Social democracy has an inherently limited shelf life because you cannot stably have workers with the right to politically associate, full employment, and continued capitalist relations of production; without the disciplining of the state or of the market they’ll bid up wages until profits are gone, at which point capitalists can (in principle) assent to their obsolescence or (as in all historical cases) seize a horn of the dilemma. It’s sociopathic neoliberalism or psychopathic national/state/authoritarian/whatever capitalism from here on out until one physically annihilates us.
Or, theoretically, Some Fourth Way Out.
The various Fully-Automated Luxury models – which burn from a kindling of “such overwhelming moral suasion & inherent niceness that the capitalists find it easiest to accept obsolescence rather than fight” – are my favorites.
(Not that this is really a strike against your theoretical model, as such. Just…making a note of what victory conditions are likely to look like.)
J.K. Rowling teaches us of four types of child, namely: the Ravenclaw, the Slytherin, the Gryffindor, and the Hufflepuff.
The Ravenclaw, what says she? “What are all the spells, jinxes, hexes, charms, divinations, potions, and enchantments, and how do they work?” You must thus reply to her with all of the laws of Hogwarts, that one may not enroll in Advanced Thaumaturgical Theory until after completing at least a semester of first-year Transfiguration.
The Slytherin, what says he? “How will graduating from this school benefit me?” “Benefit me,” he says, and not “benefit us”, thus excluding himself from the community. Therefore you must cast a Bat-Bogey Hex upon him and say, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to leverage my social connections into a successful career.” “I don’t know about you,” because if he keeps up that attitude, he won’t have any social connections to leverage.
The Gryffindor, what says he? “When’s Quidditch?” You should tell him: “Quidditch is at the end of the day, after all of your classes.”
And as for the Hufflepuff who is just happy to be there, you must begin the conversation for her, as the text states: “I think the feast’s already started.”
Magister Xenophilius used to say: whoever does not discuss the following three things on Pesach has not fulfilled his duty…
Of all the thoughts that terrify me in the darkness, one of the most terrifying of all is this –
Maybe good character really does grow out of suffering.
My childhood, and my early adolescence, were very very lonely. I had some sort-of friends, sometimes, but there were always great gulfs separating me from even the closest of them. I was an outsider to every group, even the groups that were more-or-less willing to accept my presence, and no one ever let me forget it. My interests were universally understood to be fringe. My opinions were universally understood to be outlandish, laughable, crazy.
Then I get to college and find real friendships and real intimacy, yay, happy ending, cue confetti. But of course those years of loneliness, of outsider-ness, are never getting erased. The scars will remain.
And I don’t wantthat to be a good thing. Certainly not an importantly-good thing. I really, definitely don’t want to say anything like “maybe we should make sure that kids in the future suffer the way I suffered.” I much prefer the “never again” way of looking at things. That feels like the correct viewpoint, the noble viewpoint.
But.
The moral values that are most important to me – when captured in exhortation form – tend to be things, like, well…
* “Explore every idea, engage with every argument, even the ones that make you uncomfortable.”
* “Remember that the world is a better place for having all sorts of people in it, including the ones who are frightening and alien to you.”
* “Integrity is the essence of nobility. Stay true to yourself and your ideals, in the face of all the world.”
…and of course these are exactly the values that it’s easy to cultivate when you’re an outsider, when you expect everyone else to disagree with you and to find you frightening, when it actually makes some sense to think of the rest of the world as an undifferentiatedly hostile force. I’m pretty sure that it was not an accident that I settled on my particular moral code.
It has not escaped my notice that the people who agree with me on these matters tend to be the people who had similar experiences growing up.
Nor has it escaped my notice that these values have become less and less prized in the geeky circles I call home – that the kids-these-days are becoming more conformist, more intolerant of disagreement, in a frightening way – just as geekiness is becoming less and less an outsider thing. The kids-these-days are mostly growing up feeling like they’ve got communities they can count on, like they can expect the world to take their thoughts seriously, like they’re properly integrated into humanity. Way more than I was, at least. And that’s a good thing. But I’m pretty sure, in the face of it, that the values shift is not an accident either. Their environment did not push them towards my preferred morality.
(And since the world is full of people who have suffered in different ways from the ways that I suffered – often worse ways, much much worse – I must assume that, in a similar way, they look at me and see someone who has failed to undergo proper moral development. I don’t have Group Loyalty Instincts. I don’t have any kind of physical toughness, and while my physical courage hasn’t really been put to the test, I see no reason to think I’ve got much of that either. I am really not oriented towards practical hard-headed success-oriented thinking. Etc.)
I don’t know where this ends. I don’t want future iterations of me to have to live through years of sadness. I don’t want my values to be drowned by the tide of obsolescence. I’m not sure there’s any way to reconcile those preferences.
people model a “Hugbox” as something like… “a vending machine that dispenses near-infinite, extreme validation to an individual”
but that ignores the questions “where does the validation come from?” and “what makes it so extreme?”
Well, it doesn’t come from some ghostly force or abstract concept, it comes from the other flesh-and-blood members of the community, and it’s so extreme because the Individual’s preferences, their likes and dislikes, have become simultaneously exaggerated and perfectly aligned with the rest of the community.
A better, if less succinct, definition would be this:
“A Hugbox is a community that offers you a trade: reshape your personal preferences to be in perfect alignment with (and just as extreme as) our preferences, and in turn, that perfect alignment will in itself be a source of infinite validation for you, with the intensity of the validation significantly amplified by the extremeness of the preferences involved.”
“So what?” I hear you ask. “All you’ve done is re-derive the concept of the echo chamber.”
Well there’s two points I want to make:
1) Hugboxes aren’t nice. They’re actually incredibly cruel– they ransom their members self-esteem for conformity, and enforce that conformity mercilessly. Just ask anyone’s who’s written ~problematic~ fanfic. And far too often, criticisms of hugbox communities (especially from right-of-center sources) fall into the pattern of “They’re exactly as nice as they seem, and that’s bad,” which utterly misses the point on two accounts.
2) Hugboxes are factories that turn ordinary people into utility monsters. They have to, in order to fulfill their basic function. They can’t provide validation without conformity, and they can’t maintain conformity without enforcing it, and they can’t enforce it without giving the individual members a reason to enforce it. And in most cases, the reason is that they have been conditioned to feel pain and anger at the sight of preferences different from their own. Once again, just ask anyone who’s written ~problematic~ fanfic.
This second point is the more important one– because it means that hugboxing is utterly incompatible with competing access needs.
Hugboxes are full of people who have been conditioned to see the mere existence of preferences different from their own as an attack on them, people who will never understand that others may have needs radically different from their own.
Hey @balioc what’s a pithy term for the process in #2. “Turning yourself into a utility monster sensitive to symbolic actions”? There should be one.
If we’re going to take your phrasing seriously, then the word you want is “socialization.”
…I mean, that’s precisely what any human society does: it puts you through a regime of operant conditioning, teaching you to value or abhor symbols, attaching reward and punishment to triggers that are arbitrary outside the cultural framework of the society. The world is full of “utility monsters” who are super-sensitive to actions like “being given roses and hearing the words ‘I love you,’” or “walking across a stage in a stupid robe and hat and being given a diploma,” or whatever. Because we spend our whole lives being carefully taught that those symbols define goodness and badness, success and failure.
