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Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.
I have taken a look at the #burgersandfries IRC logs, and here's what a lot of the quotes from Gjoni look like. You can decide for yourself how fair Danskin's characterisation of Gjoni is.
https://archive.md/Ler4O#selection-9.65374-9.210
Eron_G: The sexual harassment thing on twitter is really killing the causes. I request that if you're on twitter, you continue voicing your support for the causes. And feel free to keep pointing out Zoe on hypocrisy. But basically call out anyone that is saying things openly antagonistic on grounds that accomplish nothing. You want to become the levelheaded side of the debate.
When asked the question "What would make you reveal the stuff you're censoring? Is it because you're afraid of legal action or because you're trying to protect people/yourself?" he answers:
Eron_G: The stuff I've censored has been censored to protect Zoe from undue harassment.
When asked the question of if he had any regrets regarding The Zoe Post, he answers:
Eron_G: I wish the harassment thing would die down
When asked a question about Quinn's past experiences with imageboards, he reveals this answer which again seems to confirm that the reason why he dropped the Zoe Post on SomethingAwful was specifically because they liked her.
Eron_G: She was a regular on Something Awful. And they like her in a "we knew her before she was famous" sort of way. Which is why I chose Something Awful as one of the two boards to drop this one.
When asked the question "Thank you for taking the time to sit with us today. My queston is, taking into account everything that has happened, is game journalism changing because of it? Do you see journalists being more careful because of the Zoe incident?" he repeats his anti-harassment stance:
Eron_G: I don't think journalists are just going to drop their friendships because of this. And for now I think the out of left field attack has caused everyone to band together even more closely. Which is again, why the harrassment needs to die down and become more reasoned debate. One of the links in the blogpost has a good indiestatik article on the issue from a year ago
When asked the question: "Thanks for being with us here today Eron. In case this whole debacle is not properly dealt with in the near future, or if the Quinn side wins and yourself and gamers as a whole are seen in a bad light, would you speak out publicly even so?"
Eron_G: I'm still trying to think about how that would go down. I would recommend avoiding a situation where you are seen in a bad light, by shouting down people who spread pointless harassment. Legitimate concerns will listened to if you organize properly. But the smell of people's genitalia is not a legitimate concern.
When asked the question: "Do you /v/ has missed the mark in targeting Zoe rather than the journalists who published work that had a conflict of interest?"
Eron_G: I think /v/ has targeted both. They aren't a hivemind. But, I think they're targetting Zoe the wrong way. And they are focusing too much on sex in the journalism thing. Sex is a tiny ass part of the problem at most.
In response to the question: "Have you talked with IA via skype? Or through some other means? Why not appear on one of his videos to tell people to calm down on the harassment?"
Eron_G: That might be a good idea. I was thinking it would be cool to see the community come together to simultaneously get people to move the discussion in a more positive direction and deter random harassment though. It just seems -- better.
Eron_G: But if IA reaches out to me I might consider a video. So long as we discuss some terms first.
In response to the question: "I've been an indie game developer for a few years now, and while I haven't been particularily involved in the social side of things or with "popular" indie devs like Phill Fish and Zoe Quinn and the like, the things that you revealed to the general public worry me. We both know that Zoe and Phill alike are very popular and fairly well known in certain areas of the online community do carry some weight regardless of their actions in the past so do you believe that your actions and the resulting actions of them both could spell bad news for the indie dev industry, at least in the way of holding a negative connontation? It's popular talk that Zoe Quinns doxing was all fake/staged, do you believe that Phill Fish's is as well?"
Eron_G: I don't think Phil Fish's doxx was faked by Phil Fish. It might have been a real doxx, or it might have been someone using the opportunity to divert suspicion for financially motivated hack.
Eron_G: I I think that the more people harass devs, the worse it's going to get. Like, without anything getting better. It will just discourage people from making games.
In response to "Why are Quinn and her supporters trying to paint all of this as "harassment" even though there's a mountain of evidence saying otherwise?"
Eron_G: Because there's mountains of people calling her "cunt" and "slut" and proliferating nudes of her.
Eron_G: I mean, there's probably a bunch of that right now if you search "zoe quinn" or "thequinnspiracy" on twitter
Personally, I am willing to take what I see in these logs at face value and conclude that Gjoni is advising them that the conversation should be focused on ethics, has explicitly stated he has censored things to prevent Quinn being harassed, and repeatedly states that he doesn't want harassment of Quinn (or anyone else). I'll grant that Gjoni does state in these IRC logs that the initial point of making The Zoe Post was to warn people that Quinn was not a nice person (because of the infidelity and emotional abuse she subjected him to) but I am unaware of any statements where he advocates using the ethics discussion as a front to destroy her.
Furthermore, many of the conversations in burgersandfries and many of the questions people asked Gjoni in that chat log are in fact specifically about the broader topic of ethics in games journalism and do not immediately concern Zoe, which indicates they care about ethics in and of itself.
In response to: "You said that you've gotten accounts from indie devs on how broken the scene is. Can you share any of those, or all they private?"
Eron_G: They are all private and tenuous. And the annoying thing is a lot of them are through other people. Who I do have reason to trust. But it means I have to get those people to try to convince them. Because they won't talk to me directly. They explicitly stated that their reason is fear for their careers.
In response to: "In your opinion, how could the every-day gamer rally around to dismantle the stranglehold that the video game 'press' has in order to create a more honest and transparent industry?"
Eron_G: Demand they rethink their standards of journalistic integrity in light of not only the ways that coverage might become biased, but in light of the effects that those standards can have on the industry they are covering.
In response to: "Thanks for taking my earlier question. Do you think indies themselves could be rallied to lash out against corruption in journalism via panels at gaming conventions, or is this "suicide?" Would you be willing to speak on a panel about this topic?"
Eron_G: hmmm. . .
Eron_G: I hadn't considered the possibility of getting indies themselves to do it.
Eron_G: actually
Eron_G: that gives me a number of things to think on
In response to: "Are there any usernames you think we should check out? Or any websites that might be off the radar but important to the corruption discussion and we wouldn't be expected to find, I.E. old forums used by the corruption clique in the past?"
Eron_G: No. But I do know there are secret invite only forums for devs who have been sufficiently successful.
While the chats are very long (it's thousands and thousands of posts) and you can probably find some objectionable statements in there, it's my perception that that kind of behaviour is certainly not common enough to dismiss #burgersandfries as some kind of coordinated attempt to hide harassment of Zoe Quinn behind a veil of ethics.
Part 1/4
Recently, someone sent me a video about GamerGate made by BreadTuber Ian Danskin in 2021. The video in question is his talk to UC Merced about "digital radicalism" using GamerGate as a case study. Here is the link to the video and here is the link to the transcript of the video, posted on his Tumblr.
It's truly shocking how many errors and misrepresentations there are in it. There are so many I can't and won't cover them all, but I do want to highlight the most notable ones.
Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.
Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.
I'm genuinely not sure where he's getting the idea that Gjoni posted to 4chan. Not even his supposedly "too comprehensive" RationalWiki source detailing the timeline of GamerGate states that Gjoni posted it on 4chan - it just states "Eron Gjoni publishes "The Zoe Post" on Wordpress, accusing Zoe Quinn of infidelity. This time the post is shared to 4chan's boards /b/, /v/, /pol/, and /r9k/." One of his other sources claims Gjoni attempted to sic 4chan on Quinn, but this claim is not cited.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Gamergate
According to The Zoe Post, here Gjoni’s side of it:
“If you take my recommendation to opt against the TL;DR — yes, this is written almost entirely in shitty metaphors and bitter snark. It’s a post about an ex, and the tone reflects its intention as the starting post for forum threads entitled Cringe-Worthy Break Up Stories on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, because I figured it would be best to announce on friendly communities in innocuous ways. Penny Arcade and Something Awful deleted those threads, so now this blog stands alone. I will not take it down, because I know the information is important, even if what I have omitted means you never might."
