The Fungible Audience Fallacy

[maradydd]

Incidents of "Shanley Kane verbally attacks some friend of mine in some way that is obviously counter to her stated goals" keep rolling in at the rate of about one every two weeks. Last time, it was bashing a friend who started slinging C professionally around the time I was born because "her generation" didn't create the workers' utopia (by

Comments

[pozorvlak]

I have a simpler theory: she just doesn't care as much about how her actions jibe with her long-term goals as much as she likes attacking people right now. My sub-theories are that (1) she's a nasty person who really likes attacking people, (2) she hasn't thought much about the long-term effects of her actions. Sub-theory (2) doesn't actually require much negligence or stupidity on her part; social justice has a whole raft of techniques for avoiding thinking about how their tactics impact on their long-term goals, and it must be easy to internalize those. "The tone argument" (or rather, the dismissal thereof) is the obvious such technique; I'd also include the concept of "concern trolling", since I've never seen an accusation of concern trolling that appeared justified to me, but I have seen dozens of accusations that were simply attempts to shut down well-intentioned criticism, often of the form "your tactics are counterproductive in the long-term".

Two quick notes on the excellent Scott Alexander piece you linked to: I was surprised that he considered "motte and bailey" to be such an esoteric concept, but then I live and grew up in a country which still has the remains of a few motte-and-bailey castles about, and we learned about them in school history classes. Secondly, I'd always ascribed the use of sliding definition ploy by SJWs (eg, in the "racism" versus "structural racism" case) to the fact that most people just don't get that definitions of words are arbitrary things. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, and all that.

[maradydd]

A year ago that would have been pretty much my only theory, and it's certainly the case for most of the vocal SJWs with dayjobs that I've noticed. (Tim Chevalier, for instance, collects "people he has slandered" the way some people collect stamps.) Quitting her job to start an activist e-zine in fact strikes me as doubling down on both "being a nasty person who likes attacking people" and "avoiding thinking about how her tactics impact on her long-term goals." I actually do think she's internalised those avoidance techniques to the point of self-parody, but I also think at least some of that internalisation process was performative. That is to say, I think that without an audience to play to, the psychological rewards of attacking people wouldn't be nearly as compelling or frequent - to get a rush from attacking people, you have to go out and attack them, but when you're also a performer whose performance is attacking people, you get residual egoboo every time a new fan discovers you and lets you know. Now this is her job, and you probably already know the exact Upton Sinclair quote I'm thinking of.

[maradydd]

Good grief, is he still banging that drum? I wonder whether he has anything more than bald assertions to base that on yet; the first time I was made aware of it was a thread on Facebook over a year ago, and the person who brought it to my attention did so because they were so startled at how blatant (and effective) a conversation-stopper it was.

Suffice it to say that only my concern for my own privacy and that of quite a few people I care about keeps me from demolishing that argument; I give much more of a shit about that than I do about what a lying ignoramus says about me.

[pozorvlak]

It shouldn't be surprising to find members of marginalized groups exhibiting authoritarian behaviour (strong purity ethics, us-and-them thinking, aggressiveness): such behaviour is often an understandable reaction to being (or at least feeling) embattled. In simpler terms, they get attacked a lot, and so are liable to see enemies everywhere; we should cut them some slack for the odd false positive.

[pozorvlak]

Depends on the person in question: some SJWs (Shanley, for instance) far exceed the amount of slack I'm prepared to give them. But there are plenty of others who strike me as decent people who occasionally overreact in a way that's perfectly intelligible if you consider on how many similar-looking occasions that reaction would be justified.

[maradydd]

I'd be more inclined to cut people slack for false positives if there were any remedy for a false positive ... well, at all, really, given that "... and that's indefensible" is baked into any accusation of Xphobia. But what I'm really incensed about is that the expected behaviour is to countersignal in some way - to mount a defence, probably rooted in one's identity, which will set the stage for the next round of the Courtroom Game, with the jury but minus the judge (cf. Berne, Games People Play). The "reward" payoff for cooperating (which is actually just providing the trolls with more fodder) is having that identity validated, but having watched these sorts of games play out on social media for quite some time now, I'm well aware that the "sucker" payoff is being savaged by the self-appointed jury over all the ways in which one is a phony, a liar, a Traitor to One's Desired Tribe, &c ad nauseam.

Fuck essentially all of that. There are parts of my identity that are private and I will not be baited.

[pozorvlak]

Sorry, I segued away from my main point there. I was really trying to say that witch-hunts are characteristic of authoritarians, so one should not be surprised to find them among marginalised people. "Cutting them some slack" should definitely not imply "forgive absolutely everything they do", but I find that cutting some slack helps me to keep my peace of mind and stay friends with the social-justicey people I like despite their occasional (in my mind) overreactions.

On ripostes: the stated expected behaviour is to shut up, listen to what the Marginalised Person is saying, try to understand what you did to upset them and then say "I'm sorry I did X, I will try to never do it again" - indeed, "but I'm marginalised too!" is excluded as a strategy (scroll to the bottom) by the closest thing I know to an explicit statement of the rules. Listening and apologising has actually worked for me most times I've tried it, though I usually need to step away from the keyboard and go for a long walk to calm down first. I've also had some success with very quickly saying "no, you've misunderstood me, X would indeed be terrible but I was actually trying to say Y", but I've also seen that go spectacularly wrong. However, the rules of the You Said Something Xphobic game exclude such desirable ripostes as

• Your ontological framework is inconsistent
• Your claims are factually wrong
• I'm sorry that you're upset by what I said, but I nevertheless believe it to be correct
• Why are you setting all your followers on me?
• I am stepping away from this conversation now

etc, so it's still a pretty sucky game if you go second. In fact, it reminds me of nothing more than Abusive Relationships I Have Known - always being in the wrong, never allowed to explain or defend yourself, always ending up apologising even when the fight wasn't your fault.