Horrifying stuff. Decent people all over the internet are reacting with shock and sorrow and rage. As they should.
And yet…and yet…a lot of folks in social justice communities are doing what folks in social justice communities do, getting so worked up into a towering inferno of rage that they behave like the most ignorant MAGA dumbasses they deride, spouting absolute rubbish that is not only not true but cannot possibly be true, and of course shouting down anyone who tries to correct them.
Folks, don’t do this.
Yes, a large group of men did this. Yes, it’s abhorrent. No, it was not 62 million men. If you’re one of the countless people taking to the Great Online to scream your moral outrage that sixty-two million men could do such a horriffic thing, you are being a dumbass, you do not care about truth, and you are playing into the hands of conservatives who wish to mock, ridicule, and ultimately trivialize moral atrocity.
This is a trend I’ve noticed in social justice communities in North America over the last decade or so: moral outrage first, fact-checking later, truth never.
So let’s take a look at the CNN article and figure out where this “62 million men” idea comes from, shall we?
Here it is, in black and white:
Now, yes, this is poorly written (shame on the CNN editors!) and could have been much clearer. So, in the interests of fact and truth, let me spell this out clearly:
There is a site called Motherless. It gets about 62 million visits a month.
On this site was a group of people posting rape content.
That does not mean 62 million people were visiting rape content per month. C’mon. If you’re screaming outrage on the internet, you should know how the internet works.
There is a site called Reddit. It gets about 394 million visitors a month. If someone creates a subreddit called “How to Torture Kittens,” that does not mean that 394 million people a month visit that subreddit. It does not mean 394 million people a month want to learn how to torture cats.
Motherless, like Reddit, is huge. Motherless, like Reddit, has communities of people with different interests. Motherless calls them “groups,” Reddit calls them “subreddits.” Nobody visits every single Motherless group, just like nobody visits every single Reddit subreddit.
I thought this was obvious. Apparently it is not.
Yes, this Motherless group is horrific. Yes, any number of men visiting such a group is too many.
Truth. Matters.
Truth fucking matters. Going into hysterical screeds about “62 million men visiting a r@pe academy” makes those of us who care about social justice look like dumbasses. It makes us look like hypocrites when we insist on fact-checking conservatives. “Hahaha lookit these dumbass liberals, always saying ‘facts this’ and ‘fact-check that’ but when it’s their side they don’t give a shit about facts, LOL.”
It allows social conservatives to weaponize our own insistence on truth and facts against us. It allows people to ridicule and dismiss what we say. “ROFL these liberals, yapping about a ‘r@pe academy’ but they don’t even understand how the internet works, you can’t believe anything SJWs say.”
There can be no justice without truth. The truth is that 62 million men did not visit this Motherless group.
If you think I’m trying to trivialize this horror, you’re dead wrong. There can be no justice without truth. It gets right up my fucking nose when social justice liberals insist on facts and reason when we address the other side, then do the same things we accuse the other side of doing: playing fast and loose with reality in order to score cheap emotional points.
Yes, I know that the CNN article is ambiguous. I see how people acting in good faith reasonably came to the conclusion that 62 million men wanted to learn how to drug and assault their wives. But that’s not what happened, and now that you know that’s not what happened, if you continue to claim that’s what happened, you’re practicing accountability for thee but not for me. We are all accountable to the truth. There can be no justice without truth.
My fellow liberals, do better.
I started down this rabbit hole when I saw a comment on Facebook, where someone had posted about how “62 million men want to r@pe their wives” and then flew into a rage when someone else left a comment basically saying “I wish people would fact check, that number is not correct.” I switched over to my mobile browser to read the original CNN article and when I switched back,t hat post had scrolled off my Facebook feed.
If you’re pissed off about being corrected over something like this, you are the reason so many conservatives view us like this:
You may not see yourself in this meme, you may sincerely believe this meme doesn’t describe you, but other people see it.
If you expect the other side to listen to facts when you fact-check them, then you damn well have to be willing to listen and accept accountability when someone fact-checks you.
Do better. Be better. Facts matter. There can be no justice without truth. We do not win a culture war with the cheap emotional tools of the other side.
Anyone coming into the comments to try to excuse or justify deliberate factual misstatements or to argue that it’s okay to say things that aren’t true because our outrage is pure and our cause is just or that insisting on facts is the same thing as “defending rape” will be blocked permanently and without hesitation.
A couple of days ago, I saw a question on Quora asking why Christian movies always suck. Thing is, Christian movies don’t (necessarily) suck. American Evangelical propaganda movies tend to suck, but there are some extraordinary Christian movies out there, and I say this as an atheist.
I refer, of course, to Knives Out 3: Wake Up Dead Man, which is a brilliant, entertaining, and very Christian movie—probably the best Christian movie of the last two decades.
“But Franklin!” I hear you say. “Wake Up Dead Man has an atheist protagonist! The antagonist is a corrupt religious preacher who builds a dysfunctional cult of personality around himself! This is in no way a Christian movie!”
Ah, but watch this scene, where our atheist protagonist, Benoit Blank, first meets another major character, Father Jud Duplenticy, who is sent out to the corrupt priest’s parrish:
The entire movie has some absolutely marvelous dialogue, but this scene in particular stands out. When Blank enters, and Father Jud asks him what he thinks of the church, he has something pretty scathing to say:
Well, the architecture, that interests me. I feel the grandeur, the mystery, the intended emotional effect. And it’s like someone has shown a story to me that I do not believe. That is built upon the empty promise of a child’s fairy tale, filled with malevolence and misogyny and homophobia. And it’s justified untold acts of violence and cruelty while all the while, and still, hiding its own shameful acts. So like an ornery mule kicking back, I want to pick it apart and pop its perfidious bubble of belief and get to a truth I can swallow without choking. Telling the truth can be a bitter herb. I suspect you can’t always be honest with your parishioners.
Not a very Christian bit of dialogue, right?
Ah, but wait. Here’s Father Jud’s reply:
You can always be honest by not telling the unhonest thing. You’re right, it’s storytelling. This church isn’t medieval. We’re in the middle of New York. It has more in common with Disneyland than Notre Dame. And the rites, the rituals, the costumes, all of it, you’re right, it’s storytelling. I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie, or do they resonate with something deep inside us that is profoundly true, that we can’t express any other way except storytelling?
I, as an atheist, found Father Jud’s answer quite moving.
But it goes so much further than that. This scene is a masterclass of cinematic storytelling, of show rather than tell. You could teach an entire course in composition and visual design just from this one scene. Let’s go through it, shall we?
At the start of the scene, Benoit Blanc, our atheist, walks into the church. The door is behind him; the aisle down through the center of the church is shrouded in darkness. He, as he says at the scene’s start, “worships at the altar of the rational.”
He’s confident, self-assured, secure in his position.
