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I am not claiming #2 or #1, and I just spelled out that's my point. A good deal of my frustration is because of this division where the only settings are either "woke censorship is bad" or "literally herding us into concentration camps".
You did catch that there were a couple shootings that never went to trial in there, right? The ATF and EPA are not typically considered as censorship issues,. The executive branch repeatedly ignoring court orders are not "laws I don't like sometimes get passed".
And more broadly:
"[L]iterally herding us into concentration camps", "can't even share a country and accord each other civil rights", "peaceful coexistence becoming impossible in the near future", and "whining that the Left has won, laws and democracy are fake and gay, and the boot is already stomping on his face forever and ever" are all drastically different things (as are "invoking Orwell" or "disenfranchisement"), and they're not even the full scope of positions you've brought this set of claims against! Some of them aren't even the same tense!
I don't agree with FCfromSSC or TheNybbler — I’d rather their position be false, though the Litany of Tarski still reigns — so I'm not going to debate whether this is a particularly good interpretations of their posts. I'm not going to argue that you could or should try to steelman either's position.
In this thread, we have "being deprived of civil rights" or "the level of a fringe political or religious minority in previous eras in US history"], before you jump to "literally herding us into concentration camps". That entire giant list of examples is here because you set it as predictive ground points, even if you were targeting twenty years rather than three.
Do you want (and am I allowed to) point to past examples from old threads, now? There's a smorgasbord of options, but I don't want to bloat the post if it's not your point or if it's going to come across as a gish gallop.
To be as explicit as possible (and borrow formatting from Wittgenstein):
Which of the following are you actually claiming :
A. Things I'm citing are "specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies"? either that:
Dolloff really faced a trial, Garner wasn't hounded to suicide by a prosecutor who celebrated his death, few if any violent acts by leftists escaped trial or received laughable punishments, conservative public speech never encounters legal threats or state-mandated discrimination or tolerated physical violence, people don't get fired (from a government job!) for donating to legal defense funds of innocent men, the federal government does not defy court orders, there haven't been prolonged and successful efforts to restrict some conservative meetings while tolerating or even permitting progressive protestriots, so on. I'm not gonna ask you to name every false claim, but I'd like more than one.
or They happened, but they aren't common enough to 'count', and there's no reason for Red Tribers to worry about or plan around an increase in rate.
or They happened, but they aren't novel enough to count, compared to past cultural loggerheads that Americans resolved calmly.
or They happened, but they aren't novel enough to count, compared to past cultural loggerheads that included the Literal Civil War.
B. The things I'm citing real and meaningful, but not justification for retaliation:
past some threshold of behavior, or
even where those retaliations are non-violent? (or at least as non-violent as any state power can be)
C. These things real, and meaningful, and justification for retaliation, but not cause for escalation? either
as a matter of slope, eg, where it's better for someone to get beaten to hell by an angry mob than shoot his attackers or
as matter of thresholds, eg, until people get thrown in gulags/concentration camps?
D. These things are real, and meaningful, and people can retaliation and escalate in response where necessary to stop an attack/whatever, but such behaviors will not keep escalating.
Any of these are potentially interesting discussions (although, uh, I've not found discussions on the normative side of self-defense particularly illustrative in the past with other people), but I've been hammering pretty hard on A1 so we've at least got some factual foundation in agreement, and it’s very far from clear we have that.
I'd say my position is somewhere between A (3) and A (4).
I did use to be closer to 3.
... I've tried to draft a post touching on the specific examples I think break those settings, a couple times, but I keep coming up with lists that are different from past ones only in size and count, or seeing comments about 'concentration camps' or 'deprived of civil rights' or this post and having trouble keeping my temper or thinking such a discussion would be helpful.
Available if you'd think they'd help, but I think the genuine disagreement is deeper than that.
First, I think the delineations of 'novel' are vulnerable to salami-slicing and the garden of forking paths. Are politicians putting the names and employers of donors to their political opponents kinda like McCarthyism, or are they new? Offering cash rewards for the names of non-violent protesters like the Pinkerton's, or unprecedented? That dilemma is more obvious when technology comes to play: domain name services cutting off random web fora with no notice wasn't even on people's threat model five years ago (and wasn't even possible before the invention of DNS), but it's kinda like 1930s era postal regulations, kinda. And some objections would be reasonable: there's lots of novelty to the extent modern social justice has begun destroying symbols of past ('enemy') leadership and reconciliation... that almost certainly would not have been on my top ten list of concerns, and which are hard to separate from past iconoclasm in intent even if the process and impact was different now.
