arguing [...] whether or not you can be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot.
Downvoted for formulating the question in a way that treats vaguely defined classes of ideological transgressions as having an independent Platonic existence, implying that their properties should be discussed as if they were independently existing elements of reality, rather than a matter of definition. (And in this case there isn’t even anything resembling a standard, precise, clearly stated, and consistently used definition.)
Downvoted for formulating the question in a way that treats vaguely defined classes of ideological
transgressions as having an independent Platonic existence
Platonic?
If I step on your toe unintentionally, and you’re in pain, just because I don’t feel that pain (it wasn’t my toe) doesn’t mean that any harm done occurred either in a Platonic sense or not at all. It sure as heck doesn’t mean that you’re an ideologically-motivated, irrational zealot for getting mad when my response is anything other than “Whoops, sorry.”
I do not think we share sufficient premises to make discussion worthwhile.
Whether you feel pain or not is a fact. It’s territory, not map. Whether someone is racist/sexist depends on definitions. These are categories—which are map, not territory.
I’d guess that whatever value is derived by arguing over whether someone is racist or sexist can be produced better by tabooing those words, and arguing more specifically over what the specific claim is (“would his words be offensive to a significant number of member of such group” “is he trying to increase his own group’s relative power/privilege over the other group”, “does he believe in an innate inferior moral worth for that group”, etc, etc)
Back in the days when incorrect beliefs about the trinity could get you into trouble, it became heresy to doubt that Jesus was god. Shortly thereafter some people stopped believing he was man, which in due course also became heresy. Much drama ensued on the question of whether Christ was cosubstantial with god, or consubstantial with god, and whether the holy ghost proceeded from Christ, or God, or both, and whether God was three or one or both.
Discussions of racism are apt to develop a similar character.
On a conservative blog, the blogger will say something politically incorrect, which in less right wing circles would be deemed “racist”. Then one of the commenters too plainly says something horribly racist, which is clearly implied by and logically follows from the original post on which he is commenting. The right wing blogger, of course, firmly denies his post has such horrid implications, denounces the commenter as disgustingly racist, and bans him.
Back in the days when incorrect beliefs about the trinity could get you into trouble, it became heresy to doubt that Jesus was god. Shortly thereafter some people stopped believing he was man, which in due course also became heresy. Much drama ensued on the question of whether Christ was cosubstantial with god, or consubstantial with god, and whether the holy ghost proceeded from Christ, or God, or both, and whether God was three or one or both.
Discussions of racism are apt to develop a similar character.
However, in the historical discussions of the Trinity, the opposing sides at least made it clear what exact beliefs they considered as orthodox and which heretical, and spelled out the criteria for orthodox beliefs and their official justifications at length, always ready to elaborate still further if any details remained ambiguous. (However arbitrary and illogical these official justifications may have been.)
In contrast, in the modern discussions of racism, sexism, and other ideological transgressions, it is never spelled out explicitly and clearly what exact beliefs one is supposed to profess to remain orthodox. Rather, there exists a pretense that there is a certain set of beliefs that will be accepted by all people who are not malevolent or delusional—and if you ask for a precise and clear statement of what exactly these beliefs are (and let alone how they are justified), this is by itself considered as strong evidence of ideological transgression, since only a malcontent would ask so many annoying questions about things that are supposed to be plainly obvious to sane and honest people.
A clear and explicit list of official doctrine that it is forbidden to question, such as the those pronounced by various parties in historical trinitarian disputes, is at least honest and upfront in what it demands. What we see today however is the utterly mendacious and delusional insistence that the official doctrine is a product of pure rationality and free thinking that can be denied only out of insanity or malicious dishonesty.
On the other hand, the long lists of condemned theses, censured theses, and prohibited articles of the thirteenth century gave no real indication of what was not condemned, not censured, and not prohibited.
I think that the differences you perceive are because the analogies you and sam0345 make to “religious heresy” are really really bad ones. Christ wasn’t truly around to be offended or not offended if someone got his nature wrong. Demanding adherence to a particular theology was basically just a demand by the church for complete monopoly of thinking. Disagreements about the nature of Christ were effectively attacks on the authority of the church.
The best modern-day analogy to such issues of religious heresy, are probably the intra-Communist squabbles about Stalin and Trotsky and Mao and revisionism and whatever...
But in regards to racism and sexism though, it’s not about lowering the status of institutions like the Church or the Communist Party, but about lowering the status of groups of actual people. It’s a much more… decentralized defection, and similarly it gets a much more decentralized punishment—in Western states there’s no single “punishing authority” as there used to be in Communist regimes for defections against communist ideology, or there still is in Theocratic regimes for defections against theocratic ideology.
You are presenting an oversimplified picture in both cases, and the contrast is definitely not so clear-cut.
First, the christological and other theological controversies were often only part of much broader political, ideological, ethnic, and other conflicts, involving all sorts of parties and factions both within and outside the church hierarchy. Sometimes there was also a strong populist element—during the monophysite controversy, for example, there were plenty of spontaneous riots and pogroms. Therefore, in these controversies, the power and status of many groups and individuals was at stake, not just the interests of the Church leadership.
Second, the modern repercussions of various ideological transgressions are by no means limited to spontaneous reactions by people who feel directly targeted. For start, there is a complicated and non-obvious system that determines which groups are entitled to such reaction, so that their outrage will be supported and the offenders condemned by the respectable opinion, and which groups are OK to denigrate, so that protesting will only lower their status still further. Then, we also have a network of official intellectual institutions that have a de facto monopoly of respectable and impactful thinking, and the reaction of these institutions to various ideological transgressions involves many elements far beyond direct and spontaneous outrage of those who are (supposed to be) directly targeted.
But aside from all this, my main point is the contrast between two kinds of systems that is independent of the issues you raise:
A system in which certain beliefs are clearly spelled out as official dogma that it is forbidden to question, so if you’re accused of heresy, you can at least demand a clear statement of what exact official dogma you have contradicted—and if you have in fact steered clear of any matters of official dogma in your writings and utterances, this is admissible as a valid defense. (Historically, this was typically the case for people accused of heresy by the Church tribunals, though of course things varied a lot in different places and times and there were certainly instances of corruption and railroading, like in any other legal system.)
A system in which there is official pretense that there is no dogma whatsoever, that everyone is supposed to be a skeptical free thinker about everything, and that imposing some sort of official dogma would be the vilest tyranny imaginable—so that when you are accused of some ideological transgression, it is automatically assumed that your statements must be due to either disingenuous malice or some crazy delusion, since the respectable opinion is considered to be a product of pure rational thinking, as an assumption built into the system. So rather than having clearly outlined boundaries of what you may or may not say, you must pretend to be a free thinker unencumbered by any official dogma, while at the same time strictly adhering to the de facto official dogma—which is only more sweeping and onerous because it is so vague and not stated openly.
It seems to me that system (2) is hardly an improvement over (1).
But in regards to racism and sexism though, it’s not about lowering the status of institutions like the Church or the Communist Party, but about lowering the status of groups of actual people.
Surely the communist party would say something similar—and indeed it did: Trotsky complained that certain speech was a violation of freedom of speech because that speech oppressed the proletariat.
Surely the communist party would say something similar
I’m sure it would, because after all that was the prime characteristic of social-fascist regimes—claiming supposedly egalitarian-minded ideas for the pursuit of in-actuality the establishment of a new ruling class/aristocracy based on party membership. Much like corporate-capitalism propagandizes itself as meritocratic instead (while trying to form a ruling class based on control of stocks and so forth).
I made an image of this some time ago:
This of course doesn’t mean that all egalitarian ideas exist to support the communist party elite, any more than it means that all meritocratic ideas are there to support the corporate elites.
Surely the communist party would say something similar
I’m sure it would, because after all that was the prime characteristic of social-fascist regimes—claiming supposedly egalitarian-minded ideas for the pursuit of in-actuality the establishment of a new ruling class/aristocracy based on party membership
And is that not what is happening in America today?
I don’t think the idea can be written off so easily. This of course gets into all sorts of extremely charged issues, but in any case, considering the historical record of egalitarian ideas in general, surely it would not be rational to take the presently dominant egalitarian ideas at face value automatically.
Not to mention that for anyone familiar with the standard OB/LW motives, it should be straightforward to ask about the signaling and status issues involved. Should it be controversial to propose that, perhaps, egalitarianism is not about equality?
Cuba had obvious, striking, and severe inequality, with a strong element of racial inequality. Yet back before the fall of the Soviet Union, and for some time thereafter, visitors to Cuba tended to not only congratulate Cuba on its wonderful equality, but also themselves on being able to perceive that wonderful equality, that someone less sensitive might have failed to see.
During the hungry ghosts famine in China, J.K. Galbraith observed “If there was any famine in China it was not evident in the kitchen”. The kitchen to which he refers being the kitchen of the luxury hotel his hosts provided him.
You seem to be getting into thorny theoretical questions about the nature of modern Western culture and political ideology. I don’t really have much to add on that point.
I was just talking about a simple question of fact: that is, most Republicans would consider the appellation of ‘egalitarian’ to be an insult.
Edit: Actually, you know what? This is straight-up mindkilling, right here. So how about I just retract everything I contributed to this travesty of a ‘conversation’ and take extra care not to get sucked into this kind of thing again.
In communism, political incorrectness might get you shot, but far more likely might be taken into account when you next sought a holiday or promotion. For the most part, the enforcement of political correctness under communism was every bit as decentralized as the enforcement in the US.
Similarly with thirteenth century punishment for heresy, the main punishment being that one was unlikely to receive tenure. No one respectable got tortured or burned at the stake, though Roger Bacon got solitary confinement on bread and water.
And the enforcement in the US is ultimately highly centralized. The reason your boss will fire you for wrongthink is that when his business gets charged with racism, all his employees will be scrutinized for wrongthink. Most discrimination charges do not involve an employer calling a member of a protected group a derogatory name, but rather an employee revealing unapproved views unaware that there are spies present who will rat on him. A member of a protected group heard of the unapproved views—in some cases he would had to have been listening at keyholes to have discovered the unapproved views and have his feelings hurt, and I suspect that in fact these unapproved views were only discovered during the disclosure phase, and the complainant could hypothetically have heard them at the keyhole, rather than actually heard them.
For the most part, enforcement of political correctness under communism worked in exactly the same way as in the US—through employment and academic admissions.
I’d guess that whatever value is derived by arguing over whether someone is racist or sexist can be produced better by tabooing those words, and arguing more specifically over what the specific claim is (“would his words be offensive to a significant number of member of such group” “is he trying to increase his own group’s relative power/privilege over the other group”, “does he believe in an innate inferior moral worth for that group”, etc, etc)
I notice a glaring omission from your list of questions. Namely “are his words if interpreted as a factual claim and/or argument true and/or valid”
I agree these are helpful paraphrases—but as a practical matter increasing the burden on the person trying to point out the offense or marginalization isn’t necessarily a good idea since it often very difficult for people to call their friends and acquaintances on such matters. For example, I imagine it is very difficult for a black person surrounded by white people to call out behavior that makes them feel marginalized—there is a great deal of social pressure against this. In normal social contexts a minority should be free to express how something makes them feel without being expected to enter into an extended defense of the matter.
Here at Less Wrong, I almost always translate “is x-ist” in the way you suggest and think it is worthwhile where the goal of the discussion is truth seeking (I’m not a member of many relevant minorities, though)
Yes, Platonic—and it’s easy to demonstrate that it follows in a straightforward manner from your phrasing.
To stick with the (relatively) less incendiary of the two, consider the notion of “sexism.” Discussing whether some institution, act, or claim is “sexist” makes sense only if at least one of these two conditions applies:
There is some objectively existing Platonic idea of “sexism,” so that whether something is “sexist” is ultimately a question of fact that must have an objectively correct yes or no answer.
There is a precise and agreed-upon definition of “sexism,” so that whether something is “sexist” is, assuming agreement on questions of fact, ultimately a question of logic (i.e. whether the given facts satisfy the definition), which also must have an objectively correct yes or no answer.
Now, the option (2) is clearly out of the question. This is because the term inherently implies that any “sexist” claim does not belong to the set of reasonable and potentially correct claims and a “sexist” institution or act is outside the bounds of what is defensible and acceptable—while at the same time nobody has ever given any definition of “sexism” that wouldn’t be either so restrictive as to make most of the common usage of the term inconsistent with the definition, or so broad as to make many reasonable and defensible claims and institutions “sexist,” thus again contradicting this essential implication of the term. Also, the very fact that you talk about “arguing [...] whether or not you can be [...] sexist [...] without [property X]” implies that there exists some Platonic idea of “sexism,” since otherwise it would be a trivial question of whether property X is included in the definition.
Also, the very fact that you talk about “arguing [...] whether or not you can be [...] sexist [...] without [property X]” implies that there exists some Platonic idea of “sexism,” since otherwise it would be a trivial question of whether property X is included in the definition.
It is trivial. Jandila’s definition of sexism and racism does not include the speaker being a bigot as a necessary criterion. Now, I often complain to my anti-subordination activisty friends that a lot of people don’t realize their definitions of racism and sexism don’t imply that. It’s a problem since people tend to get more defensive than they need to be when someone points out something they did or said that is racist, sexist, anti- gay, etc. But people getting defensive after they know these words don’t imply bigotry really is silly. And yet it still happens—which is why Jandila doesn’t always have the patience to deal with it.
That’s because words like “bigot, racist, sexist, anti- gay” are frequently used to sneak in conotations that the argument in question (and by extension the person making it) is somehow immoral and can be dismissed without looking at its validity, or at the very least requires us to engage in motivated continuation until the argument has been “rationally” dismissed. If you and Jandila don’t mean to sneak in these connotations, say so; however, in that case you should probably pick a word that doesn’t have these connotations in common usage.
I didn’t mind being told my behavior pattern matches with that of bad people’s by people who I thought think probabilistically.
If someone were to see me handcuffed in the back of a police car with blood all over me, they should think me more likely to have killed someone than if they hadn’t seen that. If they concluded I killed someone because they saw me there, they would just be stupid.
All I really need is for two (Asch conformity) of twelve regular people who accept stupid arguments to accept arguments I am not guilty, or one nut juror, or one intelligent juror.
I am reticent to discuss this without there being any object level issue—I don’t trust either side’s claims about how these words are ‘frequently used’. I would be comfortable evaluating a specific instance of the use of these words but I suspect discussion of how they tend to be used will just leave people insisting on generalities that flatter their own ideology. Both sides have ways of framing the other’s rhetorical techniques as harmful and destructive to honest communication. And both sides are often oblivious to what the other side is saying. Usually when words like sexist and racist are thrown out the users usually have reasons why they used those words instead of others despite (or I guess sometimes because of) connotations. But again, those reasons can’t be evaluated in abstract.
I suspect discussion of how they tend to be used will just leave people insisting on generalities that flatter their own ideology.
I think that the burden of proof is on those criticizing authors for using particular language.
But again, those reasons can’t be evaluated in abstract.
It ought to disqualify the prosecutors from bringing such cases if there can’t be evidence to support them, so it seems to me you’re on a “side” if you think that.
I think that the burden of proof is on those criticizing authors for using particular language.
Both sides are criticizing the other for using particular language. Bob says x. Susan says saying x is racist (criticizing Bob). Bob says saying something is racist sneaks in connotations (criticizing Susan).
It ought to disqualify the prosecutors from bringing such cases if there can’t be evidence to support them, so it seems to me you’re on a “side” if you think that.
I don’t know what you’re talking about here.
