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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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You're absolutely right. I was being inarticulate. The accusation of bigotry, itself, is not dehumanization. The dehumanization comes when you say that because someone is a bigot, it's okay to "punch" them. That their rights, the rights that are supposed to extend to all of humanity, no longer exist. The trigger word they usually use is "Nazi," and they expand the definition of that term enough to include wrongthinkers of all races and religions. That's the most extreme example, but even it is frighteningly common.

I don't think Archie Bunker wouldn't be tolerated in today's world. While he was absolutely portrayed as in the wrong, he was also tolerated, even loved. Today, people like that are not deserving of tolerance. They get "cancelled." It's like.. you know how in the 00's, some Christians had a "love the sinner, hate the sin" attitude towards homosexuality, while others didn't want to let gay people anywhere near them? Leftists used to be analogous to the former, hating problematic attitudes while still loving people who possessed them. Now they're the latter. Or at least, that's how I perceive the situation.

Your link is broken; correct link is here

Ok, but "it is ok to punch someone who is x" is not dehumanization. Eg: it is considered ok for a woman to slap an obnoxious drunk. Does that mean that the drunk has been "dehumanized"? If a mass murderer is put to death, has he been "dehumanized"? I think you are referring to a different concept.

If the obnoxious drunk is following you, despite your repeated requests to be left alone, then he is invading your personal space and implicitly threatening you, making it okay to slap him in self-defense. Punching someone who is not invading your space or violating your rights in any way is not comparable, and doing so is actually a violation of their rights. To deny someone their rights is to dehumanize them. You are treating them as though they are not human.

Merely saying that somebody should be physically assaulted isn't the same thing as assaulting them, but it is still a form of dehumanization, and it precedes the literal violence.

The problem is that defining dehumanizing that broadly renders the term meaningless. If denying someone their rights is dehumanizing them, then a prosecutor commenting on a defendant's decision not to testify a trial is dehumanization. As is kicking a cheerleader off of the team for saying "fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer" on Snapchat. As is refusing a trademark to a band called "The Slants" because the term is derogatory.

And the other problem is with your argument that punching an obnoxius drunk is not dehumanizing him because he is invading your rights. That is the exact argument that Antifa types use when justifying punching people. They claim that speech is violence, after all.

Finally, you are needlessly complicating matters. What you are talking about is simply people using violence to silence those they disagree with. That is hardly a new phenomenon.

I was trying to say that the woman in this scenario is justified if, and only if, the man is following her and won't leave her alone despite her requests.

I'm trying to say that there's a spectrum of behavior that has violence against people you disagree with on the most extreme end. You can call this spectrum murderism, or dehumanition, or whatever, but I think it's fair to consider them all part of the same phenomenon. That's the entire concept behind racism, homophobia, and so on. I'm just expanding it more broadly.

And yes, lynchings and genocide and so forth are hardly new phenomenons. Doesn't make them acceptable. They are so terrifying that I want to make them as rare as possible.

No one is claiming that violence is generally acceptable.

To be clear, when I said that "people using violence to silence those they disagree with . . .is hardly a new phenomenon," I was not referring to lynching and genocide. I was referring to lesser forms of violence. I am dubious that most lynchings and genocides have been conducted simply because the victims held unpalatable views (and I say that as someone with PhD-level coursework on political violence).

You can call this spectrum murderism, or dehumanition,

I am sure there is a spectrum, but my point is that you really can't call it dehumanization, because that term already has an established meaning in the field of political violence.

Oh. What is the academic meaning of dehumanization? The most literal interpretation would be that it's denying someone's status as human, but that's not what happens. Like, the German didn't literally believe that Jews were rats in the clip you posted, but he was comparing them to rats as a heinous metaphor.

i marked this comment "bad" on the volunjanny page so i guess i should reply.

"it is ok to punch someone who is x" is not dehumanization

yes it is. "it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup" is the last realization of otherizing rhetoric.

