The Unit of Caring

Inside The Online Community Of Men Who Preach Removing Condoms Without Consent

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 11:49:49 -0700

Inside The Online Community Of Men Who Preach Removing Condoms Without Consent:

theunitofcaring:

auntiewanda:

marsinlibra:

Men’s Rights Advocates will go on and on about how they think a woman is going to trap them in to a pregnancy (why not get male birth control then?) but in reality, men are more likely to try to trap women to stay with them with a forced/unwanted pregnancy.

There’s even a whole fetish for forced impregnation.

“But why don’t you trust men” men will cry, when there are entire swaths of entitled men dedicating themselves to deceiving women at every turn.

According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, about 10% of men and 9% of women have experienced reproductive coercion (lying to your partner about birth control, sabotaging your partner’s birth control, refusing to use a condom).

I think it’s a mistake for campaigns to raise awareness about forms of domestic violence and intimate partner abuse to try to divide the male and female victims of reproductive coercion like this. There are abusers of both genders who lie about birth control, sabotage condoms or take them off during sex, and ignore their partner’s autonomy in reproductive decision making; there are victims of both genders who have experienced this behavior. We can raise awareness about abuse without implying that men who have been abused in this way, or who fear being abused in this way, are lying.

In general, if you are writing about abuse and intimate partner violence and your instinct is to say “oh, people say that [this group of people] suffers from this, but in reality, [this group of people] are the ones really suffering from this!!” what you are communicating to abuse victims is that unless they’re in the right category, their abuse doesn’t matter, awareness and solidarity are not for them, and they should stop talking so as not to distract from the real victims.

Instead, the right way to address the content of the article is to say “lots of women experience reproductive coercion, and awareness of reproductive coercion is important! Here’s what it looks like, here’s how widespread it is, here’s how to protect yourself if you’re in a relationship with someone who engages in it.” No need to imply that other abuse isn’t real or doesn’t matter as much.

Inform and empower people, don’t try to recruit them to one side in The Discourse.

Oh I wrote an angry post about this Huffington Article! Copypaste here:

The Huffington Post posted this article, which talks about the phenomenon of men secretly removing condoms before sex.

This is definitely a terrible thing and I agree it happens to women. The article was careful to frame this as such:

“One can note,” Brodsky writes, “that proponents of ‘stealthing’ root their support in an ideology of male supremacy in which violence is a man’s natural right.”

Because of the connection between stealthing and sexual assault, and the fact that both acts are rooted in beliefs of male dominance and supremacy…

Brodsky highlights the online communities who defend stealthing as a male “right,” particularly a right of every man to “spread his seed” ― regardless of if said man is engaging in straight or gay penetrative sex

OKAY. HOLD UP.

1. The ‘community’ of men stealthing women seems to come mostly from this link right here. In the study she implies that there are multiple sources: “One commenter on an article“ and “Another defender, commenting on a blog post detailing one man’s “strategy” for stealthing” are references to the same link above. All further quotes she cites for the misogynistic stealthing of women come from that one page. My google searches for further men-stealthing-women only turned up that one page.

2. That last quote was originally ““So you’ve got a condom watcher[.] Someone who is monitoring too closely for a tip-off broken condom or to slip it off mid-fuck,” he says. “How are you going to breed[?]” from the study. The original quote is on the forum here. This is entirely about gay sex, on a gay sex forum, and even is clarified as gay in the original study. When the Huffington Post quotes it, however, it’s careful to qualify it as: “regardless of if said man is engaging in straight or gay penetrative sex”

3. By far, the longest stealthing-promoting community online is the Bareback Brotherhood, which is an entirely gay community. In fact, nearly every single stealthing advocate online I could find was in the gay community.

—–

In the Huffington Post article, every single victim the author lists is female. I had a hard time finding any personal reports online about being a victim of stealth seeding, except for this one, who is male.

Basically, if we’re going off ‘online communities,’ as this article is, stealth seeding is probably mostly an issue in the gay community, with men as victims.

…huh. Thank you for looking into that. The erasure of male victims is horrible either way but the use of quotes about abuse of men, decontextualized to make it seem like they’re about women and then spread around to claim that only women are victimized, really raises it to a whole new level of horrible.

Inside The Online Community Of Men Who Preach Removing Condoms Without Consent

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:00:46 -0700

Inside The Online Community Of Men Who Preach Removing Condoms Without Consent:

auntiewanda:

marsinlibra:

Men’s Rights Advocates will go on and on about how they think a woman is going to trap them in to a pregnancy (why not get male birth control then?) but in reality, men are more likely to try to trap women to stay with them with a forced/unwanted pregnancy.

There’s even a whole fetish for forced impregnation.

“But why don’t you trust men” men will cry, when there are entire swaths of entitled men dedicating themselves to deceiving women at every turn.