Edit: If I understand you right I guess I don’t see a justification for ‘burden of proof’ type analyses except in literal court rooms. There usually isn’t a reason for them other than presumption and status quo bias.
Both sides are criticizing the other for using particular language.
The criticisms are importantly different.
“Susan says saying x is racist.”
There is nothing wrong with that statement, but “arguing [...] whether or not you can be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot,” is confused, though not necessarily accusatory.
“Bob says saying something is racist sneaks in connotations.”
Bob is saying something not confused, but coherent and accusatory. “If you and Jandila don’t mean to sneak in these connotations, say so;” is unfair. Bob has to address the argument as if those connotations were not intended, even if they probably were (in his mind), or weren’t but probably are so misinterpreted by others (in his models of them), he can’t decline to address the actual argument unless he has overwhelming evidence that it was designed primarily to manipulate and not substantially to present evidence.
If it’s easier for Bob to show the argument is dishonest rather than refute it, it’s fine to let him do that if he feels it is better for some reason, and I don’t think Bob owes an explanation of how the argument was wrong or even an honest attempt to try and understand it, depending on how sinuous and sinuous it was.
Susan’s statement isn’t supposed to be a counter argument, just an argument. (When I described the situation above I could have as easily started with “Bob does something racist” instead of “says. She may or may not have a propositional disagreement with what Bob said.)
[And now we have two threads about Bob. He is apparently both a racist and terrible with women.]
It relies on the implication that the user of the word frowns on racisms and that other people ought to as well. This is different from the connotation that someone who does something racist must be intentionally bigoted or some kind of secret white supremacist. The difference is that the first is merely a normative implication that is obvious to everyone while the second suggests additional beliefs about Bob that are being snuck in but not officially defended by anyone.
It relies on the implication that the user of the word frowns on racisms and that other people ought to as well.
That’s still sneaking in connotations unless deserving to be frowned upon is part of the definition of “racism”. However, in that case Susan needs to establish that the action and/or argument deserves to be frowned upon in addition to satisfying the other parts of the definition of racism to justify her claim that the action and/or argument is indeed “racist”. Notice that what you called “defensiveness” in the comment that started this sub-thread is simply Bob pointing out that she hasn’t done so.
Essentially Susan is trying to argue that Bob’s action and/or argument is racist and hence by definition bad. This argument runs into the problem Eliezer discusses in that article.
Essentially Susan is trying to argue that Bob’s action and/or argument is racist and hence by definition bad.
Too many guards were facing the wrong direction until now.
The problem isn’t so much that connotations may sneak in, it’s that relevance may sneak out. That’s why I said some things were confused and not even an argument: the key step was that a label applied and everything with that label was invalid, and that thinking something is an argument doesn’t make it so be it sentences or even a string of arbitrary characters, and so on.
It’s too difficult and too costly in terms of accusations made and inferences drained from language to zealously guard against bad connotations.
That’s still sneaking in connotations unless deserving to be frowned upon is part of the definition of “racism”.
No, it’s merely an assumption in polite society. Bob is free to say that he doesn’t care that he’s being racist—but that is not what he is being defensive about.
The defensiveness is in response to the connotation which Jandila at the very start of the thread disclaimed:
if there’s one thing I don’t need more of in my life it’s arguing with a population comprised mostly of wealthy, white Libertarian-esque cisgendered/heterosexual men whether or not you can be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot.
There is a connotation that doing something racist or sexist means you’re intentionally trying to hurt people, that you’re a bad person instead of just making a mistake or being ignorant. When I say there is an implication to the word “racism” that my activist friends aren’t paying attention to I’m talking about that not the implication that a racist statement shouldn’t be said. Note, those activist friends consider everyone a racist, themselves included.
There is a connotation that doing something racist or sexist means you’re intentionally trying to hurt people, that you’re a bad person instead of just making a mistake or being ignorant.
You’re still trying to sneak in connotations, notice how you seem to be trying to exclude the possibility that a statement you describe as racist could actually be true, or that an action you describe as racist could actually be rational.
Also, why are you getting so defensive about my pointing out that you’re sneaking in connotations? There is a connotation that sneaking in connotations or exhibiting some other bias means you’re intentionally trying to mislead people, that you’re a bad person instead of just making a mistake or being ignorant. Note, people on lesswrong consider everyone biased, themselves included.
You’re still trying to sneak in connotations, notice how you seem to be trying to exclude the possibility that a statement you describe as racist could actually be true, or that an action you describe as racist could actually be rational.
I don’t notice how I seem to be doing it, actually.
Also, why are you getting so defensive about my pointing out that your sneaking in connotations? There is a connotation that sneaking in connotations or exhibiting some other bias means you’re intentionally trying to mislead people, that you’re a bad person instead of just making a mistake or being ignorant. Note, people on lesswrong consider everyone biased, themselves included.
Clever. It’s actually a good analogy. I’m really not getting defensive, just frustrated that you seem to be misunderstanding me (which is weird because I thought your original comment understood me perfectly).
You’re still trying to sneak in connotations, notice how you seem to be trying to exclude the possibility that a statement you describe as racist could actually be true, or that an action you describe as racist could actually be rational.
I don’t notice how I seem to be doing it, actually.
The statement I quoted:
There is a connotation that doing something racist or sexist means you’re intentionally trying to hurt people, that you’re a bad person instead of just making a mistake or being ignorant.
seems to imply that the only reason one would make a “racist” statement is either out of a desire to hurt people or out of ignorance.
Clever. It’s actually a good analogy.
One difference is that the definition of bias as used on lw does explicitly include the requirement that they provide incorrect results, as such I’ve been providing you with links to the relevant lesswrong articles.
I’m really not getting defensive,
One reason I did that is so you could see how annoying arguments of the form:
“Why are you getting so defensive about my accusing you of bad thing X, X doesn’t imply worse thing Y?”
“may subjectively be considered a counterargument but that doesn’t make it important. The statement was made because it was intended to make a certain point, even though its mechanism was to exclude things from consideration based on a labeling criteria too many steps removed from truth.”
Btw, Could you provide your definition of “bigot”? I’ve gotten a vague idea of what you mean by the word from context, but I’d like to see your formulation. (Note: be prepared to explain why being a “bigot” is obviously a “very bad thing”.)
The predominant usage in modern English refers to persons hostile to those of differing sex, race, ethnicity, religion or spirituality, nationality, language, inter-regional prejudice, gender and sexual orientation, age, homelessness, various medical disorders particularly behavioral disorders and addictive disorders.
(Note: be prepared to explain why being a “bigot” is obviously a very bad thing”.)
I am not so prepared—though it doesn’t seem especially controversial to me I am vaguely open to an argument that it isn’t obvious. But I don’t see why I should be expected to explain why.
The predominant usage in modern English refers to persons hostile to those of differing sex, race, ethnicity, religion or spirituality, nationality, language, inter-regional prejudice, gender and sexual orientation, age, homelessness, various medical disorders particularly behavioral disorders and addictive disorders.
So if I believe that, say, religion X is wrong and its teachings are immoral, do I qualify as a bigot under this definition?
Thats a unique example in that definition, that, in retrospect I should have perhaps left out. Unlike the other groupings religion partly consists in beliefs and values which I think it is often important to be hostile to. Those beliefs and values are closely tied to the culture of a religion which I don’t think people should be hostile to. I would not call someone a bigot for criticizing, mocking or insulting the beliefs and values associated with a particular religion. Doing the same to the people themselves or the culture, purposefully, and not the result of merely being uninformed or temporarily blinded would make a person a bigot.
Obviously it’s specific contents are political and I don’t necessarily think it is complete (or as we seen without mistakes)-- but the criteria for an ideal list is something like ‘classes of people that agents cannot help but be members of’.
Yeah. It’s a mess of a hard problem. Thats why I try not to talk about it here because nobody is good at talking about it rationally. I’m not defending every instance of someone calling something racist, sexist etc. I’m not defending everything the people who tend to do it nor the list of groups they do it for.
That being the case I don’t think the solution is to deny the harms people are talking about when they complain about racism, sexism etc. And it’s going to get talked about at some point just like all politics.
That being the case I don’t think the solution is to deny the harms people are talking about when they complain about racism, sexism etc.
Nor is the solution to suppress discussion of statements that could be construed as bigoted. Even statements about race and IQ, or whether homosexuality is a sexual deviance.
To be fare, the main problem on LessWrong, as opposed to the world in general, is people engaging in motivated stopping and motivated continuation when discussing these topics in an attempt to avoid being sexist (for some reason race is less of a problem) and/or bigots.
Does this question have empirical content that constrains my anticipated experiences? Or is it just a value judgment?
I don’t think there is a lot of room or reason to discuss terminal or near-terminal value judgments. I find that criticism along the lines of “Stop valuing that, it’s a character defect” is a perfectly reasonable response to terminal value judgments that I disagree with (though I try not to penalize people for value disagreement here since people with bad values can still be insightful about factual matters).
With something like race and IQ I don’t think they should be suppressed and haven’t tried to suppress them (I have comments elsewhere lamenting such suppression). But do think it is reasonable to expect those conversations to occur at a higher level than they have so far. For whatever reason the most vocal advocates of genetic inheritance as an explanation for the race IQ gap have been worse than average commenters. A while back I linked to an article Steve Hsu wrote on the subject, he showed up and there was briefly a really good back and forth on the subject. But for the most part discussion of the subject here consists of anecdotal evidence, baseless claims and people on both sides paying no attention to the relevant studies or population genetics. It is worthwhile in these cases, I think, for people to do what they can to avoid pattern matching with something designed to demean or oppress people. Both to avoid hurting people unnecessarily and to avoid triggering mind-killing. You don’t have to sound like George Cuvier to argue for a genetic explanation of the race IQ-gap.
Edit: Though apparently we can’t even talk about talking it without the both of us being downvoted.
About race and IQ, that really hasn’t been a problem here.
But for the most part discussion of the subject here consists of anecdotal evidence, baseless claims and people on both sides paying no attention to the relevant studies or population genetics.
Part of the problem is how politicized population genetics has become.
I should probably have listed as an example something like talking about PUA and whether it works, because that has caused problems here, despite being less controversial in the outside world.
Edit: Though apparently we can’t even talk about talking it without the both of us being downvoted.
The only thing that offended me was the one value judgment in the bunch:
the behaviors associated with the pederastic/dominating classical style are entangled with abuse and degradation in a way that can only be described as evil
And I’m not offended on behalf of homosexuals but on behalf of BDSMers and kinky people who take those styles and practice them, but only between consenting adults. The rest of the piece, I think, exhibited a lot of ignorance about modern homosexual and heterosexual sex and desire and an overconfidence in historical records about romantic homosexuality. But I think you might be surprised at how similar his point is to that made by some radical queer theorists I’ve read.
They exist, but they’re mostly all tangled up in whatever hybrid of Marxism and/or postmodernism is in vogue. Add in a sprinkling of half-understood genetics, evolution, and evolutionary psychology, and it’s just a monstrous headache every paragraph.
The one I have in mind is Lee Edelman. He quotes Hegel a lot. He does philosophy from an English department and works in post-structuralism and, wait for it, psychoanalytic theory. Probably not Less Wrong’s cup of tea. He does show gay porn in his lectures, though.
Anyway, he critiques what he calls “reproductive futurism”, by which he means the norms and values that serve to continue civilization in the traditional sense: “The children are our future”, the fact that political appeals on behalf of children are impossible to refuse, heterosexual marriage, the nuclear family, and the entire political edifice he sees as built up around the idea. He sees the figure of the queer person as someone left out of this social order. He suggests that rather than (or maybe in addition to) fighting for the right to join in the social order—through joining the military openly, gay marriage, gay adoption etc. gays and lesbians should resist the entirety of reproductive futurism.
He positively quotes conservatives for accurately revealing just how it is queers lie outside the established social order. I suspect he might see the “romantic homosexuality” style in the above linked blog post as acquiescence to reproductive futurism.
[That make sense to anyone? Just trying to translate the ideas into something reasonable sounding.]
“The children are our future”, the fact that political appeals on behalf of children are impossible to refuse, heterosexual marriage, the nuclear family, and the entire political edifice he sees as built up around the idea. He sees the figure of the queer person as someone left out of this social order. He suggests that rather than (or maybe in addition to) fighting for the right to join in the social order—through joining the military openly, gay marriage, gay adoption etc. gays and lesbians should resist the entirety of reproductive futurism.
Even if they succeed in that goal all they’ll do is cause the affected culture to evolve to extinction.
[That make sense to anyone? Just trying to translate the ideas into something reasonable sounding.]
This is more or less what conservatives have been accusing the gay-rights movement of being a cover for since day one.
apparently we can’t even talk about talking it without the both of us being downvoted.
Many comments like this one get net upvotes. Are you concerned with total or net votes? What are your net votes from such discussions? How possible would it be for you to reshape downvoted-type comments into upvoted-type comments, particularly because any one downvoted comment is unlikely to have received much of your editing attention?
both sides
Comments expressing the lament of “people on both sides” are likely to be downvoted by me. I have many similar loose heuristics, such as “vote down people arguing by definition”, “vote up people changing their mind”, “vote up people citing sources”, “vote down people who do not apply the principle of charity”, and “vote up comments in which people correctly use the word ‘literally’”.
You’re unlikely to avoid tripping any if you make multiple comments, but I think each is fair and generally the type of content I want to see gets communicated. Consequently I suggest being less concerned by total downvotes, even if your only other change is to be more concerned with net downvotes. It’s not really supposed to be possible to avoid tripping any wire any reader has.
But I don’t see you getting net downvotes, so I’m not sure if that is instead your complaint...because that would be weird, as getting a near balance of favorable and unfavorable reviews isn’t too harsh a form of censorship.
I’m concerned not with my karma total but with the net-negative karma score for individual comments. A net negative karma for a comment signals that Less Wrong does not want to see that comment. When I see net negative comments I try to figure out why. For any one comment there are lots of possible explanations for downvoting. But when I see a trend that suggests downvoting heuristics I think are bad I sometimes publicly lament those heuristics. For example, I see a lot of bad pattern matching downvoting where people say things that unexamined resemble theistic apologist arguments. Taking any position that could be considered political also seems to be subject to downvoting. Especially when that position is inconsistent with the values of the local demographic cluster. Laments of downvote heuristics seems to be a rather unpopular comment type as well. These heuristics have a chilling effect on the discussions of those subjects and partly explain Eugine’s complaint:
To be fare, the main problem on LessWrong, as opposed to the world in general, is people engaging in motivated stopping and motivated continuation when discussing these topics in an attempt to avoid being sexist (for some reason race is less of a problem) and/or bigots.
Comments expressing the lament of “people on both sides” are likely to be downvoted by me.
Fair enough as a heuristic, though I’ll note I made it pretty clear which side I thought was worse in the preceding sentences. But don’t worry about your downvote- the heuristic you used was fine by me.
Laments of downvote heuristics seems to be a rather unpopular comment type as well.
Laments of downvote heuristics seem to be about why the complainer’s immediately preceding comments were downvoted.
How often are such complaint framed as laments that political allies were downvoted, much less neutrals or opponents?
If everyone writing a comment of content type X also always added spam links, I would downvote overconfident speculation about why people don’t like content X and how that makes them bad people.
But when I see a trend that suggests downvoting heuristics I think are bad I sometimes publicly lament those heuristics. For example, I see a lot of bad pattern matching downvoting where people say things that unexamined resemble theistic apologist arguments. Taking any position that could be considered political also seems to be subject to downvoting.