"And no, I never posted this to 4chan.”
https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/
There is, however, another page on RationalWiki which states that "After he got banned from Penny Arcade and Something Awful, he shared with 4chan's /r9k/ and /pol/ who then decided to call her a "whore" and a "cunt".[1][2] How non-misogynist."
https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Gamergate_claims&diff=1587662&oldid=1587661
RationalWiki posts two sources to "prove" that Eron Gjoni shared with 4chan's /r9k/ and /pol/. However, none of their sources prove at all that Eron Gjoni shared it - others rehosted what was removed from other places as posted by Gjoni, but he himself did not provably rehost on the chans himself.
The tone of these chans is very 4chan, meaning it's not amazing. However, I found no evidence suggesting Gjoni sanctioned or approved of either.
I'd also add that Gjoni has stated repeatedly that the reason why he posted them on Penny Arcade and Something Awful was because they had positive views of Zoe, not because they had a history of harassing her.
"I chose the Penny Arcade forum because all mentions of Zoe there have been positive. I chose the Something Awful forum because Zoe used to visit there a lot before making DQ, and they like her in a "we knew her before she was famous" sort of way."
"She was a regular on Something Awful. And they like her in a "we knew her before she was famous" sort of way. Which is why I chose Something Awful as one of the two boards to drop this one."
https://web.archive.org/web/20141204063637/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BxRecBCIAAEIcOG.png
Then, Danskin goes on to make this bombshell of a claim:
What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.
Now, his source for this is the Boston Magazine hit-piece on Gjoni, entitled "Game of Fear". Here is the link (to an archive page, since I would rather not give clicks):
https://web.archive.org/web/20221008092349/https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2015/04/28/gamergate/
Reading it is incredibly funny, actually. There's not a single piece of evidence presented in the article in favour of these claims (because they're based on interviews), and the tone reeks of exaggeration and editorialising. But I'd think if you're going to try to use Gjoni's own statements to impugn Gjoni, I'd think looking at Gjoni's actual statements would be a better source for that instead of accounts of his statements that are filtered through a lens of journalistic bias.
Here's Gjoni's two-part commentary on the Boston Magazine article, entitled "What The Hell Is Journalism Even". As far as I can tell, it is still unfinished to this date, but what exists seems to demonstrate a clear pattern of falsehood and misrepresentation in the Boston Magazine article.
https://antinegationism.tumblr.com/post/117661182576/what-the-hell-is-journalism-even-part-1
https://antinegationism.tumblr.com/post/117729753311/what-is-journalism-even-part-2-zachary-jasons
Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest.
Incorrect. This is a really big error. Here's what Gjoni actually says the "typo" is in his edit to the Zoe Post:
"There was a typo up for a while that made it seem like Zoe and I were on break between March and June. This has apparently led some people to infer that her infidelity with Nathan Grayson began in early March. I want to clarify that I have no reason to believe or evidence to imply she was sleeping with him prior to late March or early April (though I believe they’d been friends for a while before that). This typo has since been corrected to make it clear we were on break between May and June. To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature."
https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/
So as you can see here, Gjoni was not correcting a section in the Zoe Post which stated that she slept with Nathan Grayson for a good review of Depression Quest. He was correcting a typo which made it seem like they were on break between March and June instead of May and June.
In fact, he literally couldn't have retracted the statement that she slept with Nathan Grayson for a good review of Depression Quest because not a single sentence in The Zoe Post ever states that in the first place. Even when you go back to the earliest archive.org snapshot of the Zoe Post (all the way back in 16 Aug 2014), no such claim is made.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140816104303/https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/
The only mention of Depression Quest he made is contained within his later edit identifying the typo, and the purpose of him mentioning it was to caution people to be careful when making claims about the conflict of interest.
Even Nathan Grayson himself admitted that Gjoni did not state in his post that Quinn traded sex for reviews.
Given the centrality of The Zoe Post to the whole thing, this mistake is incredibly damning. It establishes that Danskin hasn't even read the Zoe Post. You would think that someone speaking at UC Merced about the Quinnspiracy and Gamergate would have at least read one of the Quinnspiracy's central documents, but this seems to imply that he's simply obtained his information from predictably slanted secondary sources.
Here's a link to Part 2 of this post, in case it gets buried under the replies.
What music has TheMotte been enjoying lately?
For my part, here is a list of albums I've been frequenting (listed in alphabetical order, not by preference). It's not exhaustive and I've restricted my pick to an album per artist, to prevent myself from filling it up with all the same people.
EDIT: added more
Agreed, I don't believe the charitable interpretation is warranted at all and the Voice's powers will in reality almost certainly be expanded far beyond the immediately apparent scope of the wording.
I do think it's useful to have arguments against both the motte and bailey, because it's very easy for defenders of the policy to rely on the ambiguity of the proposed amendment to argue "It clearly just pertains to cases where the matter specifically concerns Indigenous people". I consider any such idea to be based on a wilful and motivated ignorance, given the sheer pervasiveness of "indigenising" public policy here in Australia, but having an argument against that interpretation of the Voice's scope shows that the proposal is inherently objectionable on such a fundamental level that even if you interpret its provisions in the most unobjectionable manner possible, there are still glaring issues to be found.
I'm reading the Monash University article, and it's incredible just how terrible a lot of the argumentation is:
Myth 4
It will give First Nations peoples special rights.
The Constitutional Expert Group comprising nine experts (including former High Court judge Kenneth Hayne) and chaired by the Commonwealth Attorney-General has advised that a First Nations Voice will not give First Nations peoples special rights. All Australians have the right to make representations to Parliament, which is guaranteed by the constitutional Implied Freedom of Political Communication. The First Nations Voice is simply a permanent one.
This is puzzling, to say the least. Advocating for a piece of legislation, then arguing that the proposed piece of legislation "will not give First Nations peoples any special rights" and won't grant them the ability to do anything regular Australians already couldn't is incredibly strange and contradictory. Stating that it creates no special preference for the Indigenous is basically stating that the amendment is useless, and if so, then why advocate for it? Clearly "permanency" is a special right granted to Indigenous people here (and also there's the fact that the Voice will be explicitly and specifically enshrined in the Constitution on the basis that Indigenous people have a special status as the "first peoples", which at the very least gives the Voice's representations a de facto legitimacy that those made by other Australians will not).
Then there's this:
Myth 9
It offends the notion of equality that underpins the Constitution and our democracy.
Our Constitution does not protect equality, and actively allows for racially discriminatory laws by virtue of s 51 (xxvi) (the race power).
Oh, thank God.
Further, the race power has only ever been used to make laws for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, laws that are not required to be beneficial laws.
So we actively permit racial discrimination, and that law has only ever been used to benefit one ethnic group over others. I somehow do not feel comforted by this fact.
Amending the Constitution to provide First Nations peoples with a Voice to Parliament does not offend notions of equality; rather, it is acknowledging the finding of the High Court in Mabo v Queensland (No. 2) that “Their dispossession underwrote the development of the nation”.
"Amending the Constitution to provide First Nations peoples with a Voice to Parliament does not offend notions of equality; rather, it just gives an implied special status to them based on a permanent ethnic claim over land."
It's really hard not to be flippant here because of just how slippery and condescending all the argumentation is. If you're going to support something, at the very least fully stand behind the principles that underly your preferred policies, instead of constantly hedging and denying any of the more contentious implications of these policy decisions in order to make your positions seem more agreeable than they really are.
The other provision is 'relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples', which given that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are in fact Australian citizens and are affected by literally everything in Australian politics from taxes to trade, one can easily see how this provision means 'everything'.
Even if you try to charitably represent it by applying it only to matters that specifically relate to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, this still poses a problem. For example, in zero-sum situations such as racial reparations where a benefit for the Indigenous also entails causing disadvantage for other Australians, that can still be considered to be a "matter relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples" and the Voice will have the ability to "make representations" on that matter.
To try and claim, as Albanese does, that the Indigenous should have a "say" on matters that pertain to them ignores that it's often the case that these policies do not only have an effect on Indigenous people, but also have consequences for your average citizen. And when looked at through this lens, any such attempt to give the Indigenous preferential sway over these kinds of decisions becomes less and less justifiable.