That's especially true if there are other implied constraints -- if the problems on social media are excluded, or if COVID-specific rules can't count, or if it doesn't count when someone tries to do something unprecedented and fails, or if the complaints are First World Problems.
Secondly, I don't think these (and especially A(4)) are that great as arguments against a Great Divorce or, more morbidly, worries that interparty politics has devolved into a "massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble" where attempting to avoid playing the game maybe -- only maybe! -- means you get eaten later.
Trivially, the literal American Civil War came at tremendous cost of blood, tears, lives, and livelihoods. That could be a justifiable and reasonable response to literally millions of people being in some of the worst forms of slavery that have existed. There's a lot of arguments that none of the current snafus are on that level, and you'd have to put effort in to get one that wasn't right! But that's a lot more persuasive as an argument that we shouldn't keep escalating to maintain federal power over whatever minor culture war of the day is getting people frothing over, or that if we absolutely had to pay a ton of blood and treasure to maintain federal power we have done so once in the past. Less so about whether we can avoid it.
Ok, the literal Civil War is just the extreme end of problems that could not be "resolved calmly". So, for that matter, is the mass internment of large populations, where we 'just' had to bomb and then militarily control entire island chains. We're not at those levels, and in the case of Korematsu you quite accurately (and repeatedly) pointed out that concentration camps aren't on the menu right now.
Why should that matter? I've been trying not to hammer too hard on the "Here's a wager. Obviously if I'm wrong, you'll never be able to collect, but anyway." comment, since it was(? might have been?) joking, and you've apologized to someone else for tone in a kinda related way, but it's kinda relevant if your claim actually is that we can't highlight this problem until and unless there are people literally getting marched into concentration camps. (Or worse than concentration camps, since again, Korematsu). I don't want to go full Godwin with The Attic Test, but I'm absolutely not waiting until resistance is completely doomed just for the moral high ground.
What's the comparison we should be using? You don't like FCFromSSC's point about charcoal briquettes, and there's a good number of reasons to not like it. I don't like it! But that post was about a couple major oversteps -- one on the right and one on the left -- that 'only' were solved after small lakes of blood, and the best you can say is that they didn't involve oceans. Yes, we 'solved', at least for a short time, and for a low definition of solved, the policy disagreements in question. Even if we suppose that matters will never go worse than that, it's still pretty bad, and I don't really trust that will. What, if anything, is this supposed to tell us about policy disagreements that seem to be barrelling down that slope while maniacs are spreading grease on the brakes?
((Yes, there are possibilities that escalating violence won't lead to such extremely high fatality rates, in that we aren't as likely to have cholera epidemics in our prisons, or that the FBI is a little more careful with pyrogenic tools. But there's a lot of possibilities going the other direction, and there are reasons that discussion is one I'm not going to describe in all but the vaguest detail in public spaces without good cause. And as far as I can tell, you've not been making those arguments, and they'd mostly fall under B and C above.))
Worse than that, it's not clear that the deescalation is anywhere people want to go, especially the sort of people who get political power. An early question of political representation leading to a rebellion and attacks on prominent federal officials, which in turn was called treason and men sentenced to hang... and which they were pardoned.
Is that anywhere on the table today? Forget J6 or literal rebellion, is there any serious group on the left calling Obama or Biden to provide clemency for someone on the level of the Bundys? When Trump pardoned the sympathetic guys that the Bundys were protesting for, that turned into a fishing expedition for bribery, and their grazing permit was revoked. Forget major political victories, or even the Constitution just applying in California (last update) or New Mexico. Is there any chance someone in New Jersey is going to stop harassing some schmuck in Texas if he posts a CAD file?
It's not like this is going to only go one way, or even that it only goes one way on each topics, as the wide array of CRT/DEI or credit card processing or trans books or a thousand other types of bullshit demonstrate. Do you think any set of activists here think of each other as anything but moral mutants?
... and... separately, I made a bunch of predictions, here and here.
I didn't get all of them correct -- Rittenhouse hasn't faced federal prosecution (yet), and Dominick Black ended up with a suspended sentence for the Kenosha gun stuff and only ended up in jail for unrelated reasons (cocaine motorcycle chase was not on my bingo card). Demokovich was overturned, if on limited grounds, and Gustafson is in a weird place that I didn't even know was possible when I wrote it.