Father Jud stands facing him, literally rather than figuratively standing in the light.
Father Jud approaches Benoit, asking him questions about himself, listening to his reply, meeting Benoit where he is.
Benoit walks past him. At this point, the two of them, atheist and reverent priest, have traded places.
“How does all this make you feel?” Jud says. At this point, Jud and Benoit have traded places, and you’ll see some astonishingly good face acting on Daniel Craig’s part.
Craig (Benoit Blank) asks him, “truthfully?” “Sure,” Jud replies, giving him permission to be frank. Benoit launches into his tirade: “I feel the grandeur, the mystery, the intended emotional effect. And it’s like someone has shown a story to me that I do not believe. That is built upon the empty promise of a child’s fairy tale, filled with malevolence and misogyny and homophobia.”
While he speaks, pay attention to what happens around him. The formerly bright part of the church grows dark. The saturation is reduced, leaching the color from the scene. His words spin a veil of darkness that fills the space around him.
More incredible face acting from Craig as his words become more biting, more angry: “And it’s justified untold acts of violence and cruelty while all the while, and still, hiding its own shameful acts,” every word delivered like a bullet from a gun.
As he speaks, there’s some amazingly clever camera work. Benoit in the foreground, Father Jud in the background, the camera moves around so that Benoit, again literally and not figuratively, eclipses the pious priest, completely removing him from view. Benoit is not talking to Father Jud. He’s not even facing Father Jud. He’s talking to us.
It’s subtle but oh so well done, and it is absolutely intentional.
At the end, Benoit, realizing he’s said probably more than he intended to, and with more venom, offers to leave. Father Jud tells him, no, stay, I told you to be honest.
At this point, the entire church is shrouded in darkness. Father Jud isn’s standing in the light anymore. He and Blanc are cloaked in shadow, the darkness of Benoit’s words given physical form.
What is happening here? Father Jud has literally, not figuratively but literally, joined Benoit Blank in the darkness. He’s met Benoit where he is. He hasn’t stood above him, talking down to him. He is there, on the same footing, in the same place as Blanc. He pauses for a moment, and then he begins to speak.
What is the first thing he says? “You’re right.” He reiterates Benoit’s opening thesis: It is storytelling. The church itself, its physical form, is a story, and a false one, an illusion of a Medieval church built in modern times, as much an ancient cathedral as Cindarella’s castle is a real fortification.
Watch what happens as he speaks:
The light returns, shining from above him, almost passing through him. And when he’s finished…
…the atheist stands illuminated, bathed in the light of his words.
Father Jud doesn’t preach at the atheist detective from some higher plane. He meets Blanc where he is, he stands with him, he acknowledges the parts of Blanc’s argument that he believes are true, and then he offers a new way to interpret Blanc’s central thesis—all without condescention, judgment, or self-righteousness.
I am not a believer, but this scene still gave me chills. It’s immensely powerful. It resonates. It vibrates. This is masterful visual storytelling.
The reason people don’t recognize Wake Up Dead Man as a Christian movie is that too many of us have been conditioned by Christian™ movies, movies made by and for low-information, insecure American Protestant Evangelicals.
These movies are like the Chick tracts I used to collect back when I collected religious propaganda. They’re cartoons for the uneducated, caricatures in which every atheist is a slavering buffoon, every religious person clever and righteous, told to an audience so insecure in its faith that no atheist can ever be allowed to make any point and no religious character can ever be permitted the slightest doubt or fault.
American Evangelicals are a weird breed, convincing themselves they’re the persecuted ones at the same time they deliver a venomous mix of hatred and bile to all those who are not like themselves. They believe, they actually believe, that university professors demand their students sign statements renouncing Christianity in order to get a passing grade, then go home and drool over all the people they’ve deconverted that day.
By their standards, Wake Up Dead Man is not A Christian movie, because Christian movies have to look a certain way, a way that seems written by a drooling eight-year-old who’s never read more than three Bible verses for a Sunday School class.
There’s another scene that drives this point home even more. Benoit Blanc and Father Jud are hot on the heels of the murderer, a murderer they believe they will be able to identify if they can get one key piece of information from the church secretary, Louise. They’re this close to finding the killer. And, well…
…Louise reveals that her mother is in hospice, dying of brain cancer, and she fought with her mother, and her mother refuses to speak to her.
This scene broke me.
Father Jud is working with Detective Blanc to uncover a murderer, a high-stakes mission, but when faced with someone suffering right now, someone he has the power to help right now, he stops what he’s doing to care for her.
This is the absolute best of Christianity, the thing Christianity promises but all too often fails to deliver. It’s not highlighted, it’s not the centerpiece of the movie, it’s not delivered in a “look how good we Christians are, let’s rub it in the face of the callous evil atheists,” it’s just a thing that happens, because of Father Jud is who he is: a flawed but sincere exemplar of loving kindness, not a Christian™ (or an atheist) caricature of Christianity.
A Christian™ movie will never, can never deliver a scene like this.
Benoit Blanc ends the movie as he started, an atheist. There’s no scene in this movie like there is in every Christian™ movie where the atheist character falls to his knees and accepts Jesus Christ™ as his Lord and Savior™. That’s not the point.
The religious figures in the movie are not perfect. One of them is the film’s primary antagonist. That’s also not the point.
The point is, this movie delivers a blueprint, a template of the best that Christianity has to offer: kindness, humility, calm and patient virtue. It is without question a Christian movie, deliberately so, a Christian movie built and delivered with warmth and compassion. A Christian movie even atheists can enjoy.
That makes it far more effective than any Christian™ movie can ever be.
Every so often, I find myself involved in conversations about grammar online. Every time this happens, without fail, someone will trot out some variant of the old saw “grammar is elitist. Who cares if you have every apostrophe or period in the right place? As long as you can make your idea understood it’s fine.”
Inevitably it’s someone with terrible grammar who says this, of course, but no matter.
There are a bunch of standard responses to this argument, but they all miss an important point.
The standard responses are typically something along the lines of “using proper grammar helps make sure your idea is understood,” or “using proper grammar gives you credibility,” or “not using proper grammar makes you look like an uneducated hick, and why should anyone pay attention to an uneducated hick?” All of which are true, but all of which miss an important point, and play into the “grammar is elitist” narrative.
The mistake people make when they talk about the value of proper grammar is in focusing on the person doing the communicating, not the person receiving it.
The most compelling reason I know to learn and understand grammar isn’t about making yourself understood. The real value? Preventing you from being played for a fool.
I spend quite a bit of time tracking down scammers, spammers, malware writers, and other lowlife vermin on the Internet. The Internet started out as a hack on top of a kludge on top of some interesting ideas by brilliant but naïve people who wanted to make a better world but didn’t think about the way the tools they were building could be put to evil use, so it was built from the ground up with no mechanisms for authentication, identity verification, or security. Several fundamental decisions made very early on, when there were only about twenty sites on what would become “the internet” and everyone who had an email address knew everyone else who had an email address, would later make the Internet a haven for criminal activity. (In fact, I’m writing a nonfiction book that talks about this right now.)