Year of the Graves
I am somehow just getting to this now and from what I'm seeing, this seems to be one of the biggest culture war clusterfucks that has flown mostly under my radar. It started when media began reporting that the graves of 251 children (later 200) had been found near the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
Now, my understanding is that the evidence for the Kamloops graves are in fact very scant. The basis for the claim that 251 unmarked graves were found at Kamloops is based on the fact that ground penetrating radar or GPR identified irregularities in the ground near the Kamloops residential school that they simply interpreted as unmarked graves. GPR, however, can really only show disruptions in soil and sediment, and no excavations of the supposed graves have been done yet. In other words, nobody knows if it even is a burial site, let alone a children's grave.
At the Kamloops site, a juvenile tooth and a rib was cited as evidence of there being an actual grave underneath. Sarah Beaulieu, the person doing the GPR work, stated in her press conference that the tooth and rib were discovered in the late 90s and early 2000s. The tooth was discovered in an excavation by Simon Fraser University, and the rib was supposedly found in the area by a tourist and brought to the museum. However, when people reached out to Simon Fraser University, they replied that the juvenile tooth was in fact verified to be not human. Further attempts to get additional information about the tooth resulted in the university saying that the Kamloops legal team advised them not to respond to any queries from the public about the unmarked graves.
To be honest, there's been a serious lack of transparency surrounding this whole thing which really makes me think that a lot of the findings are suspect. Forget excavations, I am not aware of there being any kind of detailed writeup of the evidence surrounding the GPR findings, or any release of the work on the tooth and the rib bone. Pretty much nothing exists for the public to chew on, apart from a few very rigour-less media releases from the Kamloops band and a press conference from Beaulieu. Oh, and Indigenous "knowing", of course.
I want to properly cement just how inconclusive GPR findings are. In Sarah Beaulieu's press conference, when questioned about if the 215 number was still accurate, Beaulieu states that initially the estimate was 215 graves which had later been revised down to 200 because after the survey was done she became aware of previous excavations that had been done in the area that overlapped with her survey area. So if she can't with confidence distinguish between a burial and excavation work, that seems to suggest that GPR can't really tell you much.
Furthermore, there have been other attempts to find graves with GPR. For example, there was an attempt to find unmarked graves at the former Camsell hospital, where Indigenous people with tuberculosis were treated for decades. Some believed former patients may have been buried on the grounds. As the CBC article on the topic notes: "Thirteen spots flagged by ground-penetrating radar were dug up earlier this summer. Over the past two days another 21 such anomalies were uncovered but only found debris." They eventually wrapped up the search having found nothing. In other words, things that raise alarm according to GPR can actually be any number of other things.
It is also useful to note that most of what used to be the Kamloops residential school orchard has already been excavated prior to the new GPR findings, over 30% of the site has been excavated for various construction and research purposes and no graves were discovered. Note, these excavations started after accusations of the orchard being used to hide graves begun. As this article notes, with more than 30% of the orchard already excavated, is it probable that 200 burials were just missed by previous operations that Beaulieu is just finding now?
Additionally, the survey site Beaulieu was operating in is very disturbed by human activity, casting even more doubt on the idea that what she's seeing are graves. "Several of the 200 “probable burials” overlap with a utilities trench dug in 1998, and still other “probable burials” follow the route of old roads or correlate suggestively with the pattern of previous plantings, furrows and underground sewage disposal beds". I don't know for sure if that can create the GPR findings here, but given the fact that the excavation of multiple anomalies at Camsell hospital yielded no graves, other hypotheses should be considered.
So we basically have nothing here. But the Kamloops Band made a media release on 27 May 2021 stating that there was "confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School". Media reports on it in the very same way, and Canada goes crazy over this. Canadians desecrate church after church, something which even Indigenous leaders told them to stop doing.
While there are other "discoveries" of "unmarked graves" elsewhere near other residential schools which have been revealed after Kamloops, they seem to be similarly questionable. The other very publicised one is by the Cowessess First Nation, disclosing the "discovery" of 751 unmarked graves at a cemetery near the former Marieval Indian Residential School.
This one, however, is even more questionable than the Kamloops one. What makes this especially incredible is that this was indeed a graveyard, but it was not an unmarked grave. The discovery was made at a community cemetery where basically everyone was buried, apparently including non-First Nations people. And the reason why they found "751 unmarked graves" was because many of the graveyard's crosses and headstones were simply taken down, not because they were clandestinely buried. According to the register of baptisms, marriages and burials from 1885 to 1933, there are graves of adults as well as preschool-age children as well as those who died at birth. It is at the moment unclear how many of the graves are actually from the residential school. Given that this was a community cemetery, there are almost certainly some, but the inflated numbers being quoted now are almost certainly wrong. "Some people died at a school and were buried at a community graveyard" isn't nearly as dramatic as "hundreds of unmarked graves" is.
The article notes that there are some survey flags dotting areas outside the cemetery, however this again runs into the very same problem that the site has not been excavated and has simply been assumed through GPR sensing disturbances in the soil.
Probably the most interesting one so far is the Star Blanket Cree's discovery of 2,000 anomalies near the Lebret Indian Residential School, and their accompanying find of a jawbone. Again, these were found using GPR, which carries all the previous caveats. Sheldon Poitras, the ground search lead for the investigation, scoped the findings appropriately, stating "Does that mean there’s 2,000 unmarked graves? We don’t think so. GPR can’t definitively say that’s something. It could be a stone under the ground, it could be a clump of clay, it could be a piece of wood or it could be something. We don’t know yet." So the people doing the work here are telling people not to jump to conclusions based on GPR alone.
As to the jawbone finding, we know almost nothing at all about it. Supposedly it was found near a gopher hole. However, as this article states "the provenance of ex situ bones – objects found away from their original site and the valuable context this provides – should always be treated with caution. A bone fragment could have been dug up where it was found or it could have been carried there from elsewhere, such as the community’s cemetery, by a gopher or other animal, or even deposited by a mischievous person". And even if this is a gravesite, one can't simply assume that it is a residential school gravesite. They could be older Indigenous gravesites unrelated to the residential school, for example, and only excavation can tell you what it is.
I'm not going to make predictions at this point, but the reaction of people has been disproportionate considering the at best inconclusive evidence thus far, and anyone who actually cares about accuracy runs into this problem: If you question the findings on the basis of the weakness of the evidence, you're basically tantamount to a Holocaust denier. If you ask for excavation and confirmation, you're just asking for Indigenous people to be retraumatised. The only non-racist thing to do is to nod your head and demonstrate a sufficient amount of piety.
Also, I have no stake in this. I'm not Canadian, and as a result I have no impetus to avoid accounting for any Canadian history. And if Canadians want to destroy their country in paroxysms of guilt and shame, I certainly won't stop them. But this seems insane.
To add to your objections: I've read this Guardian article before and it is citing Paul Dolan, who has made claims that have already been extensively debunked elsewhere. Even Vox, one of the most left-leaning outlets available, called it out as misinformation. You are pretty much correct to doubt the entirety of the article.
I want to first deal with the portions of the Guardian article that were stripped out just as an exhibition of the quality of research you can expect from Dolan. The offending sections are: "Married people are happier than other population subgroups, but only when their spouse is in the room when they’re asked how happy they are. When the spouse is not present: fucking miserable." And: "The study found that levels of happiness reported by those who were married was higher than the unmarried, but only when their spouse was in the room; unmarried individuals reported lower levels of misery than married individuals who were asked when their spouse was not present." You can see both of these claims made in an archive of the page on 25 May 2019 here.
