I learned something this evening that explains a lot of human phenomena.
People are stupid. Young people in self-reinforcing groups are especially stupid. Would you believe that teenagers are taking something called the “fire challenge”: they douse themselves with an accelerant, like rubbing alcohol or gasoline, and set themselves on fire. This is egregiously idiotic — kids have suffered serious burns and even died playing this game. At least his is people harming themselves, although if you’re someone who has taunted friends into risking severe injury, you are a very bad person.
Why would people do this sort of thing? I think it’s because we’re social animals. We’ll engage in all kinds of insanity for peer approval and the blessings of authority, and we’ll also do them to defy authority and challenge our way up the social hierarchy. It also means that when a couple of people with really bad ideas get together, they amplify each other. It’s all in the way our minds work — and I’m sorry, Vulcan narcissists, but we aren’t autonomous beings of pure thought, we’re animals who strive to be part of a community and to acquire desirable roles in those communities, and that primary impetus means reason often takes second place.
Thus, reddit and 4chan.
Have you seen the subreddit for Ferguson? It’s called r/ferguson, and although I provide the link, I don’t recommend that you visit. Here’s the banner for it, and you’ll see why.
Those are evil ideas amplified in a culturally sanctioned setting that allows more people to find them and promote them. This property of the human mind does not have to be a bad thing; it’s exactly what atheists frequently cite as a virtue of the internet, that it allowed isolated non-believers to come together and find community and reinforce their cause. And here we see that racists can enjoy the same warm sense of a linked community.
Being part of a community can win you all kinds of social capital — look at me, taking advantage of a newly emerging atheist community to gain a fair amount of notoriety. Or look at this fellow, who earned a long profile in the Washington Post for his role in building another kind of community.
According to his personal blog, Twitter and LinkedIn profile, John has spent much of the past five years ping-ponging through a smattering of short-term odd jobs on the West Coast. He played professional poker, he yo-yoed on the Vegas strip, he applied to be an Apple Genius (without success).
In 2011, after getting laid off from a YouTube tech video series for which he was working, John lost his car, his laptop, and his phone. He applied for a trade license and failed the background check over unspecified “incidents” in Colorado. Undeterred, John registered a new Web site and claimed to be working on a startup to “monetize the common web.” Whatever that means, it doesn’t seem to have worked out.
“$100 needed to keep utilities on,” he posted on Reddit just last week, requesting a loan from a stranger to pay his gas bill. “Thank you for any help you can give me.”
That’s Johnsmcjohn, the redditor who created “theFappening”. That’s right, the man who created a forum dedicated to masturbation, theft, and violations of privacy has just got his 15 minutes of fame.
And he’s not much to look at. This is not to say there’s anything contemptible about his circumstances — I’ve been in that situation of being poor and struggling, and some of you readers might be there now. Johnsmcjohn seems to be in the particularly difficult situation of being an unfocused, long-running failure at everything he does, lacking in much talent or even the discipline to acquire a skill, but still, let’s not deplore him for his condition, but for what he believes will get him out of that condition.
The whole profile is a fascinating spectacle of motivated reasoning and ego gratification for doing something simultaneously vile and trivial — he’s not a hacker or master criminal, he’s a guy who acted as a middleman, transferring stolen nude photos from that cesspool of the internet, 4chan, to a marginally more respectable sewage pond of the internet, reddit, and then obsessively promoted and maintained the flow of celebrity nudes and sick chatter. A real Brave Hero.
And I thought of Scott Atran. Atran is an anthropologist who has a bit of a reputation as a nuisance to the atheist community — he studied the psychology of terrorist cells around the world, and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t religion at fault, but the abuse of common traits in social psychology. He gave a talk at the Beyond Belief symposium in which he profiled the young men who became suicide bombers, and they sounded an awful lot like Johnsmcjohn — reasonably intelligent and educated, but frustrated and despairing of their future, and desperate for social approval, and they fell into groups of similarly disheartened men and found a community. These communities were often soccer clubs, rather than their local temple.
When you look at young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London underground in 2005, hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in 2006 and 2009, and journeyed far to die killing infidels in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia; when you look at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them; then you see that what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy…. Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer: …fraternal, fast-breaking, thrilling, glorious, and cool.
What, the terrorists aren’t driven by fanatical god-belief? But they say they are! Just like Johnsmcjohns says he’s driven by his deep respect for FREE SPEECH, and the #gamergate goons claim to be concerned about journalistic corruption while actually carrying out a gross-out competition to see who can say the vilest things about Zoe Quinn’s vagina, and Pastor Mark Driscoll professes his love for Jesus while wallowing in performance misogyny for his peers.
I once would have said that Atran was being too generous to religion, that he was belittling the significance of bad beliefs in acting as a seed crystal to shape young people’s minds towards destruction, but I’m increasingly thinking that he’s right: the problem isn’t religion, or video games, or comic books, or naked women — it’s more deeply rooted in the psychology of this gang of social apes called the human race. What we see over and over again in our history is groups of disaffected individuals stumbling together and finding commonality in vying to outdo each other in their commitment to some bizarre, random cause: racial purity, or anime, or violent video games, or Islam, or band camp, or a pornography collection.
But if it’s human psychology, what do we do about it? We’re not going to eradicate social dynamics, and if we did, it’s that social behavior that also drives the good things humanity does and can do.
I think this is where human reason plays a role. We can identify behaviors that are destructive or do harm to people, or are demonstrably false in their premises. We can have a kind of meta community that evaluates communities for their validity or destructiveness — we do this all the time already. We can look at groups like that awful r/ferguson group and clearly see that it is about claims of racial inferiority that we spent the last century showing were wrong, and that it foments hatred towards other people, and condemn it. I don’t think there is anyone who identifies with this community called Pharyngula who needed to be told that — you were probably pissed off the instant you saw that banner. Why? Because real communities have standards. We have a set of ideas strongly held here, just as r/ferguson has their set of ideas. A war of speech is a good thing — speak out boldly about your values.
But here’s another problem: institutions that claim to be value-free. There is a good case for that, in that governments, for instance, should not be taking sides — in a democracy, the government itself should not be about silencing conservatives or progressives, or the religious and atheists, but instead about providing the arena that allows those ideas to battle it out. That’s the whole point of free speech!
At the same time, though, can a space like reddit actually be value-free? It claims to be, but it obviously isn’t — there are rules about what can and can’t be posted. I’d argue also that there is an overt ideological culture at reddit: that allowing editors freedom from responsibility with anonymity has consequences that play directly into those properties of human social psychology discussed above, creating a rich environment for extreme aberrations to flourish. It’s an environment that willfully neglects to address dangerous aspects of human nature. Would we consider a playground to be a proper place for nurturing children’s minds and curiosity and social interactions if, in addition to a sandbox and swings, it were sown with knives and razor blades? Hey, FREE PLAY. It’s good for children’s creativity.
It’s also not true that allowing free expression is value-free. When reddit allows unabashed, ignorant hatred, as it does in its racist and misogynist subreddits, it is making a positive statement that such attitudes are an acceptable part of the discourse. It is encouraging the mainstreaming of racism and misogyny. It is an abnegation of responsibility that says that crimes of neglect are not reddit’s problem.
I ran into another interesting phenomenon this morning on twitter: a fellow was very angry with me for dissing reddit, and his excuse was that there are other, larger progressive communities on reddit than r/ferguson. I hate that. Those progressive communities do not exist to provide covering camouflage for the hate groups, yet reddit advocates willingly use them that way. The existence of good people is a repudiation of the more odious aspects of our nature, not a justification for supporting them.
The bottom line for me is that a community without a cause, that does not have standards and a willingness to stand up for something, is no community at all. It is a corpse waiting to be populated by opportunistic scavengers and parasites. That’s true for reddit, it’s true for 4chan, it could be true for atheism as well. Living, thriving communities have purpose and practice good social hygiene.
This does not mean the racists and misogynists do not have a right to exist or speak their opinions. But it does mean that if you provide the amplifier for them to express themselves, you are making a tacit endorsement of the legitimacy of their views, and no amount of cowering behind the slogan of “free speech” is going to change that fact. Especially not when you are profiting from encouraging that infestation of evil views.
Bravo. Thanks for the pointer to Atran. I hadn’t run across his work, and it sounds interesting.
There was also the fellow trying to justify Reddit giving a platform to racists on the grounds that it makes it easier to “keep an eye” on them.
I’m guessing he’s white, because to my knowledge, no person of color has ever complained of any difficulty in “keeping an eye” on racists.
Seconding the thanks for the pointer to Atran. And thank you too, PZ, for setting the example that facts matter more than assumptions, and that it’s OK to change your mind when you find more facts.
Thanks, PZ.
“The bottom line for me is that a community without a cause, that does not have standards and a willingness to stand up for something, is no community at all.” A sign on my desk says it a little differently: the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. I am proud of (most) folks on this blog who strive for clarity of purpose and who work to extend atheism beyond not-god-belief.
(reading my tongue tied comment reminds me of why I don’t comment much)
Unfortunately, there is nothing new about this.
Acute alcohol poisoning can be fatal.