Outside of threads I’m personally involved in, I try to downvote any comment which seems detrimental to the overall signal-to-noise ratio on LW. Most often that means posts which are statistically illiterate, incoherent, obviously biased, or poorly written, which I imagine should be uncontroversial. Beyond content and style, though, it’s also possible for a post’s framing to lower the signal-to-noise ratio through a variety of knock-on effects.
Usually this happens by way of halo effects and their negative-affect equivalent (let’s call that a miasma effect, if it lacks a proper name): arguments matching religious apologia too closely, for example, tend to trigger a cluster of negative associations in our largely atheistic audience that prime it for confrontation even if the content itself is benign. Likewise for comments with political framing or drawing unwisely from political examples. I don’t usually click the downvote button on comments like these until there’s evidence of them actually causing problems, but that’s sufficiently common that I still end up burning a lot of votes on them.
I submit that this isn’t a bad heuristic. It’s one that shouldn’t be necessary if we were all free from emotive priming effects, but we clearly aren’t, and exposing ourselves to many sources of them isn’t going to help us get rid of the problem; in the meantime, discouraging such comments seems like a useful way of keeping the shouting down.
If I believe it’s better for people not to have behavioral disorders or/and addictive disorders develop a treatment and encourage people with said disorders to take it, am I being hostile? What if I do the same w.r.t. homosexuality?
BTW, if the answer to both those questions is “no”, I have no further problem with the definition.
Treating someone like an enemy. Shrug. I don’t have a clear bright line or anything, the amount and intensity of bigotry someone must exhibit before I’m comfortable calling them a bigoted person is pretty high.
If I believe it’s better for people not to have behavioral disorders or/and addictive disorders develop a treatment and encourage people with said disorders to take it am I being hostile? What if I do the same w.r.t. homosexuality?
In both cases it depends on why you want people to take the treatment.
We’re now very far from what was a pretty contingent defense of another commenter’s position and I don’t especially enjoy the topic...
Replace “sexism” by “X”. Do you think this alternative is still valid?
Of course it is still valid, unless X corresponds directly to some observable and clearly identifiable element of physical reality, so that its existence is not Platonic, but physically real. Obviously it wouldn’t make sense to discuss whether someone has, say, committed theft if there didn’t exist a precise and agreed-upon definition of what counts as theft—or otherwise we would be hunting for some objectively existing Platonic idea of “theft” in order to see whether it applies.
Now of course, in human affairs no definition is perfectly precise, and there will always be problematic corner cases where there may be much disagreement. This precision is ultimately a matter of degree. However, to use the same example again, when people are accused of theft, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the only disagreement is whether the facts of the accusation are correct, and it’s only very rarely that even after the facts are agreed upon, there is significant disagreement over whether what happened counts as theft. In contrast, when people are accused of sexism, a discussion almost always immediately starts about whether what they did was really and truly “sexist,” even when there is no disagreement at all about what exactly was said or done.
Of course it is still valid, unless X corresponds directly to some observable and clearly identifiable element of physical reality, so that its existence is not Platonic, but physically real. Obviously it wouldn’t make sense to discuss whether someone has, say, committed theft if there didn’t exist a precise and agreed-upon definition of what counts as theft—or otherwise we would be hunting for some objectively existing Platonic idea of “theft” in order to see whether it applies.
Of course? There must be a miscommunication.
Do you think it makes sense to discuss, say, intelligence, friendship or morality? Do you think these exist either as physically real things or Platonic ideas, or can you supply precise and agreed-upon definitions for them?
I don’t count any of my three examples physically real in the sense of being a clearly identifiable part of physical reality. Of course they reduce to physical things at the bottom, but only in the trivial sense in which everything does. Knowing that the reduction exists is one thing, but we don’t judge things as intelligent, friendly or moral based on their physical configuration, but on higher-order abstractions. I’m not expecting us to have a disagreement here. I wouldn’t consider any of the examples a Platonic idea either. Our concepts and intuitions do not have their source in some independently existing ideal world of perfections. Since you seemed to point to Platonism as a fallacy, we probably don’t disagree here either.
So I’m led to expect that you think that to sensibly discuss whether a given behaviour is intelligent, friendly or moral, we need to be able to give precise definitions for intelligence, friendship and morality. But I can only think that this is fundamentally misguided: the discussions around these concepts are relevant precisely because we do not have such definitions at hand. We can try to unpack our intuitions about what we think of as a concept, for example by tabooing the word for it. But this is completely different from giving a definition.
However, to use the same example again, when people are accused of theft, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the only disagreement is whether the facts of the accusation are correct, and it’s only very rarely that even after the facts are agreed upon, there is significant disagreement over whether what happened counts as theft. In contrast, when people are accused of sexism, a discussion almost always immediately starts about whether what they did was really and truly “sexist,” even when there is no disagreement at all about what exactly was said or done.
This only reflects on the easiest ways of making or defending against particular kinds of accusations, not at all on the content of the accusations. Morality is similar to sexism in this respect, but it still makes sense to discuss morality without being a Platonist about it or without giving a precise agreed-upon definition.
So I’m led to expect that you think that to sensibly discuss whether a given behaviour is intelligent, friendly or moral, we need to be able to give precise definitions for intelligence, friendship and morality. But I can only think that this is fundamentally misguided: the discussions around these concepts are relevant precisely because we do not have such definitions at hand. We can try to unpack our intuitions about what we think of as a concept, for example by tabooing the word for it. But this is completely different from giving a definition.
Well, morality is such an enormous and multi-sided topic that what usually matters in a concrete situation is only some particular small subset of morality. A discussion can be meaningful if there is agreement on the issue at hand, even if there is disagreement otherwise. So to take the same example again, if we’re discussing whether someone is a thief (i.e has committed the sort of immoral behavior that is called “theft”), it doesn’t matter if we define murder differently, as long as we define theft the same.
But yes, of course that discussing whether a given behavior is intelligent, friendly, or moral makes sense only if we agree on the definitions of these terms. As I said above, in practice our definitions about human affairs are always fuzzy and incomplete to some degree, so there will always be disagreement at least in some corner cases, and discussions will be meaningful as long as they stick to the broader area of agreement. However, in case of friendship, intelligence, and most issues of morality, people typically agree at least roughly on the relevant definitions, so the usage of these words is usually meaningful.
Also, when people agree on definitions, it doesn’t matter if they are able to state these definitions precisely and explicitly, as long as there is no disagreement on whether the definitions are satisfied assuming given facts. Giving a precise definition of “friendship” would be a difficult task for most people, but it doesn’t matter since there is no significant disagreement on what behavior is expected from people one considers as friends, and what behavior should disqualify them. One the other hand, when someone makes vague ideological accusations such as “sexism,” there is no such agreement at all, and a rational discussion can’t even being before a clear definition of the term is given.
If I step on your toe unintentionally, and you’re in pain, just because I don’t feel that pain (it wasn’t my toe) doesn’t mean that any harm done occurred either in a Platonic sense or not at all. It sure as heck doesn’t mean that you’re an ideologically-motivated, irrational zealot for getting mad when my response is anything other than “Whoops, sorry.”
the problem is that the pain is not caused by someone stepping on your toe, but by someone showing subtle but detectable signs of thinking thoughts that you disagree with.
The pain caused by someone committing thought crime against you has a more dubious ontological status than the pain caused impact upon your toe.
A typical example of this is the word “gay”, the latest polite euphemism for male homosexual, the latest of a great many. Like every other polite euphemism for anything, it has become a swear word, a swear word that unlike Carlin’s list of seven words you used not to be able to say on TV, still has the power to shock.
Indeed, as soon as one creates a new euphemism, it implies that the thing that it is a euphemism for is unmentionably disgusting, thus becomes good swear word, depriving the euphemism of the niceness that is the essential characteristic of a euphemism, while rendering all previous euphemisms for the thing (of which there are usually large number) too disgusting to speak.
The pain caused by the inevitable and inexorable transition from euphemism to curse word is fundamentally different from the pain caused by stepping on your toes. It is more like the pain caused by losing an election, or someone banging a prettier girl than you banged. The tenth commandment forbids you to experience or admit to experiencing certain kinds of pain. Not all pains have equal status as cause for complaint. You cannot help feeling pain if someone steps on your toes, but you can and should help feeling certain other forms of pain, which forms of pain are therefore less real.
The problem is that some insults (and this is currently true about those relating to homosexuality) get backed up with violence and/or with serious social exclusion—they aren’t “just words”.
Also, people don’t reliably put abuse behind them. Their reactions to threats that it might start up again are quite strong. The situation is complicated by the fact that these reactions can be amplified by social effects.
Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness has the thesis that, because overt racism isn’t socially acceptable but covert racism still goes on, both black and white Americans search for more and more subtle clues to whether people are racist. This looks insane, but is a rational response to a difficult situation.
I’m not sure it’s a line so much as it’s an impression. Strategists try to reshape battlefields to give themselves the high ground. I’m not sure I can articulate anything worth updating on, but I’ll think about it and get back to you if I come up with anything.
“A typical example of this is the word “gay”, the latest polite euphemism for male homosexual, the latest of a great many.”
Hmm… I’d have guessed it was less about being a euphemism and more about English-speakers wanting to have a one-syllable word instead of a five-syllable one, much like “straight” is a one-syllable word for “heterosexual”, without this meaning that hetero sex is “unmentionably disgusting”.
Not all pains have equal status as cause for complaint.
Even from childhood we know that pain caused by deliberate insults often hurts more than physical fights.
People should not seek to take offense where none was meant—but when offense is meant, and you know it’s meant, not being hurt is often harder than ignoring a merely stepped-upon toe. A deliberate insult can linger all day in your mind when a toe is soon forgotten.
English-speakers wanting to have a one-syllable word instead of a five-syllable one, much like “straight” is a one-syllable word for “heterosexual”, without this meaning that hetero sex is “unmentionably disgusting”.
Supporting evidence: American English speakers weren’t even content with a two syllable word meaning that homo sex is “unmentionably disgusting”, and it’s been shortened to one syllable.
On a tangential note, this usage of “reclaim” has always bothered me. “Queer” didn’t start out with positive or neutral connotations. It has not been reclaimed by the GLBT movement, it has been appropriated. Reclamation denotes previous ownership, something that simply doesn’t apply when you look at the historical relationship between the words that are being “reclaimed” and the groups that are claiming them, but it’s chosen for its connotations of legitimacy, since people are less likely to object to your taking back what’s rightfully yours.
Only leftists consciously try to remake language. Conservatives do not,
This may reflect the conservative belief in naive realism, that words refer to things in the world, and are ultimately defined by pointing at stuff, primarily by mothers pointing at stuff, as in “mother tongue”. Leftists frequently believe that words create reality, hence they always start language projects.
If a rose by any other name will smell as sweet, no point in finding new words for shit. You want conservatives to say “gay”. Observe. They say “gay”, but somehow it sounds remarkably as if they saying (long, long, long list of words no one is allowed to say any more)
Before building a house, check that your foundation is sound.
The bias you have to be most careful of in this situation is availability. When claiming “liberals X, but conservatives don’t X,” I think people first run a mental search for “liberal X” and then a search for “conservative X.” But mental searches aren’t as reliable as you might wish—if in the post just above, your brain was primed with an example of “liberal X,” your mental search will be a lot better at thinking of liberal X, and so you might conclude that liberal X is much more common. Curse you, availability bias!
One way to train yourself to search thoroughly is my “magical exercise of power” (actually just an improv exercise, but assertive naming seems to have worked for the Rules of Power :P).
Actually, if you spend time in a highly partisan environment, availability bias is a huge problem. One of the things people do in an effort to convince each other is invent and promulgate pseudo-experience.
If you keep getting told stories of people from group A attacking group B, and you’re a B, the stories stick with you. You’re also less likely to spend time around A’s, so that you don’t have a personal history of knowing that they might be less dangerous than you’ve been told, and you’re not likely to hear stories about them being attacked by B’s or to take such stories seriously if you do hear them.
Only leftists consciously try to remake language. Conservatives do not,
“pro-life” instead of “anti-abortion” “Enhanced interrogation” instead of “Torture” ”Collateral damage” instead of “Civilian casualties” “Death tax” instead of “Inheritance tax” or “estate tax” ”Civilian contractors” instead of “Hired mercenaries” “Freedom fries” instead of “French fries” ”Freedom fighters” instead of “Those particular terrorists we happen to support” ″illegal” used as a noun.
Only leftists consciously try to remake language. Conservatives do not,
I’ve never heard this before. Can you point me to some evidence?
The rest of your comment seems intentionally offensive. Am I correct in this assessment?
If so, feel free to pm me with your intended message without the offensive content, if you are trying to make a point with the offensive content. I don’t know if anybody else is getting your intended message, but I know I am not, and I am curious, if you can reframe your content more constructively.
Probably not. Enhanced interrogation is torture, but not all torture is enhanced interrogation. “Enhanced interrogation” implies the point is to get information, if any is available. Torture includes more acts because it includes other purposes, like fun and deterrence.
Named is examples like China mentioned in the article. Unnamed was something like torture v. dustspecks where who is doing the torturing doesn’t figure into it.
I need to add: trying to induce a confession as China did, like trying to get information, is also “interrogation”, unlike torture for no reason, fun, deterrence, etc.
I almost admire your fortitude in repeatedly charging forward, Light Brigade-like, with material you know beforehand is going to be downvoted to oblivion for partisan mindkilling.
At this point you are coming across as either a troll or as hopelessly mind-killed. It is possible you do not fall into those categories, but that’s the impression one gets from comments like the above. Please read if you have not already done so why politics is the mindkiller.
Hm. This got downvoted pretty heavily, didn’t it. So how about some of the downvoters point out some examples of conservative projects to deliberately remodel language, in the sense for instance feminism explicitely tries to, or that whole business of political correctness.
Disclaimer: I’m not conservative, hell I’m not even American and we don’t have “conservatives” where I live. I’m asking this because the falseness of what sam said is very far from apparent to me.
How do you expect people to know who was provoked or unprovoked, once you deleted your comment? If you want people to know how a discussion went, you have the option of retracting but not deleting.
If I understand correctly, when a page gets refreshed with a reply to a comment, the delete button on that comment is gone; but as long as one is viewing a previous state of the page, when you use the delete button it works.
Which is what I did. I hadn’t seen your reply, you made it just as I was deleting—literally, I deleted and upon the page reloading I saw the inbox thingie with your reply. I was deleting because I had just noticed that I missed all those other replies to Sam.
Once again guessing, I’d say that “queer” and “bent” were both at a time abandoned by the gay community (even though “bent’ is of course the actual counterpart of “straight”) because of the negative connotations of weirdness in the former case, and something that’s not in its proper shape in the latter. “Gay” persisted because it was the first name whose alternate connotations were positive (being merry/carefree).
I don’t know why “queer” became acceptable to be reclaimed again, but I’m wondering whether it’s because “weird” is not really seen as a bad thing anymore—“geek” has also become a badge of honor after all, though it once used to be an insulting word.
Geek was actually the specific term for a carnival entertainer who bites the heads off of live chickens, before it became a generic term of abuse, before it became a specific term for someone who is passionate about a particular interest.
Also possibly because the original meaning of “weird” has become lost, or at least outmoded, as a result of tarnishing by association with the slur. Nowadays, high school and college literature professors have to preface discussions of Moby-Dick with a disclaimer to the effect that the passage
Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he’s queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he’s queer, says Stubb; he’s queer—queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time—queer, Sir—queer, queer, very queer. And here’s his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here’s his bedfellow!