The Internet is swarming with scammers and con artists. Many of them don’t speak English natively; in Nigeria, for example, Internet frauds are the nation’s #4 source of foreign income.
Knowledge of English grammar is one of the first, best defenses against being scammed and conned.
Consider this, a fake Quora profile made by a romance scammer likely somewhere in West Africa:
This is a bog-standard celebrity impersonation scam; needless to say, this account is not owned by TV actress Kaley Cuoco. The man (it’s almost certainly a man) who created this profile most likely speaks English as a second language. Certain tells (“I got this page newly”) point to a native speaker of a West African language.
There are quite a few of these “tells” that can suggest where a scammer is from.
Native speakers of Yoruba, one of the languages of Nigeria, struggle with English first-person pronouns, which work differently in Yoruba than they do in English. So they’ll say things like “am a single woman, am looking for a good man” instead of “I am a single woman, I am looking for a good man.”
Nigerian scammers often have difficulty with English conjugations of “to be,” and rather oddly, will frequently use the word “at” in place of “have.”
Overuse of the word “kindly” usually suggests a scammer in India, particularly when it’s used in the expression “kindly let’s,” as in “kindly let’s talk on Signal.” The phrase “do the needful,” which is strange to English ears, is unique to India. “Please quickly” is another phrase common among Indian scammers. Indian scammers also tend to add a -s to the end of words that are already uncountable plurals, like “stuff” becomes “stuffs” (for example, “I need to get some stuffs from the store”).
Russian scammers struggle with English indefinite articles and often leave them out of sentences completely.
“I need urgently” is a phrase that is common to scammers in Myanmar but almost never seen outside Myanmar. “Against” in place of “at,” as in “I am angry against you,” is also unique to Myanmar.
Standard received wisdom is that Internet scammers make deliberate grammar mistakes in order to target only the least educated, most dimwitted marks. That’s (sometimes) true of phishing emails, which try to trick a mark into visiting a fake website like a phony banking site or a phony PayPal site, but romance scammers and confidence scammers succeed best when they speak convincing English. The romance scammers who make these grammar mistakes do so unintentionally, and at HKs (Hustle Kingdoms, scam academies in West Africa where budding scammers pay to learn scam techniques and buy scam scripts), scammers can learn better English.
The point is, knowing “correct” grammar (I put “correct” in quotes because grammar is a consensus construct that changes all the time; properly understood, grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive) is not just about communicating your ideas clearly, though of course it does help with that. It is also a potent defense against being scammed, particularly by scammers who don’t speak your language natively.
Weird, incorrect, idiosyncratic grammar is often one of the best early warning signs that someone is attempting to scam, mislead, or trick you.
This goes beyond Internet scams, too. Most people, most of the time, prefer to be honest. Few people are comfortable with telling direct lies. However, people are quite comfortable paltering—that is, lying without telling a direct untruth, by carefully constructing what they say to be technically true but to lead you to a false impression. People palter because they can tell themselves “I’m still a good person, I didn’t lie, everything I said was factually true.”
There are a number of ways to detect paltering that are outside the scope of this essay (I talk about that in the nonfiction book I’m working on right now, too), but one of them is grammar that’s just a little bit off. A palterer will torture grammar and syntax to make what he says technically true, by the most rigid definitions of “true,” but also evasive or misleading.
This is particularly the case in direct questioning, where a palterer will offer answers that seem to answer the question, but if you stop to think about it, actually don’t. Palterers may omit important information, add extraneous information that doesn’t actually address the question, or use vague language to avoid some part of the question; in all these cases, strangely convoluted grammar and syntax can alert you to the palter.
To sum up: It’s not about what you say so much as about what you hear, what you as the person receiving the communication perceive. Knowledge of grammar makes you harder to con.
Why are most Quora Top Writers in the Epstein Files?
The Epstein Files are not files of people who were connected to serial child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Or at least, those aren’t the only people in the files. The Epstein Files list everyone ever mentioned in any email Jeffrey Epstein ever sent or received (including spam emails), along with everyone known to be at any public event he attended (including events like movie premieres).
Jeffrey Epstein was on Quora for a time. That means he received the Quora Digest, a regular email highlighting popular answers on the site. The digest emails look like this:
Because I’m a Top Writer, my answers are frequently featured in the Quora Digest. (In fact, for a while one of my answers was featured in the screenshots for the Quora appl on the Apple and Google App Stores.)
Because the Epstein Files list everyone mentioned in any email Jeffrey Epstein sent or received (Bernie Sanders is in the Epstein Files 101 times; apparently Jeffrey Epstein loved to whine about him), and Jeffrey Epstein received the Quora Digest emails, I’m listed in them.
The Internet hates nuance. People would, by and large and speaking across the left-right divide, rather be told who to love, who to hate, and what opinions they should voice rather than, you know, applying reason to their own positions. (Liberals love to laugh at conservatives for doing this, but in my experience and observation liverals are just as prone to it, or possibly more so).
Yes, I am in the Epstein Files. No, I don’t know Jeffrey Epstein, nor have I ever visited Kiddy Diddler Island. (I mean, c’mon.)
I know this is not a fashionable opinion right now, but: Folks, it’s easy to manipulate people with phony narratives and social media stories. Living in a polarized society makes this even easier, and it’s cheap to make yourself feel good with self-congratulatory “moral stands” that give you a nice hit of dopamine when other people tell you how brave and moral you are for casting out the bad people and sending rape threats to women and whatever it is the social media mob tells you to do today. In such an age, principled, fact-based attitudes are a rarity. Try to be one of those.
[Edited to add] A couple of people have asked me what point I’m trying to make here. I thought my point was evident, but apparently I wasn’t as clear as I hoped. So:
“Being in the Epstein files” does not indicate wrongdoing. There are tens of thousands of people named in the Epstein Files. Bernie Sanders is in the Epstein Files. Marilyn Monroe is named in the Epstein Files, and Jeffrey Epstein was less than ten years old when she died.
I am concerned about people doing what the DinoCon organizers did, virtue-signaling and gaining unearned publicity by excluding anyone named in the files. I strongly suspect this will keep happening; while I hope I’m wrong, I predict that over the next couple of years this will become more and more popular.
I’m concerned about it for two reasons:
It’s empty, purposeless virtue signaling. DinoCon is not keeping anyone safe; they’re playing look-at-me, I’m-so-great games. I find this kind of empty moral posturing stupid and pointless at best, actively harmful at worst. I believe this is a moral panic in the making.
