I think this is a good argument, and a good thing for both sides of any large internet dispute to keep in mind. (And something that I have sometimes failed to keep in mind.) The writer is Chris, who is (if I’m following this correctly) an expert on statistics.
I’m fortunate, however, because I’ve been blessed with a pretty good grasp of numbers. I know, for instance, that while a hundred or so threatening messages are a lot, they came from a dozen or so different persons at most. I know that a dozen is, really, an insignificant fraction of people in the context of this debate. There were almost 150,000 distinct tweeters discussing #Gamergate, and almost as many discussing opposition thereto. I am not going to go out and tar such a huge group of people with the brush that would at best fit a handful.
When you get 150,000 people together, it’s impossible to do so without having a handful of people who are very enthusiastic, very passionate and very much lacking the ability to express themselves without being offensive. Equally, there will be some who join in just so they can let their primal desires out. Proportions matter. They matter even where a single instance of something is unforgivable, such as in the case of harassment.
Of course, while Chris received “a hundred or so” threats, there are other people who receive thousands. There are people for whom the harassment drags on for years. And presumably Chris’ “hundred or so” doesn’t count messages that aren’t actual threats but are still abusive, which I suspect are much more numerous than threats. I’m glad those who make literal threats are only a tiny portion of the whole, but I want to be able to keep that in mind without forgetting that abusive harassment, including but not limited to threats, is a real problem. (I don’t mean to imply that Chris would disagree with me about any of this.)
Unfortunately, Chris’ clear head is lost when his post moves on to an over-the-top rant about a program some Twitter users made to block pro-gamergate people from their twitter feeds (so if I used this bot, I would not see any tweets from anyone on the blocked list), which according to Chris is “a McCarthyesque blacklist.” (McCarthyesque? Seriously? If police gave out tickets for historically ignorant hyperbole, Chris would owe a fine.)
In the comments of Ozy’s blog, Veronica writes a good response:
Do I need an open channel to literally every person on Earth? I follow hundreds on Twitter. Hundreds follow me. I see good variety of interesting stuff from interesting people. I do not need to see *everything* from *everyone*.
I lock my door. I wear headphones on the train. I don’t display my phone number emblazoned on my shirt. I get to have some control of who I interact with.
And honestly, unless someone offers some better way to avoid the Twitter mobs, I don’t really care if they like the bot. They aren’t going to maintain my Twitter account for me.
You use the term “guilt by association,” but that is a loaded phrase. To block someone on Twitter says nothing more than you don’t want to see their tweets nor have them see yours, nor do you want to receive notifications from them. This does not prevent them from tweeting to others. It is nothing more than a boundary. I can build any boundary I want on social networks and no one else gets to say boo.
Well, they can, but I will not hear them. Which is a lovely thing.
Indeed, both philosophically and legally, Veronica has a free speech right to choose not to listen.
I have no idea what Chris’ politics are, but I’ve seen similar frenzied overreactions to the blockbot coming from anti-feminists and MRAs.
Some anti-feminists and MRAs act as if their job is to police how women respond to abuse and harassment.1 Thus we are told that if a man is harassing a woman at a bar, she is a terrible person if she calls him creepy;2 and we are told that twitter users like Veronica are wrong to use whatever tools they want to block users they don’t want to read; and Lena Dunham is called a liar when she wrote about having been raped, even though she made it clear the event was a little ambiguous and changed the name and identifying details of the man.
Obviously, the very minor abuse of an annoying tweet is in no way equivalent to a rape. But these very disparate things form a pattern of anti-feminists (mostly men) thinking it’s their business to police how women respond to harassment and abuse.
If someone is being harassed, she doesn’t have to put her harasser’s feelings above her own safety and comfort. And if someone doesn’t want to read tweets, they don’t have to. It’s that simple.
- I don’t know the demographics of the blockbot user base, but I suspect that blockbot users are disproportionately female, and those blocked, disproportionately male. [↩]
- Calling someone a creep who has in fact not done anything offensive, or gotten in someone else’s space, could be a different matter. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. [↩]
Yes, those bad MRAs and anti-feminists should not complain about a blocking program. There’s another way to view things, though: *Some* feminists (see what I did there?) are notorious for simply banning and blocking any views other than their own. I’ve noticed the general trend that MRAs and anti-feminists will discuss viewpoints other than their own on their sites for the most part. You yourself have a tendency to ban viewpoints deviating from your own (and then mock the bannee from the safety of your keyboard, when he can’t respond), with ex post facto rationalization, but other feminist sites are far worse.
As to death threats, both sides do it unfortunately. Even before the Internet, Esther Vilar got massive death threats because of her book The Manipulated Man.
It occurs to me that you are making completely opposite arguments on this thread and the “Don’t Call Trans Women …” thread.
Here, some MRAs apparently think it’s rude that people are blocked en masse.
You say that the blockers have the legal and philosophical right to do it.
There, on the Trans Women thread, you argue that what that woman is saying is rude. Although she has the legal and philosophical right to do it.
Good god yes. 15 years ago I was shocked by what looked to be gated communities online, but 15 years ago people were a hell of a lot more civil online, and there weren’t these roving bands of sea lions looking for fights while waiting for their bulk deliveries of Randian tracts to arrive.
I long ago stopped feeling obliged to argue with each and every one of these dudes, who aren’t there in good faith anyway. Nor do I have any reason to put up with their nastiness or with their “whaaat? I was being civil and polite” baloney after they’ve actually dropped the civil bit and gotten waspish and nasty. And I’ll put up with the “then you’re intellectually dishonest” business the same way anyone’s mom would.
Someone wants to show up with a legit difference of opinion — with own thoughts, rather than talking-points tiresomeness — and wants to have a serious and friendly conversation, and I’ve got time for it, sure. Happens often enough with fb friends, my boss (who could teach a course in how to get along with and be friends with people who have views diametrically opposed to yours), folks in my community. But this other bullshit, no, not welcome. And if the person goes around being routinely horrible to people, then no, of course I’m not going to engage with him. Or her. What an idea.
Then you should go play with someone else.
There is a commonality, but it’s not rudeness (seriously, you’re the only person I’ve seen objecting to the twitter blocking for being ‘rude’).
The commonality is arrogant entitlement. It’s seriously arrogant and entitled to decide that your theories about someone else’s identity ought to take priority over their self-knowledge. Similarly, it’s arrogant and entitled to complain when someone doesn’t want their twitter feed to contain you any longer.
