We’re all going to need safe spaces

Henry, thanks for this. It has clarified something that has been bothering me for a long time.

I’m reminded of something I loved and only knew from my early reading at Crooked Timber, and that’s Cosma Shalizi’s habit of adding a disclaimer before certain posts: “Attention conservation notice” or something like that.

Just had a look at the linked tweet, and I’ve got to say that if I had a whole bunch of (doubtless highly rational and intelligent) individuals posting variants on “yeehaw he got you there!” in the wake of each criticism by Professor H, I’d be tempted to make the problem go away by muting Prof H myself. A pile-on isn’t actually a flooding attack, but try telling that to the poor sod at the bottom of the pile.

Anonymity’s a weird one. A bit of mailing-list action aside, my introduction to social media was Usenet, and in particular two Usenet groups where real names were entirely normal. (And they were real names; people met, people got married, etc.) We got trolled and disrupted from time to time, sometimes quite offensively; the worst attacks came from troll[er]s working under what appeared to be their real names. I’ve mostly been ‘Phil Edwards’ ever since. Occasionally people do a bit of digging and throw ad homs at me (for someone who calls himself an academic etc) but really, so what? So I’ve never really felt that anonymity was all that important, either as a shield or as a sword. Perhaps the real harm of anonymity is the multiplicity of sock-puppets it makes possible, not to mention bots.

I have been unsure what to make of Peterson, having not read his books. The clarity and quality of what he says online is all over the place. The Current Affairs article is not tipping the balance in his favor, to put it mildly. That said, I think the article could be challenged in a few places. Example:

“Peterson … publicly opposed Canada’s Bill C-16, which added gender expression and identity to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act. Peterson claimed that under the bill, he could be compelled to use a student’s preferred gender pronoun or face criminal prosecution, and suggested that social justice activists were promoting a totalitarian ideology. In fact, there was nothing in the bill that criminalized the failure to use people’s preferred gender pronouns (full text)…”

–True, Peterson overstated the legal case for enforcing gender terms. But Regressive administrators wasted no time in abusing the law as Peterson predicted. The case was @ Laurier, in Waterloo, ON, where admins took punitive action against a TA’s discussion of gender pronouns. Part of the justification was that her actions were criminal by law. They compared her to Hitler (is that worse or better than Peterson’s maoist claims?). Again, it’s a stretch to read C-16 that way, but the real threat is that regressive idiots will, in fact, read C-16 in idiotic ways. These regressive ideologues are doing well in the age of social media. It’s unfortunate that Peterson is the big profile intellectual fighting for reason…

–The CA article is probably guilty of “iron manning” the arguments coming from trans/etc activists. Alice Dreger’s ‘Galileo’s Middle Finger’ shows how there are both regressive and progressive forces at work. I think there are good reasons to doubt that regressive liberalism is taking over campuses, but there is no good reason to doubt that regressive liberalism is having a negative impact on campuses.

Lastly, there is a sort of intellectual double standard. If Heidegger et al. are worthy of deep intellectual engagement, then adding Jordan Peterson to the mix doesn’t seem that unreasonable. It seems to contain all the necessary ingredients to be a welcome addition to the esoteric fringes of the arts curriculum. If I accept what my prof tells me, with a straight face, in my senior year, that Being and Time is the most important work of the 20th c, then I can’t very well get up-in-arms about Peterson’s esoteric work being that of today.

the worst attacks came from troll[er]s working under what appeared to be their real names

That would also be a not unreasonable lesson from CT history iirc

In the standard shibboleth, the best antidote to bad speech is more speech. What Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China have discovered is that the best antidote to more speech is bad speech.

This is not entirely correct. Both regimes take extensive measures to restrict and monitor speech (cf: “The Great Firewall of China”, and in Putin’s case, often simply jailing and/or murdering people with whose speech he or the State disagrees) and even so a better phrasing of the line is “…the best antidote to more speech is weaponized bad speech.”

Phil: “So I’ve never really felt that anonymity was all that important, either as a shield or as a sword. Perhaps the real harm of anonymity is the multiplicity of sock-puppets it makes possible, not to mention bots.”

You should try working for people who will fire you for your political, social, or economic views. Like the CEO who asked me if I could buy or build something to easily monitor the Facebook posts of all our employees.

I, too, started on Usenet under my own name, but there was no one there back then except we tech folks and the academics, so it was relatively safe. Eventually not so much.

Great piece, nice to see someone talking about the real issues.

You could say “twas ever thus” and the internet just adds some new wrinkles: science, scholarship, politics has always been about different kinds of “trust networks”– all voices are not given equal weight. As a practical matter we need filters to screen out the less promising– though I would also argue that these filters need to leak: everyone needs to spend some small fraction of their time looking for truth in unlikely places.

Like you, I’ve long since given up on the utility of anonymous, free accounts– clearly you need to know who the other person is for the filters to work effectively. Our present generation of “social network” sites may pay lip-service to verified identities, but the simple fact of the matter is they really need the traffic to sell eyeballs to advertisers: and so, a for-profit web site can’t be relied on as critical information infrastructure for democracy.

Swarms of hired shills are clearly a problem with the present-day web… and actually they’ve been a problem for quite some time, I used to call them “the rover boys” back when they seemed to be working for Karl Rove. That brings up another point: everyone is excited about the Russian invasion, but it doesn’t get any nicer if the attack is coming from a domestic source, like Hillary’s hired Brock-puppets during the 2016 primary.

But there’s still another difficulty: the left is attracted to the idea that money is the root of all evil, but there really are other sources of evil. A brigade of volunteer fanatics can jam up a conversation just as well– maybe better.

A friend of mine used to post under a gender-neutral pseudonym; I assumed she was a bloke at first and was decidedly snotty with her in a see-here-sonny sort of way (not saying I’m proud of it), which changed when I realised she was a woman. She told me later that this kind of before-and-after was something she’d seen an awful lot from men, although usually the ‘after’ stage wasn’t so benign.

I only recently became aware of Peterson. Historians of religious ecstasy will recognize a person in search of transcendent experience who doesn’t realize that this experience is wordless in nature. He should get himself into zen practice immediately, and stop expostulating to the world. Otherwise this sort of thing usually ends in a heart attack.

I use Twitter more like an RSS newsfeed and don’t engage much in discussion, unless I have a technical question. But I think that “curation” will be big in the future. I remember years ago I predicted, here, that the editorial function would grow in importance on the internet. But maybe it won’t be exactly that — more like a combined editorial/educational/teaching function, involving both interlocutors. And we hardly know what that will look like. Meanwhile most people don’t know how to think, yet they are spilling it all over the place. Hairsplitting with words is NOT how to think.

from the OP:

We don’t have any good intellectual basis that I know of for deciding the appropriate ways to allocate attention, since we’ve only started to have that problem in the very recent past.

