whose emotions were touched off by it. Easy, right?
The question I’d be tempted to derive from your connotation here is more like: “Who gets to decide which interpretations of those reports-of-emotional-significance are being proposed as the priority for the purposes of conflict resolution and communication?”
(My answer to that is “the question is slightly broken”, but I’m about to head out so can’t give you the preferred reframing right this moment).
Oh, definitely not. It has plenty of its discontents, even within the movement, who aren’t satisfied with the tools and methodologies available, its failure modes, and so on. That’s being actively discussed in many spaces, I’ve observed.
Some of us even object to “white people”!
Depends who you’re speaking to, and why. To a significant extent, the “confrontational” approach wasn’t about asking for change, it was about “consciousness raising”—debiasing the self concepts of black people, fixing learned helplessness, constructing the conceptual framework to experience white supremacy as racism rather than having internalized it as legitimate.
And, to my mind, the assumption white people “won’t and/or can’t” change was well calibrated. Political anti-racism succeeded somewhat in shoving the Overton window off avowed racism and completely off avowed segregationism. Every variety of disavowed racism remains politically viable (examples: border fences, “illegals”, voter suppression laws) or even politically unassailable (examples: the drug war and its disproportionate criminalization of black people, police casual violence against black people, felon disenfranchisement coupled with the above, lack of reparations). “Color blindness” has been shown to be a cause of / form of racism, but it remains the default “liberal” position in white dominated culture.
The war on drugs is a tricky one—I’m against it myself, but I’ve seen black people be in favor of it, and in favor of closed borders. too.
Neither the war on drugs nor severe border restrictions (which I’m also against) are overtly racist the way Jim Crow was, and that makes them harder to fight. It’s much easier to frame the war on drugs and border restrictions as the sorts of thing a normal government ought to do—some combination of help and punishment and keeping people who don’t use drugs safe for the war on drugs, and safety and control for border restrictions.
Something got accomplished to lower the racism level in the US, even though much less was accomplished than either of us want. I’m inclined to think that the real problem is that we have no idea how to reliably get people to be less prejudiced, and institutional problems will get re-established as long as a lot of people want them to persist.
This isn’t a counsel of despair—it’s a recommendation to keep trying to figure out what might work.
I would’t really call “police casual violence against black people” “politically unassailable”.