I haven't really investigated this, but there appears to be a fair amount of research on incivility in online discussions, especially related to politics. This paper looks interesting, for example.

Note that I chose to search on "incivility", which is how I'm summarizing my interpretation of foldn's concerns. I think that's a little different from how you are interpreting them here:

I agree with you that it doesn't make sense to think of vitriol as some kind of intentional rhetorical strategy, but I'm not sure that's foldn's claim. I think his claim is that vitriol is deleterious to political discourse and that leads to worse outcomes in a democracy. I think the mechanics of how incivility in particular contributes to a worsening discourse in general, and how that makes a Trump election more likely, requires more of an argument to be sure, but it seems roughly plausible to me, even though it's obviously ridiculous to take it to the extreme of claiming that specifically uncivil internet posters on just one side of the political spectrum are responsible for the results of an election. Anyway, I'm not trying to argue for his claim at this point, but I was curious so I did some googling :P

Also, with regard to the question of online vs in-person, I think there are some plausible arguments for the idea that it's a worse problem online (lack of non-verbal cues, effects of physical isolation on the perception of others), and that's problematic if a larger part of people's political engagement is happening online now than in the past.

My point is that shaming behavior is much more prevalent than you seem to be assuming here. For instance, every time you use the word "SJW," you use shame to motivate people to not post about certain topics or in a particular way. Every time you talk about how Wookie is biased and bad as a mod, you use shame (and other emotions) to motivate people to post/moderate in the way you like. It is easy for you to see how your evangelical aunt uses shame because you probably look down on evangelicalism (a lower status religion in general) and so aren't threatened by its attempts to control your norms (notice how you appeal to "most people" having the same reaction you have - which, since evangelicals are the largest religious group of its sort in the US, is likely false). But our own uses of shame are typically unconscious and automatic and so we don't notice them until they are pointed out.

So what is it about the shaming behavior in particular of these progressives/liberals that you disapprove of? Is it the targets of the shaming? The way this shaming behavior is manifested?

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I don't mean to deny that they are more on the left side of the spectrum. I was denying that they are crazy. What's I'm trying to pin you down on is what exactly you mean by SJW. If you just mean "mean liberal/progressive" then, for instance, there is no point trying to understand their ideology as distinct from liberalism/progressive thought more generally.

But you seem to have a specific set of ideas that you think is characteristic of this group as well. I would like to see what these ideas are. My own sense is that most of the people usually referred to as SJWs are actually pretty standard liberal/progressives. Sometimes they are more leftist or less liberal, but I don't hear from them really anything that suggests they think they favor state control of society in the way you see in leftist totalitarian dictatorships.

Seems relevant. Politicians aren't the only people doing politics.

Ummm...read the article again. It is saying the way the internet trolls "won" the election is by getting attention, not by swinging the election. The headline is a clickbaity way of talking about how internet trolls in particular won, not anything about Hillary v Trump.

Well, they got her to make the famously damaging "deplorables" comment, and got her to call out a freaking frog, (lulz), further distracting her and the MSM from what potential Trump supporters were actually thinking and why.

Maybe if there was less focus on David Duke and Pepe the Frog and more on say, her "blue wall" and the working class folks in MI, WI, PA, OH, where Trump spent most his time as everyone laughed heartily, and while she campaigned for a landslide in AZ, FFS, the outcome would have been different.

VG. This is why you're the gold standard for politarding.

I look forward to all this research being ignore in favor of the continuing parade of anecdotal stories about how despicable these SJWers really are. Speaking of that, did you hear about that one time some professor got called a r-word-er and cried?

I wasn't claiming that was FoldnDark's claim.

I was pointing out that if vitriol has the purported effects, it could be used as an effective intentional rhetorical strategy. It could be used in any number of ways, both as propaganda and advertising. The fact that it is not so used argues very strongly that it does not have the purported effects.

I thought Russia had troll farms for just that purpose of spreading propaganda and sewing seeds of discord in other country's elections.

That's the rumor.

There is no rumor that the Russians were using those bots to run self-denigration campaigns.