People have a right to self-definition. People have a right to control what they read. People have a right to choose what kind of conversations they have, and in what medium. Throwing a little fit when their choices don’t include you is childish.
And since we’re on the topic, you wrote:
You’re wrong.
You’ll notice that this blog is host to plenty of commenters who disagree with the authors. Jump into any thread, and locating them won’t be a problem. When someone is banned, it’s never for simple disagreement. It’s generally for being an asshole of one stripe or another, ignoring moderation, etc.
I think of this blog as a conversation in Ampersand’s living room. When someone barges into your living room, insults you, insults your guests, spills the punch, and generally makes an ass of themselves, of course they’ll be shown the door. Insisting on your right to stay in someone’s living room as you call them names? Arrogant and entitled.
—Myca
People can listen to whoever they want. People can screen folks on whatever basis they want. Of course.
But some tools are unusually stupid and peurile; this is one of them. It’s not the equivalent of saying “I refuse to engage with anyone who is a member of the Tea Party.” It’s like saying “I refuse to engage with anyone that has an acquaintance with a member of the Tea Party.”
Actually, I’ll go a bit further. It’s more like saying “I refuse to engage with anyone that has conversations with a member of the Tea Party because they probably share those views and behavior.”
Not only do people get annoyed by the implication that they must have the same views as people who they talk to (obviously that isn’t true, just look at this blog) but they also get annoyed by the implication that folks who use that tool are maintaining a general public presentation of liberal/rational inquiry and politics.
Oh, and as for cc77:
Whenever I see this sort of dreck I feel obliged to point out that this blog is incredibly and unusually courteous about tolerating and engaging with different viewpoints. In that respect it’s probably the best blog I’ve encountered. I know that personally, since I disagree with people here (including Amp) all the time. You’re entirely wrong.
This is absurd. I waste plenty of time on the internet, and among blogs that have any sort of moderation, this one has just about the most civil, level-headed, open-to-disagreement moderation I’ve seen.
…which Amp and I think pretty much everyone in that thread acknowledged, either explicitly or implicitly. There’s no contradiction here.
So build a better tool and make it available. Calling a tool “unusually stupid and peurile” when it’s the only tool available for the job seems to be an error of definition. It’s like calling driving your car to work “an unusually negligently polluting method of commuting” without mentioning that it’s your only way of getting to work.
That is: unusual compared to what? If my shitty hammer is the only hammer in the world, it’s not that shitty, is it?
Nobody owes you their time. Nobody certainly owes the Gamergate fucker their time. I’m sure this has some false positives, and that’s too bad, but the consequence is … that someone who doesn’t want to talk to you doesn’t talk to you. That barely even clears the bar for a ‘consequence.’ Most of the time, in most of the world, that’s just how polite society works.
Now, of course, I don’t think this should be used as a hiring/firing tool or in college admissions or anything – nothing wth actual consequences – but as a tool to avoid having to deal with the kind of harassment GamerGators engender, it seems reasonable. It paints with a wide brush, but sometimes that’s what you want. Sometimes, you’d rather deal with 50 false positives than 1 false negative, and in your personal decisions about who to speak with, I think that’s legitimate.
—Myca
Fair point.
I won’t build such a tool because I don’t generally think they have social benefit, and I still think this one is stupid but I concede it’s not unusually so.
Of course not.
I don’t agree.
In a broad social sense I think it is very beneficial to hear from folks who are near the boundaries of what you can handle. That’s a good way to challenge boundaries and avoid getting locked into bad solutions because you only preach to the choir. It’s also the only way to avoid super polarization.
That’s why this is bad as a general social trend. It expands the class of folks you ignore; it increases polarization; those are both bad things. It also encourages a degree of “guilt by association” and I think that is also a bad thing.
Again, just to make it crystal clear, I agree it’s legitimate. I just think that on average it has a bad effect.
Well, I was part of the argument on Ozy’s blog so I’ll comment a bit here.
First point to keep clear: no one on Ozy’s blog criticized Veronica for using the blocker (to quote myself “I was conflicted about @TheBlockBot. It could certainly be a useful tool, especially for trans people, but there are also many potential problems, which were identified from the onset by Tim Farley.”). That’s a personal choice she is free to make, as I am free to criticize the tool — as she has the right not to listen to my argument.
Erasing part of Chris’s argument is not making your position stronger, nor is the edging around his politics (see also the comments by Veronica on the same thread on the “very bad company” he keeps). He received at least 81 death threats (since he reports a 80:1 ratio in the origin), some of those threats are about what should be done to his wife (a pattern similar to the ones reported by boogie2988 and Brad Wardell). I am very much against minimizing threats towards anyone (caveat: except if they express the wish for me to do so, as some have done to limit publicity and copycat effects).
The problem with the blocking tools is their bluntness AND their dishonest advertisement (the GG autoblocker working on simple heuristics — follow 2 or more people of a list of 8 gets you flagged) was presented as a list of known harassers by the International Games Developer Alliance.
The original blockbot presented the blocked as bigots, assholes and other unpleasant characters — being on the list is an attack on one’s character (oh, and Chris has been added to the original blockbot too, but has recently, as in, in the last 5 days, been moved from level 2 to level 3 — note that if you subscribed to level2 5 days ago, you would need to manually unblock him to see his messages again, which is kind of a problem when a blocker or admin goes trigger-happy).
Other choice words for people on the blocklists: (from a previous post on Ozy’s blog)
“Original blockbot:
“Level 1 is sparsely populated with “worst of the worst” trolls, plus impersonators and stalkers” (current phrasing)
” Level 2 blocking: these are the abusive subset of anti-feminists, MRAs, or all-round assholes” (old phrasing, from Tim Farley’s post)
“Level2 and Level3 are more subjective, are you really that damaged by some people thinking you are an asshole or annoying?” (current phrasing)
GG blockbot refers to people as idiots and sheeple in the code itself – the code is public and on GitHub, better people than me have commented on it. I’m not going to speak of the language used by the creator and their friends on their social media accounts to qualify the blocked people.”
The part about “men policing women response” is a red herring. You recognize that you do not have the data to make the claim. The original blockbot was written by a man (ool0n) to automate the idea of another man (aratina cage). There was (as far as I know, there still is) a big problem of detection threshold with the original blockbot (see Martin Robbins in Vice, or the comments in Tim Farley’s piece). It also originally tried to get you banned by reporting en-masse the accounts flagged as level 1 as spam.