According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, about 10% of men and 9% of women have experienced reproductive coercion (lying to your partner about birth control, sabotaging your partner’s birth control, refusing to use a condom).

I think it’s a mistake for campaigns to raise awareness about forms of domestic violence and intimate partner abuse to try to divide the male and female victims of reproductive coercion like this. There are abusers of both genders who lie about birth control, sabotage condoms or take them off during sex, and ignore their partner’s autonomy in reproductive decision making; there are victims of both genders who have experienced this behavior. We can raise awareness about abuse without implying that men who have been abused in this way, or who fear being abused in this way, are lying.

In general, if you are writing about abuse and intimate partner violence and your instinct is to say “oh, people say that [this group of people] suffers from this, but in reality, [this group of people] are the ones really suffering from this!!” what you are communicating to abuse victims is that unless they’re in the right category, their abuse doesn’t matter, awareness and solidarity are not for them, and they should stop talking so as not to distract from the real victims.

Instead, the right way to address the content of the article is to say “lots of women experience reproductive coercion, and awareness of reproductive coercion is important! Here’s what it looks like, here’s how widespread it is, here’s how to protect yourself if you’re in a relationship with someone who engages in it.” No need to imply that other abuse isn’t real or doesn’t matter as much.

Inform and empower people, don’t try to recruit them to one side in The Discourse.

If I were to write a very short post that made Ben’s argument as well as I understand it, I’d write...

Sun, 23 Apr 2017 23:12:12 -0700

If I were to write a very short post that made Ben’s argument as well as I understand it, I’d write it as this:

GiveWell is really credible. Why are they credible? They’re good at charity evaluation. How do we know they’re good at charity evaluation? Well, we’re a bit stuck. They’re transparent about how they make their decisions, but most people who trust them don’t actually wade through the spreadsheets. Data on the actual effects of interventions is noisy or not yet available; we know how much GiveWell thinks it’ll cost to save a life by donating to AMF this year, but we don’t know how many lives have been saved by past donations to AMF.
So GiveWell, and its experimental sibling OpenPhil earned a tremendous amount of trust over the past five years, but the trust mostly isn’t grounded in the demonstrated successes of things they’ve funded. It’s been long enough we can look at track record to check if they’re doing a good job, but we mostly don’t (or we look at track record of communications, track record of recommendations, anything at all but track record of lives saved per dollar and how close their estimates were to getting that right in advance).
Now they are using their credibility to do lots of things - run EA Funds, where people can have OpenPhil staff make grants with your money. Buy a board seat on OpenAI’s board. There’s no one we’d rather have doing these things than OpenPhil, because they’re very credible. But the credibility still isn’t grounded in the thing we actually want it to be grounded in - their cost-effective estimates turning out correct if we check after the fact - and so their central role in this kind of work isn’t warranted.

My assessment of OpenPhil is mostly grounded in reading their work, talking to them, talking to people in the fields they analyze, and I think the degree to which I consider them credible is in line with that. So I still disagree with my version of the critique as an argument why I personally shouldn’t trust OpenPhil, though it’s decent as an argument why some people who trust them because their charity recommendations are accurate should give it more thought.

What do you think about Ben Hoffman's recent post regarding EA being self-recommending?

Sun, 23 Apr 2017 22:51:55 -0700

I found it really hard to parse and written in a way that added lots of emotional valence while not adding much in the way of claims or evidence for the claims. At the end he breaks it down into seven claims, of which I want to address the first three to give examples of the issue I take with his framing:

1) Good programs don’t need to distort the story people tell about them, while bad programs do.

I don’t think this is at all true. There are bad programs with a deeply compelling story. Scared Straight, an anti-crime program that studies show was actively counterproductive, had a compelling story told about it and did not need to distort the story at all to get millions in federal funding. Microfinance is a very compelling story - just give people loans and they can start businesses, and then you get the money back and give it to someone else! You could say ‘sure, but failing to mention that there’s not much evidence base for the program is a kind of distorting the story’, but then I think you’ve just expanded the claim into ‘the set of full accurate information about good programs is better than the set of full accurate information about bad programs.’

And it wouldn’t surprise me if there are lots of high-impact organizations with bad PR who should absolutely be trying to change the narrative surrounding them. They should do so truthfully, obviously, but the word ‘distort’ is doing a lot of work there; if good organizations often need to make a concerted communication effort to change the narrative around them, then all ‘good programs don’t need to distort the story’ means is ‘good organizations don’t need their communication effort to say lots of false things’.

And even that isn’t necessarily true! Imagine all charities gave precise effectiveness estimates but a bunch of them lied. Then a good charity would not get anywhere unless they distorted their effectiveness estimates. It would be unethical for them to do so. I think they would be morally obliged not to do so. But ‘they don’t need to’ seems obviously wrong. The world is not so nice that if you’re genuinely the best you would never be advantaged by dishonesty.

Ben’s counterexamples to this are anecdotes and hypothetical anecdotes, and I find them unconvincing.