At my old university, about 1 kid a year died from alcohol overdosing. I never saw a case but saw more than a few that could have gone that way but didn’t, people passed out and immobile.
We never did much for them because we didn’t realize that this can be fatal. The U. has since realized it is a problem and made some serious efforts to educate the incoming students. IMO, not enough but at least it doesn’t happen every year any more.
PSA Announcement. If you see someone in alcohol overdose range, watch them closely or take them to the ER or something. They can die this way.
Wizard’s First Rule.
People willing to kill and die just to feel like they’re part of a community…
bodach @4:
I didn’t find your comment to be tongue tied at all. It was quite comprehensible.
****
PZ:
I heartily agree.
You can always try to stop them or talk them out of it. It even works some times.
As a college kid, I once took a drug overdose to the the ER at 3:00 in the morning. Had to round up 4 people to do it to get a car and porters. As it turned out, she might well have died if we hadn’t.
PS We all know what the most dangerous sentence in English is. “Hey, hold my beer and watch this!!!”
This explains the weird video I saw on Facebook last week of a guy standing in front of a confederate flag and starting his hat on fire.
As Glenn Greenwald points out at The Intercept, places like Reddit, Twitter and Facebook are so huge, so important to the communication of ideas in the 21st century, that there’s a good case to be made for some sort of “First Amendment”-style free speech regulation applying to them. Letting them control communication at a whim creates huge potential problems (“No more talking about climate change, everyone! We’ve just signed a contract with Koch Industries and the ‘like’ buttons are now Powered By Clean Coal TM”).
Now, that would probably work reasonably well in Facebook as is, and if Twitter could get some effective and easy to use blocking and anti-harassment tools working for folks, maybe there too. But Reddit’s a special case, as it’s run like a series of feudal baronies (/r/MDZX is my own little patch of farmland, and I am allowed to run it with an iron fist) with a handful of arbitrary and capricious kings on top (the admins). It increasingly resembles the world of hate that is right-libertarian ideology, in fact.
The problem is that the Internet is a very powerful tool for amplifying hate and trolling, as not only do trolls not face the social consequences as they would if they acted like racist man-children in public, there’s a sort of public choice theory argument at work. Most people don’t get much out of fighting trolls, so they don’t bother, and leave the community if it gets too bad. Meanwhile, trolls have a greater incentive (their perverse entertainment) to put in lots of work breaking whatever counter-measures exist and ruining communities. Over time, where a “neutral, open” platform exists, it can be taken over by trolls until the last sensible folks leave and the platform dies or turns into a 4chan-like hellhole. Reddit’s well into this process already.
The Monkey Cage also talked about another piece of evidence for why this happens here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/09/09/why-reddit-sucks-some-scientific-evidence/
The bottom line is that we’re at a really terrible confluence of trends: a handful of mega-corps control most of the speech on the Internet, while racist, sexist assholes swarm said communities and invite the slippery slope of political censorship. The harassment and abuse needs to stop, but I don’t want to wake up to Reddit blocking any mention of “Gaza”, either.
It always gets me. The very people who shout loudly about free speech being an effective thing which they really really need, are so often the people who’ll misuse it, then claim no one’s really hurt by their words.
Did anyone else experience the near-sexual bliss I felt at the beautiful irony of the “You are not a member of this community. Please respect that by not downvoting.” message on that r/ferguson image?
When I heard Atran speak, my thought was that he is likely right that the suicide bombers or terrorists may not be acting on very strong religious impulses. I believe others have talked about how soldiers do their job not because of lofty goals or ideals but because they want to support their immediate team.
However I don’t think it goes to far to ask how these groups form, where they get their ideas, how they plan their strategies and which activities & virtues are rewarded and which are punished. Individual soldiers may fight for their comrades but collectively they may still invade foreign countries. Individual terrorists may be seeking the approval and bonding but collectively they still act like a religious group on jihad. I think that by focusing on the individuals and their answers to the exclusion of the group misses some big issues.
I agree with this — but then I suspect most people will agree. The hard part is where to draw the lines; it can get complicated. I’ve seen Pharyngula held up as the bad example of what happens when a community fails to practice good social hygiene. Obviously, I don’t agree with that.
The existence of gray areas of dispute, however, doesn’t negate the fact that some nastiness is freaking obvious. enough.
tyro @14:
I think the message that Atran is trying to get across is that religion isn’t the cause of these problems, not that it plays no role.
You can still blame religion for taking advantage of this aspect of human psychology, or for their choice of goals to channel these urges towards.
On the plus side, it does suggest that a good way to combat religion and other odious groups who prey on disaffected individuals, is to try and prevent people from getting disaffected in the first place. That is, promoting inclusiveness, social welfare programs, affordable education, etc.
Yeah, if people have healthy communities, they will have less need to find unhealthy ones.
I agree that religion is a contributor — it takes advantage of that social psychology. But I could also imagine a world where atheism similarly exploits properties of the human mind to carry out foolish or destructive goals.
Sastra, I also agree that there are gray areas, and there are also cases where community policing could be very, very dangerous. What if someone decided that atheism was socially destructive, and just denying religion was a deeply damaging phenomenon (I didn’t have to think very hard to come up with that one — there are people who think that way)? Boundary conditions are hard, and we live in a world with shades of gray.
But I don’t think it’s that difficult to determine that calling black people chimpanzees is absolutely wrong and harmful.
> People are stupid. Young people in self-reinforcing groups
> are especially stupid. Would you believe that teenagers are
> taking something called the “fire challenge” . . . ?
Unfortunately, calling such behavior merely “stupid” is a bit
of an oversimplification. It’s more insidious than that, and
it has a cruel logic of its own.
Kids in self-reinforcing groups play all kinds of “dare you”
games, and the kids who **take** the dares (and manage not
to kill themselves in the process) rise in social rank. And the
kids who are always too afraid to take dares (like I was as a kid)
sink to the bottom of the social hierarchy (and become bully-magnets
as well).
Gaining social status, if you can pull it off, may be terribly
risky sometimes, but it isn’t altogether “stupid” (I’ll leave
the evolutionary psychology/sexual selection/reproductive advantage/
just-so-story spinning to somebody else ;-> ).
You may retort that it’s “stupid” to be worried about “social status”
on the elementary-school playground. It would be, if the effects
of these things could be managed solely by the application of
adult logic. But the effects of ending up at the bottom of the
hierarchy at the age of 6 or 10 can have life-long consequences,
not easily reversible by psychotherapy, when it comes to self confidence,
sexual attractiveness, career advancement — the whole “adult” nine yards.
So it goes.
—-
“The drug’s dangerous,” she said, “but it gives insight. . .
It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the
drug his inward eye. . .”
“Your Kwisatz Haderach?”
“Yes. . . Many men have tried the drug . . . so many, but none
has succeeded.”
“They tried and failed. . .?” . . .
“They tried and died.”
Ummm, just how long have you been a teacher, PZ?
While I agree pretty wholeheartedly with the post, and especially with the implications it has for places like reddit and 4chan (which, unlike reddit, appears to actually espouse a vile ethos, rather than none at all) – I do have one quibble to make.
The fire challenge isn’t real. All the internet stories go back to the same two videos, plus one from a stunt group, and they did not happen back-to-back or anything.
Were it true, it would be a great example of this sort of driving force, which I have seen many hate groups utilize in recruitment. Atran’s work is solid and shows something you can see in the real world if you hang out with enough young men on the wrong side of history’s trajectories. The inclusion of the gamergate guys is a perfect one, it’s a social malignancy that offers them a nourishment society no longer can.
I am curious as to why it seems to be young or disenfranchised men and fewer women who most often engage in this type of behavior. I am a long time lurker and a woman (not young) who is curious about what drives such extremes of behavior. I have been following some of the discussions about gender and wonder where deviant behavior fits into our cultural model of male/female gender identification. I am also a small town Canadian and don’t fully understand American culture. It seems more garish, selfish and less tolerant in general. It’s taken me a long time to become confident enough to join in. I really want to learn.
This post somewhat highlights an ethical dilemma I’ve been facing for myself recently. There’s a fundy message board I’ve been debating on recently that has all the hallmarks of a self-reinforcing cesspool of hate. Long story short, it’s got all the hallmarks of a social group who exists to connect a small minority of super-haters so they can feel empowered by being part of a group. It’s honestly the most hate-filled religion-oriented community I’ve ever found that consists of more than a couple dozen posters.
Something I’ve been considering recently is if my presence there is an overall help or hindrance. Whether my mere presence is sufficient to cement them deeper in their hatred and absolutely nothing I say actually matters. If this is true, then my best option for discourse there is to simply leave it because my words mean nothing. Alternatively, if my words do have value, then its possible that I could have an impact and over time could reduce the hate there.
Groups such as r/nigger are similar dens of incestuous hate, where people of socially disparaged views can get together and feel empowered by their hate, and the same question remains with an additional challenge: Is it beneficial for people of more reasoned, egalitarian-focused views to engage them? Or is it better to just leave them to their own rage? Further, is it ethical to force discussion in communities that don’t provide a venue for discourse with outside opinions? r/nigger is a lot more important in this context than carm, r/nigger has a greater chance of influencing real world communities because the views of racism are, in my opinion, more generally palatable to the general populace than the extremist calvanism at carm. There is a greater likelihood that people at r/nigger in a real world community will group together and advance their hate to the person instead of the electron, than there is at carm.