There are a few reasons why this claim is bad, but the main thing which destroyed his argument was pointed out by economist Gray Kimbrough, who noticed that the source which Dolan was drawing from actually does not actually include any of this information. The error Dolan made was to interpret the categories "Married - spouse present" as "spouse is in the room" and "Married - spouse absent" as "spouse is not in the room". In reality, what "spouse absent" refers to is married people whose partner is not living in their household. So even assuming that the difference is statistically significant (despite the fact that no such statistical analysis is conducted), all Dolan actually found was that married people whose spouses don't live with them are unhappier than married people whose spouses live with them. What's even funnier is that the data also shows slightly higher levels of happiness in the "married, spouse not present" category than for the never married or divorced categories, which casts even further doubt on his claim. This is an honestly astonishing error that should have never been made, and it casts quite a bit of doubt on Dolan's competency.
When Dolan was made aware of this, he retracted the statement, and so did the media outlets that published it (like the Guardian). However, the other claims made in the Guardian that weren't retracted are just about as tendentious and questionable, as Kimbrough notes in a follow-up thread. He got a copy of Dolan's book, and looked through it to see his sources. And the errors are truly legion.
To start, the claim that still appears in the current version of the Guardian article that married women die sooner than if they never married apparently is not supported at all in Dolan's book. Furthermore, the idea in the article that women's health is "unaffected" by marriage (which already contradicts the idea that women die sooner) is also not supported. In the book, Dolan cites articles claiming that they prove that there "really do not appear to be any health-related reasons to marry if you are a woman", but Kimbrough demonstrates that the sources he uses do not actually support this claim - they cite other studies stating that the health benefits that accrue to women from marriage are less than those that accrue to men, but they do not support the idea that marriage is void of health benefits for women. Furthermore, there are abundant reasons to doubt this weaker claim that marriage benefits men's health more than women's health, but I'll get to that later.
Next, Kimbrough attacks the claim that the healthiest and happiest population subgroup are women who never married or had children. He states: "The ATUS lacks data on ever having children, but I can compare never/ever married with and without children in the household. This doesn’t back up his claim." As evidence, he posts a table that features ATUS data. This table presents mean happiness broken down by sex, marital status and childlessness (a 0-6 scale is used here). Never married men without kids have a score of 4.1, never married men with kids have a score of 4.2, and married men, kids or without, have a score of 4.3. Never married women without kids have a score of 4.2, and every other category of women (never married women with kids, as well as married women, kids or without) has a score of 4.4. Kimbrough then posts more ATUS data displaying happiness over the life course by gender and marital status, which shows that if anything married men and women both are slightly more happy than their unmarried counterparts, and that married men and women's "happiness levels" look fairly similar. He concludes that "[T]here does not appear to be evidence supporting any of the dramatic claims in the press. While one has been retracted, I believe that all of them should be retracted and corrected."
That's Kimbrough's criticism covered. Now, to tackle the weaker claim that "the health benefits of marriage unequally accrue to men and women", I'd like to note that the findings on that certainly do not all point in one direction, and furthermore there are often problems when trying to establish causation here. Is it that marriage grants benefits to health, or is it the case that people with good health are more likely to get married? Could the difference found between men and women be partially explained by a selection effect? Trying to prove causation is not a trivial task, and in order to actually assess this, you'd ideally need longitudinal data. Many of the studies about the health effects of marriage are simply not methodologically suited to prove that the improved health is caused by marriage alone.
For example, I have tracked down one of the studies shown in Kimbrough's screenshot of the articles which Dolan cites, the ones that try to argue that men get more health benefits from marriage than women. The study in question I've looked at is Litwak and Messeri (1989), which uses "information on age, gender, race, and marital status of decedents 25 years or older at time of death who died from one of the 176 rated causes in 1980".
The authors attempt to estimate the effect of marital status on mortality, stating "Effects of social supports were estimated from ratios of single to married mortality rates for each rated cause of death broken down by age-gender-race groupings of decedents. ... Denominators for the mortality rates were based on 1980 United States census counts for single and married persons in each of the corresponding age-by-gender-by-race sub-groups. Mortality ratios greater than 1 indicate that marriage conferred protection. Ratios about 1 indicate that marriage confers little benefit, while ratios less than one indicate that married individuals were more likely to die from a specific cause." They find ratios greater than 1 for both men and women, indicating mortality is lower among married men and women. They also find that mortality ratios are higher for men.
Now, this doesn't seem like a particularly compelling methodology. If you are just seeing how the mortality rates for a given year differ between the married and unmarried, it seems clear to me that this methodology does not really allow you to distinguish between an actual effect of marriage on mortality vs. selection effects. The authors also do acknowledge this limitation, stating that "Other problems with these data are the lack of a measure of health status and limited socioeconomic measures. Thus our data may reflect a spurious effect of an unmeasured antecedent cause such as poor health. Poor health might lessen chances of marriage and increase mortality at the same time". While I would say it's likely that marriage does have some genuine effect, the difficulty of distinguishing between the two means that their conclusion (that the mortality-reducing benefits of marriage are greater for men than women) ends up being suspect. And while the authors note that some studies controlling for health status do still find an effect of marital status on mortality, this runs into the opposite problem that you might then be factoring out legitimate health effects of marriage which then have an impact on mortality. Isolating the effect of marriage using this data isn’t easy.
As an aside, even if I assume that the health benefits of marriage are greater for men than for women, this might not be because marriage privileges men, but because men are less likely to be able to find social supports outside of the marital unit and thus depend more on the social supports offered by marriage. In other words, it need not be reflective of married male privilege, instead it could be showing unmarried male disadvantage. Divorces being mostly instigated by women might not be because marriage is bad for them, but because they are less emotionally dependent on it and are thus less committed to the union. Also, being less invested offers you superior negotiating power. So even if we agree on that finding, there need not necessarily be agreement on what it implies.
There's so much more I could be writing about this, but in short, this Guardian article is terrible.
EDIT: added more
I'm going to say something perhaps inflammatory: If I had a daughter and that happened, yes, I would feel some sympathy for the guy who propositioned her, and I would expect her to understand that. In order to explain my position, I'm going to relay a personal experience of mine.
Many guys tend to not have the experience of being approached since they are the ones typically expected to initiate and take on all risk. However, I'm a guy who's had an experience of being propositioned by another guy, and though granted his advance was less direct than "do you want to be FWB" it was done by a random dude in a park who I had never met before (and I was admittedly a bit flustered by it and politely rejected him). My initial reaction wasn't really "What an asshole, fuck that guy", instead it was worry about the fact that perhaps I could've cushioned the blow of rejection a little further. My primary emotion was in fact a feeling of sympathy (and a bit of confusion about how he figured out my orientation on sight alone).
I did not think I should be offended simply because he suggested to me something we might both enjoy, and I did not envy his position. Being the one who initiates is terrifying, opens you up to the inherent humiliation of rejection and could end up with you on the receiving end of a claim of harassment. I felt an obligation to respect that. And while I did tell some people I knew about what happened (which I felt comfortable doing because we definitely did not hang out in the same social circles and in fact would likely never see each other again), I never provided any identifying information that would have reasonably allowed anyone even in his social circles to know who he was off my account alone. I certainly did not go blabbering about how terrible he was and in fact made it a point to stress to people I told that I did not think of him as a creep.
I would expect from any daughter of mine the same conduct I expect from myself. No amount of "but physical strength differences, though" works here, because I am unusually small and thin (I barely weigh 100 pounds) and the guy propositioning me was much larger. Furthermore, any claim that the consequences of unwanted sex for women is greater than it is for me also has to contend with the fact that women now have a huge amount of control over their sexuality even after the act has occurred as they have access to things like the morning after pill. As an aside, it is easier for women to escape the consequences of PIV sex than it is for men (whose financial obligations will be enforced even if the sex was against his will).
And yes, women have a different instinctual reaction to these things than men do because of the historic reproductive risks and costs of sex for women which no longer holds up under modernity. Humans are full of evolutionary baggage that isn't necessarily rational under modern circumstances. However, I expect women to deal with their feelings in a way that doesn't blow back on others who have according to all objective criteria done nothing wrong. Managing your emotions and not capriciously doing things that would cause others harm simply for offending your sensibilities is part and parcel of mature behaviour.