Every time I decide to read article X instead of article Z, or book A instead of book B, or skim piece Q instead of reading Q closely, or look at blog G and not blog H, or look only at the front page (digitally or otherwise) of newspaper Z instead of looking at it more deeply — in each of these instances, the problem is one of “the appropriate way to allocate attention.” So the quoted formulation in the OP is, at a minimum, unhelpful, since the problem of how to allocate one’s attention has been around, assuming one was literate (when admittedly only a minority were), since the invention of the printing press, if not before.

Admittedly, I don’t know much about how Twitter works (couldn’t Chait have simply ignored Henry F’s replies instead of ‘muting’ him, whatever that means exactly?), but I suspect the case that Henry adduces of too many sincere people wanting to argue with him (or w some hypothetical person) on Twitter is more or less just a special case, w special features, of the more general problem, one that has existed for a long time and way predates the digital era.

We also don’t have good tools for muting the kinds of speech that have been weaponized to undermine conversation, while preserving the kinds of speech that conduct towards this.

That makes sense, but it doesn’t bear a lot of relation to the previous sentence about the allocation of attention, which is a problem that gets solved, to the extent it does, by people’s quirks and interests and what they happen to think is important, and also, to some extent, by the broader milieu in which they happen to live and the specific circles in which they travel (metaphorically speaking).

I decided, I guess about 2 years ago, to only post under my actual name. I discovered it made me more cautious and temperate in my words, less prone to a snide or caustic tone.

Sometimes, in the search for a way to deliver a sharp critique, I have had to erase and restart my words a number of times. But in doing so, often I just deleted it entirely, realizing that I don’t have to attend every argument to which I am invited, and not every discussion requires me to have the last word.

I had Twitter for a few weeks in 2010 before giving up on it, and just recently deleted Facebook altogether.
I’m honestly not sure if the immediacy of social media is helping our national discourse.
Part of me wants to imagine there was some golden age when people sat around having civil polite discussions in quiet rooms but I know that only happened when certain people were kept out of those rooms, or allowed in to serve tea silently.
I know that the great historical events like Vietnam, civil rights, the Cold War, and all the rest were argued in loud angry tones at bars and coffee shops, with stupid and absurd caricatures no different than Twitter.

So I am ambivalent. Even if the golden age never existed, I’m not sure that technology has elevated discussion by much.

Ups – I forgot for a second that you really take this Internetthingy kind of seriously – but that’s NOT what it was made for – and especially not ”Twitter”.

Twitter was made for anybody who wants to ”zwitscher”…

That would also be a not unreasonable lesson from CT history iirc

By-and-large, people do the things they by-and-large do because they’re comfortably satisfied that such a thing is just and reasonable under the circumstances. There are edge cases with addictions [chemical and mental-feedback stuff] and OCD-type problems and what-have-you, but generally what people do is what they think they should do.

A fortiori, people who do shitty things by-and-large don’t believe they’re shitty things. I mean, honestly/genuinely people think the vast bulk of what they do is OK. And if you think something’s OK you’re not going to hide it… unless you think:
+ that “society” doesn’t think it’s OK, and
+ that society will subject you to negative consequences if you’re discovered.

People who think that everybody else agrees with them won’t conceal their actions. People who think that a tiny powerless fraction of the population disagrees with them won’t conceal their actions. People who think that they’re beyond practical consequences won’t conceal their actions.

… people who don’t really understand their personal potential for error won’t conceal their actions either.

As for the allocation of attention – I don’t know much about how Twitter works and how this apples to it, but as for other venues (e.g. here), I would have thought that the allocation of attention can happen by, say, not paying attention to whoever and whatever you don’t want to pay attention to. And if people do choose to allocate attention to someone or something, that’s their choice.

As for bad speech stifling free speech, I might be about to produce some bad speech stifling this freely made blog post, but the claims that Chen attributes to ‘Russian activists’ make little sense. If regime trolls are, indeed, easily identifiable as such, I don’t see how they can ‘seed doubt’. Or perhaps what ‘seeds doubt’ is encountering viewpoints different from one’s own? And sure enough, next I read:

‘One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed.’

So, when anti-Putin hashtags are made to trend, that’s a real and authentic democratic expression, but when pro-Putin hashtags are made to trend, that’s the devious work of regime trolls and ‘destroys the democratic space’. And they are complaining not of being prevented from expressing their viewpoint, but of the fact that another viewpoint is also being expressed! I’m sorry, but there seems to be a misunderstanding: you are *not* actually entitled to monopolise the public space, and you are *not* entitled not to encounter the expression of other viewpoints – that’s not how freedom of speech and ‘a democratic space’ work. Freedom of speech and ‘a democratic space’ work by different people’s being able to express different viewpoints, and then people’s being swayed by one or the other. Other people’s being able to speak freely does not constitute a violation of your freedom of speech.

Yes, it sucks if some of the people speaking are actually paid by someone else, and that makes the democratic space flawed – which is exactly the way capitalist liberal democracy has always been flawed, so it’s anything but a new problem. But blocking opposing viewpoints *for being opposing viewpoints* is not the way to deal with this. This really *is* like the misguided Leninist response – the capitalist so-called free press is actually the mouthpiece of its capitalist owners (which it is, of course – no less now than in Lenin’s times), so let us abolish freedom of the press altogether!

Also, since we’re hearing that Russia and China don’t primarily rely on traditional censorship, let *us* use traditional censorship instead! And while we’re at it, abolish anonymity to further increase possible negative consequences for undesirable viewpoints! Why not the secret ballot, too? Free speech and democracy used to be a neat thing for a few centuries, but let’s face it – whoever invented them had clearly never fathomed the possibility of such a thing as Russian trolls. Their mesmerising grammar mistakes seem to have a special hypnotising effect on Westerners, causing them to vote for Trump. Above all, let us not allow them to fill us with ‘paranoia’!

As for the actual situation in Russia (I don’t read Chinese), I was scared for a second that the liberals might have been ‘drowned out’ by Putinist commenters – or perhaps jailed and murdered as per BruceJ 03.16.18 at 6:05 pm – while I wasn’t watching, and that freedom of speech had perished completely in Russia, so I opened the comment sections of the site of Novaya Gazeta (https://www.novayagazeta.ru/) and breathed a sigh of relief – they’re still the overwhelming majority there, and everyone agrees that Putin is evil and did poison Skripal, as do the editors.

