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More Olympic culture warring: Olympic Games official has accreditation revoked for...
Honestly, I can't even complete the headline, it feels too much like giving credence to the delusion. Can you guess? Here's a hint: think 2017.
Yes, that's right. The rest of the headline is "‘white supremacy’ hand gesture."
Dictionary.com has a whole entry on the "circle game" which is mostly not about the circle game, but is about the "OK hand gesture" that in almost no context has ever been a genuine signal of white supremacist beliefs. The Telegraph article asserts without evidence that "its use as a far-Right symbol is apparently on the rise." And from Dictionary.com:
Even the ADL's own expert had this to say about the "OK hand gesture" in 2017:
Of course, the ADL has since changed its tune, because, well, if you're not a part of the solution, there's money to be made prolonging the problem, I guess. I honestly kinda thought this particular meme had run its course when it got misapplied during the Kavanaugh hearings. It got new life when the Christchurch shooter flashed it in 2019, but that was more than 5 years ago, now--an eternity on 4chan. I don't know--did it actually catch on in Europe? Apparently it caught on in Brazil, kinda--
I hadn't heard the Brazil story before now. "The crime of racism" sounds pretty damn Orwellian to me, but I live in the land of the First Amendment... people do things differently in foreign countries. I'm also a little taken aback by the actions of the Brazilian journalist, who did not report a man saying racist things, or a man harassing people, but a man who might have been positioning himself on camera while making a hand signal that has sometimes been associated with having beliefs outside the Overton window. I already hold journalists in pretty low regard, generally, but this Brazilian displayed all the dignity of a classroom snitch, minus any compelling evidence that there was anything to snitch about.
For whatever it's worth, offensive hand gestures are nothing new for the Olympics--not even for these Olympics. But flipping the bird in each case appears to be pretty context-informed. As far as I can tell from the story, the dude maybe playing the circle game and maybe not doing anything especially deliberate at all was booted without hesitation:
I have never been much of a sports fan, but the Olympics in particular really get me conflicted. I've seen some remarkable displays of athleticism; Olympic gymnastics and figure skating are events I have on several occasions watched on purpose and with some interest. But I simply have no good feelings at all for the IOC. They are intellectual property trolls; they have for example attempted to use their trademark to prevent criticism (fortunately they lost that case, but the First Amendment doesn't reach everywhere). Other, specific cases of corruption are pretty well known. I, personally, would never spend any money in direct support of the Olympics, despite my occasional interest over the years.
Though I've little reason to care too much about one subcontractor getting an unceremonious boot for what, to my eyes, looks like playing a silly game he probably didn't even know had been at the center of a culture war flare-up five years ago--I do have reason to care about a slow, global slouch toward Orwellian big brother/little brother behavior. When people talk about "threats to democracy" and "the rise of fascism" I don't see Nazis goose-stepping down main street; I see progressives enforcing ideological conformity through everyday acts of institutional bullshit. This is "cancel culture," writ small.
For another example that's going around, Steven Fulop is the current mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey. Jonathan Gomez-Noriega was a mayoral aide, who previously was part of the Jersey City LGTBQ+ Task Force. Emphasis on was:
Background on what Valencia Gomez said as reported by LGBT media groups, originals here. (cw: it's exactly the Olympics Discourse you'd expect).
And while he was told to give a heartfelt public apology and did, it doesn't look like that matters; he’s fired.
In some ways, this is more 'clear'. Gomez-Noriega donated 1250 USD, not a tenner, with the most recent donation just under a month ago, and while Gomez is an unlikely and not especially competent candidate (in an 8-way race for the primary), she's undeniably a politician and she's made very clear that She's Not A Fan Of the Gays
(... enough that I was tempted to spam a Femboys and Firearms (cw: exactly what it sounds like) cover or Cathode_G link on twitter, though I recognize That Wouldn't Help).
In other ways, it runs into Problems, and not just in the optimistic sense that we might not want to punish people for political donations where the recipient acts poorly afterward; or demand employees disavow family; or look as more of a shrieking harpy as the shrieking harpy. New Jersey does not have unusual protections for the speech rights of rando employees, and it definitely doesn't have some equivalent to California's charlie foxtrot of a situation. There's a judicial construct that kinda gets twisted into protecting speech when judges want it to, but it's not gonna count here, and even were there strong and directly relevant statutes, as California demonstrates, an employer's interest in countering disfavored enough speech will get remarkable amounts of deference.