Hmm… I’d have guessed it was less about being a euphemism and more about English-speakers wanting to have a one-syllable word instead of a five-syllable
We already have more one syllable euphemisms for male homosexual than I can shake a stick at, each of which became a curse word, and each of which was supplanted by another euphemism. The most recent one previous to gay was “queer”.
The same usually happens with other euphemisms for other undesirable characteristics—for example “retard”.
Euphemisms do not work. If the thing being referred to was OK, we would not be looking for euphemisms, thus euphemising merely draws attention to the fact that the thing being referred to is not OK.
Even from childhood we know that pain caused by deliberate insults
But very rarely is someone in trouble for making a deliberate insult. When people get in trouble for being politically incorrect, they are accused of wrongthink, not intentionally insulting any specific identifiable person.
Also, I’m curious whether you think your assertion holds in cases where an activist organization of (Group X) is the entity that accuses a speaker of political incorrectness towards Group X.
The pain of deliberate insults occurs when Person A directly insults Person B, not when Person A denigrates group X. After all, school and University is non stop denigration of whites, males, white males, and dead white males, which has a lot to do with massive male drop out rate. So the alleged representatives of group X are not personally insulted.
I hate to get involved in political discussion, but that seems inconsistent with the data: dropout rates for men in the US are slightly higher than for women, but the difference is only about three percentage points. Perhaps more saliently, the gap appears to historically have been larger for black and Hispanic students than for whites (it still is for Hispanics), which is exactly the opposite of what I’d expect if “nonstop denigration of whites, males, white males, and dead white males” was a major factor.
My school more or less had all the teachers from the MTV show Daria. Most of those are leftist, with enormous character flaws and failures of rationality.
Fortunately I learned that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Marginalizing or diminishing people due to the socially enforced classes they belong to is not at all the same thing as “showing subtle signs of thinking thoughts you disagree with”.
Feeling demeaned or socially excluded is a fundamentally different kind of pain than that caused by having one’s toe stepped on: it is a much more damaging one.
Feeling demeaned is painful and can be worse than having one’s toe stepped on. But some people are allowed to complain about it, and other people are not.
It’s like saying that stepping on someone’s toe is bad, but some people by definition don’t have toes. If they claim to have toes too, it only proves their malice—by pretending to have toes they want to make us less sensitive about the pain of the real toe owners.
If you officially don’t have a toe, then everyone is free to step on your toe, because officially it didn’t happen. Other people then tell you how lucky you are for not having a toe. Then they accuse you of lack of empathy towards people who have their toes stepped on.
If you mean that there are classes of marginalized people who aren’t allowed or aren’t capable of objecting to mistreatment I agree. And I would agree that the cluster of people that cares a lot about racism, sexism, etc. often doesn’t see such people as deserving justice. When male victims of domestic violence feel excluded by feminist discussions of domestic violence which vilify men for example—I think that counts as a real harm.
But that does not mean everyone’s claim to having had their toe stepped on deserves equal respect or credibility. Claims of harm due to anti-white racism, as if it were equivalent to anti-black racism are really implausible and people taking offense to the suggestion of equivalence is reasonable. This is why I don’t agree with the anti-subordination activist’s position of privileging first person accounts of dis-empowered people when defining the scope of bigotry and injustice. I think neutral principles of some sort are required to sort out claims of injustice—but of course I don’t know how to arrive at such principles and think it is likely that any criteria I propose will be based on concern for protecting my politically favored groups. And that would be bad. In short, this stuff is really complicated and I’m not really aligned with much anyone on the subject.
Assuming it wasn’t a metaphor, it would still obviously be ill-posed though, right?
It may be that one game can be beaten by someone only on normal, but all levels but one are easier on hard with unlimited ammo. Or that one game is easier on normal and another easier with unlimited ammo on hard. One level might require 72 hours of straight gameplay to beat on hard with unlimited ammo, but such a victory might be reliably achieved, and a 9⁄10 chance of death each run on normal, with success determined by the third minute.
The metaphor is that people have different advantages and disadvantages. The one person whose challenge is difficulty conserving grenades and separating enemies to confront as few at a time as possible might have little in common with the person whose challenge is grouping enemies such that the fastest and slowest are each hit by as many of his individual grenade throws as possible.
claims of harm due to anti-white racism, as if it were equivalent to anti-black racism are really implausible
Oh come on. Lot of people get beaten up for being white, frequently maimed for life. There is a whole genre of you tube videos on the topic. No one gets beaten up for being black—and very few people ever did. The fact that when you are digging for white racist attacks, you wind up with such an implausible poster boy as Emmit Till shows how hard up you are for examples.
Which tells us:Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
I have basically no desire to have an extended discussion on this matter with someone who seems to have had their mind killed by politics (whether or not I’ve had my mind killed as well). Of particular note is second clause of
No one gets beaten up for being black—and very few people ever did.
which is historically ignorant to an almost absurd point—a point I don’t think I’ve seen anyone take before. I will note that random irrational violence is almost always done by victims of one kind or another. High status people don’t get into fights as a rule. Low status people are much more likely to—this isn’t surprising when considering what kind of behaviors get selected for in a mammal dominance hierarchy. Males with few to no mating possibilities because of their low status are much more likely to risk their lives in combat in order attain higher status and mating opportunities. Alpha elephant seals with large harems don’t pick fights with the young bulls who lack harems. Obviously black people who beat up white people do not experience a substantive status change when the succeed but we all know evolved software misfires.
(Unfortunately it may need to be said that I don’t consider the above explanation for violence to be a justification for violence)
No one gets beaten up for being black—and very few people ever did.
which is historically ignorant to an almost absurd point-
So where is your poster boy who got beaten up for being black? If you had such a poster boy, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.
I will note that random irrational violence is almost always done by victims of one kind or another.
You will seem to be conceding what you deny.
Groups that employ random irrational violence tend to lose to groups that employ rational coordinated cooperative violence, violence that is bold yet planned and prudent, groups that display loyalty and discipline. It does not follow that that those who employ random irrational violence are violent because they lost, but rather that they lost because their violence was irrational.
Nor does it follow that those groups that lost were “victims”. If we look at Africa, it is apparent that blacks were better off ruled by whites than by blacks.
So where is your poster boy who got beaten up for being black? If you had such a poster boy, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.
There’s no more need for a poster boy for racial violence against blacks than there is for a poster boy for historical repression of the Native Americans. Why should anyone have to come up with a single representative example when you can point to general policy?
Well into the 20th century, the Klu Klux Klan was still considered socially respectable as an institution, and being a member could even be politically advantageous.
It’s easy to take a position that’s socially frowned upon, and argue or assume that everyone who disagrees with you is too biased by social conditioning to change their minds. Easy enough to turn it into a fully general counterargument. But here of all places, I think you should keep in mind that if your position is getting a bad reception, you should strongly consider the possibility that you are either not making a good case for it, or that you’re arguing for something that simply isn’t correct.
So where is your poster boy who got beaten up for being black? If you had such a poster boy, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.
There’s no more need for a poster boy for racial violence against blacks than there is for a poster boy for historical repression of the Native Americans
So you are not going to let the absence of any facts get in your way.
Well into the 20th century, the Klu Klux Klan was still considered socially respectable as an institution
Which presupposes that which is to be proven: That the Klu Klux Klan beat blacks up for being black, the way blacks beat whites up for being white every day.
The Klu Klux Klan made it dangerous to engage in certain political activities, especially if one was black (see the Wikipedia list of notorious Klan Murders). It did not make it dangerous merely to be black, the way it is dangerous merely to be white in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks. Klan violence was political violence, and indeed terrorism, but it was not race hate, not the race hate that we see so enthusiastically displayed by blacks on You tube
Come to think of it, it is also dangerous to be black in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks (the presence of whites makes blacks safer from other blacks), but it is even more dangerous to be white in such areas.
Which presupposes that which is to be proven: That the Klu Klux Klan beat blacks up for being black, the way blacks beat whites up for being white every day.
What would you take as adequate evidence? The Klu Klux Klan is notorious for having lynched and committed other acts of racially motivated violence. There’s no shortage of writers who have written about racially motivated violence against blacks as part of their personal experience. There’s no shortage of documentation. What evidence, that we should reasonably be expect to be there if a significant amount of racial violence against blacks has happened, and have access to, would be sufficient for you?
If you simply wanted to convince other members of this board that most racially motivated crime in America today is committed against whites, your best bet would probably have simply been to link them to this. But even this is a seriously problematic claim; the idea that 90% of race based crime incidents are white seems to originate here. I read the original report, and confirmed that it makes no such claim, rather, Sheehan gets that figure by classifying all interracial crime as race based crime, and comparing the number of violent crimes committed by black perpetrators and white victims with the number of violent crimes committed by white perpetrators with black victims. But not only is it absurd to suppose that all violent interracial crime is racially motivated, there are a lot more white people in this country than black people, meaning that if all criminals chose their victims completely at random, black on white crime would dramatically outnumber white on black crime. In fact, according to the report, crime among black people is more intraracial than crime among white people relative to the number of crimes committed.
The swastika on the tab for the site where Sheehan wrote the article is a pretty significant sign of a biased agenda all by itself.
But claiming that violence against blacks by whites has not been historically significant, in addition to present day race based crime being slanted in the opposite direction, that’s a really outstanding claim. So what evidence are you prepared to present?
What would you take as adequate evidence? The Klu Klux Klan is notorious for having lynched and committed other acts of racially motivated violence.
A black man who happened to be walking down the street while a dozen Klansmen happened to be walking by in the other direction was not going to be attacked by a dozen Klansmen for no special reason other than general hatred of blacks, the way a white man walking down the street may be attacked by a dozen blacks for no special reason other than general hatred of whites.
If you count all the blacks that were attacked to be carried off into slavery, unjust white attacks on blacks probably greatly outnumber unjust black attacks on whites, but these were not race hate attacks. They attacked because they wanted someone to cut sugar cane, not because they disliked blacks.
From the absence of race hate attacks by whites, and the frequency of race hate attacks by blacks, we can conclude that everywhere in America today, the safest places for a white man, are also the safest places for a black man.
From which we can conclude that you do in fact believe that blacks on average, have worse character than whites, since you are aware that predominantly black areas are unsafe—unsafe for everyone, but especially unsafe for whites.
From the fact that Everett Till is the poster boy for white attacks on blacks, we can conclude that in all of American history from around that time to the present, there has never been a racially motivated attack on a black resembling racially motivated attacks on whites that occur every day in today’s America, because if there ever had been such an attack, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.
Why bother to quote my text if you’re not going to answer the question?
You could say that there are cases where black people have attacked white people for being white, and I wouldn’t contest it. And you could say that white people haven’t attacked black people for being black, and I would be willing to concede that there is a sense in which that is true. But to say that black people have attacked white people for being white, but white people have not attacked black people for being black is simply absurd.
The reason that they can both be individually correct, but not accurate as a comparison is because it involves a manipulation of terms. I am prepared to accept the claim that black people sometimes attack white people for being white, with the implicit understanding that what this really means is “being white and being in the wrong neighborhood,” or “being white and being taken as a scapegoat for a lifetime of second class citizenship.”
I am also prepared to accept that the claim that white people don’t kill black people for being black can be said to be true in a sense; you’re not going to find a white person who’ll kill a black person for being black in the same sense that they’d kill a person for sleeping with their wife. But you can find white people who’ll go out and commit premeditated attacks on people of other races to promote their ideology of a racially homogeneous society and strengthen their allegiance to the cause. It’s called lone wolf activism. And while the Klu Klux Klan would not, as you said, attack a black man who just happened to be walking down the street, a black person could attract violence for being found in the wrong neighborhood, just like your white person in a black neighborhood scenario, or for associating too closely with white people, or being too successful, or “getting ideas above their station.” Black people were attacked for representing a threat to white individuals’ place in the social hierarchy among people who needed someone to look down on. Saying that this doesn’t count as white people attacking black people for being black, while black on white racially motivated violence does count, is a severe case of special pleading.
Come to think of it, it is also dangerous to black in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks, but it is even more dangerous to be white.
What dangers are you referring to, specifically? Can you point me to a specific source that measures these harms? I have never heard your concluding suggestion before, though I think I have heard the opposite claim.
It did not make it dangerous merely to be black, the way it is dangerous merely to be white in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks.
Evidence?
One series of anecdotes: I’ve been the only white person in the subway car quite a few times. I didn’t check carefully, but there were few if any Asians. I’m short, I’m female, I have no reason to think I’m a scary looking person. I haven’t been attacked or threatened.
Downvoted for selecting one out of hundreds of potential effects and calling it “apparent” without a shred of evidence. Seriously, you can’t make that point without a book-length argument, and good luck getting anyone to read a book like that.
You said something like this before, and—at risk of lowering the signal-to-noise ratio further, in which case I apologize—I’m honestly curious: what’s wrong with Emmitt Till?
It seems that you are going out of your way to spread general mind-killing to this thread.
Your second point, regarding differential admissions to colleges is potentially much more interesting. The claim that there’s both directed harm and actual inefficiency resulting is a pretty strong type of argument. And you even back it up with sources.
But you start off your post with a claim that even if it were true is only marginally related to the topic at hand and is going to create a clear negative emotional reaction in almost any reader. And that claim is made with zero sourcing other than your own say so.
Depending on your viewpoint one can classify the following as either Dark Arts or as good communication: when talking to people about controversial subjects you don’t need to throw out every claim that could potentially help one viewpoint, and this is an especially bad idea when one of those supporting arguments will give a negative association to the claims in question. This is true whether or not the supporting argument is factually accurate.
Here’s an example that will be likely less controversial here. If I’m discussing evolution with a religious Jew or Christian, it more efficient to stick with the easily discussed factual issues. If they make specifically religious objections one can simply say that that’s something they’ll need to resolve and just lightly note that some people seem to be able to do it. You aren’t going to get very far if your central arguments are something like fossil record, genetics, oh and your religion is all bullshit.
Eh, not that hard to give examples in the US either. The most recent that comes to mind. And that’s just the most recent fatality. If one extends to just people being “beaten up” the set will be much larger.
I (perhaps incorrectly) understood him to be speaking of within the US.
Claims must be specific and backed with evidence. The claim as he stated it is false. If he wants to limit it in scope, then let him limit it as he will, and its significance then becomes proportionaly limited in a similar way. From a claim about the world entire, it becomes a claim for about 1/20th of the global population, and thus attains 1/20th its former significance, at which point we ought give it about 1/20th the weight we otherwise would.
I want parochialism and assumptions of parochialism to have no place in this forum. If we can discuss many-worlds and if we can worry about what we’ll be doing for fun a million years from now, then people can bloody well lift their noses up to perceive there exist countries outside the USA.
On the one hand, of course the whole world matters. On the other, we can make much more specific claims about smaller regions, and test them more easily.
In this particular case, I think both are overwhelmed by concerns of conversational pragmatism. If you can defeat his arguments in the framework where he made them, you win. If you make an objection outside that domain, and he says “but that’s not what I meant”, then squabbling about particularities of domain, word choice, and inference is a frequently observed failure mode. Noting and criticizing US-centrism (or any other -centrism) is worth doing, but should be considered an aside.
I am surprised that this is so severely downvoted.
The second and third paragraphs are excellent, with sources, and I have very different standards for voting depending on the speaker and what I expect from him or her. Do others not? I would encourage sam0345 to make more posts like this until they are standard for him, and then later dowvote him for such posts when posts like this are typical for him.
