Civility, Non-Argument

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/930459427353890816

Jesse is correct.

As people like Scott Atran note, tribalism leads to moral crimes, even though it is (almost?) always mixed with righteousness and the conviction that one's side is incapable of moral crimes.
One of the things that has been really brought home to me over the last year is that it is a good idea to constantly check one's personal righteousness, no matter how good one thinks one is.
...Unfortunately, this advice is not likely to be heeded by many internet Leftists, since sequestering oneself away in communities packed full of moral grandstanders constantly striving for the most ultra-leftist signal does not really conduce to moral self-criticism!

Anyway, on a related note, remember that Sam Kriss guy? He was actually a real asshole on Twitter, and in general (I promise you I'm not suffering from hindsight bias, I had these views before). I mean, I guess he was not much more of an asshole than a lot of people on Twitter, but the reason I say it is this: people who criticised him on Twitter were routinely publicly insulted in colourful ways to entertain his enraptured sycophantic fans, and on more than occasion, a detractor with an unflattering photo was given the treatment of having an enlarged image of them posted by Sam accompanied by a caption in which he brutally insulted their appearance (a specific incident stuck in my mind where he tweeted the photo of some right-wing incel-type with a really severely blotchy face and said he looked like "mouldy bread" (I felt really, really sorry for the guy; I find it personally very troubling that this kind of bullying is tolerated amongst people who are supposedly meant to be caring and compassionate (medical problems seem to be fodder for humour among some Twitter leftists, which is also troubling to me))). Meanwhile, on his blog, he said some thoroughly nasty things in longer form about a bunch of people. Last year, he went after Nick Cohen pretty viciously. Funnily enough, I also strongly dislike Cohen and think he's not very good at thinking or writing (and when Kriss' piece on Cohen was originally published, I should say that I couldn't help finding it funny and nodding in agreement). Nevertheless, I am capable of recognising that he really did not deserve the vitriol and no doubt only felt his convictions about the loony left grow stronger as a result.
Of course, Kriss was not only an asshole, but also a highly irrational person, as I noted in a previous post that happens to be (last time I checked) the most viewed on my blog ever (http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com/2016/11/exhibit-exhibit-b-two-mysticist-counter.html). Worse, he was often most irrational when he was at his most horrible. For instance, in his infamous piece on Neil deGrasse Tyson, he castigates Tyson for spoiling the fun of life by constantly stating obvious facts that everybody knows... thereby betraying his total disconnect from the vast majority of humanity and making his extreme populist politics seem more laughable. (Sam, if you talk to ordinary people, you actually realise that they don't know basic scientific facts---which, incidentally, helps explain why not everyone does think that Neil deGrasse Tyson is an annoying pedant! A curious fact, isn't it, how these posh Marxist extreme-populists are so pretentious and elitist (anti-populist) in terms of how they express themselves (the absurd neologistic cant of the pseudo-intellectual charlatan academic Left) and what they talk about and even what they do (go to fancy restaurants and the theatre)---as Chomsky noted in his tremendously fun takedown of the entire postmodern Left from the 90s (http://www.mrbauld.com/chomsky1.html). It's almost like the more extreme the populist, the more extreme the cloistering from normal society!)