2) Moral confidence games – treating past promises and trust as a track record to justify more trust – are an example of the kind of distortion mentioned in (1), that benefits bad programs more than good ones.

I think calling this a ‘moral confidence game’, after a long wordy digression about financial scams called confidence games, is a manipulative rhetorical trick. If we replace ‘moral confidence game’ with the meaning then I think this sounds way less scary. Organizations make promises and are trusted, and then they fulfill those promises and earn more trust. And when people see that lots of experts trust an institution, they become more inclined to trust it. This incentive works better for good organizations than bad ones. It is not a distortion; it is the reason you trust Amazon more than a random person who says if you send him money he’ll send you shoes in two days. I think Ben’s framing makes a completely normal and healthy thing sound sinister.

3) The Open Philanthropy Project’s Open AI grant represents a shift from evaluating other programs’ effectiveness, to assuming its own effectiveness.

I think it would have been beneficial to just write an essay arguing this, instead of trying to package it the way it’s packaged here. Anyway, I think what happened is this: GiveWell is a charity-evaluator that tries to identify charities that are effective. The Open Philanthropy Project is, and from the very start has been, an organization which explores lots of ways of using money to do good - for example, funding potentially effective programs, but also funding lobbying for potentially effective programs, making exploratory grants that are mostly about seeing what gets done as a consequence of the grant, making exploratory grants to gain credibility in a field, and, yes, making grants in exchange for encouraging an organization to change focus/org strategy towards something they’ve concluded is more effective. So, no, the grant doesn’t represent a shift, it represents one of the many things OpenPhil does. And ‘we have evaluated this area and concluded that the most effective projects in this area are [this type of project]; we’ll pay you to influence you towards doing that type of project’ isn’t about assuming ones own effectiveness; it’s about assuming the ability to evaluate program effectiveness, same as always.

I think it would have been good for Ben to make and argue for each of these points separately; there might be stronger forms of his argument I’m missing because the whole is very long and very hard to parse for claims. And most of what you get out of reading it is general negative affect/ negatively connotated descriptions of harmless practices. The claims are not well-presented. Additionally, they should be defended with evidence (or it should be acknowledged that there’s no evidence to be found in this domain, but we have to reason about it anyway) instead of being defended by extended analogy to things which aren’t really at all analogous.

That said I think the listing the main claims at the end is very good practice which makes up in part for the lack of clarity of the whole piece, and I acknowledge that writing short things which convey a big picture is really hard.

You'd be somewhat more convincing if you didn't obviously hold the fear of other people in contempt. Or at least some people. We must of course understand and sympathize with the fear of white racists, or those who control the levers of a violent police state. But the fear of people who support ineffective street violence? That's exactly the same as supporting genocide.

Sun, 23 Apr 2017 09:30:32 -0700

I do not feel any contempt for the emotions and experiences and worries of antifa activists. I wrote that piece to try to convey their emotions and experiences in a sympathetic light and to try to help everyone imagine what it’s like to be them and what makes their approach viscerally appealing.

I have a great deal of contempt for the actions of antifa activists. This is, to be honest, mostly because I’ve dealt with a week of ‘you’re a fascist and all fascists should die’. The bludgeoning innocent people in the streets is much worse, obviously, but I can assume my interlocutor hasn’t actually beaten people in the streets whereas I know that their activism includes ‘send death threats to people who disagree with you and call the descendants of Holocaust survivors fascists every chance you get’. So, yeah, I will readily acknowledge that I feel some contempt there.

I have of course absolutely never said that supporting street violence is exactly the same as supporting genocide. I have said that uncritical Stalin-stanning which amounts to genocide denial is very bad and should stop? But I’m really not sure where you’re getting that.

I see the accusation of false equivalency being thrown around by antifas in a lot of cases where it doesn’t apply, and I wonder what is actually going on is that you feel a false equivalency of scrutiny? Like, I have more blog posts about antifa than about Trump lately, and he’s dropping bombs and killing civilians left and right! And I have more blog posts about Trump than about malaria, which kills more people every year than all U.S. militarism has killed since Vietnam!

The only thing I can really say there is that I write about things that I think have not been accurately or fully discussed in other medial outlets and that I find interesting and that people send me asks about, and so I’m writing a lot on this topic right now, and this does not represent a claim that it’s the most important problem in the world or as bad as the thing it opposes.

I think your missing moods hypothesis is very plausible. It explains why so many many antifa use arguments like, "you secretly love fascists" instead of something like "you underestimate our effectiveness"

Sat, 22 Apr 2017 20:39:51 -0700

Yes, this is sort of what pushed me towards that interpretation.

I'm boggling trying and failing to understand how it is that so many people (in this case, the advocates of violent anti-fascism sending you asks) don't have the idea that _political actions should have the consequence you want, not just be on the right side_. It feels like... not getting that trying to affect reality except in the simplest most local one-dimensional way is even a thing. Do you feel like you understand the mindset better?