But Gomez-Noriega was a city employee; Steven Fulop is the mayor.
Unlike us private-sector peons, that implicates state power directly. While rare, cases have rarely even survived both motion to dismiss and inevitable attempts to moot them where a state could have threatened or retaliated directly over private speech on matters of public concern.Of course, as the ACLU (caveat: New York ACLU) helpfully points out, there's a broad exception where the speech "disrupted its work or have the potential to disrupt its work, including by affecting public perception of your employer if you frequently interact with members of the public in your job", and while the specific examples of exceptions reflect places where the speaker directly "targets individuals or communities because of their racial, ethnic, or religious identity", I wouldn't want to try to talk an employment lawyer into taking the case on contingency on the basis of that distinction.
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There's a statement to send a chill down your spine. Found not guilty, but lol nope. Guess again.
The American founders' bitter resentment of sham trials pays off yet again.
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Where I’m from there was a “circle game” where you make the OK symbol on your leg, and if your friend looks at it you get to punch them on the shoulder. Was played middle school through high school (in increasingly ironic ways). I wonder if that’s what this is: some dude knows his school buddy is watching so he pranks them with an old childhood game.
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I only half understand this news item but isn't it saying that he deliberately made this hand gesture while on duty as an olympic official, having manoeuvred himself carefully so that it would be visible on TV? I don't know what he thought he was doing if not clandestinely referring to this meme. If he was just trying to subtly make the 'cool' hand gesture with hand by side while on TV, then that is behaviour that at least needs looking into on the grounds of it being baffling!
If a subcontractor for the Olympics was standing in front of a TV camera and made a thumbs-up gesture, do you think they should be reported to their superior and be given instruction in how to properly comport themselves to the media? Or the horns? I certainly don't. I consider the OK symbol to be exactly as innocuous as either of these - as noted by @naraburns, the farcical claim that it has any legitimate connection to white supremacy was astroturfed into existence circa 2017. Prior to that, it was not remotely difficult to find photos of public figures making the gesture, including such notable spokespeople for the white ethnostate as Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton. (For bonus points, here's one of Obama throwing up the horns too.) Only a certain class of extremely online Anglophone is even aware of the supposedly offensive meaning associated with this completely innocuous gesture: I would put money that if you asked this guy why he made a "white supremacist" gesture, he would sincerely have not the slightest clue what you were talking about.
If he was on crew and I was director, and he walked deliberately into shot and did something to steal focus from the Olympics, I would want to know and I probably wouldn't be very happy about it.
How many people would have heard about this if not for the journalist ratting him out?
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It's saying that's how the Brazilian reporter described things. Maybe it's true?
I mean... did you read my post? Assuming everything was as described by the Brazilian, the "circle game" is probably the most obvious explanation to anyone who is not Extremely Online. It was popularized (as noted in my links) by the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, which still streams and airs in several languages around the world.
...really, though? "Someone is engaged in baffling behavior, I'd better report them to the authorities" is usually something progressive reporters get conspicuously concerned about and ask the general public to stop doing. Remember: this guy wasn't saying anything to anyone. He wasn't hurting anyone. He wasn't doing anything overtly aggressive or even, probably, actually against any rules. He was, at worst, making a hand gesture that some people sometimes associate with ideas they don't like. If you think that's the sort of thing that "needs looking into," like... hard disagree, I guess.
I admit I didn't click the circle game link, but having now done so, yeah that makes sense. I still think it is eminently reasonable to look into it though because he's an employee of a broadcast company messing around on camera during a broadcast.
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I don't think it's uncharitable at this point to say progressive reporters are not really concerned about stopping the general public from snitching.
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A couple weeks ago, when right-wingers got that one Home Depot worker fired for supporting the assassination of a former President, there were reams of articles produced (including one by our own Scott) calling for a cancel culture ceasefire; reams of articles, along with torrents of tweets from left-wingers.
When a random Olympic official then gets cancelled for, in contrast, making an innocuous hand gesture, have any of these same peaceniks continued their call for ceasefire?