Others, it hasn't been long enough to check: the NRA's New York DFS lawsuit isn't likely to be resolved for months at best, and we don't know that the next Republican President is one who's had tactical leaks against him yet.
But I don't look back at that and think "well, we're on a lot better a trajectory now" or "well, I need to toss a ton of disclaimers and caveats for each of these". In many cases, the extent these attacks have reduced conservative access to the public sphere has remained constant or accelerated. Given the news from today, if anything, I am feeling a little like I was insufficiently pessimistic.
Well, this is where I tend to walk away (though I am trying not to do that here, even though I also find these conversations very frustrating and circular, but when I give up in exasperation, you later come back and accuse me of ducking the argument, so). I just reread all those posts of mine you linked to. I can see how you might disagree with some of the things I said. I can see how I might have worded some things better, or might even walk back a line or two if I were re-editing myself now. I cannot see where you get (what I perceive to be) an accusation that I am lying or arguing in bad faith or ignoring your counteraguments. For the most part, I stand by what I said and have not changed my opinions. You think invoking concentration camps and literal Civil War is hyperbolic or something? Fine, duly noted, I will take that into account when trying to get my point across (to you) in a way I hope will be received in the way I intended, but I used those examples for a reason (and often because other people invoked them first!)
I also admit at this point I am honestly not sure whether you think my problem with FCfromSSC's position is that I disagree with his conclusions or that I dislike what he is forecasting. In fact I do disagree with a lot of what he has said (regarding how oppressed Red Tribers are), and of course I dislike the idea that we might fracture into a bloody civil war. But those are not the same issue!
It seems to me like we often come to a point where I don't really disagree with most of your specific examples ("Yes, that's bad" ... "Yes, I agree, that's bad too") but then you still rail at me because I don't agree that all those bad things mean Blue Tribe is already where nybbler says it is, stomping on your face forever. I am not sure you believe that, but clearly you believe the situation is worse than I do. Or perhaps unlike me, you don't see this as a historical pendulum, but some sort of irreversible state change. That's fine, we can disagree about the severity of the problem. Is that your problem, that I just don't agree with you about the severity of the problem? Or are you convinced that I'm lying about how bad I actually think it is, or lying about whether I actually think it's a bad thing for the Red Tribe to be oppressed? If the actual problem is that you just think I'm wrong and too stupid to see how obviously correct you are, well, you are only going to continue to be frustrated (and frustrating me) with this pettiness.
Because none of these things would break from the standards you demand, now!
Time, after time, after time, after time, you propose horribles or parades of horribles of things that are Worse that are your evidence that conservatives need sit down and take it, not just in response to civil war rhetoric but even to matters as simple as turnabout being fair play.
And then I provide examples that those parades of horribles are happening, or being attempted, or in rare cases have been room temperature for a decade or been applied to me personally. In some cases, you explicitly say that "mostly, it's not happening" and a "gish gallop", even after I provide explicit evidence, without even the slightest effort to point to a single one that I'm actually wrong on. Other times, you just ipse dixit, or simply duck out because my claims "doesn't impress", none of the examples I bring were persuasive enough for you to even bother responding to.
And now it turns out it doesn't matter! It wouldn't change the conversation even if conservatives were being literally marched into concentration camps -- which, to be extremely explicit so you don't deflect down that rabbit hole again, I'm not claiming is the current state. If A(3) or A(4) are what we're trying to talk about, we've had concentration camps before! Why the hell were you asking me about shit like voicing conservative opinions in public or struggle sessions? You, in this thread, brought up "(Or even, say, the level of a fringe political or religious minority in previous eras in US history.)" as what you were arguing against, and by definition even if I could have demonstrated this to your requirements, it'd still not have been novel at all!
Well, okay, maybe the conversation topic just drifted in the last handful of posts. You've said our real disagreement was about whether the severity and novelty of the
gish gallopsexamples I provided weren't serious enough to justify defection. That's something we could discuss seriously, and I spent a thousand words doing it: why evaluations of novelty are vulnerable to giving you whatever answer you came in wanting, and why defection is both necessary and laudable before the more extreme degrees of marginalization and exclusion from the public sphere hit.Did your response here engage with any of that, either? You literally can't see how you're ignoring my counterarguments or arguing in bad faith, with all that?
This is very frustrating.
I reread those links and do not see where I am arguing that "turnabout is fair play so conservatives need to sit down and take it." Evidently that is your interpretation of what I said, but it is certainly not what I intended to say.