RE: interchats:

Just as academic institutions support the arts, we can imagine a similar practice involving the curation of internet conversations as a discipline in which diverse peoples study and are trained in the field (a hybrid of language arts, communications, etc…?) and strive for mastery and excellence.

(Academic? Democratic?) institutions could host chat rooms in which curation is professionalized. Conversational parameters for inclusion and exclusion could be diverse yet standardized in a manner to likewise aid the public in its participation.

RE: Peterson:

He seems to have the fire (as most of us do, no?) to see Beyond, but has lost his way and will stay lost given all the positive social feedback he’s getting. The “you’re mao-ists!” shtick is the tell. Definitely agree with Lee A. Arnold @17 there. The Angry Father is an archetype whose usefulness has passed.

RE: zombies (“It’s in your heeeeaaad, in your heeeeaaaad”)

While constructing this post I argued with myself, “But there are no real barriers to chat room evolution. If the public really wanted a more lively and disciplined salon culture, they’d have it”. And then I catch it: there’s the free market free choice ideology, spillin’ out my brain!

We are the collective that we choose…or that we allow others to choose for us. We have not yet realized a democratic culture responsive to an un-manipulated and empowered public. Internet culture is like an abused pet that has been let off a leash.

Chait would not be worth taking seriously were it not for the fact that so many clearly do. The same can be said for Dr. Peterson. The voluminous hit piece you link to confirms that Peterson has clearly gotten under Nathan Robinson’s skin. I very strongly disagree with your atypically facile reading of the piece in question, perhaps because you share a dislike of Dr. Peterson. I’ll get straight to my complaint.

Robinson makes ZERO effort to contextualize Peterson’s arguments within the discipline Peterson practices. Robinson writes: “Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say.”

This is a astonishing claim to make about a highly regarded clinical psychologist who has indeed proven that has something of value to say to a great many people, just not Nathan Robinson. And for that, it seems, Dr. Robinson so very widely-read, must be recast as a quack, or worse.

Nathan Robinson might easily have bolstered his shabby and frequently venal complaints had he taken the time to compare Dr. Peterson’s arguments within the discipline of psychology with those of other psychologists. The science of the mind is a notoriously nebulous topic when discussing behaviors. Neurochemistry is another matter. I’m entirely willing to accept that Peterson is vague and does repackage platitudes as wisdom, but he is no sense alone in this.

Wisdom has been packaged and produced in precisely these simplistic and easily accessible terms in parables and fables from the dawn of time. Peterson is accessible and has legions of mostly satisfied patients who attest to the efficacy of his methods and his work. Might he be Dr. Phil, or Tony Robbins? Perhaps so. Yet, millions find benefit from these as well. There are plenty of therapists who are nothing more than distributors for pharmaceutical companies. Peterson and other psychologists are not licensed to hand out pills, which I’d have thought would be a good thing.

There are a great many complaints to make about the discipline of psychology, but failing to compare Peterson with other psychologists, and instead to Socrates, or perhaps Einstein, seems a very poor form of analysis. As psychologists go, Peterson is fairly clear, easy to understand, and accessible. And his patients seem very happy with the results.

Robinson might simply have written: ‘the story of the fox and the grapes has nothing to teach me, and therefore anyone else.’ It’s shabby work.

Mario

I don’t think you can understand the Jordan Peterson phenomena in isolation of the context within which it is happening. Sure, he says a lot of platitudes, but he says it because he feels they have to be said (so, in a way, they are no longer platitudes), and is proven right by the fact that many people feel a sense of relief when they hear JP say them.

Things like women and men being different. Or that biologically born men cannot become “real” women neither through surgery nor through any other means.

I know that things like that are said. They’re said a lot, and not just by Jordan Peterson. But I can’t figure out any justification for describing them as things that have to be said. I don’t think the fact that you can get positive reactions from a lot of people by saying them makes them into things that have to be said. Indeed, on the face of it, the suspicious way in which you use scare-quotes makes it seem highly likely that you’re spouting rubbish. You need an excellent reason to use scare-quotes, and in this case none is apparent.

Intriguing! hypothesis about “what’s wrong with men” (relative job market participation, educational performance):

They’re (we’re) experiencing gender equality. In many social contexts, fear and insecurity is socially apportioned through the medium of consensual stories about
What’s Happening. (“We heard a knock. My wife made me go take a look.”) So…

…gender-specific social fear and anxiety was like 70-30 put onto women and for a host of reasons its quickly evolved to 50-50. This gives gender-specific emotional/peformative momentum for w0men and against men, who are waking up to more social anxiety and fear at that same time that women are taking a load off.

It’s just a harder time to be a dude…but that’s a good thing, kinda.

Jeez it’s easy to be a pundit. If you put the spotlight on me, I’d start dancing too!

We don’t have any good intellectual basis that I know of for deciding the appropriate ways to allocate attention, since we’ve only started to have that problem in the very recent past.

Is that really true? Weren’t there tons of daily newspapers (local, national, union-based, faith-based, right-leaning, left-leaning…) in any European or American city already in the late 19th century? Far, far more than anybody could possibly read?

Addendum from someone with professional experience in the general area of platforms in the same ballpark, more or less, as Twitter: there seems to be an enormous appetite for software technology (including discourse rules) that will perform all the work of creating and maintaining communities, with no work on the part of the people in the community. Then when stuff happens, we hear that software corporations have to be made more sensitive to the needs of the community.

One good thing about Twitter is letting people know about stuff like this
https://mobile.twitter.com/JohnClarke1960/status/974766676213420033

Is this person who has just shown up in my timeline the: 1. smartest 2. knowledgeable 3. well-intentioned 4. interesting person who is right now writing about: 1. an mportant issue 2. that I care about 3. at a level and in a mode I can understand? If yes, read on. If no, skip.

Iow only pay attention to experts. Which is fine because we’re definitely not living through a time when the antagonism between technocratic elites and the wider population has become political dyna… oh wait

It’s perhaps off-topic for this post, at least at first; but reading through the Current Affairs piece on Peterson it seemed to me that Robinson is rather burying his lede. Much more important than the content of one Canadian celebrity psychologist, is what the man’s rise to fame implies about our world:

And [Peterson] is popular partly because academia and the left have failed spectacularly at helping make the world intelligible to ordinary people, and giving them a clear and compelling political vision.

But here the left and academia actually bear a decent share of blame. … Some of it is just that self-help always sells. Another part of it, though, is that academics have been cloistered and unhelpful, and the left has failed to offer people a coherent political alternative.

These seem to me to be rather large explosive charges, especially here at CT the home — cloister? — of so many leftists and academics. Not just “failed,” but “failed spectacularly.”
Is this the argument that Robinson really wants to have?