I wouldn’t have downvoted it in isolation, but it seemed to me that, taking his other activity today into account, sam0345 was basically trolling. My habit is just to downvote that stuff until it goes away. Maybe the line between relatively high-quality trolling and needlessly inflammatory dissent is blurry...but are we really short on Brave Truth-Tellers here on LW? I submit we are not.
Oh no, not at all, I meant it more like “Oh LW, you so crazy!” I believe we are very, very contrarian here; stating unpopular beliefs is a form of showing off (see The Irrationality Game). I am not sure what quantifiable evidence I can offer of that, but I’m far from the first to make the observation.
I am surprised that this is so severely downvoted.
If it had excluded the sentence “No one gets beaten up for being black—and very few people ever did,” I would have given it an upvote without a second thought. Because of that comment, I gave it an upvote only because I think it doesn’t deserve to be at −6, and would not have upvoted it if I saw it at 0.
Then they accuse you of lack of empathy towards people who have their toes stepped on.
And by abduction: lack of empathy for people who have thorns in their side, lack of empathy for those weak at the knees, and eremikophobia (fear of sand).
Marginalizing or diminishing people due to the socially enforced classes they belong to is not at all the same thing as “showing subtle signs of thinking thoughts you disagree with”.
When someone uses “gay” as a curse word, he is not “marginalizing blah blah blah”. He is inadvertently revealing that he thinks homosexuality is a bad thing—or inadvertently revealing that he thinks the frequent change of euphemism is an indication that most people think it is a bad thing. You are punishing him for his beliefs, not for his actions. He is not intentionally attacking anyone.
No one is saying he is. In fact, the context of this entire thread is someone saying explicitly that no one is saying he is.
Jandila:
if there’s one thing I don’t need more of in my life it’s arguing with a population comprised mostly of wealthy, white Libertarian-esque cisgendered/heterosexual men whether or not you can be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot.
When people say “that shit is gay” gay people feel marginalized and diminished. They feel hurt. Whether or not it was intentional (and certainly it often is).
When people say “that shit is gay” gay people feel marginalized and diminished.
School and university is a non stop denigration of whites, males, and white males. It is clear that males feel marginalized and diminished, which contributes to high and rising dropout rate of males, but it is more important to worry about the marginalization of some groups that other groups.
Downvoted for formulating the question in a way that treats vaguely defined classes of ideological transgressions as having an independent Platonic existence, implying that their properties should be discussed as if they were independently existing elements of reality, rather than a matter of definition. (And in this case there isn’t even anything resembling a standard, precise, clearly stated, and consistently used definition.)
Platonic?
If I step on your toe unintentionally, and you’re in pain, just because I don’t feel that pain (it wasn’t my toe) doesn’t mean that any harm done occurred either in a Platonic sense or not at all. It sure as heck doesn’t mean that you’re an ideologically-motivated, irrational zealot for getting mad when my response is anything other than “Whoops, sorry.”
I do not think we share sufficient premises to make discussion worthwhile.
Whether you feel pain or not is a fact. It’s territory, not map.
Whether someone is racist/sexist depends on definitions. These are categories—which are map, not territory.
I’d guess that whatever value is derived by arguing over whether someone is racist or sexist can be produced better by tabooing those words, and arguing more specifically over what the specific claim is (“would his words be offensive to a significant number of member of such group” “is he trying to increase his own group’s relative power/privilege over the other group”, “does he believe in an innate inferior moral worth for that group”, etc, etc)
Back in the days when incorrect beliefs about the trinity could get you into trouble, it became heresy to doubt that Jesus was god. Shortly thereafter some people stopped believing he was man, which in due course also became heresy. Much drama ensued on the question of whether Christ was cosubstantial with god, or consubstantial with god, and whether the holy ghost proceeded from Christ, or God, or both, and whether God was three or one or both.
Discussions of racism are apt to develop a similar character.
On a conservative blog, the blogger will say something politically incorrect, which in less right wing circles would be deemed “racist”. Then one of the commenters too plainly says something horribly racist, which is clearly implied by and logically follows from the original post on which he is commenting. The right wing blogger, of course, firmly denies his post has such horrid implications, denounces the commenter as disgustingly racist, and bans him.
However, in the historical discussions of the Trinity, the opposing sides at least made it clear what exact beliefs they considered as orthodox and which heretical, and spelled out the criteria for orthodox beliefs and their official justifications at length, always ready to elaborate still further if any details remained ambiguous. (However arbitrary and illogical these official justifications may have been.)
In contrast, in the modern discussions of racism, sexism, and other ideological transgressions, it is never spelled out explicitly and clearly what exact beliefs one is supposed to profess to remain orthodox. Rather, there exists a pretense that there is a certain set of beliefs that will be accepted by all people who are not malevolent or delusional—and if you ask for a precise and clear statement of what exactly these beliefs are (and let alone how they are justified), this is by itself considered as strong evidence of ideological transgression, since only a malcontent would ask so many annoying questions about things that are supposed to be plainly obvious to sane and honest people.
A clear and explicit list of official doctrine that it is forbidden to question, such as the those pronounced by various parties in historical trinitarian disputes, is at least honest and upfront in what it demands. What we see today however is the utterly mendacious and delusional insistence that the official doctrine is a product of pure rationality and free thinking that can be denied only out of insanity or malicious dishonesty.
On the other hand, the long lists of condemned theses, censured theses, and prohibited articles of the thirteenth century gave no real indication of what was not condemned, not censured, and not prohibited.
I think that the differences you perceive are because the analogies you and sam0345 make to “religious heresy” are really really bad ones. Christ wasn’t truly around to be offended or not offended if someone got his nature wrong. Demanding adherence to a particular theology was basically just a demand by the church for complete monopoly of thinking. Disagreements about the nature of Christ were effectively attacks on the authority of the church.
The best modern-day analogy to such issues of religious heresy, are probably the intra-Communist squabbles about Stalin and Trotsky and Mao and revisionism and whatever...
But in regards to racism and sexism though, it’s not about lowering the status of institutions like the Church or the Communist Party, but about lowering the status of groups of actual people. It’s a much more… decentralized defection, and similarly it gets a much more decentralized punishment—in Western states there’s no single “punishing authority” as there used to be in Communist regimes for defections against communist ideology, or there still is in Theocratic regimes for defections against theocratic ideology.
You are presenting an oversimplified picture in both cases, and the contrast is definitely not so clear-cut.
First, the christological and other theological controversies were often only part of much broader political, ideological, ethnic, and other conflicts, involving all sorts of parties and factions both within and outside the church hierarchy. Sometimes there was also a strong populist element—during the monophysite controversy, for example, there were plenty of spontaneous riots and pogroms. Therefore, in these controversies, the power and status of many groups and individuals was at stake, not just the interests of the Church leadership.
Second, the modern repercussions of various ideological transgressions are by no means limited to spontaneous reactions by people who feel directly targeted. For start, there is a complicated and non-obvious system that determines which groups are entitled to such reaction, so that their outrage will be supported and the offenders condemned by the respectable opinion, and which groups are OK to denigrate, so that protesting will only lower their status still further. Then, we also have a network of official intellectual institutions that have a de facto monopoly of respectable and impactful thinking, and the reaction of these institutions to various ideological transgressions involves many elements far beyond direct and spontaneous outrage of those who are (supposed to be) directly targeted.
But aside from all this, my main point is the contrast between two kinds of systems that is independent of the issues you raise:
A system in which certain beliefs are clearly spelled out as official dogma that it is forbidden to question, so if you’re accused of heresy, you can at least demand a clear statement of what exact official dogma you have contradicted—and if you have in fact steered clear of any matters of official dogma in your writings and utterances, this is admissible as a valid defense. (Historically, this was typically the case for people accused of heresy by the Church tribunals, though of course things varied a lot in different places and times and there were certainly instances of corruption and railroading, like in any other legal system.)
A system in which there is official pretense that there is no dogma whatsoever, that everyone is supposed to be a skeptical free thinker about everything, and that imposing some sort of official dogma would be the vilest tyranny imaginable—so that when you are accused of some ideological transgression, it is automatically assumed that your statements must be due to either disingenuous malice or some crazy delusion, since the respectable opinion is considered to be a product of pure rational thinking, as an assumption built into the system. So rather than having clearly outlined boundaries of what you may or may not say, you must pretend to be a free thinker unencumbered by any official dogma, while at the same time strictly adhering to the de facto official dogma—which is only more sweeping and onerous because it is so vague and not stated openly.
It seems to me that system (2) is hardly an improvement over (1).
Surely the communist party would say something similar—and indeed it did: Trotsky complained that certain speech was a violation of freedom of speech because that speech oppressed the proletariat.
I’m sure it would, because after all that was the prime characteristic of social-fascist regimes—claiming supposedly egalitarian-minded ideas for the pursuit of in-actuality the establishment of a new ruling class/aristocracy based on party membership. Much like corporate-capitalism propagandizes itself as meritocratic instead (while trying to form a ruling class based on control of stocks and so forth).
I made an image of this some time ago:
This of course doesn’t mean that all egalitarian ideas exist to support the communist party elite, any more than it means that all meritocratic ideas are there to support the corporate elites.
And is that not what is happening in America today?
No, it’s not.
I don’t think the idea can be written off so easily. This of course gets into all sorts of extremely charged issues, but in any case, considering the historical record of egalitarian ideas in general, surely it would not be rational to take the presently dominant egalitarian ideas at face value automatically.
Not to mention that for anyone familiar with the standard OB/LW motives, it should be straightforward to ask about the signaling and status issues involved. Should it be controversial to propose that, perhaps, egalitarianism is not about equality?
Cuba had obvious, striking, and severe inequality, with a strong element of racial inequality. Yet back before the fall of the Soviet Union, and for some time thereafter, visitors to Cuba tended to not only congratulate Cuba on its wonderful equality, but also themselves on being able to perceive that wonderful equality, that someone less sensitive might have failed to see.
During the hungry ghosts famine in China, J.K. Galbraith observed “If there was any famine in China it was not evident in the kitchen”. The kitchen to which he refers being the kitchen of the luxury hotel his hosts provided him.
You seem to be getting into thorny theoretical questions about the nature of modern Western culture and political ideology. I don’t really have much to add on that point.
I was just talking about a simple question of fact: that is, most Republicans would consider the appellation of ‘egalitarian’ to be an insult.
Edit: Actually, you know what? This is straight-up mindkilling, right here. So how about I just retract everything I contributed to this travesty of a ‘conversation’ and take extra care not to get sucked into this kind of thing again.
In communism, political incorrectness might get you shot, but far more likely might be taken into account when you next sought a holiday or promotion. For the most part, the enforcement of political correctness under communism was every bit as decentralized as the enforcement in the US.
Similarly with thirteenth century punishment for heresy, the main punishment being that one was unlikely to receive tenure. No one respectable got tortured or burned at the stake, though Roger Bacon got solitary confinement on bread and water.
And the enforcement in the US is ultimately highly centralized. The reason your boss will fire you for wrongthink is that when his business gets charged with racism, all his employees will be scrutinized for wrongthink. Most discrimination charges do not involve an employer calling a member of a protected group a derogatory name, but rather an employee revealing unapproved views unaware that there are spies present who will rat on him. A member of a protected group heard of the unapproved views—in some cases he would had to have been listening at keyholes to have discovered the unapproved views and have his feelings hurt, and I suspect that in fact these unapproved views were only discovered during the disclosure phase, and the complainant could hypothetically have heard them at the keyhole, rather than actually heard them.
For the most part, enforcement of political correctness under communism worked in exactly the same way as in the US—through employment and academic admissions.
I notice a glaring omission from your list of questions. Namely “are his words if interpreted as a factual claim and/or argument true and/or valid”
I agree these are helpful paraphrases—but as a practical matter increasing the burden on the person trying to point out the offense or marginalization isn’t necessarily a good idea since it often very difficult for people to call their friends and acquaintances on such matters. For example, I imagine it is very difficult for a black person surrounded by white people to call out behavior that makes them feel marginalized—there is a great deal of social pressure against this. In normal social contexts a minority should be free to express how something makes them feel without being expected to enter into an extended defense of the matter.
Here at Less Wrong, I almost always translate “is x-ist” in the way you suggest and think it is worthwhile where the goal of the discussion is truth seeking (I’m not a member of many relevant minorities, though)
And is the pain of envy and covetousness also a fact?
I would call it an attitude, not a fact.
Envy is an attitude/emotion.
Whether or not someone feels envy is a fact.
Pain is a feeling.
Whether or not someone feels pain is a fact.
Yes, Platonic—and it’s easy to demonstrate that it follows in a straightforward manner from your phrasing.
To stick with the (relatively) less incendiary of the two, consider the notion of “sexism.” Discussing whether some institution, act, or claim is “sexist” makes sense only if at least one of these two conditions applies:
There is some objectively existing Platonic idea of “sexism,” so that whether something is “sexist” is ultimately a question of fact that must have an objectively correct yes or no answer.
There is a precise and agreed-upon definition of “sexism,” so that whether something is “sexist” is, assuming agreement on questions of fact, ultimately a question of logic (i.e. whether the given facts satisfy the definition), which also must have an objectively correct yes or no answer.
Now, the option (2) is clearly out of the question. This is because the term inherently implies that any “sexist” claim does not belong to the set of reasonable and potentially correct claims and a “sexist” institution or act is outside the bounds of what is defensible and acceptable—while at the same time nobody has ever given any definition of “sexism” that wouldn’t be either so restrictive as to make most of the common usage of the term inconsistent with the definition, or so broad as to make many reasonable and defensible claims and institutions “sexist,” thus again contradicting this essential implication of the term. Also, the very fact that you talk about “arguing [...] whether or not you can be [...] sexist [...] without [property X]” implies that there exists some Platonic idea of “sexism,” since otherwise it would be a trivial question of whether property X is included in the definition.
It is trivial. Jandila’s definition of sexism and racism does not include the speaker being a bigot as a necessary criterion. Now, I often complain to my anti-subordination activisty friends that a lot of people don’t realize their definitions of racism and sexism don’t imply that. It’s a problem since people tend to get more defensive than they need to be when someone points out something they did or said that is racist, sexist, anti- gay, etc. But people getting defensive after they know these words don’t imply bigotry really is silly. And yet it still happens—which is why Jandila doesn’t always have the patience to deal with it.
That’s because words like “bigot, racist, sexist, anti- gay” are frequently used to sneak in conotations that the argument in question (and by extension the person making it) is somehow immoral and can be dismissed without looking at its validity, or at the very least requires us to engage in motivated continuation until the argument has been “rationally” dismissed. If you and Jandila don’t mean to sneak in these connotations, say so; however, in that case you should probably pick a word that doesn’t have these connotations in common usage.
I didn’t mind being told my behavior pattern matches with that of bad people’s by people who I thought think probabilistically.
If someone were to see me handcuffed in the back of a police car with blood all over me, they should think me more likely to have killed someone than if they hadn’t seen that. If they concluded I killed someone because they saw me there, they would just be stupid.
Scary thing is: The jury is made up of these people!
All I really need is for two (Asch conformity) of twelve regular people who accept stupid arguments to accept arguments I am not guilty, or one nut juror, or one intelligent juror.
I am reticent to discuss this without there being any object level issue—I don’t trust either side’s claims about how these words are ‘frequently used’. I would be comfortable evaluating a specific instance of the use of these words but I suspect discussion of how they tend to be used will just leave people insisting on generalities that flatter their own ideology. Both sides have ways of framing the other’s rhetorical techniques as harmful and destructive to honest communication. And both sides are often oblivious to what the other side is saying. Usually when words like sexist and racist are thrown out the users usually have reasons why they used those words instead of others despite (or I guess sometimes because of) connotations. But again, those reasons can’t be evaluated in abstract.
