Trolls

The unifying factor is that they don’t care at all about what they’re arguing. The goal is to defend power, and they’ll spit out anything that serves to tie up the discussion so no progress can be made.

And it works, because small-l liberals always react in good faith and spend hours earnestly quoting scientific data and statistics and providing historical context, in the sad belief that the trolls are simply uninformed and will change their minds if provided with sufficient evidence.

John Quiggin @3

Something seems off if the question of whether someone seems like a troll to you depends on how far to the left of them you are.

There seems to be a specific kind of bias (i don’t know if there is a name for it) whereby views which are more ideologically distant from my own are are so unreasonable that people who hold them must have bad motivations. (and not just in the sense that they have bad or mistaken terminal values, but that they do not argue in good faith)

And you seem to be uncritically taking that bias to represent an actual truth of the matter.

Consider Victim trolls, if you can maintain enough of an appearance of reasonableness (whatever that means) but still get piled on or banned, that says (or at least seemingly says) something about the people piling on or doing the banning: That they can’t quite tolerate seemingly reasonable views.

Consider also false flag trolls. It is perfectly possible for people to have inconsistent views. Sometimes they may be people like Dershowitz who have otherwise liberal views but hold a particular view that is out of the mainstream. Other times it may be mainstream liberals who for various historical and social reasons may have a particular grab -bag of views which happens to be inconsistent.

I’ve been puzzling in a related vein about the word “transactional” when used to describe Trump’s approach to policy e.g. foreign policy. Foreign Affairs just dropped its paywall for ten days as a come-on to find new subscribers and “transactional” surfaces even there, written by people who are presented to be actual professors at colleges.

But what does “transactional” mean exactly? It is bruited in its best light to connote something like “sudden clarity”, cutting through the burble, and brought to bear in the national interest — as if the history of foreign policy does not show a sincere attempt to protect the national interest, however much you may disagree with it, and however manifest its failures and horrors. And upon reflection it does not seem like a “transactional” approach could improve things better than deliberated long-term agreements, long thought-out by many experts and creating trust among the allies. “Transactionalism” is short-term and its deals can’t be guaranteed secure from the very next day’s circumstance. Worse, there must be deleterious effects from the leader jumping up-and-down and pounding his chest like a gorilla, using inflammatory rhetoric in public threats to abrogate those long agreements. No one wants to stand in the same room with a brute; this will ward off allies old and new, not gain them; and it cannot contribute to the long-term security of the country in an era of greater complexities, with the rise of serious military competitors and more dangers of war. Professors should conclude that “transactional” means the opposite of “clarity”.

Then does “transactional” really mean, “based on a moment’s whim”? This seems to be it. And since it isn’t useful, it may be a symptom of the lack of intellectual coherence in the leader’s brainpan, for which we adduce the evidence of more than a handful of his top defense, security, and legal advisers over the last two years, who have called the leader an “idiot” or “fucking moron”.

Without casting such judgments on the character of lesser trolls in general, still it could be said that “based on a moment’s whim” is a good description of the general troller’s procedure from writing one sentence to writing the next sentence. It is so predictable that I had lain it to a clinical syndrome: the True Believer’s emotional tribalism, laboring futilely under the enormous intellectual complexities of the modern scene. At these complexities (political, economic) we may all be daunted — but trollers present an extra clinical symptom: they don’t keep on top of their own central point, although they insist that they do. Indeed they may unknowingly contradict it. They exhibit a persistent atomization of the attention span at the higher contextual level, throughout the course of their arguments. They are “transactional” from sentence to sentence. In consequence I am never sure how much of a new troller’s trolls are intentional (i.e. just trying to “own” somebody — as if that goal could be interesting, important or consequential!) and how much of it is the incoherent fruit of an intention to be coherent by a patient on the shallow end of the autism spectrum.

I’d like to unpack right wing trolling and divide it into two pieces. One is the tribalism, responding to ideas or speakers simply on the basis of whose side they’re on, positioning and performing rather than engaging and thinking. The second is the tone of the response, often bullying or provoking but sometimes adopting the faux concern that JQ rightly pins on Haidt (performing anti-tribalism rather than dealing with the substance of a dispute).

The reason is that our side can be just as tribal, with robotic cheerleading of the good guys and heaping invective on the bad guys as substitutes for actually making arguments. This dumbs us down. I despair, for instance, at the way the term “neoliberalism” has been turned into an epithet and drained of nearly all its potentially useful descriptive content. (Can neoliberalism have any upside? Does it mean anything other than “against progressive policies”?) I don’t say this to disparage the left, rather to suggest that something larger and politically pernicious is happening to the overall culture, and the left is largely inside that process along with everyone else.

What’s distinctive about the right is the style of its tribalism. It presents itself as on the side of “fun”, unlike the dour, desiccated left, where fun for them means snark, insult and generally transgressing norms of respectful behavior. This strikes me as a dramatic reversal, since I’m old enough to remember, and participate in, the joyful iconoclasm of the 60s. Back then it was the left that wanted political action to be fun (Abbie Hoffman anyone?) and the right that was all formal attire and seriousness.

I agree with JQ that we don’t need to put up with the various forms of trolling that weigh down potentially intelligent online discussion, but I’d also like to see the rebirth of a non-nasty, mostly uninhibited sense of fun on my side of the spectrum. The contest between meanness-as-fun and dour hectoring is no fun at all.

Like the post. A lot. Clear and unequivocal.

(I see a number of the Very Clever People in your Trollsification have a presence in Quillette, which seems to be an Ozzie wannabee Spiked Online – an incoherent echo of the Institute of Ideas. Gawd help us! The IDW thing really is just pure theatre/stage-craft as you’ve noted before).

In a strange twist of coincidence, prior to the post’s publication, I’d been thinking of quiet ways to obtain a moderator second-opinion of some dropped-in, but mostly unremarked-on, comments in recent threads.

The apparently throw-away occasional comments, from one party, seemed to have this “pattern”: i) concern about population increase and fecundity of immigrant women (i.e. hinting at “swamping”?); ii) nationalisms are equivalent (i.e. “nothing to see here”?); iii) the NHS is a Soviet style of thing (What???); and, bizarrely, in the Armistice Day thread: iv) war is about killing and impregnation of enemy women (which seems to run perilously close to asserting a doctrine of race war?)

Of course, I’m very happy to be entirely wrong about all of that: it’s all just thoughtlessness, vacuity, or merry japing, or combination thereof. But. As serious comment, what then?

(Near-) zero tolerance seems an entirely appropriate response for the “too clever for you” crowd.

Great post. Thank you.

I find your assessment pretty spot on – though I wouldn’t have thought to use the term troll. For that perspective, I thank you. The IDW has long struck me as creating the illusion of a leftist attack on free speech in order to substantiate their desire for rogue intellectual status. They want to believe any questioning or subsequent discounting of their ideas is driven by fear of all the “dangerous truths” they imagine they tell. But they are trafficking largely in hackneyed ideas (and with no nuance to add) that have already been considered, processed, and filed away – and are thus wasting everyone’s time with their cries for attention. The Bell Curve, as an example of the type of essentialist argument I see as common on the IDW, is over 20 years old after all – and its core thesis and attempt at justification wasn’t new then. Ultimately the IDW just seems to want so badly to recast ideas similarly baked in essentialism and traditionalism as the edgy cool kids on the block – and it reads as comically desperate to me – which definitely makes the troll analogy work for me.

Alas, I’m new here. I just discovered Crooked Timber recently. Forgive me if my comment posting violates the etiquette of your community.

John @13

Not to belabour the point, but there is a difference between “people you cannot engage with” and “trolls”. The former are people who you share nothing in common with (neither normative nor non-normative premises/facts) but for all you know may be sincerely believing what they believe and not just say stuff to trigger/own the libs. The latter say stuff just to get a rise out of people, in this case, those to their left.

One can feel frustrated and think it is futile engaging with people with whom you do not share enough of a starting point. And that certainly feeds into the idea the life is too short sentiment in the first part of post. But trolls seem to be only one subset of those it is futile to engage with.

It seems hard for me to see how trolling is an essential feature of any viewpoint. It is more likely that bad viewpoints are just the normal product of normal human incompetence and disinterest in careful reasoning.

Murali @17:

The former are people who you share nothing in common with (neither normative nor non-normative premises/facts)

There are two ways of interpreting this:

(1) people who disagree on the -facts-. Like flat-earthers, climate-denialists, anti-vaxxers, creationists, etc. It’s legitimate to argue that these are imbeciles to be indulged in the manner we indulge small yapping dogs. As Moynihan once said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

(2) people who disagree on (unprovable) -axioms- of the organization of human society. A good example might be “libertarians who believe that property rights, or contracts, are prior to government, sacred, inviolable, *inalienable* by government as a matter of -right-“. Now, someone who disagrees with this position can have an argument with these folks. But when they argue that the benefits of free market capitalism obtain from these preconditions, they’re arguing in bad faith. When they later argue that my right to the clean air and water my forefathers breathed, isn’t a [n equally inalienable] property right, they’re arguing in bad faith. Etc.

