Redemption is to just try not to be a jerk.
I note that this says nothing about the original speaker's feelings and opinions. If the other party denies the validity of the speaker's feelings and opinions, are they not also jerks?
Motte and Bailey.
Telling people you aren't a racist and didn't mean the thing they consider to be racist in a racist way is in no way denying the other party's feelings are valid.
https://unherd.com/2020/01/modern-politics-is-christianity-w...
It's also very good and worth reading.
Ok, but which authority gets to objectively identify when accusations of racism have been weaponised? How do we distinguish between "weaponised" accusations of racism, and legitimate ones?
The presenter suggested that the solution would be to not believe in the ideology. "The best way to get rid of witchfinders is to get rid of the belief in witches"
No one. If there was such an authority, you wouldn't have a "purity spiral" to begin with.
Who is more credible? How are we sure which one is?
https://quillette.com/2019/02/17/a-witch-hunt-on-instagram/
https://quillette.com/2019/06/07/instagrams-diversity-wars-r...
https://quillette.com/2019/07/28/knittings-infinity-war-part...
You could gather and directly examine evidence yourself:
https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col...
https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col...
Ultimately I guess you have to make your own judgement of what kind of ideas and behaviour you deem 'reasonable'. The difficulty, I suppose, is if you yourself are caught up in one of these purity spiralling communities. It's hard to maintain objectivity in such a situation. Delusional people don't know that they're delusional. People caught up in a cult don't think they're in a cult.
I've seen people only come to understand how insane things are when the mob finally turns on them, but by then it's too late to get out unscathed.
Is it possible that some people accuse those who believe Quillette is objective of being caught up in such a community?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette
It'd seem so. Now who am I to believe? Should I believe Quillette because three different articles corroborate accounts of purity spirals? Or should I believe the editors of this other page when they say Quillette isn't objective.
Should I infer from comments on the internet some social malady that needs a remedy?
Shrug.
At this point I think I'm going to bow out of this conversation. Good luck on your quest for objectivity!
> Perhaps nothing is knowable, and you should never believe anyone about anything ever.
Or maybe I should be sceptical of claims that some social illness is pervading internet communities when that claim is made with only anecdotal evidence.
Appealing to the authority of Jacobin and Chomsky won't get you back. Doubly so when the question that started this whole thing is (I hope you don't find this uncharitable paraphrasing): when do claims of foo rise to the level of "genuine foobar"?
Actually, this is a fundamental flaw of some counter-arguments to my line of argument. I'm pretty clearly undermining the idea that there exists an authority that can identify the social ill of "purity spirals". I'm not making any epistemological claim. But people like the commenter that "pushed me over a cliff" (lol) seem to quite often think "well, you're saying my claim that the left-wing is a cult has no objective basis, therefore you don't believe in any objective basis for anything! HA!"
The point I'm making by saying Quillette is a "cult" is that my claim it is a cult is as credible as Quillette's claim that purity spirals exist and are cults. Shove
> Appealing to the authority of Jacobin and Chomsky won't get you back.
Appealing to authority by linking Quillette articles is just as fruitless. My entire line of argument is that linking to these articles like they somehow identify an objective social malady is an appeal to authority, with no basis in actual authority.
You can't undermine a point nobody is really making. Maybe someone is making it somewhere, but tracking back up this comment chain I can't find it. 8 levels up probably_wrong explicitly says "No one" is such an authority. And further asserts that the type of claims suggest that the question is of a type where such an authority can not exist.
If I had to guess, what you actually want to do is tell people off for making and sharing personal assessments of social situations to the best of their own abilities and doing it at a lower evidentiary standard than you're comfortable with. If so, have the courage of your convictions to admit you think that either (A) nobody should do that at all, or (B) you're so much more better at it than them that they shouldn't do it. Or maybe (C) tell them to stop because you disagree but don't want to wade into such imprecise debate.
From the outside, you're not articulating your point well enough to avoid looking like epistemological flailing.
Well that's not "so", so I'm not going to admit something that isn't so.
> From the outside,
How are you simultaneously discussing this with me while being outside the discussion?
> You can't undermine a point nobody is really making.
Excellent! If people are making the point, I'm undermining it, and if they don't think they're accessing objective truth in this discussion, my observations in my comments still stand. shove
I'm not religious, but from my understanding, it is kind of like original sin. Humans are flawed; you can't fix that but you can minimize it and you can be forgiven for it. Same goes for the specific flaw that the brain is really prone to stereotypes, as a sort of cognitive shortcut.
Edit: By the way, contrary to a claim in a link in one of my sibling replies, this is not a 'sin' specific to white people. People who are themselves members of minority races are influenced by the same tropes as everyone else.
It is not sinful or flawed in any way.
That this happens among 'all kinds of people' is not hugely relevant.
That people would try to classify normal behavior as examples of racism is extremist.
In some situations, said subconscious thoughts might alter decision making in small ways is something we should be aware of, but even then it's not 'sinful' and the mere suggestion is at the root of the problem.
We're not talking about actual racists here, we're talking about ladies knitting groups and the minor triflings that develop into purity wars.
Indeed, which is why I said:
> It's not a bad thing, since most tropes are positive or neutral.
However, in the specific case of tropes that are racist or have racist components, being influenced by them certainly is bad to a varying extent.
> In some situations, said subconscious thoughts might alter decision making in small ways is something we should be aware of, but even then it's not 'sinful' and the mere suggestion is at the root of the problem.
I think we’re in violent agreement. The important thing is to be aware of unconscious bias, and try to counteract it where possible.
> We're not talking about actual racists here, we're talking about ladies knitting groups and the minor triflings that develop into purity wars.
I’m referring to actual racist tropes. I cannot speak for the knitting group example: the article certainly makes it seem like the accusations of racism are crying wolf, and it is probably accurate to a significant extent, but the article also obviously has an anti-‘political-correctness’ agenda, so it may be presenting the facts in a biased manner.
(And, unsurprisingly, the website it’s published on is anti-progressive more broadly. From a skim of the current front page, in terms of concrete social issues, I see one article saying that “the inconvenient truth is that transwomen are male”, while another recounts media bias” “when I worked for a pro-life organisation”. More abstractly, I count at least 5 articles complaining about progressives and political correctness.)
I tend to agree that prejudice is part of the human condition. The response to that should be humility, but also an attempt to counteract that prejudice in ourselves. In an ideal world we would be able to call out racism without it being a taboo. It shouldn't neccessarily mean that the person is bad, but that they may be wrong.
Sure, by the definition of racism that you and I would use. But not by the one that's been weaponised in these purity spirals. By their definition, as explained by the academic interviewed in the podcast, it is literally impossible for someone raised in modern society NOT to be racist. Taking offense at being called a racist is more evidence of racism. Trying to explain how you aren't racist is more evidence of racism.
It is like Original sin, but without any path to redemption.