@raggedjackscarlet, of course, is talking about something a lot narrower than that.
I’m reading between the lines a bit, but if I understand correctly, he’s describing the process whereby people are taught to expect (and crave) ideological fealty. In one of his “hugboxes,” the universe is Good and Correct when-and-only-when people are agreeing with you…not because your view is necessarily all-important or even all-correct, not because it reflects some profound natural sympathy between your beliefs and theirs…but because agreement is the symbol of personal validation and disagreement is the symbol of personal attack. In a Not-Fearful World, a Basically-OK World, people will be falling all over themselves to demonstrate that they treat your opinions as sacred and that they don’t want to offend you. (This is why the Forced Apology is so highly valued, and why the hugboxes in question are generally happy to forgive acts of Problematic Sin so long as there is effusive sincere-sounding self-abnegating contrition.) If people are acting like they’re perfectly happy for you not to agree with them, that’s a form of ongoing threat, in the way that having shady-looking people hanging around outside your building at night is a form of ongoing threat.
This is honestly pretty much the thing that happens in societies of mutually-hostile tribes, as far as I can tell, except that the symbols of tribal pride/allegiance take discursive/ideological form.
On an episode of one of Vox’s podcasts, Ezra Klein said something that I can’t get out of my head, and that bothers me on a deep level. He said that in the present age, with the internet, myriads of think tanks, public intellectuals, universities, and ideological outlets, that any intelligent well-educated person can come up with a strong and hard-to-conclusively-refute argument, with copious citations, expert opinions, interpretation, and analysis, and supportive anecdotes, for almost any position they like in politics.
It really is bothering me because at some level I suspect it is true. I think of how often I see thousands of words used in internet arguments, with copious quotation and citation of experts, for many different sides of an issue, and they all seem pretty convincing if I took them on their face, and it would probably take me dozens of hours of research to be able to engage with them.
You could spend years just reading the output from libertarian intellectuals and outlets and experts, or liberal ones, or socially conservative ones, or anarchist ones, or marxist ones, etc. and still have more to consume without ever challenging your ideological preferences. If you encounter an expert or opinion that is disagreeable to your worldview, you can use Google to pretty quickly find a very articulate and well-cited counterargument to, if not that particular argument, at least that worldview and that position.
You can spend years becoming an expert on a particular issue, and read every expert and source from all sides, and still you’ll probably find people as well-informed as you with the opposite view.
I wouldn’t say this is the fault of, as many people in the rationalist community put it, the mindkilling ability of politics (I think there is truth to that, but I don’t think it’s strong enough to explain this). Rather, I believe it’s because understanding politics involves the intersection of two notoriously difficult areas of study, the social sciences of large groups/societies on the one hand, and ethical and political philosophy on the other. They’re hard because they’re subject matter is so vastly complicated, in a way that is extremely difficult to comprehend and think about.
But, we’re still political animals, and we have to do politics, so we have to keep thinking about this stuff (or, at least, some subset of intelligent people do) to keep society functioning and (hopefully) improving.
This is why “I don’t have an ideology, I’m just following the evidence” is such a dangerous position.
Also why myth-making and dream-weaving are, at least at this point, the most potentially powerful forms of political engagement.
All the arguments, all the evidence…however important they are, and however good they are…end up getting thrown into the giant churning pit that is “everyone throwing arguments and evidence at everyone else.” If you can make people want something that they didn’t want before, if you can change someone’s value function, you might actually stand a chance of making a difference.
The original aphorism always struck me as pro-hedgehog, but not even that strongly?
And it kinda sounds like Gingrich is lowkey saying Trump doesn’t know much but I haven’t seen anyone reacting as though this were the savage drag it feels like it is…
‘Foxes are very clever, while hedgehogs know the one thing they need to do to not die’ doesn’t really seem like it’s praising either, to me.
I think the reaction on that post was mostly to the anti-intellectual reframing by Gingrich: ‘Clinton knows many LIES, while Trump knows the SIMPLE TRUTH, and that’s all he NEEDS to know’. (Although there’s probably some people who just didn’t get the reference.)
Oh fair, I definitely didn’t read the tweet as calling up the notion that Clinton knows lies but that read is definitely available.
I think it’s hard, if you’re reading along the grain, to interpret Gingrich as saying “Clinton is full of untruths.” He says specifically “many things you can fact check,” and does so as a direct contrast to Trump, who is famous for saying things that turn out to be factually false. If he meant “Clinton says things but then you FACT CHECK THEM and they are LIES”…well, he did so in a way that causes his favored candidate to look even worse than his non-favored candidate, by a lot, using his own proffered metric.
I think this has to mean “Clinton has technical command of the political and economic situation, whatever, boring, she’s not going to do anything useful with that knowledge because politicians like her never do; meanwhile, Trump is no expert, but at least he’ll be actually trying to fix things somehow.”
(Berlin was neither pro-fox nor pro-hedgehog as such, but Gingrich’s framing is definitely “lots of unimportant things versus The Only Important Thing.”)
…aaaaaaaaaaand now I’ve dedicated measurable amounts of time to exegesis of a Newt Gingrich tweet. Possibly I need to rethink some life choices.
OK, a serious non-glib non-rhetorical question, asked in good faith:
Given that the US has such a terrible problem with police officers killing people, why have we decided that #blacklivesmatter is the ideological tool we want to use to deal with it?
Vox in particular lovestotalk about the importance of #blacklivesmatter-ing, and I think it serves as a pretty good mouthpiece of elite identitarian liberal thinking generally. So let’s use Vox’s own chart as a baseline for thinking about this:
First thought: wow, that sure is some disproportionate killing of black people right there. I don’t know whether it should be chalked up to disproportionate crime rates, or disproportionate poverty rates, or latent police racism, or full-throated Bull Connor police racism, or what…probably it’s some complicated melange of all those things…but, yeah, I can’t blame anyone for thinking that our Sworn Protectors are disturbingly cavalier with black lives, and that black people have a special grievance.
Second thought: wow, even given the above, that sure is an awful lot of white people getting killed by the police. Even when they’re not being violent. More white people than black people, in absolute terms.
This is a big fucking problem for white people too, right? I’m white, and I promise you, I do not want the police to shoot me. Given how often this awful thing seems to happen – and given that almost half of those fatal encounters are fatal for white people – this issue seems like it should be legitimately very concerning to self-interested white people who have any reason at all to be uncomfortable with Johnny Law. Hell, they have reason to be concerned even if the only lives they care about are white lives!
So OK. All my instincts are telling me that this is a perfect Big Tent Populist sort of issue. Everyone versus the police.
(…OK, except maybe for Conventionally Attractive White/Asian Women and Charismatic Well-Heeled White/Asian Men, who can probably put themselves in a “really very unlikely to be shot by the police” category. But, y’know, everyone else. Black Lives, Hispanic Lives, American Indian Lives, White Trash Lives, White Teenager With Attitude Lives, Non-Neurotypical Lives, Homeless Lives: not only do they all Matter, all of them have a dog in this fight, like for serious. All of them have excellent reason to be afraid of the cops. All of them are natural allies here.)