Final note: it is sad that those are the only available tools, but there have been lots of suggestions lobbed at twitter on how to limit abuse. One of potentially good one (from TotalBiscuit) is to be able to set a limit on interactions by age of the accounts. Most of the abuse and death threats are coming from burner accounts which are easy to set up and re-create after you get banned (I’m assuming that the original blockbot growth is partly due to this).
(note: I have never been added on either of those blockbots, and have no personal connections to someone I know is on one of those lists)
Sure, and in a broad social sense, I think it’s very beneficial to ride your bike to work. But I’m not going to call driving your car ‘stupid and puerile,’ because some people live much farther from work than others, and riding their bikes just isn’t practical.
There are plenty of people arguing with the GamerGate folks. It’s fine for some people to opt out.
Finally, when you use the term “near the boundaries of what you can handle,” I think you need to be aware that they’re the ones who are the best judges of what they can handle, what they can’t, and where the boundary is. Opting out of wasting one’s time with intensely unpleasant and unproductive conversations that are “near the boundaries of what you can handle,” isn’t stupid or puerile, it’s making a perfectly reasonable adult judgment about how they spend their time.
—Myca
#10 Myca: Thank you!
More to the point, whether there’s social utility in there being good cross-political conversations (and I’d agree that there is), there’s more going on here:
1) The degree to which GamerGators are people with honest political opinions they’re interested in discussing fairly as opposed to horrible trolls who exist to harass their opponents. I come down on the horrible troll side for a number of reasons, and I’ve read quite a bit of GamerGate stuff. I don’t know how familiar you are with them, but I think it’s instructive that we’re not having this conversation about racists, anti-abortionists, anti-feminists, etc. I think the GG folk are legitimately different.
2) It’s good to have conversations with people you disagree with, yes. That’s different than making twitter well-nigh unusable due to sea-lioning, which has been a complaint I’ve heard more than once.
3) It’s good to have conversations with people you disagree with, yes. That’s different than “being compelled to have these conversations at times and places not of your choosing.” Twitter is one platform of many. I’d not be surprised to learn that some of the same people who use the blocklist also have conversations regarding GamerGate on blogs or other platforms where moderation prevents dogpiles, personal threats, and doxxing.
—Myca
And to this point:
“In a broad social sense I think it is very beneficial to hear from folks who are near the boundaries of what you can handle. That’s a good way to challenge boundaries and avoid getting locked into bad solutions because you only preach to the choir. It’s also the only way to avoid super polarization.”
In the context of gamer gate, I wouldn’t assume that those who are blocking others are ignorant of “the other side’s ” viewpoint. It’s more like, how much does any one person want to or have to continue re-hashing and re-hashing and re-hashing it, just for the sake of interacting with people who disagree?
Are there a lot of people for whom rape threats or harassment are “near the boundaries of what [they] can handle”?
Should that be near the boundaries of what one can handle? To the degree those boundaries are under one’s control, is there a benefit to moving them to just this side or harassment?
I think you’re envisioning people on Twitter blocking the accounts of people who are calmly and civilly* hold an opinion at odds with theirs. Which happens, no doubt,but if we take away that tool there will still be a need to accommodate people who are being harassed and for whom Twitter’s own routes for addressing that are inadequate.
*A term I am using to refer to the overall effect of the interaction, as opposed to “politely,” which is more about tone and register.
What’s really “stupid and puerile” is childish rage over the realization that freedom of speech doesn’t come with a moral right to force other people to listen to one’s free speech.
Almost as “stupid and puerile” are mindless platitudes like In a broad social sense I think it is very beneficial to hear from folks who are near the boundaries of what you can handle. What is that even suppose to mean? Is it ‘beneficial’ to hear from folks who fabricate their sources, or who think that “suck my dick, faggot” is an appropriate response to a measured argument? If it’s ‘near the boundaries of what you can handle’ to have people express disagreement by wishing death on your family members rather than a substantive rebuttal, how is that beneficial or a social good to make a point of listening to and even engaging with them?
Am I “stupid and puerile” because I choose not to go hang out at Stormfront and argue with people who think I and my family should be exterminated? If a Stormfronter shows up on my Twitter feed and starts spewing anti-Semitism, is it “stupid and puerile” for me to block that person? If not, g&w, why not? Because the First Amendment imposes some moral duty on me to sit there like a good little girl and listen up? Because you enjoy stimulating intellectual debate that treats other people’s lives as interesting debate topics, and your nose is out of joint when those other people may decline to be the props in your William F. Buckley Re-Enactment Faire?
@Louise de Rênal’s Left Shoulder: while I deeply admire your writing, I couldn’t disagree more with the idea that the Internet was much nicer 15 years ago. Just as artificial intelligence is always 5-10 years away, the Internet was always nicer and more civilized 10-15 years ago. The sociopathic hatefucks are perhaps more organized than they were when the technology was less advanced, but they were always, always there; it’s just that the death threats and sexually vicious messages came across BBSes or IRC or in chat rooms.
cc77, you seem to be a poster who has already been banned several times under a variety of aliases. Please stop returning here.
G&W, Myca, and Lee1, thanks very much for pointing out that dissenting opinions are allowed here. I really appreciate y’all saying that. :-)
I think it’s important for Fox News fans to be able to set up a forum where only people who love and agree with Fox News are allowed to speak. Letting in other opinions would be a violation of their right to a safe space to agree with each other, and that’s what the Internet is all about. Suppressing the open exchange of ideas is what’s best for society, after all; anyone who worked at Charlie Hebdo would agree.
Please don’t confuse privacy with cowardice.
Indeed it is important. They have a free speech right “to be able to set up” such a forum if they want to, in fact.
I’m glad we agree!
P.S. Seriously, it seems obvious that free speech is helped, not hindered, by the existence of a potentially infinite variety of forums, all of which may be moderated in different ways (including no way at all). No forum is going to be able to serve the needs as as many different people as an infinite variety of forums can.
Shit, I’m one of the poster children for dissenting views being allowed here (Robert, hurry back!).
Free speech means you have a right to speak. It does not mean you have a right to make people listen. It means that you have a right to keep someone from speaking to you. It does not mean you have a right to keep someone from speaking to someone else.
Yep. I’ve been cut off from commenting on numerous threads on various blogs and even entire Facebook pages because of what I considered asking rather mild questions. With many people out there, either you drink the Koolaid by the gallon or you’re a fascist rape apologist. While you do see that on the right, I think it’s not as prevalent. It’s my observation that they’re more likely to engage you in discussion rather than just cut you off.