As for #1, perhaps these people disagree on the scientific support for some “fact”. As John Oliver put it so well, the appropriate way to have a climate debate is not to put Lord Monckton (or whoever) on one side, and Bill Nye on the other. It is to put Monckton on one side, and 9999 climate scientists on the other, giving each person equal time. B/c that’s the actual state of the scientific consensus.

Let me note one last thing: you didn’t actually give an -examples- of your “people who you share nothing in common with ” above. You need to give such examples, or, I’m sorry, but this seems to be just another variant of trolling.

I find the invocation of Scruton as an example of a non-trolly rightist strange. He just gave a couple of talks in a row where he leans on the Soros-Jewish manipulation and pretty obviously recites the latest right-wing US talking points. You’re not an intellectual if you’re just putting an intellectual veil over Fox News’s virulent anti-semitism. Putting a pretty face on anti-semitism to give it some intellectual cover is still trolling. The same with Max Boot – yes, 15 years after he supported the Iraq war he has finally realized that he has been a grade A troll for most of his adult life. He’s an ex-troll, not an intellectual. You don’t suddenly get to walk away from the rhetorical and PR practices that got a million Iraqis killed and collapsed several countries, just because the new generation of trolls are now too much for you.

I am yet to see a modern conservative “intellectual” who is not at heart a troll, a liar, a fraud and likely a traitor. Find me one who opposed the Iraq war, accepts climate change is real AND proposes some kind of genuine action on it, and has been genuinely opposed to the treacherous rantings of the past few years. That is the minimum standard for having even a modicum of honesty and genuine interest in ideas. If they don’t meet that minimum standard, they’re not worth even considering further.

But I bet you even the ones who meet that minimum standard still behave like trolls.

I share your frustration about dealing with people arguing in bad faith. I do, however, think that the tendency on the left to assign the worst possible motives to people who disagree with us has been enormously harmful. And the tendency to dismiss entire classes of viewpoints as “beyond the pale” is a sign of intellectual weakness in my view – and, again, depressingly common. I’d rather see us explain why viewpoints with a significant following are mistaken, rather than airily dismissing them as so worthless that we don’t even have to say why. From your list – Haidt, in particular, is clearly sincere as far as I can tell – and, to be blunt, I think that he gets a lot more right than his critics do. Actually, whenever I see “concern troll” now, I think that this is a way of dismissing criticism from an ally that cuts too close to the bone, rather than being genuine.

I’d wager that the best analogy here is with the White House Press corps. They should just stop attending “press conferences” with Sanders and Trump, because just showing up enables those trolls. We need to stop placing trolls in the place of normalizing trolling truth.

Hi,

I don’t know if this helps, but I came across this recently.

It’s from the meme philosophers on FaceBook looking for a simple way to refute the alt right libertarians. (It’s on their face book page – https://www.facebook.com/socraticmemes/)

They have categorised the alt-right arguments – making them easier to identify and call out. I thought it was brilliant.

https://scontent-syd2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/46383073_2026120447469660_7652237025331904512_n.png?_nc_cat=104&_nc_eui2=AeHvE8RTHzB_cI9JN4taogn0VAcPQ9tfTDme1g-N-K8Vbxv3Lnjzh2QmvQYNewcli5YjRJFLejuXcuRsUCbYS9umkErrc7Z_yAHbicceJgIb3g&_nc_ht=scontent-syd2-1.xx&oh=277d755ff119ce48a02f6d6e528e6241&oe=5C644966

faustusnotes, what you say about Scruton and his recent talks is certainly plausible, and I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise (although I haven’t heard those talks myself). I think that maybe (some of) his books are different because there he takes himself to be addressing other conservatives and not just making trouble. And indeed I think one learns the most from people with whom one disagrees fundamentally not by talking with them directly, where the fundamental disagreements will trip you up constantly, but by listening to them talk with each other.

Also, no, there is no such thing as a conservative who isn’t a troll. The whole point of conservatism is to lie constantly in service of brutality supporting unearned privilege. It’s inherently a trolling argument.

Marc says:

the tendency to dismiss entire classes of viewpoints as “beyond the pale” is a sign of intellectual weakness in my view

Recent viewpoints that have become mainstream in the US right:
1. The Jew is using the black as muscle (to quote the Blues Brothers)
2. There were good people on both sides of neo-nazi violence
3. Climate change is a hoax (this is old news now obviously)
4. Just because you gang-raped a few chicks doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be on the supreme court

But apparently if we consider any of these ideas to be beyond the pale and refuse to engage with these trolls, we somehow are intellectually weak.

I’m not sure how it’s intellectually weak to dismiss these views. Perhaps I should engage with them, and allow myself to believe that rape, anti-semitism, old-fashioned confederate racism, and scientific ignorance are cool. We have 12 years left until the window for action on climate change closes. I’m sure we’ll all be fine if we treat these ideas seriously!

MFB@34:

The problem with this is that if a lot of other people think that they are worthy of engagement, then you are necessarily writing off all attempt at persuading those other people.

I accept that some people can’t be changed by argument. However, some of those who listen to those arguments could probably be changed. Refusing to attempt to do that has big political implications.

NOBODY is saying that we will not engage with -all- the arguments of our political opponents. To make that claim is to argue in bad faith, and I’m sure you’re not doing that. And as with Murali, now I’m going to ask you to CITE some examples of arguments that we think are trolling, but you think should be debated in good faith. Examples, please.

The question is: which arguments are beyond the pale. Let’s start with an extreme case: suppose Person X’s political argument is that some population of humans [say, Indian-Americans like me] be butchered and served as barbeque for the rest of us. Is this worthy of engagement? Person X thinks so, so clearly, you need to engage with him, yes? Obviously not. So it comes down to -which- arguments are beyond the pale. We [I] believe that there are two sorts of arguments: (1) those contravening well-established scientific factd, and (2) those denying equal rights to members of our polity, that are beyond the pale.[3]

But yes [to your second point], you’re absolutely right. Here’s the thing: we [and I’m really saying “I”, but I suspect I’m not at all alone] are pretty sure that many, many of those people who (for instance) think climate change is a hoax, are simply not amenable to reasoned argument. They don’t care what the facts are, and no reasoned argument would convince them, PERIOD.

Imagine that “the Earth is round” were a subject that was critical to the future of the human race. Would you believe that it’s worth engaging with “flat earthers” in a reasoned discussion? Really? What about evolution? What about the efficacy of vaccination? Fluoridation?

It makes far more sense [to us/me] to empower those who more-or-less already agree with us, than to fruitlessly waste time and resources attempting to convert the irredeemable.

Yes, I said it: irredeemable. Maybe you think otherwise. That’s ok: we can have a discussion about that, and there’s evidence that can be adduced for each side of the argument. But if we believe that (for instance) it’s not worth arguing with some racist shitbird who accosts a citizen woman of color[2] in a voting line, telling them they’re in the wrong line, and when we have, y’know good evidence that in fact this shitbird cannot be convinced otherwise [hell, he’s 75 years old[1], not like he’s for changing at this point], we MIGHT have good reason. To instead focus on reaching & empowering his [several] grandchildren, who practice active-shooter lockdown drills in school every month.

[1] yes, this actually happened
[2] and this citizen woman of color has almost certainly done more for our country that that shitbird did, both in her career in federal service, and to our system of electoral democracy as a volunteer.
[3] I hope you noticed that I’ve already given up *enormouse* rhetorical ground, in saying “members of our polity” — basically conceding that it is a valid subject of political discussion (for instance) whether or not bombing Yemeni children into starvation and death is something America should support. Many, many progressives would see this ALSO as beyond the pale. So y’know, again, many of us are not absolutists. I mean, it’s not like we argue that “all tax cuts are good and stimulate the economy”.

Dave Maier

The only member of the IDW I’m really familiar with is Sam Harris, and he strikes me less as a troll than as a earnest and sincere thinker who has taken his early fame too seriously and is out of his depth: a competent scientist (I assume) …

Why would you assume that?

Sam Harris has a PhD in neuroscience, but he hasn’t worked as a scientist since taking the degree.

Now – what am I going to do? –
as I never ever will stop trolling anybody who believes ”Pleasure” is ”Paradise”.

“polity” — basically conceding that it is a valid subject of political discussion (for instance) whether or not bombing Yemeni children into starvation and death is something America should support. ”

Not all such people are on the right. Not when Obama is blamed. I am speaking from experience. Not that anyone that I have seen on either side of the spectrum ever says it is okay to starve kids, but it turns out that if you are trying to calm the Saudis down after the Iranian nuclear deal you get some sort of pass.

