Twenty Years

Twenty years ago on the 22nd of July – so twenty years this Tuesday coming up – I migrated from ranting on MySpace, to blogging on Blogger. If you don’t count the Blogger blog I think I remember starting, forgetting, and losing the login information to in around 2001, the 22nd of July, 2005 entailed my formal induction into blogging. I made the leap to WordPress-dot-com in March of 2007, and have remained with that host under a succession of blogs – all mothballed, bar this one.

The writing was on the wall well over a decade ago though; the blogosphere is dying. Not that I listened. Social media was spitting out posts for shorter and shorter attention spans, WordPress was becoming an e-commerce platform, and increases in internet access speeds were making vlogging and short video content more viable.

Text blogging? That was for nerds who hung out in Borders. Which closed, appropriately. People want to consume content about the top 10 substitutes for anal bleaching, not participate in a glorified online book club.

***

I left things turned on around here all the same. I’ve renewed the domain name every time it’s been due since starting at this address just over 9 years ago. Now there’s a thing. It feels like forever, but I haven’t even been at this address for half my time blogging. That first half went quick.

I have to admit, though, that the output has been low in the second half. Very low. As in, I-don’t-do-the-algorithmic-churn low. One or two posts a year for the last a few years. I even skipped 2022. “Why bother writing if you’re not going to be bothered fostering an audience? Aren’t you just shouting at clouds?”

Nonsense. Anything involved with The Cloud gets more traffic than I do.

I managed a few words by email with Mikey of Harrangueman fame last year. Have also kept in touch with Mr Ponsford of 2-bit noir – an old stalwart of a number of comments sections, and a metaller from way back.

More broadly, and more prominently…

Calling Ophelia Benson of Butterflies and Wheels a “blogger” would seem a little too reductive – she’s more than that – a fully fledged author and editor at least, as well – while also being more of a cornerstone of the blogosphere than any of us, and for longer.

We chat. And I still chat with a number of the commenters on her blog, elsewhere. But I haven’t commented over at B&W in a few months, so I should probably go back for a visit some time soon.

ScienceBlogs died long ago when it was sold. FreeThoughtBlogs had a few good bloggers to begin with, but probably wasn’t conceived on all fronts by people who held to the mission statement in good faith.

Ed Brayton of Dispatches From The Culture Wars has been gone for almost five years now. It feels more like two. I’ll admit that five years prior to that, I’d stopped taking him seriously when he exited Dispatches from the FTB network, while pulling the “both sides” card when Ophelia Benson was being dog-piled in a very one-sided, obviously coordinated campaign by a number of Brayton’s fellow travelers. Or former fellow travelers. He really did both the sides he left behind.

So off to Patheos he went. I’d always found the atheists at Patheos conspicuously self-interested, and even cynical on some occasions. It’s not that I think atheists and the religious can’t work together, it’s just that there was always this ick factor from the godless there; a little too much ease with the self-promotion, a little too heavy on the use of polarized jargon the user clearly didn’t fully understand, and a little too many inconsistencies in self-positioning over time. I’m sure the religious readers felt something was a little off, too.

Pharyngula is still going. But the less said there…

If AV from Five Public Opinions had never linked to Dispatches and Pharyngula as much as he did, I’d have probably not have read them nearly as much. I’m not happy Ed is dead, not in any sense, but I do wish I’d clarified my views on his writing, earlier. And, as often is the case, I wish I’d trusted my gut more.

(Gawd, AV. Missing from the blogosphere for over sixteen years now – some of us still miss ya, fella!)

I do recall before blogging myself, that some of the more inquisitive Australian bloggers read and linked to Butterflies and Wheels, while not doing the same with Pharyngula‘s early presence – possibly due to the reception of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense in Australia. I know which I prefer.

I also remember the Usenet atheism days, at least around the 1998-2001 mark. I have very vague recollections of a mass-transition of atheists from newsgroups to blogs in 2004, but in 2004 I was tinkering with various flavours of Linux, and communing with LUGs and open source communities. And arguing with creationists in LUGs and open source communities – which was about as pleasant and not-at-all-embarrassing as you’d expect.

So I missed that transition from Usenet to early Atheosphere, re-emerging in a part of the blogosphere largely separate from what was going on in the US, with a perspective ground in Australian politics (I’d done a lefty political-internship not long before). Of course, evolution was a part of my studies at Uni then, so of course I was going to go there.

Australian political blogs got more of a look-in from me at least until around 2010. Anonymous Lefty, Grodscorp, The Happy Revolutionary, Larvatus Prodeo, The Road To Surfdom, Legal Eagle and others featured.

(And who could forget Iain Hall and Graeme Bird? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Who can remember Iain and Graeme and is still hanging around?)

***

Coming to blogging in 2005, before The God Delusion was published, and with a local political blogosphere that seemed like it was up for open discussion, was welcoming. I’d been to my first protest years before, had joined the Labor party and was already largely disillusioned by it, and had been arguing with creationists online since the ’90s, on and off. (I wasn’t going to join the Greens though, on account of the dogmatism, cultish harassment problem and history of pseudoscience).

2005. The Kansas Evolution hearings had kicked off, and The Flying Spaghetti Monster was unleashed. The End of Faith was starting to getting people interested in discussing religion, but not so much in Australia. Sam Harris was still being roped into atheist circles back then. People forget his first book wasn’t born of “The Atheist Movement” – it was conceived for better or worse, quite independently. And in 2005, it wasn’t really a news item in Australia. Not like The God Delusion or God Is Not Great were, later on.

