Sim-Modernism

I've been thinking about the endless war between Modernism and Post-Modernism. Not even a debate, since so much of the discussion is about even defining the borders and who is on what side. To restate things:

Modernism is the James Scott sense of a belief that we can figure out the rules and principles - behind the universe, life sciences, sociology, morality and ethics - and our leaders can apply them to create an ordered and just society. The Enlightenment was big on Modernism, and really Marxism was its apex. 

Post-Modernism is the post-WW1 understanding that none of these rules ever consistently work and the world is nigh-impossible to understand, and any rules we *think* we have about the world are really just stories we tell ourselves, to justify our position in society or to advance one political side over another. It's very meta, often in the Bulverist sense. 

(Pre-Modernism just being the regular traditionalist "I do this because my ancestors' ancestors were doing this hundreds of years ago. And because God, speaking through His divinely chosen ruler, tells me to or else He will strike me dead.")

A key thing about both of these philosophical schools is that they can't really be disproven. If a modernist regime fails, obviously they just had bad laws instead of good laws, or the people didn't try hard enough to stick to these principles. And post-modernism never fails, it's failure is just a story *you* tell to justify your opposition to it.

(Really you should think of both of these as tools to analyze situations with, sometimes even using both tools on the same situation and asking yourself which is more useful in this moment. But anyway.)

I'm not going to resolve the war between these things today, but just talk about another *modernism I see that is neither of these.

***

Let's talk about World of Warcraft.

It's the extremely big MMO that has had millions of players for well over a decade now. In the beginning, we knew nothing about the undercarriage of how the game worked (what items dropped from what, how good they were, etc.) Over time we figured out some principles, and we got large forums called "Elitist Jerks" where people argued over the best classes, the best ability rotations, the best gear, etc etc. They referenced guides and came up with general theories and had vibrant conversations. This is clear modernism.

Then almost all the conversations died, and people talk very little on the forums last I checked, compared to years at its prime.

What happened? Politics and post-modernism?

No, what happened was Big Data.

Eventually someone built a downloadable tool called simcraft. It knew every spell, boss, item, and talent in the game. You could just input all your gear, the skills you used, the order you used them in rotation, the general style of fight and... hit a button and it would tell you how much damage per second (DPS) you would do with perfect execution.

This is in some ways a cludge. Few of us have perfect execution, after all. And this doesn't cover utility, tanking, and healing and so those needed other sims with more assumptions. And there were a number of errors anyone could find with its assumptions. But it at least gave a concrete answer to argue over.

Now anytime anyone had a question of "is this talent underrated, because combined with this weapon, on this fight you could..." and the only answer would be "sim it." If sims reliably showed your new idea was better, the top raiders would drift to that, and then the way they did things would trickle down to everyone else. No one really had to argue about which class was the best - there were numbers for it.

The "skill" of the world of warcraft community got better, and the discourse of it dimmed. Just sim it.

Now this would just be an anecdote about games, except for the fact that Big Data is entering more and more of our life.

If you have any problem that can be addressed by throwing it at GIANT FUCKTON OF DATA, now people do that. We often don't know *why* the correlation between two things is the way it is, but we know it's correlated now.

Our incipient AI's aren't Asimovian entities built on three principles taken to their logical conclusions. They're neural nets trained on a ton of data and reinforced with adjustments to hell and back. They give very good answers (and beat us at boardgames.) We generally don't have any modernist explanation for what they are thinking or what rules they are following. 

While manipulating training sets is as old as data science, with big data we are talking about sets too big for naive actors to change a few datum and get the answers they want (plus part of this mythos is that anyone can run the simulations themselves if they want to.) The simulations are still built very much on human error, but they are too large and incomprehensible to be easily hijacked by postmodernists into giving the simple answers they want (or rather, that they claim ideologues want.)

This is Sim-Modernism.

We don't just see it in videogame sims and GPT outputs. We see it when someone asks our favorite route from NYC to Philadelphia and we answer "...I just follow whatever Google tells me to." We see it in the most famous political prognosticator of our era not making a simple political model (like Sam Wang would), but rather the model with the most inputs they can imaginably throw in, run the simulation 10,000 times, and see what the results look like. Nate Silver has some idea why his models will favor one party or the other, but he still is in the dark often on what is going on "under the hood." We sort of see it in Tetlock's Superforecaster-ism. And most of all we see it in algorithms on social media and video sites, that are trained to get the most "engagement" from audiences, and so start throwing up bizarre recommendations that no tech executive would have predicted or even wanted.

A lot of the answers Sim-Modernism gives are pretty good! And even more useful, they are plentiful. Sim-Modernism isn't limited to theorizing what a good novel is, it can generate a new one in seconds, or hundreds of new novels for you to read, once it gets good enough.

I'm not celebrating this as "WE HAVE THE ANSWER that cuts the Gordian knot of modernism." Sim-Modernism does get more accuracy than either regular Modernism or Post - but it's obviously scary in its own way. It means running or being a part of a system that you don't know how it works or where it is really leading you.

(Has anyone else had the experience of driving well out of your way because Google says this path is faster, only to find it eventually requires you to drive through an area you wouldn't have - either because construction means it's really blocked, or it's a suburb that feels like cheating to treat as a bypass?)

And, it will feel sad, in a humanistic way, to live a life that is more efficient but not to understand any of its underpinnings. Do this because "the sim said it is optimal" is not a lot more satisfying than "because your father did and your father's father did..."

And of course, we will have to deal with "whether a computer code that is just regurgitating predictions based on a very large sample of text" is a person or not when it answers questions.