More important, this empty posturing diverts attention from actual child abusers who are listed in the files. Already I’m seeing a new narrative emerging on social media: “Look, the Epstein Files are a big nothing-burger. Liberals are making a fuss over them, but Marilyn Monroe is in them! Ha ha ha, look how dumb those liberals are.”
Jeffrey Epstein was a monster. The people protecting Jeffrey Epstein’s influential, politically powerful child molesters are monsters. This is a serious crisis, arguably among the most serious threats to American governance in the last century. Let’s not play self-congratulatory virtue-signaling games with it and let’s not get sidetracked. It should be possible to hold both these ideas simultaneously: they are a serious record of deep, systemic abuse of the most vulnerable by powerful, wealthy, connected men, and also simply being named in them is not, by itself, evidence of wrongdoing.
If we want to see justice, we must be willing to evaluate the evidence critically, rationally, and thoughtfully. Yes, that requires work…but that’s the way it’s always been.
“If you’re conservative, you’re fearful. Socially conservative ideas are driven by fear.”
This is the conclusion of social psychology, backed by peer-reviewed, published studies and fMRI research. Neurologists can tell you with a high degree of probability whether a person is liberal or conservative just by looking at brain scans1. Conservatives tend to have a larger amygdala, which mediates threat and fear, and a smaller anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain responsible for resolving conflict and detecting deviances between what you expect to see and what you actually see.2
That’s pretty well established in the neurobiology community, but…
I would like to propose it’s oversimplified. In my experience and observation, liberals and conservatives both tend to be fearful, with political ideologies driven by fear; it’s just that conservatives are frightened of people, and liberals are frightened of things.
First, a bit of background.
The amygdala is a small structure in the brain. It’s occasionally described as a memory center” of the brain, but that’s not really true. It regulates emotional association. If you’re near a cave, and a leopard springs out of the cave and devours your friend in front of you, your memories of that cave will be associated with fear. That’s the job (simplifying a bit) of the amygdala.
Image: RobinH at en.wikibooks from Commons, cropped and resaved in PNG format, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5228021
PTSD is essentially the amygdala doing what it’s designed to. If your friend gets devoured by a leopard that springs from a cave, you should be afraid of that cave. That fear has survival value. Our ancestors who weren’t, didn’t survive.
The amygdala in conservatives tends to be larger than that of liberals, suggesting greater propensity to recall emotional associations of memories. The notion that liberals are emotional and conservatives are rational is not supported by science; reality seems to be quite the opposite.
Anyway, fMRI studies suggest that social conservatives experience greater amygdala activation in social situations, are more sensitive to potential threats,3 and have greater in-group/out-group sensitivity than liberals. Conservatives are more likely to see people different from themselves as frightening and more likely to see the world in tribal, us-vs-them terms.
The conclusion from these studies is “conservatives are more fearful.” And if you look at racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on, all of which are more prevalent on the American right than the left, that makes sense.
But there’s more to fear than just fear of people.
Something I haven’t seen, but I’d love to, is fMRI scans and brain studies of liberals and conservatives when shown things rather than people that evoke fear. It’s easy to say that conservatives are hypersensitive to fearful stimuli when they’re shown pictures of people, but what explains the political divide when it comes to fear of, for example, nuclear power?
Nuclear power is one of the safest forms of large-scale power generation known to man, with a human-deaths-per-terawatt-hour-of-energy record that puts it well ahead of almost everything else. The safest forms of power generation are nuclear, wind, and solar, with nuclear power thousands of times safer than fossil fuel power generation.4
If you read that and the first thing you think is “But waste! But Chernobyl! But radiation!”, then you are rehearsing, a mechanism by which the brain clings to ideas that you believe are true in the face of evidence to the contrary. Rehearsing is the core mechanism of the “entrenchment effect” or the “backfire effect,” a system where a person who sees evidence that something they believe is wrong will come to believe the wrong idea even more strongly…and the stronger the evidence against the idea, the more firmly the belief becomes entrenched in the believer’s mind.
If you’re a liberal reading this, and you sneer at conservatives who continue to insist that Donald Trump is not an abuser or sexual assaulter in spite of the reams of evidence in the Epstein Files, while at the same time clinging to fear of nuclear power, well, maybe you have a better understanding of what those conservatives are going through, because you’re doing it too.
The point here isn’t to talk about nuclear power, but to say that there’s more to irrational fear responses than fear of people. Brain studies that conclude conservatives are more fearful than liberals tend to look at threats from people; I think there might be something to the idea that liberals and conservatives are both fearful, and their fear responses might originate in structural differences in the brain, but they are afraid of different things.
Liberals and conservatives are also, I think, highly susceptible to propaganda that reinforces their fears. Conservatives respond strongly to propaganda that reflects vertical hierarchies (“The Hatians are coming to eat your dogs and cats! Mexicans are rapists and murderers!”), while liberals are more receptive to propaganda that emphasizes outside forces attempting to dominate or control society or implement hierarchy or power (“Big Pharma is taking away your access to natural cures!” “Agricultural businesses are using plant patents to control your food supply!”)
I’d love to see more research on this; “conservatives are fearful and liberals are not” seems too pat to me, and doesn’t match my observations.
I got called for jury duty a few months back, and ended up seated for voir dire for a case that quite frankly scared the shit out of me. I wasn’t selected, something I’m still not sure if I’m relieved or disappointed about, but man, there’s no way the prosecution would ever have allowed me within a thousand feet of that jury.
I have never served on a jury. I’ve been called many times, of course, but it’s always gone the same way. “Number 17, what do you do for a living?” “Well, I’m a computer programmer, and I also—” “Thank you, Number 17, you’re dismissed.” That’s happened in Florida, Georgia, and Oregon.
I didnd’t say that this time. I haven’t done development work in far too long. When I showed up, they gave us these fluorescent nametags to wear, because apparently at some point in the past a juror seated at a trial went to a restaurant for lunch, the prosecutors sat down nearby, and proceded to talk about the case unaware a juror sat next to them, and caused an expensive mistrial.
I knew something weird was up when they called us for voir dire. They’d been calling people out of the pool room all morning, but this time, they called twice as many potential jurors than normal, 48 of us. So many of us that we couldn’t all fit in the space reserved for potential jurors.
The prosecution talked to us for a while. “This is a rape case,” she said. “I’m going to ask you all a list of questions. You’re required to answer honestly. Has anyone here ever been physically abused by a romantic partner?”
I and a handful of other people raised our hands.
Then it got weird.
“Has anyone here ever heard the expression ‘junkies lie’?” she said. “Are you able to believe the testimony of a victim even if you’re aware the victim is addicted to drugs like heroin?”
“Do you believe that people suffering from mental illness are trustworthy? Would you be able to believe someone’s testimony even if you knew she had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder?”
“Would you be able to believe the testimony of a victim even if you knew she had made false accusations in the past?”
Then it got really weird.