Apologies if this is a de-rail, and might better be taken up in a different thread. But I’m not sure that it isn’t directly relevant: is Chait’s criticism of Henry at all akin to Robinson’s criticism of unhelpful academics? Or, how much of the general reader’s time is it worth to be parsing intra-left denunciations, which are hardly in short supply?

I think your point is a fine one, so long as we don’t encourage companies like twitter to start adopting a similarly enlightened stance. Free speech has never included a right to be listened to, nor should it; mute whomever you want, or block them, for any reason or no reason at all. But denying someone an important public platform altogether on similarly broad grounds m—even if a private company’s doing the denial and the first amendment isn’t implicated—seems a little iffy to me. I’m not sure that I want twitter to be in the business of curating the speech I hear for me

Re the mute-inducing tweet: Chait’s

In the contemporary United States, these ideas are confined by the fact that only in certain communities (like college campuses) does the illiberal left have the power to implement its vision, and even there it is constrained by the U.S. Constitution. If illiberal ideas were to gain more power, the scale of their abuses would widen.

…is hardly a claim that “we’d all be marching towards the gulag”. That sounds like not letting accuracy get in the way of a good burn.

Re the “really fantastic essay”: it was curious to me that I got through almost all the first paragraph under the impression that I was reading another takedown of post-modernist bullshit factories: “restate your platitude using as many words as possible”, check; “as unintelligibly as possible”, check; “Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense“, check. “Never say anything too specific”, check; “if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite”, check.

Re bianca steele:

The best way to not be harassed online is to have an Anglo-sounding male name.

Not clear, according to Pew Research, at least with respect to gender. In 2017, 12% of men reported physical threats, vs. 8% of women, while 4% of men reported sexual harassment, vs 8% of women. Regarding physical threats and sexual harassment as equally “serious”, the total numbers are the same. Slightly more men than women received “purposeful embarassment” and “sustained harassment”, slightly more women than men received stalking. There was no data on “Anglo-sounding”.

Re: “Second, speech is increasingly being weaponized to drown out inconvenient voices.” It’s certainly true that professors like George Ciccariello-Maher are targeted. But apparently these days even Margaret Atwood is inconvenient, as is Carmen Aguirre, for supporting due process. And of course Rebecca Tuvel was inconvenient.

Lee A. Arnold@17:

But I think that “curation” will be big in the future. I remember years ago I predicted, here, that the editorial function would grow in importance on the internet. But maybe it won’t be exactly that — more like a combined editorial/educational/teaching function, involving both interlocutors. And we hardly know what that will look like.

Yes, that’s exactly it: we’re still missing an institution and we need it badly if the internet is going to be something besides a toy to goof around with. My take is that in the first ten years of the web we saw a lot of progress in developing “critical information infrastructure” (to stick with the phrase I used before), but in the second ten years it all went sideways and people chased bright and shiny distractions like “mobile apps”.

Meanwhile most people don’t know how to think, yet they are spilling it all over the place.

And that’s one of the issues, how do we all learn to think better? Myself, I think the stuff we usually call “education” is only part of the answer at best.

Hairsplitting with words is NOT how to think.

Oh yeah? What about that time when you said this five years ago? Ha ha, gotcha!

(Chait looks like he’s going down the David Brooks-hole: “How dare you take what I said seriously?”)

M Caswell@18:

Imagine that tomorrow, for some strange, otherwise inconsequential reason, Twitter ceases to exist.

It’s not hard to imagine reasons that could happen, it’s somewhat amazing Twitter has survived this long. It was a historic event when they announced a profitable quarter last month.

How many people are sad?

Actually, much fewer than you might think. If today, you tried to convince everyone that Twitter was an evil and destructive force and they should really do something else, they’d act like you were a mad man– but if (when?) Twitter falls over, you’ll see them all collectively shrug and move on to something else (probably something worse).

Isn’t this an awfully strange state of affairs?

I’d put that in my sigfile if they still existed (and if I ever used them).

Nicholas Gruen@28: “I wrote about this here”

Well sure, I’ve been writing about this for years, and talking about it to anyone who would listen, which is (perhaps ironically) not many.

I’ve got some material up here at my site:

http://obsidianrook.com/doomfiles/THE_TOY_WEB.html
http://obsidianrook.com/doomfiles/NERVE.html
http://obsidianrook.com/doomfiles/THE_ROVERS.html

And for a while I was working on a series at the dailykos:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/9/19/1423012/-The-Two-Gatekeepers
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/8/29/1416163/-Thinking-Even-Slower
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/11/6/1446086/-Anti-Nuclear-Amory-vs-Atomicrod-and-Other-Fun-with-Credentials

About your piece (Nicholas Gruen’s “The middleware of democracy”) from 2014:

http://clubtroppo.com.au/2014/07/30/from-knowledge-to-wisdom-or-at-least-knowledge-2-0/

There’s some good stuff there. Tetlock, et al, is one of the areas worth studying in this field — if you folks aren’t up on this: his cohorts have come up with a pretty simple set of principles and demonstrated that if you spend an hour studying the material you’re ability to predict current events improves by 10% (e.g. see the Appendix to “Superforecasters”). Considering Kahneman’s pessimism about training people to dodge epistemic biases, that’s pretty big news really.

I’m sorry I missed the “YourView” site: were they using any method of verifying identities? That’s the big thing that most such things miss: user-moderation schemes where the “users” may be an infinite supply of fraud accounts can’t possibly work for anything but a toy site that no one cares about much.

And as engels@40 points out “Whatever you think of Richard Dawkins it doesn’t make a lot of sense to claim he isn’t an intellectual.”

Sure, Dawkins counts. He’s the guy who put over the meme for “meme”– which a decade or two later evolved into meaning “image-hack joke”.

(Who invented the self-referential humor? Norbert Wiener?)

I’d extend the premise of the OP more explictly and wonder why so many still see Chait as worth engaging with. We’re living through a time of increasing ideological variety and the likes of Chait/Douthat et al offer very little insight into understanding it or contemporary politics. So much of this sort of mainstream opinion became stale very quickly over the past few years, so the question perhaps is how to engage with the new ideologues who are offering quite popular critiques of the status quo, and limit the pernicous analytical influence people like Chait have. Im not against him riding his hobby horse for the next two decades if he must, but there’s a need for a way to stop these talking heads diverting the debate down such stupid, tedious dead ends. We’re living through interesting times and they have literally nothing interesting to say about it.

bianca steele:

Looking quickly I don’t see what they’re counting as “online.” I’m talking about forums like this one where opinions are given and discussed. It’s interesting if women are bothered less in groups like this one, because if that were so, I’d expect there to be more women here!

