OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I'm thinking particularly of politics.
For an example... I remember being very struck by this listening to a podcast with Sophie Lewis, a family abolition advocate. Unfortunately the one I'm thinking of as since been taken down, but this kind of conversation. Other examples of the podcast I was originally thinking of have the same kind of high-strung, nervous energy that I was trying to describe. Another way of putting it might be just the way that Robin DiAngelo talks.
Perhaps a linguist would be able to explain this better than I can, but there's a feeling I get somewhere beneath the surface where, say, Steve Turley comes off as wanting to yell. He has the energy or vibe, I suppose, that I associate with having clenched teeth, or wanting to punch someone. I get the opposite feeling from people like Lewis or DiAngelo - not actually crying or having an anxiety attack, no more than Turley is actually laying about himself with a golf club, but a sort of... 10% or 15% concentration of the same ingredient that would, at 100%, lead to those more spectacular breakdowns.
I do think it's gendered - I don't get, for instance, any of the nervous energy I'm talking about from Ezra Klein. He comes off to me as professional and articulate, and I think in general men don't project anxiety as much as women (and when they do, they come off as effeminate and weak and that makes it very hard for them to build a brand). But I think it's fair to say that women are more prominent in the left-wing sphere, and right-wing culture warrior women do more to imitate the angry affect anyway.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Not a right-winger either, but I have noticed a number of subtle speech habits or audio cues between each wing?
You're right that the generic right-wing affect is a kind of aggression or rage. It's not that they're all shouting all the time, because they're not, but they often speak as if they're about to. They tend to have some visible signs of masculinity or working-class LARP (the baseball caps, the beards, etc.) and their visual style is deliberately un-classy (that guy's video is plastered with garish ads, which for some reason I see a lot among right-wing commentators, but lefties seem to avoid).
By contrast I find the generic left-wing affect to be... one of two, it's either an affected sense of superiority (the I-can't-believe-I-have-to-explain-this-to-you style), or it's a kind of fragility? I don't know how to describe it, but if the right-winger feels like they're about to start screaming, the left-winger feels like they're about to start crying. There's a kind of insecurity. In my experience the superior, smug style is more common among men, and the fragile, desperate style is more common among women.
In both cases this is a generalisation and you can find counter-examples on both the right and the left all day.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
This has been relevant to me in professional contexts - I don't want to get into specifics, but I have seen laws drafted on 'conversion therapy' that, if taken literally, would make it illegal for a pastor to pray with someone.
It's not that rare a situation that a religious person feels same-sex attraction, wants to resist that attraction and not act on it, and requests help and comfort from one of their spiritual authorities, or even just from brothers or sisters in the faith. Yet I have seen proposed laws that would criminalise that.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I wonder, looking at some of the comments up-thread, if it's somthing peculiar to Americans? Do the rest of us treat it like fun make-believe to share with the kids, and for some reason it's just Americans in particular who take it extremely literally and obsess about genuinely convincing children with the most convincing illusion possible?
Or is it, for lack of a better way of putting it, about certain personality types, perhaps very detail-oriented or autistic ones? Maybe if you can't read social cues very well, are very literal-minded, and very trusting by nature, you take what's supposed to be make-believe, genuinely believe it, and then feel surprised and betrayed when you realise your mistake? It's possible that people like that are just overrepresented here and on rationalist-adjacent blogs.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
...okay, fair, that made me laugh.
Again, I don't think it's quite the same - the motte-and-bailey is a tactical move you make in an individual argument, whereas this is more like concept creep - but it is close enough that you got me.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
For what it's worth I put that one in because I have heard others talking about it. Personally I cannot remember ever believing that Santa was real, but neither can I remember ever being edgy about it. I can't remember anyone else ever believing that Santa was real either. My recollection of being that age is that of course we all knew it was a game of pretend, and of course we all played along with it for fun.
I may have been very atypical, I don't know. I have never thought about what to tell children about it myself. We'd probably just play the game, but I don't think I'd go to any real effort to hide the truth if a kid was curious.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Got to admit, of all the examples, that is not one I expected to occasion any controversy.