I think that the burden of proof is on those criticizing authors for using particular language.
It ought to disqualify the prosecutors from bringing such cases if there can’t be evidence to support them, so it seems to me you’re on a “side” if you think that.
Both sides are criticizing the other for using particular language. Bob says x. Susan says saying x is racist (criticizing Bob). Bob says saying something is racist sneaks in connotations (criticizing Susan).
I don’t know what you’re talking about here.
Edit: If I understand you right I guess I don’t see a justification for ‘burden of proof’ type analyses except in literal court rooms. There usually isn’t a reason for them other than presumption and status quo bias.
The criticisms are importantly different.
“Susan says saying x is racist.”
There is nothing wrong with that statement, but “arguing [...] whether or not you can be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot,” is confused, though not necessarily accusatory.
“Bob says saying something is racist sneaks in connotations.”
Bob is saying something not confused, but coherent and accusatory. “If you and Jandila don’t mean to sneak in these connotations, say so;” is unfair. Bob has to address the argument as if those connotations were not intended, even if they probably were (in his mind), or weren’t but probably are so misinterpreted by others (in his models of them), he can’t decline to address the actual argument unless he has overwhelming evidence that it was designed primarily to manipulate and not substantially to present evidence.
If it’s easier for Bob to show the argument is dishonest rather than refute it, it’s fine to let him do that if he feels it is better for some reason, and I don’t think Bob owes an explanation of how the argument was wrong or even an honest attempt to try and understand it, depending on how sinuous and sinuous it was.
(...)
The problem is that without the connotations associated with the word, Susan’s statement doesn’t even constitute a counter argument.
Susan’s statement isn’t supposed to be a counter argument, just an argument. (When I described the situation above I could have as easily started with “Bob does something racist” instead of “says. She may or may not have a propositional disagreement with what Bob said.)
[And now we have two threads about Bob. He is apparently both a racist and terrible with women.]
The presumed purpose of the statement is to criticize Bob’s argument and/or action. To do this it relies on the connotations of the word “racist”.
It relies on the implication that the user of the word frowns on racisms and that other people ought to as well. This is different from the connotation that someone who does something racist must be intentionally bigoted or some kind of secret white supremacist. The difference is that the first is merely a normative implication that is obvious to everyone while the second suggests additional beliefs about Bob that are being snuck in but not officially defended by anyone.
That’s still sneaking in connotations unless deserving to be frowned upon is part of the definition of “racism”. However, in that case Susan needs to establish that the action and/or argument deserves to be frowned upon in addition to satisfying the other parts of the definition of racism to justify her claim that the action and/or argument is indeed “racist”. Notice that what you called “defensiveness” in the comment that started this sub-thread is simply Bob pointing out that she hasn’t done so.
Essentially Susan is trying to argue that Bob’s action and/or argument is racist and hence by definition bad. This argument runs into the problem Eliezer discusses in that article.
Too many guards were facing the wrong direction until now.
The problem isn’t so much that connotations may sneak in, it’s that relevance may sneak out. That’s why I said some things were confused and not even an argument: the key step was that a label applied and everything with that label was invalid, and that thinking something is an argument doesn’t make it so be it sentences or even a string of arbitrary characters, and so on.
It’s too difficult and too costly in terms of accusations made and inferences drained from language to zealously guard against bad connotations.
No, it’s merely an assumption in polite society. Bob is free to say that he doesn’t care that he’s being racist—but that is not what he is being defensive about.
The defensiveness is in response to the connotation which Jandila at the very start of the thread disclaimed:
There is a connotation that doing something racist or sexist means you’re intentionally trying to hurt people, that you’re a bad person instead of just making a mistake or being ignorant. When I say there is an implication to the word “racism” that my activist friends aren’t paying attention to I’m talking about that not the implication that a racist statement shouldn’t be said. Note, those activist friends consider everyone a racist, themselves included.
You’re still trying to sneak in connotations, notice how you seem to be trying to exclude the possibility that a statement you describe as racist could actually be true, or that an action you describe as racist could actually be rational.
Also, why are you getting so defensive about my pointing out that you’re sneaking in connotations? There is a connotation that sneaking in connotations or exhibiting some other bias means you’re intentionally trying to mislead people, that you’re a bad person instead of just making a mistake or being ignorant. Note, people on lesswrong consider everyone biased, themselves included.
I don’t notice how I seem to be doing it, actually.
Clever. It’s actually a good analogy. I’m really not getting defensive, just frustrated that you seem to be misunderstanding me (which is weird because I thought your original comment understood me perfectly).
The statement I quoted:
seems to imply that the only reason one would make a “racist” statement is either out of a desire to hurt people or out of ignorance.
One difference is that the definition of bias as used on lw does explicitly include the requirement that they provide incorrect results, as such I’ve been providing you with links to the relevant lesswrong articles.
One reason I did that is so you could see how annoying arguments of the form:
“Why are you getting so defensive about my accusing you of bad thing X, X doesn’t imply worse thing Y?”
are when you’re on the receiving end of them.
What if someone thought that even with the connotations associated with the word, it still wouldn’t constitute a counter argument?
Then why did Susan make that statement at all?
Any arbitrary string of characters djRX3YeKTQUw BdIml13Ep6vAqa8WdflzY 7adQKSEXDp0paMg7K87 pKw4CCey C068tqagUkSs7H7HsCZdA 84MaxAJr4VwIV28tASRPcDO1Wtv1Oh02DTyFyaM PcAOPJ2CLBnztEG6 4kvjZ3aTKHEcPMN2gjOjzuWB pdzmu9hPRQnmYEJZ Uy6Q96cIkguaYbgwJcte
Is that a ponycode?
It’s ponycode for:
“may subjectively be considered a counterargument but that doesn’t make it important. The statement was made because it was intended to make a certain point, even though its mechanism was to exclude things from consideration based on a labeling criteria too many steps removed from truth.”
Btw, Could you provide your definition of “bigot”? I’ve gotten a vague idea of what you mean by the word from context, but I’d like to see your formulation. (Note: be prepared to explain why being a “bigot” is obviously a “very bad thing”.)
Wikipedia looks fine:
I am not so prepared—though it doesn’t seem especially controversial to me I am vaguely open to an argument that it isn’t obvious. But I don’t see why I should be expected to explain why.
So if I believe that, say, religion X is wrong and its teachings are immoral, do I qualify as a bigot under this definition?
Only if you are therefore hostile to its members.
Depending on what you mean by “hostile” that may be a perfectly reasonable course of action.
Thats a unique example in that definition, that, in retrospect I should have perhaps left out. Unlike the other groupings religion partly consists in beliefs and values which I think it is often important to be hostile to. Those beliefs and values are closely tied to the culture of a religion which I don’t think people should be hostile to. I would not call someone a bigot for criticizing, mocking or insulting the beliefs and values associated with a particular religion. Doing the same to the people themselves or the culture, purposefully, and not the result of merely being uninformed or temporarily blinded would make a person a bigot.
What exactly is the criterion for being an element on the list?
Obviously it’s specific contents are political and I don’t necessarily think it is complete (or as we seen without mistakes)-- but the criteria for an ideal list is something like ‘classes of people that agents cannot help but be members of’.
And that’s the problem given that politics is the mindkiller.
Yeah. It’s a mess of a hard problem. Thats why I try not to talk about it here because nobody is good at talking about it rationally. I’m not defending every instance of someone calling something racist, sexist etc. I’m not defending everything the people who tend to do it nor the list of groups they do it for.
That being the case I don’t think the solution is to deny the harms people are talking about when they complain about racism, sexism etc. And it’s going to get talked about at some point just like all politics.
Nor is the solution to suppress discussion of statements that could be construed as bigoted. Even statements about race and IQ, or whether homosexuality is a sexual deviance.
To be fare, the main problem on LessWrong, as opposed to the world in general, is people engaging in motivated stopping and motivated continuation when discussing these topics in an attempt to avoid being sexist (for some reason race is less of a problem) and/or bigots.
Does this question have empirical content that constrains my anticipated experiences? Or is it just a value judgment?
I don’t think there is a lot of room or reason to discuss terminal or near-terminal value judgments. I find that criticism along the lines of “Stop valuing that, it’s a character defect” is a perfectly reasonable response to terminal value judgments that I disagree with (though I try not to penalize people for value disagreement here since people with bad values can still be insightful about factual matters).
With something like race and IQ I don’t think they should be suppressed and haven’t tried to suppress them (I have comments elsewhere lamenting such suppression). But do think it is reasonable to expect those conversations to occur at a higher level than they have so far. For whatever reason the most vocal advocates of genetic inheritance as an explanation for the race IQ gap have been worse than average commenters. A while back I linked to an article Steve Hsu wrote on the subject, he showed up and there was briefly a really good back and forth on the subject. But for the most part discussion of the subject here consists of anecdotal evidence, baseless claims and people on both sides paying no attention to the relevant studies or population genetics. It is worthwhile in these cases, I think, for people to do what they can to avoid pattern matching with something designed to demean or oppress people. Both to avoid hurting people unnecessarily and to avoid triggering mind-killing. You don’t have to sound like George Cuvier to argue for a genetic explanation of the race IQ-gap.
Edit: Though apparently we can’t even talk about talking it without the both of us being downvoted.
I had in mind something like this.
About race and IQ, that really hasn’t been a problem here.
Part of the problem is how politicized population genetics has become.
I should probably have listed as an example something like talking about PUA and whether it works, because that has caused problems here, despite being less controversial in the outside world.
Welcome to my reality. ;)
The only thing that offended me was the one value judgment in the bunch:
And I’m not offended on behalf of homosexuals but on behalf of BDSMers and kinky people who take those styles and practice them, but only between consenting adults. The rest of the piece, I think, exhibited a lot of ignorance about modern homosexual and heterosexual sex and desire and an overconfidence in historical records about romantic homosexuality. But I think you might be surprised at how similar his point is to that made by some radical queer theorists I’ve read.
They exist, but they’re mostly all tangled up in whatever hybrid of Marxism and/or postmodernism is in vogue. Add in a sprinkling of half-understood genetics, evolution, and evolutionary psychology, and it’s just a monstrous headache every paragraph.
The one I have in mind is Lee Edelman. He quotes Hegel a lot. He does philosophy from an English department and works in post-structuralism and, wait for it, psychoanalytic theory. Probably not Less Wrong’s cup of tea. He does show gay porn in his lectures, though.
Anyway, he critiques what he calls “reproductive futurism”, by which he means the norms and values that serve to continue civilization in the traditional sense: “The children are our future”, the fact that political appeals on behalf of children are impossible to refuse, heterosexual marriage, the nuclear family, and the entire political edifice he sees as built up around the idea. He sees the figure of the queer person as someone left out of this social order. He suggests that rather than (or maybe in addition to) fighting for the right to join in the social order—through joining the military openly, gay marriage, gay adoption etc. gays and lesbians should resist the entirety of reproductive futurism.
He positively quotes conservatives for accurately revealing just how it is queers lie outside the established social order. I suspect he might see the “romantic homosexuality” style in the above linked blog post as acquiescence to reproductive futurism.
[That make sense to anyone? Just trying to translate the ideas into something reasonable sounding.]
Even if they succeed in that goal all they’ll do is cause the affected culture to evolve to extinction.
This is more or less what conservatives have been accusing the gay-rights movement of being a cover for since day one.
Many comments like this one get net upvotes. Are you concerned with total or net votes? What are your net votes from such discussions? How possible would it be for you to reshape downvoted-type comments into upvoted-type comments, particularly because any one downvoted comment is unlikely to have received much of your editing attention?
Comments expressing the lament of “people on both sides” are likely to be downvoted by me. I have many similar loose heuristics, such as “vote down people arguing by definition”, “vote up people changing their mind”, “vote up people citing sources”, “vote down people who do not apply the principle of charity”, and “vote up comments in which people correctly use the word ‘literally’”.
You’re unlikely to avoid tripping any if you make multiple comments, but I think each is fair and generally the type of content I want to see gets communicated. Consequently I suggest being less concerned by total downvotes, even if your only other change is to be more concerned with net downvotes. It’s not really supposed to be possible to avoid tripping any wire any reader has.
But I don’t see you getting net downvotes, so I’m not sure if that is instead your complaint...because that would be weird, as getting a near balance of favorable and unfavorable reviews isn’t too harsh a form of censorship.
I’m concerned not with my karma total but with the net-negative karma score for individual comments. A net negative karma for a comment signals that Less Wrong does not want to see that comment. When I see net negative comments I try to figure out why. For any one comment there are lots of possible explanations for downvoting. But when I see a trend that suggests downvoting heuristics I think are bad I sometimes publicly lament those heuristics. For example, I see a lot of bad pattern matching downvoting where people say things that unexamined resemble theistic apologist arguments. Taking any position that could be considered political also seems to be subject to downvoting. Especially when that position is inconsistent with the values of the local demographic cluster. Laments of downvote heuristics seems to be a rather unpopular comment type as well. These heuristics have a chilling effect on the discussions of those subjects and partly explain Eugine’s complaint:
Fair enough as a heuristic, though I’ll note I made it pretty clear which side I thought was worse in the preceding sentences. But don’t worry about your downvote- the heuristic you used was fine by me.
Laments of downvote heuristics seem to be about why the complainer’s immediately preceding comments were downvoted.
How often are such complaint framed as laments that political allies were downvoted, much less neutrals or opponents?
If everyone writing a comment of content type X also always added spam links, I would downvote overconfident speculation about why people don’t like content X and how that makes them bad people.
Outside of threads I’m personally involved in, I try to downvote any comment which seems detrimental to the overall signal-to-noise ratio on LW. Most often that means posts which are statistically illiterate, incoherent, obviously biased, or poorly written, which I imagine should be uncontroversial. Beyond content and style, though, it’s also possible for a post’s framing to lower the signal-to-noise ratio through a variety of knock-on effects.
Usually this happens by way of halo effects and their negative-affect equivalent (let’s call that a miasma effect, if it lacks a proper name): arguments matching religious apologia too closely, for example, tend to trigger a cluster of negative associations in our largely atheistic audience that prime it for confrontation even if the content itself is benign. Likewise for comments with political framing or drawing unwisely from political examples. I don’t usually click the downvote button on comments like these until there’s evidence of them actually causing problems, but that’s sufficiently common that I still end up burning a lot of votes on them.
I submit that this isn’t a bad heuristic. It’s one that shouldn’t be necessary if we were all free from emotive priming effects, but we clearly aren’t, and exposing ourselves to many sources of them isn’t going to help us get rid of the problem; in the meantime, discouraging such comments seems like a useful way of keeping the shouting down.
If someone is going to be pulling a thread dangerously close to politics, we should expect those comments to be held to a higher standard.
What do you label with that symbol? How do you know no aspect of any of them should be criticized, mocked, or insulted?
Good point. Consider it striked.
I had assigned what felt like a 10% probability to your defending that without falling to the no true Scotsman fallacy, so I am disappointed.
Also, what do you mean by hostile?
If I believe it’s better for people not to have behavioral disorders or/and addictive disorders develop a treatment and encourage people with said disorders to take it, am I being hostile? What if I do the same w.r.t. homosexuality?
BTW, if the answer to both those questions is “no”, I have no further problem with the definition.
Treating someone like an enemy. Shrug. I don’t have a clear bright line or anything, the amount and intensity of bigotry someone must exhibit before I’m comfortable calling them a bigoted person is pretty high.
In both cases it depends on why you want people to take the treatment.