------

Note, this is not the same thing as ontology-thru-markets, be it the Wall Street Stock Market or the smallest online predictive market. Those are most driven by intelligent, optimizing agents interacting with each other and then iterating on what will get the best results given other intelligent optimizing agents, who then iterate based on that. Which is interesting, and profitable, but not really just running models and regressions through a very large load of static data.

Popularism and its Discontents

 

(Is no one going to make the obvious joke?)

Anyway, "popularism" is the hot button term among lefty technocratic circles popularized by the likes of David Shor and Matt Yglesias. You can read Ezra Klein's very thorough interview on the subject in the NYT. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/democrats-david-shor-education-polarization.html or use Wayback machine to circumvent the paywall.)

Popularism is a shorthand for the belief that the Democratic Party, when it is trying to get politicians elected, should focus on policies that are popular and downplay things that are unpopular and irrelevant. Lot's of commercials about cheaper prescription drugs and border enforcement, less talking about systematic racism and anti-capitalism. And by popular we mean "tested in polls, and especially among white voters over fifty with no college degree."

It's obviously a response to perceptions of the 2016 Clinton campaign and the 2020 Democratic primary, and it leans heavily on the success of the Biden campaign, and the specific tactics Obama used in his two successful elections (where he was anti-gay marriage and cautious on immigration.)

Shor and Ygs and others have pushed this tactic in a very loud way, to counter what they see as groupthink among center-left staffers and activists in institutional non-profits, who value staying in like over effectiveness. And fair enough, we can all see where they are coming from.

But predictably, popularism has come in for a lot of criticism. Sometimes issues are more popular after they have passed and begun providing benefits. Sometimes you want to pass a policy because you believe in it, that's why you got elected after all. Sometimes you need to get your base excited and elections aren't entirely about the median voter. Republicans will say bad things about us no matter what we do (they certainly don't hesitate to call us socialists even when Democrats are like, de-regulating zoning restrictions.) Why do Republicans keep saying unpopular things but still winning elections anyway? And the rhetoric politicians use themselves can move public opinion. Playing to the crowd will only lead to centrist milquetoast policy that doesn't change America's underlying problems.

(Since they are always-online-political-pundits, the popularists of course have rebuttals to all of these questions.)

Most importantly I think, the line between "who is a political staffer that has an obligation to stay on message" and "who has responsibility to more people than just today's electoral campaign" is pretty vague, and I don't see why, say, the Ford Foundation which has been around for most of a century would feel obligated to change their message to fit the Harris 2024 campaign's needs. It's not clear who Shor and Ygs are really talking to.

Popularism is just one particular strategy, and I am sure if it gets lots of buy in, eventually it will have one high profile embarrassing loss. I do not recommend anyone put all their credibility eggs in their one basket, or else you'll become one of those people parsing all the data with a fine-tooth comb to say "if you look at this cross tab and that local trend, you'll see really we overperformed the fundamentals and popularism has never failed, it can only be failed."

You don't want to be that.

There is a more fundamental point, that these pundits risk losing for getting lost in the ideological weeds.

"Candidates should try to do what works."

The parsing of all messaging by all Democrats running for office to be acceptable to sensitive college-degree holders who live in big cities... has not paid dividends for the success of the party. The emphasis on supporting idealistic and edgy symbolic causes du jour over what bills can actually be passed and deliver results to voters this year, does not seem to make any situation better when you look at the results. It's not entirely fair to say "a decade of policing speech got Trump elected" but it's at least fair to say that attitude did nothing to *stop* Trump from winning, and the most reviled candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary from winning as well.

I don't think there is One Consistent Plan that will always win you elections. But a serious movement should care about what does and doesn't win. And when one tactic doesn't seem to be helping, it should be willing to drop that and try other tactics. "Winning" is not solely confined to elections, but it should be mostly about "policy change." You should care about what tactics change policy, and lead to better policy rather than irrelevant or badly designed policy. Popularism is a nod towards that, but it's really not the end all and be all of being politically responsive.

The Ideology of Climate Justice

In the news because of the #GreenNewDeal and various right-wing attempts to bait its proponents (do they notice that by paying so much attention to an absurd GND while ignoring many more technocratic proposals, they fulfill the exact raison d’etre of this platform: at least you’re talking about it?) But it’s really an evergreen topic.

Any student of ideology should be very concerned about the way climate change is talked about among the progressive set. While most policy matters on the left really are talked about in material terms and how much benefit people will immediately reap (which contrasts positively against both Republican policy proposals and progressive *cultural* discourse), climate change is an arena where discussions tend far more towards the uncertain and symbolic than the concrete. And that should be a concern.

For this discussion, assume I already believe everything quote unquote “all environmental scientists believe” (as if there isn’t plenty of disagreement even when they are to the left of current policy.) Human causes are changing the atmospheric makeup enough that over the next century the temperature will rise by 2 degrees C or more, which will have massive changes in local ecosystems, and devastate coastal cities. One can agree with this, but also think progressive discourse around climate change is terrible.

The problem is that even with this empirical backing, climate change concerns can become like other causes motivated by distant future threats - extremely ideological and symbolic. If you think about movements defined around “okay if you keep doing this thing now you won’t notice anything bad, but generations from now it will lead to collapse so we need to crackdown now”... they are often pretty reactionary. Homosexuality, immigration, atheism or religious tolerance are all things that demagogues have warned “will eventually destroy society, you just can’t see it yet.” Because you can’t see if you’re having any beneficial effects or not, the “cause” easily becomes entirely symbolic and immaterial, dominated by status games among its leaders to see who can be the most pure/extreme/politically savvy.

You see this most with changing environmental issues to “climate justice” and other methods of making it part of the overall social justice alliance toolkit. It becomes one more way to beat down the “greed” of corporations, aligned with a dozen other causes, rather than about “does it have a proposed policy measure that will change material conditions of the world?”