I’m not sure that you had specified exactly what you meant by “online” either, although a different Pew survey on “social media” mentions Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Youtube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. With the exceptions of LinkedIn and Whatsapp, these are all to some degree or other “forums on which opinions are given and discussed”, clearly so for Twitter.

An older Pew Survey for 2016 says that more women than men use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, particularly Instagram and Pinterest, and overall outnumber men on social media. The only platform mentioned on which men outnumbered women was LinkedIn, and there modestly. Following your reasoning, those monstrous women on Instagram and Pinterest must be driving men away.

LFC @54

Furthermore, Tim Wu makes the surprising and provocative statement just before his conclusion:

Congress might conclude that our political discourse has been deeply damaged, threatening not just coherent governance but the survival of the republic. On that basis, I think the elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s. (!)

I think this is mistaken and so must many. But I would enter a very large discussion to give the even larger related issues their due. I won’t attempt to overfill a margin (in this thread) to take it. Modesty forbids :-)

(Plus it’s a lot of writing that will remain in notes and in my head for a future draft)

engles @40

You’re quite right to pick me up on that throwaway line – I thought it was stupid shortly after I wrote it. It’s based on a kind of private definition of an ‘intellectual’ for which Dawkins doesn’t qualify because, though he might spend a lot of his time reading and writing about ideas, he’s obtuse on so much he debates – when it gets philosophical.

Ditto Sam Harris. It was also stupid when applied to Petersen whom I think is quite insightful, if long since given over to a kind of escalating self-certainty and one-sidedness about those whom he critiques.

J-D @58 and others.
Of course there are different reasons to take someone (or institution seriously). Only one is if you think their arguments have merit. Another is that if you think they have influence, then you could take them seriously because you want to understand the effect they are having on the wider world. The second of these resembles my attitude toward religion, personally I think they are all bunk, but they have a strong influence on the actual world I live in, so I take having at least a basic understanding of the principle ones to be an essential part of being an informed human. And of course if you wish to counter the alleged harmful effects of the charlatan in question, there is the old adage “know thine enemy”.

Public intellectuals – the new mendicant order

The pious beggar Nathan Robinson rattles his cup:
“If you appreciate our work, please consider making a donation or purchasing a subscription. Current Affairs is not for profit and carries no outside advertising. We are an independent media institution funded entirely by subscribers and small donors, and we depend on you in order to continue to produce high-quality work.”

Keith Richards observed that good bands do not need to seek audiences.

Some critics reject popularity as a metric of quality; not me. The fact that so many people line up to participate in an event I find strange, or inexplicable suggests that some highly-desirable qualities are present – just ones I don’t understand, or perhaps approve of.

Bad them.

J-D @58

Is this the five-minute argument or the full half hour? I read some of the article on Jordan Petersen and it was obvious the author wasn’t taking Petersen seriously – he wasn’t trying to engage with what Petersen is getting at but rather taking potshots at what he’d said – which is an easy thing to do – everyone says things which you can, in your interpretation of them, make nonsense of.

He was pulling the old intellectual authoritarian trick on Petersen – demanding that his utterances be read as if they were a contribution to a scientific discussion with science being predefined in authoritarian terms – about falsification and all that stuff. Even though Petersen would, presumably, accept that plenty of stuff that he says is good to be judged in that kind of context, pretty obviously it’s going to be difficult to subject lots of what he has to say to those kinds of strictures. If one did that, his reference to archetypes and much of his advice to readers would have to read like the dullest, worthiest and most useless social science.

Nicholas Gruen@62:

Regarding the stuff of yours you’ve linked to, beyond diagnosing the problems which you have done far more presciently than most, I couldn’t find much that helps improve things – other than your attack on anonymous content.

True enough, I’ve got no magic formula– and even if one of the half-dozen or so site ideas I have turns out to be The One I wouldn’t know how to sell people on trying it out. There’s actually large numbers of variants out there that people try– most of them go the way of YourView pretty quickly, irrespective of their merits.

I’m broadly supportive of the idea, though surely you want to have pathways whereby people can build up pseudonymous IDs that gain respect and currency.

That was the old idea, back in the usenet days– in retrospect it was based on the idea that email addresses were difficult to get and roughly tied to a single individual. You could try to hack something similar using public-key encryption tricks to do digital signatures, the trouble there is a far-sighted agency that wants to game the system by having employees act like “sleeper spys”, doing relatively benign, positive things with the IDs until they’re needed for a propaganda campaign. There’s also a funny phenomena that arose with slashdot: low ID accounts are accorded a certain amount of respect– with a low number you’re not some late-comer little kid– so some people auctioned theirs off on ebay.

I’m afraid we’re stuck with anonymity of the “editorial from Mister X” sort, where you need to convince some other human beings to front for you and conceal your identity.

I quoted Tetlock, but in many ways, his work is NOT a solution because, like Wikipedia, his focus is on what is (or will be) not on political discussion which is about what OUGHT to be – which is a much harder nut to crack.

True, it certainly is– but I’m backing the belief that “the truth will out and justice be done”, or more precisely if the truth does go out, then justice will be done. E.g. without a believeable “skeptic” position, we’d be further along to a solution on global warming–

I’ve looked round to try to make contact with you directly, but can’t find out how to do it. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to on ngruen AT gmail.

My apologies, didn’t realize it was obscure: it’s doomvox@gmail.com or doom@kzsu.stanford.edu. I decided not to hide from the world some time back, and it hasn’t bitten me yet.

@67

It would seem that the onus is on you to state what Peterson is getting at and then you will have shown that Robinson evades it.

OP:

We don’t have any good intellectual basis that I know of for deciding the appropriate ways to allocate attention, since we’ve only started to have that problem in the very recent past…We are all going to need safe spaces – and to start thinking systematically about how to build them while preserving conversation.

So…like always there’s been too much content & choice is necessary, but unlike 19th C urban newspaper culture, we no longer see ourselves as forming or preserving a shared identity that constrains and focuses our choices. We must construct collective goals and methods.

The theme returns again to the limits to liberalism as an indidualistic political and social philosophy

Charlie

Free speech has never included a right to be listened to, nor should it; mute whomever you want, or block them, for any reason or no reason at all. But denying someone an important public platform altogether on similarly broad grounds m—even if a private company’s doing the denial and the first amendment isn’t implicated—seems a little iffy to me.

In general, it’s impossible to evaluate the merits of a ban without knowing the reasons the ban was imposed, and I can’t think of any reason for excepting bans imposed by Twitter. If Twitter has the power to ban people (and I assume it does), it is possible that it will use that power unwisely, but it is also possible that it will use it wisely.

nastywoman – let me remind you again that you are banned from commenting on my posts.