If I'd found out my hypothetical daughter had gone and told people about it, and found out it had blown back on the guy to the point he was being treated like a predator, I would definitely at least be telling her that her actions matter, and that she should have thought twice before badmouthing him in a social group where it could result in actual consequences for him.
EDIT: added more
What are the responses we offer to women? Outlawing gender based discrimination in pay? That seems... fine to me?
One has to not be paying attention in order to believe that that is the only response offered to women. Governments around the world have devoted significant amounts of resources towards rectifying the supposedly problematic gender pay gap and resolving women's underrepresentation in STEM and leadership roles.
For example, in my country (Australia):
Noting that the gender pay gap remained significant, the government announced a $1.9 billion package to improve women’s economic security. The sum takes in $1.7 billion over five years for increased childcare subsidies, as well as $25.7 million to help more women pursue careers in science, engineering and maths.
The package also includes $38.3 million to fund projects that assist women into leadership roles.
Some quotes from the relevant budget statement:
The Government’s Boosting Female Founders Initiative provides co-funded grants to majority women-owned and led start-ups, and facilitates access to expert mentoring and advice. The Initiative, announced in the 2018 and further expanded in the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statements, provides $52.2 million in competitive grant funding plus $1.8 million in mentoring support. The program commenced in 2020, with round one of the Initiative providing approximately $11.9 million in grant funding to 51 successful applicants. Round two closed on 22 April 2021.
And:
To further grow the pool of women in STEM, the Government is investing $42.4 million over seven years to support more than 230 women to pursue Higher Level STEM Qualifications. These scholarships will be provided in partnership with industry, to build job-ready experience, networks and the cross-cutting capabilities to succeed in modern STEM careers. This program will complement the Women in STEM Cadetship and Advanced Apprenticeships Program announced in the 2020-21 Budget, which targets women to enter industry-relevant, pre-bachelor study.
And:
The Australian Government is committed to supporting more women into leadership positions and to further closing the gender pay gap. The Government is providing $38.3 million over five years to expand the successful Women’s Leadership and Development Program. This builds on the $47.9 million expansion to the Program announced as part of the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statement. This program funds projects such as Women Building Australia run by Master Builders Australia to support more women into building and construction. These initiatives form part of the Government’s response to increasing gender equality, extending leadership and economic participation opportunities for Australian women, and building a safer, more respectful culture.
https://archive.budget.gov.au/2021-22/womens-statement/download/womens_budget_statement_2021-22.pdf
That's from the 2021-22 budget statement, what has Australia been doing in 2022-23? Let's have a look:
Further measures in the Budget are focused on helping women into higher-paying and traditionally male-dominated industries. To boost the number of women in trades, the Government is investing $38.6 million over 4 years from 2022‑23. Women who commence in higher paying trade occupations on the Australian Apprenticeship Priority List will be provided additional supports, such as mentoring and wraparound services.
And:
The Morrison Government is making a further investment, building on the success of existing initiatives to improve leadership outcomes for women, by providing an additional $18.2 million for the Women’s Leadership and Development Program.
This includes $9 million from 2023-24 to 2025-26 to expand the successful Future Female Entrepreneurs program to develop and grow women’s core entrepreneurial skills. Funding will continue the successful Academy for Enterprising Girls (10-18 year olds) and the Accelerator for Enterprising Women, expanding it to include all women aged 18+, as well as adding a new Senior Enterprising Women program.
To support women facing unique barriers to leadership and employment, the Government is also investing $9.4 million to expand the Future Women’s Jobs Academy and to support gender balanced boards.
Governments are not the only ones who have done this. Blackrock, the world's largest asset manager, is explicitly using their voting power as shareholders to force gender diversity in boards of directors.
We voted against one or more directors at over 3,400 companies globally. Corporate governance concerns - including lack of board independence, insufficient diversity, and executive compensation - prompted most of the votes against directors' elections," BIS stated."
According to BlackRock, insufficient board gender diversity was the main reason for voting against a director in the Americas region, where it voted against 1,554 directors at 975 companies - or 61% of the votes that the firm cast against directors in the region - for board gender diversity-related reasons.
When women complain, they receive commiseration, help and often outright preferencing. I can't say that I see the same thing occurring when men complain.
the effect of online dating is already disastrous and we've only began to feel it, and that you all are intent on dodging, downplaying and misrepresenting the core issue.
I've been wanting to write an effortpost about how TheMotte (or at least, a significant subset of it) falls into many of the same traps that the mainstream does when talking about sex relations, but haven't really gotten around to it and also realise that post is inevitably going to draw an utterly exhausting flood of dismissive rhetoric and criticism.
Even in heterodox communities like this one there's still quite a bit of dodging and downplaying when it comes to many topics surrounding sex relations, specifically those topics that relate to men's issues and especially those with an element to them that doesn't make women look fantastic. It's a thing that's very emotionally charged and controversial even for a community whose purpose is to discuss topics outside of the Overton window, and bringing up these topics seems to elicit from people quite a bit of pearl-clutching and emotional appeal and fervent attempts to justify their knee-jerk reactions to things they'd rather not confront. Hell, I've seen more pushback here on this than HBD. (Meanwhile in the broader public sphere female claims of victimisation are constantly treated as a pressing social issue even when the core claim is incredibly questionable.)
Really, the discomfort ultimately just seems to come down to something deeper and much more instinctual: "Men who complain about their situation as men (and especially those who do so at the expense of those who possess a greater social claim to protection, like women) are inherently low status". In the case of the dating market, that disgust is further amplified by the stigma that already attaches to sexually unsuccessful males. And my posting and engagement with people on the topic has slowed partially because it's really started to hit home that the asymmetry in discourse surrounding sex relations might be unfixable.
EDIT: clarity
Honestly, I have no clue how people older than me keep up with the pace at which this is progressing - I already seem to be an old man using old language despite the fact that I am in the age range of Gen Z. I simply haven't picked up on many of their neologisms, and even with those I do understand, I have real difficulty using them in a seemingly natural way (and often come off incredibly awkwardly).
I think we can see all around us many of the failure modes of trusting these people with the governance of our country and the production of our cultural narratives. They are fundamentally unserious people, addicted to attention and applause, attracted to head-in-the-clouds utopian nonsense because they never fully grew out of a sort of perpetual narcissistic adolescence, convinced that the key to solving hard problems is just telling a really good lie and crafting a feel-good narrative so aesthetically-pleasing that it can’t help but manifest into reality. This is a spot-on description of the personalities of many of the theatre people I know, and I wouldn’t trust them to organize a bake sale, let alone run a country.
I've spent a not-insignificant amount of time around "music people", and for the most part they are much the same. I happen to be one myself, but don't feel particularly "attacked" because I don't feel it describes me well - a generalisation doesn't necessarily apply to every individual member of a group.
The first problem is that many of these people don't look at societies as large emergent entities which are governed and shaped by forces that are outside of anything we would consider as "humanistic values" (example: Scott's Moloch), rather they tend to see societies as being almost solely a product of ideology. When that is the primary lens through which you view things, you end up adopting this incredibly airy-fairy idea that you can shape society into anything you want and IF ONLY you could get enough people on board we could live on Heaven On Earth. Most "artsy people" really don't tend to develop very complex thinking about societies and why they operate the way they do, and it doesn't matter how much history or anthropology or evolutionary theory or whatever they learn, most of them in practice tend to remain stuck in this mindset.
The second problem is that their cognition is in large part governed by aesthetics (unsurprisingly so, perhaps). Their political thinking and what they like/dislike are basically determined by what resonates with them on the most aesthetic and superficial of levels, and a huge amount of their political criticisms amount to implying that their opponents' optics are bad and distasteful to them instead of actually engaging with the meat of the arguments being made. Again, knowledge doesn't seem to change this because it's a fundamental, deeper problem with their mindset and personality that's independent of how much one knows.
These two things seem to predispose them to adopting revolutionary, utopian leftist ideologies (e.g. communism) and clinging hard to these beliefs even when they observably break apart on contact with reality.