On the far right, I know someone— a good friend of mine going back decades- whose mind has been totally corrupted by Fox. I can’t figure out if he really believes everything he says. My guess is that the details don’t matter — what is good for the political tribe determines what is true.

Raven Onthill@37:

That’s a fairly basic point, but it’s one worth explicitly underscoring. Outside of purely nihilistic “for the lulz” disruption & griefing, trolling is, to tie into another recent thread, the discourse equivalent of strategic voting. It’s an exploitation of the structure/norms of open discourse and assumptions of good faith in order to achieve specific goals that would be harder to achieve in the “intended” manner. It’s trying to game the system rather than playing the system’s game. If I can be forgiven for giving a lot of trolling more gravitas than it deserves, it’s sophistry.

Of related interest: George Lakoff on how the media should deal with Trump’s lies:

“Notice that when you repeat something, you’re strengthening it in people’s brains. The more a neural circuit is activated, the stronger it gets. Trump is using certain communicative tactics that are very sophisticated and he doesn’t realize it.”

https://www.vox.com/2018/11/15/18047360/trump-lies-media-strategy-george-lakoff

The problem here isn’t only opposing far right-wing trolls. Another problem – I would argue is also a serious problem – is that this is also how liberals police leftists, by pretending that the leftists are trolling them. Or how analytical philosophers attack and police all other philosophical schools.

Once all the conservative movement lost its animating enely of Marxism, it lost any ability to think critically or evolve.
Likewise, whatever respectable intellectual ideas it had have become part of mainstream conventional wisdom.
I mean, is there anyone who refutes Buckley’s 3 legged stool by suggesting we have a weak defense posture? Wild irresponsible spending? Lax morality?

The new governor of [The People’s Republic of] California is inheriting a budget surplus, a strong state economy, and a precedent of cautious, prudent budgeting. He was elected on the strength of social class of affluent educated bourgeoisie who emphasize stable family relationships and respect for the human person.

In other words, the conservative traditions of Burke and Kirk have found their home in mainstream liberalism, leaving the opposing movement to become a top/bottom coalition of white ethnic grievance and individual capitalist radicalism.
These two strains are almost by definition trollish since they have no reasonable core. No one can mount an honest or coherent argument for them.

burritoboy@40: You’re right, that sometimes liberals -do- “police” leftists. Unlike you, I’ll give an example, and argue that the designation is correct. Ever hear of Duverger’s Law? It is on that basis that we find idiots Stein in 2016 [and all the other “not a dime’s worth of difference” preachers] to be trolls, plain and simple.

In political science, Duverger’s law holds that plurality-rule elections (such as first past the post) structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system,

Now, a leftist can disagree with Duverger’s Law, but unless they have strong evidence [and “b/c reasons maan” isn’t] they’re going to be dismissed, just as psychics are. If one takes Duverger’s Law as a given, then (for example) being a leftist is *inconsistent* with deciding not to vote for the Hillary in 2016, regardless of how much one detests her and views her as a sellout.

So, y’know, leftists like that, they’re either idiots, or hypocrites. Or they voted like that to, “stick it to the [wo]man”. You know, to troll.

Peter Dorman @9

I like the whole comment, but the first sentence of your second graph is esp. well put. I made the same point recently elsewhere, but not as pithily.

J-D corrects me: “Sam Harris has a PhD in neuroscience, but he hasn’t worked as a scientist since taking the degree.”

Fair enough. I guess that’s all the competence I meant anyway.

John @56

Add another two senses to the term

3) A kind of technocratic wonkish sensibility e.g. Matt yglesias

4) An imposition of particular social forms (e.g. private property rights) on organically developing communities to make them legible to the state.

Ostrom IIRC comments on this tendency to replace organically formed collective solutions to collective action problems with more textbook private property based solutions which do not necessarily work as well.

Murali @38: OK, let’s take your two examples:

(1) immigration restrictions: True, there are influential progressives who argue for open borders. Lemme see if I need more than one hand to count ’em all …. nope. Almost all influential progressive legislators argue for two things: (a) regularization of those folks who are already here, and (b) enforcement of laws against EMPLOYERS in order to reduce DEMAND for undocumented immigrants. And this is -different- from decent treatment for those seeking asylum, esp. (e.g.) from countries that we spent a good part of the last century destroying. Y’know, like El Salvador, or Guatemala. [Not merely] B/c we’re signatory to many international conventions guaranteeing such decent treatment. There’s a vigorous debate here.

(2) property rights. People who start with “property rights are inalienable and given by God” or some such, and argue that they can do whatever they want with their property, refuse to admit any other sort of “property rights”. Like, say, to clean air, or clean water. Their usual response to such things is “show me your deed to clean air”. At which point, they’re tacitly admitting that the reason they have property rights is that the state codified and enforces them. The same sort of folks believe that intellectual property has precisely the same sort of status as real property, even though the former is -expressly- created by government. First, it’s the “Rule-Standard switcheroo” from David’s (above) “Prima Facie Logical Fallacies” link (they want to define what “property” is). But second, that which the state creates and grants, the state can destroy or revoke. And of course, when it comes to many other rights (like, say, the right to declare bankruptcy) they fully believe this.

Why do I call this trolling? B/c I define trolling as more than just about “pissing off the libs”. It’s also about bad-faith argumentation, not designed to actually prove one’s point, but rather, to obscure and mislead. Just so, as I’ve described above, with “propertarians” (I guess you called them). In short, “bullshit” (Harry Frankfurt’s definition) is trolling. Now, you might argue that this example is just a case of “lazy reasoning”. And sure, if it were 1950, or whenever that Pinochet apologist asshole Hayek came up with this shit, I might accept it. But it’s not 1950, and they don’t get a mulligan after a half-century of “lazy reasoning”.

Frankfurt tells us that there’s always a hidden agenda in bullshit. Something -else- entirely different from the surface subjectx of discussion, that the troll is trying to put over on us. And in this case, it’s “What’s mine is mine, sucks to be you”. It’s precisely as Frank Wilhoit said: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Care to give other examples?

@trolling – and
@62 ”I disagree about the definition of trolling”

You don’t have to –
Just take a different definition – like what’s about the definition from a German Dude who wrote a book on ”troll culture”?

„Trolling ist the act of disrupting people for personal amusement or the amusement of many.“

That’s why a lot of blogs even used to employ ”trolls” in order to get some more ”amusement”. And there are these rumors – that even some of the most ”sincere” -(and serious) US bloggers -(like for example ”The Great Greenwald”) – trolled themselves -(”sock-puppeting”) with very disruptive comments in order to get some very, VERY ”serious” conversations going?

– but on the other hand – there is always the definition of the urban dictionary:
”Trolling – (verb), as it relates to internet, is the deliberate act, (by a Troll – noun or adjective), of making random unsolicited and/or controversial comments on various internet forums with the intent to provoke an emotional knee jerk reaction from unsuspecting –
OR SUSPECTING?-
– readers to engage in a fight or argument
Trolling on-line forums as described above is actually analogous to the fishing technique of “trolling”, where colorful baits and lures are pulled behind a slow moving boat, often with multiple fishing lines, covering a large bodies of water, such as a large lake or the ocean. The trolling lures attract unsuspecting fish, intriguing them with the way they move through the water, thus enticing these foolish fish to “take the bait”. Not unlike unsuspecting internet victims, once hooked, the fish are reeled in for the catch before they realize they have been duped by the Troll/Fisherman.

Quiggin, since you’ve identified Christina Hoff Sommers and Jonathan Haidt as trolls, how would that translate into concrete actions?

1. If Sommers or Haidt were to enter this thread to defend themselves against trolling charges, would you delete their comments and ban them? Or just not reply to them?

2. If you were invited to a widely televised debate against Sommers or Haidt on a subject you feel strongly about, would you decline because they are trolls?

3. Do you call for intellectuals to refuse to engage with Sommers and Haidt, to not talk to them or about them?

4. Do you call for publishers and lecture organizers to boycott Sommers and Haidt, to not publish their writing or book them for lectures?

5. Would you support or oppose protests that block access to events where Sommers and Haidt are speaking or that go into the venue and try to shout them down?

WLGR@64:

I’m not trolling you when I say: Shorter WLGR@64: “Heighten the contradictions”, viz

the instrumental reasoning for leftists is to issue a corrective to the nominally left-wing major party for drifting too far to the right, incentivizing it to move further left in future elections

Because that sure seems to be the distillation of your position, when it isn’t “Political power grows from the barrel of a gun”, viz

I tend to doubt the utility of electoralism in the long term at all

With positions like these, why should anyone take you seriously?