Online atheism was, and still is, a dis-aggregated population of godless people, with godless interests and an array of persuasions, political and otherwise. It still tends towards social liberalism, with flair-ups of hot-headed, misogynist, libertarian, cry-baby gronks here and there. It still has its clutches of former religiously minded people, overcompensating for their past, while still not quite getting the materialism they rhetorically lean toward. It’s got all that and more – not all of it good, obviously. People are people.

I tell you what though. The tendencies of the Australian political Blogosphere, and the Atheosphere, really started to pull in opposite directions quite strongly. And in bad ways. If the Blogosphere hadn’t imploded, if things kept on going the way they were and blog participation kept up, straddling the two would have gotten pretty unpleasant.

The Oz political blogosphere owed a lot to being arts-adjacent. A number of more prominent bloggers here had intended career trajectories that could be, fairly or unfairly, negatively effected if certain prejudices weren’t catered to, or at least, not aggravated. Depending on what parts of the arts you don’t want to antagonize, you may not want to be seen as too sympathetic to Salman Rushdie – even this late in the piece. Pointing out that “sampling around the dependent variable” in statistics is a methodological flaw, could have you painted a supporter of the Iraq War, and made an outsider in other sections.

Deflate a beloved legal fiction and… you get the picture. Needless to say, denouncing The Wrong Kind of Atheists, irrespective of what those atheists may actually believe or do, was very popular back in the day in arts circles. And still is. What was allowed and what was verboten for atheists to inquire into was not being decided by people who actually knew what those atheists thought or did – or where they were actually going with things. Arguing against eugenics in a technically literate manner could get you accused of supporting eugenics by people with all the understanding of eugenics you’d expect of those raised on a media diet entirely made up of Sunday Arts.

(People who overly pride themselves on being cerebral often don’t like it when people use language they don’t understand – and technical language can become a repeat offender at setting this off).

If it was otherwise, maybe left-leaning religion journalists and the like would have made a bigger deal about specific instances of sexism documented within atheist communities, a lot earlier? In retrospect, it’s really odd that the critics of “New Atheism” mostly just left this alone, when it had the most evidence to support it relative to other complaints.

But why investigate sexism when you can accuse people, without a shred of evidence, and without being able to articulate why it’s even a problem, of attempting to resurrect a long-dead movement in philosophy? Because some of the people in arts circles you want to impress say it’s on the naughty list, that’s why.

The left side of the Australian political blogosphere catered to this kind of sensibility, to varying extents.

***

Meanwhile, in atheist land… We had the backdrop of an influential, but quite feudal arrangement of US secular organizations steeped in the American Civil Religion. The influence of Paul Kurtz in motivating US Humanism is large and well known, but his influence in making things so tribal? Not as much.

It’s been published what a control freak Kurtz could be, but there’s not so much analysis of the feudalism, at least not that I’ve come across. Needless to say, the details of his feuding with Richard Dawkins and intemperate or tone-deaf atheists seemed contrived – Dawkins hasn’t said half the stupid shit he’s been accused of, and of the actual stupid shit he’s said, Kurtz has had fellow travelers who’ve said worse, all without complaint from Kurtz. Hell, Kurtz had been falsely accused of some of the same going back decades, so he knew the tricks.

So when Kurtz joined in with the chorus decrying the “New Atheism” in the 2000s – a epithet he himself had used against him in the 1980s! – when Kurtz joined in in decrying Dawkins’ tone, amongst other things, Kurtz seemed mostly just to be railing against Dawkins’ influence relative to his own.

There was a struggle, from Kurtz, to direct organizations away from supporting Dawkins’ style (if not Dawkins himself). The way Kurtz exited CFI under a cloud after losing this struggle, just reinforced the impression.

It’s not that I want to smear Kurtz, though. But he had a part in making Playing The Game normal behaviour in movement spaces that are supposed to be geared to, in some sense, serve the truth. That’s not okay.

(It’s not that I imagine that Dawkins wouldn’t have done the same if he were able – he’s just not a natural at it is all, so you don’t really see it from him. At least, not directly. His proxies on the other hand…)

Meanwhile, American Humanism… yeesh. Much like a lot of their Unitarian brethren from the Harvard Divinity School, a lot of formally affiliated American Humanists seen to suffer from a strain of Smartest Person In The Room disease. Albeit a American liberal variety. For decades – DECADES – I’ve been seeing them waltz into conversation, not really understanding what other people are saying, and just assuming something deplorable is being said before launching into a condescending, corrective lecture. Never mind that their interlocutor may have been saying the opposite, and saying it better.

Add to this level of conceit, a dash of overcompensation for shameful memories of previous religious or bigoted misdeeds, an internalized redemption arc fantasy (ala American Civil Religion), and lashings of the kind of ambition-driven anxieties you get from The Cult of LinkedIn, and you’ve got the average American Humanist Association apparatchik I seem to keep coming across. You should see the Humanist chaplains!

Across the pond in the UK, Humanism doesn’t seem to have as much of the American Civil Religion aspects (obviously, but it does seem to be importing some of the tropes), or as much of the overcompensating, cult-hopper nonsense. But self-serving, media-aware professionals, again of the LinkedIn disposition? Yikes!

Australian Humanoatheoskepticism? Not really worth a mention. It’s got most of the usual symptoms, but a lot less of the statistical significance and all of the lack of influence to boot. Again, all of the Humanist chaplains I’ve come across in Australia are the same condescending, Smartest Guy In The Room, modeled-on-American-liberalism types, who seem to be conspicuously lacking in the actually-knowing-shit department for people so confident.