So why are we lasering in on the fact that, of everyone who has it bad in this particular unconscionable way, black people have it the worst? Why are we turning this into a race issue instead of a general-public-safety issue? Why are we ensuring that, instead of being “everyone versus the police,” this turns into “the race-conscious left versus everyone with a preexisting grudge against the race-conscious left?”
My instincts tell me that this is memetic toxoplasma in its purest form – that the identitarian left just instinctively finds ways to make everything about its traditional causes, and seeks out excuses to attack its traditional foes, baiting them with ideological irritants if necessary. Even to the point of sabotaging its own actual policy agenda.
But I feel like I’m missing something. I have to be. This is just…it’s too dumb, too grotesquely self-destructive on all sides, the way I’m looking at it now. Even for contemporary culture war politics.
Thoughts?
*****
Bonus question: does anyone know why “not killed with rifle or shotgun” is a category worth special investigation?
So the issue is fear.
The extremely small percentage chance you(black person) will be
shot by a cop is somewhat greater than the extremely small percentage chance
you(white person) will be shot by a cop. It’s unfair, but also not enough to
change your habits. Sickle cell anemia is a greater cause of disproportionate
deaths.
But, black people walk down the streets feeling afraid they
will be shot. It’s a constant fear that infects their everyday joy. (Not all
black people, and not every day… but a lot and enough.) This sort of fear is
intolerable for our society, and causes massive dysfunction between communities
and the institutions we need to maintain law and order.
By calling it fear, I am not dismissing it, I am naming the
monster that needs to be slayed.
Unfortunately, fear is not very related to statistical
evidence. Plenty of people live in dread and paranoia of things that are
statistically trivial. What you need is a narrative where the fear has been
resolved.
Doubly unfortunately, political movements founded in fear,
have systemic incentives to feed the fear, and not to find ways to calm it.
They have to justify the existence of their movement, after all, and that
usually involves a lot of awareness raising about what they are afraid of.
This is all true as far as it goes, but I don’t think it answers the question.
There’s a certain legerdemain here between cause and effect. If the vast looming fear of black-people-getting-shot-by-the-police is not an outgrowth of actual omnipresent danger – if it’s a “disproportionate” reaction to a low-in-absolute-numbers phenomenon – then it presumably it exists because it’s being stoked. Which seems to be pretty much the case, as you say. But then…why did we stoke it? Why did we decide to rile up black fear instead of anyone-who-might-get-hassled-by-the-cops fear?
The cynical explanation is obvious.
But usually systemic cycles happen without intention. I suspect both people tried to frame this in the context of black fear, and some people tried to frame this in the context of general anti-cop fear, and one of those two got a much stronger reinforcement because of pre-existing anxieties by the relevant group.
I suspect maybe the fact that there are groups of white people who really are very respectfully treated by police and have never had a negative police experience matters for this too. You hear reports of how upper/middle class African Americans/Hispanics etc. dressed in business attire are still hassled by the police and this is a lot rarer for white people in similar situations. I think this makes it easier for minority communities to unite in that distrust of cops even across class lines (though you see arguments about respectability politics still). If the only person you know that has had a run in with the police is your druggy cousin who you disprove of you are going to be a lot less able to relate to these stories.
Also historically police forces have been pretty white so there may also be a difference in how many white people have friends or family on the police force.
Yeah…to the extent that the #BlackLivesMatter urge arises autochthonously, I’m sure it arises much more easily in alienated minority populations, who have long-standing antagonistic relationships with the cops.
But it’s not totally autochthonous. It’s not even mostly autochthonous. It’s a movement, which is being deliberately built up and expanded by social engineers. Many of them are white, elite social engineers. The entirety of the American Fashionably-Liberal Values Apparatus™, from the NYT to Vox to your friendly neighborhood SJ Tumblrina, is shouting “The police are killing innocent people! This is a huge problem! You need to be paying attention to this!” (And, often, adding “And you are a worthless garbage person if you don’t give sufficient air to this particular issue!”)
Which is fine, as far as it goes. “The cops are killing innocent people” is a pretty reasonable thing over which to be losing your shit. Fashionably Liberal elite white Americans have certainly rallied around causes that are a lot less worthwhile than this one.
My point is that, given that they’ve decided to fight this particular battle, I don’t understand their strategy. They had a perfect opportunity to pull some of their usual enemies into their own forces, to be “reasonable” and “ecumenical” and “on everybody’s side,” to isolate the opposition. Instead they demanded that the battle be fought on the usual culture-war lines. They insisted that talking about this in any terms other than blacks-against-racism was, itself, a species of bigotry. They mocked and marginalized everyone else’s problems with the cops. Hell, they made #AllLivesMatter – probably the single most obvious, morally-mainstream, inoffensive thing that any human could say under any circumstances – into a Badge of the Enemy.
The results were entirely predictable. #BlackLivesMatter has become just another Deeply Polarizing Thing, another piece of evidence that the SJ meta-movement “doesn’t care about white people” (for those who want such evidence), another reason for non-hip non-political white folks to be scared that the modern left is all about directing anger straight at them. Certainly it’s failed to unite people in opposition to the police. Quite the reverse – it’s ensured that people who under normal circumstances should hate the police, people who have “Live Free or Die” on their T-shirts, will stand by the cops because they really hate people who tell them that their problems don’t matter.
And, OK, maybe this is what Team #BlackLivesMatter kinda wanted all along. It’s hard to resist tangling with your perennial ideological foes. That’s the thing at which @bambamramfan and I are darkly hinting, more or less.
But it still feels really dumb. At least, it’s really dumb if you care about winning.
The secret purpose of the State is to be just, to be principled, so that we don’t have to.
This is not a dig at the State. This is totally sincere. There have been cultures and ideologies, throughout our histories, that placed all the burden of principle and justice upon the individual; they were (and are) some of the most anti-human, spirit-crushing, selfhood-destroying idols that we have ever erected.
Go forth into the world, my friend, and become whatever monster your soul demands that you be. Trust in the institutions that we have built to shoulder the awful weight of Optimal Goodness. And please, for the love of heaven, don’t undermine those institutions in the name of your own particular provincial desire…
JS Mill had the inverse view, that informal culture is the enforcer of these principles, and a scary one that crushes liberty at that. Government participation in that is only concerning because it makes these rules explicit.
I’m not arguing with Mill at all – very much agreeing with him, in fact. This is hinging on the normative / positive distinction. There are lots of “informal cultures” that enforce such principles; they are crushing, and drive people mad. In the worst cases, they succeed at burrowing into people’s brains, and train those people to do the enforcement on themselves. (See: everyone driven to self-destructive patterns of “scrupulosity” by religion or SJ or whatever.)
Better all around to be free people in a free society, and leave principled justice to the State.
tbh I don’t get why “speaking louder and slower to people who don’t understand your language very well” became a bad shameful white action performed only by bad shameful white people who should feel shame and derision and are morally and spiritually impure
talking slower and louder makes it easier for people to understand you. fucking half the people I meed on a regular basis mumble most of the time, and I’d sure fucking appreciate it if they talked louder and slower to me so I could understand them the first time instead of asking them to repeat three or four times, making them angrier every time
[le sigh]
It happened because “talking loud and slow” scans primarily as “talking the way you’d talk to a child,” and “treating foreigners like children” lies near the heart of the ugly-colonialist / ugly-tourist memeplex, for reasons that are mostly pretty reasonable.