I was also somewhat tempted by "circumcision is child abuse" or "circumcision is surgical mutilation", though I think that's just the noncentral fallacy, rather than concepts being opportunistically expanded and diluted. It's also a proxy with a larger and more comprehensive argument behind it - that in general we seem to have a rule against unnecessary, permanent surgical procedures being done on children without their consent, or when they are unable to consent, and circumcision does not qualify as an exception to that rule.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I've never run into a torrent of the like on Hinge either - I have a few deal-breakers, obnoxious politics are one of them, and after hitting X on a number of people the app seemed to figure out that I don't want to see more of them.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I think that's a bit different - that's presenting a non-central member of a class as if it's the centre. That's something like what I'm talking about, but I have a process in mind.
Moral dilution, maybe?
OliveTapenade
4d ago
This perhaps a bit of a tangent, but for a while I have struggled with the idea of 'conversion therapy'.
At the one end, it's easy to understand a minimalist definition of it, and why treatments that meet that minimum definition should be banned - we're talking about things like using electric shocks to artificially create aversions to certain sexual stimuli.
On the other, I have seen the phrase 'conversion therapy' to refer to any kind of treatment or even just conversation around the idea of a person abstaining from same-sex sexual contact. Some time ago I read a document with some personal stories from two progressive Christians describing their experiences with 'conversion therapy', and in both cases the so-called conversion therapy was just another Christian telling them that they shouldn't have sex with someone of their own gender. That kind of maximalist definition of conversion therapy is clearly absurd, and would ban certain kinds of speech.
I feel as though I have seen this gambit many times and that it ought to have a name. Definitional expansion? You start with something that is obviously bad, and you have a word for the thing that's obviously bad - conversion therapy, violence, racism, genocide, child abuse, and so on. Then you want to draw attention to some issues that might be related to the bad thing, but don't quite fit under the same heading, so you just use the same word, but expand its meaning, hoping that the negative affect the word is already loaded with will come along with you. So meat is murder, or words are violence, or immigration is genocide, or your pastor telling you that homosexuality is bad is conversion therapy, or telling your kids that Santa Claus is real is child abuse. Trivial use of the word eventually weakens its meaning and even attempts to use it in the original context, for the obviously bad thing, fall flat. This is why telling Republicans that they're racist is pointless now.
I can understand the initial impulse, from the activist direction. If you want to expand a cause or mobilise people, trying to hook into their pre-existing moral logic is a good idea. "Meat is murder" is a cliché now and I think it's ineffective, but I can see how it is a shorthand for a serious moral argument: meat-eating depends upon killing living creatures in a way that a vegetarian could argue is morally analogous to murder. But the more you use that tactic, the weaker the words become, and you undermine yourself.
Is there a word for this process? Or at least something to say when you notice somebody doing it?
I'm not as positive about the right or as tribal as some, and I still hold back from identifying as conservative, but I would say that my experiences with online leftists and rightists in the late 2010s and early 2020s had two common themes.
The first is, as you say, the right was usually more accepting. There's that Hanania line - "the left looks for heretics, and right looks for converts" - and it is basically right. My experience of the time was that the left was looking for differences in order to exclude people from their coalition, and the right was looking for similarities in order to include people. If I disagreed with leftists on one issue, they badgered and hectored me, seeking conformity; if I disagreed with rightists on one issue, they'd probably call me an idiot and then laugh and say that we're still basically on the same team. The only one sort-of-exception to this was Trump. I generally ran into people who were happy to say, "okay, fine, you don't like him, we can still hang out and be friends", but at the time I was conscious of traditional conservatives (e.g. David French or Jonah Goldberg, Dispatch types) being intensely vilified, as far as I can tell only for being anti-Trump. But that one specific issue aside, they were more willing to accept diversity of thought. Notably they were fine if you were pro-choice or pro-gun-control or whatever and could work with you on other issues, whereas admitting to being pro-life or pro-gun-rights in a left-wing crowd was just asking for a bullying.