What’s worse, if we take a laissaz-faire approach to communities of hate on the internet in the hopes that they simply burn themselves out to impotency, do we risk them running the opposite and gaining social capital in the real world?
This is one of the more interesting discussions we’ve had here for a while. The acceptance of Atrans’s position to some degree is an interesting turn on PZs thinking. I agree. We should pay more attention to this.
Could we be coming to the position that mocking and ridiculing religion is ultimately vacuous? Firstly, it’s too easy and can make one lazy. Second, does this ridicule address the problem of our social constructs at all? Is not the problem much more deeper than simply pointing out believing in Sky Fairies is stupid. Atheism does quickly become a religion if this is all it sets out to achieve. And it would do so at the ruin for everyone.
Think of these people as being in a swift river, being pushed along and tumbling, feeling like they’re about to drown. They come up on something to grab hold of, and it could be almost anything, they’ll grab on and hold as tight as they can.
If they’re really lucky this will give them purchase and they’ll be able to climb out. But a lot of these things are themselves drifting, and the grabber is stuck; letting go to try for something with a real future seems dangerous, and it’s scary.
Religions are commonly one of these things (that was the classic Moonie and Scientology target audience), and it’s true for online cesspool communities, for terrorist cells, and plenty more. The specifics of what the thing is they’re grabbing on to are really unimportant; its apparent solidity (and solidarity) as a rescue from the rushing water tumbling you through the rocky riverbed is the important aspect.
nomadiq @24:
I think if that’s all one does, then definitely. The atheists that want to sit around at mock and ridicule religion without speaking up against the social ills plaguing humanity-yeah, I think that’s vacuous. But people who criticize, mock, and ridicule religion and religious beliefs, while *also* championing a better world and fighting social ills? I think there’s still a place for that.
Social pressure on the people running the sites is, I believe, the best way to handle these situations (as opposed to outright censorship, which can easily be turned to silencing).
While the actual hacker and the people who spread the photos may not care about social pressure, the site owners certainly do, and will bow to that pressure. As mentioned by PZ, Fark has implemented a ban on openly misogynist statements, and was extremely cautious in handling the “fappening”.
Even 4Chan has changed dramatically. Back in the mid-2000s 4Chan’s /b/ truly was one of the vilest, most horrifying sites on the internet, but after its owner was forced to go public, he cracked down on the overtly illegal stuff and most of Anonymous moved elsewhere. Not that /b/ isn’t still racist, sexist, and stupid as hell, but it is no longer the hive of scum and villainy that it once was. [Note that 4Chan has a number of boards aside from /b/ that aren’t particularly evil.]
Granted, it often seems like a game of whack-a-mole, but public pressure on the owners of the larger sites can force them to disown the racist/sexist/whatever bigots, who must then relocate to smaller, less trafficked site.
Eric Hoffer?
So I’m majoring in anthropology and currently taking an introductory course to evolutionary psychology because fanaticism fascinates me. And the more I learn, the more I discover how ubiquitous fanaticism is, and how lacking, empty, and narrow our classical idea of it really is (9/11, Christian Dominionism, Creationism, etc).
Thank you for this post. It’s one of the most comprehensive write-ups I’ve seen so far of what I would indeed call fanaticism. And I think you’re 100% correct:
Can it go further, though? Is it possible to find similar instances in non-human species? I do think so, and I think I’ve seen it in the past, but of course I don’t know for sure yet, and there’s a chance that it may be extremely hard to define amongst non-human animals, making it hard to ever say for sure.
And is fanaticism purely expressed in violence or bigotry, or can it be expressed also as obsession? “Fan”, after all, is short for “fanatic”… does that make 100% of humans fanatics of some form or another?
I still think religion is a problem. A major problem, in fact. But I would say that Atran is absolutely right, as well.
Thank you thank you thank you. A-FUCKIN’-MEN.
…and,
Very much yes. Religion is the cause of the current forms of much of the behavior in question. But whatever religion is will be all about raw human group behavior. The sentence following the second quote is more iffy, but the harm that flows from places like 4chan and reddit more than justify the outrage so I like it.
As for the rest, I’m thinking about harms that I have caused very carefully. Being reasonably and rationally concerned about harm that appears regardless of intent is critical to community. Communities that take firm stands on harm causing behavior is very important, and very important to personally confront. I picked this community because of how other competing communities refused to judge certain kinds of behavior like r/ferguson. I must be willing to understand objections to my behavior. That is still ongoing, and will honestly be a skill that must last a lifetime.
It’s testosterone poisoning. I’m being only a little bit facetious.
For me, the weakest chapter of Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee was the one in which (as I recall) he hypothesized that the (ab)use of “dangerous” “drugs” “and alcohol” was a manifestation of a Handicap-Principle sexual-selection scenario (he doesn’t seem to realize that such (ab)use can be very fun).
But in there he claims to have seen New Guinean tribesman quaffing kerosene in alleged displays of intestinal fortitude.
Physical one-upsmanship is an integral part of the social relationships among boys and male adolescents everywhere.
It’s testosterone poisoning.
I do too. I’d wager that populations of all intelligent social species–monkeys, crows, parrots, dolphins–feature at least occasional development of rogue gangs of young, nonbreeding individuals, and that they are made up largely of males.
Helps clean out the gene pool.
voyager @23:
Maybe being a woman is already risky enough without getting caught up in dangerous group pressure?
Seriously, I would say a lot of the pressure to succeed for women is exerted internally – women are told they must modify themselves, their appearance, their behaviors, etc., in order to achieve success. Their individual achievements out in the world are not rated as being as important as personal (i.e. “get a man/relationship/children”) actions. Women’s peer pressure may trend away from external displays or actions and toward modifying the self. I also don’t get the feeling that a lot of women are brought up expecting to receive a hot husband and perfect life by default, but are told it’s something they have to achieve by being perfect themselves first, whereas male entitlement is taught to boys at a very early age.
Men’s success is often pressure on the externals – you gotta be number one, top of your class, on the team, the quarterback, the top lawyer, the CEO, have the right car, lots of money, and the most attractive woman. So if you don’t have those things, it’s highly visible to others and results in feelings of alienation and failure. There’s also the strain of entitlement, that those successful external signs were just expected to materialize, and not have to be earned and in reality only the province of a tiny few. When young men of a certain mindset discover that these things are not only not guaranteed but extremely hard to get, you have an opening where they need some sort of support, and some of them may glom on to things like the MRM because it reinforces their feelings of anger. Then in order to maintain that support, they are expected to join in the anger/hatred/violence through peer pressure.
And before anyone jumps at me, I want to be clear that I’m speaking very broadly and mostly of western societies, that none of this – even if my suppositions are in any way accurate – is universal, and that the influence of culture and family as well as personality would be huge factors in how any individual person behaves.
Interestingly, a recent episode of Inquiring Minds had on Arie Kruglanski, who argues a similar point to Atran. Kruglanski was more focused on converts to Islam, but where it seems that religion becomes problematic is because these converts seem to be out to prove themselves to be Real(TM) Muslims. Religion does not help the situation, I would argue, because, 1, these “holy” books promote vile acts as being good, and, 2, religion is socially acceptable. Perhaps part (albeit maybe just a very small part) of the solution, then, is to make religion less socially acceptable. These youths will then have to find other avenues to gain their street cred. (And then we’ll have to work to take away those avenues!)
voyager @23,
Because these little militaristic fuckmonkeys believe they are ENTITLED to shit on or take advantage or whatever of other people. They literally believe it is their birthright.
Most women and sane, feminist men do not generally believe they are entitled to use others for sex, are generally civilized, and generally aren’t militaristic little fuckmonkeys.
“Angry White Men” by Michael Kimmel is illustrative.
>Seriously, I would say a lot of the pressure to succeed for women is exerted internally – women are told they must modify themselves, their appearance, their behaviors, etc., in order to achieve success. Their individual achievements out in the world are not rated as being as important as personal (i.e. “get a man/relationship/children”) actions.
As a woman this is not something I have ever gone through.
That’s an interesting list of deviant behaviors. Not sure why “anime” got thrown in, but I’ll assume it was for variety. As for why this happens, I can only offer a hunch.
The most ubiquitous aspect of human culture is social exclusion. It’s the umbrella that includes more obviously harmful things like rape culture and homophobia, but it can all be grouped under the more general term “bullying”. Bullies are everywhere in society; to the point where if you think you aren’t responsible for bullying others, you’re likely one of the worst offenders. This exclusion can be more pervasive in some cultures than others — the ones that we typically call “repressive”. The Hikkikomori phenomenon in Japan is a clear example of excessive bullying in many aspects of an individual’s life leading them to withdraw from social contact. American culture is also more repressive in specific aspects; bullies abound when it comes to racism, misogyny, transphobia, etc. but fat people also have to deal with a steady and ubiquitous social exclusion that is perhaps less visible to the non-obese population.