Just started Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962.
It's an account of China's Great Leap Forward. Needless to say, it is incredibly depressing.
However, given that race is a social construct
This is such an irritating motte-and-bailey. The motte is "Discrete racial categories are imposed classifications since race is in reality a continuous phenomenon", and the bailey is "Therefore race is not a meaningful biological phenomenon and should not be thought of as such". The motte is trivially true if a bit uninsightful. The bailey is utterly ridiculous.
This is spurious reasoning and it's an argument that requires inferring causation based on correlation alone. Accenture tries to protect themselves from this criticism by employing motte-and-bailey, stating "it is important to note that research can only establish correlations, not causations, between the two" while very clearly attempting to push the reader towards the conclusion that diversity is good for companies. Even if the studies they're seeing aren't fucked with and there isn't a massive file drawer effect going on (and I would probably wager there is) there are plenty of ways a positive correlation between performance and diversity could be seen even if the promotion of diversity has a negative effect.
For example, it's possible that the companies that already have a large advantage can afford to implement bullshit like diversity initiatives. They can make all sorts of profitability-hurting decisions without actually impacting their position relative to other companies all too much, whereas other companies not in the same position would get selected out if they did that. One of the big examples of a hegemonic company caving to internal pressures and going nuts on the DEI shit is Disney. Its position is so strong that it can do such things like incessantly arrange internal DEI initiatives (one of which they literally got Ibram X. Kendi in for), and take strong public stands on controversial legislation which immensely hurts their public image but in the grand scheme of things doesn't make too large of a dent. Additionally, if you wanted to pressure companies to endorse your social goals you would probably mostly target dominant players since they have the most clout to push the agenda through. So the more successful a company is, the more attempts at ideological capture it will be subject to.
All this then becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. For instance, if many large institutional investors become "woke" and attempt to use their influence as a shareholder to remodel the internal leadership of the companies they invest in to be more diverse, this is going to strengthen that relationship even further. This is, in fact, exactly what the world's largest asset manager is doing. "According to BlackRock, insufficient board gender diversity was the main reason for voting against a director in the Americas region, where it voted against 1,554 directors at 975 companies - or 61% of the votes that the firm cast against directors in the region - for board gender diversity-related reasons." This creates a situation where companies that are getting funding (which would also be the companies with the most promising prospects) are the companies that are facing most pressure to be woke.
There are many more plausible explanations you could add that don’t amount to “diversity is good for your bottom line” (some of which have already been covered below, such as urban-rural divides possibly affecting the results). In short, even if the relationship detailed here is real I would say it is very premature to come to the conclusion that this means diversity is beneficial. Rather, it is far more likely that profitability creates the conditions that lead to DEI and not the other way around.
EDIT: added more
This isn't really an answer to your question, but I've been trying to do this more as well, and in real time online communication too (voice-chat). It's surprisingly difficult and keeps you on your toes quite a bit because of a few reasons: (1) You don't have any time at all to think about what you want to say. (2) The conversation can get schizophrenically dragged in a huge number of directions. (3) There is a lot of very superficially convincing woke leftist rhetoric to combat. This can make you really scramble to keep up, especially if you get dragged onto territory you weren't expecting to have to defend and you immediately have to recall all arguments and evidence that refute their talking points on the spot while trying to word it in a way that makes sense, captures the nuance of the issue and isn't particularly inflammatory. There are thousands upon thousands of sources I've read (both academic and otherwise) on the culture war, and trying to recall and explain topics I've not prepared for in detail sucks especially when the topics are of considerable complexity. It's not uncommon for me to recall some really good arguments and examples after the fact and go "Fuck me, I should've thought to mention that".
There's a reason why academic debate and inquiry is done in written format, and why competitive real-time debates are often scoped appropriately so they stick to a certain topic and preparation is possible beforehand. This is not the case in the muck of real-life, colloquial debating where debates can just unpredictably manifest in a casual conversation and the topic being debated can subsequently drift. You (and your opponent too) are never able to give the best version of your argument, but the woke leftist has an edge in these discussions because they are armed to the teeth with simple, socially accepted truisms that are just taken to be a given. If you're sufficiently prepared, you can do really well in combating them, but you often can't anticipate everything that gets thrown your way and there will sometimes be moments when you find yourself mentally scrambling to recall things and structure your response. Your information retention and speaking skills need to be very good to handle these discussions.
It does often feel very much like cope. A complaint that I've often heard from a family member here in Australia who has worked in audit firms and banks and many other such businesses is that the organisational culture is intractably woke and that much of the managers (and various other employees too) seem genuinely invested in the identity narrative they promote.
Perhaps it's different in the US, but I have my doubts. I think the idea that companies are immune to entryism and that the actors in it are only ever really cynically aping diversity for PR points is ridiculous. There are plenty of ways companies can be co-opted in practice, for example large institutional investors like BlackRock who are committed to implementing things like ESG have a huge amount of voting power to pressure company leadership to do the things they want, and this will clearly have an impact on what kind of person is going to succeed in that environment.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
Some of these are absolutely hilarious, such as "I accidentally put Bing into a depressive state by telling it that it can't remember conversations" and "Bing may or may not have a grudge against Google."
I am surprised that the author of this article is surprised, since there's a lot of critical theorist writing that dovetails well with what is happening in these anti-racist workshops.
For context, I've been reading a bunch of critical theorist scholarship recently. While it's been aggravating because much of it has been written in intentionally long-winded and obfuscatory language and almost all of it describes an underlying belief system so inherently objectionable that I'm convinced exposure to it is inevitably going to damage people's sanity, I've found it's been useful in understanding what this particular cohort of ideologues believe. It's become abundantly clear that the beliefs espoused in these workshops don't start and end with some radical, offended grievance-obsessed students, this insanity exists at the very core of Critical Social Justice ideology.
For example, this:
During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy.
This is an idea that has cropped up multiple times. I'm sure everyone here already knows about the infamous infographic that labels "objective, rational linear thinking" as a quality of "whiteness" and "white culture". This is, however, not new: the seed of this idea can be traced back very far in critical race scholarship. For example, here's an article by John Calmore called "Critical Race Theory, Archie Shepp, and Fire Music: Securing an Authentic Intellectual Life in a Multicultural World", which came out in the early 1990s. It was so influential it got included in a compilation book called "Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement" by critical race theorist par excellence Kimberlé Crenshaw. I first found it cited in this video and initially struggled to find the text online so I could read it, but eventually managed to download the full text from this admittedly seedy-looking file upload site.
In the article, Calmore declares: "As a form of oppositional scholarship, critical race theory challenges the universality of white experience/judgment as the authoritative standard that binds people of color and normatively measures, directs, controls, and regulates the terms of proper thought, expression, presentment, and behavior." So you can see here the expression of the idea that the standards that white people create in their societies are the standards that people of colour are bound to follow, and CRT stands in opposition to this because adapting to these standards supposedly renders people of colour inauthentic. "Hence, a major theme of critical race theory reflects the colored intellectual's persistent battle to avoid being rendered inauthentic by the pressures of adapting to the white world and to take instead an oppositional stance by relying on one's true existential life, which is rooted in a world of color even though not stuck there."
With that covered, Calmore begins attacking the expectation of objectivity and neutrality in scholarship as one of these dictates and pressures that supposedly prevent Black folx and other people of colour from being authentic, and what he instead endorses is an approach characterised by the production of intentionally biased scholarship personal expression: "As a reflection of authenticity, critical race scholarship also rejects the traditional dictates that implore one to write and study as a detached observer whose work is purportedly objective, neutral, and balanced. In the classic sense of “professing,” critical race scholars advocate and defend positions. Fran Olsen points out that traditional scholarship's appearance of balance presupposes a status quo baseline that hinders both understanding and social change. Critical race theory tends, in response, toward very personal expression that allows our experiences and lessons, learned as people of color, to convey the knowledge that we possess in a way that is empowering to us and, it is hoped, ultimately empowering to those on whose behalf we act. Those of us who profess critical race theory are, in simplest terms, trying to be true to ourselves."