Layered across this, online, you have a small number of secular folks genuinely interested in open, honest inquiry in spite of how the algorithms try to shape their discussion (there were more, but the algorithm, online harassment and loss of interest have each taken their toll). You have a lot of profilitic identities trying to be the next trending thing in quote-unquote “progressive” thought. And you have a load of manosphere-adjacent chuds, similarly profilitic, but who are also the volatile, rage-baiting, less-humorous troll-successors of 2000s 4Chan, Something Awful, the crass end of Internet Infidels and so on.

Too many of the arts-adjacent seem apt to lump all, or much of this into the false taxon “New Atheist”, for various, often self-serving reasons. Maybe they want to appeal to their liberal-arts friends while also being sciencey, but they engaged in some misogynistic online abuse back in the day; they can claim they were “radicalized” by “New Atheism”, thereby externalizing blame.

Never mind that some of those radical “New Atheists” were women on the receiving end of said misogyny. Women who made great efforts in standing up to it. You can’t let facts like that stop you from lumping them in with their harassers and blaming them for your past actions.

Or maybe somebody doesn’t want to be accused of being a “New Atheist”, so they single somebody else out who is (but nobody is – it’s a bogus taxon). Maybe they can’t get tenure at Australian Catholic University, and need to keep being seen to be behaving, so need to differentiate themselves from people – anyone – seen as pesky in received wisdom. Or maybe it’s more base.

“Oh hey babe. Yeah, I’m not like those New Atheist guys. Yeah, nah, I’m not religious but I respect a broad who studies theology. I’m totally a feminist.”

You think people haven’t witnessed behaviour online that’s reducible to parody like this? That this doesn’t happen in liberal, “progressive”, arts-friendly circles? That it hasn’t always happened for as long as there have been progressives?

***

But yeah… if you were a blogger straddled across an arts-adjacent, center-left political scene, and a candid, secular movement committed to inquiry, you’d basically be spread across two antagonistic cultures at once. I’m certainly not the only one I’ve seen straddled across it.

I guess that’s a silver lining to the end of the blogosphere – that particular rift is gone.

I’ve grown away from several people from “both sides” over the years. Some I wish I’d cottoned on to earlier, other I had issues with but tolerated out of deference to the judgement of mutual friends, and with others, we’ve just changed. A handful of folks I’ve befriended via the blogsophere have sadly turned out to just have been somewhat awful all along – but we all knew to expect that about the Internet once upon a time, so I can’t complain at length.

Having Oz politics bloggers and secular bloggers go at it full-tilt, at the same time, at length, would have certainly made this process of parting a lot more explosive. Maybe painfully. Maybe destructively. And the polarization did increase, even if the readership didn’t.

Someone who kept writing, and yet somehow managed to rise above this kind of division in-general, gracefully, and all while not self-censoring (while religious), was the late Neil Whitfield, who died just prior to Christmas last year. I’m coming around to thinking that Neil was the definitive elder-statesman of the Australian blogosphere. I can’t think of anyone more deserving.

The real question is probably whether or not the Australian blogosphere deserves to be associated with him.

Even before his death, more than once I’ve thought “what would Neil say?” The idea of OzBlogging without him around is still hard to process.

So. Back to that question. Why bother writing if you’re not going to be bothered fostering an audience?

***

I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to keep this blog going. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be going.

I’m mortal. When I started this I was in my early thirties and throwing around some heavy weight at the gym, despite not being at peak health even then. I’m in my fifties now, feeling it, and no longer at the gym since the early pandemic. My health isn’t great.

I’d like to leave something – and yeah, I’m thinking of the leaving part – but I’m not entirely sure of the worth of the project. Especially without genuine engagement (no, not the social media statistical definition – I mean the human kind!)

I’ve stopped listing and have changed my email addresses, and I’m considering closing the comments section, given nobody uses it. Due to legal changes in Australia, blog hosts are now more liable for comments made than they used to be, and it’s otherwise a time-sink, if not a particularly frenetic one.

How would people engage with this “content” after that? Not outside of social media linking to it, I guess. Which is kind of worrisome. Handing over power, even a small residual amount after holding out seems bleak. Not in a practical sense, but in that it’s finally confirming the final nail in the coffin of proper, open discussion. The death of The Dream of The Internet.

This may be goodbye, my friends. Eventually. Soonish.

The only thing stopping me is a kind of Camus-style, existential rebellion against the Universe. The continuation of this blog for so long in spite of everything has certainly been absurd.

What to hope for? I’d like people to be able to talk again like they did in the 2000s. Maybe without the casual bigotry, but also without the self-censorship. How do you balance that? Well, not with an algorithm, and not with BlueSky or Twitter admins.

Maybe, if some of the few people remaining can band together and see past their differences, they can… We had a slow cooking movement, maybe we can have a slow reading… What if Zoomers took on 2000s-style blogging like it was retro…

No. There are challenges, and likely solutions, but they won’t involve denying that the blogosphere is dead.

I’ll keep the lights on around here for a while yet, just to rail against an absurd world in an absurd universe. And maybe I’ll even get a chance to debunk a few falsehoods about movement and subculture history. But I’m not going to kid myself.

If you’ve read this far, then thanks. It’s absurd that you’re here. But appreciated.

~ Bruce

Tone, emotional range, character

If you’d asked me ten years ago what I thought of the importance of tone when discussing contentious politics, I would have rated it low-to-non-important, this largely being down to having been tone-trolled by folks arguing in bad faith. Some people do have a tendency to expect you tread on eggshells around them, if only to distract you from what you’re actually trying to say.

“It’s the validity of the argument and the truth of the premises wot matters!”