“Suppose a victim recanted her testimony and told you that she had not been assaulted. Would you be able to look at her original testimony with an open mind?”
“Would you automatically assume that the defendant were not guilty if the victim refused to testify against him during the trial?”
“If the victim testified for the defense to say that she didn’t think he should be convicted, would you still be able to convict?”
Then she dropped a doozy:
“Do you accept that in the court system in Oregon, the job of determining guilt or innocence is separate from the job of passing sentence? If you personally felt that a defendant was guilty, but you believed the defendant was facing a sentence you considered harsh or undeserved, would you still be able to return a verdict of ‘guilty,’ knowing that deciding on a sentence was the judge’s job, not yours?”
The defense attorney had a much shorter list of questions, but one of them really jumped out at me:
“Does anyone here believe that men can abuse women, but it is impossible for a woman to abuse a man?”
It took quite a long time for the two sides to choose twelve people for the jury. I was not, as you might imagine, one of them. I suspect saying “yes” to “have you been physically abused by a romantic partner” did me before the process even got started.
I have no idea how that case panned out or what happened to the defendant, but I have to say if I’d been on the jury, I’d’ve quite likely found it very hard to convict him, given only what I know from the prosecutor during voir dire.
We are living through historic times right now, and I mean that in the worst possible way. We’re witnessing, in real time, a slow-motion coup against the United States government, one that may already have reached a point of no return.
We’re also seeing unparalleled propaganda, Soviet-state-level propaganda, become woven into the social discourse, which is terrifying but also fascinating to watch.
Some of the propaganda has historical parallels. Ssome of it does not. Unfortunately, those of us who care about the preservation of the Union tend to play into the propaganda. We reinforce it without intending to, without even knowing that’s what we’re doing.
The current Administration makes no secret of the fact it wants to annex Canada. The idea seems laughable on its face, but nearly every war, every act of atrocity in human history, starts with an idea that’s laughable on its face.
This is what propaganda is for: making the absurd seem inevitable.
It starts, of course, with demonizing the Other. That’s how atrocity works. You never go from zero to this:
Right here, right now, we get to see the start of the process.
Of course, I’m not comparing Trump’s rhetoric about Canada to anti-Jewish agitprop in WWII, but I am saying that the ideas, the fundamental process of propagandizing a society, are the same.
In both cases, the target is made out to be an enemy, inflicting ruin on the peaceful citizens of this great nation, without cause or pity—ruin that demands retaliatory action (in the name of self-defense, of course), ruin that constitutes a national emergency…and with it, emergency power.
The current Administration is in the process of declaring a national emergency against Canada on multiple fronts: there’s an emergency because Canada didn’t like Trump’s tariffs, there’s an emergency because fentanyl something something, there’s an emergency because Canada isn’t keen on selling electricity to the US after the Administration talked about conquering Canada to make it a state. I wish I could say this was all a South Park parody, but it’s not.
It’s fascinating, in a morbid kind of way, to watch this unfolding before our eyes, rather than reading about it in a history class.
Let’s talk about just one part of it: “We need to protect ourselves against Canada because they’re sending fentanyl into the US.”
This ticks all the ticky-boxes for effective propaganda:
✅ We have to protect our children from the evil scourge!
✅ They’re poisoning our people!
✅ The enemy is at the gates! They’re right at our border!
✅ We need to secure our border from the invasion!
The problem, of course, is the fact that less than 1% of the fentanyl coming into the US flows across the Canadian border; we send far more fentanyl to Canada than they send to us (though of course that doesn’t make us the bad guys; we’re the USA, everyone knows the USA is never the bad guys).
Liberals play into this propaganda
I’ve seen a lot of liberals try to push back against this narrative with information about fentanyl smuggling into the US, like the fact that almost all of the fentanyl coming into the US originates in China, or that the fentanyl that doesn’t originate from China tends to come in from Mexico and Central and South America. “Only 1% of the fentanyl that comes into the US crosses the border from Canada!” they say. “Canada is barely a rounding error on DEA statistics!”
Please stop doing that. It doesn’t work. It only reinforces the propaganda.
How?
When you say “Only 1% of the fentanyl that comes into the US crosses the border from Canada,” what you think you’re saying is “stop demonizing Canada. They aren’t the problem.”
That isn’t what die-hard MAGA hears.
What die-hard MAGA hears is something more like this:
See? Trump is right! Canada is the problem! Even the liberals agree! Oh, sure, the liberals want to argue about this percentage or that percentage or blah blah blah percentage, but they don’t deny Canada is sending us fentanyl that’s killing American children. They quibble over numbers, but they still admit he’s right. Fentanyl is coming from Canada. We have to defend ourselves from the Canadians poisoning our children.
And boom! By pointing out facts that you think prove Trump wrong, you have reinforced the propaganda.
This is about feelings, not fact. Feelings don’t care about your facts.
In fact, countering false narratives with facts is likely to make the false belief stronger, thanks to a psychological phenomenon called “entrenchment” or “the backfire effect.”
Put simply: When a person encounters a fact that contradicts a belief, that person is likely to rehearse—that is, to replay in his mind, over and over, all the reasons he believed that thing in the first place. Reinforcement strengthens the synaptic connections in the brain that correspond to that belief; it literally, not figuratively, reinforces the false belief.
The stronger the contradictory evidence, the more the person rehearses, and the stronger the false belief becomes.
What’s the answer, then?
Stop quibbling over facts and statistics. Facts and statistics don’t matter. Too many people don’t make decisions based on empirical reality.
The University of Pennsylvania has an excellent article on countering propaganda and entrenched narratives: bypass, don’t refute.
Instead of contradicting the false narrative with statistics that directly refute the false belief, find other avenues, other paths to the truth.
If people hold the false belief that GM food causes allergies—a common bit of misinformation among anti-GM circles—don’t talk about allergies. Find other ways to highlight the advantages of GM food.
If people hold the false belief that we need to retaliate against Canada for poisoning our children with fentanyl, don’t attack the idea that fentanyl is coming from Canada. Talk about the other sources of the drug problem. Talk about the reasons Canada, our largest trade partner, is vital to the US economy. Talk about the people who will suffer if Canadian trade breaks down.
Bypass the issue of “Canadian fentanyl.” The people who believe the narrative about “Canadian fentanyl” will only entrench in their false belief if you try to approach it head-on.
Don’t reinforce the propaganda you’re fighting against.
Trigger warning: Stalking, graphic death and rape threats, doxxing, threats of swatting, impersonation
I’ve been putting off writing this for a while now, because it involves dredging deep into some incredibly ugly stuff.
Most of you know that I’ve been stalked for years by a stalker (or stalkers) who has created fake social media profiles in my name to harass other people, and sent explicit, violent rape and death threats to me, my family, my friends, and those who follow me on social media.
