Why is the alt-right and the rest of the right full of resentment? Their self-proclaimed supremacy is widely rejected.

So you think that neither of these examples constitutes shaming?

Person A: That advert is not racist.
Person B: Of course that advert is racist you ****ing idiot.

Person A*: That advert is racist.
Person B*: Of course that advert is not racist you ****ing idiot.

What was the point of the earlier quote, from psychology today, to capture the moral component because both of these examples contain a moral component but you are saying despite satisfying the moral component they fail to satisfy what exactly?

From your link earlier

Yes, I've never denied that conservatives like to mock progressives who care about racism and sexism. This mockery unsurprisingly is popular among some conservatives. This is much like when the Daily Show or John Oliver clips making fun of some conservative gets passed around among liberals. But Trevor Noah has to make a show one way or the other. He's always going to find something to mock. You can't run a political movement solely to avoid being mocked - you'll never do anything.

Our disagreement is not over whether SJWs are being mocked. It is over whether this mockery/reaction is politically significant (you claim it swung the election, I'm skeptical it had much effect) or is responding to a real problem in the left. So far, you've failed to show that it is a real problem. The best you can find are a few nameless protesters who yell at controversial political provocateurs and politicians and some internet people who like to unfairly accuse people of being bigots. That is only a very small problem.

It's interesting that dereds is defending the concept of shame in the thread.

The ideologies and structures that have upheld the moral foundations of the right -- moralities that bind -- have traditionally functioned on shame and social stigma.

For example, think of the taboos around divorce, or the concept of people not doing things or keeping them under wraps because they were scared of what the neighbours might say. Haidt argues that the decline of this in western society is unique in history. Hence the playful anachronym WEIRD.

What is interesting is that these tactics have been co-opted by leftists, but because they are leaning on principles that fundamentally divide rather than bind, they are failing.

FoldnDark's own reference suggests that moderate shame can be a force for good, do you disagree?

For what it's worth I am not claiming that my trolling you is a force for good or indeed is much of the shaming that happens here but I am curious as to whether you reject it entirely.

Note if you do reject it entirely I am going to question what purpose your attempts to shame those with whom you disagree serves.

Sure. I agree that many people associate with or even call themselves alt-right because they are attracted to its rebellion against social strictures around speech codes and other social and political norms. In this sense alt-right signifies a style or attitude more than an ideology (think "punk"). Nonetheless, regardless of whether these other people want to accept it, the alt-right whose attitude they are copying are not themselves just attitude. They have a real political program, with policy goals, a view of the world, institutions, meetings, magazines, and so on. White nationalism is a central (although not universal) part of that worldview. If some conservatives want to carve some new version of rightwing thought also called "alt-right" but that isn't white nationalist, great, go for it. But they shouldn't be surprised when people mistake them for the white nationalist alt-right.

But you're right, we do focus on different things. I will tend to define political movements by their most influential thinkers and powerful politicians and political leaders. This is because ultimately politics is about power and internet commenters and university protesters have very little. I think your focus on these things in describing both the alt-right and the left is misplaced.

Sure, or maybe they voted for Trump because of jobs, the economy, immigration, abortion, the Supreme Court, they're sexist, they thought Hillary was a criminal, or any other of the equally or more plausible reasons someone might have voted for Trump. Or even more likely, these reasons are rationalizations for the actual reason they're voting Trump: they live in a community where most of the people they know identify with a particular party, so they also identify with that party and/or its views and vote for its candidates.
Fair enough. Look, you have to see it from my perspective. You have obviously been scarred by years of being called horrible things by progressives in 2p2 conversations. So when you tell me there is a great social problem afflicting America, which is progressives saying horrible things in internet conversations, you can see how I'm worried you overestimate the severity of this problem. I'm not going to trust your judgement here, you'll have to convince me with objective evidence.

If you read my last post carefully, all of the answers are there.

And your problem with restating them so they are clear to me?

If you don't want to fine, it's up to you how you post and who you engage with.

Is it possible that the barometers you are using to measure these things are outmoded?

You seem to be talking as if it were still 1995. It isn't 1995 it's 2017. The world has changed. Culture is more diffuse. Young people do not perceive and define society by its institutions and VIPs.

If you watch my video on social cohesion, I talk about the real effects of being in an "on demand" culture as opposed to one dominated by television (or the church before that).

I think you are missing some of these crucial changes in your assessment of things.

Surely it's ALL of them?

Your party line would hold if Trump hadn't have won so many traditionally blue states which voted for Obama last time, but clearly *something* motivated these people.

I wrote my assessment of the election in November. What aspects did I get wrong?

After a full week of consuming post-election analysis, here are some things I think need addressing:

1. People are silo-ed both in terms of being part of online communities that only speak to their own echo chambers, and physically, that is, in terms of not being a part of meaningful local communities. Heterogeneity and diversity, so championed for so long, have actually had the effect of driving people apart. Some effort should be made to bring people together.