If you’re only interested in the truth of a specific proposition, then okay, fine. But what if you’re interested in more?

Say you’re in the union movement and the prospect of a demarcation dispute with another union raises its head; you ask “Comrade, do you think X is the demarcation criterion we should be using to sort this out?” and get an answer in the affirmative. What does this tell you? Say you spool things out to have a discussion of why a given demarcation criterion is appropriate, and your interlocutor is on-point on all of the details. You absolutely agree on all the technical details.

Perhaps you bring an appreciation of social ques and historical context to this conversation. Perhaps they’re not telling you what they really think. Perhaps they do believe what they’ve told you, but are holding back that these details are actually irrelevant to their plans.

Maybe there’s no question of ideological trustworthiness, and you just want to make sure you’re both on the same page, or that you can campaign together from the same office. Perhaps the social ques and the historical context point to a healthy, stable solidarity. It could be that the tonal differences between bluster and genuine affection are what settles things and allows you to focus on the work.

It’s easy to take an appreciation of tone and character for granted, but it gets a lot harder to parse it all if your appreciation of tone is deprecated.

***

Over the last seven years, I’ve run into people who’ve had a pretty rough time participating in political discussions online, who’ve subsequently fallen into deep depressions. Blocking and withdrawing has been the order of the day, and seemingly with a relatively high error level; erring on the side of caution while realizing rightfully they don’t owe strangers their time.

But what about what they themselves are owed? The right to be healthy and aspire to happiness takes more than just being able to brush off abusers and trolls. What if, owing to an acquired tone-deafness, one lost the ability to tell the difference between passive-aggressive concern trolls, and genuinely caring individuals with valid criticisms? Or the difference between someone willing to offer moral support, and someone just looking to establish their base by flattering vulnerable people? Wouldn’t that be a bit isolating – unhealthily so?

“I’m happy to have a small, select circle, thanks! I don’t need to keep my enemies that close.”

Well, maybe. Maybe you’re due a break, and it’s not like you earn 4 weeks paid leave arguing on Twitter. You don’t need my permission to walk away.

Still, I’ve been seeing people adhering to crude, tone-deaf, by-rote heuristics to work out who is and who isn’t a bad actor; seeing people of good faith being turned aside, and seeing a number of those doing the turning aside winding up even more miserable for reasons they can’t begin to articulate. Worst case scenario; I’ve seen someone clearly isolate themselves this way, then blame the people they’ve turned away for making them do it.

“LOOK AT WHAT YOU’VE MADE ME DO!”

A lack of range in your emotional capacity can do this. The numbness of depression can beget self-neglect. Self-neglect can beget further depression. It helps to have trusted people around you to help prevent this from spiraling out of control, and for that you’re probably going to have to put up with at least a little political disagreement.

Which brings us back to the matter of how to know who you can trust, and how tone helps.

***

A friend and I were musing the other week about two guys with a couple of very similar radical left sensibilities; sensibilities that friend and I regard as problematic. Two guys with the same particular tribes, much the same particular ideations, and to some extent even the same incoherence and inconsistencies. But independent of each other, friend and I decided that we regard their character as immensely different, such that one stands out as clearly more trustworthy.

There’s no particular political transgression that sets them stand apart. A crude, political dot-point heuristic couldn’t possibly clear things up; they’re both equally on-point with their political tribes. And yet, one of them would easily be welcome at a dinner party among like-minded(ish) friends, while the other is regarded as more than a little suspect.

One guy is clearly driven by empathy and good intentions, erring on the side of sappiness, while the other seems to have more pride invested in his tribalism, resulting in what passes as a mildly venomous smugness. Both will make the same dismissals, but while one will appeal to what he sees as people’s better nature, the other will lace his assertions with subtle backhandedness, and deliver them with a not so subtle sniff.

It also helps that it’s clear – at least to those of us familiar with their tone – that one of them is both warmer and more capable of uttering the words “I think I may have made a mistake.”

There’s something to be said for having political disagreements with people you can trust – for one they serve as a check should you turn out to be wrong. Potentially this serves as a check on self-harm. So if your criteria for allowing social proximity is a reduced, narrow list of marginal political differences, well, that’s a bit daunting. And what’s it like for a political community, or a family with politically contentious advocacy needs, if most of the adults therein are isolated like this?

“You’re expecting ethnic minorities to sit down and sup with white supremacists? To never punch a fascist!?! That’s the politics of civility!”

No. I’m not expecting that. Obviously.

For the most part we’re talking narcissism of small differences level disagreements here, not overt, intentional political hostility; fine-grained disagreements about ontology or epistemology; arguments over the merits of deontology versus utilitarianism; concerns over to what extent functions of a mutually supported organization should be decentralized; differing perspectives born of differing material interests on what clauses of proposed legislation may have unintended consequences, and so on – all argued with what a healthy appreciation of tone would inform you is good faith, and what an appreciation of material, political reality would inform you is not being treated as an abstract, intellectual plaything.

If a democratic socialist can’t sit down for coffee with a social democrat to talk their differences over, then their problem isn’t political theory. Their problem is personal and it won’t be resolved or navigated through with the use of an ideological spot-check.

Tone and emotional range go a long way to helping here, and I was wrong to ever doubt it*. I for one am happier and healthier knowing this now.

~ Bruce

* PS. Neil, you were right.

“Hate”

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve been accused of hating anyone or anything, let alone spuriously, and I’m at odds to explain why other than perhaps my ever-shrinking Internet presence of the past 10 years. I’m not a bit enough win, I guess.

Over the period, I’ve had a fair bit of time to reflect on the matter. Particularly on the relatively futility entailed in letting someone else make it all about you, and then proceeding to defend your case.