Also because non-culturally-cosmopolitan Americans (in particular) occasionally lapse into the mindset of thinking that of course everyone in the world speaks decent English, or should…and, thus, that language-barrier problems are in fact problems of stupidity or obduracy, which can be solved by making the English communication sufficiently simple and hard to ignore. Unsurprisingly, non-Anglophones find this behavior unpleasantly condescending.
None of which contradicts your basic normative point. Speaking loud and slow is often useful. And even at it’s worst it’s mildly obnoxious in a provincial way, which is not the same as “horrifically shameful evidence of moral bankruptcy.”
But even in the “bad” situation it doesn’t seem all that bad? I think it doesn’t have to be “everyone speaks English well” but “most people have probably picked up a few words here and there, or could have cognates in their language.”
Like, I don’t speak Spanish. If you don’t speak English, and try to talk to me like a normal Spanish-speaker, I will understand nothing. If you talk loudly and slowly, enunciating each word, it is much more likely I will pick up on a word I can recognize, and from there can try and figure out what you need.
I mean, you’re not wrong. It’s not “that bad,” in any direct sense. It’s just closely associated with bad things…or, more precisely, with things that people have invested huge amounts of identity and ego into hating.
When you’ve learned to hate gentrification (and there are people with really excellent reasons to hate gentrification), then it can piss you off when people build nice things in your neighborhood. Even though “building nice things” is pretty much the archetypal textbook methodology for making the world a better place.
When you’ve learned to hate chauvinistic sexism (and there are people with really excellent reasons to hate chauvinistic sexism), then it can piss you off when a dude holds the door for you and calls you “m’lady.” Even though this is, in theory, a small token of respect combined with an imposition-free decision to make your life slightly easier.
And when you’ve learned to hate Obnoxious Westerners Coming In and Messing Up The Place…and, boy, are there people with really excellent reasons to hate that…then it can piss you off when they talk loud and slow at you, like those goddamn Obnoxious Westerners always do, treating you like goddamn sub-adults and forgetting that you have your own goddamn language. Even when the only actual direct effect of this behavior is that it makes it easier for you to understand what they’re saying.
OK, a serious non-glib non-rhetorical question, asked in good faith:
Given that the US has such a terrible problem with police officers killing people, why have we decided that #blacklivesmatter is the ideological tool we want to use to deal with it?
Vox in particular lovestotalk about the importance of #blacklivesmatter-ing, and I think it serves as a pretty good mouthpiece of elite identitarian liberal thinking generally. So let’s use Vox’s own chart as a baseline for thinking about this:
First thought: wow, that sure is some disproportionate killing of black people right there. I don’t know whether it should be chalked up to disproportionate crime rates, or disproportionate poverty rates, or latent police racism, or full-throated Bull Connor police racism, or what…probably it’s some complicated melange of all those things…but, yeah, I can’t blame anyone for thinking that our Sworn Protectors are disturbingly cavalier with black lives, and that black people have a special grievance.
Second thought: wow, even given the above, that sure is an awful lot of white people getting killed by the police. Even when they’re not being violent. More white people than black people, in absolute terms.
This is a big fucking problem for white people too, right? I’m white, and I promise you, I do not want the police to shoot me. Given how often this awful thing seems to happen – and given that almost half of those fatal encounters are fatal for white people – this issue seems like it should be legitimately very concerning to self-interested white people who have any reason at all to be uncomfortable with Johnny Law. Hell, they have reason to be concerned even if the only lives they care about are white lives!
So OK. All my instincts are telling me that this is a perfect Big Tent Populist sort of issue. Everyone versus the police.
(…OK, except maybe for Conventionally Attractive White/Asian Women and Charismatic Well-Heeled White/Asian Men, who can probably put themselves in a “really very unlikely to be shot by the police” category. But, y’know, everyone else. Black Lives, Hispanic Lives, American Indian Lives, White Trash Lives, White Teenager With Attitude Lives, Non-Neurotypical Lives, Homeless Lives: not only do they all Matter, all of them have a dog in this fight, like for serious. All of them have excellent reason to be afraid of the cops. All of them are natural allies here.)
So why are we lasering in on the fact that, of everyone who has it bad in this particular unconscionable way, black people have it the worst? Why are we turning this into a race issue instead of a general-public-safety issue? Why are we ensuring that, instead of being “everyone versus the police,” this turns into “the race-conscious left versus everyone with a preexisting grudge against the race-conscious left?”
My instincts tell me that this is memetic toxoplasma in its purest form – that the identitarian left just instinctively finds ways to make everything about its traditional causes, and seeks out excuses to attack its traditional foes, baiting them with ideological irritants if necessary. Even to the point of sabotaging its own actual policy agenda.
But I feel like I’m missing something. I have to be. This is just…it’s too dumb, too grotesquely self-destructive on all sides, the way I’m looking at it now. Even for contemporary culture war politics.
Thoughts?
*****
Bonus question: does anyone know why “not killed with rifle or shotgun” is a category worth special investigation?
So the issue is fear.
The extremely small percentage chance you(black person) will be
shot by a cop is somewhat greater than the extremely small percentage chance
you(white person) will be shot by a cop. It’s unfair, but also not enough to
change your habits. Sickle cell anemia is a greater cause of disproportionate
deaths.
But, black people walk down the streets feeling afraid they
will be shot. It’s a constant fear that infects their everyday joy. (Not all
black people, and not every day… but a lot and enough.) This sort of fear is
intolerable for our society, and causes massive dysfunction between communities
and the institutions we need to maintain law and order.
By calling it fear, I am not dismissing it, I am naming the
monster that needs to be slayed.
Unfortunately, fear is not very related to statistical
evidence. Plenty of people live in dread and paranoia of things that are
statistically trivial. What you need is a narrative where the fear has been
resolved.
Doubly unfortunately, political movements founded in fear,
have systemic incentives to feed the fear, and not to find ways to calm it.
They have to justify the existence of their movement, after all, and that
usually involves a lot of awareness raising about what they are afraid of.
This is all true as far as it goes, but I don’t think it answers the question.
There’s a certain legerdemain here between cause and effect. If the vast looming fear of black-people-getting-shot-by-the-police is not an outgrowth of actual omnipresent danger – if it’s a “disproportionate” reaction to a low-in-absolute-numbers phenomenon – then it presumably it exists because it’s being stoked. Which seems to be pretty much the case, as you say. But then…why did we stoke it? Why did we decide to rile up black fear instead of anyone-who-might-get-hassled-by-the-cops fear?
tbh I don’t get why “speaking louder and slower to people who don’t understand your language very well” became a bad shameful white action performed only by bad shameful white people who should feel shame and derision and are morally and spiritually impure
talking slower and louder makes it easier for people to understand you. fucking half the people I meed on a regular basis mumble most of the time, and I’d sure fucking appreciate it if they talked louder and slower to me so I could understand them the first time instead of asking them to repeat three or four times, making them angrier every time
[le sigh]
It happened because “talking loud and slow” scans primarily as “talking the way you’d talk to a child,” and “treating foreigners like children” lies near the heart of the ugly-colonialist / ugly-tourist memeplex, for reasons that are mostly pretty reasonable.