Sat, 22 Apr 2017 17:11:28 -0700

One of my favorite articles by Bryan Caplan describes the concept of missing moods.

Modern warfare almost always leads to killing lots of innocents; if governments were held to the same standards as individuals, these killings would be manslaughter, if not murder. This doesn’t mean that war is never justified. But the reasonable hawkish mood is sorrow - and constant yearning for a peaceful path. The kind of emotions that flow out of, “We are in a tragic situation. After painstaking research on all the available options, we regretfully conclude that we have to kill many thousands of innocent civilians in order to avoid even greater evils. This is true even after adjusting for the inaccuracy of our past predictions about foreign policy.”

I have never personally known a hawk who expresses such moods, and know of none in the public eye. Instead, the standard hawk moods are anger and machismo. Ted Cruz’s recent quip, “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out” is typical. Indeed, the hawks I personally know don’t just ignore civilian deaths. When I raise the issue, they cavalierly appeal to the collective guilt of their enemies. Sometimes they laugh. As a result, I put little weight on what hawks say. This doesn’t mean their view is false, but it is a strong reason to think it’s false.

2. The immigration restrictionist. Immigration from the Third World to the First World is almost a fool-proof way to work your way out of poverty. The mechanism: Labor is more productive in the First World than the Third, so migrants generally create the extra riches they consume. This doesn’t mean that immigration restrictions are never justified. But the reasonable restrictionist mood is anguish that a tremendous opportunity to enrich mankind and end poverty must go to waste - and pity for the billions punished for the “crime” of choosing the wrong parents. The kind of emotions that flow out of, “The economic and humanitarian case for immigration is awesome. Unfortunately, there are even larger offsetting costs. These costs are hard to spot with the naked eye, but careful study confirms they are tragically real. Trapping innocents in poverty because of the long-run costs of immigration seems unfair, but after exhaustive study we’ve found no other remedy. Once you see this big picture, restriction is the lesser evil. This is true even after adjusting for the inaccuracy of our past predictions about the long-run dangers of immigration.”

I have met a couple of restrictionists who privately express this mood, and read a few who hold it publicly. But in percentage terms, they’re almost invisible. Instead, the standard restrictionist moods are anger and xenophobia. Mainstream restrictionists hunt for horrific immigrant outliers, then use these outliers to justify harsh treatment of immigrants in general.

The idea is that, if you’re pushing for some policy that involves doing or ignoring great wrongs in the service of necessity, it should hurt. You should be agonizing over it. You should be desperate for alternatives, and you should be grieved you can’t find any. The point is not ‘your opinion is not valid if your feelings are not valid’, but when that feeling is absent, it’s incredibly hard to trust the opinion.

I think that to antifas and the people who gravitate towards them, the entirety of liberalism has a colossal missing mood. There are Nazis and white supremacists holding rallies and chanting in favor of unthinkable, colossal atrocities. Lots of people sympathize with them. Shouldn’t we be terrified? Shouldn’t we be angry? Shouldn’t we be desperate? Whatever you think of the merits of smashing unarmed Trump supporters in the head with metal bike locks and then running away, the proponents of doing so are vocally and demonstrably angry and terrified and desperate, and if the thing you’re looking for is people who are angry and terrified and desperate then you find them. And if all of the people who seem to grasp the magnitude of the threat are saying sickening street violence is the way to fix it -

- and all of the people observing that that doesn’t fix it, that it makes it worse, that our institutions suffice and have sufficed and that there are better avenues of resistance should they fail, seem to be insufficiently desperate and angry and frightened -

- then people believe the antifas, even though antifas constantly give incoherent or conflicting accounts of how their methods are supposed to help and threaten and alienate their allies and spend a lot of their time threatening to kill gay Jews on the internet because we disagree with them about how to fight fascists.

And to people who are not sympathetic to antifa, it seems obvious that they have a gaping missing mood: compassion, or concern, or awareness of collateral damage. And if you know anything about violent resistance, indifference to or denial about collateral damage is the most chilling blind spot imaginable.

So both sides perceive missing moods, and it damages trust, and even though we both want to prevent the rise of fascism there’s basically no confidence that the other side actually wants to prevent the rise of fascism, and most efforts I’ve had to bridge that divide have sort of run aground on ‘I don’t think your evidence is very good and you don’t think my evidence is very good’, and so it’s really hard to fix.

This is a roundabout answer to your question: the straightforward answer is that I think they understand actions can have downstream effects and counterproductive effects, but don’t trust us about it and don’t trust anyone proposing alternative courses of action and were also drawn to antifa specifically by the desperate, angry dominant mood and it’s not a dominant mood conducive to realizing that doing nothing at all would be better than what you’re currently doing.

I have now talked with multiple bi women who’ve said ‘sometimes when I have a crush on a girl I get...