Serious response #1: yes COMMA the time to do this “pulling the Dems to the left, is in primaries”.

Serious response #2: you haven’t disputed Duverger’s Law at all. You just believe that somehow, losing will cause the Dems to become more leftist. When ALL EVIDENCE is that that’s not what happened in real life, when they lost in the 80s. Instead, they moved to the RIGHT.

nastywoman@63: Fair cop. I’ve always used the definition “people who piss up my leg and tell me it’s raining”, but I grant that that’s not the commonly-used definition.

Actually mountaineer, the standard way to kill trolls, in the absence of a flamethrower, is to smash them with a hammer and then burn the body. The reason starving them doesn’t work is that they’re trying to eat you, usually.

A little attention to basic facts here please!!

On a related point:

CT used to have unmoderated comments: write your screed, hit “submit”, and it shows up on the screen.

Now, comments have to be posted manually by a front-pager, and it can take hours.

I think it’s a big improvement.

Yes, I miss some of the old-fashioned, high-speed back and forth. But it was probably not very high-quality interaction. Slowing it down does not make it worse.

And presumably it allows the front-pagers to simply decline to post particularly egregious contributions.

So–thanks for instituting this change!

Why did my comment from yesterday not appear? Lost to the void? Or was i deemed to be trolling?

Coarse language. I don’t like swearing in comments, and didn’t have time to check whether it was trolling. Write it again in line with the comments policy and I’ll post it – JQ

@72
”I do wonder one thing, though: how do you discern which of various manifestly dishonest arguments is trolling, and which is just, well, y’know, dishonest argumentation”?

– if the definition of ”trolling” is ”the act of disrupting people for personal amusement or the amusement of many.“ it doesn’t matter much…?

How do you tell which people are sincere, and which are insincerely trying to infuriate?

Once upon a time -(when small caps still ruled) – it was considered kind of ”a good thing” that ”THE internet” -(or anybody on the internet) was ”infuriating” or ”provocating” or writing whatever or however anybody liked to write – (and nobody dragged a line anywhere) – BUT then -(like everywhere – where there aren’t any ”rules” or ”structure”) – the ”Sincere” showed up – and the ”serious” ones – AND most annoying ”the grammar police”.

And THEN as it all evolved (not only) Jon Stewart started to joke:

It was/is on the Internet!

– and how do people NOT even joke lately:

”THE internet is -(or has become?) an a..hole”!

And as ”THE internet” might be ”an a…hole” everybody on there/here might be more or less a –
Troll?

Thanksgiving is nearly upon us, the season for wondering how to handle right-wing uncles. As the senior uncle in my liberal family I take umbrage; the only conservative in the family is my sister’s son, who takes turkey with his wife’s family.

He’s a bit of a troll, at least on Facebook. I would not put his global warming denial or opposition to gay marriage into that category, as nonsensical as they seem. However, attacking Elizabeth Warren for the insufficiency of her Native American ancestry, or ranting about the shortage of Republicans in higher education, can hardly be regarded as serious contributions to enlightened discourse. Immigrants, of course, are stealing our jobs and living large on welfare.

Outrage is addictive, and peddling outrage is profitable. Rage is stoked, and the anger is sincere, no matter how distant the perceived offense from reality. When both sides have different facts to bolster their arguments, trust is lost, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Chetan Murthy, like it or not the critique of liberal-democratic electoral politics has a rich tradition in serious political theory, a tradition that people in philosophical settings like this one have traditionally grappled with even if they may disagree. If you’re really that eager to blithely dismiss those kinds of critiques as inherently beyond the pale, why should anyone here take you seriously?

I understand that “heighten the contradictions” and “political power grows from the barrel of a gun” are both easily quotable memes for non-leftists scrambling to pretend they have any understanding of basic precepts of leftist thought, but neither is really related to the argument I’m making. What the strategy I described tries to do is drag the Democratic Party to the left by appealing to the party’s political self-interest in purely liberal-democratic electoral terms, explicitly saying “if you move too far to the right, we’ll withdraw our support from you, and without that support you’ll lose.” Not only is that strategy entirely consistent with a narrow first-past-the-post two-party system (the state of affairs observed in “Duverger’s Law”) but in fact it’s really only consistent with such a system: a freer and fairer electoral system with procedures like ranked-choice voting or proportional representation would allow leftist parties and politicians to make these kinds of center-left coalition decisions after having clawed out a solid foothold in the electoral system, as opposed to a system like the US where operating in coalition with the center is an inherent requirement for the left to meaningfully participate in electoral politics at all. The strategy I described is basically a way for the electoral left to play hardball with the center in negotiating the terms of that coalition, and if there’s a reason the Democratic Party has been consistently moving right for decades now, at least part of it has to do with the way people like you have been conditioned to reflexively reject a hardball strategy like that as inherently out of bounds.

Why I’m skeptical of that strategy has to do with the suspicion that appealing to the Democratic Party establishment’s political self-interest in purely liberal-democratic electoral terms is a futile endeavor, based on a deeper understanding of who these people are and who they represent: in short, they’d rather be a corporate-aligned centrist party and lose, which would let them remain members in good standing of the ruling elite with easy access to well-funded sinecures at lobbying firms and think tanks and the like, than be a labor-aligned leftist party and win. To me this goes a long way toward explaining why the Democratic Party has responded to separatist electoral tendencies like that of Ralph Nader not merely with opposition, which would be understandable, but above and beyond that with perpetual “two minutes hate” level frenzies to delegitimize and demonize such tendencies in a way that only alienates their supporters even further from the Democratic-voting fold, thus ironically indulging the exact same sort of counterproductive anti-pragmatic moral grandstanding they attribute to those people in the first place. (As Nathan Robinson presciently wrote in September of 2016, “Democrats seem to have a better thought-out plan for how to blame leftists for allowing Trump to get elected than they do for how to actually defeat Trump.”)

To put it another way, if you want to know why I’m skeptical of the electoral-leftist strategy I outlined, it has to do with the ideological horse-blinders you yourself are wearing right now in this very conversation to prevent yourself from understanding that strategy, and why the centrist liberal establishment might have perfectly pragmatic self-interested reasons to allow or even encourage that kind of willful ignorance to persist. And if such bad-faith rhetorical tactics to deliberately short-circuit the possibility of basic inquiry are part of what qualifies as trolling, then on this issue both you and the centrist elites of the Democratic Party could reasonably be regarded as trolls.

Put simply. the IDW and others are trolls. Their object is not to put forward ideas, or even to mount a critique, but to annoy and disrupt their targets (us).

Concern trolls: Jonathan Haidt is the leading example. Keep[s] trying to explain how the extreme lunacy of the far right is really the fault of the left for pointing out the lunacy of the mainstream right.

I understand the idea that in the public arena people make comments that are essentially “trolling” – in the US context, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh immediately come to mind. But even with someone like Coulter, I see her not as primarily caring whether she annoys or disrupts her targets, I see her main purpose as furthering a certain set of ideas (and her career) by trolling – ridiculing, really – her targets.

Anyway you can find many CT commenters (not the bloggers, the commenters) using similar techniques. Look at comment 33 in this thread:

Recent viewpoints that have become mainstream in the US right: 1. The Jew is using the black as muscle (to quote the Blues Brothers) 2. There were good people on both sides of neo-nazi violence 3. Climate change is a hoax (this is old news now obviously) 4. Just because you gang-raped a few chicks doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be on the supreme court

The third one actually is a mainstream view, but the first one is a somewhat obscure neo-Nazi idea (in the actual right-wing mainstream, the main attitude vis-à-vis Jews is love of Israel); the second one derives from a single idiotic Trump statement – not every idiotic thing Trump has said is a mainstream right-wing view, not yet; and the last one is pure Coulterism. No one thinks there’s any compelling evidence that Kavanaugh ever gang-raped anyone – John Holbo ran several posts here at CT that explicitly incorporated this belief. Clearly with 4 (and arguably with 1 and 2) faustusnotes is ascribing views to people that he knows they don’t hold as a means of ridiculing their actual views. (Or else he’s just being a nut).

Is Haidt a Coulter? I’m not sure which of his arguments amount to blaming the left for stupid ideas held by the right. Looking at his Wikipedia page and his articles in the Atlantic, I see Haidt arguing for greater civility in political discourse and arguing against ideas like “microaggression” and “safe space” and so on.

From Wikipedia:

In chapter 8 of The Righteous Mind, Haidt describes how he began to study political psychology in order to help the Democratic Party win more elections, but in chapter 12 [he] argues that each of the major political groups—conservatives, progressives, and libertarians—have valuable insights and that truth and good policy emerge from the contest of ideas. Since 2012, Haidt has referred to himself as a political centrist. Haidt is involved with several efforts to help bridge the political divide and reduce political polarization in the United States. In 2007, he founded the website CivilPolitics.org, a clearinghouse for research on political civility. He serves on the advisory boards of Represent.Us., a non-partisan anticorruption organization, the Acumen Fund, which invests in companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty; and Better-Angels.org, a bipartisan group working to reduce political polarization. Three of his four TED talks are on the topic of understanding and reducing political divisions.