Also because non-culturally-cosmopolitan Americans (in particular) occasionally lapse into the mindset of thinking that of course everyone in the world speaks decent English, or should…and, thus, that language-barrier problems are in fact problems of stupidity or obduracy, which can be solved by making the English communication sufficiently simple and hard to ignore. Unsurprisingly, non-Anglophones find this behavior unpleasantly condescending.
None of which contradicts your basic normative point. Speaking loud and slow is often useful. And even at it’s worst it’s mildly obnoxious in a provincial way, which is not the same as “horrifically shameful evidence of moral bankruptcy.”
The plus side is that sneering can be usefully used as a barometer to which memeplexes are currently in power. Who Sneers, Rules, no matter what persecution narratives they’re selling.
This is either false or the word ‘sneering’ is now being used in a different way than I originally meant. The Dark Lord Potter form is clear sneer culture: they consider themselves the sophisticated connoisseurs of edgy dark adult Harry Potter fanfiction and get together to sneer at slashfic (or HPMOR). They are not the dominant memeplex in Harry Potter fanfiction and are little noticed outside their own tiny Internet forum. Sneering doesn’t go with power, period.
It goes with self-perceived power and a belief that you are a successful bully getting in hits on the target, but it doesn’t go with actual power and it is found just as much in marginalized outsider groups as in mainstream journalists.
Going back to a discussion this old is tomb-robbing by Tumblr standards…but nonetheless I think it’s worth unpacking a bit, because there’s a useful insight to be dredged up here.
*****
Power exists at all scales. Anyone can have a place of power, and places-of-power can be arbitrarily tiny. The fact that your notional domain is the size of a postage stamp doesn’t make it any less real, and doesn’t (much) reduce your ability to impose consequences within that space.
It’s a little silly to equate sneering with power in any kind of absolute global sense. Sneering is the favorite pastime of the wretched of the earth, and always has been. Imagine the outcast leper clique of five high school boys, the lowest of the low on their school’s social totem pole, the poor greasy-haired acne-scarred souls who are the favored victims of every bully. What do you think they talk about, when they get together in their basement lair?In large part, they talk about how stupid and shallow the popular kids are. They talk about their dripping contempt for their abusers. And of course this is exactly, exactly, the dynamic that’s going on with the Dark Lord Potter people.
(You can go even smaller-scale than that, and talk about the terrifying dictatorial power that one person can often wield over his family, even if in any broader sense he is a totally powerless peon. There are also, of course, parallels to be drawn with some of the Officially-Recognized Marginal Oppressed Cultures.)
But…why is it that these outcast leper kids can get away with sneering at their social betters? Why doesn’t the high school hierarchy crack down? Because, within the basement, they’re in power. It’s their space, and it operates by their rules. Within it, they’re the popular kids, in the sense that they’re the ones with the ability to impose social consequences. If any outsider comes into that space, he’s going to have to follow their rules and adhere to their party line…or else he risks mockery and scorn and abuse and shunning, in exactly the way that the clique kids themselves run that risk in the “wider” world of high school.
On a local level, it’s absolutely true: Who Sneers, Rules. You can’t successfully sneer up. Your attempt to display disdain towards your betters will not harm them socially [1], because they have enough support to withstand the blow, and the retaliation will be tenfold. Most people have enough native social sense that they won’t even try. If you find that you can get away with sneering at the mighty ones, and it has the social effect you want, that’s a pretty good sign that power dynamics are realigning and that the mighty ones aren’t going to be so mighty for long.
Why does this matter? It matters because local power matters, and watching the sneer patterns is a good way to learn where local power lies in a given community.
In any given society or sub-society, no matter how small it is, someone’s going to be at the top of the social pyramid. That’s a form of authority, whether or not you want it to be, and as such it comes hand-in-hand with responsibility. Even if you’re a miserable wretched peon despised by the whole world, you can still be a bully, because in your place of power you can still possess the ability to hurt people terribly. So…be careful not to do that. And if you want to learn whether your community is ruled by bullies, then watch where the sneering comes from, and evaluate how cruelly-weaponized it is, and draw the appropriate conclusions.
*****
[1] Which doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to wound them on a personal, emotional level. Hi there, @savetheprincessorditrying!
*****
Side Topic A: What determines who holds the power within a given space? It’s a perception game, largely. You have power if everyone thinks you have power. Those who perceive you as powerful will back up your decisions and pronouncements, which is the substance of power-in-fact. If you enter a space and try to disrupt the local perceptions-of-power, via the-emperor-has-no-clothes-ing or self-aggrandizement or any such thing, then it’s functionally an attempted coup. In spaces where there are multiple discernible subgroups or factions, this dynamic usually collapses into “the biggest faction has the power” – if you assume that the members of any given faction are mutually supportive in most cases, then the members of the big faction will reliably get the most support.
Side Topic B: Does this mean that absolute global power hierarchies don’t matter within someone’s local rinky-dink social domain? Of course not. In particular, if you have the sort of power that matters in a large-scale way, you can often use that as a weapon or a shield in a small-scale setting. “I know that I’m just a contemptible outsider by your standards, but…if you do what I want, I’ll help you out in the outside world, by using my power to help you do things that you couldn’t do on your own. And if you make things hard for me, I’ll make your life in the outside world a living hell. In fact, maybe I’ll have my outside-world buddies invade your cute little bubble here, and destroy it completely!” It’s like being a Roman citizen in a barbarian court. This is why Privileged People are often able to thrive, and rise high, even in settings that are theoretically hostile to them.
…but Internet communities, especially anonymous ones, are pretty good at subverting this dynamic. On the Internet, it’s hard for outsiders to use either carrots or sticks on you, even if in absolute terms they’re very powerful indeed.
The secret purpose of the State is to be just, to be principled, so that we don’t have to.
This is not a dig at the State. This is totally sincere. There have been cultures and ideologies, throughout our histories, that placed all the burden of principle and justice upon the individual; they were (and are) some of the most anti-human, spirit-crushing, selfhood-destroying idols that we have ever erected.
Go forth into the world, my friend, and become whatever monster your soul demands that you be. Trust in the institutions that we have built to shoulder the awful weight of Optimal Goodness. And please, for the love of heaven, don’t undermine those institutions in the name of your own particular provincial desire…
My feelings about gender abolitionism are pretty much the same as my feelings about postmodernism-guided anticapitalist revolution.
I’m enough a realist to see how much pain and suffering there is under the current regime. I’m enough of an idealist to think that, with care and insight, we can hope to do better.
But, goddamn, the Big Bad Oppressive System sure does a whole lot of good for a whole lot people.
So…before you start getting all excited about tearing it down, maybe make sure you know what’s going to replace it. And then make sure we know. Because otherwise there’s no way in hell we can trust you.
“Unleash massive carnage, and then wing it” is not an acceptable plan.
why do people feel so strongly against pumpkin spice like its tasty and people like pumpkin spice flavored things in the fall literally fucking chill nobody is forcibly attaching you to a pumpkin spice IV
This has always baffled me too. This and mocking “white girls” for liking Starbucks. I’ve always been confused about why people care.