The second is that the right tended to be more honest and direct. This may be just as simple as having a more masculine communicative culture, but I remember being struck very strongly that, if people on the right disagreed with me, they told me that I was wrong and stupid, and we had it out fiercely in an argument, and then we went right back to being friends. We had the fight and then got on with our lives. On the left, there was much less direct aggression, but a lot more passive-aggression and shunning. It wasn't the stereotype of the blue-haired leftist screaming at me - it was more like the way that a stereotypical clique of popular girls shuns people? I felt like the way they handled disagreement was to go "ew" and then disgust and ostracism did the rest. The times we did have debates there was a lot more pre-emptive dismissal.
I don't mean that in general the right was wonderful and the left was terrible. I am stereotyping large crowds. The worst of the left were conformist bees angrily shunning anyone who doesn't fall into line, and the worst of the right were rage-obsessed idiots fed on a constant diet of grifting misrepresentations. What I did in the end, of course, was make friends with the people I liked most in both camps and spent my time with them, though to my great and lasting unhappiness, many of those people, though friends with me, find it impossible to tolerate each other. Even with close friends, though, I look out for certain kinds of failure mode? With people on the right the failure is "oh no, don't mention X, he'll go off on another rant". With people on the left, I can almost see the ideological blinders descend in real time, as the brain turns off and they go back to smug slogans. I'll spare you any examples. Suffice to say I do find, in a quite immediate sense, that the right's sin is anger or rage, and the left's sin is contempt or pride. The right's response to disagreement is to pick a fight. The left's response to disagreement is to pretend that the fight has already happened, you lost, and now all you need to do is fall into line. I find the latter much more annoying than the former.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I am not convinced that right-wingers responding to Klein are today are thinking about, or even necessarily aware of, a Vox column he wrote eleven years ago. I agree that the position in that column is, at best, completely daft, but I also don't think that column is likely to be motivating outside a small, highly atypical tribe of politics-obsessed weirdos. My guess is that @crushedoranges is more correct - it's not this or that column from over a decade ago, it's the way that Klein in general, in his politics and more importantly in his whole affect, symbolises a type of holier-than-thou policy wonk who calmly explains why you're wrong about everything, why your values suck, and why it all needs to be bulldozed.
That would make it very hard for them to take him seriously when he says, "Seriously, we do need to moderate and focus on practical outcomes that will benefit every American". They already think he's a liar.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
It's honestly bizarre to me how much Klein is hated - people here and on the right loathe him, and anyone vaguely left or progressive loathes him, and all he's doing is sitting in the middle politely saying that Trump is bad and maybe Democrats would do better if they were less crazy and built more stuff.
I suppose he's positioned himself somewhere that picks a fight with both the loudest tribe on the right and the loudest tribe on the left.
I thought Klein had it mostly right there, and it reminds me of something Dean said on this site a while back, albeit about fictional characters. Do so-and-so feel like they want people like me in their lives? Not just tolerate me, not be civil or 'inclusive', but genuinely want people like me to be happy? Do they want me around?
It's a piece of advice that I would actually generalise to all people. Be the kind of person who is interested in other people. Be the kind of person who wants other people in his life. As this applies to gender, I'm reminded of Eneasz Brodski writing about the same - be the kind of man who genuinely likes women, and look for the kind of woman who genuinely likes men. That doesn't necessarily mean sexually or romantically (here I like Dean's examples of celibate or homosexual women who clearly care deeply about white men in their lives), but you need to like other people.
Obviously policy matters and this is not the one weird trick that will fix all the Democrats' problems, but insofar as attitude or culture can help, I would advise them to start by trying to like - to genuinely like and appreciate - the kind of people they want to vote for them. You cannot say, or even imply, "vote for me you pond scum". Start by training yourself to like them. It's possible. Openness and affection for people is something that can be practiced.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I could be in an echo chamber. But, it sure feels like the truth.
