Reversed and Remanded

[dachte]

One of the ways you can tell you're arguing poorly about an issue is when people who have little opinion on the issue read your argument and hope things go against you just for spite. I confess to the latter with a recent post on Google+ by "Siderea B", a post which has been floating through my social circles. There are quite a lot of these posts

Comments

[rfunk]

Without necessarily endorsing all that Sidera B is saying, I have to say that reading your response, one thought kept going through my head:
Your privilege is showing.

(Which I guess is part of what hvincent is saying too.)

[dachte]

Which is not an argument, and not the sort of thing I'm inclined to pay attention to. I don't care for that style of discourse; it strikes me as cheap.

[hvincent]

this is what, as someone who is part of an apparent minority trying to explain why i am uncomfortable with certain opinions of the apparent majority leading to the creation of policies that i find troublesome to comply with, i find frustrating about this discussion. what i am reading from this comment is 'i don't care that my personal situation and beliefs make it far easier for me to deal with this problem than for you; sucks to be you for having to deal with it.' it might be cheap to point out someone's position of privilege, because that is technically an immutable part of an individual (you can't very well change your upbringing or the sort of situation you were born into), but dismissing personal privilege as a valid point of discussion altogther is a discredit to people who don't have that privilege and are trying to make a bad situation better for themselves

[wjl]

Random question: did the original post identify the poster as female? I noticed you making that assumption throughout, though the text you linked to doesn't appear to profess a gender.

[dachte]

She's a very minor internet personality (unless I misrecognise her), and has self-identified as female in other places.

[gwillen]

After talking to someone about your post, I realized that one of the things I find odd about it is that I've always thought of you as "non-multiculturalist", but here you seem more "anti-multiculturalist". Meaning, I've always thought your position was "just because something is from another culture doesn't mean we have to accept it to be properly liberal", but your position here seems more like "to be properly liberal, we ought to reject other cultures". I understand that, e.g., the rejection of Sharia and the associated facets of Islamic culture might be a position not merely compatible with, but mandatory for, liberalism in your eyes. But I find it odd to see the same attack deployed against something as seemingly-innocuous as the choice of how names are formed. Is that choice something that is important in your philosophy, or are you really strongly opposed to using such conventions -- regardless of the topic -- from cultures other than our own, or is something else going on that I'm missing

[dachte]

I think either I'm being unclear or you're reading things into what I'm saying that are not there

[gwillen]

Hmm, it seems like allowing people to use any name they wish is, at least in my view, calculated to "permit significant personal diversity" and is "applicable to everyone and based on broad reasoning." I don't know whether you think that is true; I also don't know whether, if that were true, it would be an argument that Google ought to allow people to use any name they wish, or whether it would merely be an argument in favor of designing a system that way if we were to build our own.

I do see your point that you are not explicitly claiming that Google should or should not use real names. I do think it is a dangerously libertarian and illibeal view to say "the designer of a commercial system ought to be able to choose the values that are baked into it, and if those values are incompatible with your own, you should not use it." Perhaps you are only saying that about this specific choice, since you don't think that Enlightenment Liberalism takes a position on the choice one way or the other.

[dachte]

I think any person (or system) will have some value framework embedded into it, and it's unfair to impose onto people/entities that their value frameworks must be those that provide maximal comfort/ability to others in their self-expression. The variety possible in value-frameworks make that a losing game to play, and it's stifling to force people to even try.

pseudonyms vs real names

[rfunk]

Just in case you still have any interest in this topic, this seems relevant and useful:
Who is harmed by a "Real Names" policy?