Whether or not a given individual, in their heart of hearts, actually hates someone is usually pretty nebulous, even if they’re arguing in bad faith. It takes a truly bad actor – say a mugger or the like – to make the matter utterly unambiguous. Similarly, you have to be an unmitigated saint in order to disprove all but the most absurd of accusations, and it’s impractical to expect sainthood of anyone.

It’s largely a distraction. It’s a distraction if you’re unfairly accused. It’s a distraction if you’re fairly accused – the purity of your soul isn’t really salient if there are material consequences to be considered. Unless you’re appointed to some role with a duty of care to the alleged hated, if you’re just some schlub off of social media, or a writer with a small platform, what’ve people got resting on it?

And yet it’s easy to be distracted by it. Maybe you’ll kid yourself that the way past it is to argue through it, only realizing the conversational mobius loop you’ve slipped into after the fact. The return on all that effort is pretty damn nominal.

I’ve been watching people I follow on Twitter being drawn into discussions of “why wouldn’t you fuck people from group X?”, or less colorfully “what is your sexual preference”. We’re talking about sexuality, and the apparent expectation that people make themselves available to certain dating pools.

If I were to participate, I’d probably have to say that I’m Popperian about my sexuality: inductively, I’ve only ever been attracted to natal women, but if I were attracted to anyone outside that group I’d accept it as the proverbial black swan that disproved the hypothesis of my hetero-sexuality. Beyond that, in terms of civics, I’d assert that I’m not under any obligation to date anyone I’m not attracted to, or anyone I am attracted to, and that anyone who thought otherwise was exhibiting the kind of sexual entitlement bias that deserves the attention of a forensic psychiatrist.

Going by the way discussion has gone, this would variously be seen as evidence of a lack of hate, or evidence of hate. For the life of me, I don’t think this does demonstrate hate, but I can see how it’s not compelling as well – it doesn’t disprove hate.

And who’d want to get bogged down in that discussion? And why? And over Twitter?

And of course, while all this has been going on, people haven’t been able to talk about the other matters they’re interested in; mental health, discrimination, confounding variables in social science research, public safety and the common good, medicine, the ontology of protected groups and subsequent proposed demarcations, the trustworthiness of our government, the scope and function of medical organizations, and so on. (Who ever said Twitter was bad for this kind of thing, right?)

Bringing things back…

I have a kind of confidence, and maybe it’s an unearned confidence, and maybe it’s because I’m a white man going through all of this in easy mode, but my suspicion is this: if in future I don’t contest the matter of my own alleged hate, and just ask that we move on to the material stuff – the points of contention – I’m confident that the kinds of people that I want to reach are going to be less inclined to be mistaken about my hate that if I’d dug-in and defended myself.

Sadly, though, I can’t generalize this confidence in the form of advice for others. For one, I’ve seen enough lesbians maligned as malicious in the last three decades to suspect that they can’t expect the same good faith that I can, apparent progress over the years notwithstanding. A good part of Aboriginal activism in Australia has extended good faith towards white Australia in a way that hasn’t been reciprocated.

If popular morning television serves as a barometer, when Aboriginal Australia is accused of hate and white Australia’s vanity is served by this accusation, is it likely that yet more good faith from Aboriginal Australia is going to bring ordinary people around?

All the same, any issue of privilege not withstanding, I think I’m going to go with this confidence in future should I need to. “Okay, so say I’m a hater. What about the important details?”

If I’m a hater, and it matters that much to them, they can always unfollow me and not invite me to their birthday party. Beyond that, I can’t see that it matters terribly much – I don’t wield that much power.

~ Bruce

“Identity politics”

One of the most unproductive things you can have in political discourse is the situation where people polarize around a poorly defined piece of terminology; people will talk past one another, people will misrepresent one another (willingly or unwillingly), and people will just plain not argue their case, regarding their conclusions as obvious because argument to the contrary has been made semantically inaccessible.

Argue about “identity politics” on Twitter, and you’ll likely receive a shit-storm in response, impugning your character in ways determined by which caricature you can be most closely associated with. Woke, with-it hot-takes abound on pseudo-leftist media start-ups, decrying the use of the word, while angry white men quiver on YouTube, simultaneously treating their own use of the term as rigorous and unequivocal, all while not bothering to even define it.

***

To give you an idea of the vista of confusion I’m seeing, here’s a few different definitions of “identity politics” I’ve seen in play. (This list of meanings is non-exhaustive, and for even more confusion, there’s probably more overlap than I’m indicating here.)

The Bubba/Brexit/One Nation Definition: “Identity politics is wot those uppity blacks used to humiliate me for loosin’ my job after they dun stole it with the immigrunts.”

The ‘Bert Definition: “Identity politics separates us all into fictional boxes – but we’re all the same: I don’t see race! There’s no wage gap! All lives matter!”

The Brocialist Definition: “Racism is bad, but identity politics – arguing about race and sex – is a wedge strategy to stop us talking about class, so stop talking about racism and sexism and be my wingman at the next Marxism convention! #Solidarity”

The Identarian Definition: “All oppression is leveled against intrinsic identities, and “identity politics” is a derisive term used by people who seek to engage in said oppression by denying who we are on the inside!”

The Anti-Identarian Definition: “Not all oppression is leveled against “intrinsic identities”, and a good deal of identity is not intrinsic to begin with. Identity politics moves the focus of debate away from the material living conditions experienced by various social groups – the distribution of wealth, and control over the means of production – towards demands for often trivial (or epistemologically impossible) acceptance of other people’s internal accounts of themselves. It is solipsistic, narcissistic and regressive.”