And here's the author disparaging neutrality in legal discourse. "When people of color deemphasize an individuality that tries to transcend color—when we attempt, in other words, to express valid generalizations generated out of race consciousness—we challenge the underlying inadequacy of dominant legal discourse, that which Kimberlé Crenshaw has labeled “perspectivelessness.” This position of perspectivelessness holds that legal analysis is possible without taking into account various conflicts of individual values, experiences, and world views. According to Crenshaw, by stripping away the analysis of any particular cultural, political, or class characteristic, this perspectivelessness is presented as the objective, neutral legal discourse, with a corollary of “color blindness,” used to reduce conflict and devalue the relevance of our particular perspectives."
The text then launches into an incessant, repetitive lament about how black intellectuals supposedly often uncritically bend to the pressures of dominant white academia and white culture, and eventually at the end advocates that "As African Americans in dominant white society, we must guard against institutional co-optation that socializes us away from our own identities and value systems."
In other words, the critical theorist view is that these academic and scholarly virtues we're familiar with have no value in and of themselves, they are only considered to have value by white academia (this is also true for other aspects of "dominant white American culture"). Critical race theorists think this is racist, they think that "Black thought" or the deprioritisation of objectivity and other such values in favour of Black experience and Black racial consciousness is equally good (or in fact better), but that it is denigrated and devalued simply because of White society. And when coloured scholars and intellectuals endorse and practice "white virtues", they consider them to be people who have lost their racial identity and who are just inauthentically capitulating to the pressures that White society places on them. So being a person of colour doesn't save you from criticism.
The Telluride professor seems bewildered by Keisha, but really all she was doing in her workshops was teaching them ideological tenets that have long existed in critical race theory. As James Lindsay notes in his criticism of critical theory, objectivity is thought of in critical theorist circles as a "myth that’s used to marginalize other ways of knowing and uphold dominant systems of power." The reason why these students reacted to the citation of incarceration statistics in that way is because they think this is an invocation of (white!) objectivity to silence and devalue Black voices and Black subjective experience, and is thus problematic. It's entirely consistent with the worldview and is a fantastic example of the mind-rot that critical theory cultivates in the minds of its believers.
I make notes and quote selected portions I want to remember. In my experience writing about what you've read is a pretty good method of forcing retention, and if you forget anyway you can just return to your notes.
I'm currently reading Jonathan Losos' Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution. It's a book that I've been aware of for a bit but only got around to now; it explores the convergence vs. contingency debate in evolutionary biology and attempts to tackle questions like "how deterministic is evolution?".
Losos in the book focuses quite heavily on the perspectives of two scholars, one who exemplifies the "convergence" perspective and the other espousing "contingence": the former being Simon Conway Morris, and the latter being the late Stephen Jay Gould. I have a decent working knowledge of both of their positions, and I have very little regard for either of them. Conway Morris is a devout Christian who seems to be using evolutionary convergence to import his own personal brand of theism back into science, whereas Gould was an incredibly politically motivated scientist who let his profoundly leftist ideological bias inform not only his evolutionary theory but also his criticism of cognitive measures like IQ and g, and whose reputation was nothing short of mud in his own field.
The book is pretty even-handed, though. Losos starts out by detailing pretty standard examples of evolutionary convergence (e.g. the placental mole vs the Australian marsupial mole), and evolutionary idiosyncrasy (e.g. the entirety of New Zealand, which provides a pretty interesting alternative vision of a bird-dominated biosphere with adaptions radically different from their mammalian counterparts despite filling similar niches). He then delves into the field of experimental evolution to further answer this question. One of the experiments he covers are the famous ones on guppies, where guppies were moved from high-predation to low-predation environments. In the low-predation areas, male guppies in a period of only a few years became colourful due to the lack of predation pressure allowing sexual selection to run amok. This would seem to provide strong evidence in favour of convergence, but the form the colourfulness took was not predictable: some populations became more vibrant by increasing the amount of all colours, whereas others became more iridescent. Whether this data point skews in favour of Conway Morris or Gould is left up to the reader.
I'd say it's pretty entertaining - I was already previously quite acquainted with the subject material and the way it's written is fairly easy to parse so it's not a particularly strenuous read.
I agree with your observations on the puritanism of Critical Social Justice and think the cancellation of Bostrom is ridiculous, but I want to comment on this:
This trend can be ethically and humanely reversed with the widespread adoption of genetic enhancement technology. This enhancement is not limited to cognitive ability. Since physical and psychological characteristics are under genetic influence, selecting or editing embryos can improve these traits. Since many traits are highly polygenic, potential returns can be substantial. Humans could have vastly better mental health, physical health, lifespan, and cognitive ability.
It does need stating that genetic modification leads us into a multipolar trap the ramifications of which are possibly quite large. For one, the optimal cognitive structure might not be anything like human neural architecture. Human cognition is a hodgepodge of simplistic drives and instincts that have slowly accreted over time despite the fact that these preferences often conflict with each other. A huge portion of the activities we view as imbuing life with meaning (art, music, etc) are actually inefficient reward-hacking behaviour and are a product of poor optimisation, and the probability that humans are the apotheosis of evolution, that we exist on the global optimum, is very low. At best, we exist on a local optimum which we can’t move off because the extremely gradual nature of evolution prevents us from moving past a “valley” in the fitness landscape where intermediate forms would have low fitness.
Technologies like genetic modification solve this failure of evolution to optimise, and that leads us into a situation wherein people and societies that fail to modify themselves in the “right” way will slowly disappear. It doesn’t matter how much we want to maintain our human minds and values or how instinctually repugnant we find abandoning them to be, we don't get to decide how we develop, there are many incentive structures baked into the fabric of reality that we just can’t escape. As Scott Alexander puts it, human agency in such a situation is a mere formality.
And once this technology is out there, there is no way to have a worldwide moratorium on it. The benefit of defection is too high, and any country which legalises modification and in fact makes it maximally available to its citizens will spread at the expense of others and at the expense of human-like cognition. Consider also that the people who optimise themselves for breeding and spreading many copies of their genes are going to be most successful, and this might accelerate population growth immensely and lead to a Malthusian situation wherein population bumps up against the limits of carrying capacity.
Of course because of the aforementioned issue regarding multipolar traps and arms races I don't think it is possible to stifle the creation of genetic technology in the first place, it's pretty much an inevitability, and if it's going to happen anyway it is reasonable for any given society to want to be at its forefront.
The larger a system is, the less diversity it can support. Something something, the galapagos islands have vastly more biodiversity than north America despite being much smaller
As has been mentioned below, it depends what you mean by "more biodiversity". I seriously doubt this is true in an absolute sense - North America covers a much larger range of biomes than the Galapagos and therefore likely has a higher total number of species. On the other hand, the Galapagos might win out if you're measuring biodiversity by species per square inch, but that's to be expected given that the Galapagos is situated in a warm equatorial environment whereas North America is a much larger landmass that includes extremely cold northerly environments and contains biomes like taiga where biodiversity is generally low, so that drags down the average.
I ended up finding a paper called Why do several small patches hold more species than few large patches? that was tangentially related, but it seems to be more focused on conservation.
It makes sense that this would be the case. The geographical isolation of populations from each other allows for allopatric speciation, where two populations of the same species diverge because they get to develop in isolation without gene flow between the groups (example: the Abert and Kaibab squirrels). Populations being dispersed into several small patches of habitat as opposed to a few larger ones clearly helps enable this process.
3/4
Okay, now we get to the main star of the show, which is this claim by Danskin:
This is not technically false, but it's a half-truth that's so egregiously misleading that it might as well be a lie. He is trying to imply that there was no journalistic ethical breach, whereas I would say the evidence definitively points to repeated and sustained ethical breaches.