However, there’s a more general phenomenon here that you see on all sides. Back when there were 3 TV networks (PBS was out there too but they didn’t run news programs) and 4 newspapers per city (or one or two in smaller areas), you had limited options for information, and you were more likely to see things you disagreed with. But now that there are thousands of sources of information, it’s a lot easier for people to only look at sources that agree with and reinforce their pre-conceived viewpoints – and that’s what they tend to do. The amount of information available has gone up – but ironically, the amount of different viewpoints people listen to has, I think, gone down.
You’re correct, Ron. Because when people can freely choose what ideas they’re exposed to, a depressingly large number of them choose to hear nothing but a chorus of agreement.
They have the right to be closed-minded cowards… but that doesn’t mean we should praise them for it.
I think that’s unfortunate.
Neither blog moderation nor twitter blocking some Gamergate jerks come anywhere near it, of course.
—Myca
But even people who do choose to seek out views they disagree with, filter when and how they encounter those views.
Copyleft, you’re being very vague about just WHO you think is a “close-minded coward.”
Would a person who uses the blockerbot on Twitter but also reads right-vs-left debates on open forums on Reddit be a coward, in your view?
The idea that the Internet acts essentially an echo chamber has been around as long as I’ve been online; I do know of at least two studies that show otherwise. (Both those links are Slate news pieces about research posted elsewhere; I’ll summarize that the first one shows that lots of the links you see on Facebook are from people you aren’t very closely connected to, while the second shows that most people look at online news sites that are more ideologically segregated than traditional news media like local newspapers, but significantly less ideologically segregated than face-to-face interactions.) There are also some studies that show that Twitter users are more likely to interact with people who share their views, but again I think the interpretation of that depends on what you’re comparing it to: traditional news media, or traditional social circles?
In looking for those links, I came across this quite thought-provoking essay on whether there are echo chambers on the Internet, how we would measure that, and how we would interpret it in the context of a democracy. I don’t know anything about the author or the site it’s on, but I enjoyed reading it.
One of the things I don’t understand is that there seems to be so little recognition that different platforms are good for different things. Twitter, with its character limit, seems to be one of the worst platforms possible in which to have political arguments.
I totally understand why people, even political junkies who are otherwise fine with having arguments on the internet, might want to keep their twitter for other stuff. I mean, I don’t try to debate tax policy on pinterest either.
—Myca
Pinterest might be good for tax policy, though. Lots of opportunities for graphs and policy papers and so on.
I tell you the one that always startles me is when I run across a tumblr blog that isn’t just fandom and porn. Like there are some people with perfectly serious tumblogs. So weird.
—Myca
Yes, I did find it interesting that all studies I could find supporting an echo chamber looked at Twitter.
In related humor, I’m sure you’ve all seen this before, but just in case: social media explained by donuts. (There are a bunch of versions, this is just the one I’ve seen most recently.)
Myca: Heck, I even run one of those tumblrs.
(I’ll link over in the open thread.)
Er.
RonF, this is just the “public square” question again. If a public downtown moves to a private mall, are the mall owners obliged to behave as though they’re stewards of a public space and let people rant about, I don’t know, industrial river pollution, or can they behave like they own the joint? That one got answered in a practical sense by the internet: if low-barrier public venues exist elsewhere, the problem’s solved and the mall cop can send you on your way. And then we had the same bogeyman turn up again in the mid-90s when NSF shucked the internet and everyone was afraid that AT&T would turn it into a “hail to our corporate overlords” consumer zone.
So long as you have a venue in which those *who want to hear you* can assemble and hear you, you’re fine. But no one’s obliged to maintain an audience for you, and your fb friends who’re sick of you aren’t obliged to keep a channel open to their other friends for you. Those friends know how to find you if they want to hear more. You haven’t been gagged, just shown the door.
mythago, thanks (and #16 made me laugh). I’m sure there were plenty of awful people online in 2000, but it sure was easy to avoid them. It wasn’t the wine-and-cheese party of USENET days, but the BBSes and fora I hung around on at the time were pretty polite (and by “polite” I mean you might get someone turning up being nasty about your views, but personal attacks and physical threats still weren’t the done thing). Even when that stuff did start becoming unavoidable a few years later — mostly in comment sections in newspapers venturing online, which is when the whole “what is moderation” fingerchewing started, iirc — it wasn’t, as you say, organized. And I think that’s made a very big difference, especially as other large-scale organization’s gone on, so that there there’s this fluidity from site to site, with one conversation (or fight) spreading across many nodes.
I strongly disagree with this – at least in my experience, it’s plenty common on right-wing sites as well. (I don’t really spend any time at right-wing sites any more so I can’t give a decent recent example – I definitely do the self-segregation thing online, although not in real life.) But I do agree that it’s also plenty common on left-wing sites. One thing I enjoy so much about this blog is the much more open-to-disagreement moderation policy than most other blogs, as long as that disagreement is respectful.
(I should add I realize I’m coming at that from a position of privilege, since as a cis, straight, white, middle-class man I’m much less likely to be the target of harmful disagreement. The trans women thread that Amp closed down a couple days ago gave me some more small idea what that’s like, and as usual Grace was eloquent and powerful in describing her position. So when blogs take a more strict moderation policy I can understand the motivation, even if I think it causes its own problems sometimes.)
Nobody here is disagreeing, or seriously arguing for
a) an actual right to force others to listen and attend to you;
b) an enforceable obligation that you must listen to anyone who wants to talk to you; or
c) an equivalence between individual ignoring/blocking/banning someone who you don’t want to interact with, and real free speech suppression.
Those are pretty clearly straws.
Item (c) is a bit more complex, though, outside the individuals. Because we have ended up with places which are legally private (twitter, facebook, any email provider, wordpress, etc.) but which act as the de facto public networks for a lot of people. Blocking me on every Internet portal you frequent would have almost no censorship effect; successfully lobbying every one of those portals to ban me would have a huge effect.
AFAIK, at least some of the folks who were arguing for the blocker were, at one point, also trying to use it to get people banned from Twitter. Certainly there’s a movement to try and do thing like encourage companies to respond to reported abuse, which seems like Step 1 in the “get the companies to take down the accounts of people who we don’t like.” See also http://www.infowars.com/twitter-bans-womenagainstfeminism-founder-for-saying-christmas-is-not-oppressive-to-women/
Also, did I miss an introductory post? IIRC usually there’s some sort of post so we have an opportunity to do things like say hi (hi!) and whatnot.
Nope.
Nope.
Because that person has done something which sensibly leads to blocking, whether it’s “voluntary membership in the Nazi party” or “personally attacking you.”