  1. outgroup is bad

  2. we should do something about outgroup

  3. we should be violent to outgroup

to give the sharpest comparison, that phrase is syntactically identical with "it is righteous to kill jews."

no motte & baileying. as-spoken "it's okay to" is to be heard and understood as "it is righteous to"

it's not righteous for a woman to slap a lush, but also nobody gives a shit. almost all of europe believes it is not righteous to execute criminals because their framing of human rights extends even to mass-murderers. this is a deep subject of philosophy where i largely though not entirely agree with the europeans. i blame none for being uncomfortable with the state ending lives.

it is not righteous to practice indiscriminate violence against anyone. even nazis. this was the point of postwar trials: moral authority. righteousness. because they understood the indiscriminate violence practiced during the war was bad in and of itself. that statement goes against the trials.

that statement necessarily affirms certain premises; it is okay to dehumanize, it is okay to practice indiscriminate violence.

that statement says what the nazis did was only bad because of who they did it to.

to repeat and conclude: there is nothing you can say more dehumanizing.

There are several things wrong with your argument:

"it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup" is the last realization of otherizing rhetoric.

  1. Even if the last step of otherizing is making the claim, "it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup", it does not follow that every incident of making the claim is necessarily the last step in the process of othering.

  2. We are talking about dehumanization, yet you are making a claim about othering. They are not the same thing. See, eg, Genocide Watch's "Ten Stages of Genocide", which distinguishes clearly between othering (what they call "classification") and dehumanization.

to give the sharpest comparison, that phrase is syntactically identical with "it is righteous to kill jews."

Perhaps I was imprecise when I described the class of statements as, "it is ok to punch someone who is x." As my examples showed, I did not mean to define "x" as group membership, but rather as exhibiting a certain attribute, such as drunken loutishness, or a tendency to commit murder.

More importantly, you seem to believe that I said that it is righteous for a woman to slap a lush, or righteous to execute a murder, or righteous to practice indiscriminate violence against anyone. I said no such thing, nor do I believe any such thing. I merely said that doing so was a phenomenon different from dehumanization. I was making an analytical claim, not a normative claim.

i marked this comment "bad" on the volunjanny page

I >90% agree with your post, but I marked the one you're replying to as neutral because I didn't see evidence that @Gdanning was dishonest. My theory is "we want honestly-wrong people to come here, say honestly-wrong things, talk to people about them, and stop being wrong, so I don't want people to get in trouble for saying honestly-wrong things".

If we say that dehumanization means strictly to treat someone as inhuman or less than human than maybe not. But people on the left have been using an expanding definition of dehumanization for decades. Feminists love to say that various forms of sexual attraction to a woman are dehumanization. Like if a man wants masturbate to images of pretty women, it's dehumanizing to the women. That sort of usage has the same flaws as saying that "it's okay to punch someone" is dehumanizing.

  1. I'm not a big fan of the "the other side does it, so it is ok for me to do it" argument.

  2. Those examples are re using "dehumanize" to mean "treat as an object, not as a person", as in the second definition here ["to deprive of human qualities or attributes; divest of individuality"]. I believe that the OP was using the first definition ["to regard, represent, or treat (a person or group) as less than human"]

I'm not a fan of "the other side does it, so it is ok for me to do it" either, but I think it makes far more sense that people saying "we should be able to inflict physical harm on a person without remorse" is an example of dehumanization, as opposed to "we should be able to imagine a person in sexual situations". The later doesn't make much sense for it to be dehumanizing.

The latter fits the second definition of dehumanizing reasonably well, it seems to me, if the claim is that the person in question is treating a human being like a fleshlight, as a tool, essentially, as opposed to a person with feeling of their own, etc. That is indeed what they are saying, as I understand it. I don't know that I agree with the claim empirically, but it is a reasonable use of the term. It is really a very different claim than the other definition, which I think OP was using, which was to see someone as less than human (note, by the way, that some have argued that, in some contexts, it is toxification, rather that dehumanization, which is what is really going on).

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