J-D @76

It’s a fair cop. And here was I imagining JP had fine Scandinavian DNA :)

Of course there are empirical rules for the attention allocation problem. They don’t constitute a complete and infallible system, but they are, as are all the rules we live by, good enough to get by with.

One very fundamental rule you violated by even reading anything written by Chait, much less engaging him in a back and forth, is that you don’t pay attention to arguments made by people whose word is not actually crafted to convey ideas, but to signal status, as everyone who has ever wasted time on Chait understands as his reason for writing. He has way more access to the machers than you do, Shlub Reader, and is way more clever than you are either, because he has found the Third Way between what he has to project as the positions of any two sets of mere shlubs grubbing it out in the arena of public policy.

What possible good could come of reading what Chait has to say? It no doubt is true that the machers will indeed talk to him and not to me and you, and understanding the powerful in our society is as important as understanding deadly microbial parasites, for similar reasons. But understanding the powerful is the least of the problems faced by the powerless. They are no mystery to us, we need no Virgil to guide us through the hell they have created. What Chait is there to do is to help distract us from the reality we know from experience, the boot grinding the face forever, with tales of intrigues of one set of rulers against another. You stop paying attention to Chait as the first step to paying the useful attention to the powerful provided by your own experience.

Okay, so this empirical rule of not paying any attention to the writings of courtiers, has this distinct advantage, it encourages the reader to pay attention to me. Read what Glen Tomkins has to say, and you are in no danger whatever of status signaling.

The rule you violated by engaging with Chait on Twitter is that at Twitter length, you can do nothing for understanding but harm. You can’t grapple with reality in Twitter-sized bites, any more than anything good can come of political debates as conducted in US presidential elections. People who actually suffer from mid-stage dementia do better in that sound bite format than people who are not impaired by any condition more serious than Potomac fever. You can undoubtedly prove that you’re more clever at repartee than your interlocutor at Twitter length, in fact, Twitter length or even shorter is exactly what that goal of writing demands — but why pursue that goal. What is it worth, to prove that you’re smarter than Chait? Or less bought than Chait? You think that needs any more proof than Chait supplies every time he takes pen to paper? You trying to replace him in his function in our society?

Okay, self-instantiation alert! What I had to say about paying attention to what Glen Tomkins has to say at least following the rule of avoiding status signaling, has to now be seen in context. You’re reading what Glen Tomkins has to say in a setting not much more expansive than Twitter, you fool. You’re thinking of engaging with him based on Twitter length statements, you idiot. (Okay, many of you are not at all tempted to engage, oh wise ones.)

That said, I will try to recover by insisting that what I write here has to be considered only as a small addition to the much, much lengthier — long enough to be true to the complexity of reality — expanse of the sum total of my internet writings. I won’t hear any criticisms of what I write that aren’t based on a review of everything I have ever written! So, google away before you even think of saying anything against me. There will be a quiz for anyone who dares to contradict me.

You’re evading the question. Do you believe that it’s impossible for “women and minorities are harassed more than white men” and “men are harassed more than women” both to be true? Because it isn’t. If you believe this, I don’t see why I should bother pretending that this is worth my time. If you don’t believe this and are pretending to, I don’t see why I should bother pretending that it’s worth my time. (On a second read, it’s clear you do think they are contradictory, so goodbye.)

You claim that your issue is that I was imprecise in my use of language? What gives you the right to decide on the proper degree of precision required here, and to choose whether to be polite and let it slide, or play language cop?

I was under the impression that someone earlier in the thread had used the word “harass” and they hadn’t, so I’ll take it back. But people had used the word “online” to mean places generally similar to a CT comments section, so what things are like for YouTube users seems not especially relevant. I made a claim based on my experience and observation and reading/hearing about the experience of others. What gives you the right to police my comments for what you apparently perceive as insufficient academic seriousness?

You apparently don’t like that I suggested women get treated badly at places like CT (including CT). You dislike it enough, it seems, to throw insults around. I suppose it’s possible that, in fact, the insults are all in fun, and you just want someone to play with. As long as you set the parameters for discussion. Its possible that you realize your bad arguments might look better if you word them not as “I’ve thought about this and it’s my opinion” but as “this chick here is being incredibly stupid.” Or it’s possible that you’re the kind of troll who thinks it’s hilarious to get people to type longer than he did.

Not all men have Anglo names, do they?

@77
”I hope you won’t be too offended if I agree.”

Not at all if we also agree why anyone sensible would erect a bunch of sick ”Tweets” – as President of the United States?

How did that happened?!

I find the idea of an attention allocation issue helpful, if we recognise – and this is a partial response to Z #37 and someone else (bianca steele?) above – that the ‘social’ element of something like Twitter does make a difference. There are, as there always have been, multiple opinions, cultural products etc clamouring for my attention, but I don’t on the whole feel a *personal* obligation to any of them. When someone engages with me on Twitter, however, I do instinctively feel an obligation to respond, as a matter of courtesy, even if my instinctive reaction is that they’re an idiot; it’s a situation somewhere between getting a question after a lecture (since it usually is in response to something I’ve chosen to put into the public domain) and getting buttonholed by someone in a pub, where the process of edging away carefully still involves a certain amount of engagement. They (generally) expect a response, I feel obliged to give one, because this is all about being social – and even at my sub-minnow level, it can be time-consuming and upsetting. But not engaging makes you the sort of person who considers themselves above engaging with hoi polloi. Newspapers don’t make me feel guilty for not reading them.

Interesting piece on American pro-Clinton botnets:
http://m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/democratic-bot-network-sally-albright_us_5aa2f548e4b07047bec68023

@Z: well, it’s better than Facebook, with its manipulative talk of ‘friends’… I find Twitter useful as a means of keeping up with global developments in my own discipline, what’s going on in other disciplines, and a broad range of perspectives on news and culture. It does take work to avoid getting stuck in different bubbles or sucked into “someone is wrong on the internet” obsessions, but it’s less bad than anything else I know of for achieving the same ends.

Z
If Damon Knight tried to write ‘Babel II’ now, he’d have to come up with a different ending.

engels I think it’s partly designed to foster large, shallow, sympathetic networks for exchanging information and it does that tolerably well (I agree it’s awful in a lot of ways)

Probably, I’m missing on everything that is mildly good about Twitter and obvious for everyone who ever used it so never commented about, and just hear about the strikingly bad things.

…and less furiously anti-Marxist

OT, but you really find this comment section furiously anti-Marxist? I’d say Marx is moderately well-liked around here (I quite like him myself, I should say).