There’s a broad social tendency to give greater value to the people who happen to be in front of you or participating in the conversation, which is why folks will make supportable broad statements (“all lives are equal and I want to save lives with my charity”) but then take actions that don’t match (giving $10,000 to a child cancer victim when asked face to face, instead of giving that same $10,000 to fight malaria in Africa.)
That effect is well known. Some people make conversational use of that, generally in the “this is affecting me personally or these people I care about” kind of way. That’s a normal strategy to try to make your needs important, because most people find it socially difficult to tell someone “sorry, I’d rather prevent 500 kids from dying than save your kid in particular.” Or to say “I am not really concerned or responsible for your kid in particular, so I decline to give her money.”
In fact, many people would find such an honest answer to be monstrous or incredibly offensive, even if they believed that the underlying choice was perfectly valid.
Other groups of folks think that this disparity makes little sense. Those people don’t find that response especially difficult to say, and argue for less social opprobrium about that type of honesty. I’m one of those folks.
So if I am arguing for a process and someone asks “well, I personally wouldn’t_____: are you saying that I personally should ______?” I am often comfortable saying “yes, I guess so.” Putting a personal stamp on something doesn’t make it worse or more offensive, at least not to me.
That’s why I am not as affected by personal anecdata, nor by the frequent “this is my life you’re talking about” comment. I know that I’m talking about serious stuff and that these are people’s lives, but I try not to give special credit to someone’s views or wishes just because they’re in front of me. And I attempt to identify and take account of the relevant interests which are NOT being presented by the asker, or in the conversation. For sure, I sometimes get the balance wrong. But I try.
It’s why I seem unresponsive to personal stuff, I expect. When someone posts about something bad that happened to them, I imagine lots of folks feel “we should prevent that person from experiencing that bad thing ever again.” I tend to jump right over that to “here’s a person who says this is bad, and wants to avoid it. Do I agree it’s bad? What will it take to prevent it occurring in general? What are the costs and benefits of various actions? Should we actually try to prevent it or not, and if so, how?”
In a thread about “rights of ___ people,” where some ___ people are participating, there’s a very common tendency to privilege those people’s interests–intentionally or not. Not only don’t I do it intentionally, I try to avoid it. I know that can come across as offensive, but that’s how I think.
To be fair, that’s also Step 1 in stopping people from being subjected to abuse. Although I can see the utility of being vigilant, we shouldn’t let our worries of companies taking down the accounts of people we don’t like have primacy at the expense of allowing people to be subjected to abuse.
Link, please?
No, it’s step one in “get the companies to respond to reported abuse.” It might even, arguably, be step one in “get the companies to remove accounts that are used for abuse.” But – unless you simply don’t believe in giving anyone you dislike any benefit of the doubt at all – to claim that it’s step one in getting peoples accounts removed for mere dislike seems incredibly dishonest.
Yes, that article you just linked as if it were serious evidence is full of lies.
Janet Bloomsfield did, in fact, make up malicious fake tweets and (using her twitter accounts) attribute them to Jessica. She did this multiple times, and boasted about it, publicly. Do you really think it’s unreasonable for Twitter to find that Bloomsfield has committed “targeted abuse”?
That was put about by the people whom the blocker was blocking. The creators and maintainers of the blocker I am most familiar with say they neither intended for the blocker to get people banned nor made any other coordinated effort to get the people blocked by it banned.
It’s not quite that straightforward, since some of the people being blocked were blocked for harassment and some of them were also banned for harassment, and some of the same people may have been involved on the other side; it’s not surprising that if A harasses B on Twitter, B will both block A and, separately, take actions that may lead to A being banned from Twitter (perhaps intending this outcome, but not necessarily).
That isn’t the same as “the people behind the blocking effort are doing it to get people banned, just for disagreeing”
Yup, so it is. My bad for getting trolled. I was finding the first one on Google (I had read it before) and both popped up; I stuck in the second one without really checking it first.
I certainly concede that some conduct is abusive. That much is obvious.
I don’t really believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, but I try my best not to limit it to folks I dislike. In this particular area I think I’m unusually neutral.
I think that ill-defined terms like “abusive” (often, though not always, accompanied by equally ill-defined terms like “hate speech” and “harassing”) are often misused to report conduct in an attempt to get it shut down.
No surprise, to me at least, given the incentives. Right?
Say you’re arguing with someone about whether a specific joke is OK. The “objectively not OK under any circumstances” argument may be difficult to win; the “benefits are outweighed by the costs” may not be convincing; and so on. But it’s probably much easier to convince a conflict-averse administrator that the joke is “abusive” or “offensive” or “hate speech”. At which point you win (they’re gone) without winning the argument.
That’s an incentive for you. And people use incentives. Special weapons give bigger incentives because they are unusually effective.
If you look at a set of accusations of “that’s _____,” some of them are true, and some of them are made because it’s an easier argument to win than “that’s wrong because ___”
That’s probably why, for example, you get over 200,000 people signing a petition to get Facebook to “stop promoting rape and rape culture.”
Which, when you look into it, unsurprisingly is aimed not only at the obvious “no death threats and rape threats” stuff, but also anything which (in the minds of the signers) does things like imply that they should also ban pages which makes jokes about it.
Explaining rape culture to an objector is hard. Defending the claimed link between non-rape stuff and actual rapes is hard, and gets harder as the distance increases and the links become more tenuous. It’s a lot easier to win that argument by banning “things which support rape culture,” and also sitting in judge of what those things are, if you can get away with it. then you win.
That’s why so many people use “abusive” as a synonym for “opposed” or “offensive to me.” Feminists call MRAs abusive; MRAS say feminists are abusive. Trans people call TERFs abusive; TERFs say they’re the ones being abused. Some people think it’s abusive to publish the names of rape accusers; some think it’s abusive to publish anyone’s name before a trial; some thing it’s perfectly fine to publish the accused’s information but not the accuser, trial or not. Etc.
Actualy, G&W, when it’s someone you like you do give the benefit of the doubt. For instance, when FIRE puts a ton of effort into objecting to students exercising their free speech right to protest Condy Rice, but doesn’t bother to write a single article objecting to a PA law aimed at keeping leftist critics of the justice system off campus, you wrote:
The reason for giving people the benefit of the doubt is that doing so encourages intellectual honesty. That you don’t do this (when it’s someone you disagree with) is not a reason for pride, as you seem to think; it’s a sign that your arguments, however well meant, might not be fair or trustworthy.
g&w:
To me, this sounds like you fundamentally don’t understand why I bring up personal anecdotes in an argument. I imagine that applies to other people’s arguments too (I don’t think I’m special in my use of personal anecdotes).