2. The slow death of paid print media is a bad thing with bad consequences. We talked about polling data, but there were fewer polls than four years ago or eight years ago, because people haven't been paying for news, and so there is no money to pay for such things. Local newspapers which would have picked up on disaffected communities much more vocally in the past no longer exist.

3. Facebook and twitter are not news sites and should not be substituting for them while their algorithms have no filter for accuracy. There should be pressure on those companies to filter only creditable sources. The phrase "post-factual" has done the rounds enough, let it end now. Although how this is done is a complex question in itself.

4. Meaningful political debate is circumvented by the dogmatic and unreflective application of political correctness. This is becoming a major barrier to progress because it is so spectacularly ineffective. It has had a net negative effect on the very causes for which it has so righteously strived. It has a long track record of pissing people off. That needs to be replaced by common sense and intelligence in all areas. Racism, sexism and so on are bad. We must show they are bad and why, not get in stupid debates about policing language and the freedom of speech. That's too easy a deflection tool for the right. Racism is still a huge problem and the wide-scale efforts to combat it have clearly not worked. So rather than doubling down, maybe try something different?

5. Negative campaigning is still actually not that effective. Many of the Trump voters if you listen to them voted because he promised hope and change, not because he called Hillary a nasty woman, but despite of it. Meanwhile, the Democrats' relentlessly negative campaign on the other side focusing on how unfit he was for office, had the opposite effect in many cases, making Trump seem like a forbidden fruit.

6. A poor economy is still the chief driver of populism. The rust belt states in microcosm have not done well. A job that made you middle class in 1980 puts you just above the breadline now, wages have not increased with inflation. Nothing has replaced old industry. The pervading feeling that time has left them behind is something that can't be glossed over with talk of social issues. These areas, as well as corresponding old industrial areas in Europe need something. The Full Monty came out in 1997, that was 20 years ago. What has changed? What has helped them out? It is not helped if they are called "whites", and this specific issue is made racial. The economic base comes first and the other stuff follows. Food is the first thing, morals follow on.


It is quite difficult to quantify these things and surely you know that.

I mean, we have pointed to the enormous followings of certian youtube accounts.

When Youtubers have north of half a million subscribers and their sole content is anti-SJW, don't you think there must be *SOME* underlying cause to that?

Do you buy the way it was explained away as just a cynically manufactured money-making enterprise?

Do you think that all these random people from all over the world are just making up the things they talk about every week?

No, neither of those situations constitutes shaming, imo. Calling someone and idiot is insulting their intelligence. Most of us do or think stupid things from time to time, and that doesn't speak to our morality. We should be embarrassed when we're dummies, not ashamed.

We had a very long and silly discussion about a couple of photoshops in another thread, some people arguing they were racist, and others arguing they were not. I don't recall much shaming in that thread, just disagreement, sometimes heated. Shaming would have looked more like:

Person A: That advert is not racist.
Person B: Of course it is racist, and you are a terrible person for not seeing that! [and/or] How dare you question my personal point of view, you racist! I demand an apology.

We have to be able to have conversations about morality, about tough issues like racism, sexism, etc. We also need to be able to allow that in arguments, people will be wrong, often. Being wrong can lead to embarrassment, and sometimes even shame when the person who discovers they're wrong realizes they've broken a moral principle, and done harm.

A big problem, imo, is when one side decides they're clearly right and the other side must just be evil for not agreeing with them, not that they simply disagree about some key premise or element of logic. When their go to in situations like that is to heap shame upon their opponent, like in the example above, I think that's a stupid non-argument meant to force a position on morality down other's throats, and should typically met with a middle finger.

Can light shaming be appropriate sometimes, sure. I've acknowledged this before. It's sometimes necessary with your dog or a small child during potty training, or when they get into the scooby snacks. But among adults, it is often overdone, counterproductive and harmful.

Foldndark, people seem to be completely unwilling or unable to talk about underlyining values. They just won't do it.

More on this later, but if that's the best you can find, then you haven't really looked, or taken much time to understand where the push back is coming from.

I will.

When the response is to a statement of our moral beliefs it does speak to our morality. This is where we disagree and I do not see a way to resolve this. In both cases Person A + A* is making a moral claim and Person B + B* is responding to that claim. The moral component is central to the ridicule.

It's almost entirely white men alienated from society, buying into an exaggerated mythology of The Other as oppressor; anti-SJW tend to find this appealing because they are more egocentric than empathetic

345 videos
From over 100 different accounts (maybe more, it's hard to count)
Nearly MM views
In one week!