I’ve seen backlash against “stop judging/mocking people for the harmless stuff they like” that was something about “I’m not here for celebrating white women’s mediocrity.” Maybe I’m not interpreting this right, but it seems like such a good example of trying to achieve equality by making sure the privileged group is treated worse, because the converse is harder to achieve. Why can’t we celebrate everyone’s mediocrity in the sense of “it’s fine to do things you like, you don’t have to be really special or talented to earn the right not to be made fun of.” And I understand black women really often don’t get that kind of respect for the stuff they like, but that doesn’t mean being a jerk to a different group of women and saying “but you’re not allowed to be mad about this” is a good idea, or helpful.
Ugggh, argh, argh. I think it’s actually really hard to manage this kind of dynamic on a macro scale.
In theory, mocking white women for liking pumpkin-spice-flavored drinks from Starbucks is…about as anodyne as you can be, as friendly as you can get, while still actually poking fun at someone for something.
Which is not to say that, in the wide world of human awfulness, you won’t find someone using that line to gouge at some poor woman’s soul and make her feel like killing herself. You’ll probably find a lot of people doing that, if you dig hard enough. People are the worst.
But still. As a category of mockery, it tilts very far towards the “all in good fun” side of things.
And you can say that’s not good enough. You can say that no one can ever really count on mockery being “all in good fun,” especially from a distance, because it’s so often used as a way to do serious harm. I understand why you’d want to say that, really, I promise.
That logic has a very clear endpoint: don’t mock people, ever, unless you’re absolutely sure that you can justify your mockery as a sincere argumentative/moral position.
Which, at the very least, means that your callow asshole critics will be right when they call you “anti-humor” and say that you’re no fun. Saying “your jokes can’t have any kind of barb on them” is equivalent to saying “we don’t approve of jokes” – sanitized, inoffensive, Officially Non-Problematic humor is always too weak to live.
It gets worse. Teasing and poking-fun are part of the Basic Human Interaction Toolkit. You can’t take them away no matter how hard you try. And if you do try, people will stop listening to anything you say. As a general principle: don’t make rules that people will never follow, that only robs you of legitimacy.
And even worse than that…
…if the only acceptable mockery is seriously justifiable mockery, people won’t stop mocking, they’ll change their serious beliefs as needed.
This fucking terrifies me. I feel like I’ve seen this exact thing playing out as I watch Internet communities degenerating into monster-pits. The people who have reason to feel like Straight White Men are annoying them, hurting them, imposing burdens on them, aren’t going to take it in pure saintly silence; they will find a way to vent their spleen. Same goes for the people who have reason to feel that way about feminists. And the people who have reason to feel that way about rationalists. And so on. This can be fine, it can be healthy, if we acknowledge that at the end of the day the spleen-venting is just needling and pettiness. Needling and pettiness have their place! But when you start cracking down on it, when you start using the needling and the pettiness as an excuse to lay into people yet more, when you start telling them that the mockery is a Big Important Deal that defines who they are – they’ll double down. They have to.
Anyway. Pumpkin spice. I don’t find anything objectionable about it, and I doubt anyone else really does either. But our snarky comics have to have something to talk about, right?
This reminds me that jokes about “bacon” on the internet are really jokes about jouissance (that phantasmic good that you want more of until you are drowning in it), and not about the particular fatty meat. And even if it becomes cliche to like bacon (or you’re vegetarian), people will always need jokes about The Ultimate Consumption.
Yep.
Also in the category of “things about which humans will always find ways to make jokes” –
* That One Local Guy We Hero-Worship, Oh My God He Is So Awesome (also available in female flavor)
* Those People Who Are Just So Dumb and Don’t Get It
* Our Culture, Boy, It Sure Is Lovably Wacky and Distinctive (plus, if at all possible, And We Drink a Whole Hell of a Lot)
OK, a serious non-glib non-rhetorical question, asked in good faith:
Given that the US has such a terrible problem with police officers killing people, why have we decided that #blacklivesmatter is the ideological tool we want to use to deal with it?
Vox in particular lovestotalk about the importance of #blacklivesmatter-ing, and I think it serves as a pretty good mouthpiece of elite identitarian liberal thinking generally. So let’s use Vox’s own chart as a baseline for thinking about this:
First thought: wow, that sure is some disproportionate killing of black people right there. I don’t know whether it should be chalked up to disproportionate crime rates, or disproportionate poverty rates, or latent police racism, or full-throated Bull Connor police racism, or what…probably it’s some complicated melange of all those things…but, yeah, I can’t blame anyone for thinking that our Sworn Protectors are disturbingly cavalier with black lives, and that black people have a special grievance.
Second thought: wow, even given the above, that sure is an awful lot of white people getting killed by the police. Even when they’re not being violent. More white people than black people, in absolute terms.
This is a big fucking problem for white people too, right? I’m white, and I promise you, I do not want the police to shoot me. Given how often this awful thing seems to happen – and given that almost half of those fatal encounters are fatal for white people – this issue seems like it should be legitimately very concerning to self-interested white people who have any reason at all to be uncomfortable with Johnny Law. Hell, they have reason to be concerned even if the only lives they care about are white lives!
So OK. All my instincts are telling me that this is a perfect Big Tent Populist sort of issue. Everyone versus the police.
(…OK, except maybe for Conventionally Attractive White/Asian Women and Charismatic Well-Heeled White/Asian Men, who can probably put themselves in a “really very unlikely to be shot by the police” category. But, y’know, everyone else. Black Lives, Hispanic Lives, American Indian Lives, White Trash Lives, White Teenager With Attitude Lives, Non-Neurotypical Lives, Homeless Lives: not only do they all Matter, all of them have a dog in this fight, like for serious. All of them have excellent reason to be afraid of the cops. All of them are natural allies here.)
So why are we lasering in on the fact that, of everyone who has it bad in this particular unconscionable way, black people have it the worst? Why are we turning this into a race issue instead of a general-public-safety issue? Why are we ensuring that, instead of being “everyone versus the police,” this turns into “the race-conscious left versus everyone with a preexisting grudge against the race-conscious left?”
My instincts tell me that this is memetic toxoplasma in its purest form – that the identitarian left just instinctively finds ways to make everything about its traditional causes, and seeks out excuses to attack its traditional foes, baiting them with ideological irritants if necessary. Even to the point of sabotaging its own actual policy agenda.
But I feel like I’m missing something. I have to be. This is just…it’s too dumb, too grotesquely self-destructive on all sides, the way I’m looking at it now. Even for contemporary culture war politics.
Thoughts?
*****
Bonus question: does anyone know why “not killed with rifle or shotgun” is a category worth special investigation?
I will grant that there is such a thing as a difficult movie. There are movies where it’s a serious interpretive challenge even to puzzle out what the “point” is, let alone to determine how you would make that point in a new idiom and a new voice.
The Magnificent Seven is not that kind of movie. The Magnificent Seven is a movie where, at the very end, the main character literally looks into the camera and tells you point-blank what the story’s message is. This should not be a thing you screw up. This is Easy Mode for scriptwriters.