The point is not to get my opponents (or supporters) to say, “This hurt you, therefore it should never happen again.” The point is to get my hurt included as one of the consequences you’re considering in your weighing of interests.
A personal anecdote that is a demonstration of what I’m talking about: I’m on the market for a temporary academic position (postdoc) at the moment. If I were offered two jobs, at similar institutions, with similar records of getting permanent positions for their female postdocs, but one of them was at an institution which was also known to have a couple of misogynist assholes that I’d have to work with…it would be worth something of a pay cut to me to take the other job. My final decision would depend on the level of interaction and the size of the pay cut, but like, even if there are no tangible effects on my life or career, I don’t want to work with people like that. Because even if it’s “just” that I’m getting hurt/annoyed by something, I don’t want to put up with that if I don’t have to. (In the real world, of course, having misogynist assholes around is also usually correlated with reduced job performance for the women that have to work with them, but my point stands even when that is not true.)
When somebody describes their pain to you, the bad response is not a response that fails at being 100% sympathetic. The bad response is a response that treats pain as 100% irrelevant to the discussion, simply because it doesn’t have an objectively measurable consequence.
G&W correctly notes that the word ‘abuse’ is being so overused that it’s losing all meaning. As in the Wondermark cartoon above, abuse is getting redefined as even polite disagreement. In fact, ANY disagreement can be condemned as abusive, to the point of some bloggers making entries accompanied by the posting note: “Please don’t comment if you’re going to be a jerk because I’m very sensitive about this,” i.e., “Please don’t comment unless you agree with me.”
That would be one example of simple cowardice… not to mention foolish futility, given that they could easily make their blog private if that’s what they wanted.
I’m not terribly surprised that you consider those requests equivalent, but you’ll find that most adults do not.
—Myca
Of course my arguments aren’t always “fair and trustworthy,” and are, as I certainly acknowledge, sometimes wrong. And as I noted above, I don’t claim to manage to do what I try to do all the time.
My thefire response has nothing to do with “benefit of the doubt.” Benefit of the doubt is when you DON’T think you have enough personal knowledge to reach a conclusion. But I DO think that, because I read FIRE’s blog all the time–have for ages–including their articles, sublinks, etc. And based on that information, I don’t think your conclusion is correct. Sometimes it’s posting in favor of right wing stuff, and sometimes in favor of left wing stuff. It was pro-Salaita and pro-Fun Home as well as pro-Condi-speaking. It’s hit much smaller issues than this on both sides. The accusation that the editors would deliberately ignore something specifically because it was pro-left (and this isn’t even really identifable as such, at least not to me) just seems inaccurate. Of course I could be wrong, and conversations with folks like you have suggested that I should revise my view of it as unbiased, and I’ve tried to do so, but I think you’re wrong anyway.
That’s why I don’t think that the absence of an article on that particular subject is incredibly indicative of a political bent; if anything it’s indicative of thefire’s incompleteness as an overall First Amendment source, which I already knew. It’s not like Marc Randazza is posting about it either, right?
Copyleft:
1. Neither Amp nor the cartoon refers to the depicted actions as “abuse”.
2. While I would also not characterize the sea lion’s actions as abusive, I strongly disagree with the implication that the sea lion’s actions are as simple as “polite disagreement.”
Of course it can–and should–be included and considered. But that’s a process argument. And much of the time, people (not you specifically!) retroactively define “consideration” in an outcome sense. That’s where we part ways.
This is a bad example because the hypo isn’t at all what I would say. But…
Imagine that someone replied “OK, Harlequin, thanks for sharing that. I’ve taken your losses into consideration but it hasn’t changed my views; you’ll just have to live with things as they are.”
Many people (not you specifically!) would then claim that the speaker failed to “properly consider” the point. But they wouldn’t be basing this on a stated refusal to consider it, they’d be basing it on the outcome. That’s not the same.
Or, look at Amp: he basically is implying that after consideration of his point about the PA law, I should have changed my views of thefire and support of them. My views didn’t change, so he implies I must be biased. But he doesn’t seem to leave open the possibility that I considered it, included it in the evidence I know about them, and properly declined to change my view.
Pain itself can be described and absolutely can be relevant. It’s hard to weight it properly, though. Either we should talk as if feelings are relevant or not; there’s no “my feelings alone are relevant” or “only superduper upset people are relevant.” So you start having to guess about everyone else’s pain as well.
And it isn’t always true that “nobody is upset” is always the necessary outcome. Sometimes (just like in other aspects of economics) the outcome is imbalanced. So it’s important not to confuse “consider pain” as equivalent to “eliminate pain.”
The brilliance of the sea lion cartoon is its flexibility.
The bad sea lion: imagine the sea lion as an intruder, ideally one who deserves initial comment about them. Then its actions rightfully seem inappropriate and if anything, demonstrate what a jerk the sea lion is.
The good sea lion: imagine the sea lion as a wrongly-persecuted minority. Then its actions rightfully seem appropriate to defend its own reputation, cut down on persecution, and prevent people from ignoring important things. That’s because the sea lion is right minded.
So I like it because of how much the whole cartoon depends on your assumptions that you make in the first two panels.
Just like real life: are these folks more like “good sea lions” or “bad sea lions?” The answer probably depends on who you ask.
No, I’m not. I’m really not. I didn’t say that, didn’t imply that, and didn’t mean that.
My take on FIRE is that they are not as politically neutral or objective as they imagine; but that they are on the whole a good organization doing good work. I would never suggest to someone to stop supporting them, because I think people should support them.
My take on you is that you have stereotypes in your head about what I (and others) say and mean, and that you tend to imagine that we’ve said and meant those things, while discounting or ignoring what actually gets said.
Uh, no, there is no “good” sea lion. I don’t care if you’re a persecuted minority, following people into their houses to insist they debate you is creepy.
Because that person has done something which sensibly leads to blocking, whether it’s “voluntary membership in the Nazi party” or “personally attacking you.”
Interestingly, g&w, you carefully ignored my first question, which is the context for the other questions. So let’s try again: What does “In a broad social sense I think it is very beneficial to hear from folks who are near the boundaries of what you can handle” actually mean? As a follow-up, why do you back off of that ringing statement when it’s applied to views that you personally find abhorrent – and thus in your opinion constitutes “sensibly” blocking them rather than a “puerile” refusal to engage? “Nope” followed by a rambling dissertation on the personal vs. the abstract is not really an answer.