I'm not convinced by this kind of argument. It assumes something like the efficient market hypothesis for political strategy, as if no novel and effective strategies could ever be discovered because if something is effective it must already be in use. I'm not sure that's warranted.

Beyond that though, I think you might conflate the idea of a strategy intended to achieve some specific objective (i.e propaganda) with problems caused by the general worsening of political discourse. In some loose sense we have seen developments in our politics that suggest the targeted use of techniques which also worsen discourse, even if it isn't through incivility. The anti-intellectualism and distrust of experts and media which the right have fomented over the last 20 years have been pretty effective strategically, for example. But, at the same time the establishment GOP didn't actually want Trump, even if they've come to embrace him. Trump seems to some extent like an unintended side-effect of the strategy, and I think you could argue that the side-effect results in part from the worsening of political discourse. One answer to your objection here might be simply that political operatives prefer other means of influencing discourse over mere incivility because mere incivility is less effectively targeted at their goals than the delegitimization of media, academia, and government in general.

First, I'm not threatened by religious attempts to control my norms anymore, which is why I can now laugh at it instead of allow it to shame me. Second, I didn't mean to tar all evangelical Christians as I did my aunt, or look down on that denomination any more than Christianity at large. I was talking only about those who get all overly judgmental, too sure of their place in heaven and yours in hell if you don't obey with the glimmer in their eye of love spreading gods grace through daggers of shame, like she can get. Most evangelicals Christians are very nice, imo, I know and love several, thanks. Presbyterians and Catholics too. We've all learned to ignore my crazy aunt's chain mails.

So goes with people of any stripe who act that way. It doesn't take religion to turn someone into a prick and a zealot, I think it runs in the human dna. My calling out of Wookie et al is not to shame them, it's to point out I won't be shamed by their constant claims of bigotry, because I know they're FOS. They are doing exactly what my crazy aunt is doing, getting too wrapped up in an orthoxy and often trying to shame everyone else into submission. Won't work here. I need convincing through reasonable argument.

Sorry, I sometimes use SJW as an invective to describe the crazies, not all people who fight for social justice. It's not my favorite term. Anyway I go into much more detail in Shameys thread, but it's not a blankets description of social justice advocates, many of whom I have great respect. If you don't like crazy, then twisted, outrageous, zealot, all work in different spots. Crazy is a loose term. Think of my aunt. I often use similar if not worse language to describe Trump and the alt-right trolls.

I made sure to qualify with "argues strongly". Sure, it could be nobody has ever thought of these self-denigration campaigns before. That is no longer the case. Going forward, do you expect to see this strategy used in the future? Do you think some day the textbooks for Advertising 101 will cover them?

Second, there is no functional or historical distinction between propaganda and advertising. Whatever works for one, will work for the other.

No. Not at all. I'm focusing on the "SJW's incivility made peeps vote Trump" conjecture. That's a claim that those called SJWer's speech had a propagandic effect.

It's not an either/or choice.

Not all operatives are on the same team, or even the same page. Hypothetically, our bot masters might run online incivility campaigns, the think tanks might spew to delegitimize the academy, and the Koch bros might fund both.

OK. I'm not interested in that one specifically. I think it's obviously silly.

I don't know why anyone thinks it's obviously silly. I know a guy who told me straight up that's why he voted Trump. I'll bet there are posters here who did too. I think that mongdig guy sounds like one. It seems like a lot of liberals have trouble empathizing with conservatives, or trusting them when they say they don't like to be called bigots all day.

Here's a post he showed me from a forum where he contributes. See if you can taste the frustration dripping off it.

Just because someone rationalizes their vote that way doesn't mean it's not silly :P

It's silly alright, and scary. That doesn't make it untrue.

Nailed it.

This goes back to the earlier point (from the far left thread) about whether or not people are really objecting only to methods, or also to goals.