***

I think it’s pretty obvious by way of my giving it the final word, which meaning I’m most sympathetic with, but it’s not really my point right now to promote any given definition. Rather, it’s my point that these commonly circulating meanings for “identity politics” are quite at odds with one another, and yet people will go on arguing as if we’re all talking about the same thing; arguing and achieving nothing.

When YouTube Atheists or Skeptic Douches prattle on about “identity politics”, too often it’ll be a case of the Bubba objection masquerading as the pseudo-enlightened ‘Bert objection, which basically guarantees that you’ll never be able to pin them down to an unequivocal statement without drawing their motives out first; motives which they’re not apt to self-examine in the first place. Good luck with that.

The ubiquitous Internet ‘Berts will often have the broadest definition of “identity politics”; engaging in hyper-skepticism of statistically meaningful social groups in order to further denialism about the living conditions of said social groups, to whatever extent is needed for them to feel comfortable with their own fortunes. And you’ll be the racist or sexist for contradicting them.

The Brocialists, if they’re your standard variety, will at least have the good manners to stick with their objection, even if it does make if difficult to have a conversation with them (not that you’d necessarily want to).

Identarians, I’ve often found, will deploy the confusion of the inverse fallacy; that they’ve seen a number of Brocialists/’Berts/Bubbas use the term “identity politics”, before noting that you’ve used it, and are hence therefore a Brocialist, ‘Bert or Bubba, or hybrid of all three or more. Aside from being logically invalid, and not-infrequently factually wrong, when people take this kind of non-argument on-board they’re internalizing a shit-tonne of confusion. Confused? Yes, well that’s to be expected.

(I get that this fallacy can serve as a heuristic to ward off racist/sexist trolls, but still, it’s one that generates a lot of confusion/signal degradation).

The mistake I think anti-identarians make, when they make it, is a simple case of taking their own assumptions for granted and subsequently talking past interlocutors. This may not generate as much confusion or conflict as the practices of the other camps, but it doesn’t help to inform readers either, nor does it cut through any of the confusion generated by the other takes on the topic.

***

A couple of years ago, I was surprised to read that people who have a problem with identity politics were all opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement. This struck me as weird because all the people I’ve known who’ve had articulated objections to identity politics – old Trots from some time back – I’d expect would be Black Lives Matter supporters.

The message I get from this confusion is that people – particularly people who get published writing about politics – aren’t examining their own lexicons, instead passively adopting definitions from their own social bubble.

To some extent, at lower levels or in private spaces this isn’t a problem, and we all do it. But if you aren’t familiar with a set of perspectives – if you didn’t know who was voicing a vague term or where they were coming from when using it – you could be forgiven for not having a fucking clue what they were on about.

Public participation in discussion of politics shouldn’t be confined to select in-groups, as much as certain groups may benefit from such insularity.

I’m not going to get all Bolshi and demand that everyone closely police their semantics in their own personal spaces, but I think it wouldn’t hurt for writers with some modicum of political responsibility to reconsider how clearly they’re getting their points across, and whether or not they want to do more than just preach to the choir.

It wouldn’t hurt the public for such writers to tie themselves down to a definition or two.

~ Bruce

Netiquette

It seems a little bit self-regarding writing-up a comments policy for a small blog these days. Due to changes in the way people consume media online, and the frequency with which I post, I don’t get nearly as much blog traffic as I used to a decade ago. Furthermore commentary is largely something that’s migrated away from the blogosphere towards social media, which for the most part is out of my hands.

Why write a policy confined in scope to an outlet folks won’t use? Why put yourself in the position of being able to be questioned on matters of policy compliance for so little? What kind of reader would press for the precise exercise of such a policy in such a circumstance, anyway?

So this isn’t a policy document. This blog doesn’t have a comments policy. To paraphrase old Art, “I reserve the right to be a capricious bastard…”

Still, what makes for good discussion online is interesting and important, if elusive and ever changing. Instead of delivering edicts limited to an incredibly confined scope, this post serves as a discussion piece, should it be needed, wherever it may be wanted.

***

In the ‘90s, if you joined a discussion list or USENET newsgroup, and “netiquette” was enforced, the kind of edicts you’d see invoked often entailed technological concerns; top-vs-bottom-posting, cross-posting, HTML vs plain-text content and so on. If you were new to the conventions – that is if you hadn’t used email prior to the popular uptake of the World Wide Web – it was a bit like learning the conventions of CB Radio for the first time.

In 1995, Intel’s Sally Hambridge wrote a seminal text for the Network Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force; Netiquette Guidelines. Being largely a response to an influx of “Newbies”, and geared towards providing a blueprint for policy makers at the time, the document has noticeably dated. For example…

“Never send chain letters via electronic mail. Chain letters are forbidden on the Internet. Your network privileges will be revoked. Notify your local system administrator if your ever receive one.”

(Hambridge, Netiquette Guidelines, ‘2.1.1 For mail’, 1995)

By today’s standards, just over two decades later, this clause seems over-reaching and authoritarian. It’s certainly, in as far as the social media equivalent is concerned, un-achievable. If you were to contact your ISP to inform them you’d received a chain letter in 2017, maybe you’d get a reply from the help-desk, but you can pretty much guarantee that the sysadmins wouldn’t be that interested in your query.

What I’d like for you the reader to consider though, are the likely concerns behind, and the context surrounding this rule.

In terms of concerns, to this day chain letters and their equivalents degrade the signal-to-noise ratio in Internet discussion. The best case scenario is some mild entertainment, while the worst, especially when such spam is particularly both viral and dis-informative, is an effect that undermines democracy.