(There’s nothing wrong with opposing corporations of course, but emphasis on the greed of the Other is pathological and generally prevents you from contemplating structural reform, and instead focuses on replacing “bad” actors with “good” ones and hoping it produces change. It will not.)

It helps to split our discussion into moderate measures, and radical measures, meant to address climate change. Moderate measures are those already implemented by many developed nations, and include carbon taxes, credits into research of renewables, etc. Radical measures are ones that would have a large impact on the economy and dramatically reduce greenhouse related outputs immediately.

In terms of radical measures, we should be honest that no government is contemplating them (certainly the GND is not on a sufficient scale). One should not blame democracy - historically authoritarian governments are even *worse* on environmental matters than bourgeoisie republics, if only because they tend to reap the full gains of exploiting the environment. (Do not forget how often environmental preservation was considered a bourgeoisie cause, valuing pretty parks over the defense of the state and feeding the masses.)

We should also be honest that’s probably what is necessary. Scientific estimates of greater than 2C temperature rise usually come with “based almost entirely off of what we have already set in motion.” Very few researchers believe that we can just stop the train now. If the Earth is to be doomed, we have already doomed it. But activists do not promote that message, because it leads to defeatism and nihilism. Which may be true from a political perspective, but that means everything you hear downstream of that is motivated by politics, not truth. The truth is nihilist despair: the world might end or at least displace billions in the next century, and it’s too late to stop it.

That being said, moderate measures are still possible, to reduce what damage we can, and reducing harm remains our moral obligation.

The next lament of the modern tumblr anti-capitalist becomes that capitalist is incompatible with any attempt to reign in pollution, because it is too short sighted and greedy. So it’s important to remember how untrue this is. Most capitalist nations have happily passed laws regulating greenhouse emissions - in fact in most of those nations the conservative party supports at least some version of them. In fact if capitalism was not so adaptable to so many different circumstances, it would not be nearly so damaging an ideology - it lurches from crisis to crisis where theocracy or dictatorship would fail, never fully failing nor fully fixing its problems.

It’s really only America that is the standout, with the dreadful combination of: a right wing party that has gone all in on denialism, and a veto-heavy system that has prevented moderate measures from being passed even when the left-wing party was in control. Which is terrible and has led to dysfunctional policy. But then the lesson has changed to “America has a broken system of checks and balances” and not “capitalist democracies are inherently unable to confront global warming.”

Machine Learning and Ideology

Article: AI BIAS DOESN'T MEAN WHAT JOURNALISTS SAY IT WILL MEAN

The current political conversation over machine learning apps is so damn depressing.

(Also related: https://discoursedrome.tumblr.com/post/167714252325/joseph-heath-how-to-beat-racism )

Depressing, as in a missed opportunity for what could be amazing.

From rationalists, to social justice types, to every strain of thinker about our conflct-happy culture, we talk about “bias” a lot. Maybe it’s tribal bias to “like your ingroup” or maybe it’s structural bias that you need to cure yourself of, whatever. Is it the way our brain is built, our genes, what books we read as kids, our original sin of whiteness?

Zizek (and some other critical theorists) instead say the bias isn’t anything inherent in us. “Ideology is our spontaneous reaction to the world.” You drop a perfectly rational creature in a situation, it looks around, collects some data, then generates conclusions and a narrative based on that data.

A Martian looks around and sees many of the poor people are lazy, and the rich people are energetic. They conclude “wealth must be the result of how hard you work.”

With greater knowledge, we see the errors in this. Poor people may have learned helplessness, while the rich people perform useless work in order to feel meritorious. Or one culture literally conquered and stole stuff from the other, and just coincidentally it matches up to our lazy/energetic divide. Or our definitions of lazy and hard working and rich and poor are hopelessly loose and impossible to scientifically verify.

Rather than the traditional “we would see everything correctly if not for our bias”, with the clean slate neutral observer being the perfect judge, Zizek sees that biased ideology is our starting point, and we need to gather more information to climb out of our first, spontaneous biases.

Ethically speaking: you need to arrive at universal principles yourself (like that all humans are equal), but just going with the observable data is not going to tell you that.

So that’s the debate: is bias something we bring to the table, or a spontaneous result of rational observation of limited and complicated data environments?

Which makes the thing about machine learning controversies fascinating! We write some programs whose job it is to collect the data and give us conclusions… and it turns out they’re racist! They copy insults other users of social media are using, the tell you to stay away from minority neighborhoods when you walk home, rather than pure electronic angels, these bots fall into all our worst, lowest common denominator impulses. How could this fail to be interesting?

Instead we get a very predictable partisan argument. People on the right say it’s because all these stereotypes are objectively true, and now AI is validating them. And people on the left say that the original sin of implicit bias has managed to leak over from the programmers to their children. That if the right people had programmed it, the bots wouldn’t be so full of nascent ideology and *isms.

No one just accepts “if you put a pattern-matching mind into a situation with limited data, it will come to unethical conclusions.”

*****

 dedicating-ruckus

Rather than the traditional “we would see everything correctly if not for our bias”, with the clean slate neutral observer being the perfect judge, Zizek sees that biased ideology is our starting point, and we need to gather more information to climb out of our first, spontaneous biases.

Ethically speaking: you need to arrive at universal principles yourself (like that all humans are equal), but just going with the observable data is not going to tell you that.

Okay, but this is… like, false.

If you put someone with no preconceptions or relevant entanglements into a situation and let them come to conclusions, the conclusions more or less by definition cannot be “biased” in the common political sense. The alien comes and sees that many rich people are hard-working, and many poor people are lazy, and they come to the conclusion that wealth is related to how hard you work. And it’s correct.