This person, or these people, have made repeated rape and death threats directed at me, my wife, my father, and people who have expressed support for me or been rumored to be connected somehow with me online. They’ve sent death threats containing photographs of my partners. They’ve doxxed my family and partners.
The harassment has escalated over the past three years, as the rape and death threats have become more frequent, more violent, and more graphic. The stalker has escalated to threats of swatting (phoning fake tips to the police to have SWAT teams sent to the homes of the target). My websites have been DDoSed.
Last December, as I was leaving for Florida to help care for my mom, who was in the final stages of terminal cancer, I had an unexpected and rather uncomfortable conversation with Portland PD about an email I’d supposedly sent them saying I was stockpiling guns and the voices were telling me to murder my wife.
Fortunately, I have been documenting and reporting the stalking, rape and death threats, and harassment as it’s happened. The nature of the conversation changed once they pulled up the previous police reports and realized this was part of an ongoing pattern of harassment.
So how did we get here? And what does this have to do with polyamory?
Propaganda and the Poly Scene
So how did we get here? And what does this have to do with polyamory?
My first inkling something weird was going on came when a number of different people, some of whom I hadn’t spoken to in years, all messaged me to say “Do you know someone named Louisa Leontiades? She says she’s a journalist and she’s asking questions about you.” A few of those people sent me screenshots of messages or emails they’d received:
Louisa is a client of a former partner. After the relationship with that former partner ended, Louisa started messaging pretty much every female-presenting person who’d ever interacted with me online, going back through this very blog for decades, looking for women willing to dish dirt.
Next thing I know, somehow there are more “exes” that are accusing me of having “abused” them than the total number of people I’ve ever dated. Few forms of gaslighting are more head-twisty than someone you’ve never dated, never talked about dating, never wanted to date, never had sex with, never talked about having sex with, and never wanted to have sex with telling all and sundry about how you abused her when you were “together.” For a while, I quite literally thought I was going insane.
These “survivor stories,” as Louisa calls them, tended to the bizarre (like the woman who I’ve never been sexually or romantically connected with and never been in the same room with except in passing at a party claiming I abused her by flirting with someone else in front of her), toward the utterly untrue (a former partner claiming I “got her into” BDSM and that a 25-year-old is “too young to consent” to BDSM, when in fact she was interested in BDSM long before we ever met, and the fact her ex-husband wasn’t interested in BDSM was one of the reasons she divorced him), and the technically kind of true if you squint hard enough (my ex-wife claiming she was an “abuse victim” because I yelled at her on the phone once—which did happen—but declining to mention that it happened after we’d separated, when she broke into my house one night while I was out of town, stole a bunch of stuff like consumer electronics, then sold it to buy a new laptop).
As a side note, there’s a lesson here in how to spot the difference between journalism and a smear campaign. If a journalist hears “he yelled at me once on the phone,” he or she will ask followup questions: “Did this sort of thing happen often? What happened?” Ethical journalists also disclose personal or financial connections with the stories they cover.
My goal is not to go through all the rather strange “survivor stories” here. I may end up doing that at some future point, but that’s not the point of this blog post.
Right now, I’m here about the aftermath of these weird, wordy-but-vague accusations, what it says about the way many people see “social justice” as a tool of bullying and control, and how the poly scene’s support for “social justice” led directly to a barrage of rape and death threats against a whole bunch of other people beyond just me.
Louisa published these “survivor stories” from exes and non-exes with results you might predict: the Internet Hate Machine™ cranked up into full gear, I had to lock down comments on my blog because random strangers started posting death threats, I lost friends.
With all the various contradictory stories (“Franklin dated someone ten years younger than he was, he’s obviously an abuser,” “Franklin refused to date me because I’m younger than he is, he’s obviously ageist”), they became a sort of Rorschach test, with different people seeing different things in them. It’s kind of a Gish gallop of accusations.
One dude on social media wrote that I was clearly a bad person, because it was plain to him that I’d written the stories myself as a sort of humblebragging, since the theme to a lot of them is “I knew when I dated Franklin that he was polyamorous but he’s so awesome I wanted him all to myself and he said no.”
Seriously. Someone over on Quora actually said that.
Dr. Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist and author who serves as an expert witness in court for abuse cases, published an analysis of the “survivor stories” that concluded the stories don’t actually describe abuse.
The poly community as a whole thought about her analysis, set aside their first knee-jerk emotional response, said “huh, I wonder if there’s a reason she might have reached those conclusions,” went back, and re-evaluated the survivor tales with a more considered eye…
Hahahahaha, I’m kidding, that didn’t happen. Instead, the Internet piled on to Dr. Sheff. She was threatened personally and professionally, and received so much harassment and abuse she was forced to back away from the whole situation. You know, classic straight-up bullying.
And it wasn’t just threats. A lot of folks sent her emails that they probably wouldn’t think of as problematic—messages like “don’t you realize you’re just hurting women who have been abused?” and “I’m so disgusted that an academic would support an abuser” and “I used to be such a fan of yours, but this has really made me rethink that,” because they couldn’t even consider the possibility that she might, you know, be right.
After that, things got even weirder.
“I want a just, fair, and equitable society, and I don’t care how many rape threats it takes to get there.”
Now let’s fast forward a bit, to a nonprofit polyamory convention run by a registered nonprofit in London, called “PolyDay.”
COVID interrupted the convention for a couple of years. During the COVID lockdown, a team not previously involved with PolyDay announced they would be taking over the PolyDay name and launching a new for-profit convention under that name.
The organization that owns the PolyDay convention informed these people firmly that it owns a trademark on the name, and they would not be permitted to use it.
Lockdown ends. The organizers of PolyDay announce the convention was on once more. I don’t know if the person who tried to steal the name started the rumor or merely amplified it, but anyway, someone starts a rumor that I own PolyDay, or run it, or somehow profit from it, depending on which version you believe. (For the record, I have absolutely nothing to do with it—I live in Portland, and it is owned and operated by a nonprofit in London.)
As the rumor spread through the North American polyamory scene, people said “Hey, we can look up the history and organization of PolyDay and figure out if this rumor is true.”
Hahahahaha, I’m kidding, that didn’t happen. Instead, a large number of people determined to make a more just and equitable society and stand up for women raced to their keyboards to send a flood of rape and death threats to the scheduled speakers at PolyDay. So many threats of serious violence poured in, the conference organizers canceled the event.
Apparently, threats of rape and murder are how some people think we create a more peaceful, more enlightened Utopia.
And it just kept going. Once this kind of harassment and bullying gets going, it takes on a life of its own. A former BBC and Guardian journalist named Jonathan Kent published a book on polyamory. Someone started a rumor that I profit from the book somehow, or (depending on which version you believe) that I secretly wrote it under his name, or something.