I find it hard to believe that Haidt’s points about political divisiveness fail to rise to the level of a “critique,” or that they are merely put forward to annoy “us,” whoever that is. (Although the rhetoric of JQ and the other CT bloggers is often dismissive and critical of right-wing ideas, for the most part – maybe Chris Bertram is an exception, I’m not sure – I don’t see him and them advocating for strategies to amplify political division specifically).

I don’t think this is any kind of “nothing” issue – I think it’s a crucial issue. Vox.com puts out a lot of wacky stuff, but I thought this interview with Joe Trippi, the campaign manager for Doug Jones (the Alabama Senator who beat Roy Moore), was brilliant:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/26/16810116/doug-jones-alabama-polls-roy-moore

Although you often (not just in the CT comments section) see claims along the lines of “when they (the R’s) go low, we should go low,” I think Trippi is really on to something, and people should listen to someone who helped beat a Republican in a “+28 Trump” state. Just a couple of weeks ago a lot of other Democrats won (or almost won) in “red” states or districts and I think the typical strategy employed in those races was to emphasize the “liability” aspect of Trumpism (the fact that most people dislike him) by differentiating themselves from him, not by trying to appear more like him.

Although saying that “the extreme lunacy of the far right is really the fault of the left” is wrong, what if you changed “really” to “partly?” I would say it then becomes right. Especially in a two-party system, if one side adopts an idiotic idea or ideas, isn’t this often going to be at least in part “enabled” (or something like that) by the other side’s response, or by the other party’s ideas? Let’s say that a lot of voters in swing states have dim views of things like “microaggressions” and “safe spaces.” If these things make the left in general look stupid or authoritarian or in thrall to bad ideas, maybe it’s good that people like Haidt are out there arguing against them.

In the one case where JQ touches on a “Haidt issue” specifically, he doesn’t disagree with Haidt, he agrees. From 68:

But no-platforming (as opposed to peaceful protest) is silly and counterproductive in nearly all cases. In particular, it plays into the hands of victim trolls like Sommers.

If it didn’t play into the hands of victim trolls, would it become sensible and productive? I can’t believe JQ believes that….

Bonus point:

79 However, attacking Elizabeth Warren for the insufficiency of her Native American ancestry … can hardly be regarded as serious contributions to enlightened discourse.

Forget about wacky nephews, what’s going to happen in the Democratic primaries, if Warren runs? What might look like an opportunity for “trolling” to a right-wing person might look like a hanging curveball (or “full toss”) to a Democrat running against Warren.

Well, best of luck with this rule.

I definitely understand why you want it, and I definitely think that there are plenty of conservatives out there arguing in bad faith.

But I think you’ll have trouble with it. Part of what ideologies do is connect concepts in ways that are, for lack of a better word, stupid and illogical. The result is that people can, in what subjectively feels like good faith, strenuously insist on the truth of things that, to an outside observer, are objectively impossible for a fully rational, fully self aware person to simultaneously believe in good faith.

I think some of the CT royalty are in the thrall of those sorts of ideologies.

Would I be right in thinking Kidbeystones was the only commenter here to predict the Trump win? (A genuine question as there’s honestly nothing I’d like to do less than search back through comments threads from that time…)

J-D this has been my approach, but I don’t stick to it with iron discipline and when I see him make outrageously false claims I like to dispute them in case someone reading might mistake anything he writes for an important truth.

anon/portly, I’m not sure if what you are doing is wishful thinking or concern trolling (your last paragraph makes me think the latter), but in either case it’s seriously wrong. Let us consider:

1. The Jew is using the black man as muscle: this is an idea now repeatedly expressed by the president, supported by senior cabinet and congress allies, blasted all over Fox news and recently reiterated by supposed non-troll “intellectuals” as Scruton. It’s the reason, along with the related nazi idea that all leftism is Jewish, that Central European University is leaving Hungary. At this point you cannot dismiss this as an obscure view.

2. There were good people on both sides: It’s true that this is a slight exaggeration, because nobody in the modern American right thinks there were good people on the side of the anti-fascists. This is a view, let us remember, that was put forward by the President. He is supported by a bunch of republican congresspeople who associate with neo nazis, broadcast their views, and use their views in election campaigns – Steve King, the lynch-friendly woman who’s about to go to a runoff and nowheresville, Trump Jr., de Santis, and a bunch of other ne’er do wells are all in on this.

3. Climate change is a hoax is not a mainstream idea. Nobody believes it except the right.

4. Just because you gang-raped a few chicks doesn’t mean you can’t be on teh supreme court: this isn’t just Coulter. The NRO had a beers for Kavanaugh party, Trump said the man had been done wrong, and a bunch of other leading conservative figures supported the idea that youthful “indiscretion” should not be disqualifying. I note here that whether there is compelling evidence is irrelevant – the usual suspects have made this belief clear when they refused to investigate in case they found compelling evidence.

As an aside, I would like to point out that “micro-aggressions” is a serious and solid idea, and if you (as I have) live in a genuinely foreign country for more than a micro second you’ll understand the concept immediately. It’s hilarious to see all the white american good ole boys who rock up sushiside and suddenly discover themselves the victims of regular micro-aggressions, who implicitly and immediately understand the concept. A reminder of the most important adage in modern culture: just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it don’t make sense. If Haidt “argues” (to use the term loosely) against this then he’s an ignorant fool who understands nothing about race and racism.

Finally, you address the Warren “controversy” in exactly the way a concern troll would. She spent years being abused for supposed racial crimes, in an entirely manufactured right wing controversy which included the absolutely ludicrous idea that she was treated better at law school because of her native American heritage (top tip: native Americans don’t get treated better by white people). Now you want everyone on the left to disqualify her from office because she’s been trolled for years by vicious thugs. Here’s an idea: drive the vicious thugs out of polite society, and don’t give in to their bullying. But I get the impression that that is not what you want – they serve a useful purpose, like lions patrolling the edge of a herd to cull any animal that strays too far.

on the other hand –
”As for the word troll, it may be related to common germanic truzlon which like old high germanic trollen means ”running with small steps”. Trolls basically include all sociale mythic creatures, eg. giants, dwarfs, pixies, though in later Scandinavian tradition trolls have become known for their strong family ties.

The word dwarf/dværg is also common germanic and is also often used about the illnesses caused by these creatures. It may be derived from the indoeuropean verb dhreugh meaning deceive (Danish ‘at bedrage’) – and here is a quick list of Scandinavian names for the creatures we generally call ‘trolls’:

Denmark: bjergfolk, højfolk, bakkefolk, de underjordiske, puslinger, vætter, trolde
Sweden: vättar, bolvättar, underbyggarna, de underjordiska, bergsrån, troll (Southern Sweden), älvorna (speciality: dance) in the whole of Sweden, but no important role in folk tradition, vittra/vittror (Northern Sweden)
Norway: Haugtussar, haugfolk, tuftefolk, underjordiske, rorefolk
Norway/Iceland/Faroes: huldre, huldrefolk (general term for troll)
Germany: Wichten (same as vætter)

So seriously thinking about changing the moniker into ”Wicht” or ”Underbyggarna”?

I think you’re right Engels, kidney stones got that right, but he was lucky. And everyone arguing against him didn’t know about Russian ratfucking. And a troll being occasionally right doesn’t make him worth listening to.

“Would I be right in thinking Kidbeystones was the only commenter here to predict the Trump win?”

My recollection is that he was by far the most persistent one, but that a couple other trolls popped up. Most of us (maybe all) on the other side made no prediction, just stated our own preferences and reasons. How do I know how people in other regions are going to vote? I don’t particularly trust polls (never answer them, myself).

Kidneystones was also very loud on how great a president Trump would be compared to Obama. That’s an issue that seems less a matter of luck, to me.

Lesser-evilism was also loudly derided by some. They should feel some small responsibility for Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and all the lower-court appointees, immigrant families being broken up at the border, and so on. The harm that the greater evil does can last for generations, not just until the next election.

kindeystones’ prediction was “right” only insofar as the candidate with 3 million fewer votes was declared winner by a mechanism that is incompatible with the basic definition of democracy – majority rule. For my part, I did point out that US presidential elections are usually decided by small margins and warned against the danger of assuming a Clinton win. Ultimately, the mistake that the MSM and really almost everyone including Trump himself made of assuming that Trump couldn’t win is precisely what made his “win” possible. Plenty of leftists have bitterly regretted their reckless behavior (the one advocated above by WLGR) and would have voted Clinton if they hadn’t been assured of her “certain” victory. In the midterms, Democrats won as decisively as they did precisely because progressive voters did not wish to take any chances again.