(And of course it’s more complicated than that, and a full investigation of “what factors lead to wealth” will come out with a whole laundry list of factors including genetics, various character attributes, general social situation and pure contingent luck. But “hard work” will in fact be prominent in this list of factors. The more detailed analysis filled in and detailed the naive pattern-matching, it didn’t invalidate it.)

“All humans are equal” is true in a particular moral sense, but “all humans have an equal capacity to acquire wealth” is just sky-is-green obviously wrong.

Instead we get a very predictable partisan argument. People on the right say it’s because all these stereotypes are objectively true, and now AI is validating them. And people on the left say that the original sin of implicit bias has managed to leak over from the programmers to their children. That if the right people had programmed it, the bots wouldn’t be so full of nascent ideology and *isms.

No one just accepts “if you put a pattern-matching mind into a situation with limited data, it will come to unethical conclusions.”

In other words, “coming to the best possible conclusions given the data available to you is unethical”.

So if the disinterested pursuit of truth leads you to conclusions that violate certain previously received and unquestionable moral axioms, you must seek more information and overcome your biases until you can get yourself to conclusions that match with what you previously thought. Never mind if the extra information you seek continues to lead you down paths of wrongthink. Continue investigating until the answer is acceptable!

Also, make sure you walk through bad neighborhoods on your commute home, otherwise it would be racist!

*****

If our neutral alien were to land in early 1800′s America and look at black versus white people, they would probably conclude that black people had dramatically less intellectual capacity than white people did. Because they really weren’t as educated by most metrics.

Of course it was because they were denied education (and otherwise punished for being too smart.)

Look at this like a proper Bayesian: your priors are important. You can for instance start with “brains of roughly the same size and structure are probably roughly similar in outputs”, and even though you see a lot of examples of black people being able to read less than white people, you can hold firm to that prior until you’ve untangled the confounding nurture variables.

I would not stick to priors I had reason to believe are wrong. Just my prior of “most-to-all people are capable of complex thought, emotions, and motives” overrides almost every statistical inference I would make if I were a naive frequentist.

There’s nothing wrong with saying the current state of some people are such that they commit more violence or can read less. In fact, denying that is the sort of liberal idealism that refuses to face the ugly degradation of poverty, how being low class DOES make you worse off than others. But this is very different from the essentialism of saying “all people of that race are like that, and I don’t have to look at any individual case or check for other reasons they’ve become like that.”

Bad Atheism

In today’s SSC post, Scott and his commenters come up with a lot of theories why the atheist movement isn’t a strong pillar of the left (like climate change, concerns about sexual harassment, and poverty), but rather a source of awkward disdain. This is in response to a long article in the Baffler making fun of New Atheists.

They come up with a bunch of theories (Islam became a protected group, atheists kept talking about the science of gender differences, etc), but the post is a perfect example of a wrong form of analysis.

1. Authority is making claims about a group.
2. I disagree with those claims, or the results of them.
3. Therefore they must just be making these claims up, and we must figure out wholly different reasons they must have for the end conclusion, and this argument is 100% post-hoc rationalization.

Instead, we should read the claims directly, and see them as evidence of how that speaker is thinking. Let’s look at the article.

The heirs to New Atheism may have a new target and a remodeled ethos, but their rhetorical crutches remain the same. They announce at every opportunity that they revere logic, evidence, and science, even if the opposite is plainly true. 

…

In a political cartoon by Ben Garrison, an ex-libertarian who now panders to the alt-right, Molyneux is drawn popping bubbles—labeled “Trump is a misogynist,” “Trump is stupid” and “my feelings”—using enormous needles tagged “logic,” “reason” and “evidence.” In another, Molyneux holds a golden shield emblazoned with “REASON EVIDENCE LOGIC” as Hillary Clinton fires arrows representing her various campaign slogans. 

Uh. I think the author doesn’t like (the way atheists use) logic, evidence, and reason. Hell even if the author is a 100% cynical propagandist, there’s a reason they felt these jibes would resonate with their audience.

What we’ve seen in the last decade with social liberalism is an embrace of one-directional subjectivity. Instead of gender-blind tests for hiring, the new left has discovered the tests themselves are biased (they are), and you need an out-right pro-women hiring policy in order to redress structural inequality before a level playing field can mean anything. And we’ve seen cultural social justice crash up against this again and again: due process, metrics of any sort but especially economic ones, anything that tries to use objective or extrinsic measurement, is deemed retrograde by an ideology that focuses on the subjective experience of the oppressed.

(In no small part because of postmodern academics who are able to poke holes in the biases of many objective measurements. And because of the many obvious cases where you can find these advocates fall to bias and prejudice.)

If the left chose subjectivity (a wise decision in theory, but in practice it’s been executed horribly), then where would we expect movements founded around objective tools to end up?

And I did this by looking at the words they themselves use, rather than solely my knowledge of what various scandals happened in an elevator and on bulletin boards afterwards. This doesn’t mean I think they are right, but I do think their own words are the best way to examine a groups grievances.

***

I find this type of analysis particularly important regarding the Trump phenomenon. A large cottage industry has sprung up of “understanding Trump voters.” Is it just because they are racist? Is it they want jobs that no longer and exist and aren’t coming back? There are so many reasons we can hypothesize, and the more we hypothesize the more our theories will just reflect our own preconceived notions.

We can ask them. We can go on reddit, and listen to campaign speeches, and just hear what they say about the other half of America. We don’t have to agree it’s true, but we can look at the logic behind it and conclude “this is how they are thinking.”