Surely all echo chambers feel like the truth? That's the function of an echo chamber.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I apologise for obsessing over this, but I can't help finding it strange and interesting. This is not how the "sneak it in through fiction" gambit works. That trick requires two things: firstly, that the story be independently compelling, enough for people who disagree with its conclusions to enjoy it anyway, and secondly, for the conclusion to be sufficiently subtle or concealed for the reader not to notice it. The goal is to slowly initiate the reader into this world, and get them subconsciously accustomed to a logic other than their natural one, so that eventually, without even realising it, the reader notices their view has been shifted.
This is why, for instance, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe isn't that good at it. It's too obvious. If the lion just comes out and says "by the way, I'm Jesus", the gambit fails, because all of our pre-existing beliefs and assumptions around Jesus appear again. The best Narnia books are the ones where the religion is mostly implied. However, The Lord of the Rings is good at it. The mask never drops; Tolkien never tells you that the value-system underlying his whole work is Christianity, or more specifically Catholicism. The Lord of the Rings therefore has a large number of non-Christian fans - most famously atheists, but plenty of lukewarm agnostics, and I believe even a fair share of fans of other religions entirely. Once you know to look you can see the points Tolkien's making, and you might realise that Christ was in there all along, but the presence must be hidden to be effective.
Even LotR isn't a great example because Tolkien did not intend it to preach Christian or Catholic values - he just wrote a book that expressed what he believed was good and true, and because he was a devout Catholic, that was reflected in the work. The point, at any rate, is that it needs to sneak in - even in a work intended to proselytise.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
I didn't say they're analogous to any one modern group. I gave them as an example of a context where there's a case to be made for annihilation.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
If that was the digression I started, then I'm glad some people liked it. I felt very self-indulgent going into that dispute, but I felt some good discussion came out of it.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Sure, the ideal amount of force or destruction is context-dependent. I think of Chinese history as one context, for instance: you can argue that the correct amount of force to use against steppe raiders is to wipe them all out to the last man, woman, and child, as with the Dzungars, but that this is a very inefficient way to handle a rival Chinese state (which is why e.g. Sun Tzu recommends leaving them lines of retreat). On the other hand, wiping out steppe peoples to the last is extremely expensive and only buys you a couple of generations before a new group of nomads moves into the void and then you have to do it again, so a preferable solution might to be strongly disincentivise raids with punitive strikes and alliances with some tribes as proxies (who can do your dirty work for you by punishing tribes who don't play by your rules); but of course those alliances can also end going quite badly and turn into the tribes just extorting tribute from you.
It's always a pretty delicate balance, I think. I don't claim that maximum force is never the merited response - just that it's a very expensive one that is not always to be desired.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Well, he said, "The United States should stop with this half ass shit... If the US decides that you are deserving of its wrath there is no resistance, there is capitulation or everyone dies."
I asked a clarificatory question: "Er, are you advocating that the US should only do nothing or destroy its enemies utterly? And if the standard for utter destruction is astronomically high, doesn't that imply that most of the time the US should do nothing?"
His response to this question was: "Errr... um...errr.... ummm....uuuuur... Correct."
I took that to mean that, yes, his position is as I described it - that the US should either do nothing, or completely annihilate its enemies with nothing in between.
I believe that the point in the Starship Troopers passage, and the metaphor of punishing a baby by cutting its head off, is an effective argument against that position. Sometimes a military should enact a level of destruction that stops somewhere short of "everyone dies" (zoink's words) or "utter destruction" (mine), because the policy goals that a nation might wish to achieve with military action might be, well, something other than complete annihilation of its foes.
Now to his credit zoink seems to back off from his statement and say that he was using bombastic rhetoric. I'm not entirely sure what his actual position is - he rejects the child comparison but concedes he was using extreme rhetoric, but does he concede the actual point of controversy, that is, that some mission profiles call for less than maximum force, and that is desirable for the US military (or any military) to be able to exert controlled force for limited effect? But I stand by what I said as being a reasonable interpretation of what he had said at the time.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Likewise letter #29 (1938) where he "should regret giving any colour to the nation that [he] subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine", or letter #100, where he confesses, "I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust", or the way in letter #71 he speaks of having "a curious sense of reminiscence about any stories of Africa, which always move me deeply" (he was born in South Africa), and so on.