Now to WLGR: That thing you call a strategy has never worked now has it? So why do you still claim it’s a valid strategy? Oh it’s because Democrats are really evil. If they were just opportunist, your “strategy” would work, right, so the fact that your strategy isn’t working and has never worked proves that Dems are hopelessly evil.

Bloody nonsense. The US has just produced an election in which the left of center party won a decisive majority of votes (and seats). If Dems were a pure leftist party, they could never win a majority. No “true left” party anywhere does that. Left parties e. g. in Europe can, if at all, only win power by forming alliances with centrist parties. If the US had a “normal” party system, there would be at least a left, right and centrist party and neither would usually win a majority on its own (except in the UK where a party might win power with only a third of the votes). But the US has a two-party system, and that means that the left-of-center party has to be a coalition of progressive and centrist forces. There are valid strategies for strengthening the left forces within that coalition but voting against it is not one of them.

So, your “strategy” has put a fascist into the White House. You don’t care? Then you are not on the left. There is no genuine progressive who doesn’t care about defeating fascism. Whatever you are, don’t you try to claim the mantle of the “true left”.

89

1. The Jew is using the black man as muscle: this is an idea now repeatedly expressed by the president, supported by senior cabinet and congress allies, blasted all over Fox news and recently reiterated by supposed non-troll “intellectuals” as Scruton.

Since about the time Trump became the Republican candidate, I have reversed a long-standing policy of paying almost no attention to the news of the day (other than what I get filtered via blogs) and in particular have actually made an effort to watch Fox News and MSNBC, at least in small bits, as I can tolerate it. Never once have I seen this idea, or anything remotely resembling this idea, come up. As I said, it is an obscure neo-Nazi idea, not one that I think Fox News would have any desire to be associated with. Isn’t Fox News having enough difficulty with advertisers? But then okay, I admit I can be somewhat oblivious, if so please link to something that gives me some idea where you got this notion from. Here’s what I know, more or less:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/14/jews-will-not-replace-us-why-white-supremacists-go-after-jews/?utm_term=.2b829d352782

2. There were good people on both sides: It’s true that this is a slight exaggeration, because nobody in the modern American right thinks there were good people on the side of the anti-fascists. This is a view, let us remember, that was put forward by the President. He is supported by a bunch of republican congresspeople….

“Let us remember,” right, as I said in 83 this comes from a nutty statement by Trump, who of course also said the opposite, and always more or less covers as much of the possible terrain with nutty comments as possible. Please link to something that tells me exactly which “republican congresspeople” are out there making claims that there are good neo-Nazis. I’m not saying that Republicans aren’t often quite adept at writing the attack ads of their opponents for them, but this would be ridiculous.

3. Climate change is a hoax is not a mainstream idea. Nobody believes it except the right.

Yes. This, or something like it, is actually a mainstream right-wing view.

4. Just because you gang-raped a few chicks doesn’t mean you can’t be on teh supreme court: this isn’t just Coulter. The NRO had a beers for Kavanaugh party, Trump said the man had been done wrong, and a bunch of other leading conservative figures supported the idea that youthful “indiscretion” should not be disqualifying. I note here that whether there is compelling evidence is irrelevant – the usual suspects have made this belief clear when they refused to investigate in case they found compelling evidence.

Before one side can refuse to investigate, doesn’t the other side have to want to? I didn’t realize there was any real interest on the anti-Kavanaugh side for an investigation into the gang-rape charge. Maybe this John Holbo quote will help explain it:

I will admit that, with the third woman [Swetnick – a/p] coming forward, a skeptic could say: maybe this is just a symptom of a kind of erupting national craziness around this case. So we kind of have to stop believing what people say, if there’s no – you know – evidence. I just saw tonight that two – two! – guys have evidently come forth to say they were the ones who maybe ‘encountered’ Ford. That’s completely messed up and I don’t believe it. That’s part of why I focus just on Ford in the post. I’m applying a serious discount rate to any new stories that aren’t backed up. It’s just too likely that people get worked up and fabulate stories, or are – at this point – put up to telling stories that favor one side or the other.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/09/26/odds-2/

https://www.newsweek.com/brett-kavanaugh-gang-rape-avenatti-julie-swetnick-1139745

I think one of the problems here is that for some of us, the “gang bang” concept is sort of strange and remote – limited to people like the wives of Roman emperors, or New York Yankee players of the 1960’s. If HBO had come up with this as a plot element in a series, maybe people would have said it was not only too lurid but also too fantastic, and they should stick with more realistic and traditional teen plot elements, like vampires and werewolves and sorcerer-stepmoms and visually-arresting dystopias.

Finally, you address the Warren “controversy” in exactly the way a concern troll would. … Now you want everyone on the left to disqualify her from office because she’s been trolled for years by vicious thugs. …

(On the other hand, I admit to not knowing what a concern troll really is, or even wanting to know – I agree with engels in 80 completely).

WLGR

I understand that there are political parties which do not make electoral success a priority: I can think of a few examples, and I am sure there are more. However, the examples I am thinking of are parties which do not make electoral success a priority and do not achieve it. The Democratic party, in the US, does not have a record of unmixed electoral failure; it has a mixed record, which includes both electoral failures and electoral successes. I can’t find a way to reconcile the idea that it does not make electoral success a priority with the number of electoral successes it has actually achieved.

WLGR’s comment at 94 is poorly informed. The polling popularity of left wing policies, particularly social safety net policies, does not translate well into electoral success or ease of passage of those policies. A lot of those policies get more that 50% support from Republican voters! But those same voters will still fight tooth and nail against those policies at the ballot box, and will argue against them at the drop of a hat once their party’s opinion leaders tell them to. Liberal social safety net policies poll well in the abstract. But politics isn’t performed in the abstract.

Orange Watch, I don’t think that’s a credible interpretation of what has been happening over the past 30 years. The best counter-example is UK Labour, which spent 20 years losing elections until Blair sold out a bunch of its basic principles and won in a landslide. What does that tell UK Labour?

This debate has happened ad nauseum in the Labour parties of the non-US left, and the argument of the labour right has been the exact same as yours, with the names swapped: they argue that the radical left has spent years losing elections, happy to sit in the wilderness letting the far right rule the lives of working people while they play purity-pony games with each other, while the labour right does the dirty job of actually winning elections. This is very clear in Australia, where a new party, the Greens, formed in 1996 in response to the Australian Labor Party’s failings on environmental and social issues. The Greens have done well but they have never got more than about 15% of the vote nationally, and don’t have any real strongholds in the lower house. If it were true that the centre left is abandoning its left wing base and tacking right, how come the Greens can’t get steal more than 10-15 % of the ALP’s vote in Oz, and even less in the UK? The obvious answer is that the electorate is more conservative than most of the ALP left, and they need to make compromises to win power in that environment. It’s even worse in broken barbaric systems like the UK and USA, where voting is voluntary (booo!), there are no preferences, and the regional effect in the upper house is stronger (US) or the upper house is not elected (UK).

The solution to this problem is simple and has been repeated continuously here and elsewhere: join your party and fight to drag it left, and vote! vote! vote! That’s what young people did in these midterms and they were way way more effective than all the grumpy old beardy dudes who walked away from their civic responsibility in 2016 and allowed a fascist cheeto to take over their country. What you just saw in the US was not the party finally realizing that it needs to tack left to win votes. It was young people finally getting jack of the stupid decisions their elders are making, and taking control of the political process, both within the party (in the form of people like AOC) and at the ballot box (with record turnout).

And what did the old beardy dudes do when these kids took over? Even before the election, Corey Robin was on here throwing AOC under the bus, and twitter was aflame with people complaining about how she wasn’t left wing enough. Fortunately she ignored that noise, and it looks like her and her colleagues’ tireless efforts within the party are going to drag it far further left than your abstemious crankiness ever would have.

Is Rod Dreher a troll? I would call him a pseudo-intellectual, not bright enough to see that his present demand for “religious liberty” is just “multiculturalism but only for white guys”. At least that’s how he tells it.

His latest work includes the priceless combination of casting himself as the American Solzhenitsyn and also that he is “pitching a book” about it. Because that was Alexander’s story, wasn’t it, he went round the Moscow publishing houses pitching a book about how Stalin wasn’t very good.

109

But that article in not by him! It is not reasonable to criticise Haidt (or anyone) based on a partisan summary *by someone else* of what he says. In the actual talk (which is Haidt) he does not say “Trump was all the fault of the liberals for pushing multiculturalism and diversity” or anything remotely like it. And I struggle to see how anyone could come away from it thinking it does.