Humor, Ideologically Speaking

Responding to a thread of people I respect talking about humor and politics, very wrongly. (@baroquespiral, @balioc, @kontextmaschine)

https://balioc.tumblr.com/post/164632139706/punching-up-ruined-comedy

I’ll have to start at the basics, but this will get to the issues they were talking about like Dave Chappelle.

One of the key forms of humor is a punchline that takes advantage of something the audience knows but is unsaid within the joke, and so the punchline only makes sense if you know that unstated fact. For instance a joke that relies on “Oh, Italians are stupid” or “rich men are entitled.”

Two men are sitting drinking at a bar at the top of the Empire State Building, when the first man turns to the other and says “You know, last week I discovered that if you jump from the top of this building, the winds around the building are so intense that by the time you fall to the 10th floor, they carry you around the building and back into a window”. The bartender just shakes his head in disapproval while wiping the bar.
The second guy says, “What, are you nuts? There’s no way that could happen. “No, its true,” the first man says. “Let me prove it to you.” He gets up from the bar, jumps over the balcony, and plummets toward the street below. As he nears the 10th floor, the high winds whip him around the building and back into the 10th floor window and he takes the elevator back up to the bar.
He meets the second man, who looks quite astonished. “You know, I saw that with my own eyes, but that must have been a one time fluke.” “No, I’ll prove it again,” says the first man as he jumps again. Just as he is hurtling toward the street, the 10th floor wind gently carries him around the building and into the window. Once upstairs he urges his fellow drinker to try it.
“Well, why not.” the second guy says, “It works. I’ll try it.” He jumps over the balcony, plunges downward passes the 11th, 10th 9th, 8th, floors… . . and hits the sidewalk with a SPLAT.
Back upstairs the bartender turns to the other drinker and says, “You know Superman, you’re a real jerk when you’re drunk”.

This joke only makes you laugh if you know the various powers of Superman.

There are two important ways this can be used politically:

–To tell a joke that relies on ideological truths as the unstated assumption.

You ask a white guy who’s he votin’ for, like, “Hey, Bob, who you gonna vote for?” “Dave! Dave! Whoa, whoa, whoa! Take it easy. So I was fuckin’ my wife in her ass, right? And let me tell you, it was something else.” “Yeah, yeah, but who are you gonna vote for?” “Dave! Dave, come on with the voting! I’m trying to tell you about fucking my wife in the ass, and you’re asking me all these personal questions.”

–To tell a joke that uses the ideological truth as the facade, with the ways that ideology fails being the unstated assumption. The is known as an encounter with the Real.

Have you ever watched, like, a cartoon that you used to watch when you were little, as an adult? I was sittin’ there with my nephew. I turned it on Sesame Street. And I was, like, “Oh, good. Sesame Street. Now he’ll learn how to count and spell.” But now I’m watching it as an adult and I realize that Sesame Street teaches kids other things. It teaches kids how to judge people and label people. That’s right. They got this one character named Oscar. They treat this guy like shit the entire show. They judge him right to his face. “Oscar, you are so mean. Isn’t he, kids?” “Yeah. Oscar, you’re a grouch!” He’s, like, “Bitch, I live in a fucking trash can! I’m the poorest motherfucker on Sesame Street. Nobody’s helping me.” Now you wonder why your kids grow up and step over homeless people, like, “Get it together, grouch. Get a job, grouch.”

The two examples I gave were from Dave Chappelle, the person people are arguing over as a particular unspoiled strain of humor. He’s not. (Though at his best, like the gameshow “Who Knows Black People?” he emphasized the latter style of joke.)

The point is not to reliably identify which of these categories a joke falls into, and to “only do the good kind of joke” – but to understand why ideology will always find humor a threat and a useful weapon.

There is no such thing as a humorless ideologue. The humorless feminist, the humorless christian conservative, these are all fantasies. The more someone shows umbridge at a joke that’s “not funny” because of inappropriate content, the more they love jokes that play by the rules of their particular ideological system.

(This isn’t about target, so much as about “agrees with my rules about how the world operates.” Someone who says “jokes about rape are never funny,” likely will laugh at a joke whose punchline is “frat boys try to dope drinks to get laid.”)

***

So what’s bad about all this discussion of “punching up” is acting like this concept is a remotely new thing. Every powerful ideology has felt the need to clamp down on humor, AND to use humor as a sharp weapon that enforces social order in a way most people can’t defend themselves against (ie, it’s just a joke you big baby.)

And the mourned libertine consensus of “everyone can take a joke” was just as doctrinaire about how humor was used as well. Most of what libertarian cultural advocates are complaining about is, after all, people making mean jokes at their expense.

***

To be more clear, what made Chappelle special and particularly good was not that he “offended all targets.” I believe the original analysis upthread was fatally flawed because of that. Obviously you can find endless comics who took that attitude, the Jeremy Pivens of the world and PCU. “Oh wow, he made fun of black people AND white people” is nothing to write home about.

Instead, so much of Chappelle’s comedy was about deconstructing societal assumptions rather than reifying them. His funniest pieces were both positive and surprising, such as a white dowdy-looking cop being eloquent in urban African-American slang, which held the promise that there really could be communication across communities.

(Jamelle Bouie wrote a piece on an SNL skit with a similar theme that gets at the point I’m making, except Chappelle did it a decade earlier, and with an entire show not just one skit.)

The joke is that we are all human. This is the second half of the distinction I made.

Or other skits, like “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” were less about the clubgoing boi who is the butt of the joke, and more about the traumatic encounter with the Real, where norms about masculine aggression are crushed beneath the weight of a nihilistic universe that does not give a fuck about your personal identity.