By now, I’m sure you can predict what happened next:
People looked up Jonathan online and realized he’s actually a person, a reporter with a long documented history, and not an alter ego for me? Hahaha no. Of course not.
People harassed him, called for a boycott of his (I mean “my”) book, threatened and harassed his podcasting co-host…because in this brave new world of empathy, compassion, and social justice, that’s what you do. You harass and intimidate anyone you don’t like, or anyone associated with anyone you don’t like, or anyone rumored to be connected to anyone you don’t like, so that one glorious day, if you harass and threaten enough people, you’ll wake to a world of perfect social justice.
Meanwhile, of course, the rape and death threats aimed at me and those close to me kept rolling in. My co-author Eunice and I released a science fiction novel; a bookstore that planned to host a book event got harassed into dropping the event. Some random stranger I’ve never met made a YouTube video about what a terrible person I am, repeating the “survivor stories,” insisted she wasn’t making the video for money, then used it to beg for Patreon donations.
So it goes.
And is still going. People are still following me around on social media, doxxing and threatening my partners, friends, and folks who follow me.
Just like with the “survivor stories” themselves, the stalking and threats have become a Rorschach test of their own. A random woman on Facebook told me, with what seemed like perfect sincerity, I must be making it all up, because men never get stalked, only women have stalkers.
So here’s the thing: The North American polyamory community has a problem.
I want to be clear this is not a problem everywhere. Poly folks elsewhere largely seem to roll their eyes at all this.
But the poly scene in North America is overrun with folks who are okay with using rape and death threats as a way to express themselves, who don’t do even the barest minimum of fact-checking, who are so caught up in righteous fury that sending women anonymous messages saying “I am going to rape you to death, here’s a photo of your house” seems like a perfectly reasonable way to support social justice for women.
Now, if this is you, if you’re one of the people who sat down at your computer to type out threats to Dr. Sheff or to the people scheduled to speak at a conference because you heard a rumor that it was somehow connected to me and couldn’t be arsed to fact-check, this essay is not for you. You are irredeemable and I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t quite understand the mentality of someone who says “I’m going to stand up for women and justice by sending a bunch of people I’ve never met anonymous emails saying I’m going to murder them if they present at this conference,” and honestly I don’t want to. If this is you, fuck off.
If this isn’t you, and you’re on the sidelines saying things like “I don’t know what the hell is going on but I don’t want to get involved,” well, I get it, I really do. I’ve been there myself. I’ve unquestioningly accepted stories because they fit a narrative I believed in, and discovered later that the things I’d been told didn’t actually happen, at least not the way they were presented to me. (I may write about that at some point as well.)
And I’m not saying the fact that a bunch of bullies and Internet trolls have taken it on themselves to send rape and death threats all over the Internet because, you know, that’s how you support women and fight for social justice automatically proves that what I’m saying is true and what they’re saying is false. Only that mmmmaybe it might be worthwhile to look a little closer, you know? After all, if people are wrong about basic things that can easily be checked, like who runs a nonprofit conference or who wrote a book, perhaps it might possibly be worth considering whether or not they’re trustworthy about things you can’t easily verify.
Moving the Overton window
I’d like to believe this is a fairly new thing—that twenty years ago, communities dedicated to egalitarianism and self-determination wouldn’t so quickly embrace this kind of toxic behavior. That’s probably wrong—the same thing was common in the 1970s feminist circles—but I do believe that events like GamerGate brought a new level of toxicity into acceptability.
If you don’t believe bullying and threats are okay, but you really don’t want to (or don’t care enough to!) get involved in other people’s drama (or you really don’t care enough to get involved), so you stay out of it, or you “don’t take sides”, or you choose a default rubric like “believe all women” because investigation is too much effort, well, that’s kind of how we ended up here, in a world where harass and threaten in the name of social justice, because they feel safe in their communities who appear to support them, or at least don’t oppose them.
Just a thought.
Brandolini’s Law, or the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, tells us it takes longer to refute bullshit than it does to put it out there, and if there isn’t a corollary that tells us this is especially true when people have been told that it’s morally wrong to question the bullshit, there ought to be.
Few subcommunities have figured out how to deal with vague claims of mistreatment that kinda follow common narratives, and anyway few people really have the inclination to try to sort through it all. It’s easier to just assume that where there’s stuff that kinda looks like smoke, there must be fire, and accept a generalized “so-and-so is a bad person even if I’m not exactly clear on what he or she did.” Kinda the way people who still say the 2020 election was stolen say “there are thousands of affadavits about election fraud, it must be true.”
I mean, hell, I’ve done this myself. When you want to do right by the people around you, and you know enough about social justice to understand the uphill struggle people have faced for years getting anyone to take abuse they’ve faced seriously, you default to believing whatever you’re told by anyone who presents as an abuse survivor—a noble inclination, but one that is also easy to exploit.
Abuse is about power and control. When the poly scene went after Dr. Sheff, everyone else got the message loud and clear: Do as we say, or you’re next. Believe what we tell you to believe, or you’re next. Don’t ask questions. Keep your head down. Hate who we tell you to hate, or you’re next.
So perhaps this might be a good guideline: When you see people facing off against each other, with both sides claiming they’ve been mistreated, it might be helpful to ask yourself, “which of these two sides is sending rape and death threats, punishing anyone who steps out of line, and controlling the narrative through intimidation and threats of violence?” Because it’s hard to champion social justice and also think those things are okay.
I know the people sending the rape and death threats are a small minority, whose noise and zealotry make this seem more common than it is. That’s the thing, though: if you want your community to be a good space, sometimes you need to stand up to the bullies.
It’s okay to ask questions and look for more information. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Note: Any comments containing abuse apologism, denialism, threats, rationalization, whataboutism, sealioning, or victim-blaming will be deleted.
This is an essay about cultural appropriation, except that it’s not really an essay about cultural appropriation.
This is actually about the way genuine, complex problems in complex societies get reduced to nattering virtue-signaling nonsense that become used as blunt instruments to ensure conformity and serve as tribalistic us-vs-them markers, in a process of ensuckitude that substitutes sloganeering for genuine thought, bleating of approved bumper-sticker platitudes for engagement, and tribalism for solutions.
Buckle up, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going bye-bye.
Let’s look at cultural appropriation
Odds are probably pretty good you’ve heard of cultural appropriation. Odds are also pretty good you have strong feelings about it, and that your strong feelings map closely to whether you self-identify as liberal or conservative, but can you actually offer a cogent description of what it is?
Cultural appropriation is a great proxy for the general dumbification of social justice and the generalized ensuckitude of real social discourse, because, oh my God, the prevailing culture-wars conversation around it is So. Fucking. Dumb.
This is how social justice dumbification in general works:
Step 1: Distort and water down the meaning of “cultural appropriation” until you use it for nothing more than “wearing vaguely ‘ethnic’ clothing” or “styling your hair in an unconventional way.” (To be fair, those who understand cultural appropriation is a real thing sometimes do this step for you.)