I mean the firing bothers me for example and I've been against OK-sign policing since the issue began, and I was part of the vehement "let's tone it down" camp in the HD case -- but stakes and the amount of consequences do matter. As the OP alludes to, I think part of the reason I'm not as outraged here is the job of "Olympic official" feels like a low-impact part-time job rather than something more extensive. Also, there's kind of an expectation for some PR bullshittery that comes along with the Olympics. I don't really expect them to be super fair on the fringes. If, for example, articles were to come out saying the official had been totally blackballed from everything in their sport, or lost tons of money, or something along those lines I would feel more strongly! As far as I know most officials for this type of thing are somewhat well-off hobbyists from a wide variety of countries. The Home Depot case however was someone who is often living paycheck to paycheck and has to deal with a lot of crap already in their job, and furthermore I know firsthand a lot of people in similar positions. That's a significant contrast. Moreover I don't even have a strong sense for who is running the IOC in the first place, so seeing it as part of some larger and uniquely Western cancel war isn't immediately obvious to me.
so it's all about who/whom and not about principles.
That's not what I said. There's principles, but we're talking about the context of people making a big fuss on Twitter. Making a big fuss on Twitter requires more than one's principles being breached, it requires some degree of outrage. I'm just saying that many of these "peaceniks" do continue to in good faith call for a ceasefire, but they may be understandably less motivated to loudly call for a ceasefire in this case.
The highly-upvoted post I responded to is alleging a double standard where none actually exists. It's also doubly frustrating that at least on its face, their post seemed to ask (really, allege, but hiding behind an insincere question) about where is the outrage and use that as evidence of a double standard. I provided a literal and direct answer to their question (i.e. people probably still are consistent but the "outrage"/"demonstrated harm" dial isn't very high here) and was downvoted for answering that very question. Guess people writ large aren't actually all that interested in other perspectives after all, it seems. They just want their echo chamber. Do better, Mottizens.
Like, did you read my comment? Read it again. I'm saying that most people see the news and see "rich international hobbyist loses a part time gig after political overreaction" and obviously that's a different level of harm and thus outrage as "poor working-class person gets fired from their minimum wage job due to online crusade". The difference is pretty obvious?!? Of course people are going to be louder about the second case! No one gives two shits about often faceless "Olympic Officials". Hell, no one gives a shit about the jobs of refs in practically any sport!!! So expecting a twitterstorm of outrage as "proof" people are being morally consistent seems misguided at best.
I fail to see any meaningful clarification in your post. All I got away from it was the dynamic who/whom laundered through a context/harm relabeling.
"It's not that he was bad, but that there was more harm/the context is different in this occasion".
As I understood it, the whole point of acting principled/having principles was that it didn't matter the who/whom of the equation, just that the situation "activated" the relevant principle, guarantying a level of impartiality and bias avoidance which conferred a certain moral high ground.
This isn't X Dawg, we don't do shaming here.
Seriously? People speaking up on media is directly proportional to outrage, not principles. That doesn’t mean you can conclude “I don’t see social media outrage, thus there must be no principles”. This is so obvious I’m confused why I have to say this out loud.
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What exactly is a "continued call"? Do you think Scott should be posting on every example of cancel culture? He (and many others) have been consistently against it.
Ignoring all of them, except for one aimed in the "wrong direction", tells us very much.
Not that Scott is guilty of that. But "what do you expect me to do, respond to all of these" is the cry of the malicious selective enforcer.
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Yeah, Scott wasn’t a great example, for precisely the reason you give (he’s very principled and ideologically consistent, even despite whatever meanings and groanings have arisen from certain portions of his readerbase post-ACX).
Rather, I’m primarily referring to the wider array of more-explicitly-left-wing twitterers and bloggers who developed a sudden interest in opposing cancel culture during that one moment in time a few weeks ago. IIRC, a number of these folks’ reactions can be found linked to in the Culture War threads from that time. At the very least, it would be nice for the people who participated in that groundswell against cancel culture then to post a tweet now showing that they’re opposed to it in this case, too.
True,
people like Matthew Yglesias, Contrapoints, and TracingWoodgrains would be far better examples as they were all solidly in the "no bad tactics, only bad targets" and "its just a bit of harmless trolling" camp right until those tactics started to be weilded against people/institutions they cared about.
Do you have any examples of TracingWoodgrains saying "it's just a bit of harmless trolling" right until those tactics started to be wielded against people/institutions he cared about?
I think all the people performatively outraged about LoTT being targeted are more solidly in the "no bad tactics, only bad targets" camp. If Trace had done something like that to a liberal group, they'd be raising glasses to him to this day.