I find nothing to be impressed with the PCU / Bill Maher humor of the nineties, and I do not mourn its (vastly overstated) passing. Yes, yes, it is a particular cruel double punch to be told you are the butt of the joke and that’s because you’re evil, which is what “punching up” entails -- but ideological humor was always morally charged that way. You don’t think Nazi jokes about Jews were both mean, and leveraged the belief that Jews were immoral so that made the meanness okay, even positive?

I am genuinely sad there is less Chappelle show in the world, and I find current controversies about his standup extremely interesting. He’s making jokes exploring his hero worship of Bill Cosby and OJ Simpson, while believing they are a rapist and a murderer, with all the awkward ambivalence that entails. That is hella edgy, in a way that making fun of purple haired college chicks is not.

The SMG Gamergate Thread

In 2014, when the geek internet was blowing up with the controversy Gamergate, the forums at SomethingAwful.com were no exception. It was such a toxic subject that it was confined to one thread. SA’s resident communist movie critic, SuperMechaGodzilla, entered the fray – condescendingly lecturing everyone on capitalism, the fun of videogames, Christianity, anti-semitism, and media studies.

It was fantastic, and extremely educational. A point of view on GamerGate that was neither social justice totality, nor liberal/libertarian defensiveness.

His posts from the thread have been copied here for posterity.

Everything below here is written by SMG, who is not me. Posts are separated by quote bubbles, or an asterisk.

Life Under Polyamory Ideology

There’s a lot of… dialogue about monogamy vs polyamory these days, in our cosmopolitan little bubble. No one wants to tell others which lifestyle you should choose so I wouldn’t call it a debate, but there’s a great deal of defending “how your lifestyle works, and why you’re happy with it” that can’t save itself from becoming discourse about the two main options.

This happens enough that we fail to recognize that no, polyamory just won. We all live in its world now.

Or more accurately, we all live free of monogamous ideology now.

Case in point. I have a friend, and she’s monogamously committed to her boyfriend. Sure, she hangs out with a lot of other boys. She even visits them by herself, and crashes in their bed. She’s generous with hugs and other mild displays of physical affection to men. And she kind of pines after some specific men, wishing for greater emotional attachment. This isn’t even hidden, it’s all openly acknowledged. But, this is the definition of monogamy she and her SO have worked out.

The reaction of people from her social circle, the people from our general social bubble is “fine. Whatever works for the two of you. If that’s what you call monogamy, I have no reason to disagree with you.” There’s no call for us to try to strictly define what monogamy should mean for them.

Let me assure you, this is not how it would work under monogamous ideology. In a society where monogamy was the reigning lifestyle choice, it includes a specific definition of monogamy, and “being too touchy with other men” would definitely violate that. Even with her partner’s consent, she would be found guilty of breaking social taboos. (Which is basically how her non-cosmopolitan co-workers react.)

But none of us (which I assume includes most of my readers) give a fuck. Call yourself polyamorous, monogamish, what the fuck ever. As long as you both are happy what business is it of mine? And that is the true spirit of polyamory - anarchism towards society wide definitions of romantic relationships.

You might individually choose to snuggle with just one person, and hopefully can get that special person to agree. But it’s very different when that’s a private agreement between two people (one which can be altered at any time they want), than when it’s an arrangement coded and enforced by the whole social world. And we just don’t have that in liberal cosmopolitania any more.

After all, one of the main benefits of monogamy was that you don’t have to negotiate shit. You’re together, you’re just dating each other, these are the default rules, and for people who don’t want to process and explicitly lay out their preferences, this is a lot easier. But that’s gone now - any couple does have to figure out whether they are poly or mono, and even if they are mono, where they feel those boundaries lie, because ain’t no one else doing that regulating for them.

***

The point is not “be monogamous or be polyamorous.”

The point is that ideology is a society wide phenomenon, and it is not located solely in the individual.

Under monogamous ideology, not only were most people monogamous (at least publicly), but what monogamy meant and enforcement of following this code was a public matter.

If you live in a bubble where polyamory is accepted now, then you also live in a bubble where no one is defining monogamy for you. You can make up the definition of monogamy to fit your relationship. It can include “cuddling other people is ok but no sex”, or hell, it can include “having sex with other people is okay but we still call it monogamy because we want to” and no one is really going to criticize you for that.

Guess what. This freedom is new. It’s a result of living under polyamory, which exists outside just the individual.

(It’s also a burden. It means when you start dating someone, you need to clarify whether your relationship is poly or mono, and if it’s mono what those boundaries are. You can no longer just assume the default rules. Some people understandably loathe this.)

Transitioning from “the rules of my romantic relationship are defined by the social structure around me” to “I get to / must choose the rules” is a big step. But it’s a culture-wide step, and can’t exist solely on the individual level, anymore than “I decide to have private property” is a decision solely by the individual. Both need the social structures that support them.

There’s no escaping this. It’s not saying “polyamory is an ideology yay”, but rather “your society is going to have an ideology about how much freedom people can expect in defining their relationships.” This has always been true, and will be true in the future.

You can say “FUCK OFF I’M NOT POLY” all you want, but I bet if your partner cheats on you none of your friends are going to immediately tell you (at least, as compared to how likely they were to under monogamy), because that’s now your business and not theirs to enforce. This is the anarchy I am talking about.

(And obviously, the current polyamory acceptance only exists in a few very specific bubbles, and monogamous ideology holds sway in most of America and the world still.)

***

WW: Partners were already non-monogamous unless that was specifically defended, the difference is now everyone knows about it.

Obviously.

One of the key things about ideology is that it’s a public performance. With any of these beliefs - monogamy, social justice, Trumpism, rationalism - everyone says in private “oh, I don’t believe all that stuff. I don’t go that far, I’m just reasonable about it. It’s other zealots who actually take this seriously.”