The loneliness that sustained social exclusion causes for the victim, whether that exclusion is justified or not, would naturally lead to individuals desperately trying to find any social contact that doesn’t exclude them. Yes, the roots of fanaticism naturally spring from this, but other significant subcultures have emerged from the same process (the atheist community is a great example). I would have to agree with PZ that I don’t see this basic human behavior changing anytime soon — at least not while we get to call ourselves human.
It should be ZERO surprise that marketing with themes of hyper-‘masculinity’ tends to target both young men and working-class, uneducated men http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-013-0268-1
acetylcholine @38
That’s… nice for you?
@ironchew
I’m sure that your perception lines up with that assumption. But other perceptions are critical as well.
I’m in a really screwed up and unpleasant place on this issue. But it is one that has some value if I learn to express it usefully.
As a person with Tourette syndrome I get to feel like literally all social groups exclude me. That is what happens when your uniqueness of brain and mind pluck at social rule processes in a way that comes out in behavior. I can make a universal plea for tolerance, but not acceptance.
Those social rule systems of brain and mind are critically important parts of how we do what we do in groups. It makes sense in a similarly universal plea that others can’t help how they react based on what they experience.
What is the balance? Some people have had experiences that make particular kinds of behavior painful. Those experiences will match to some sort of pattern and I must (and can) learn them even if it is harder. I can’t make a plea about universal pain without also honestly and fairly dealing with the pleas of universal pain from others. I have to do everything in my power to understand the painful patterns. That understanding requires paying attention to the things that shape social interaction and cause pain now. That understanding requires paying attention to the things that historically caused the shapes of social interaction that exist.
I live that balance, but I can’t pretend that everyone shares the same balance.
acetylcholine @ 38:
Well, aren’t you the lucky one? drst @ 34 has is right. For men, the proving ground of the homosocial sphere is everything, given the various definitions of masculinity, and how toxic that has become. Social pressures on women are different, and yes, to a great extent, they do focus very much on modifying yourself physically and modifying your behaviour. Even now, something like rape prevention still focuses on women modifying their behaviour, rather than focusing on those who would rape.
And if you’re going to insist on posting here, Acetylcholine, learn to quote properly. Use <blockquote>Place Text Here</blockquote> to get:
Voyager @ 23:
Welcome to the fray, Voyager. Our open threads are the Lounge and Thunderdome, if you feel like talking outside topic threads.
I’ve found my understanding of a lot of behaviours was helped a great deal by getting a good background on basic issues. Two books that really helped me were Manhood in America: A Cultural History by Michael Kimmel, and Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice, by Jack Holland. There’s an excellent history in both, covering the deep roots of patriarchy, and the ever changing ideas of what constitutes masculinity.
Voyager @ 23, I’d second Iyéska’s recommendations and suggest Guyland by Michael Kimmel as well, which specifically focuses on younger men like you mentioned.
@Nate #29 – if you read “The Authoritarians” and then listen to Atran’s lectures on terrorism more or less back to back, your head may explode. To me it seems pretty clear that there is a component to being an authoritarian follower that plays into the ease with which some angry, desperate, directionless people can be whipped into a froth.
The Mellow Monkey:
Thank you, I realized I left that out after I posted, natch. While a lot of Guyland is on the depressing side, It was optimistic in showing that real changes can be made in the homosocial sphere when men decide to speak up.
@OP
QFT
voyager 23
The short of it is that (people identified as) men and women get allocated social credit for different types of activities. People identified as female who do these types of stupid shit don’t generally get praise and accolades. Rather the opposite, usually. This isn’t to say that there aren’t groups/social patterns that prey on the same drives and aim at women, it’s just that they tend to be less flamboyant and public (due most likely to ingrained cultural misogyny). This isn’t to say that it’s not risky, of course. Things that often get women social credit in toxic environments (i.e. almost all environments) include e.g. staying with an abusive partner and/or popping out kids in an endless stream.
Also, Voyager, there’s a fucktonne of links at the wiki: Social Justice and Economics, Social Justice Link Roundup, and Sexism Education 101 link roundup.
I’m actually in favor of allowing horribly racist/misogynist/etc subreddits, but I think Reddit should have a much stricter definition of free speech: Harassment and violations of privacy are not free speech. I consider the ‘ferguson’ subreddit a form of harassment: The people who created the subreddit originally disguised it as a ‘social justice’ subreddit with the clear intent of attracting a community then subverting it, but after they were discovered they gave up and transitioned to balls-out racism. There are a number of other subbreddits with similar histories. Perhaps a step in the right direction would be for reddit admins to force controversial subreddits to change their name to something more specific, if there is a dispute over the use of the name.
Why allow them? If reddit censored its subreddits, I’m pretty sure many of the social justice communities would be brought down by complaints from people with more ‘centrist’ positions. Sure, in principle the community could move to its own forum but realistically that wouldn’t happen. I also appreciate the interaction between related subreddits that wouldn’t happen otherwise.
Also, about “keeping an eye” on racist subreddits: While I agree with PZ that this is a silly justification for keeping them around, here’s another possible justification: Reddit allows much more talk-back than they would get out on their own isolated forum somewhere. On reddit there’s an ‘other discussions’ tab which shows other subreddits discussing the same topic, or having a ‘meta’ discussion of the post itself. Often, these are other people criticizing the post. For example, the ‘SRS’ and ‘openbroke’ clusters of subreddits, which I enjoy, often discuss misogyny and racism in other subreddits. PZ gave Mark Driscoll’s forum as an example of a dysfunctional community, but that wasn’t on reddit. If it had been, it’s virtually guaranteed you would find plenty of other discussion of his misogyny in the ‘other discussions’ tab. Perhaps a young person reading Driscoll’s posts on reddit would be exposed to a counter view ridiculing it, and have a seed planted in his mind. Or even more simply, on reddit there *are* other people with anti-racist/misogynist views around to argue, while there are pretty likely none on Driscoll’s isolated forum.
So yes, on the one hand you are more likely to be exposed to racism on reddit, but on the other hand racist people are more likely to get push back. That said, reddit could do with a *lot* more push back.
acetylcholine @38:
Would that millions, if not billions, of women could say the same. You’re one of the lucky ones. Sadly, countless women across the planet have their lives scrutinized by their friends, family, loved ones, and society. Whether it’s what they eat, how they should talk, how they should walk, how they should interact with men, how they dress, where they go, who they choose to associate with, what occupation they have, and more, so many women get this pressure, both subtle and overt, throughout their lives.
It’s been a while since I took Intro to Managementese, but isn’t this “I want to get paid for spending time on Reddit”?
ealloc @ 51:
Well, it goes deeper than just needing to somehow foster pushback. Last week, an admin for /r/blackladies was banned by the admins because she complained too much about the fucking racists who were brigading her sub. A mod of /r/AMR (Against Mens Rights) who showed up in a thread with her was also banned. I.e., They WERE pushing back, and they got slapped down by the admins. The excuse given by the admin to the /r/blackladies mod was that she was violating Reddit’s policies of disturbing other subreddits of which she was not part. Two fucking racists were banned near the same time; the admins probably think this served to make things even.
Public subs related to social justice, feminism, and interests/POV of PoC are attacked on an ongoing basis. I’ve joined a private sub that’s shielded from such attacks, but to keep it safe, we can’t even mention the name of it in the open. As a consequence, few people know to join, and there aren’t enough participants to make discussion there of good quality.
I’ve tried to stay sane on Reddit by heavily moderating the subs that I read/participate in, but the problem is that the core itself is rotten. The admins are sympathetic to the bigots.
Reddit can’t allow the type of discourse that takes place on Stormfront and still expect to be a diverse website that caters to people of all races. Eventually the racists will crowd out the people of color. It’s like throwing a party in a mansion and saying, “Hey this isn’t a racist party, but there is a room set aside for racists to party in by themselves if they want!” Nah, it’s still a racist party.
Substitute other axes of oppression/privilege to my last. Same phenomenon.
Wow – I ignorantly stumbled into reddit just to find a good forum about ham radio. Most ham radio forums are full of old white guys (I’m a middle aged white guy) complaining about the how world’s going to hell and my lumbago and you kids get off my lawn! The /r/amateurradio forum is great! People are helpful, respectful, and jerkwads aren’t tolerated. Now I’m wondering if I’m inadvertently supporting evil just pursuing my hobby there. Guilt ON.
Remember, you’re
inadvertantlyobviously supporting evil if you do any of the following: reading comic books, listening to rock and roll, playing video games, or participating on Reddit or 4chan. Society is on such a precipitous moral decline that we can’t let these activities take hold.DSRT @ 34:
“Seriously, I would say a lot of the pressure to succeed for women is exerted internally – women are told they must modify themselves, their appearance, their behaviors, etc., in order to achieve success. Their individual achievements out in the world are not rated as being as important as personal (i.e. “get a man/relationship/children”) actions.”
I agree. My father always told me I’d better be a good cook and a whore in the bedroom if I wanted to attract a man.
Iyeska @ 43, 47, 50,
Thanks for the welcome and the reading list. I can see I have a lot of catching up to do. Even though I call myself a feminist I haven’t really read much on the subject except for Gloria Steinem…too busy trying to figure out how to educate myself and make a living because no-one thought it was important to tell me about that.