See my reply to 4bpp below
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Besides the overall inappropriateness of inserting this sort of drive-by attack against a member of this community in a completely unrelated context, the connection you are trying to make to make your attack work is way too contorted. What does "only bad targets" (not having universal principles) have to do with "just trolling" (not acknowledging the impact of your actions), and what does either have to do with the action of Trace's you presumably are still seething about (Sokalling LoTT)? As far as I can tell he neither contended that there are bad targets for being made ridiculous by being baited into posting fakes, nor did he claim that doing so would be inconsequential fun. If anything, his detractors are the ones who were shouting bad target after cheering on any attempt to bait and make ridiculous their opposition before.
It's not an "unrelated context" though.
Ive been reading and commenting in Rat-Adjacent spaces under various pseudonyms since my freshman year of college. I watched the transition of LessWrong from a place to discuss epistemology to a social club for a Silicon Valley nerds to vent thier spleens and "pwn the normies" in real time.
The three people I mentioned were not picked at random, they were picked because they played an active role in that transformation by arguing for the legitimacy of the so-called "dark arts" so long so long as they were weilded "appropriately".
As those "dark arts" gained acceptance, those who were not part of the SV/MIRI/EA clique drifted away and evaporative cooling took over.
I agree with @raakaa is that Scott is a bad example, because as i remember it Scott was one of the few grandees of the rationalist movement to actually stick to his guns and try to push-back against this transformation while it was happening, for this he became a target for these "dark arts" himself.
Call it "Seething" if you like but as @Dean observed last month memory and context are powerful things.
I'm with you as far as lamenting LW drifting from its original purpose, however you want to describe the direction, but what does that have to do with anything? If you want LW fundamentalism, you obviously lost the moment you waded into a CW forum - "politics is the mind-killer" and all that. For that reason alone, neither cancel culture nor opposition to it can be a core LW cause. If you are looking to describe a hypothetical shared ethos of the "annus mirabilis SSC reader diaspora", rather than the LW community, then sure, being against cancel culture is part of it - but making a fool out of LoTT was not cancel culture by any reasonable definition. The post you linked under
also does not seem to contain any argument for Trace either being in the "only bad targets" or in the "just kidding" class, or being in favour of cancel culture. Rather, it just appears to be a dunk that you are particularly fond of. Do you expect me to update in favour of anti-Trace after reading it, so I reason "Trace bad, cancel culture bad, therefore Trace likes cancel culture"?
The point of that subthread was that it was difficult to read the moralistic framing of thier objection as genuine or sincere when they had, up until very recently, been advocating for and engaging in similar behavior and that when confronted with fact thier responce was "screw you" instead of "I screwed up".
My point is that these incidents are not "unrelated" they are examples of the same fundemental failure-mode being discussed and make for a better example than Scott Alexander for the reasons stated above
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I had an account on LW-sphere discourse at the time (2012-2015ish? imo), if not particularly active on LW-proper.
I don't know where you're getting TracingWoodgrains into the Dark Arts stuff. He started his current display name in 2018 in a mix of /r/slatestarcodex and SSC-open-thread proper education-posting. He's mentioned having read LessWrong in the 2010ish space, and it's possible that he commented to some degree, but he hasn't publicized any username he had at the time, and his writing style is vastly different from any Dark Art advocates like fual_sname or 08res (or even adjacent people like nydrawku).
((I've got my complaints about both his position and his tactics, but they're a lot more prosaic.))
Yglesias is absolutely following in that approach, often to the point that's less 'parallel evolution' and more 'who stole whose homework', but I don't think anyone has accused him of being on LessWrong. Contrapoints is less Dark Arts and more Sneer, which is maybe closer to what you're motioning around, but again more someone people in the ratsphere talk about than someone who argued for the legitimacy of the Dark Arts (or Sneer) themselves on LW.
I was introduced to the rat-sphere around late 2012/early 2013 and the transition period I'm thinking of was around 2015-ish. Its hard to point to exactly when the schism began as it happened slowly over time, but it was largely complete by the time Scott had his "You're Still Crying Wolf" moment in 2016.
As for the rest lets just say that those who attended some of the early rat-space meet-ups at the house of the UC professor who carried a duck were a memorable crowd.
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None of those people seem very much like each other.
Did you not finish reading the comment? Specifically the bit about them all being in the same camp.
I’m pretty confident they aren’t.
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I'm not sure they do all believe the same things about cancellation.
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