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 22:05:45 -0700

I have now talked with multiple bi women who’ve said ‘sometimes when I have a crush on a girl I get really worried I’m a Fake Bi and not really attracted to women and therefore I won’t ever get to kiss her.’

And I know orientation and labels and so on are complicated but I think there should be a rule that if you are sometimes scared you’re not bi which would be bad because it means you can’t kiss girls, you are totally and categorically allowed to kiss the girls.

for the record, social sciences are hard and the existence of a study finding that...

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 11:17:15 -0700

for the record, social sciences are hard and the existence of a study finding that disruptive/violent tactics don’t work is not the last word on disruptive/violent tactics. It’s totally legitimate to find methodological complaints with the study, or even to vaguely suspect there are some without having the time/skills to dig into it. It’s totally legitimate to argue that the study’s conclusions even if true are limited in scope in a way that gives us reason to expect they don’t apply (in a different country, to a very different form of disruptive protest, etc etc).

I don’t think people who look at that study and go ‘hmm, that’s evidence against violent protest but I’m not convinced yet’ are all anti-science or incapable of admitting they’re wrong. Science converges on the truth, but not all scientific papers are a pure unfiltered window into truth.

But you can’t just be in denial about what the research concluded. Have doubts, have caveats, have skepticism, but make sure you understand what the evidence says and represent it accurately when you’re disagreeing with it.

actually as per study that's already been linked in comments, no-platforming short-term increases publicity but is followed by long-term decrease in participation. "you fool. you buffoon. killing me actually makes me stronger somehow." are all lesswrongers actually dril

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 11:06:38 -0700

You misread that study. It says that the use of disruptive and violent tactics short-term increases publicity (for the cause using violent tactics) but that in the long run they damaged the movements employing them by turning moderates against those movements. The use of violent/disruptive tactics by antifa gets publicity for antifa but makes them unsympathetic and loses them the support of moderates in the long run.

extreme protest tactics – actions that are highly counter-normative, disruptive, or harmful to others, including inflammatory rhetoric, blocking traffic, and damaging property – are effective for gaining publicity. However, we find across three experiments that extreme protest tactics decreased popular support for a given cause because they reduced feelings of identification with the movement. Though this effect obtained in tests of popular responses to extreme tactics used by animal rights, Black Lives Matter, and anti-Trump protests (Studies 1-3), we found that self-identified political activists were willing to use extreme tactics because they believed them to be effective for recruiting popular support (Studies 4a & 4b). The activist’s dilemma – wherein tactics that raise awareness also tend to reduce popular support – highlights a key challenge faced by social movements struggling to affect progressive change.

In other words, no-platforming decreases sympathy with the activist group trying to achieve the no-platforming. Antifa conduct decreases sympathy with antifa. I think you might have misread it as suggesting that the ‘decreased popular support for a given cause’ was a decrease in support for the targets of disruptive/violent tactics? If so, definitely give the study a reread, you accidentally arrived at exactly the opposite of the study’s conclusion!!

this is all very fascinating, however, consider this: death to the fascist insect. explain how less fascists is a bad thing without proving that you are a fascist yourself

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 00:19:24 -0700

I regret having somehow failed to communicate that I think the antifa approach is bad precisely because it creates more fascists.

hey about the childcare law in DC do you think it would be reasonable for the district to mandate people pass a shorter technical certification? just because knowing SOME children things, like medical dangers, might be good

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 00:15:55 -0700

I think it’s really reasonable to look into what kinds of training make for a better environment for children, and to subsidize those and say that government subsidies for daycare only go to daycare that meets those standards. I don’t approve of a law, though, for a couple reasons:

1) Laws should always be conceived of as ‘things we are willing to put people in prison for’ or at least ‘things we are willing to have the police called on people over’. I do not think that running a childcare operation without having obtained certification is something we should be willing to do that over. Regulatory penalties are also an option, and a better option, but you could still absolutely end up bankrupting poor grandmothers who watched her own and the neighbors’ kids without proper licensing.

Obviously running a childcare that is not healthy or safe for the kids is something we should be willing to punish, and evading safety inspections etc. etc, but I want the focus to be on a good safe environment and not on having successfully navigated the application for certification of a good safe environment.

2) Lots of the effect of regulatory laws is basically ‘making it illegal to be poor in this area’. You see this a lot with housing. Houses that don’t meet zoning standards are outlawed, and so in practice living in the area while poor is outlawed, and so the poor people get shunted out. I think we need to be far more cautious of this phenomenon, and that the burden of proof is on any new regulation to prove that it won’t just make it illegal to be poor (and in need of childcare) in the bounds of the city where the law is in place. The default assumption should be that this will be a side effect, and unless extraordinary measures are taken to mitigate it it might be the dominant effect.

Oh related to the discussion yesterday my absolutely least favorite leftist meme is ‘communists...