To underline this point: that is not, in fact, what I believe. I am literally not sure what you think I do believe.
If conservatives were being literally marched into concentration camps it would absolutely change the conversation, and I would say "Goddamn, gattsuru, you were right and I was wrong!" How are you concluding from anything I wrote that I would be unmoved by conservatives being marched into concentration camps?
Yes, fine, this is the only part I can make sense of. You have a lot of specific examples of oppression-of-Red-Tribe which you think are compelling examples of a dystopian slide and I do not. We could debate the specifics of each one of those examples (I'd rather not, because it probably wouldn't lead to much in the way of agreement, but again, not gonna be accused of ducking arguments, I just hate having to go through a list of 20 bullet points and starting a subthread about each and every one of them), but I would summarize it as "I still think the evidence does not say we are as far along down the slippery slope as you think we are" - do you think that is a fair summary, or not? Is it that there are specific examples whose litigation you are unsatisfied about/you think I dodged, or that you think I should have been convinced by the volume of your examples and I am not?
No, no I literally can't. When I say maybe I'm just too dim to understand you, I am not being entirely ironic. I mean, I do not think I am dim, but sometimes I read and reread your arguments (specifically, your indictments of me) and I cannot tell whether there is a hidden code I'm not deciphering or you're just trolling me. To me, a lot of your accusations seem to be made in bad faith. (You seriously think I'd say "nbd" if conservatives were being literally herded into concentration camps, really? You think I haven't taken you seriously or engaged with what you're saying, even though here I am in yet another interminable thread that's just going to leave both of us pissed off again because I cannot help trying to futilely convince people that I'm trying to be fair-minded?) It doesn't help that we told you once to lay off the big collection of "links to every argument you've ever made" every time you argue with someone, because it's antagonistic and obnoxious, and to this day you claim that we told you you "aren't allowed to refute people with evidence." That is not what we told you, and that sort of thing makes me squint whenever you accuse me or someone else of arguing in bad faith.
[I'm answering this a little out of order, as I think the more critical stuff was wedge into the center.]
I am neither describing concentration camps as a current or plausible near-future problem, to be very explicit. If they happen, I will be wrong, too. Beyond that:
... where do you put concentration camps on a scale of novelty? They literally happened, more than once, as particularly shameful periods in American history. One memorable and significant set in living memory. They certainly weren't anywhere near what you'd have to dive to the Literal Civil War, to use the term I applied for A(4).
Novel means new. Not mean worse, or a different color, or upside down: it means different from what has come before.
I'm not sure where this confusion is coming from, but looking for something that has already happened in the United States and been meaningful is precisely what A(3) and A(4) are trying to exclude, where A(1) is about whether the specific examples I've presented being true, and A(2) is the Chinese Cardiology option.
Ok, that's not A at all, which was about whether "Things I'm citing are "specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies". It sounds more like something along one of B ("The things I'm citing real and meaningful, but not justification for retaliation"), or C ("These things real, and meaningful, and justification for retaliation, but not cause for escalation").
Is that closer? Or is there something on "meaningful" that you're trying to dig into?
... I don't think this helps expand the problem. You've said countless times that our situation -- if not "greater free speech than has existed in almost any period of history " -- at least not bad enough to do some greater action over, beyond complain or persuade, and even for complaining you have little patience for people thinking they're oppressed.
That does not explain if the examples I bring up "mostly isn't happening", or if they're happening but they can't justify any retaliation, or if they're happening but can't justify any escalation. I did the whole Wittgenstein format question, trying to break this down, and instead I'm asking a second time.
Even this exact quote doesn't deliminate between whether you disagree with my evidence, or with my assessment of the tactical or strategic or moral sphere. And it's infuriating, because you keep bringing examples of specific acts as if they mattered, and it's really not clear that any but the most extreme, unlikely, and irrecoverable ones do. And I can't even tell if that's because there's something you don't like about the examples I bring of those specific acts, or because they don't matter to the extent they did happen.
See above. I'm not going to, and can't, and don't want to, demand anything, but I can't see this being productive without at least trying to:
Pick one-to-three claims that I presented as a present-day encroachment of conservative civil rights and freedoms, and argue that it did not happen or mostly did not happen (in the sense it never occurred to start with, rather than in the sense it was overturned or punished in some form by the state).
Give as low-severity an example of a thing as you can think of, that would justify retaliation, which you believe has not happened, which if I can show has happened would persuade you retaliation on that matter were acceptable.