A communist experiences himself as simply an instrument whose function is to actualise a historical necessity. The people, the mythic people - whose instrument the totalitarian leader is - are never simply the actually existing individuals, groups of people and so on. It's some kind of imagined idealised point of reference which works even when, for example in rebellions against the communist rule like in Hungary '56, when the large majority of actually resisting people raises up, is opposed to the regime. They can still say: "No, these are just individuals, "they are not the true people. " When you are accused of: "My God, "how could you have been doing all of these horrible things?" You could have said, and this is the standard Stalinist excuse: "Of course my heart bleeds for all the poor victims, "I am not fully responsible for it. "I was only acting on behalf of the 'Big Other'". "As for myself, I like cats, "small children", whatever - this is always part of the iconography of a Stalinist leader.  

- Zizek, Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

So yeah, in private lots of people have been functionally polyamorous. But they still had to present the public face of monogamy, and would effectively enforce this. This is like the dozen Republican leaders who decided to try Bill Clinton on impeachment, when privately every single one of them was engaging in adultery or worse.


(This does not obviate that many people are not fucking around, and still have and have always had one partner. It’s just the transition from a system where society codifies and enforces that one-partnerhood for you, to one where you must manage it all yourself, is a big and real step that has happened.)

Trump as Pure Ideology

Original Article: To Believe Trump You Must Believe Contradictory Things

Me: Trump is Pure Ideology

Kenny-Evitt: What? Isn't Trump the least ideological politician?

Me:

The one liner was a reference to contradiction again. “Pure ideology!” is a Zizekian gasp of exasperation at something that is empty and meaningless, bereft of any substance but its ideological structure.

As Zizek says “pure ideology is impossible.” What does this mean? That statements of an ideology, when closely studied and interrogated, reveal themselves to be vapid and contradictory.

This is why I have no problem with an artwork being “too ideological.” If say, a film is part of patriachal ideology and denigrates women, rather than considering this a “bad influence’ on our culture, studying it reveals exactly the profound errors that ideology has about women. The famously racist and ideological movie “Birth of a Nation”, shows how white racists viewed black people as ravening monsters who cannot control themselves when it comes to white women BUT ALSO as clever, urbane politicians who manipulate us. The more ideological a work is, the more it displays the seams of that belief system. For a work to be “pure ideology” would mean it would end up being nothing but seams - ie, impossible.

So you bring up that Trump was a non-ideological candidate. Indeed that was some of his appeal - this unsophisticated man who said government should protect healthcare, and the Iraq War was bad, and we didn’t need tax cuts. Even his focus on immigration was obviously different from normal Republicans, who were catering to both a business class that wanted more labor, and hopes to convert socially conservative hispanic voters. Ted Cruz was considered “the ideologically pure” candidate of that primary. Trump was like a barbaric yawp that was a violent, chaotic reaction to the stultifying Republican ideology that was no longer functional. If anything he came across as tribalist, representing and serving one particular group of people who could identify with him.

One could have imagined non-ideological President Trump: cancelling NAFTA, passing infrastructure deals with Democrats, appointing New York cronies from both sides of the aisle, being rude but speaking blunt truth in the voice of the common man.

But just in the way that a rebel overthrowing a tyrannical ruler can themselves become a dictator, the amorphous chaos that comes from rebelling ideology, can crystalize into it’s own ideological order once it comes into its own. (Which is why we must be careful and not give away our ethical principles when we get power.)

Through the unfortunate combination of “establishment Republicans deciding to defend/enable President Trump” and “Trump needing Republicans to defend him”, he’s accelerated past even the Ted Cruz’s of the world.

See, most ideology still has some adherence to the principles it began with. Social justice ideology still tries to be about fighting racism, and helping the lowest of society. They know their principles even if they are bad at them and routinely sell them out. Similarly, an early or weak ideology still interfaces with the facts of the world, acknowledges inconvenient reality, etc.

A very powerful, endgame ideology does not do any of that. All statements and actions are solely based on “what is comfortable.” To Trump it is comfortable that the leakers are lawbreakers, and that the leakers don’t exist, so both statements are true in the world generated by his ideology.

Every single one of the Republican ideals Trump pays paeans to (because to disagree would be an uncomfortable argument) and completely ignores in his actions. He’s moved beyond having to care about those principles. He indulges himself, terrifies everyone around him, and rubber stamps whatever comes across his desk so long as the people sending it promise not to investigate him. He certainly has not passed laws to benefit the WWC tribe or appointed members from that group.

This hasn’t created a non-ideological presidency, but because Trump is a needy child, it’s created a White House that is pure ideology - trying to comfort the child 100% of the time and bending reality in all ways in order to do this. There ends up being no “there” there.

Ideology is Comfort

Vox's first reaction to the Democratic defeat in the special election in Montana was "Republicans' 7-point win in last night's Montana election is great news for Democrats".

This is of course some terrible, Pravda-level analysis. In short:

• To turn this ship around, Democrats need to not just close the margin in some districts, but actually rack up Scott Brown style wins.
• Special elections are when protest votes against the incumbent party should be at their high-water mark. The effect will be smaller in midterms, even smaller in the re-election year.
• This was not the reddest of the red seats. While Democratic Presidents rarely pick up MT, it has an extremely strong local party, that has recently held both Senate seats and in 2013 elected Democratic Governor Steve Bullock. Of all the places an independent Democrat should be able to defy an unpopular national Republican party, it would be here.
• Most political watchers had already known the race would be close, and are not surprised by a “shrinking margin.” This margin was rather safer than we thought it would be.
• And the Republican aggressively assaulted a reporter the day before the election, putting him in the hospital and getting charges filed against the candidate. Democrats couldn’t even win against that epic news story.