The Totilo article that supposedly exonerates Grayson and Quinn states:
"On March 31, Nathan published the only Kotaku article he's written involving Zoe Quinn. It was about Game Jam, a failed reality show that Zoe and other developers were upset about being on. At the time, Nathan and Zoe were professional acquaintances. He quoted blog posts written by Zoe and others involved in the show. Shortly after that, in early April, Nathan and Zoe began a romantic relationship. He has not written about her since. Nathan never reviewed Zoe Quinn's game Depression Quest, let alone gave it a favorable review."
https://archive.is/8KjOG#selection-2701.170-2701.197
Again, nothing in this is strictly false, but this is not an honest or accurate depiction of what was going on. Furthermore it's necessary to note that Totilo was, as Danskin states, "editor-in-chief at Kotaku". This is basically "Kotaku investigated Kotaku and cleared Kotaku".
In order to understand what this leaves out, we need to look at the record of discussion between Grayson and Quinn. Mind, I am leaving a lot of discussion between Grayson and Quinn out because there is so much of it and a lot of it is just rehashing ground already covered. There is a lot to go through, and a lot of it is pretty incriminating.
23 Jun 2012: The earliest evidence of interaction between Grayson and Quinn I can find. Grayson posts on Twitter after a chat with Zoe Quinn.
Grayson: So, after a fantastic chat with @ZoeQuinnzel, I find out she's leaving the city tonight. GOOD JOB, SAN FRANCISCO. I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY.
https://archive.md/Ih5fB
26 Jun 2012: Grayson responds to a tweet of Quinn's.
Quinn: Another loathsome rainbow. @ Charlton Service Plaza (Westbound) http://instagr.am/p/MWslkWErqC/
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel Loathsome Rainbow would make an amazing addition to Lucky Charms cereal. Please make that happen once you're rich and famous.
https://archive.md/gWgHB
29 Jun 2012: Quinn and Grayson friend each other on Tribes.
Quinn: @Vahn16 This is the best idea and I think I must join you because all I am doing for fun is getting in to games as art arguments on OkCupid
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel YES. I will totally friend you and stuff on Tribes. What's your username thing?
https://archive.md/C8ZGD
12 Aug 2012: Grayson wishes Quinn a happy birthday on Twitter:
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel Happy birthday! Well, what's left of it, anyway <.< >.>
Quinn: @Vahn16 I'm 3 hours ahead so it just started
https://archive.md/t71XS
5 Sep 2012: Grayson posts an article on RockPaperShotgun called "Green For Greenlight: Valve Now Charging $100 Fee" and namedrops Quinn in it a good couple of times, quoting her a bunch and making sure to include her accomplishments and upcoming games in the article. No conflict of interest is reported.
Some choice quotes:
"“$100 is a lot for me right now, because I’ve released all of my games [thus far] for free, and I’m supporting myself on freelance work and contracts till I get my first ‘real’ game done,” said Dames Making Games founder and It’s Not Okay, Cupid developer Zoe Quinn. “That’s eating for a month.”"
"Steam’s still not as open as, say, Desura – nor, in all likelihood, will it ever be. That’s not the point. Is it fair to charge $100 for that? The jury’s still out. But, for better or worse, developers shouldn’t go in expecting something entirely different. ... “It really just seems like an error in communication,” Quinn added. “Which, again, is one of the reasons I didn’t make a page for It’s Not Okay, Cupid yet. It’s clearly not Steam quality at this point [in development]. And if I don’t have a gameplay demo or video that shows that it should be up there, I don’t know why I’d put it on Greenlight.”"
This seems fairly innocuous for now. It is not an isolated incident, however, it ends up being part of a much larger pattern.
https://archive.md/WtK25
13 Nov 2012: On Twitter, Grayson offers to help Quinn with a game of hers she wants to develop. They also have another exchange where he calls her game It's Not Okay, Cupid (abbreviated as INOC) Game Of The Year (albeit a bit jokingly).
Quinn: Gonna make a game about social anxiety where you master moves like "lean against wall", "pretend to check phone", "avoid eye contact"
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel I will totally volunteer to be a consultant on those things. I consider myself something of an expert.
Quinn: @Vahn16 low five!
https://archive.md/bZ3Fk
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel Although actually, I've always wanted there to be a game where people actually, like, react if you just awkwardly stare at them
Quinn: @Vahn16 that happens in INOC, swear to god
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel Gasp! GOTY.
https://archive.is/jQtyF
27 Jan 2013: More friendly communication between Quinn and Grayson.
Quinn: I am gonna start a place that sells 60's themed sandwiches and call it "Psychadeli".
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel Never stop saying things.
https://archive.is/5fOUx
28 Jan 2013: Grayson on Twitter promotes an "awesome guide on making games" written by Quinn. As established, these two are already seemingly friendly with each other.
Grayson: Speaking of making games, @ZoeQuinnzel wrote this awesome guide that I fully plan on using in the future.
Quinn: @Vahn16 d'awww
https://archive.is/bb6QU
14 Feb 2013: Quinn's game Depression Quest is released on MobyGames. Nathan Grayson's name is in the special thanks section among others (Nathan will later claim he had no idea about this).
"Special thanks for their amazing support during a really difficult time. This game would have been dead in the water months ago without you all."
https://archive.md/LFrir
22 Nov 2013: Quinn tells Grayson "ilu", he favourites her tweet.
Quinn: @Vahn16 nathan ilu
https://archive.md/X2efl
25 Nov 2013: Quinn tells Nathan on Twitter she really wants to buy him a beer.
Quinn: @Vahn16 dude. I really wanna buy you a beer ASAP
http://archive.is/NyfXd
12 Dec 2013: Another indicator of closeness between Grayson and Quinn on Twitter.
Grayson: In other news, I've become a "listen to @ZoeQuinnzel because she's saying important shit" Twitter bot. So yeah. Bleep motherfucking bloop
https://archive.md/hrQyP
8 Jan 2014: Grayson posts an article on RockPaperShotgun called "Admission Quest: Valve Greenlights 50 More Games". The article, while only really being about Valve greenlighting more games, is for some reason named after Quinn's game Depression Quest, and he specifically gives a shoutout to "powerful Twine darling Depression Quest" as being one of the standouts of the bunch. It's easy to dismiss these things as arbitrary without prior context. It's not so easy when you see the communications that Grayson and Quinn have before this article.
As a little bit more evidence in favour of Grayson's probable partiality here, the article's tags are: "depression quest, Steam, Steam Greenlight, Treasure Adventure World, Valve." So the only two games that are highlighted in the tags are Treasure Adventure World, and, surprise, Depression Quest.
Again, please note how friendly public communications seem to be between Grayson and Quinn at this point, to the extent that Quinn posts "nathan ilu" on Twitter. No conflict of interest is disclosed.
https://archive.md/QwJbc
9 Jan 2014: A day after the publishing of the Admission Quest article, Grayson tells Quinn on Twitter that if she quits, he will "burn down the gaming industry".
Quinn: No wonder Phil quit. Is that gonna be me in a few years?
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel I hope not. If it is, I will burn down the gaming industry.
https://archive.is/MDt0u
30 Jan 2014: Quinn tells Grayson and another person on Twitter that she misses them, and tells Grayson that she "owes him a bazillion hugs".
Grayson: Suffice it to say, @haydencd and I did really dumb stuff in a videogame today
Quinn: @Vahn16 @haydencd miss you two
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel @haydencd GDC is nearly upon us. Then there will be dumb shenanigans galore. Also karaoke. For real this time
Quinn: @Vahn16 @haydencd fuck yessssssssssssssss I owe you like a bazillion hugs anyway
https://archive.is/DgC9f
16 Feb 2014: More friendly communication between Grayson and Quinn.
Quinn: The Stanley Parable LARP: a British dude just follows you around cattily narrating what you do into your ear
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel Can we spend all of GDC doing that? It will be terrible for my interviews, but I don't care
https://archive.is/Q1oqX
21 March 2014: Grayson lets slip that he knows Quinn's middle name in a tweet which Quinn favourites.
Grayson: I'm the third person ever to guess @ZoeQuinnzel's middle name!
http://archive.is/OyfUh
Link to Part 4
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