Notice some key things:

1. While searching for "SJW" predictably gives mostly bloopers, try typing in any other social justice terms, like feminism, racism, Black Lives Matter, white privilege, rape culture, etc. Thankfully, you will find some advocates, and a few even have a whole lot of subscribers, this is encouraging. But notice the critics vastly outnumber them in uploads, subscribers, views, thumbs up/down.

2. Sure, this backlash may be mostly coming from conservatives, but they outnumber the liberals by quite a lot, so maybe that's not the entire picture. There are plenty of liberals and former leftists involved as well if you look. Just search "why I left the left," or "former leftist", compare that to the opposite. Yeah, some of that could be conservatives in disguise, hard to tell. David Reuben, previously of The Young Turks, had solid leftist credentials, and now he's devoutly against "the regressive left". Plenty of other mainstream critics like Sam Harris and Bill Maher question if the left hasn't left them. It's hard to imagine there aren't plenty of regular folks facing the same dilemma.

3. These are not all just blooper reels. There are plenty of serious criticisms mixed in.

4. Not only isn't this just coming from conservatives, it's not just angry white gamergate MRA boys. There are plenty of women and various races/ethicities represented. Realize they are speaking out against the sorts of people who will inevitably call them traitors and "uncle toms" etc.

To sum up and add, more and more of the electorate identifies as neither left nor right, but centrist fence sitters like me, not Democrat or Republican but independent. These are the people who's votes tend to be up for grabs and who exit polls indicate went for Trump. That should never have happened! How could anyone not completely brain washed partisan right wing vote for Trump?!

I think political uncertainty is especially true of younger internet dwelling college age and young adults 16-30. They are still forming their political identities, still looking for what world views make the most sense. I'd love to see a study based on polling data, and even youtube hits - why not? I think it would show the left is losing a lot of younger support, and that is not a small problem!

I think you're missing the point, and it's important. Arguing about moral positions and their particulars and disagreeing about them doesn't require we directly attack each other as immoral. We should be able to discuss moral positions without resorting to shaming in this way. I think you tend to do this well, so it surprises me you don't see the difference.

Sounds like a demographic to appeal to using media like youtube (for views and subs.) How long a list of others could we make for them?

Questions for th14:

1. What has the person's gender or skin colour got to do with their political views in this context?

2. Why do you think these people are "alienated" from society? What are the reasons for them feeling this way?

3. Do you think that all people who oppose "SJWs" necessarily buy into "an exagerrated mythology of The Other"? Do you see Foldndark or myself doing this, for example?

-----

On a related note, I was talking to a colleague just before Christmas. I reject some of her core feminist ideas about why people behave the way they do. I think that men and women have certain dispositions which recur with such stunning regularity and predictability that they must be hard-wired. I also said that the scientific data on this is overwhleming to the point that we cannot just dismiss it as nothing because it is inconvenient to our political beliefs.

She said "but most of the evolutionary biologists are men"

Question for everyone: Do you think this was a valid objection against my argument? Why?

I see. Being against something is fine--what are Milo and company against? ("SJWs" isn't a good enough answer here. Be specific.)

Okay. What do you think Milo stands for and/or against?

That's up to the universities, right? There's nothing that says that universities have to allow groups to invite speakers or that universities can't have a say in who they will invite.

I was looking around for right-wingers whining about liberals being "victims" so I could serve this one up for you and found a couple of great Cotton posts. Here buddy, behold, the party of, um, not being victims?



Oh yes, poor, persecuted Betsy DeVos.

Just read up on academic freedom and campus free speech rights.
http://www.npr.org/2017/02/12/514785...o-yiannopoulos
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.f93f4cc21268
https://www.thefire.org/campus-rights/

All state schools who choose to host student organizations are bound by strict viewpoint neutral rules with regard to how they choose to distribute funding and how they regulate the group membership, activities, etc. Suffice to say, if a young Dems group is allowed, so are young Rep, Socialist, Libertarian, etc., groups. If one is allowed to invite speakers, they all are. Naturally then, if a Dem group is allowed to invite a pro-choice speaker, the Reps can invite a pro-life speaker. If one can invite a feminist who says she wants to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig, or claims 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted in college, then another can invite Milo.

What is Milo for and against? He has plenty of literature and videos, so if you're interested then why not look for yourself? What I've seen he appears to be against "third wave" feminism and for freedom of speech, against identity politics and white supremacy and for tight immigration controls. He's also got a lot of strange beliefs, like he's gay, but against gay marriage. He claims to love black dick, but he is for harassing a black woman on twitter and calling her a man. Real classy guy.

So, what's your point?

Only a tool would do that.

Discuss away.

There's a War on Christmas/Christianity, a War on Men, and now poor Betsy DeVos (look at the cartoon, they call her "conservative", is there no end to this cruelty???) is likened to a girl facing racial violence during desegregation in the 60s.

Conservatives ****ing love being the victims.