“You aren’t handed a romance plot because it’d make the game more
interwoven, you’re given an image held on a pedestal, lit in soft
moonlight and lush with life. I don’t read a sheet and get told I love
someone, I
fall in love with her myself.”
This would be the best review I’ve ever gotten, except that I’m pretty sure it applies exclusively to stuff that my coauthor did.
why do people feel so strongly against pumpkin spice like its tasty and people like pumpkin spice flavored things in the fall literally fucking chill nobody is forcibly attaching you to a pumpkin spice IV
This has always baffled me too. This and mocking “white girls” for liking Starbucks. I’ve always been confused about why people care.
I’ve seen backlash against “stop judging/mocking people for the harmless stuff they like” that was something about “I’m not here for celebrating white women’s mediocrity.” Maybe I’m not interpreting this right, but it seems like such a good example of trying to achieve equality by making sure the privileged group is treated worse, because the converse is harder to achieve. Why can’t we celebrate everyone’s mediocrity in the sense of “it’s fine to do things you like, you don’t have to be really special or talented to earn the right not to be made fun of.” And I understand black women really often don’t get that kind of respect for the stuff they like, but that doesn’t mean being a jerk to a different group of women and saying “but you’re not allowed to be mad about this” is a good idea, or helpful.
Ugggh, argh, argh. I think it’s actually really hard to manage this kind of dynamic on a macro scale.
In theory, mocking white women for liking pumpkin-spice-flavored drinks from Starbucks is…about as anodyne as you can be, as friendly as you can get, while still actually poking fun at someone for something.
Which is not to say that, in the wide world of human awfulness, you won’t find someone using that line to gouge at some poor woman’s soul and make her feel like killing herself. You’ll probably find a lot of people doing that, if you dig hard enough. People are the worst.
But still. As a category of mockery, it tilts very far towards the “all in good fun” side of things.
And you can say that’s not good enough. You can say that no one can ever really count on mockery being “all in good fun,” especially from a distance, because it’s so often used as a way to do serious harm. I understand why you’d want to say that, really, I promise.
That logic has a very clear endpoint: don’t mock people, ever, unless you’re absolutely sure that you can justify your mockery as a sincere argumentative/moral position.
Which, at the very least, means that your callow asshole critics will be right when they call you “anti-humor” and say that you’re no fun. Saying “your jokes can’t have any kind of barb on them” is equivalent to saying “we don’t approve of jokes” – sanitized, inoffensive, Officially Non-Problematic humor is always too weak to live.
It gets worse. Teasing and poking-fun are part of the Basic Human Interaction Toolkit. You can’t take them away no matter how hard you try. And if you do try, people will stop listening to anything you say. As a general principle: don’t make rules that people will never follow, that only robs you of legitimacy.
And even worse than that…
…if the only acceptable mockery is seriously justifiable mockery, people won’t stop mocking, they’ll change their serious beliefs as needed.
This fucking terrifies me. I feel like I’ve seen this exact thing playing out as I watch Internet communities degenerating into monster-pits. The people who have reason to feel like Straight White Men are annoying them, hurting them, imposing burdens on them, aren’t going to take it in pure saintly silence; they will find a way to vent their spleen. Same goes for the people who have reason to feel that way about feminists. And the people who have reason to feel that way about rationalists. And so on. This can be fine, it can be healthy, if we acknowledge that at the end of the day the spleen-venting is just needling and pettiness. Needling and pettiness have their place! But when you start cracking down on it, when you start using the needling and the pettiness as an excuse to lay into people yet more, when you start telling them that the mockery is a Big Important Deal that defines who they are – they’ll double down. They have to.
Anyway. Pumpkin spice. I don’t find anything objectionable about it, and I doubt anyone else really does either. But our snarky comics have to have something to talk about, right?
However, I don’t think grammar or clothing or web design are “deeply arbitrary”? Some sentences are less ambiguous and comprehensible to a wider range of listeners and shorter than others. Some garments are better at protecting the body without overheating it. Some web pages match the official definitions of elements better, and are more compatible with a variety of browsers (screen-readers included).
I’m basically one of these “same people”. I see fashion as a language, and I judge people for what they say in what context and how they say it. And the same for graphic design, and for architecture, and so on.
Is there any way for me to opt out of this? Mandatory beauty labor is always and everywhere obnoxious as fuck.
(Okay I realize I automatically get to partially opt out by being a dude, but)
Opting out <i>as such</i> is hard. However, there’s my usual dress sense - I like to describe it as the intersection of “plain”, “conformist” and “low maintenance” but I’ve suddenly realised that “clean” (hah! - Ed.) and “in compliance with the not particularly arduous work dress code” are also a part of it. The message is “This page intentionally left blank” or “nothing to see here, move along”, past experience at school has taught me that any message you send <i>will</i> be misinterpreted, often wilfully, and “blank” is often safest; fortunately my school had a school uniform so I was spared one aspect of that.
The trouble with all of this is it all gets terribly depressing after a while…
My current frustration is trying find something to function as a purse that’s socially acceptable as a man. Since high school I’ve used a drawstring bag* but this seems like it’s both not terribly professional and getting less acceptable as I get older. But I still need something to carry my epi pen + wallet + checkbook + phone + keys + ideally hand sanitizer + anything else I need to hold on to. My alternate strategy is cargo shorts, which run into a similar problem. I’m sorta confused about how other men manage this. And in regards to the OP, I do think of this as “deeply arbitrary.”
Most of the time I do this with a huge deep-pocketed trenchcoat, because…I’m the sort of guy who’s willing to go around in a huge trenchcoat, and I’m fortunate enough that I can get away with that socially in my everyday life. Doesn’t work so well in the summer, though.
This kind of silly vest, on the other hand, does. I got one a couple months ago and have been very happy with all my compartmentalized storage space.
I have no idea whether you’re in a position where “silly fisherman/suvivalist vest” is the sort of thing you could wear without undue social penalty. It’s probably viable for most casual/geeky sorts of spaces, I’d guess?
Today on my Shit List: People on both sides of the Gater-adjacent culture war operating under the assumption that there is some kind of inherent ideological conflict between progressive narratives and quality, challenging, mechanically complex gameplay, action or otherwise.
If you’re referring to the post I made that went sort of viral… that wasn’t what I was trying to say, at all, in any way shape or form.
Even if everyone on the left decided tomorrow that progressivism was Dumb and we were all going to become some variety of libertarian- there would be some people who would prefer challenging, mechanically complex gameplay, and some people who would prefer simpler gameplay with a very strong story backing it up. This is a competing access needs thing, not a tribal values thing.
I personally cannot play games that require me to do complicated action gameplay, or complicated physics gameplay, or anything that requires timing and not running into the walls on a frequent basis. I play games on easy most of the time, and like to be able to take it slow. I prefer Bioware games, interactive fiction, and sim games for these reasons, and I loved that Undertale gave me a way to ‘cheat’ (by using the Tem Armour) so that I could keep playing and experience more of the game.
That doesn’t mean that someone who likes doing more complicated and challenging gameplay is in the wrong! It means that we need two different things out of gaming, and that’s okay.