In terms of the context, in 1995 and discussed elsewhere in Hambridge’s text, is the reality that people often didn’t have their own Internet connection – often they had an account at work, or on campus, or so-on. The implication of this, not expressed so clearly in Hambridge’s text, although more obvious at the time, was that your sysadmin was a flesh and blood human being you may very well have even mingled with in meatspace; someone you basically had a pact with rather than someone institutionally removed from you to the umpteenth degree. The illusion that the Internet was a public space, rather than a construct built up on privately owned servers, wasn’t nearly as strong as it is now either.

There also weren’t the same automated bells and whistles more modern sysadmins have today, and this meant that they may very well had to have gotten up close and personal with your drama. Algorithms are copping a lot of flak lately, having introduced an array of self-perpetuating biases into democracy itself, but at base, they’ve saved sysadmins an awful lot of work as well.

So back in the day, if you handled yourself courteously – thus potentially saving your sysadmin an array of thankless and resource draining chores – you got your Internet privileges. Over a more manually-run Internet, over more obviously private infrastructure, saying chain letters were “forbidden” was a far more reasonable expectation.

***

Without wanting to sound ecclesiastical about it, one of the best ways to kill a comments policy, or any policy regarding discussion, is to use the letter of the law to violate the spirit of the law. You’ll see this in particular in any instance where someone who’s abusive online engages in a narrow parsing of the rules in order to confect the case that They’re The Victim Here^(tm) – that everyone else just feels that they’ve been abused, but that objectively, by the rules, they’re the one’s engaging in wrongdoing.

If you’ve ever argued with a Men’s Rights Activist, or other, similarly querulous sorts, you already know what I’m on about.

I’m no doubt re-inventing the wheel by making this observation, but I strongly suspect that as technology ages, literal rules of communication, heavily grounded in the particulars of a given medium, are bound to act as an anchor upon civil, open discussion. This rapid dating of rules then further compounds the problem of the letter of the law being used to violate its spirit.

It wouldn’t have been out of place, for example, for a 1990s sysadmin to consider what someone did over a different Internet connection and a different medium, outside their purview. However, even late last decade, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for someone moderating blog comments to take Twitter harassment into consideration when considering who is or isn’t allowed to participate.

It’s not that the concerns have changed, it’s that the technology, the specific consequences, and hence the range of feasible implementations of the rules, have. This, I think, is true much more for online discussion than for say the conventions of formal meetings in meatspace.

New conventions were needed after Gopher gave way to the World Wide Web, the latter eventually bringing in an influx of “newbies”. Newer rules were needed with the explosion of Web 2.0 in the Aughts. Social media has subsequently thrown the specifics of a lot of this out of the window – supplanting the older technologies all while increasing the size of a user base that largely doesn’t care about how it was all done before they arrived, much less why.

***

So what, then? No rules? Maybe not here, but in general I don’t think it’s all a lost cause.

While the specific acts have changed – SkeezBros don’t ask “ASL?” on Facebook like they did on Yahoo! Chat, and you don’t have to manually accept that dick pic on Facebook the way you had to on IRC – the mentality of abusers has not. Instead of grounding the rules so heavily in tech, then, why not base them on something more persistent, like basic attitudes?

I can think of a few good reasons why this may present problems. It is easier for example, for both algorithms and humans to target cuss words, than it is to run your text through something based on the DSM-V. While something based on the DSM-V may provide insights into more far reaching behaviours than what the current tech used to enforce the ToS does, it would be more expensive.

That is until Facebook finds a profitable way to sell the results of a DSM-V-based test to the likes of potential employers, insurers and so on. (Assuming they haven’t already).

Ultimately though, I think that in as far as human involvement in facilitating online discussion is concerned – and at least until AI is more field-proven as democracy-friendly, I think humans should be more involved here – it’d be good for folks to familiarize themselves with a bit of human nature and its implications. (Viewers of Halt and Catch Fire can consider me Team Comet on this front.)

***

What sort of things about human nature? What kind of considerations?

At the risk of appearing to create a set of rules for this blog, here’s a list of a few things that come to mind. It’s by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope it highlights the kind of attitude-based, rather than specific-tech-based approach to moderating online discussion I’m talking about.

This bit will probably blow out the word-count, so don’t feel obliged to not skip forward if you get the gist.

No media outlet, nor its authors, are apps on your computer.

Automated, near-instantaneous electronic gratification may have conditioned you to expect a certain response at the click of a button. But unless shoe-horned into inequitable conditions, humans don’t offer this feature to end-users. If you’re in the habit of being indulged this way, try to grow out of it, and certainly don’t expect it from actual people in discussions of contentious issues.

(Nor, if you manage to get humans to be largely compliant with such expectations, should you expect quality discussion; reduce a human to the role of a bot, then don’t expect them to produce output of a higher standard.)

If you still have trouble with this concept, consider taking your technological solipsism to a therapist.

You are not the editor of someone else’s media.

Unless you’ve got a heap of state power behind you, or a contract employing or otherwise positioning you as an editor, you’re not participating in discussion in that capacity. Bloggers etc. get to make their own mistakes in their own space. Think you’ve got legal recourse to change that? See a lawyer, or ask Napoleon The Boar.

There are occasions where a friendly, professional editor may chip in with editorial advice for an emerging writer, but even then, from what I can tell, said editors tend to observe and appreciate the emerging writer’s creative autonomy. Unsolicited editorializing is something I’ve only really seen either from people who aren’t editors at all, or who are recently-graduated, self-employed editors with massive entitlement biases. (Admittedly, my experience is limited).