Give an example of a thing progressives have done, which is acceptable for conservatives to retaliate on, but not to escalate, and what that escalation would look like.
[edit: Yes, these do leave remaining options unavailable: you could, for example, disagree out of a general moral principle toward deescalation, with an exception for the absolute last-second of some extreme and irrevocable all-consuming abuse by a fascist government; or need some sort of statistically-validated incidence rate for discrimination or civil rights violation; or perhaps some certain classes of injury set aside for special pleading. There are some interesting conversations to be had under each aegis. Two or three years ago, I would even be interested in having that conversation with you. But you've made bets about things that don't make sense in any of those frameworks. If they're your real objection, state it and we'll at least have closure, but I'm not getting into those debates with you given the communication problems we've already had.]
The actual words I wrote were that "your evidence that conservatives need sit down and take it..." "in response to" "...matters as simple as turnabout being fair play."
"My heart does not bleed much when "liability" is being kicked off of Twitter" is literally the comment I linked to in those words you (mis)quoted, as was "I'm on your side if you want to push back against the anti-free speech, authoritarian ideology that is increasingly popular on the left. I am not on your side if that "push back" is defection and civil war." This was in response to a series of conversations not about civil war, or succession, or street warfare, or Minecraft LARP, but about some stupid speech restrictions (in Hungary!) or (a strawman of) "surely, we must burn THIS book?".
If you want a direct one: "I don't like cancel culture, at all, but the ironic thing is that most of the "solutions" I see proposed, other than "persuade people not to do that," would require that the government just change the rules to allow censorship that is more to the other side's liking."
There are good arguments against making that particular choice! But instead of an argument against such an action, you simply jump to acting as though people were plotting "defection and civil war" rather than fairly trite regulations.
Now, this was before it was demonstrably proven that Twitter's moderation schema was often government employees naming individual posters to take down; it was merely blindingly obvious that these groups were at least reacting to government threats. Now, I don't particularly agree with FCFromSSC's position on free speech, and I at least try to be (if not always successfully) a true believer in free speech.
But come on. You're "on [my] side if you want to push back", somewhere... so long as that's limited to complaining about it, or trying to persuade people who don't care or actively want to punish conservative positions. Absolutely your prerogative to hold that position; I'd like to hold it as well. But instead of arguing why it is morally or pragmatically correct, instead you leap to people not being sent to a gulag.
Who was talking about gulags, when FCFromSSC in your exact quote was comparing a thousand-dollar fine against the social cost of his online identity being attached to his real one? Doesn't matter, it's the new standard!
((I mean, you do touch on the turnabout is fair play when progressives do it gimmick, with literally "you guys started it" sometimes, but it's rare enough that I try not to focus on it, and it wasn't among my links above.))
And also asked me not to joust with old posts and ZorbaTHut said "I'm kinda not okay with digging through people's Reddit history using search tools to catch them in contradictions."
Fine. It's your shop, it's your rules. It's just this one class of evidence, and only when antagonistic, and it's only evidence of past claims, why would that matter?
(Apropos of nothing, did you know Darwin's back? Maybe he'll engage more seriously these days.)
I'll be more specific about what I'm not allowed to dig for in the future.
I find this bizzare. If you're having a conversation with someone across dozens of threads and months, how is it anything but helpful to cross-check what they were saying in the past with what they're saying now? If someone's being slippery or careless with their arguments, how else can you demonstrate that?
Reading the context, it looks like the report claimed "selective quoting/misrepresentation of another users post history to try to argue some kind of dishonesty or inconsistency, apparently motivated simply by not liking what that user had to say". So maybe they'd only moderate for doing that in a dishonest way? But I mean, you can just moderate for "misrepresentation" and "motivated by not liking" directly (except, well, you have to distinguish disliking for bad personal reasons and disliking because it's incorrect).
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I've been away a few days, so forgive me if I do not dive into each of your responses (sigh) as thoroughly as you would like.
I suppose. (I am pretty sure I have never accused you of lying.)
I don't think everyone on "your side" is plotting defection and civil war. I think very few are, actually. I never claimed everyone who feels they are being oppressed is an accelerationist or a would-be secessionist.
I don't think I leaped to that. I think there are many degrees between "complaining" and "being sent to gulags" and I don't know why you are accusing me of presenting only such stark choices.
Find a way to do it without being antagonistic, and the other conditions are not a problem.
Yes, I've noticed.
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