I don’t think it was about your post (which was very well written by the way)
But if you traverse the bowels of twitter you will find plenty of people from the Hardcore /v/-is-always-right scene proudly saying
“Liberal politics are just an excuse to fill games with avant-garde mechanics
and mumblecore aesthetics!”, and people from the Alt-Games scene proudly saying “But what’s even the POINT of liberal politics if we don’t also get avant-garde mechanics and mumblecore aesthetics??”
The hardcore case seems based purely on ”my enemies like this therefore it is inherently bad” … I mean… did they all forget that beloved FPS based entirely on Objectivist-bashing? Did they forget that groundbreaking RPG about how corporations that pollute are bad?
The alt-games case… is… far deeper, and far worse.
It’s based on the idea that any game mechanic that can be read as a metaphor for a reactionary idea– e.g. “Character levels replicate the distinction between Ubermensch and Untermensch, Quest Rewards replicate capitalist ruthlessness, logically consistent rules replicate the myth of perfect meritocracy”– necessarily encodes reactionary assumptions. So it’s not enough to make the game’s story a liberal fable, a game isn’t ~truly~ liberal until its very software architecture has been subjected to a struggle session.
this is the line of thought that gaters lovingly refer to as “Going Full McIntosh”
Is “subjecting games’ software architectures to struggle sessions” really more insidious than other kinds of progressive media analysis though?
If we allow that gameplay is as worthy for critique and analysis as story and art direction are - which it totally is - and that media critisism in general is alowed to include working out the political implications of things, then is it not valid for critics to analyze the political implications of game mechanics?
We can all disagree with the conclusions such critics make. But such analysis can’t be much worse than reading sexism in random cartoons or whatever.
okay, so, sorry for the late reply.
first, an admission of a mistake on my part.
<writes “I will not use ‘mumblecore’ to refer to ‘poorly executed bildungsromans’ anymore” on the chalkboard 1000 times>
second, I think there is a problem with the “mechanics have meaning” framework that’s not present in other, more conventional forms of analysis.
The problem is that there is something inherently flawed in the notion of interpreting engineering as if it were art. To look at a machine and ask of each gear and wire “What does this symbolize?” probably won’t produce any meaningful answers. A machine isn’t designed with the same sort of artistic intent that a work of fiction is– the design process is about accomplishing a practical task within practical limitations, not about conveying information or mood. It’s designed with the assumption that the average end-user will never “peek inside the black box”, as it were, and as such, the stuff inside the black box is not meant to be meaningful to the layman (unlike the stuff outside it). There’s no trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Nothing intended as a signifier. Just numbers and abstract logic.
With no seed of meaning there to latch on to, interpreting it artistically tends to turn it into a rorschach test. The innards of the machine symbolize whatever the critic wants them to symbolize.
When it comes to video games, the practical task of the mechanics is usually entertainment. Giving the player a sense of goals, getting them into a flow state, giving them the exhilaration of risk and reward. Mechanics are rarely intended as a statement on how the real world works, or how the real world ought to work, rather, they’re intended as an answer to the question, “what kind of abstract logical system is enthralling to play around inside of?”
I know, I know, Death of the Author. But as soon as you start saying “Gameplay Mechanic X can be interpreted as an endorsement of Reactionary Concept Y, which means Game Designer Z has some explaining to do”, you’ve moved from the Death of the Author to the Weekend at Bernie’s of the Author, and that’s almost always what critics are trying to do.
Anyway, this shit’s too abstract. I think the meat of the problem is that the mechanics ultimately don’t have meaning on their own. They derive their meaning from the aesthetic/storytelling elements attached to them.
In your average RPG, Experience Points more or less represent muscle memory and physical toughness.
In inFamous, Experience Points represent reaching greater understanding of your supernatural abilities.
In Saints Row III, Experience Points represent prestige in the criminal underworld.
In Undertale, Experience Points represent becoming emotionally acclimated to combat.
does it make sense to lay down the same blanket judgement of “the concept of Leveling Up is reactionary” in those four separate contexts? Of course not. But that’s the sort of decontextualization-ridden approach the “mechanics have meaning” framework encourages.
Anyway. I once had a friend tell me that Skyrim was “anti-science” because you could kill a robot (Dwarven construct) with a sword. But for some reason the actual fucking magic didn’t bother him.
I don’t want to give that kind of nitpicking-but-bizarrely-arbitrary thinking any sort of respect.
OK, uh, speaking of late replies…
Seriously, though, I think there’s a major problem here with boundaries/definitions. Where exactly do we draw the line between “mechanics” (which are exempt from cultural critique under this schema) and narrative (which is not)?
This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical sneer.
Because on the one hand, yeah, there definitely comes a point when we’re really definitely talking about engineering rather than idea-communication, and so it’s really definitely dumb to use the critical language of the humanities. I promise, that arrangement of wires and chips on the motherboard isn’t any kind of statement, it’s just that we need some tool to turn our ideas into playable video games. Same goes for the programming language in which the game is written. At some point the struggle session becomes obvious farce.
On the other hand…“what kind of abstract logical system is enthralling to play around inside of?” might be the world’s most culturally loaded question. Even if we’re talking about The World’s Least Artistic Game Designer, who somehow has no vision or message at all and who “just wants to make an entertaining game,” the concept of “entertaining game” is precisely the kind of thing that cultural critics most want to address.
To explain where I’m coming from here: I write theater LARPs. As far as I’m concerned, to do good craftsmanlike work in that medium – to make an “entertaining game” – there are certain mechanical and structural rules you have to follow. Things like “make sure every player character has agency, and gets to make real independent decisions.” “Make sure no one feels like he’s irrelevant to the game as a whole.” “Make sure every character has enough internality to be psychologically engaging.” Stuff like that. This is not me trying to make a statement, this is just me trying to ensure that my players are satisfied and interested and not sad.
But, wow, following those rules sure has an impact on what kind of stories you tell! In my games, every “real person” – everyone who might actually be animated by a real human consciousness – is someone who has real power of some kind. Powerless people are not PCs (because the experience of inhabiting a powerless person would be no damn fun). And PCs are not only always powerful people, they’re always psychologically intricate people (because the experience of being in thrall to simple motivations would be boring). And it’s very easy to see how you get to each of those places. But you end up saying “to engage with this medium, you have to inhabit a viewpoint where everyone who feels like an Actual Person is a powerful individual driven by his own mental complexities, everyone else will be totally invisible, or maybe played by an index card”…and by that point the critics are salivating, ‘cause damn, they’ve got a whole lot to say.
And I think this generalizes. It’s easy to imagine The World’s Least Artistic Novelist saying “ok, this is the climax, I just have to find a thing that will get my readers’ blood pumping.” Totally mechanical, no meaning at all. OK, what does that? Well, your most reliable answer is probably something like “a good guy righteously unleashing a giant cathartic burst of whoop-ass on some bad guys.” Which is, I believe, the thing that the postmodernists call “fascism,” the thing that they think is the most important subject of criticism in the entire world. I don’t agree with them about that, but I’m not comfortable saying that it’s Obviously Mechanical, Obviously Out of Bounds For Critique Altogether.
I do not know where to draw this line. I really don’t. I suspect it’s one of those things that will always require judgment and sensitivity. So…we’re fucked.