Step 2: Ignore and/or disregard actual instances of genuine cultural appropriation.
Step 3: Pretend your diluted, absurdist definition of “cultural appropriation” is the only definition there is; refuse to discuss, or even acknowledge, any other meaning.
Look, I get it. There are folks who make me roll my eyes so hard I can see my own brain stem when they talk about “cultural appropriation.”
Probably the greatest example of an absurd self-own was the Internet goon squad that accused a woman of “cultural appropriation” for wearing Japanese clothing when she was Japanese.
All the cringe. ALLLLLL the cringe.
So yeah, I get it. Stupid gonna stupid, man.
And it ain’t just cultural appropriation. Remember when James Cameron’s movie Avatar 2 came out? Some Native people complained that the movie peddled Native tropes for entertainment without actually recognizing Native history of defending biodiversity.
A lot, and I mean a lot, of white urban liberals jumped onto Twitter (yes, I’m totally deadnaming the name of Elongated Muskrat’s social media platform) to crow about how they were boycotting the movie and dish on people who saw it.
Some folks I know personally, folks I once used to respect and even admire, did this. And you know what was especially pathetic about it? They had no intention of seeing the movie in the first place, oh no. They took to social media to crow about how righteous they were for not watching a movie they never intended to watch, because it made them better people than the ones who did watch it…
…and yet, did they actually materially improve the lives of even one single Native person anywhere? Even one? Even a little bit?
Nope.
See, I might respect someone who went onto social media to say “hey, this movie might be problematic, and here’s why, so I took the $30 I was gonna spend on tickets and popcorn and a gigantic tub of Coke, and I donated it instead to this charity that helps Native populations, and here’s the URL where you can donate too,” but did they?
Nah, bruh, because it was never about the Native people.
It was virtue signaling and bullying. It was “Look at me! Look at me! I’m better than you! Hey, everyone, look at me!” It helped nobody, because it wasn’t intended to. It was about preening and primping, about vanity disguised as social justice.
I didn’t watch Avatar 2, but I didn’t crow about it on social media either, because I never intended to see it in the first place.
Not watching a movie you never intended to watch is not a virtue, and that’s really what this is all about.
But I digress. Let’s get back to cultural appropriation.
“Cultural appropriation” in the academic sense does not mean “woman who kinda looks maybe white on Twitter wearing a yukata that self-righteous white craft-beer liberal dumbfucks think is a kimono.”
Cultural appropriation is when a white businessman sees a Navajo pattern, thinks it’s pretty, and commissions a sweatshop in China to make millions of knockoffs that he gets rich from without, you know, contributing to the people who created it, or even bothering to learn anything about it at all.
And that’s not nonsense. It’s a real thing that happens, just like turning other people’s brutal oppression under colonialism into entertainment whilst you eat overpriced popcorn is a thing that really happens.
But bullying a Japanese woman on social media because she looks “too white” to be wearing the clothes you don’t think she should wear doesn’t actually strike a blow against cultural appropriation, does it?
The difference between social justice and bombastic bullying
Liberals tend to whine about conservatives who mock and deride “social justice warriors,” but if I’m to be perfectly honest, a lot of that is our own fault. We liberals are easy targets, because we have a habit of taking our own values and reducing them to bumper sticker platitudes that we use to bully others without, you know, actually doing anything to solve the problems we claim to care about so much.
I would like to propose a test to help separate genuine concern with social justice from the general enshittification of morality into empty tribalism and bullying. Don’t worry, it’s a simple test, one that can be applied in less time than it takes to drink a single soy-milk latte. Just ask yourself these questions:
At the end of your social justice venture, can you point to any person whose life or situation is now a bit better for your actions, in any way, however small?
Was your social justice venture invited by the people you, a rich white person, claim to be speaking on behalf of?
Is your social media venture targeted at the people who are responsible for the injustice you see, rather than bullying people for not doing what you want them to do?
If you can’t answer “yes” to all three of those questions, maybe you aren’t as virtuous as you like to pretend you are.
[This essay is an expansion of a thought I originally wrote as an answer on Quora]
There is a notion, a myth enshrined in a great deal of Western philosophy, that as time goes on, societies move ever further from superstition and ignorance, and ever closer to Truth.
It is, like many social myths, complete nonsense.
In fact, societies swing to and fro, sometimes moving closer to the truth, sometimes further away.
The way I model this in my head is that truth is a strange attractor, and societies loop and whirl around it in complex ways that are extremely hard to predict and vary depending on how the society formed.
Pretty much exactly like this:
These are strange attractors—mathematical functions that loop and swirl around a point, sometimes moving closer, sometimes farther away, twisting and curling as though drawn to it without ever entirely reaching it. They never repeat, they never settle down into a stable orbit.
This is, I think what human societies do. Every society has its collection of myths and legends, things it wants to believe about itself whatever the reality might be, and its own unique monomyth. These things influence the trajectory a society takes through social space, tugging it this way and that, whatever empirical fact or philosophical truth might be.
This means you could, for example, take snapshots of a society’s history, like paragraphs out of the society’s history books, and treat the pile of snapshots like a Poincaré map of that society’s eccentric orbit around the truth. And what you’d find would be something like a Philosophical Strange Attractor, a chaotic churning orbit about the truth, full of twists and turns, always tugged in the direction of truth but never settling there.
People like to talk about history as a swinging pendulum, but I don’t think that’s a good model. A pendulum retraces the same arc over and over. Societies may progress or regress, may seek to explore new ideas or retreat into history and tradition, but they never really repeat the same path twice. Even when those who long for some imagined idyllic past gain power, they never really quite reach it. Societies, like people, never set foot in the same river twice.
Every society has its mythologies. Mythologies are necessary for social identity, they’re always going to be there. Mythologies weld disparate people into something like a more or less cohesive whole, forming an overarching sense of identity that (ideally) takes the place of family or tribal identity. Without that overarching identity, you don’t have Rome, you have a bunch of squabbling families and tribes who don’t much like each other. (Even with a foundational mythology, you still have that, of course, but the overarching mythology helps create glue that aggregates all those disparate elements.)
A foundational myth creates identity—the way people see themselves. And identity distorts and shapes the way we see the world.
But the thing about that myth is it is, in any objective, empirical sense, not true. And subtle variations in a society’s founding myth, like subtle differences in the start condition of a chaotic system, have huge effects on that society’s chaotic path around the attractor of Truth.
So no. No, the moral arc of society doesn’t always bend int he direction of truth, or justice, or any of those other wonderful philosophical ideas. It may follow a chaotic orbit around these things, but it is not inevitable that if you wait long enough a society will necessarily arrive at Truth, or Justice, or Enlightenment. If you want to get there, it’s your job, and will always be your job, to work to make it happen.