Did the link to this post already make the rounds among the …
nvm
Mike @ 57,
I struggle with the same. For the past 2 years (before these recent revelations about the admins actively making Reddit hostile to “social justice warriors”), I’ve tried to use my actions to make Reddit more hospitable by downvoting/commenting at bigots, trying to provide high-quality content, and managing my subscriptions list to filter out the hopeless subs. Now, though, I’m conflicted. On one hand, I still enjoy some subreddits and find the content/discussion of heavily moderated subs to be consistently interesting. I like that I see content on Reddit hours and days before it shows up in my Facebook feed or the media (for the same reason that many people like Twitter). I like that it is an anonymous alternative to sites that are trying to aggregate data about my web consumption habits. However, I will not financially support the site until they improve their moderating policies, and as soon as there’s a viable alternative that fulfills the above criteria, I’m out. If not sooner, I dunno.
ironchew @ 58
Oh bullshit. You’re supporting evil if you participate in any of those activities while willingly turning a blind eye to the more problematic aspect of such communities. Refusing to get involved in making things better for everyone is actively being involved in making them worse.
Mike @ 57:
It really is tough anymore, and all of us have to face these decisions. Your group sounds like good people, and maybe for you and your group, it’s a matter of being more aware, and adding to the pushback so desperately needed at reddit. If people don’t speak up, well, that’s what allows all the nasty shit to proliferate.
Matthew Trevor @ 62, don’t wear your fangs out on Ironchew. This is someone who oh so bravely announced in Tdome that they won’t stop using ‘butthurt’, they don’t care if it’s a homophobic slur, they don’t care if it hurts people, and they don’t care if it’s against the rules here!
Matthew Trevor @ 62, don’t wear your fangs out on Ironchew. This is someone who oh so bravely announced in Tdome that they won’t stop using a certain word, they don’t care if it’s a homophobic slur, they don’t care if it hurts people, and they don’t care if it’s against the rules here!
Thanks Iyéska, I thought that might have been the case. There’s been a lot of ” said [gamers|comic readers|some other subculture] are all misogynists!!!” cries lately, which almost makes me wonder why those people think such comments are directed at them, unless they’re aware at some level that they actually warrant them.
That should be “[Person X] said…”. Got to remember not to use html-like tags :)
been there, done that, still have the bandages on my skull.
I also have to pile on with the others and mention that this was a very thoughtful post on PZ’s part.
bookmarked for future reference.
I agree with the idea that a lot of the bad behavior on both the Internet and in the world at large is motivated by a desire for belonging to specific communities. Since religion and fanaticism were brought up in the OP, I’d go even further and say that what we call fanaticism in any form is primarily motivated by a desire to remain in one’s community of choice. If you reject any beliefs associated with a certain community, you may be perceived as rejecting the community as a whole and end up an outsider. Ergo, if you have any desire to remain in that community, you’ll fight like a cornered tiger for its core beliefs, all evidence contradicting them be damned. That probably explains why arguments on religion and politics end up so fruitless all the time.
Take young-earth creationists for example. Most of the people who identify as such come from religiously conservative Judeo-Christian communities who have literal interpretations of Genesis as part of their suite of defining beliefs. If you question the creationist position, those who uphold it see you as threatening not only their individual beliefs but their membership to an entire community. They think accepting the modern theory of evolution would get them kicked out of the conservative Christian social circle they’ve spent their whole lives bonding within. What we generally interpret as stupidity, obtuseness, or blind faith is really a defense mechanism for staying in one’s club.
@PZ
About Scott Atran in particular. Sam Harris once reported a conversation he had with Scott Atran: Sam asked him “Has there ever been a person who blew himself up with a bomb, killing other people, with an expectation that they will get into paradise?”. Scott’s answer was “no”. Scott Atran beliefs on the subject are completely detached from reality.
However, in general, I agree merely destroying religion won’t help anything. I agree that we need to form community around shared values. We need to form community around the shared values of morality, skepticism, science, rationality, etc. However, to do that, we need to destroy all cultural memes that stand in our way, which includes religion and faith. It also includes other memes, like libertarianism, extreme nationalism, and other false or harmful dogmas.
…
@PZ
“What do we do about it?” What do we do about people who form anime clubs, or who go to band camp? Are you suggesting we need to do something about disaffected individuals forming community? Are you suggesting that anime clubs or band camps have negative characteristics associated with them moreso than other kinds of communities? PZ, you realize that you are making the exact same argument that your elders made about dancing and rock and roll music, right? It is ridiculous to compare anime clubs and band camps with people who come together under the banner of racial purity.
Enjoying PZ’s post. I was reminded of an opening narration from my youth remarking on the fictitious ‘Society of Invisibles’:
“You do not know these men. You may have looked at them, but you did not see them. They are newspapers blowing down a gutter on a windy night. For reasons both sociological and psychological these three have never joined or been invited to join society. They have never experienced love or friendship, or formed any lasting or constructive relationship, but today, at last, they will become a part of something. They will belong. They will come a little closer to their unrealistic dreams of power and glory. Today, finally they will join th… I almost said the human race, and that would have been a half-truth, for the race they are joining today is only half human.”
voyager @60
Damn, I knew I’d got something wrong. I thought it was supposed to be a whore in the kitchen and a cook in the bedroom.
Ever since taking a class in social psychology I’ve been convinced that it’s the social identity that is the important factor, not religion, ideology or race. It’s gratifying to see that the idea is slowly gaining hold, as arguing this position doesn’t generally make you popular among atheists. For anybody interested, I suggest you look into Social Identity Theory (SIT), and read up on some of the famous experiments that support the theory, such as the minimal group paradigm. Looking at theories around prejudice reduction are also useful, (such as Contact Hypothesis), as it leads to an understanding of how communities interact, how it can go wrong and how it can be improved.
I think the shying away from enforcing values in reddit and 4chan is more a pragmatic response than a principled response. Enforcing values takes a lot of time and effort, and you need to be a really skilled communicator to make people understand how your values align with your actions. Not to mention that values are inherently gray instead of black and white, and are bound to piss someone off somewhere somehow. All of these things are problematic if your main interest is having the largest amount of people on your site, and being able to make money from it. Why court controversy when you don’t have to?
then you failed your course, or they failed you.
SIT is only ONE correlative factor, it has a lot of explanatory power, but is insufficient in and of itself, isolated from mechanisms that even many have been derived from it.
like, for example, organized religion.
you don’t stop talking about the effect religious ideology has because you found a variable that explains why people group together.
atheists are rightly criticizing you, if you don’t grasp this yet. sociologists should be criticizing you as well.
Even Altemeyer never said that his authoritarian index explains everything, he said it had powerful correlative value compared to other variables, not that it was the only variable.
even many -> even may
@PZ
Religion teaches people that at some point in history people found the ultimate truth of existence and (while people interpret it differently) it is absolute and unchanging and made just for YOU. It is entirely anti-evidence.
…
The power of evidence is impossible for those people to comprehend, because they place primacy on “faith”. You can talk about climate shifts and they say “but god promised Noah”. You can talk about evolution and they say “but god created man”. You can show them geology, point to it, right there, and they say “but the flood did that”.
…
And those folk who go and fight for Islam (or for the USA as the case may be): the money, the guns, the ideology, the sense of momentary persecution to be overcome by privileged destinies; that all comes from religious folk back in the empires of Saud and Rockefeller. Rich men funding the apocalyptic fantasies that religion gave them.
…
When George W. Bush (and Bill Clinton, and George Bush) decided to ruin the secular state of Iraq, and abandon the people there to religious-inspired slaughter, they claimed that simply wouldn’t happen. Despite the evidence of the “reality-based community”. Because they were the actors, and everything was going to work out like they wanted. Yet more manifest destiny.
“wikipedia is not a source”
You’ll find similar garbage platitudes doing the rounds in the Saud-inspired war machines, only they paste in some virtues of Islam. It’s a huge difference to anything r/atheism is ever going to inspire in the world.
Are the religious and anthropological accounts not likely to be compatible, and maybe even reinforcing? As you say, Atran’s explanation of fanaticism suggests that “We’ll engage in all kinds of insanity for peer approval and the blessings of authority”, presumably this is still the case when that authority is divine.
Replace ‘people’ with ‘actions’ or something similar, and the same argument has been made by us against religion for many years.
Agreed. But we’re tool using apes. Religion is one of the tools we use to get people to do things they might not otherwise, and to get people to feel like part of the tribe.
It just seems to make sense to me that without the supernatural bullshit in religion, what you have left is a collection of human behaviors. Behaviors that will also be present in us as individuals.
I have seen some very religious behavior ripple out all over the atheist community for the past decade. I have seen similarly religious behavior ripple out in other online communities as they form and suffer their own social conflict from the outside and within. Passionate creation of symbols, text, art and mixing of ideas to create new combinations is pretty common in every newly pinched off group of people from political parties, to fandoms ( there are so many religious behaviors among Bronies), to socially focused activism.
In the atheist community I have seen mythologizing of allies, foes, and people chosen by individuals as authorities. When one takes what is in one’s perspective and twists it into an unrealistic characterization and transmits that you have a mythology. I’m sure I have unintentionally been part of that myself somewhere.