Wed, 19 Apr 2017 15:13:27 -0700

Oh related to the discussion yesterday my absolutely least favorite leftist meme is ‘communists stopped fascists last time’. I’ve written about this before, but my middle school math teacher was a survivor of the Soviet regime who escaped with her family when she was nine or so, and she talked a lot about how painful it was that Stalin and the USSR - their symbols and colors and flag, their actions, their version of history - were so enthusiastically embraced by Americans as cool and radical.

Stalin committed genocide. By ‘communists stopped fascists last time’ what you mean is ‘two genocidal regimes went to war, and one of them was on the winning side of the war’. Stalin was a monster temporarily instrumental (among many others) in the downfall of another monster; the USSR was a genocidal totalitarian state that certainly rivaled fascists for its body count. The lesson of that is not that anything at all about Stalin or his regime should be emulated.

Communists should be deeply horrified that the USSR’s atrocities were committed in the service of their cause, and at a bare minimum they can avoid insulting the survivors with facile glorification of the regime that slaughtered their families.

I think this (no-platforming) would be justified if it worked, but it doesn’t work. A great deal of evidence supports the conclusion that having toxic lies voiced, even if they are immediately counteracted with conflicting truths, leads to the internalization of those lies on some level. If we could keep people from lying to other people (i.e., no-platform them) that would be a Very Good Thing(TM). Disorganized violence seems like a pretty bad way to go about that. What are some alternatives?

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 17:00:32 -0700

I think it’d be reasonable and right for universities to change their speaker policies in a way that discourages attention trolling in the Milo style. My litmus test for proposed changes to university policy is “would this university policy have been used to prohibit speech in favor of gay rights in 1950?”. For example, “no platform if the speaker is calling for something that is obviously disgusting and immoral” fails this test, as does “no platform if the speech is harmful to students on campus” and “no speech if the speech is for an ideology that, if it spread, would obviously be harmful”.

But ‘no speakers who have a history of harassment of individual students’ is extremely reasonable, as is ‘no speakers who announce plans to use their platform to name and threaten specific individuals’, as is ‘higher standards of scrutiny for speakers who have a track record of plagiarism and academic dishonesty’.

And that’s with respect to the rules universities should have for denying students the chance to invite speakers to campus, which should be more carefully drawn than the rules students ought to use to invite speakers to campus. Students inviting speakers to campus ought to pick people who have substantial and interesting contributions, who are good at characterizing their opponents fairly, who hold themselves to high standards of truth and clarity. Universities shouldn’t prohibit student groups from inviting bad dumb speakers, because universities are establishment-y and not good at suppressing only the speech you’d want suppressed. That doesn’t mean there’s moral virtue involved in inviting bad dumb speakers.

And I think that’s a necessary message - that truth-seeking is hard, and that more people should be engaged in the project of truth-seeking, and that it’s not courageous or virtuous to compromise on it. I think people can get better at not believing lies, and just like the knowledge of Nigerian-prince scammers has filtered into the common consciousness so that even uninformed people know better, that can happen with lots of other damaging lies. I think if the resources and energy people put into shutting down talks was instead put into explaining the truth accessibly and meaningfully - and personally, studies show that personal explanations are more effective - I think they’d do far more to stop the spread of misinformation.

Again, people googling randos they've never heard of before is not evidence that they become Nazis themselves. You know what stops Nazis? Ten million communists with weapons. You know what would have helped? Liberals. Fucking. Helping. I know you like fascists way too much to defend the oppressed, but AT LEAST DO NOT INTERFERE.

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 16:18:23 -0700

If your plan only works if no one ‘interferes’ by arguing on the internet that your efforts are observably counterproductive and unhelpful, then your plan is a colossal failure.

But, seriously, the ‘should you no-platform speakers at colleges’ debate isn’t the ‘punch Nazis’ debate and I think it’s really unhelpful to conflate them. Someone might believe that it’s right to pull fire alarms, scream at the top of your lungs, block cars, etc. in order to make sure that, say, trans-exclusionary feminists can’t give a talk at their college, while also believing that bludgeoning purported Nazis is a terrible idea. “Does suppressing speeches on college campuses and in other public arenas by having violent demonstrations against them work?” is the question I am discussing in that post, and as you correctly observe, “no, that fails to suppress the speech” is not an answer to a wide variety of unrelated questions.

When I write posts about whether punching Nazis is a good idea then you are welcome to spam me with hysterical anons claiming that I love Nazis, am personally a liberal fascist, am responsible for the rise of the Third Reich, etcetera etcetera, but when that’s also your response to ‘no-platforming fails because of the Streisand effect’ then someone might conclude that’s just your default response to literally any dissent, you know?

As always I am proudly and openly committing to interfering with street violence against unarmed people, organized brutality of every kind, and the spread of dishonest, misguided, and nonsensical information about how a society can fight violent extremism. Yes, I will interfere. Yes, I do interfere. Yes, I will persuade everyone that I possibly can to interfere alongside me.