All this combined with the earlier special election loss, and a Rasmussen poll putting Trump’s approval at 46%, mean things are really bad for Democrats. The broad public is not rebelling against Trump, not enough to stop him or even slow him down. This should worry us.

---

But no one’s really surprised that Vox (with its famous liberal bias) wrote a piece saying “thing is great news for Democrats.” We should interrogate that.

If a writer is biased for one political party, we would expect them to talk up the virtues of their candidates and the sins of the opponent, sure. And days before an election, they might do all they can to pump up their voters and disillusion the enemy voters. This all makes sense from the tactical point of view of wanting to advance your political goals.

We can also see why they might just be blind to the costs of their policies, and the benefits of opposition policies. That’s just what a political standpoint means.

But what’s the point of this? What political gain is there in talking up how the situation really is great? And who cares about pumping up voters 17 months before any big election?

This is why I say the most important desire of ideology is being comfortable. Right now, Democrats are sad (I sure am.) The role of the ideology is not to channel our political instincts into successful programs, or even to rev up the war drums before a fight, it’s a much more fundamental human need: to make us feel comfortable. To reassure us when we are scared.

That’s what sells papers and gets re-shares after all. You read something that makes you feel better, especially when you’re uncomfortable, that shows what a cruel and pointless place the world is, and then you want to share it to like-minded allies. This is how the meme propagates.

And once you’re completely swimming in information designed to make you comfortable - not even to score tactical advantage - it’s easy to become wholly disconnected from the rest of the world. Ambiguity and uncertainty after all, aren’t comfortable. Making your enemy into a one-dimensional buffoon is comforting, even if it’s strategically counter-productive.

Ideologies aren’t good at achieving their stated goals, but that’s not what is really driving them anyway.

Quel Innocence

@mugasofer asked: I would be fascinated to hear you defend this claim.

***

It's just the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Or Zizek's favorite metaphor, Wile E. Coyote, which is the same thing.

***

(Okay, besides the last line about happiness, which is just a dumb platitude that attempts to mystify what makes people happy.)

What really works about Zizek's pop-philosophy writing style, is that he will give some very common everyday occurrence in normal life that is pretty weird when you think about it. Then he will give a psycho-economic explanation for it, based on Lacan or other critical theorists. This only works if you already empirically agree that his everyday example happens; it does not work for proving to you that such things do happen if that is not your experience.

In this case, he uses the example of "lovers who do not yet define their relationship." Are you flirting, are you dating, is this an affair yet, is this a relationship, all those ambiguous phases. Certainly in my experience this is a very common stage of most relationships. (For all the mockery the "Left Behind" novels get, they are an excellent depiction of the American Evangelical worldview, including the main character having just this sort of "undefined flirting" with the femme fatale.) Either you agree that exists as a phenomenon, or you don't. If you don't, I can't help you.

And the thing about these undefined lovers is that not only do they defy traditional answers to "what are you to each other," but they usually rely on not even asking the question. You can not even discuss "So, are we dating?" without it suddenly becoming awkward. See this parody from Reductress. The problem is not solely the labeling of the relationship, but even the consideration of what factors would determine the label. The magical moment of the new relationship relies on not questioning or even thinking about "what are you," but just going along with the ride.

This is the natural contradiction and mystification of ideology, where you can go along happily so long as you never ask the hard questions that challenge the ideology. We were just talking about progressive ideology's unwillingness to ask the question "which of our myriad causes is the most important?" or you can look at Republican ideology's inability to draw the line "how far would Trump have to go before you abandon him?"

This is our favorite coyote, who can run on air so long as he never notices. The minute he looks down, and becomes aware of his impossible state, is only then when he succumbs to gravity.

The concept of "innocence" is similarly highly ideological. Innocence is not just "the lack of doing evil" but lack of awareness of the possibly of doing evil. That is why a child who sees a brutal murder is "robbed of their innocence." Or if someone is offered sexual favors, there is no "innocent" answer to it - they must suddenly consider whether they want that or not, and in doing so they have considered sex, and have entered maturity. (Or as we know, the truly innocent answer is to be so naive you don't understand the offer, and continue on blithely.)

This is why the Fruit of Knowledge destroyed the Garden of Eden. Because once Adam and Eve then had the choice between Good and Evil, once they knew Evil was a possibility, then they could no longer exist in a state of innocence, even if they chose Good.

We can see this Garden of Eden at work in most lively communities. A community floats on the magic of never explicitly defining their rules and boundaries. They might have some very loose ideals, or even a few rules made by geeks who enjoy that sort of thing, but it's still usually an open question of enforcement, and a million possible edge cases that no one wants to deal with. For instance, the comments section of a popular blog: the blog might enjoy proclaiming "Free Speech" and so declare a principle of anything goes in the comments, yet any blog that has done that and gotten a following has found that there become a lot of things you want to censor after all (for instance: commenters who harass other commenters for expressing the wrong opinion.) The blog author might vaguely know it's a possibly problem, but they hope it doesn't come up and they avoid thinking about it, because that's not the spirit of a fun-easy going community.

Once the harassment, and spam, and the desire to minimize disproportionately represented viewpoints, actually happen, then the leader(s) of the community have some very awkward decisions to make. And while some answers are worse than others, it is the mere experience of having to debate those questions that destroy the group's innocence. Things are now less fun, and more stultifying, until you find another community. And that newer community rarely has "found an answer" to these awkward questions, so much as it is once again a place where you can pretend you don't need an answer to them because the problem hasn't and never will come up. Thus continues the cycle of TAZ.

We should of course reject this form of innocence, willful ignorance of possibilities, and the attempts to float past ideological contradiction.