Right here in this thread ironchew practiced it at #59.
Taking the intended meaning of what other people are saying and deliberately distorting it? I wonder which meaning is the one ironchew will be using when talking with people they agree with socially? Spreading tales of people you don’t like is so much of things like the Bible.
I have seen victims punished for being victims and speaking out on it just like in religious groups. It’s one part laziness in dealing with the abuser or abusive behavior. A privileged and/or aggressive person is harder to have a conflict with. It is one part psychological denial about the threat of victimizing behavior to people in the community. A person has to reduce the negative emotions associated with abusive/predatory behavior somehow. Elevating the abuser or devaluing the victim both feature here. It is all about thoughtless and instinctive means to the ends of keeping the group strong at the price of socially and personally weaker people in pain.
There is much more to religion than simple beliefs that don’t match up with reality. The parts of religion that are also parts of us can not be ignored if atheist activism is to be taken seriously.
EnlightenmentLiberal @72:
I think you’re misreading PZ here. He’s not comparing those groups. He’s pointing out the tendency among humans, especially those who are disaffected, to group together and form communities. But the ones he’s criticizing, those that he thinks “we need to do something about”, are the extremists (like the discredited example he starts the post out with), the people who are hurting themselves and others. Given PZ’s history and my understanding of his beliefs, I really don’t think he feels that disaffected people coming together to form a community devoted to knitting (or anime, or comic books) are a problem we need to do something about.
@Tony! The Queer Shoop
I hope.
Sure. That’s the impression I got to, but then what do you make of this specifically?
I am trying really hard to imagine what PZ might mean. I’m trying to be generous. However, taken at face value, he is saying that outcasts who form anime clubs, who play video games together, or who go to band camp, take part in self destructive or noxious behavior. That’s the question I asked, and I’ll ask it again. What else could he mean? What did PZ mean? I do not see a reading of that sentence which is anything but ridiculous.
If he merely meant that sometimes outcasts can come together to form groups where peer pressure can cause them to do self destructive or noxious aka the activity is irrelevant, then why list out activities? If it can happen with any kind of activity, why list some activities out? The clear implication is that these activities are somehow more prone to self destructive or noxious behavior. Alternatively, that more often than not it just happens that more self destructive or noxious behavior happens with these activities. Again, I think that’s patently ridiculous.
Worse, he specifically described liking anime, video games, and band camp as a bizarre, random cause. Who is PZ to say that an interest is bizarre or random? That’s pretty judgmental, with no basis in reality. Liking anime is bizarre and random – what about knitting or volleyball?
Violent video games are today’s boogeyman in the culture war, just like yesterday’s rock and roll music and dancing.
Anime – I don’t even know what PZ was thinking here. Does PZ think that all anime is tentacle rape? Jese.
Band camp? I admit I’ve never been to band camp and I’m not that familiar with that culture, but it also seems like a ridiculous assertion.
@ EnlightenmentLiberal
I found that statement that PZ made “iffy” myself, but worth it given the context. Maybe my perspective can help.
Your general objection seems to be that PZ is applying general characteristics to complicated groups. That is only a problem if he is being unfair or unreasonable.
All groups can be discussed in terms of their proportions of good, and bad characteristics. All groups can be said to fall on higher or lower scales with respect to racism, sexism and similar bad things, or good things when the context is appropriate (that risks a subject change). All groups can also be criticized for the presence of utterly unacceptable behavior and often group shaming that makes the good members of groups feel like they might be connected to the bad ones is appropriate. The best person to work on bad behavior in a group is another person in that group despite the complications in how people react to “betrayal”.
Fine so far. We all do this and it’s a neutral thing.
Lots of disaffected people look for causes. It is a valid way to find community. I think I’m in there too. And we do in fact try to be noticed and recognized for our contribution to our causes. Sometimes in unhealthy ways.
Looks like my “iffy” feeling was wrong after all. I learned something about myself today.
@Brony
Where to start.
The key phrases PZ said are:
“groups of disaffected individuals”
“finding commonality in vying to outdo each other in their commitment”
“to some bizarre, random cause”
“racial purity, or anime, or violent video games, or Islam, or band camp, or a pornography collection”
“what do we do about it? We’re not going to eradicate social dynamics, ”
“We can identify behaviors that are destructive or do harm to people, or are demonstrably false in their premises.”
PZ asks the question “What are we going to do about it?”, and in context that has the clear and unambiguous implication that he sees some negative here which we should consider fixing. PZ goes on to identify the negatives: the behaviors are destructive, do harm, or involve demonstrably false beliefs.
The list is not merely some random collection of activities. Upon a comprehension review, it is clear that PZ identifies that list of activities as leading to behavior which is destructive, harmful, or involving demonstrably false beliefs. PZ intends the list as some non-random collection of activities which more often than your average activity lead to behavior which is destructive, harmful, or involving demonstrably false beliefs. This is the only honest and accurate reading.
Thus, PZ is saying that coming together to enjoy anime, band, violent video games, and porn has some kind of causal link towards behaviors which are destructive, harmful, or involve demonstrably false beliefs. That is a patently ridiculous assertion.
I have no idea what you mean by “good causes” and “bad causes”.
Playing violent video games has no causal relationship to behaviors which are destructive, harmful, or involve demonstrably false beliefs. At least no more so than reading a book or watching a movie. PZ didn’t address the incidental misogyny in many gaming circles – which is a real and serious problem. Instead, PZ used the dog whistle term “violent video games”.
Similarly, enjoying porn has no causal relationship to behaviors which are destructive, harmful, or involve demonstrably false beliefs. In fact, I would say that we have evidence – very weak and preliminary evidence – which suggests that the causation is the exact opposite. Where porn is widely available, destructive and harmful behaviors actually decrease. There’s some plausible psychological mechanisms which can explain this too. This seems like an amazing sex-negative decree by PZ Myers. “Ok. You can enjoy porn. But just not too much, and not with friends.”
Your comparison and conflation of 1- people who enjoy anime together, and 2- people who enjoy cartoon pictures depicting anthropomorphic “underage” ponies engaging in sex acts, is ridiculous in the extreme. This shows a brazen level of ignorance and bigotry. (Bigotry in the general sense of an unjustified and unreasonable dislike or hatred of some group.) This is exactly what I’m talking about. You (and IMO PZ) are playing into this bullshit generational war, exactly like PZ’s elders said that dancing and rock and roll music would lead to moral decline. Exact same shit.
How the hell is it the fault of my local anime club or circle of friends who watch anime together what some jackasses do online? What the fuck? Again, your actions here can only be the result of extreme ignorance plus bigotry. You seem to think that there is this massive monolithic community of “anime fans”.
Again, look at the key phrases above. “groups of disaffected individuals”. PZ is characterizing anime fans as social outcasts who, more often than other groups, will come together in some sort of self destructive or externally harmful behavior by the community continually trying to one up the other in their “commitment to some bizarre, random cause”. Instead of reality where most anime fans are normal, adjusted people who just happen to enjoy a different medium of art. The bigotry and rank ignorance in both you and PZ is astounding.
@Brony
Let me explain one bit, just in case it wasn’t clear.
When I surfed 4chan many years ago, there was an anime board, /a/, and another board for “bronies”. Bronies were not welcome on the anime board. At all.
First, it’s ridiculous to conflate 4chan with anime fans in general. 4chan is just but one small part of people who like anime, just like the video game board on 4chan is just a small part of people who like video games, just like the arts and crafts board on 4chan is just a small part of people who like arts and crafts.
But more, even on 4chan your ridiculous assertion fails. Even on 4chan, your complaint that anime fans are accepting of “bronies” is fucking ridiculous.
you’re going to start calling people who “misunderstand” anime bigots now?
seriously?
fuck off.
EnlightenmentLiberal:
I don’t think that’s a valid face value reading of what he said.
He’s not talking about the average person who joins together with like minded individuals based on their shared affection for a subject. He’s talking about people who are disaffected outcasts, extremists even, that form communities who engage in self destructive or noxious behavior. I’m not familiar with many of the communities he spoke of, but I don’t doubt there are people in those communities who engage in that behavior. Look at the harassing misogynists who have grouped together in the video game community and the harassment and misogyny they’ve directed at Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian. Or those comic book readers who sent Janelle Asselin rape threats because she criticized the cover of Teen Titans #1. Heck, look at his example of the people who created N*gg*r Town. Disaffected, extremist individuals form a community based around shared beliefs. They engage in noxious activities.
EnlightenmentLiberal @86:
Yes, it is ridiculous. That’s not what he’s doing though. While I think he could have worded things better to avoid confusion, look back at PZ’s history.
Do you see him mocking people who play video games? Does he spit on people who enjoy comic Books? Does he show disdain to people for enjoying anime?
If he has, I haven’t seen it.