Or, or: punching people who want to exterminate the oppressed, shutting them up, stomping the fascist insect in its root is extremely effective, and the only problems with this are because liberal fascists like you jump to the defence of Nazis rather than listen to the voices of the oppressed. How about this obvious fact?

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 13:41:52 -0700

I just gave some examples of this tactic failing spectacularly and giving the opinions which were ‘attacked’ far more attention than they’d ever have earned on their own merits.

Or are you arguing that, yes, the tactic fails spectacularly, but the reason it fails spectacularly is because of all of the people who responded to the Middlebury fiasco by buying The Bell Curve, and if instead they all ‘listened to the voices of the oppressed’, then the tactic would be a success, so the thing to do is to keep right on doing it but also yell at them for making it fail?

Because, uh, plans that only work if everyone overwhelmingly agreed with you and acted the way you want them to act are otherwise known as plans that don’t work at all. If the ‘only problems with’ your approach are that it won’t work unless everyone in the world reacts the way you’d personally like them to react, then your approach is terrible and you need to throw it out and start completely from scratch.

I know I’ve discussed this to death, but someone asked for a single, comprehensive post....

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 13:22:00 -0700

I know I’ve discussed this to death, but someone asked for a single, comprehensive post. So:

No-platforming people gives them a much, much bigger platform. And violently preventing a talk from occurring means that the ideas will reach thousands of times as many ears. While their talk would be one among a hundred poorly-attended talks on one of a thousand college campuses, a backlash against the talk will make headlines everywhere and get people curious. If the backlash escalates to violence - and lately, it often has, the protestors successfully boost the opinion they’re protesting to overwhelming national attention and sympathy.

(Google searches for Milo Yiannopoulos; the first spike is the violence in Berkeley; the second spike the pederasty videos surfacing). The violence in Berkeley increased interest in Milo tenfold at least.

In addition, after the violence in Berkeley, Milo got invited to speak at CPAC and interviewed on major news networks.

Same pattern with Charles Murray:

The hundred-fold spike corresponds to the violence interrupting his talk at Middlebury. The violence was of course also followed up by a gazillion news articles about his views. And of course it did wonders for sales of his books.

The direct immediate effect of ‘no platforming’ someone is giving them a huge national platform and favorable press coverage. The single biggest favor you can do someone abhorrent and attention-seeking is to violently protest their talks.

The most commonly offered justification of preventing people from delivering talks is that the ideas do not merit any discussion and should be prevented from getting any. When I present the above evidence to supporters of shutting down talks, by violence if necessary, they sometimes say that it’s really about the talks being prevented on campus, where students are vulnerable. It does not seem to me that moving talks from ‘on a campus in a lecture hall, advertised in advance so people can avoid them, surrounded by a skeptical audience’ to ‘on national television with a sympathetic audience’ is an improvement. Another explanation sometimes offered is that it’s about making other people aware that they should fear for their lives if they voice those opinions. Aside from being a morally abhorrent thing to strive for, I don’t think that works either; all the people who bought The Bell Curve clearly learned the wrong lesson, and people in general like feeling that they’re standing up to coercion and intimidation and violence.

It’s convenient when something you think is morally wrong turns out to also be spectacularly ineffective and a really terrible means to its intended end. I think that’s part of why lots of proponents of getting speeches cancelled don’t trust the arguments that they shouldn’t be doing it; they’re hearing those arguments from people who are like ‘your goals are bad and I want to thwart you in achieving them and also your methods won’t achieve your goals so you should stop for your own sake’. Of course they find that unconvincing! And yet. I don’t agree with suppressing speech as a goal and I also think the evidence is overwhelming that when you try it you fail spectacularly. I think it’d be very courageous of people who support or are open to suppressing speech to say “I think this would be justified if it worked, but it doesn’t work”. I really hope some of them do.

How Junk Science and Anti-Lesbian Prejudice Got Four Women Sent to Prison for More Than a Decade

Sun, 16 Apr 2017 18:46:33 -0700

How Junk Science and Anti-Lesbian Prejudice Got Four Women Sent to Prison for More Than a Decade:

Gosh, the child custody case linked at the end of that article is upsetting. Gay mother files for full custody because father whips the kids and they’ve started failing school. Says the state of Alabama (2002):

the homosexual conduct of a parent- conduct involving a sexual relationship between two persons of the same gender -creates a strong presumption of unfitness that alone is sufficient justification for denying that parent custody of his or her own children or prohibiting the adoption of the children of others. […] It is an inherent evil against which children must be protected.