If you try hard enough, maybe you’ll be a shit lawyer.

Lawyers tend not to push judges as far as some trolls try to push admins, because if they did, they’d be turfed for contempt of court. This seems funny to me, because a lot of Internet trolls appropriate the terms-of-art and dramatized rhetoric of TV lawyers.

Not that I think lawyers are perfect role-models, but I think folks cribbing their lines from Rumpole of the Bailey could at least emulate a little of his self-restraint (such as it is).

You’re not owed affection or affirmation.

Sure, people shouldn’t dehumanize you, but it’s not incumbent upon individuals, as individuals, to tend to your wounds after the fact – even individuals with opinions about the nature of the kind of dehumanization you’ve experienced. There are a lot of ways this matter can play out, politically.

Even if you’ve been dehumanized by an oppressor, conservatives may very well tell you to harden the fuck up. This wouldn’t be my approach. Rather, I’d argue that its the responsibility of a progressive state to cater to your psychological health via a universal public health care system. (That, and for the system causing the initial oppression to be overturned).

I can’t however, see myself as being personally responsible for providing this kind of health care; for a start, while interested in these kinds of issues, I’m not a qualified practitioner. Nor incidentally are most bloggers. You don’t need people like me tinkering around in your brain. Further, there’s a whole load to unpack here concerning the issue of individual action versus collective organizing (and how progressive causes have been undermined by such individualism).

This is where I’d find common ground with a number of conservative bloggers; it’s not our job as individuals. We’re not obliged to love you. We’re not personally obliged to provide care. Suffice to say that those who aren’t actually oppressed (yes you, MRAs), can reasonably expect even less sympathy.

“Practitioner of pathological behavior” is not an oppressed class.

The mentally ill may on occasion exhibit behaviour that is pathological towards other people, but as any number of people affecting social justice concerns have rightfully pointed out, pathological behaviour towards others isn’t something mental illness guarantees, nor that mental health prevents. We mentally ill are not incapable of occasionally keeping our shit together.

The corollary that some people seem unwilling to make, though, is that while the mentally ill may form an disadvantaged class, a predisposition to abusive behaviour does not qualify as membership in this class.

If you’re a clinical narcissist, and that’s the limit of your psychological flaws, then sorry, no, you’re not mentally ill and you’re not being stigmatized/oppressed on that basis. All this means is that you have a particular set of character deficiencies that makes you a pain, and that this may be of diagnostic use for people with an interest in that kind of thing (e.g. employers, prisons etc.). The pathology is in what you do, not in what’s being done to you.

This doesn’t make you a victim of SJWs/2nd Wave Feminists/The Family Court/Reductive Positivists/Psychiatry/[Insert Anyone Else You Wish To Scapegoat]. Nor, back on the matter of this piece, does it make poor behaviour on the Internet magically excusable.

If this is you, people get to exclude you from their spaces on precisely this basis, not in spite of it. No amount of trying to shoehorn yourself into a category where you don’t belong changes this.

Connotations

Intending your words to have different connotations than the ones people attach to them won’t change the connotations attached to them. Sure, it’s not unreasonable to anticipate that some, possibly many people may extend a degree of charity of interpretation to you. Yes, some other folks will vexatiously attribute any connotation to any word you use if it serves their ends.

But if you wind up with dishonest interlocutors, and they’ve not come to you, then a solution is as easy as walking away. Why spend time and effort at a blog, or Facebook page, or IRC channel, or wherever else where you’ll be intentionally misunderstood?

And if you’ve honestly been inept in your use of language, and you haven’t been abused for it, you’ve got an opportunity to learn. Why squander that by letting your ego get in the way?

Why would your very first instinct be to be skeptical of the sincerity of a person attaching different connotations to a word than you; a skepticism that kicks in before even a consideration of the semantics of the word, let alone the context your interlocutor argues from?

The bots have to pass a Turing Test, and so do you.

The Turing Test, put simply, is a test to see if an artificial intelligence can act so much like a human, that it becomes indistinguishable from one. There’s probably no good reason why actual humans should be held to a lower standard online, so it’d also probably be a good idea for people to lift their game to a level more convincing than that of an automated advertisement for penis pills.

Best not to make your contributions boilerplate if you want actual discourse. (Sam Harris fans, I’m looking at you, but not at you in particular).

You get no receipts.

So someone’s blocked/banned you from their own space online. Their reason: …

Get used to it.

***

It’s maybe a bit much to expect everyone with control over an online outlet to exercise judgement in-line with a thorough study of human nature. Despite the verbiage, I certainly haven’t reached that benchmark here. Like most people I haven’t majored in psychology.

To some extent, the success of a healthy place for open discussion is going to rely on the discernment of readers, at least in as far as supporting good hosts of discussion. A world where the likes of The Mind Unleashed and The Freethought Project can masquerade as the hosts of serious discussion, in front of millions no less, possibly hints at a need for moderated expectations. The mere existence of the Alt-Right as an Internet powerhouse makes this seem all the more daunting.

And not everyone who wants to host discussion in good faith – as is their right – can be a good student of human nature to begin with, let alone put things into practice. The hurdles are many, and it’s not the case that we’d all want to discourage argument in good faith, even if hosted a little ineptly.

As personally confronting as the prospect may be, I’m finding the prospect of judging people by their character, rather than moderating them according to the precise letter of their word or the formation of their metadata, is going to be the best way to be fair to the fair-minded. For all the risks, I’m hoping this outlook will be the more sustainable in the long run, for anyone who takes this approach.

~ Bruce