The essence of what he does say in that talk it that we should try harder to listen to and understand other points of view. Amusing, given your post is about people you intend to not listen to.

faustusnotes: “The solution to this problem is simple and has been repeated continuously here and elsewhere: join your party and fight to drag it left, and vote! vote! vote! That’s what young people did in these midterms and they were way way more effective than all the grumpy old beardy dudes who walked away from their civic responsibility in 2016 and allowed a fascist cheeto to take over their country. What you just saw in the US was not the party finally realizing that it needs to tack left to win votes. It was young people finally getting jack of the stupid decisions their elders are making, and taking control of the political process, both within the party (in the form of people like AOC) and at the ballot box (with record turnout).”

What’s doubly (triply, quadruply) maddening about the purity people was that the Tea Party faction of the GOP demonstrated how to drag a party around: primary ruthlessly and then vote 100%. They understood that the decisions were implemented at the primary level. A reporter who talked with them said that they were all batsh*t insane and detached from reality on every topic except how the GOP machinery worked.

We lost so much because the old, rural white people showed up to vote on each and every election (and then, of course, used their government power to make sure that they had additional non-democratic power).

About a month before the election, I wrote that Trump could win. This was based on the opinion polls narrowing.

👍

114

Anon/portly, I gave you names of republican congresspeople who do the neonazi shuffle. Google them yourself.

Okay. It appears that Steve King’s greatest offense (so far) has been to re-tweet a Neo-Nazi saying this: “65% of Italians now oppose mass immigration. Europe is waking up….”

King says he didn’t realize that the original tweet came from a Neo-Nazi, which I would think was obvious – I would be surprised if anyone in the entire US House of Representatives could name a single European Neo-Nazi. I certainly couldn’t, unless Marie Le Pen or someone like that is one.

That becomes this, in 89:

There were good people on both sides: It’s true that this is a slight exaggeration, because nobody in the modern American right thinks there were good people on the side of the anti-fascists. This is a view, let us remember, that was put forward by the President. He is supported by a bunch of republican congresspeople who associate with neo nazis, broadcast their views, and use their views in election campaigns – Steve King, the lynch-friendly woman who’s about to go to a runoff and nowheresville, Trump Jr., de Santis, and a bunch of other ne’er do wells are all in on this.

King is not being accused of “associating” with any neo-nazis, nor (really) of broadcasting their views, since the claim that 65% of Italians means that “Europe is waking up” is not in particular a “neo-Nazi” view, it’s an anti-immigration view. If 65% of Italians think X and then you say this means “Europe is waking up,” that’s an endorsement of X, primarily, unless the phrase “waking up” is supposed to be some sort of fascist dog-whistle or something.

I declined to Google the claims about de Santis and the “bunch of other ne’er do wells,” sorry.

(Note; before faustusnotes jumps to one of his usual conclusions, I’m personally probably around P98 or P99 on the “friendly to immigration” axis for the US population, and think King’s views on immigration, to the extent that I now know about them, reflect a great deal of ignorance, perhaps even moral vacuity).

Meanwhile….

The Jew is using the black man as muscle: this is an idea now repeatedly expressed by the president, supported by senior cabinet and congress allies, blasted all over Fox news….

Look we all say dumb things. Maybe my point at the end of 83 about Elizabeth Warren is dumb – it occurs to me now that her opponents in the primaries may want avoid using any arguments already used by Donald Trump, therefore Trump may have actually inoculated her, at least to some degree. My musings on the Kavanaugh stuff were kind of dumb – I tend to think out loud, unfortunately – but then part of my thinking there is that the whole “gang rape” charge just leaves me bewildered, so maybe I at least imparted that idea.

Anyway, if that statement from 89 isn’t just a tad silly, I’d love to know why, because if it’s not, it would suggest that my level of paying attention to and understanding what is going on in my own country is pretty shocking. Can I be that obtuse?

Surprised to find this thread open so late. Well, I might as well say I’ve hit on another suggestion as to how strangers with unconventional values can contribute here.

Wait until pretty late before you post a wall of fresh, hot text. It’s kind of like barging into a cocktail party; you don’t want to do it before everyone’s had a chance to catch up. It sometimes happens that a thread begins to flag and grow cold around 50-70 comments. If you sense that, it won’t hurt anything to poke things up.

What, still open? Might as well give you the neo-Nazi schtick!

Previously in this thread, I indulged in a little speculation as to how I would proceed if it was my job to moderate CT discussions and provide incentives for quality conversation. Now let’s suppose I was in charge around here and had the resources to enforce the policies of my choosing. What would I do if an earnest, well-spoken neo-Nazi came around here and started talking neo-Nazi talk?

Well, I’d almost certainly ban him. But my reasons are not the same as yours.

I wouldn’t ban him for being offensive. The views of neo-Nazis do not offend me; rather they fill me with a righteous sense of mild bemusement and pity. Nor would I worry about giving him a platform; to a first approximation the views of neo-Nazis are ignored or reviled by 100% of people, regardless of where those views may appear. Nor would I concern myself with the tender sensibilities of others in the community; we are all supposed to be grownups here, and if you need to retreat to the Puppy Room because of something someone said on the internet, then the problem is you.

I would ban him because he would fail to be interesting. Consider the burdens under which a neo-Nazi labors:

1. He is stupid. Stupid people are not fascinating.

2. His values are way out of sync with the community. He may even be a psychopath. None of this proves he’s a Bad Person, but having a radically different values stack does tend to make a person less interesting. Incompatible values reduce the scope for rational persuasion, and in this forum we would prefer to persuade and be persuaded, if possible.

Do you want to know what a neo-Nazi thinks? The good news is, you don’t have to ask. You already know. Everybody already knows, and everybody already made up their minds on the subject. A real-live neo-Nazi has nothing to add. Therefore he is boring, therefore he is banned.

“what he says is pretty much exactly what I also said in the comment he thinks he disagrees with,”

Hmm. Let’s see if that’s true.

“What I’m saying is that the Democrats, like any other major-party establishment in a comparable two-party system, are primarily focused on remaining in the good graces of the wealthy and powerful, a goal that directly conflicts with trying to attract a mass voter base on a remotely leftist platform. Accordingly, the reason they move to the right isn’t because they somehow inexplicably have no way of knowing that their voters (including potential voters) would prefer a move to the left — they’re perfectly able to read the polling data that consistently shows clear public support for broad social-democratic redistributionist policies, just as well as anybody else can — rather it’s because even though they know full well that their voters would prefer a move to the left, and moving to the left would give them the best chance of defeating the fascist far right at the ballot box, they still don’t want to do it anyway.”

Nope. Not even close. Go read my comment again.

TM, the intelligent and mature response to failure is to analyse one’s mistakes and learn from them. That’s not really the vibe I’m getting from you and other self-appointed ‘centrists’. Instead there is a lot of handwringing, magical thinking and blaming.
Regarding the latter instead of blaming a European social democrat with a pacifist bent who can’t even vote in the US, why don’t you direct your ire towards, say, black people and millennials, who didn’t turn out to vote sufficiently, or white working class former Obama voters who swing towards Trump. I’m sure that will be a huge help in getting people to vote Democrat next time around.

120 Not trying very hard are you anon? Steve king endorsed a known neonazi candidate for Toronto mayor, saying she was a defender of western civilization, and refused to delete a tweet even after everyone made clear it was from a nazi. The gop refused to support him because of his known leanings. This stuff is all over a simple google search.

Well, first of all, I was specifically looking for something to justify the specific term “neo-Nazi,” as used here:

89 He is supported by a bunch of republican congresspeople who associate with neo nazis, broadcast their views, and use their views in election campaigns – Steve King, the lynch-friendly woman who’s about to go to a runoff and nowheresville, Trump Jr., de Santis, and a bunch of other ne’er do wells are all in on this.

Okay, you have two things to justify your statement now, the tweet and the endorsement. Both I think are pretty weak; he probably didn’t know about the source of the tweet and the Canadian woman isn’t actually a neo-Nazi, although she, unlike King, has actually done something to directly associate herself with neo-Nazis, doing an interview with the Daily Stormer, which she now claims to regret.

Anyway, if you drop the term “neo-Nazi” and replacement it with something like “white nationalist” or “far right,” I wouldn’t be objecting. King has obviously “associated with” some far-right people and ideas, like the Freedom Party of Austria and the Confederate flag.

It seems to me that describing everyone on the right or far right as “neo-Nazi” is exactly the sort of thing I described back in 83, either it’s “exaggeration as ridicule” type trolling or else it’s nutty.

Perhaps you don’t want to see these things so you didn’t really search?

Here for once you actually show some insight. I probably should have searched a little harder. King is even worse than I would have guessed, and it’s not as if I am one to expect great things from American politicians . I admit that you’re absolutely correct, I really don’t want to see or know these things. I was a little bit happier a couple of days ago than I am today. Thanks!