@Henry there was, I think, a very real attempt to use these techniques to stir things up in the US election, and in Western European countries too.

About that, there was a recent blogpost of Branko Milanovic (http://glineq.blogspot.fr/2018/02/fake-news-reaction-to-end-of-monopoly.html) that expressed my uneasy feelings about that topic. Historically dominant countries are experiencing for the first time what has been usual for less powerful ones: seeing their internal narratives being stirred and influenced by foreign point of views. I’m not saying that it’s good, but some people are used to it (admittedly, this explains why less dominant countries usually have a markedly different approach to freedom of speech issues).

@96

Twitter isn’t “designed.” If it’s designed for anything, it’s to allow newspapers and organizations to publish information that can be passively consumed. User “engagement” is a matter of tapping the screen to indicate “I like that” or “I don’t like that.” (All of which is brought to the original writer’s attention as well as bringing him to the attention of your own friends, manifesting as a claim for attention, a kind of micro-publication, on your own part.) It permits a certain amount of amateur publication, as well, which operates on the same premise, and within narrow parameters, a set of individual publishers with both a well defined community and a large outside readership (for at least some of its members) to engage socially with one another.

There is a well known SF blogger who wouldn’t show up in my feed—she was the only SF writer I was following—until I spent a few days liking and retweeting everything she tweeted. And even then she disappeared from it after a month or two. So I followed a few people she’d retweeted and the problem was solved, except that I really only wanted to read the same pieces she’d forwarded on in the first place. So I muted them. (Which may have negated the effect of following them, who knows.) Then I started opening Twitter only one time a day, which resulted in getting an hour’s worth of the same stories I’d read the day before, often from “important” publications I didn’t happen to follow, before I could get down to people I was following, among whose posts the app chose only a subset of what it deemed “the best.”

Compared to CT comments (and the old ‘left-blogosphere’ generally as best I can tell) it seems less aggressive

This seems like a pretty extraordinary claim. I’ve never heard of the CT comments section trying to get anyone fired.

Okay, I over-generalised and I’m talking about my own experience obviously. Most of the interactions I have on Twitter are friendly conversations with like-minded people (I appreciate there’s a worry there about bubbles).don’t have s high profile so I don’t tend to get hostile responses. I appreciate that could easily change if I tweeted something that blew up my face.

CT comments seems to have moved left over the years and I think there several people who comment now (including Z) are in the same ballpark as me. Still imo there’s an pervasive atmosphere of nerdy competitiveness which means that any given comment is far more likely to draw pedantic efforts to shoot it (and preferably the author) down than engage with the substance of its ideas, let alone agreement. (I’m sure I’ve contributed to that at time’s.) And there’s no equivalent on my Twitter timeline to the ‘communism = pile of skills’ ‘argument’ that has been helpfully presented here at great length on a succession of threads with only a glancing connection to Marxism or socialism.

Henry @102,

But I do think that there is something different, and more specific happening, with how Russia and China genuinely do seem to have developed internal tools intended to prevent coalition building among potential opponents of their regimes, and how Russia at least is employing this externally too.

I find this statement fairly strange. Because if you squint a little, it seems to be claiming that, up until recently, governments (of any kind) were not having any tools of manipulation of public opinion that could or even were used to prevent coalition building among potential opponents of the established order. That seems to me to be more than a bit of a stretch. Can you clarify?

It seems to have been largely forgotten, but our beloved west isn’t exactly innocent when it comes to internet-based mischief:

[…] these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

It is a bit strange that only Russia and China are charged with that kind of thing. On the other hand – perhaps it’s not strange at all, of course…

To me, the meaning of the internet (which by that time I hadn’t even thought much about) changed after 9/11, when a colleague forwarded all his colleagues the flight number hoax (also known as wingdings hoax) which he apparently had received from a credulous acquaintance. I was spooked – it looked so believable yet unbelievable. Then I entered it into a search machine (not sure whether that was already google). The internet passed the test with flying colors – within seconds I knew with absolute certainty that it was a complete hoax. But most recipients, including fairly well educated people, never thought of checking the claim.

Never in history was it so easy to access information, to look up large quantities data. Never was it so easy to satisfy one’s curiosity, to find answers to so many questions. Not just any answers but true answers. Of course the internet also allows people to publish false answers but provided one is really interested, it is rarely hard to distinguish fact from fiction. Anybody willing to spend a few minutes at most on internet research, to take the effort to check several sources, can almost always quickly identify which claims and sources are reliable and which aren’t. As is the case with all the hoaxes and conspiracy theories which are easily debunked.

And yet the fake news, the hoaxes and conspiracies seem to be winning or at least they prove immune from the truth. The internet has made us individually incomparably better informed than any earlier generation could even dream of, and yet as a society we are no better and arguably worse informed than our forebears. And it seems to me that nobody knows what to do about this paradox.

bianca steele

In an earlier comment, you mentioned Twitter, then said “The best way to not be harassed online is to have an Anglo-sounding male name.” And then mentioned some personal experiences that may be relevant to that claim.

I responded “Not clear, according to Pew Research, at least with respect to gender.”, and described some survey data about hostility on social media to men and women, such that, grouping together “physical threats” and “sexual harassment” (where these were distinct from “stalking” and “sustained harassment”), the numbers for men and women were the same.

You said “Looking quickly I don’t see what they’re counting as “online. I’m talking about forums like this one where opinions are given and discussed” And then mentioned apparent low female participation here, and your husband’s Facebook page.

I responded by noting another Pew survey that showed higher female participation in social media than male, apparently in all venues except LinkedIn.

You responded “At this point I’m just curious whether you believe that “the best way to not be harassed online is to have an Anglo male name” is falsified by “more men than women report being threatened physically online.”

This was an inaccurate description of what I said, but I assumed that you were focused on the distinction between physical threats and sexual harassment, so I asked whether you thought physical threats were not harassment.

You responded “You’re evading the question. Do you believe that it’s impossible for “women and minorities are harassed more than white men” and “men are harassed more than women” both to be true? Because it isn’t. ”

So having given no evidence beyond invoking “my experience and observation and reading/hearing about the experience of others” (and little of that), you now want to argue that something you claimed (well, not quite what you originally claimed) is not logically impossible. Sure, OK, I give in, it’s not logically impossible. Do you have any evidence for this not-logically-impossible claim? Do you think that the Pew survey findings of roughly equal levels of general social-media hostility to men and women, and the greater participation of women than men in social media, in any way support my contention that your claim “The best way to not be harassed online is to have an Anglo-sounding male name” was “Not clear…at least with respect to gender”?