What he has done is call out bad behavior. There are lots of people in lots of communities that engage in bad behavior. Some shitty people group together in communities and engage in noxious behavior. I think you’re viewing PZ’s words the wrong way. It’s not that coming together to form these communities leads to harmful behavior. Its these types of people who are extremists and engage in harmful behaviors gather together to form communities around a wide variety of subjects, whether that’s comics, anime, or video games. His whole post is about people who engage in harmful or shitty behavior coming together and forming communities. He’s not besmirching everyone who groups together and forms a community and I think your reading is far too malicious and doesn’t match up at all with the actions and attitudes PZ has demonstrated over the years. Under your way of thinking, PZ just did an about face from the way he’s acted for years now!
Oh, hell no. You’re a fucking idiot.
I listed a random collection of activities because I’m trying to get across the idea that it is not necessarily the activities that are the problem, but that wretched people can form self-reinforcing groups about anything. Racial purity is an evil goal, but I really have no problem with anime or band camp, and I might personally dislike porn or violent games — I was trying to illustrate with a range of things, from innocuous to historically destructive.
Seriously, including Japanese cartoons and high school band get-togethers wasn’t enough of a clue for you that this wasn’t a list of activities that must be automatically condemned?
You really are a fucking idiot.
Here’s an example of the sort of wretched person you find among the larger group anime fans. She’s a massive weeaboo defending and encouraging weeaboo behavior. As such, her video ends up reinforcing racism for nearly 14 minutes straight.
(Anyone who don’t know what’s so horrible about what she’s saying should read this. Though, that only begins to go into all the shit that’s wrong with the video.)
You did not do anything to demonstrate a “clear and unambiguous implication”. You separated his paragraph and added extra bits without explaining how they connected. I parsed his paragraph apart and explained my interpretation of his meaning between sections.
I read his post and I see that the negative behaviors he describes are the terrible factions inside of larger groups, and the communities that let them do what they do without comment. “What are we going to do about it?” is all about external group-shaming because of lack of criticism of one’s peers, and appeals to the people in those groups to do the right thing and call bad behavior out. You can say that some other reading is the right one, but that does not make it so. He was describing general human behavior and listed a set. If you want more evidence, go look at the words just before “What are we going to do about it?”. You skipped that bit. You might want to ask yourself why.
“Good causes” are things like enjoying anime. “Bad causes” are things like racism. Yeah, the meaning was ambiguous.
“Violent video games” is not a dog whistle unless it is used to ignore an argument or dismiss emotion without showing that it is illegitimate. What emotion or argument did he dismiss or avoid? That’s the thing about “political words and phrases that emotionally trigger”, they have a dishonest use and a shred of plausibility that lets them work.
PZ never claimed that general group forming causes destructive behaviors, or suggested that the things like anime watching cause them. He wrote about bad people in groups forming sub-groups totally unchallenged. That goes for your comment on enjoying porn too so your comments about benefits of porn are wasted. Heck my only problem with any Brony porn is that it needs to avoid the same problems that we have with real porn (harmful themes), and it should be easier for people to avoid accidentally googling into.
I didn’t conflate anything. I and PZ clearly separated a general group, from people engaging in shitty behavior inside of that group. You have totally ignored the whole group-shaming angle and did not even try to show that PZ wants to end gaming or something like those religious groups want to. You can say it but that does not make it so.
No one claimed that it is your fault that some jackasses online did something with whatever specific bit of group-affiliation burn that you are feeling. You are being pressured to speak about against the behavior of the jackasses that you choose to ignore in whatever group you are part of. We are saying that your apathy makes you a bad person, and that since you have in-group psychological advantages you get the pressure. Don’t get me wrong, you are allowed to not like it. I am allowed to not give a fuck because I’m tired of seeing shitty behavior unchallenged by one’s peers. Evolution made the emotional rules and I am going to use them as they were intended when moral and ethical and be honest about it the whole time.
I realized that my “iffy” came from a similar bit of group-affiliation burn. Do yourself a favor and learn what yours feels like. It makes you stronger when you are in control of it.
“disaffected” means not happy and resentful. There is no implication of what people will do with that behavior. Fuck, people who support social justice are often disaffected themselves. I can take that label if you don’t want it. Also in many schools anime fans were bullied when it first started getting popular in the US so yeah, that can count there too.
I spent a very long time on 4chan. I know all about it and am ultimately glad I did because I learned a lot about how really horrible people think. I was disturbed by my morbid fascination with how and why shitty people do what they do, until I realized that it was a perfectly reasonable defense mechanism for a person who got bullied a lot as a kid.
I tried to “piss in the ocean of piss” (for the uninitiated that would be trying to troll /b/, which complaining about bad behavior is interpreted as) while I enjoyed things that did not have to do with abusing other people. I have absolutely zero problem seeing people from 4chan or Bronies get criticized for the awfulness that was tolerated by too many. I have zero problem saying that as a community 4chan and the Bronies that were banned en masse were far too tolerant of shitty behavior. Some people have problems learning from experience. I did my best when I was on Ponychan and I hope that I changed some perspectives.
And I was also part of the “love and tolerance” “trolling”* on /b/ and know all about the hate on /a/. It was amazing to see people get so butt hurt over other people enjoying cartoon ponies.
*Trolling is kind of perspective dependent sometimes. You can often troll Republicans by talking about communism. A guy choosing to use a purse might get accused of similar “trolling”.
Ack,
#93 is for EnlightenmentLiberal
I apologize for using “butthurt”. I slipped into old habits.
(reposting because I don’t see the first attempt)
I’m sorry I used “butthurt” in #93. I slipped into old habits.
@PZ
Poe’s Law.
Not when there are large segments of society who honestly do hold that violent video games are dangerous. Not when you use the “violent video games” dog whistle. Not when there are large segments of society who really do think that all Japanese cartoons are violent tentacle rape snuff. Not when you play into the stereotype and bigotry that all anime fans, band camp people, and video games are loser loners (“disaffected”). Not when you play into some weird stereotype where disaffected youths huddle together and watch rape porn snuff. You called those activities “bizarre” and “random”. You then followed up with a discussion about what we’re going to do about it.
PS: I agree band camp was a weird outlier. I thought I just missed a memo on perceived moral outrage.
I want to apologize for the offensive word (two words, I used a space for some reason) I used in my second to last paragraph in #93. I slipped into old habits and that is particularly embarrassing because I agreed with why it was offensive and was part of the argument against using it.
I’m still working on it.
Err, I should say this. Your list was oddly selective for hobbies perceived by many to be those of social outcasts. “Bizarre” and “random” even. What really gets me still is how you get off saying that those things are bizarre and random.
EnlightenmentLiberal:
All in the context of a post discussing people who are extremists displaying harmful behaviors to themselves or others who form communities. The communities these extremists form are diverse: from the innocuous like underwater basketweaving to misogynistic gamers. You appeared to be the only one to not understand this despite repeated attempts to explain it.
@Tony! The Queer Shoop
@Brony
I think I covered the important parts in my response to PZ. If you want anything else, ask again please.
@A. Noyd
Please. That’s like saying there’s something wrong with all atheist groups because Thunderfoot, or otherwise tarring atheism because Thunderfoot. I bet there’s more destructive and harmful atheists out there in atheist groups by percentage than anime fans in anime groups.
I understood PZ’s list as not random… I agree that any kind of groups can go bad, although some are more prone than others, such as religious groups (“Islam”) and “racial purity” groups. Anime groups? That’s really, really low on my list of things to worry about.
Oh – we’re swallowing the bullshit from Atran now? Sorry. I was coming from the direction of reality, where racial purity groups are much more likely to have “destructive and harmful behavior” compared to an underwater basket weaving group. But if we’re going to say that beliefs don’t matter, and everyone is just as likely to blow themselves up no matter what groups they are in … then I guess I can leave and go find some sane people to talk to. I hope we’re not going there. PZ is taking some steps there, but like the rest of his post he seems amazingly non-committal and apologetic and so I don’t actually know what his position is.
EnlightenmentLiberal @99:
I think you’re still misunderstanding. It’s not groups of people who GO bad. It’s groups of already bad (disaffected, extremist) people coming together under the umbrella of a particular community. That community can range anywhere from anime to white supremacists.
EnlightementLiberal @100:
It is mindboggling how difficult you’re making this.
The people who are disaffected?
The people who are extremists?
PZ is talking about those people finding one another, grouping together in communities and displaying harmful behavior.
He’s not talking about the NOT harmful people coming together.
@EnlightenmentLiberal
You covered nothing of substance.
People who believe that violent video games are dangerous are wrong and need to be criticized. Asking PZ to be careful while pointing out gamers being shitty is second degree victim blaming as far as I am concerned (since you are too lazy to go after the people with the shitty ideas and PZ is trying to help people being victimized by more people with shitty ideas and shitty behavior.
You can claim “violent video games” is a dog whistle all you want. If you don’t demonstrate how he is using an emotionally triggering phrase to avoid something you have not done anything. All his focus has been on two groups, people doing bad things in communities, and people in the communities letting it happen without comment or action.
Did you even look at what I said about the word disaffected? People who are different often get abused and harassed and become disaffected. That has happened to a lot of anime fans and other groups. You just pulled “loser” out of your butt. I was in a role-playing group in high school that literally was a disaffected group of people that banded together.
It’s not stereotyping when he is deliberately criticizing people in communities that are letting other people do terrible things. That implicitly requires non-abusers and abusers to exist for the idea to work.