We’re now very far from what was a pretty contingent defense of another commenter’s position and I don’t especially enjoy the topic...
Replace “sexism” by “X”. Do you think this alternative is still valid?
Or maybe you should elaborate on why you think “sexism” gives rise to this alternative.
Of course it is still valid, unless X corresponds directly to some observable and clearly identifiable element of physical reality, so that its existence is not Platonic, but physically real. Obviously it wouldn’t make sense to discuss whether someone has, say, committed theft if there didn’t exist a precise and agreed-upon definition of what counts as theft—or otherwise we would be hunting for some objectively existing Platonic idea of “theft” in order to see whether it applies.
Now of course, in human affairs no definition is perfectly precise, and there will always be problematic corner cases where there may be much disagreement. This precision is ultimately a matter of degree. However, to use the same example again, when people are accused of theft, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the only disagreement is whether the facts of the accusation are correct, and it’s only very rarely that even after the facts are agreed upon, there is significant disagreement over whether what happened counts as theft. In contrast, when people are accused of sexism, a discussion almost always immediately starts about whether what they did was really and truly “sexist,” even when there is no disagreement at all about what exactly was said or done.
Of course? There must be a miscommunication.
Do you think it makes sense to discuss, say, intelligence, friendship or morality? Do you think these exist either as physically real things or Platonic ideas, or can you supply precise and agreed-upon definitions for them?
I don’t count any of my three examples physically real in the sense of being a clearly identifiable part of physical reality. Of course they reduce to physical things at the bottom, but only in the trivial sense in which everything does. Knowing that the reduction exists is one thing, but we don’t judge things as intelligent, friendly or moral based on their physical configuration, but on higher-order abstractions. I’m not expecting us to have a disagreement here. I wouldn’t consider any of the examples a Platonic idea either. Our concepts and intuitions do not have their source in some independently existing ideal world of perfections. Since you seemed to point to Platonism as a fallacy, we probably don’t disagree here either.
So I’m led to expect that you think that to sensibly discuss whether a given behaviour is intelligent, friendly or moral, we need to be able to give precise definitions for intelligence, friendship and morality. But I can only think that this is fundamentally misguided: the discussions around these concepts are relevant precisely because we do not have such definitions at hand. We can try to unpack our intuitions about what we think of as a concept, for example by tabooing the word for it. But this is completely different from giving a definition.
This only reflects on the easiest ways of making or defending against particular kinds of accusations, not at all on the content of the accusations. Morality is similar to sexism in this respect, but it still makes sense to discuss morality without being a Platonist about it or without giving a precise agreed-upon definition.
Well, morality is such an enormous and multi-sided topic that what usually matters in a concrete situation is only some particular small subset of morality. A discussion can be meaningful if there is agreement on the issue at hand, even if there is disagreement otherwise. So to take the same example again, if we’re discussing whether someone is a thief (i.e has committed the sort of immoral behavior that is called “theft”), it doesn’t matter if we define murder differently, as long as we define theft the same.
But yes, of course that discussing whether a given behavior is intelligent, friendly, or moral makes sense only if we agree on the definitions of these terms. As I said above, in practice our definitions about human affairs are always fuzzy and incomplete to some degree, so there will always be disagreement at least in some corner cases, and discussions will be meaningful as long as they stick to the broader area of agreement. However, in case of friendship, intelligence, and most issues of morality, people typically agree at least roughly on the relevant definitions, so the usage of these words is usually meaningful.
Also, when people agree on definitions, it doesn’t matter if they are able to state these definitions precisely and explicitly, as long as there is no disagreement on whether the definitions are satisfied assuming given facts. Giving a precise definition of “friendship” would be a difficult task for most people, but it doesn’t matter since there is no significant disagreement on what behavior is expected from people one considers as friends, and what behavior should disqualify them. One the other hand, when someone makes vague ideological accusations such as “sexism,” there is no such agreement at all, and a rational discussion can’t even being before a clear definition of the term is given.
the problem is that the pain is not caused by someone stepping on your toe, but by someone showing subtle but detectable signs of thinking thoughts that you disagree with.
The pain caused by someone committing thought crime against you has a more dubious ontological status than the pain caused impact upon your toe.
A typical example of this is the word “gay”, the latest polite euphemism for male homosexual, the latest of a great many. Like every other polite euphemism for anything, it has become a swear word, a swear word that unlike Carlin’s list of seven words you used not to be able to say on TV, still has the power to shock.
Indeed, as soon as one creates a new euphemism, it implies that the thing that it is a euphemism for is unmentionably disgusting, thus becomes good swear word, depriving the euphemism of the niceness that is the essential characteristic of a euphemism, while rendering all previous euphemisms for the thing (of which there are usually large number) too disgusting to speak.
The pain caused by the inevitable and inexorable transition from euphemism to curse word is fundamentally different from the pain caused by stepping on your toes. It is more like the pain caused by losing an election, or someone banging a prettier girl than you banged. The tenth commandment forbids you to experience or admit to experiencing certain kinds of pain. Not all pains have equal status as cause for complaint. You cannot help feeling pain if someone steps on your toes, but you can and should help feeling certain other forms of pain, which forms of pain are therefore less real.
The problem is that some insults (and this is currently true about those relating to homosexuality) get backed up with violence and/or with serious social exclusion—they aren’t “just words”.
Also, people don’t reliably put abuse behind them. Their reactions to threats that it might start up again are quite strong. The situation is complicated by the fact that these reactions can be amplified by social effects.
Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness has the thesis that, because overt racism isn’t socially acceptable but covert racism still goes on, both black and white Americans search for more and more subtle clues to whether people are racist. This looks insane, but is a rational response to a difficult situation.
It is unclear to me that those consequences were unintended.
I think you’re overestimating people’s competence, but it’s hard to tell about that sort of thing.
What’s your line of thought?
I’m not sure it’s a line so much as it’s an impression. Strategists try to reshape battlefields to give themselves the high ground. I’m not sure I can articulate anything worth updating on, but I’ll think about it and get back to you if I come up with anything.
Hmm… I’d have guessed it was less about being a euphemism and more about English-speakers wanting to have a one-syllable word instead of a five-syllable one, much like “straight” is a one-syllable word for “heterosexual”, without this meaning that hetero sex is “unmentionably disgusting”.
Even from childhood we know that pain caused by deliberate insults often hurts more than physical fights. People should not seek to take offense where none was meant—but when offense is meant, and you know it’s meant, not being hurt is often harder than ignoring a merely stepped-upon toe. A deliberate insult can linger all day in your mind when a toe is soon forgotten.
Supporting evidence: American English speakers weren’t even content with a two syllable word meaning that homo sex is “unmentionably disgusting”, and it’s been shortened to one syllable.
But the original word was “queer”… which is now not a curse after having been reclaimed.
On a tangential note, this usage of “reclaim” has always bothered me. “Queer” didn’t start out with positive or neutral connotations. It has not been reclaimed by the GLBT movement, it has been appropriated. Reclamation denotes previous ownership, something that simply doesn’t apply when you look at the historical relationship between the words that are being “reclaimed” and the groups that are claiming them, but it’s chosen for its connotations of legitimacy, since people are less likely to object to your taking back what’s rightfully yours.
I find amusing the notion of bigots launching a campaign to reclaim “queer” as an insult.
Only leftists consciously try to remake language. Conservatives do not,
This may reflect the conservative belief in naive realism, that words refer to things in the world, and are ultimately defined by pointing at stuff, primarily by mothers pointing at stuff, as in “mother tongue”. Leftists frequently believe that words create reality, hence they always start language projects.
If a rose by any other name will smell as sweet, no point in finding new words for shit. You want conservatives to say “gay”. Observe. They say “gay”, but somehow it sounds remarkably as if they saying (long, long, long list of words no one is allowed to say any more)
Before building a house, check that your foundation is sound.
The bias you have to be most careful of in this situation is availability. When claiming “liberals X, but conservatives don’t X,” I think people first run a mental search for “liberal X” and then a search for “conservative X.” But mental searches aren’t as reliable as you might wish—if in the post just above, your brain was primed with an example of “liberal X,” your mental search will be a lot better at thinking of liberal X, and so you might conclude that liberal X is much more common. Curse you, availability bias!
One way to train yourself to search thoroughly is my “magical exercise of power” (actually just an improv exercise, but assertive naming seems to have worked for the Rules of Power :P).
I really don’t think availability bias is his biggest problem.
Actually, if you spend time in a highly partisan environment, availability bias is a huge problem. One of the things people do in an effort to convince each other is invent and promulgate pseudo-experience.
If you keep getting told stories of people from group A attacking group B, and you’re a B, the stories stick with you. You’re also less likely to spend time around A’s, so that you don’t have a personal history of knowing that they might be less dangerous than you’ve been told, and you’re not likely to hear stories about them being attacked by B’s or to take such stories seriously if you do hear them.
Freedom fries.
“pro-life” instead of “anti-abortion”
“Enhanced interrogation” instead of “Torture”
”Collateral damage” instead of “Civilian casualties”
“Death tax” instead of “Inheritance tax” or “estate tax”
”Civilian contractors” instead of “Hired mercenaries”
“Freedom fries” instead of “French fries”
”Freedom fighters” instead of “Those particular terrorists we happen to support”
″illegal” used as a noun.
Do these suffice?
I’ve never heard this before. Can you point me to some evidence?
The rest of your comment seems intentionally offensive. Am I correct in this assessment?
If so, feel free to pm me with your intended message without the offensive content, if you are trying to make a point with the offensive content. I don’t know if anybody else is getting your intended message, but I know I am not, and I am curious, if you can reframe your content more constructively.
Homicide Bomber.
There are certainly other examples, but that’s the first one to come to mind.
Islamofascism, “real America”, ‘Democrat’ as an adjective as in ‘Democrat Party’, Death Tax, Obamacare.
It’s politics; people come up with this stuff for a living.
If Lesswrong were an explicitly conservative site, we would recently have been re-reading the “Enhanced interrogation v. dust specks” sequence...
Probably not. Enhanced interrogation is torture, but not all torture is enhanced interrogation. “Enhanced interrogation” implies the point is to get information, if any is available. Torture includes more acts because it includes other purposes, like fun and deterrence.
Also, it is only enhanced interrogation when you or your allies are doing it. When others do it, named or unnamed then it is torture. See here.
What does this mean?
Named is examples like China mentioned in the article. Unnamed was something like torture v. dustspecks where who is doing the torturing doesn’t figure into it.
I need to add: trying to induce a confession as China did, like trying to get information, is also “interrogation”, unlike torture for no reason, fun, deterrence, etc.
Because no conservatives have ever started language projects?
I almost admire your fortitude in repeatedly charging forward, Light Brigade-like, with material you know beforehand is going to be downvoted to oblivion for partisan mindkilling.
At this point you are coming across as either a troll or as hopelessly mind-killed. It is possible you do not fall into those categories, but that’s the impression one gets from comments like the above. Please read if you have not already done so why politics is the mindkiller.
Hm. This got downvoted pretty heavily, didn’t it. So how about some of the downvoters point out some examples of conservative projects to deliberately remodel language, in the sense for instance feminism explicitely tries to, or that whole business of political correctness.
Disclaimer: I’m not conservative, hell I’m not even American and we don’t have “conservatives” where I live. I’m asking this because the falseness of what sam said is very far from apparent to me.
People already have. See comments below.
Yawn.
Missed it due to clicking on a link that produced a single-thread view.
Same to you, friend.
I’m not your friend, pal.
Downvoting both of you for signalling contempt at each other.
Let’s try and keep the forum as respectful as we can.
Certainly. Though I admit I am a little baffled as to why I got downvoted more heavily, when I wasn’t the one who came out with unprovoked rudeness.
How do you expect people to know who was provoked or unprovoked, once you deleted your comment? If you want people to know how a discussion went, you have the option of retracting but not deleting.
I’m still wondering how you were able to delete your post after I had already replied to it.
If I understand correctly, when a page gets refreshed with a reply to a comment, the delete button on that comment is gone; but as long as one is viewing a previous state of the page, when you use the delete button it works.
Which is what I did. I hadn’t seen your reply, you made it just as I was deleting—literally, I deleted and upon the page reloading I saw the inbox thingie with your reply. I was deleting because I had just noticed that I missed all those other replies to Sam.
Which would mean, with some greasemonkey, one could have a delete button on anything I guess.
Once again guessing, I’d say that “queer” and “bent” were both at a time abandoned by the gay community (even though “bent’ is of course the actual counterpart of “straight”) because of the negative connotations of weirdness in the former case, and something that’s not in its proper shape in the latter. “Gay” persisted because it was the first name whose alternate connotations were positive (being merry/carefree).
I don’t know why “queer” became acceptable to be reclaimed again, but I’m wondering whether it’s because “weird” is not really seen as a bad thing anymore—“geek” has also become a badge of honor after all, though it once used to be an insulting word.
Geek was actually the specific term for a carnival entertainer who bites the heads off of live chickens, before it became a generic term of abuse, before it became a specific term for someone who is passionate about a particular interest.
I may never think of Best Buy’s tech support department the same way again...
Also possibly because the original meaning of “weird” has become lost, or at least outmoded, as a result of tarnishing by association with the slur. Nowadays, high school and college literature professors have to preface discussions of Moby-Dick with a disclaimer to the effect that the passage
has nothing to do with sexuality at all.
(Melville knew what he liked, I guess.)
--Moby Dick
That makes sense.
There were lots of words before queer.
I can only imagine how Roy Cohn felt during the Army-McCarthy hearings when Joseph Welch quipped that “a pixie is a close relative of a fairy”...
We already have more one syllable euphemisms for male homosexual than I can shake a stick at, each of which became a curse word, and each of which was supplanted by another euphemism. The most recent one previous to gay was “queer”.
The same usually happens with other euphemisms for other undesirable characteristics—for example “retard”.
Euphemisms do not work. If the thing being referred to was OK, we would not be looking for euphemisms, thus euphemising merely draws attention to the fact that the thing being referred to is not OK.
But very rarely is someone in trouble for making a deliberate insult. When people get in trouble for being politically incorrect, they are accused of wrongthink, not intentionally insulting any specific identifiable person.
“Wrongthink” is oldspeak. Say ‘ungoodthink’.
Also, I’m curious whether you think your assertion holds in cases where an activist organization of (Group X) is the entity that accuses a speaker of political incorrectness towards Group X.
The pain of deliberate insults occurs when Person A directly insults Person B, not when Person A denigrates group X. After all, school and University is non stop denigration of whites, males, white males, and dead white males, which has a lot to do with massive male drop out rate. So the alleged representatives of group X are not personally insulted.
I hate to get involved in political discussion, but that seems inconsistent with the data: dropout rates for men in the US are slightly higher than for women, but the difference is only about three percentage points. Perhaps more saliently, the gap appears to historically have been larger for black and Hispanic students than for whites (it still is for Hispanics), which is exactly the opposite of what I’d expect if “nonstop denigration of whites, males, white males, and dead white males” was a major factor.
And Protestants! Can’t forget those poor, persecuted Protestants, nosiree.
Seriously, where did you go to school? Cause it wasn’t where I went to school, I’ll tell you that.
My school more or less had all the teachers from the MTV show Daria. Most of those are leftist, with enormous character flaws and failures of rationality.
Fortunately I learned that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Marginalizing or diminishing people due to the socially enforced classes they belong to is not at all the same thing as “showing subtle signs of thinking thoughts you disagree with”.
Feeling demeaned or socially excluded is a fundamentally different kind of pain than that caused by having one’s toe stepped on: it is a much more damaging one.