@99 Twitter, FB and other data-harvesting corporate tools are most emphatically designed – as your experience with the ‘like’ button illustrates.

One of the most important design features is inviting the user to ‘simplify’ the user experience by asking permission to access other data stored on one’s device, which is then packaged and sold to corporate clients, or given away.

https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the [Facebook-based app] gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”

The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button. More than 600,000 supporters followed through with more than 5 million contacts, asking their friends to register to vote, give money, vote or look at a video designed to change their mind. A geek squad in Chicago created models from vast data sets to find the best approaches for each potential voter. “We are not just sending you a banner ad,” explains Dan Wagner, the Obama campaign’s 29-year-old head of analytics, who helped oversee the project. “We are giving you relevant information from your friends.”

We are living through the infancy of this technology. What happens when the state has access to all our data? The new Chinese laws on ‘social credit’ are instructive.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion

Virtually everyone and everything connected with corporate data-harvesting is the product of design. The only individuals not given to much ‘design’ or ‘thought’ are the users or ‘tools’ passively allowing corporate and state actors into every nook and cranny of our lives and of those we care about.

I’m sure Henry’s links cited are instructive. On matters of social media I rely on simplistic folk wisdom: ‘Free is always the most expensive.’

Re Henry 03.19.18 at 4:01 pm:
‘social media tactics that are deliberately intended to make democratic politics impossible’

Oh, where has it gone, our pure unmanipulated democracy of yore? Democracy in class societies has been manipulated by people hiring people and by people brainwashing and manipulating people in sophisticated ways since forever. It’s a miracle that anything even marginally democratic or approaching accountability occasionally results from the entire mechanism. The extremely clumsy and inefficient, according to Chen’s assessment in the second article, attempts at manipulation of Westerners by the Russians are nothing compared to the long-established, sophisticated manipulation of Westerners by their own establishments (Milanović has a point in that the establishment is indignant because its own monopoly on the brainwashing of the serfs/proles – is endangered, if only ever so slightly).

Really, people think RT is propaganda, but the media that prepared the Americans for the Iraq war is – a decent democratic media? There is a very well-functioning machine, including the media and the intellectual elite, that manufactures consent (as Chomsky put it some 30 years ago) by using its central positions of authority to spread propaganda, and where climbing towards success is based on internalising and uncritically repeating the propaganda. Ah, the good old days when speech wasn’t ‘cheap’, so ‘only a limited number of important speakers could compete in the marketplace of ideas’ and could be counted on to take only the ‘reasonable’ positions – and now, there’s this mess where all kinds of rabble can speak, and God knows what comes of it. Possibly even an absence of truly monolithic public support for our next coup, invasion or imperial manoeuvre? How dreadful.

Directly paid internet trolls are extremely inefficient (especially non-native speakers impersonating natives); a media establishment whose salary and career depends on parroting the prevailing narrative is infinitely more efficient, as is an intellectual elite where reputation within the cultural hegemony depends on the parroting it – preferably while *believing* it. Even the fiercest cold warriors will recognise that besides paid trolls, there are also people who sincerely believe in (some of) the positions that the Russians see fit to advocate or support. Those will be identified as the so-called ‘useful idiots’ – with the certainty that their positions are discredited and rendered illegitimate by the very fact that the Russians also support them. Yet when people happen to believe sincerely in the position promoted by the *Western* establishment on any given subject, that is not thought to discredit it in the least. Assuming that the Russians can occasionally win over a few ‘useful idiots’ on foreign soil, how come it doesn’t cross people’s minds that their own Western system might be turning *regularly* *the overwhelming majority* of its subjects into its own sincere, convinced, serious, well-meaning ‘useful idiots’ – and ones who take pride in their sophisticated critical thinking skills, too!

@ ph 03.18.18 at 6:03 am
>Wouldn’t the world be a better place without the likes prayers and hymns such as ‘Amazing Grace’… etc.

Surely anti-Semitism and the brutal suppression of peasant rebellions can’t be that bad – after all, we know that the likes of Martin Luther were very much in favour of them. And can we really object to adultery, when MLK himself committed it? Monarchy is fine – it definitely looks like both Homer and Luther approved of it. Speaking of which, what would Homer even have been without war, which so much human art and thought have been devoted to? And slavery gave us Plato and Aristotle, as well as Athenian democracy and Roman law – do not malign it lightly.

Re statues of Hitler and Lenin, ‘Triumph of the Will’ is widely described as a great artistic achievement, if I’m not mistaken, and ‘The Eight Model Operas’ and ‘The East is Red’ are definitely very fine works that we have the Cultural Revolution to thank for. In general, you may do a search for renowned Communist and Marxist artists yourself. I’m sure that, upon appreciating the beauty of their work, you will finally reconsider your dismissive attitude towards Leninist revolutionary theory and precepts.

115 Very droll. I’m surprised you left out Eisenstein.

You raise an excellent point. The arts, as opposition to authoritarianism and empire, produce very fine works. I also think you draw some very fair criticisms of the banal self-imposed blandness of the arts in the democracies that seem very much to serve to further only a culture of consumption and existing social norms – hardly so surprising when the TV and print products are financed by P and G, Exxon, and the Ford (foundation).

My general point, hardly novel, is that we need belief systems even as we tell ourselves we don’t. My Chinese history professor argued quite strongly that the current leadership can be best understood as another dynasty, and the cults of leadership of very much resemble the magical man-gods of Rome. Belief? We’re kind of stuck with our, and let he/she who is without ‘it’ cast the first stone.

Let fly!

A good, negative take on social media that I broadly agree with (in case my qualified defences of Twitter above sounded too upbeat):
https://www.patreon.com/posts/17665617

I don’t think you, Henry, and Chait are really that far apart. It’s no fun being shouted at by reactionaries and 4chan nerds. It’s also no fun being shouted at by the latest bunch of ‘mogai’ would-be progressives, being harassed online by self-diagnosed ‘neurodivergents,’ or any of the rest of it. Being on the cultural left in the age of Tumblr means getting to see the next generation denounce you as an archaic reactionary in only two years. In this way we may have some sympathy for right-wingers who were denounced as enemies of the people and excommunicated from the Grand Old Party because they wanted to maintain firearm licensing, or to permit legal abortion.

A general theory: It’s no fun being shouted at by college kids who think their vague theories of gender (or of other social issues they only glimpse dimly) are some radical truth, whichever camp they come from. They don’t have the perspective to realise yet that their passion is misplaced. It’s frightening in a greater way when it’s their elders, because they may just stay this way for decades.

And we get to be yelled at by a variety of groups for a long time to come. It’s not always easy not to yell back.