Concerning Archive of Our Own

Fri, 14 Apr 2017 15:22:48 -0700

ozymandias271:

Concerning Archive of Our Own

[content warning: discussion of stories about abuse, child porn, porn of teenagers] I’ve gotten into a fair number of conversations recently about AO3’s way of dealing with controversial fanfics (i.e. you can use the standard archive warnings so people don’t have to see stories with rape or abuse or underage sex in it, but the moderators don’t delete fanfics), so I thought I should write up my…

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I agree with everything in this post and appreciate the effort to make practical arguments rather than try to stretch yourself to also convince people that also no, kink isn’t bad and portrayals of abusive relationships are not endorsements of those relationships and Harry Potter fanfic set in the students’ fifth year is not pedophilia and also censorship is a harmful and destructive norm. All those things are true but have been discussed to death, and it’s harder to bring clarity. While this is balanced and practical and clear.

That said, I really really want every discussion of what U.S. law demands to make it really abundantly clear that U.S. law is not a moral argument. The fact the U.S. government prohibits drawn obscene pictures of teenagers (edit: apparently only as part of general obscenity law) has some practical implications for fanfic sites but says nothing at all about whether those pictures are harmful or should be discouraged. I find it really frustrating how many people who generally agree that the U.S. government is fanatically punitive who forget that when it comes to fanart arguments.

The U.S. government is not a moral authority. The fact the U.S. government defines child pornography in a certain way is not an argument that the things it prohibits are bad (or that things it permits are okay!). Congress, given the power, would almost certainly make abortion illegal; I think pretty much everyone in the fanart debate agrees that this would not make abortion immoral. This post does nicely at clarifying where U.S. law stands, but I really want to remind everyone that U.S. law is often wrong! On this specific case I think U.S. law is ridiculously wrong! And the merits of a ban on drawn pictures need to be debated on their own instead of raising the policies of this terrible government to the status of moral law.

Callout culture is a thing because callouts work.Some clarifications: by ‘callout culture’ I mean...

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 14:48:45 -0700

Callout culture is a thing because callouts work.

Some clarifications: by ‘callout culture’ I mean something like ‘a dispute resolution norm where if someone does something wrong and harmful, you make an angry aggressive public post describing it and implying they should be shamed for it’. I mostly see the phrase used to describe SJ communities, but I think the norm exists in a lot of other places.

I think callouts are one of the worst dispute resolution norms. They make the cost of mistakes really, really high, and really saliently high, so everyone considering wading into a conversation is hyperaware that if they mess up they might be targeted for public shaming.

They are rare, so most mistakes go totally undiscussed until there’s a buildup of pressure/frustration/anger/hostility, and then they are all listed at once in a twenty-point tumblr post. This means that people aren’t rewarded for responsiveness to critique, and don’t get a warning, and it means that people who haven’t done anything wrong spend lots of time in a state of anxiety that they are in the middle of the secret buildup of pressure stage.

They aren’t very truth seeking - the process of being publicly called out is approximately as horrible whether a thousand people or a dozen actually agree with the critique, and not much mitigated by people later deciding that your conduct was okay, and the high emotional stakes make it really hard to respond to a callout with nuance or clarity.

None of these are novel ideas, so why does callout culture persist? (And, in particular, why are the communities I am part of getting more callout-y, which they’ve distinctly been doing recently?)

Well, say someone does something wrong. (For simplicity let’s discuss ‘wrong’ as in ‘factual error’ rather than as in ‘implies harmful beliefs’, because that adds all the extra complications of whether they agree that they’re implying those beliefs and that those beliefs are harmful. A simple factual error.) The courteous thing to do is privately message them asking them to fix it, or to reblog with disagreement. But if they have a big platform and you don’t, this is a really inadequate fix. A thousand people might see the original content and six see the correction; you might send off a polite corrective message and never get a response because the person has 3000 messages and forgot about it or didn’t see it or saw it and started drafting a response and then got distracted.

So you see a factual error, and you try the polite avenues, and you get no response. Maybe this happens five or six times. And then you get frustrated and you write an angry public post saying ‘that shithead Bob is a dirty rotten liar, he keeps getting his stats wrong and never corrects them and I hope everyone knows never to listen to a word he says, here are six errors just in the last month!’ and that gets tons of attention and Bob probably feels obliged to respond and the factual error is probably fixed.

And other people see this dynamic - quiet polite critique doesn’t reliably get results, callouts get immediate and very emotionally satisfying results, and the norms shift callouts-wards. Even if people disagree with you at least now they’re informed about the mistakes and discussing them! And if people say “I take your point but you should’ve handled it better”, you truthfully say “I tried that, and got nowhere”, because you did. And the debate is usually not fully resolved, with fault lines and suppressed frustrations and greater community tendency to assume bad faith, and the next person with a critique is more likely to handle it the same way.

One form of successful deescalation is obviously to be usefully responsive to polite critique, though I think people underestimate how hard that is when you get lots and lots of it. I think it might be valuable to have a widely-read place for polite critique so that it’s easy to get an audience for your criticisms without putting all the burden of ensuring criticisms get publicized on the original author.