That actually should have been parsed apart better. Violent video games as a set are not necessarily dangerous, but the idea that there exist problematic things in video games, including violent ones, that spread problems like stereotypes and such can be seen as worth criticizing.
Oh hell there I go again when I accidentally worded things like criticizing video games is bad in general.
I like criticizing harmful things in video games like stereotyping and similar problem. I’m going to bed. My processor is sparking.
EnlightenmentLiberal (#99)
No, you under-stuffed tampon, it’s the opposite of saying that. I specifically said the vlogger I linked to is “the sort of wretched person you find among the larger group [of] anime fans.” (Pardon the omission of the “of.” The rest of the words should have made it clear, though.) It’s not tarring anime fans¹ beyond the extent that each might support racist shitbags like her (ie. the sort of fans who coalesce around a nucleus of weeabooism). Same goes with Thunderdouche and atheists.
There’s a reason I linked that particular video. It’s not just an example of the destructive sort of person PZ talks about in the OP, but an example who is engaged in an explicit, unapologetic defense of that destructiveness.
Then I guess you don’t understand that the complaints in the critical piece I also linked are common as fuck. Asians and Asian-Americans get abused by weeaboos all the time.
………………
¹ I’ve been an anime fan since the early 90’s, by the way. で、日本語を習い始めたきっかけは、翻訳なしで漫画を読めるようになりたかったからだ。当時は、「おたく」を誇らしげに自称したり、アニメで見たこと以外に何も知らないくせに日本に憧れたりした。つまり、私も「weeaboo」だった。 So don’t try to bullshit me with this outrage in the name of the poor, downtrodden cartoon-humpers.
EnlightenmentLiberal @ whateverthefuck #
You quoted this from the OP:
And claim you can’t come up with any interpretation other than:
You are a fuckwit on wheels. How the everloving fuck do you get “self destructive or noxious” out of “vying to outdo each other in their commitment to [miscellaneous things]”?
Leaving that aside though, the very next two sentences:
He’s clearly saying, in plain fucking English, that the same social behavior that causes people to come together over the random causes he listed above is “what drives the good things humanity does and can do.”
Even if you were a bit unclear on his meaning, you have no cause to still be unclear after that sentence.
Well feel free to not list any activities when you write your own blog post on this subject.
First, he specifically called the activities he was about to list “random”. Second, “self destructive or noxious” is a description you’re smuggling in here. The clear implication is that you are making shit up.
Oh, that’s easy. When you presuppose from the beginning that what PZ wrote must be bad and terrible, as Enlightenment Liberal is doing (and IIRC, has done before), it’s pretty easy to get such things.
pretty much why I vaulted to “fuck off” response level.
I see Elightenment Liberal is neither enlightened nor liberal in their interpretation. Why do I keep getting the impression they are out to show PZ is a hypocrite under the guise of pseudo-intellectual discussion?
@A. Noyd
And that’s ridiculous, unsubstantiated bigotry. This is simply not true of anime fans. I have no idea why you think this. Again, if you are basing your beliefs off 4chan or youtube, I would have to similarly condemn atheism, sports, video games, and basically every group of people ever.
…
@Seven of Mine
I didn’t. I quoted verbatim where PZ said “destructive” and “harm[ful]. See:
PZ:
…
I called it as I saw it. I saw a list that included only harmful activities or activities which have been declared to be harmful by large portions of the generational culture war. (Except band camp. I don’t know anything about band camp, and so I assumed there was something I was missing.)
PZ tried to hold himself non-responsible with:
No.
In this discussion, the context is discussing the ills of 4chan and reddit.
Anyone with a basic knowledge of 4chan knows that nearly the entire place is suffused with anime fans and anime culture. Video games discusison is also quite popular on 4chan. For reference, after the “random” board /b/, the two largest and most frequented boards on 4chan are /a/ anime and /v/ video games. IIRC, 4chan itself started as a clone of a Japanese message board, and the original board of 4chan was the anime board. Of course, porn is also quite popular. (Did PZ post talking about the recent incident where the celebrity nudes were circulated on 4chan?)
It is in that context that I read your list. In the context of discussing the ills of 4chan, I saw a list containing many obvious evils, and also “anime community” and “violent video games and its community” and “porn community”. I think it a rather obvious conclusion to anyone with a basic knowledge of 4chan, that in context, “anime”, “violent video games”, and “porn” was a reference to 4chan and its culture. It seems that I assumed too much knowledge from PZ, where PZ is actually completely oblivious to these very obvious connections. PZ seems mostly obviously to 4chan culture entirely – just that it’s bad (which it mostly is). To PZ, it seems like a completely random list. To any knowledgeable reader, it seems like an indictment of obvious evils and of 4chan. (Plus an indictment of band camp, which I know nothing about, and I merely assumed that I missed the memo on some perceived moral outrage. If all but 1 fit the pattern, I assumed it was my own ignorance.)
In the real world, “bizarre, random” activities is pejorative. The clear implication is that “disaffected individuals”, re: losers, are the only people who come together for these “bizarre, random” activities. Further, he again plays into the caricature and bigotry when he says that anime fans, video game fans, porn watchers, are “vying to outdo each other in their commitment to some bizarre, random”, and that is also a fairly accurate description of 4chan culture. Again, a mistake on my part that I assumed PZ knew what he was talking about, and was making references to 4chan.
PZ later asserts that the list was a “random collection of activities”. My ass. PZ was more honest the first time where he described the list as “bizarre, random” activities. Together with the above implied bigotry, this is the farthest thing from the truth. I say that PZ is being dishonest here. I now feel that the bigotry was entirely accidental, but even still, PZ is being dishonest here. You do not describe “a random collection of activities” as “bizarre, random causes”. That’s simply not what the words mean.
you know, repeating an argument that has been shot down, logically and repeatedly, is rather pathetic.
but hey, it’s your space.
I’d frankly suggest you start your own discussion of the “bigotry against anime” in the thunderdome.
here?
it’s a strawman.
@ EnlightenmentLiberal
Whatever.
All of that is based purely on your personal perception of possible motives in choosing the content of the list and your feelings about it don’t match with anything I can see as reasonable or logical.
Seconding Brony’s ‘whatever’. EnlightementLiberal appears to have a bone to pick with PZ over something and refuses to listen to anything approaching reason on this subject. He’s reading a horrible interpretation into a post by PZ that is completely at odds with PZ’s beliefs, as seen up to and including today. EL, just fuck off.
@EnlightenmentLiberal
That conversation Harris claimed to have had with Atran is rubbish. Atran has responded here
http://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/here-he-goes-again-sam-harriss-falsehoods
Considering that Atran has never written this claim about jihadis not believing paradise anywhere and in fact the opening of his book ‘Talking to the Enemy’ discusses the 9/11 hijackers ‘preparing themselves for paradise’, I’m pretty confident Harris is fibbing. It’s actually pretty pathetic he has resort to that kind of behavior.
It is not strictly true that Atran claims religious beliefs have nothing to do with the behavoir of jihadis:
“This does not mean that the behavior of Muslim jihadists has nothing to do with their religious beliefs. In our own interviews and experiments with militants, we have found overwhelming support for the idea that suicide bombing is an “individual obligation” (fard al-ayn) for any Muslim when the society around them fails to fight off the perceived onslaught of infidels (this notion of jihad against infidels as the “sixth pillar of Islam”— on par with the five traditional pillars of belief in God, prayer, alms for the poor, fasting at Ramadan, and pilgrimage to Mecca—is considered heretical by most religious Muslims). But such radical religious commitment arguably has less to do with traditional and institutionalized forms of religious learning and teaching than with the sacralization of political aspirations into new, nontraditional forms of group identity and commitment into new, nontraditional forms of group identity and commitment.”
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/satran/files/ap_ginges_atran.pdf
This is corroborated by Marc Sageman’s work ( see Leaderless Jihad, 2008) .
Let’s look at it this way. There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. According to poll data many Muslims express sympathy with al-Qaida’s viral social movement, but relatively few willingly use violence. Following a 2001-2007 survey of 35 predominantly Muslim nations, a Gallup study estimated that 7% of the world’s Muslims thought that the 9/11 attacks were “completely justified”. That’s about 100 million people; however, of these many millions who express support for violence against the outgroup, there are only thousands willing to actually commit violence. This is what Atran’s work is looking at: why certain Muslims are willing to join jidahi movements when so many are not.
Blaming it all on Islam is not only severely lazy, it is also simply not good enough.
EnglightenmentLiberal (#113)
This is the point where I have to wonder if you even know what words mean. As a response to what I said, this means you don’t think any terrible people exist at all among anime fans.
Gee, maybe if you’d read even the English portion of my footnote in #108, you’d know that!
Yet again: I specifically said the vlogger I linked to is “the sort of wretched person you find among the larger group [of] anime fans.”
The bit in italics mean that I’m not talking about the entire group.
I
am
NOT
talking
about
the
ENTIRE
group.
Like, seriously, how can I get you to acknowledge this very basic concept? That you’ve repeatedly come to the conclusion I mean the opposite is utterly absurd.
@dereksmear (#117)
Great takedown.