There is a very strong tendency for fans of Tolkien, in the public sphere, to misrepresent what he said and believed, or just ignore it. From more left-wing or progressive sides it tends to be about avoiding the way that he was a devout traditionalist Catholic with everything that implies about things like social policy, sexuality, or gender. From more right-wing sides it tends to be about the way he was equally anti-imperialist and anti-racist.
Perhaps more relevantly to the current discussion, one part of his writing that springs to mind is from The Two Towers, in the confrontation with Saruman. Théoden's response to Saruman's offer of peace runs thus:
...we will have peace, when you and all your works have perished – and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us. You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men’s hearts. You hold out your hand to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor. Cruel and cold! Even if your war on me was just – as it was not, for were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired – even so, what will you say of your torches in Westfold and the children that lie dead there? And they hewed Háma’s body before the gates of the Hornburg, after he was dead. When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you and Orthanc. So much for the House of Eorl. A lesser son of great sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers. Turn elsewhither. But I fear your voice has lost its charm.
I think the aside is significant. Intelligence or technical wisdom does not confer any right to rule another. Even if the other appears, to outside eyes, to be ruling themselves incompetently or in squalor, superior wisdom does not create a right to dominate. No, not even for the other's own good.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
As I indicated in my response to him, it's to illustrate a point in principle. Sure, the US military has often been used badly. The US military's record over the last thirty years is pretty darn embarrassing. The point I am making, citing Heinlein, is that past incompetence notwithstanding, it is both necessary and good for the US military to be able to deploy a wide range of levels of force, as appropriate for many different mission profiles.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I don't see what the word 'Christian' can be other than a group identifier, really. What else is the word for? I suppose my feeling is that the Christian community, in a historical process whose most visible products were the ecumenical creeds, established and defined its own boundaries. Some people around the edges disagree, but I would defend the community's right to do that.
It is correct to say that in itself this process does not establish anything about salvation, or about who's theologically correct, or what have you. At that point we would presumably need to have a discussion about the doctrine of the Trinity itself, or about Christology, or about the basis of Mormon theology, on their own merits, and that's something we can't really get into now.
Thank you for the productive conversation, though, and I wish you all the best for the future!
OliveTapenade
12d ago
The point of the metaphor is to be illustrative of a principle.
To wit, the purpose of military action is to impose your will on another party. It is to threaten, induce, or compel another party to accept your will.
Frequently it is desirable to do so using the least amount of force possible. This is partly because it is frequently preferable to injure the enemy the least amount necessary; for instance, if one conflicts with an enemy with whom one has a trade relationship, one may not want to shatter their economy entirely, or if one is conquering a piece of territory, one probably wants to preserve that territory in as good condition as possible. It is also partly just because of expense on one's own side; if your goal can be achieved with a special forces operation, that is much more affordable than a full-scale invasion. One can get maximum value, so to speak, from one's own military by using the smallest amounts of force necessary to achieve one's goals.
If your military has only two settings, zero and one hundred, you lose a tremendous amount of ability to meaningfully compel one's rivals. If I'm a rival of the United States and I know that the only military force the United States will ever deploy is total nuclear annihilation, then I am free to do anything I like without fear of retaliation as long as I stay below the nuclear death threshold. According to your own words, the nuclear death threshold should be extraordinarily high, so in practice I can do whatever I like. The US has effectively disarmed itself.
It does not seem in American interests, to me, to disarm itself.
Look, the idea that the US has used its military force badly over the last thirty years is extremely defensible and probably common sense at this point. But you are overcorrecting to the point of total absurdity. Has the US military not been used well recently? Certainly. But I don't think the correct response to that is to rule out the possibility of using the US military to do anything.
For what it's worth, I can't imagine the idea of watching a film on a phone or even on a computer monitor. It's practically the only thing I use my television for these days, but I still insist on watching films on a television.
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