Just because someone implies that their objection to liberal messaging about inequality is merely an objection to methods (or tone) doesn't mean that they are being entirely honest about it, even with themselves. There's a lot of research into the way that we (Americans) construct ideologies to justify the status quo and absolve ourselves of responsibility for various inequalities. What is actually going on with any individual vote is going to be as complicated as you like, human psychology is messy, but it's trivial to reject the notion that a lot of these Trump voters would have magically voted for Clinton provided that internet liberals were just a little nicer about the way they talked about racism. As I've said before, making the conversation about tone and methods is often a pretty transparent distraction from actually dealing with the substantive issues. I don't want to make this into a false dichotomy. As I've said, I think messaging and civility and framing and all of this stuff matters. But if you can't ignore that problem neither can you ignore the very real fact that a lot of people just don't want to hear about real problems involving race, regardless of how those problems are described by activists.

Of course.

These fools also ignore the possibility that a lot of these H.Clinton voters would have voted D.Trump if they hadn't heard D.Trump called a r-word-er.

Seriously guyz, I met a guy once who's aunt used to date a dude, who's daughter said she was a lifetime elephant voter, but voted H.Clinton this one time for that very reason.

I guess the other immediate problem is there's a lot of mean conservatives on the internet too, writing lots of scathing and uncivil things. Check out the comments on like any news article ever written on a mainstream news site. Somehow that's not creating a bunch of liberals. One of the things some of the research that I really briefly looked at discussed was how prior political partisanship influences how we react to incivility when its from the in-group (your own party) vs. the out-group. The people who are incensed by perceived incivility from liberals are precisely the people who are already ill-disposed towards liberals. Those same people aren't particularly incensed by the incivility of conservatives towards liberals (or beta-cuck SJWs!) precisely because liberals are the out-group they don't perceive themselves as belonging to.

The rationalisation defence is usually a bit self-serving but in any case, if people rationalise their actions on the basis of their dislike of another group then that's sufficient for it to be true that the dislike of that group influences their actions.

Sure. My point is they don't just dislike liberals because they are mean, but because they disagree with them substantively.

Right, all of that can be true, and it doesn't change anything. People act irrationally, and emotionally, everyone knows this. Do I think many Trump voters would have voted for Hillary, not really. But it's terribly simplistic to just drop the line of thought there. Frankly, I find it bizarre how quickly many of you dismiss this.

Many who might have been convinced to vote for someone else early on in the primaries, or who might not have bothered to get off the couch in the first place may have had their decision made for them by frustration and anger. I don't know how you dismiss the arguments in this article I posted earlier.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...ald-trump.html

Were there other reasons, sure, was it often just a rationalization, most likely. That doesn't exclude that it did actually motivate people, and it wouldn't have taken very many to make the difference.

Liberals aren't 'mean'. Some 'mean' people are liberals.

It's a wide, messy spectrum from some of us who agree on the substance (and will never switch) to those who disagree substantially enough to never switch. In between are the people who matter most.

Okay. I don't see how you can justify your criticism of shaming progressives. I asked you if your objection is to some set of ideas held by SJWs, and you said it wasn't to the ideas, but rather to the crazy, twisted, outrageous, zealous, nature of their posting. You also earlier said that it used shame and you disapprove of using shame on humans. So fine, your objection is to how they act.

However, you yourself accept almost exactly the same argument for "calling out" Mr Wookie, FlyWf, P forum, et. al that is used by progressives to call out sexism, or racism, etc. That is, some progressive might say, "My calling out P is not to shame him, it's to point out that I won't be shamed by his constant racist claims." In fact, this method of "calling out" other people is almost exactly the same method you are condemning progressives for using to shame people they disapprove of. If your disagreement isn't with the ideas, and you use the same justification to call out P forum regs that they use to call out (perceived) racism, then I don't know where your objection is.

But I don't think what I'm doing is shaming. These are people who have called me out as a bigot, and a sexist, all sorts, even a rapist. I'm describing what they have done to me, and what they do somewhat often to others who do not deserve it in my opinion. I'm allowed to point out and reject what I believe is falsehood. I do not consider that shaming. I'm not calling for them to be banned or their forum to be shut down either, as they often do. And they'll freely admit they're shaming. I've had this discussion with Wookie before. He won't deny it.