And here’s what’s pretty clearly not a straw: You have repeatedly argued that people have a moral obligation to listen to, and perhaps even engage with, others who do not agree with them – with the exception, of course, of rude anti-Semites and those who you personally deem unacceptable. So no, your little list is a bit disingenuous, since you don’t believe anyone should be ‘forced’ to listen when you think they should; you simply believe they are bad people for doing so.
The fact that you keep propping up this ‘echo chamber’ tantrum with bullshit ought, perhaps, to give you pause.
To quote from my earlier post:
Jesus fucking christ. Drop the bloody snark.
If you want me to answer a specific question, and you ask nicely, I’m happy to do it. Sometimes I’ll miss one, in which case a reasonable assumption might be “he missed one.” I’ll address your questions if you’re polite about it, just like I’m not deliberately attacking anyone else for failing to answer the questions I posed. Should I start doing that, too? No? Well, then. let’s move on.
It means that ideally, you would occasionally seek out or permit conversations and information from people who challenge your views, to the degree you can manage it.
I haven’t developed in much. It was merely a speedily written blog response; it was not intended to be a dissertation on the confucian ideal of conversational ettiquette. Neither are the remainders of my posts, for that matter.
I didn’t “back off that ringing statement.” I assumed that “they think my family would be exterminated” would fit outside the “if you can handle it” box. Also, generic group hatred is not really the type of “opposing view” which I am discussing here. Perhaps you should try asking a different question.
What the fuck?
If you’re going to talk about being disingenuous then you should definitely not (a) start the sentence with “this is definitely not a straw” and then (b) inaccurately–and deliberately–misstate a straw version of my point.
Try a block quote next time. Or a specific reference. Actually, let me do it, since I’m not especially trusting you right now.
First, (post 6) I said I thought it was a bad idea, and also that it was inaccurate to chatacterize all such blockees as having been problems.
Then (post 9) I said “just to make it crystal clear, I agree it’s legitimate. I just think that on average it has a bad effect”.
Then, post 32, I said
Not a single one of my comments is as you just represented it.
Apologize, please.
Ahem.
Please don’t try to tell me what I do or don’t believe. Not only because it’s generally frowned upon on Alas. But also since it seems that you may currently be either deliberately deceptive or brutally inattentive–not sure which–so even if you could accurately suss out what I think at some point, you sure as hell haven’t done it here.
Just in case you need yet more clarification: not ONCE did I actually say that. In fact, the only statement I made about individuals was that it was a legitimate act. I said that I thought it had a broad negative effect, in a social sense, and that I think engagement is a benefit.
But then, i’m pretty much done arguing with you until you apologize, anyway.
Wait, what? What on earth were you meaning, then, in #38? Because it sure seemed like you thought that was some sort of zinger of a point, at least at the time. (Which, FWIW, I explained anyway, in a later post.)
Well, this is sort of funny.
You’re telling me why I thought something about FIRE (but you’re wrong, as it happens.) Someone else is telling me what I believe (but they’re wrong, too.) Adding to the irony, I’m doing my best to read all the posts and am probably answering more questions than anyone in the thread mostly using blockquotes for accuracy, while–for example–you have skipped a few questions directed at you, and your recent comments appear to have entirely ignored my direct response to you in #42.
I’m not sure if you find that as amusing as I do. Perhaps it’s just the late hours.
but:
Er… of course. Is this news? I mean, does anyone NOT have stereotypes and expectations in their head? That’s what “your take on me” MEANS. I have a “take on you” as well. That’s just how things work.
I’m sure I do at times. Not intentionally, of course. But I have confirmation bias and selective perception just like the next guy; the best I can do is to remember and try to fight against it.
So does everyone else. That’s probably why it’s easy for Mythago to think that I said or implied that you’d be a bad person if you failed to engage. Or why Mythago thinks that I believe something which I don’t, and so on.
And on that note, I’m off to sleep.
G&W #49:
I responded:
I wasn’t saying you “should have changed my views of thefire and support of them.” I was saying that your claim that you’re “unusually neutral” in not “giving people the benefit of the doubt” doesn’t seem to be true, by showing a recent example of you giving people you agree with the benefit of the doubt.
I never said you were WRONG to give FIRE the benefit of the doubt. On the contrary, on reflection I think you were correct to do so. I didn’t say or imply that you or anyone else should stop supporting FIRE. Again, I believe that FIRE, although imperfect, does good work worth supporting.
But contrast your easy (and correct) willingness to give FIRE the benefit of the doubt, with your constant, unsupported claims that feminists are seeking to wipe out free speech and due process. It’s not just that you don’t give ordinary benefit of the doubt; it’s that you always assume the very worse, and then treat your assumption as it if were known fact rather than unsupported allegation.
This is fair enough. But I sometimes get the impression that you believe you’re much better at fighting bias than the people you’re disagreeing with (for example, when you write things like “In this particular area I think I’m unusually neutral”). If that’s the case – and maybe it’s not – I’d ask you to consider that your bias-resistance powers might not be greater than normal for the folks participating in discussions on “Alas.”
Finally, I’m still waiting for you to provide a link to support this claim:
If you won’t or can’t support the claim, then could you at least acknowledge that? (Sorry if you did already explicitly address this and I missed it.)
You are not in a position to be requesting apologies from anyone.
You often strawman the arguments of others, and you have outright refused to acknowledge my stated positions when corrected.
For fuck’s sake, it was yesterday that you were defending misgendering trans people, even after having been informed how viciously hurtful it is.(withdrawn because I don’t want to invite further discussion on that topic.)If you want to be treated with respect, you must treat others with respect, something which you consistently fail to do.
Then maybe you shouldn’t be discussing the blocking of GamerGate folks, who have made a career out of their hatred for women. You have demonstrated amply that that doesn’t particularly matter to you, but I would hope you’d understand that it matters to women?
—Myca
Everybody:
We need to dial this thread down a few notches.
Less heat from everybody, please.
Amp, would you at least consider acknowledging post 42? Or, ideally, responding in a way that accounts for what it actually says? because I wrote it, and I keep referencing it, and you keep quoting from everywhere else… except for the post which specifically addresses the point you’re making.
But oddly enough, I wasn’t: that is not true at all.
When I first started reading FIRE, I was originally convinced that it was a right wing place which mostly focused on conservative causes, and that it was just a neutral/liberal front and an actual right wing agenda.
Only after a long time reading it anyway did I change my mind. To the degree that I doubted, it was against them.