Kriss would, if he ever read this post, find it hilariously 'liberal' and stupid and whatever (my syntax here obviously embeds my assumption that his ostracism didn't turn him into an angry alt-right incel). I know this for sure (assuming his politics didn't change) because one of his major themes was the supposed absurd hypocrisy of people who are concerned with "civility" in discourse. This theme originally emerged on Twitter, but he also ended up writing a widely shared (on the Twitter left) blogpost on the issue called "The Iron Law of Online Abuse". I won't link this, because I only link things I endorse (I'm not being intellectually irresponsible, it's easy to find!). Sadly, it was a very bad and dumb post (this is relative to other posts and articles he wrote, which I sometimes liked quite a lot!). He pointed out correctly that there are angry and horrible people with all kinds of political affiliations and that the people most vocally concerned with "civility" tend to be massive hypocrites. What he failed to do was actually think about the issue generally and systematically---a recurring theme among internet Leftists. What do I mean by that (in this particular case)? Well, he totally ignored the following considerations: that people with extremist views like his (and I don't mean "extremist" here entirely pejoratively, because some of his extremist views are views which I myself would like to see become far less extremist) actually require advocates who are capable of convincing others and getting them on side; that being civil rather than resorting to personal insults means you are being a better person, because bullying people is wrong (and that it is irrelevant if you are bullying in the context of a debate about, e.g., war crimes, because your bullying is not helping stop those war crimes); that norms of civility almost certainly help us get closer to truth, by limiting polarisation and fractiousness; and that norms of civility probably help foster a healthier society. These considerations make me personally think that it is a very good idea to try to uphold a standard of civility!

As for why I turned that criticism into a general claim about online Leftists, I'll explain that now. A very recent Jesse Singal article (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/there-have-been-so-many-bad-lefty-free-speech-takes-lately.html) helps illustrate the problem with regard to "free speech". Singal notes that instead of actually thinking in terms of abstract moral principles and the long-term consequences of upholding or trashing certain political norms, many Leftists are instead opting for asinine moral grandstanding on free speech, adding weight to their positions not by means of argument, but by insinuating or even directly stating that people who don't agree with them have severe moral failings. I think this is a very important specific insight of Singal's, because I think it generalises. I think the same thing happened with the Nazi-punching 'debate', such as it was; instead of thinking rationally, the objection was simply, 'These people are Nazis? What are you, some kind of Nazi apologist? You don't think Nazis should be punched?' (for more, see http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/08/quick-and-belated-word-on-punching-nazis.html and https://johnhalle.com/outragesandinterludes/on-left-anti-fascism/). I think we are seeing it again in the extreme reactions to people writing articles worrying about trends in desire for extreme body modification in children and the apparently growing extreme dogma that children and early-adolescents with such desires always somehow know deep truths about what will make them happy (Singal's obviously been a major target of backlash on these issues, ever since his piece on Ken Zucker's (seemingly) terribly unfair firing (http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/02/fight-over-trans-kids-got-a-researcher-fired.html)). Believing, e.g., that drastic and dangerous medical interventions should be a last resort for kids and adolescents and that it's worrying that a growing number seem to be seeking it, does not mean that you don't think that we shouldn't try to eliminate job discrimination against trans people, encourage people to show concern about pronouns if uncertain, reduce 'attack helicopter'-type horrible bigotry, and let trans women into women's shelters. But such nuance is impossible for the overheated tribal soldiers of the internet.

The saddest thing about all of this trouble on "the Left" is that people like me or Jesse, who are 'far Left' insofar as we feel the Bern and hate the Democratic Party and think the Republican Party is the most dangerous organisation in human history and hate the fact that the US government kills thousands of people for no reason and whatnot (and I'm really an ultra-leftist on the environment, in that I think that environmental issues (pollution (plastic in the ocean, air pollution, heavy metals, etc), climate change, species extinction, soil salinisation and erosion, pesticides) totally subsume all other political concerns), are not only alienated by the horrible people I have described in the above, but actively excluded by them, decried as "liberals" for writing things like I have just written and thereby lumped in with the Eric Garlands and Hillary Clintons of the world in an absurdly Manichean, self-undermining ultraleftist worldview.
For chrissakes, people, I'm a huge fan of Chapo Trap House, even if they did seem to be fans of Sam Kriss before the big story and even (more fundamentally) if I do still fail to understand why people give themselves the invidious label of "socialist" when they are not that extreme in their politics and even if I am starting to grow in my conviction that I no longer want to call myself a "leftist" at all, despite all my nutty ultra-left views (well I mean I'm not into tribes anyway, even if tribes are the only hope for achieving anything).