Feeling demeaned is painful and can be worse than having one’s toe stepped on. But some people are allowed to complain about it, and other people are not.
It’s like saying that stepping on someone’s toe is bad, but some people by definition don’t have toes. If they claim to have toes too, it only proves their malice—by pretending to have toes they want to make us less sensitive about the pain of the real toe owners.
If you officially don’t have a toe, then everyone is free to step on your toe, because officially it didn’t happen. Other people then tell you how lucky you are for not having a toe. Then they accuse you of lack of empathy towards people who have their toes stepped on.
If you mean that there are classes of marginalized people who aren’t allowed or aren’t capable of objecting to mistreatment I agree. And I would agree that the cluster of people that cares a lot about racism, sexism, etc. often doesn’t see such people as deserving justice. When male victims of domestic violence feel excluded by feminist discussions of domestic violence which vilify men for example—I think that counts as a real harm.
But that does not mean everyone’s claim to having had their toe stepped on deserves equal respect or credibility. Claims of harm due to anti-white racism, as if it were equivalent to anti-black racism are really implausible and people taking offense to the suggestion of equivalence is reasonable. This is why I don’t agree with the anti-subordination activist’s position of privileging first person accounts of dis-empowered people when defining the scope of bigotry and injustice. I think neutral principles of some sort are required to sort out claims of injustice—but of course I don’t know how to arrive at such principles and think it is likely that any criteria I propose will be based on concern for protecting my politically favored groups. And that would be bad. In short, this stuff is really complicated and I’m not really aligned with much anyone on the subject.
The question “Is it easier to beat action game levels on normal mode, or on hard mode with an infinite ammunition cheat on?” would be ill-posed.
Sorry, don’t follow the metaphor.
Assuming it wasn’t a metaphor, it would still obviously be ill-posed though, right?
It may be that one game can be beaten by someone only on normal, but all levels but one are easier on hard with unlimited ammo. Or that one game is easier on normal and another easier with unlimited ammo on hard. One level might require 72 hours of straight gameplay to beat on hard with unlimited ammo, but such a victory might be reliably achieved, and a 9⁄10 chance of death each run on normal, with success determined by the third minute.
The metaphor is that people have different advantages and disadvantages. The one person whose challenge is difficulty conserving grenades and separating enemies to confront as few at a time as possible might have little in common with the person whose challenge is grouping enemies such that the fastest and slowest are each hit by as many of his individual grenade throws as possible.
Edit: Never mind. I got it.
That there are different advantages and disadvantages does not mean that there cannot be, on net, one group that dominates another.
Oh come on. Lot of people get beaten up for being white, frequently maimed for life. There is a whole genre of you tube videos on the topic. No one gets beaten up for being black—and very few people ever did. The fact that when you are digging for white racist attacks, you wind up with such an implausible poster boy as Emmit Till shows how hard up you are for examples.
Similarly, lots of people are excluded from university for being white and male, and worse, white and male from rural America
Which tells us:Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
I have basically no desire to have an extended discussion on this matter with someone who seems to have had their mind killed by politics (whether or not I’ve had my mind killed as well). Of particular note is second clause of
which is historically ignorant to an almost absurd point—a point I don’t think I’ve seen anyone take before. I will note that random irrational violence is almost always done by victims of one kind or another. High status people don’t get into fights as a rule. Low status people are much more likely to—this isn’t surprising when considering what kind of behaviors get selected for in a mammal dominance hierarchy. Males with few to no mating possibilities because of their low status are much more likely to risk their lives in combat in order attain higher status and mating opportunities. Alpha elephant seals with large harems don’t pick fights with the young bulls who lack harems. Obviously black people who beat up white people do not experience a substantive status change when the succeed but we all know evolved software misfires.
(Unfortunately it may need to be said that I don’t consider the above explanation for violence to be a justification for violence)
So where is your poster boy who got beaten up for being black? If you had such a poster boy, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.
You will seem to be conceding what you deny.
Groups that employ random irrational violence tend to lose to groups that employ rational coordinated cooperative violence, violence that is bold yet planned and prudent, groups that display loyalty and discipline. It does not follow that that those who employ random irrational violence are violent because they lost, but rather that they lost because their violence was irrational.
Nor does it follow that those groups that lost were “victims”. If we look at Africa, it is apparent that blacks were better off ruled by whites than by blacks.
There’s no more need for a poster boy for racial violence against blacks than there is for a poster boy for historical repression of the Native Americans. Why should anyone have to come up with a single representative example when you can point to general policy?
Well into the 20th century, the Klu Klux Klan was still considered socially respectable as an institution, and being a member could even be politically advantageous.
It’s easy to take a position that’s socially frowned upon, and argue or assume that everyone who disagrees with you is too biased by social conditioning to change their minds. Easy enough to turn it into a fully general counterargument. But here of all places, I think you should keep in mind that if your position is getting a bad reception, you should strongly consider the possibility that you are either not making a good case for it, or that you’re arguing for something that simply isn’t correct.
So you are not going to let the absence of any facts get in your way.
Which presupposes that which is to be proven: That the Klu Klux Klan beat blacks up for being black, the way blacks beat whites up for being white every day.
The Klu Klux Klan made it dangerous to engage in certain political activities, especially if one was black (see the Wikipedia list of notorious Klan Murders). It did not make it dangerous merely to be black, the way it is dangerous merely to be white in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks. Klan violence was political violence, and indeed terrorism, but it was not race hate, not the race hate that we see so enthusiastically displayed by blacks on You tube
Come to think of it, it is also dangerous to be black in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks (the presence of whites makes blacks safer from other blacks), but it is even more dangerous to be white in such areas.
What would you take as adequate evidence? The Klu Klux Klan is notorious for having lynched and committed other acts of racially motivated violence. There’s no shortage of writers who have written about racially motivated violence against blacks as part of their personal experience. There’s no shortage of documentation. What evidence, that we should reasonably be expect to be there if a significant amount of racial violence against blacks has happened, and have access to, would be sufficient for you?
If you simply wanted to convince other members of this board that most racially motivated crime in America today is committed against whites, your best bet would probably have simply been to link them to this. But even this is a seriously problematic claim; the idea that 90% of race based crime incidents are white seems to originate here. I read the original report, and confirmed that it makes no such claim, rather, Sheehan gets that figure by classifying all interracial crime as race based crime, and comparing the number of violent crimes committed by black perpetrators and white victims with the number of violent crimes committed by white perpetrators with black victims. But not only is it absurd to suppose that all violent interracial crime is racially motivated, there are a lot more white people in this country than black people, meaning that if all criminals chose their victims completely at random, black on white crime would dramatically outnumber white on black crime. In fact, according to the report, crime among black people is more intraracial than crime among white people relative to the number of crimes committed.
The swastika on the tab for the site where Sheehan wrote the article is a pretty significant sign of a biased agenda all by itself.
But claiming that violence against blacks by whites has not been historically significant, in addition to present day race based crime being slanted in the opposite direction, that’s a really outstanding claim. So what evidence are you prepared to present?
A black man who happened to be walking down the street while a dozen Klansmen happened to be walking by in the other direction was not going to be attacked by a dozen Klansmen for no special reason other than general hatred of blacks, the way a white man walking down the street may be attacked by a dozen blacks for no special reason other than general hatred of whites.
If you count all the blacks that were attacked to be carried off into slavery, unjust white attacks on blacks probably greatly outnumber unjust black attacks on whites, but these were not race hate attacks. They attacked because they wanted someone to cut sugar cane, not because they disliked blacks.
From the absence of race hate attacks by whites, and the frequency of race hate attacks by blacks, we can conclude that everywhere in America today, the safest places for a white man, are also the safest places for a black man.
From which we can conclude that you do in fact believe that blacks on average, have worse character than whites, since you are aware that predominantly black areas are unsafe—unsafe for everyone, but especially unsafe for whites.
From the fact that Everett Till is the poster boy for white attacks on blacks, we can conclude that in all of American history from around that time to the present, there has never been a racially motivated attack on a black resembling racially motivated attacks on whites that occur every day in today’s America, because if there ever had been such an attack, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.
Why bother to quote my text if you’re not going to answer the question?
You could say that there are cases where black people have attacked white people for being white, and I wouldn’t contest it. And you could say that white people haven’t attacked black people for being black, and I would be willing to concede that there is a sense in which that is true. But to say that black people have attacked white people for being white, but white people have not attacked black people for being black is simply absurd.
The reason that they can both be individually correct, but not accurate as a comparison is because it involves a manipulation of terms. I am prepared to accept the claim that black people sometimes attack white people for being white, with the implicit understanding that what this really means is “being white and being in the wrong neighborhood,” or “being white and being taken as a scapegoat for a lifetime of second class citizenship.”
I am also prepared to accept that the claim that white people don’t kill black people for being black can be said to be true in a sense; you’re not going to find a white person who’ll kill a black person for being black in the same sense that they’d kill a person for sleeping with their wife. But you can find white people who’ll go out and commit premeditated attacks on people of other races to promote their ideology of a racially homogeneous society and strengthen their allegiance to the cause. It’s called lone wolf activism. And while the Klu Klux Klan would not, as you said, attack a black man who just happened to be walking down the street, a black person could attract violence for being found in the wrong neighborhood, just like your white person in a black neighborhood scenario, or for associating too closely with white people, or being too successful, or “getting ideas above their station.” Black people were attacked for representing a threat to white individuals’ place in the social hierarchy among people who needed someone to look down on. Saying that this doesn’t count as white people attacking black people for being black, while black on white racially motivated violence does count, is a severe case of special pleading.
Stop feeding the troll.
I was thinking the same thing as Desertopia, but decided that he wasn’t worth the time it would take to type up.
I’m curious: who are your white victim poster children?
What dangers are you referring to, specifically? Can you point me to a specific source that measures these harms? I have never heard your concluding suggestion before, though I think I have heard the opposite claim.
When I walk down the street and hear footsteps I start thinking about robbery. Then I look around and see someone white and feel relieved.
Evidence?
One series of anecdotes: I’ve been the only white person in the subway car quite a few times. I didn’t check carefully, but there were few if any Asians. I’m short, I’m female, I have no reason to think I’m a scary looking person. I haven’t been attacked or threatened.
Downvoted for selecting one out of hundreds of potential effects and calling it “apparent” without a shred of evidence. Seriously, you can’t make that point without a book-length argument, and good luck getting anyone to read a book like that.
You said something like this before, and—at risk of lowering the signal-to-noise ratio further, in which case I apologize—I’m honestly curious: what’s wrong with Emmitt Till?
Edit:
Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you said that.
It seems that you are going out of your way to spread general mind-killing to this thread.
Your second point, regarding differential admissions to colleges is potentially much more interesting. The claim that there’s both directed harm and actual inefficiency resulting is a pretty strong type of argument. And you even back it up with sources.
But you start off your post with a claim that even if it were true is only marginally related to the topic at hand and is going to create a clear negative emotional reaction in almost any reader. And that claim is made with zero sourcing other than your own say so.
Depending on your viewpoint one can classify the following as either Dark Arts or as good communication: when talking to people about controversial subjects you don’t need to throw out every claim that could potentially help one viewpoint, and this is an especially bad idea when one of those supporting arguments will give a negative association to the claims in question. This is true whether or not the supporting argument is factually accurate.
Here’s an example that will be likely less controversial here. If I’m discussing evolution with a religious Jew or Christian, it more efficient to stick with the easily discussed factual issues. If they make specifically religious objections one can simply say that that’s something they’ll need to resolve and just lightly note that some people seem to be able to do it. You aren’t going to get very far if your central arguments are something like fossil record, genetics, oh and your religion is all bullshit.
Don’t mindkill when you don’t have to.
May 2011 : Greece: Fascists attempt to kill immigrants : one migrant stabbed to death, 17 hospitalized.
I (perhaps incorrectly) understood him to be speaking of within the US. Otherwise, Libya also has some significant, very recent counterexamples.
Eh, not that hard to give examples in the US either. The most recent that comes to mind. And that’s just the most recent fatality. If one extends to just people being “beaten up” the set will be much larger.
Claims must be specific and backed with evidence. The claim as he stated it is false. If he wants to limit it in scope, then let him limit it as he will, and its significance then becomes proportionaly limited in a similar way. From a claim about the world entire, it becomes a claim for about 1/20th of the global population, and thus attains 1/20th its former significance, at which point we ought give it about 1/20th the weight we otherwise would.
I want parochialism and assumptions of parochialism to have no place in this forum. If we can discuss many-worlds and if we can worry about what we’ll be doing for fun a million years from now, then people can bloody well lift their noses up to perceive there exist countries outside the USA.
I have mixed feelings about what you say here.
On the one hand, of course the whole world matters. On the other, we can make much more specific claims about smaller regions, and test them more easily.
In this particular case, I think both are overwhelmed by concerns of conversational pragmatism. If you can defeat his arguments in the framework where he made them, you win. If you make an objection outside that domain, and he says “but that’s not what I meant”, then squabbling about particularities of domain, word choice, and inference is a frequently observed failure mode. Noting and criticizing US-centrism (or any other -centrism) is worth doing, but should be considered an aside.
I am surprised that this is so severely downvoted.
The second and third paragraphs are excellent, with sources, and I have very different standards for voting depending on the speaker and what I expect from him or her. Do others not? I would encourage sam0345 to make more posts like this until they are standard for him, and then later dowvote him for such posts when posts like this are typical for him.
Upvoted.
I wouldn’t have downvoted it in isolation, but it seemed to me that, taking his other activity today into account, sam0345 was basically trolling. My habit is just to downvote that stuff until it goes away. Maybe the line between relatively high-quality trolling and needlessly inflammatory dissent is blurry...but are we really short on Brave Truth-Tellers here on LW? I submit we are not.
(Pretty short on black people, though.)
That just sounds self-congratulatory applause-lights. What’s your evidence for this claim?
I read “Brave Truth-Tellers” as a slightly sarcastic way of saying “contrarians”, which we’ve got plenty of.
Quite.
No we don’t.
Oh no, not at all, I meant it more like “Oh LW, you so crazy!” I believe we are very, very contrarian here; stating unpopular beliefs is a form of showing off (see The Irrationality Game). I am not sure what quantifiable evidence I can offer of that, but I’m far from the first to make the observation.
If it had excluded the sentence “No one gets beaten up for being black—and very few people ever did,” I would have given it an upvote without a second thought. Because of that comment, I gave it an upvote only because I think it doesn’t deserve to be at −6, and would not have upvoted it if I saw it at 0.
And by abduction: lack of empathy for people who have thorns in their side, lack of empathy for those weak at the knees, and eremikophobia (fear of sand).
When someone uses “gay” as a curse word, he is not “marginalizing blah blah blah”. He is inadvertently revealing that he thinks homosexuality is a bad thing—or inadvertently revealing that he thinks the frequent change of euphemism is an indication that most people think it is a bad thing. You are punishing him for his beliefs, not for his actions. He is not intentionally attacking anyone.
Or he could be advertently revealing that fact.
No one is saying he is. In fact, the context of this entire thread is someone saying explicitly that no one is saying he is.
Jandila:
When people say “that shit is gay” gay people feel marginalized and diminished. They feel hurt. Whether or not it was intentional (and certainly it often is).
School and university is a non stop denigration of whites, males, and white males. It is clear that males feel marginalized and diminished, which contributes to high and rising dropout rate of males, but it is more important to worry about the marginalization of some groups that other groups.
You know, you’re going to have to back up these claims eventually. Why not start now?