http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/113930168256/some-people-have-questioned-the-term-sneer

slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com

yudkowsky:
What sneer culture members have in common is that they’re strongly reinforced by sneering, seek out provided info that they can sneer at, and hang out with other people who sneer at things in a group where they know they have an approved target. There are more skillful professional sneerers who specialize in feeding those audiences, but the masses below are just as much a part of the culture. “Lol homeopathy” skepticism is sneer culture, just as “Burn down the churches” atheism is hate culture, but neither of these are apex predators of Blue-coded spaces (if I understand correctly what that term means)…
“sneer culture” seems reminiscent of the “serious people” concept that floats around political journalism, where proposing certain ideas makes you unserious and hence dismissable, eg. Ron Paul, or any non-mainstream candidate.
But I think it’s better to describe tactics than cultures, otherwise it is too tempting to identify the bad tactics with the bad groups we don’t like in isolation, and forget that these tactics are incredibly tempting and crop up in every group that doesn’t carefully police itself against their use.

I agree that it would be good to have some magic way of reminding people that ‘sneer culture’ or ‘the culture formerly known as sneer’ or whatever we end up calling it is a degenerate state that any group can end up in if they don’t pump against entropy. I also think it’s important to have a compact category that fires when you see a Slate journalist talking about a ‘referendum on autism’ or someone talking about how Yudkowsky gets in all these great punches on Rowling (something that disturbs me every time I see it said, because the only part of HPMOR that I see as even arguing with Rowling is Ch. 39) or someone boasting about how they wrote their criticism while drunk, etc. How will we know what not to do if we don’t have a category for it?

The phrase ‘sneer tactics’ occurs to me, but it’s probably a little too close to ‘smear tactics’ and doesn’t convey the cultural depth of the problem.

(via argumate)