I note you don’t want to engage with the idea that the president represents his party’s ideas. It’s all a little difficult to defend the trolls when they have stopped bothering to hide their true nazi ideals.

It’s difficult to respond to this because of how it’s written. I hope Trump is the “true nazi” troll and not me.

Anyway yes and no. Take Obama. Did everything he say, while he was President, “represent his party’s views?” I’d say not fully, on some things he got a lot of pushback from others in his own party. Trump gets pushback too, but also I think at times they kind of ignore what he says almost completely. How can they not? He says one thing, then he says the opposite, or at least a different thing. He makes stuff up.

Anyway Trump and the Republicans (of course) have generally condemned neo-Nazis and neo-Nazi violence, and the idea that they have “stopped bothering to hide their true nazi ideals” or are “broadcasting [neo-Nazi] views or are “using [neo-Nazi] views in election campaigns” is just absurd and false.

Trump’s equivocation after Charlottesville definitely means something, though. It means that he is foolish and unfeeling and offensive and stubborn and maybe even a touch doddering and confused. It’s on a par with lots of other things he says. That to me is the underlying message that the American public is slowly absorbing and that Democrats used in 2018 and will use in 2020.

Novakant, TM is not a “self-appointed centrist”, he/she nominated him/herself a leftist. I don’t think dismissing everyone who criticizes you or defends the Democrats as a “centrist” is very productive. You could try addressing his point. The Democrats are losing because of rat-fucking, not because of bad policies.

You also really shouldn’t ask people to direct their ire towards black people for not voting, when the swing states that cost Clinton the election (by a very narrow margin) are all engaged in voter suppression. Perhaps when you consider that (and the fact that millenials actually had higher turnout in 2016) you might consider the points TM made about how large Clinton’s voter share was, and take the “intelligent and mature response” to your own mistakes.

Faustusnotes, I understand how comforting it may be for you to believe the opposite, but the truth is that the Democrats are losing because of bad policies, not because of rat-fucking.

Novikant could have been clearer, but I don’t think it’s particularly unclear how their “centrist Democrats should blame the voters” point makes sense. If centrist Democrats really are so confident that their agenda is firmly in the interests of the most downtrodden members of US society, and they’re also confident that only from the rarefied heights of privilege could anybody even think of denying this reality, then the demonstrated fact of electoral apathy among downtrodden potential voters (not just voter suppression, which is a real enough problem itself, but honest and explicit voter apathy) obviously can’t somehow be the fault of excessively privileged leftists — after all, if it really does take such massive oodles of privilege to ever possibly think it might be a good idea to refrain from voting Democratic, then how could such privileged people ever successfully convince any significant bloc of people without that level of privilege to do so anyway?

No, for anybody committed to the self-evident righteousness of the centrist Democratic agenda, or at least the self-evident soundness of the lesser-evil argument for voting Democratic, the only viable explanation for voter apathy among the downtrodden (again, not just voter suppression but voter apathy) is either to blame some form of black-magic propaganda manipulation above and beyond ordinary means of persuasion (viz the astonishing wave of Bircher-level paranoia from liberals these days about sinister Rooskies and their nefarious Facebook ads of doom) or else to blame these potential voters themselves for being too stupid and ignorant to understand how great the Democrats really are for them.

novakant’s 125 isn’t out of place in a thread titled “trolls”. While not remotely engaging with the comment he is ostensibly responding to, he manages to fantasize that I somehow appointed myself ‘centrist’ and am “blaming a European social democrat” for something. Of course I haven’t said anything about European social democrats. What I did is call out the reckless delusion of the likes of WLGR who advocate that the left should help fascists win power for the satisfaction of giving the hated centrists a pair of black eyes.

I know novakant can do better than that. But somehow whenever it comes to Clinton, there seems to be this overwhelming urge to dispense with some facile and borderline sexist platitudes instead of actually considering the facts, trying to understand what happened and, heaven forbid, learn the lessons. Talk of an “intelligent and mature response”. (Thanks FN).

WLGR

It is true that in Hungarian elections Fidesz consistently receives far more votes than any other party. It is not true that in US elections the Republicans consistently receive far more votes than any other party. The two cases are not similar in this respect. The difference requires different explanations.

I’d like to unironically endorse the “eligible voters are too stupid to realize how great Democrats are” narrative. My support for this is that I live in the midwest and know a lot of eligible voters. Also, like, its a well established bit of political science. Voters don’t understand which party stands for what, which party has accomplished what, and which policies which parties support. There’s a reason Trump could campaign on “Democrats will take away Medicare.” Voters are dumb.

I’d like to unironically disclaim the related “therefore Democrats should yell at them” narrative. The left could do with a lot less of that. With a lot less yelling at people in general, regardless of reason.

And I’d like to unironically add- given what the left has to say about privilege and about the status quo of the world in which we live, it would be downright bizarre if oppressed constituencies were as well informed and motivated to vote as the left would hope. Dealing with this hurdle is an inherent part of having a left, or even center left, political party. If you ever look out your window and discover that the oppressed people on who’s behalf you were working are equal to their oppressors in autonomy, education, and personal resources, you would just, you know, declare victory and stop.

As a US citizen, I’m very interested in trollology. You really can’t understand this country without understanding trolls. Murali, I think, gets this wrong in an interesting way:

Not to belabour the point, but there is a difference between “people you cannot engage with” and “trolls”. The former are people who you share nothing in common with (neither normative nor non-normative premises/facts) but for all you know may be sincerely believing what they believe and not just say stuff to trigger/own the libs. The latter say stuff just to get a rise out of people, in this case, those to their left.

I don’t think sincerity is what separates trolls from non-trolls. In fact, I think trollism itself is a sincere belief system — an epistemic approach. Karl Rove was sufficiently self-aware to know he was a troll, but Republicans are correct to associate Trump with a certain kind of authenticity. That said, for both Trump and Rove, trolling is a method.

On some blogs – say, a creationist blog – any sincere participation by me would be trolling. I would be (and, indeed, have been) deliberately provocative by challenging the premises of people who adopt a certain kind of reading of the Bible. Likewise, kidneystones comes here and proposes methods of discerning truth that aren’t acceptable to many people here. He’s a troll.

(What happened to kidneystones/ph? Did he finally get banned?)

For my part, I am interested in exploring the trolls’ epistemic approach. I’m still not sure how this can be done without feeding the trolls, but I think this is the central dilemma of discourse in the US today.

I don’t think we can ignore people such as Rove and Trump, but how can we engage them without legitimatizing them? I find comment sections like this one – especially the bottom of comment sections, when everybody but the trolls have lost interest – a good place to explore this.

steven t johnson @138. I found the links on the Camus page linked by zarka eye-opening:

Also interesting was his weird admixture of politics (e.g. his prolonged silence over deaths of hundreds of thousands under French colonial rule) and metaphysical musings that could lead to praise by everyone from police prefects responsible for “dejudaising” French cities to self-proclaimed Israeli liberals who are in favor of “finishing the work of ’48“.

Just wow! Reminds me of how disturbing it was when I learned that so many of the founders of ecological movement in first half of 20th century were flaming racists (Muir was only one of many). This excellent essay from Alex Cockburn reprinted on Thanksgiving Day in same vein is very worthwhile imo:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/22/romanticisms-revenge-from-vegetarianism-to-nazi-animal-rights

I don’t know how many columns Chait has to write with headlines like “If you’re a conservative you’d probably have supported Jim Crow” or “Trump is a racist and conservative excuses to the contrary are laughable” for people to stop claiming that he blames the left for Trump’s win because he thinks they shouldn’t call the right racist. He was writing about two of those a week for a while. He must think its ok to call the right racist at least some of the time, considering he spends so much time doing it! So presumably you’ve misinterpreted him somewhere.

This is kind of my thing from comment 85. I consider OP’s views on Haidt, and WGLR’s views on Chait, to be so ridiculous that my intuitive move is to declare them trolls who aren’t arguing in good faith. But I’ve been around long enough to know that they’re probably as committed to them as I am to the sun coming up tomorrow.

Please continue to correct/ignore/ban those who are disagreeable and fail to show the desire or skill to engage analytically and charitably: I appreciate “CT: the moderated years”.

But no name calling is required. There are no trolls. Or, we are all trolls: ever eager for more attention and greater regard, ever desirous to feign greater emotional detachment.

politicalfootball

(What happened to kidneystones/ph? Did he finally get banned?)

I don’t recall any announcement to that effect. Sometimes people just stop commenting. I have left no instructions for my death to be announced here, so in that event there’d be no more comments from me and nobody here would ever know why. Maybe the cops caught up with kidneystones? Speculation may be amusing, but it’s otherwise futile.