So as I tried to explain in #42, you picked a pretty bad example here.
First of all, as a sidebar: I generally use terms like “limit” or “oppose” or “fight against” or “try to reduce.” But you often represent my arguments using terms like “wipe out” or “eliminate” or “remove.” Would you mind trying not to do that, especially given your comments here? Alternative, just use block quotes, like I usually try to do.
And I’m not sure what you mean by “unsupported.” To choose a single issue, if you look at (for example) the feminist pushes w/r/t Title 9 and college enforcement, those have been widely discussed here and have been heavily linked. Presumably you don’t dispute the underlying facts. While we can dispute the proper interpretation of people’s motivations and goals, from an undisputed factual standpoint it seems pretty clear that there are a lot of recent reductions in certain process protections.
To me that seems obviously “support” of an issue with “process.” Unless, that is, you select a definition of “process” or “support” which lets you ignore that data.
What do you think qualifies as “support?” Why doesn’t that count?
Let me put it this way: if you can’t even see the links between feminist action and arguments/actions opposed to process, or between feminist action and attempts to crack down certain speech such as”hate speech” to the degree that you think it’s merely “unsupported allegation,” then I think that (a) you’re doing what you say i’m doing, i.e. ignoring stuff; (b) you’re using carefully-chosen and highly-limited definitions of “due process” and “speech” in some semantic-type argument; and/or (c) you’re going to the true-scots land of NotAllFeminists because there are, certainly, plenty of people who do NOT feel those ways.
As for “always assuming the worst,” it’s true I have a cynical bent.
It seems to me that a lot of people confuse disagreement with dislike. So, for example, after a gay FB friend I know from high school days posted an attack on a Starbucks commercial that featured a couple of drag queens, which I and a few other people disagreed with, he posted a meme with the following text: “I don’t live my life to please anyone. I don’t care what anyone thinks. If you don’t like me, don’t talk to me; problem solved.”
Of course, by attacking Starbucks and the drag queens in the commercial he wasn’t directly talking to them, so I suppose his own stricture wouldn’t apply to him. By posting the “if you don’t like me” meme, he wasn’t directly talking to the people who’d disagreed with his attack on the commercial — this gave him a certain amount of plausible deniability. One of the downsides of the Internet for many people, I think, is that what they post there is to some extent public in a way they’re not used to. It never occurs to them that other people, especially strangers, will see the thoughtless, foolish things they post, though on some level they know otherwise – otherwise, why post them? Offline, they can play “Ain’t It Awful?” with one or two like-minded people, or people who for whatever reason can’t talk back to them, or they can rant at the TV, and it will stop there. But online, it’s easier for people to talk back to them. So they’re called to account for stupid, dishonest, bigoted things they say, and they have no idea how to respond. They’ve never learned how to do so, and anyway, they think it’s unfair to have to answer for what they say. I mean, did their parents or grandparents or teachers ever have to account for the stupid, dishonest, bigoted things they said? I don’t think so. And where would they learn to do it? It’s not a regular part of the school curriculum, for very good reason: most people, whatever their politics, dislike critical thinking and don’t want their kids to learn it. Critical thinking is not part of our evolutionary heritage. Like riding a bicycle, we can learn to do it, but it doesn’t come naturally.
And yet I think most people know quite well that it’s possible to like someone you disagree with, and dislike someone you agree with. They choose to forget this when it’s convenient for them, usually when someone disagrees with them. I’m not sure what, if anything, can be done about this, especially in people my age (mid-60s) who aren’t likely to start learning new things if they can possibly avoid it. But it is entertaining, as well as frustrating, to see them react to disagreement as if they were three-year-olds.
Yet here I am, requesting one. Just as you, if memory serves, have done so even in situations where I thought you didn’t deserve one either.
You wrote an excellent reply, which I read multiple times, took into heavy consideration, and am still chewing on and considering a sea change in my position. I didn’t respond because the thread got closed. Nor will I respond here, since you’re asking me not to.
But even if that failure to respond annoys you, it doesn’t really have anything to do with what Mythago did.
You don’t have to respect someone to agree to request mutual adherence to conversational rules. You may or may not respect me, but your response is within the rules. I may or may not respect you, but so is mine.
As for “always assuming the worst,” it’s true I have a cynical bent.
Yet you fly into a rage at the idea that others might exhibit a similar bent towards you. You wax indignant that anyone would consider your selective or poor arguments to be deliberate – instead we should first assume that you missed portions of a comment, or that you wrote in haste instead of trying to craft a dissertation – yet you extend no such courtesy in return. When you fail to present a flawless argument, you’re only human. When someone you disagree with does likewise…well. You know how those SJWs and feminists are.
I suggest, g&w, that you consider you may have read my second comment with as little care as you claim to have read the first one. Because I’m currently giving you the benefit of the doubt, and assuming that your completely bizarre misreading of what I said to you is a result of whatever is leading you to act the way you’re acting, instead of a deliberate rhetorical tactic.
Harlequin, I really liked that PersonalDemocracy link! Being exposed to different viewpoints is also important, but there are some in-depth conversations that simply don’t happen when keep coming on wanting to debate basic principles.
g&w @49:
That is probably the best rationale for encouraging one to interact with different points of view. You might actually get to understand what those points of view actually are. It helps eliminate confirmation bias and straw arguments.
Following from that, it seems reasonable for there to be a limit to what ideas one chooses to expose oneself to. I think I understand Holocaust deniers enough; I have a pretty good idea about where I part ways with the KKK; I am pretty sure I know that PETA-people have a completely different reason for despising turkey bacon from my reason (hint: it’s in the Bible, don’tcha know); and I get the birthers, the truthers, and the tax protestors. Further exposure is not likely to make me understand them any better or persuade me of the “rightness” of their positions.
-Jut
@JutGory: I agree; that seems pretty reasonable.
There are so many reasons to object to turkey bacon.
Following from that, it seems reasonable for there to be a limit to what ideas one chooses to expose oneself to.
Indeed; and to which persons espousing one chooses to expose oneself to. If a particular person appears to be a fan of truthers, PETA, or vaccine conspiracists, then I have a pretty good set of information that this is not a person who is big on rational discussion, considering evidence or accepting that they could be wrong, and I don’t want to waste time interacting with them – even though it is entirely possible we may be in agreement on some issues.
OK, I went and read a lot more Gamergate stuff than I had before, and I’m just popping back in to concede that my initial impression was wrong.
There are so many reasons to object to turkey bacon.
YOU ARE DEAD TO ME