Distortion and Disgust

I want to talk about two terms that are very weighty in a *moral* sense, but I believe should be looked at as neutral in *ethical* senses. So we’re going to take a more detached, clinical view in this discussion, and trying to remember that each are tools that could be used in either good or evil ways, from an ethical perspective.

The first let’s call *distortion*, although disharmony would work too. This is the warp in the normal state of affairs, or just the sense of heavy weight, when something is going dramatically wrong. If someone has a family life where they are constantly being yelled at and shamed, they may find their work starts suffering as well. That result, where one disruptive thing bleeds into all the things around it and causes difficulty, is distortion.

Distortion occurs when the harmonious state of affairs (a stable, happy community or universal agreement on norms) is interrupted by some disagreeable agent. That agent could be a stranger coming to town, or a member of the group behind closed doors acting terribly to others, or one personally privately coming to realizations that the group and its rules don’t make sense. Notably it can’t be a “typical” problem that the society is set up to deal with, but rather one that is unexpected by the normal social working order. Simplistically, a mugger beating someone up is not distortion, but a police officer doing so is.

Harmony is a watchword in Marxist and Zizekian language, since both schools are so quick to point out how often harmony is a lie that seeks to pave over any contradictions within itself, or the experiences of members that do not match the beliefs of the community. However from a practical and common sense perspective, we know that some level of harmony is just a basic necessity for life, and someone who does nothing but kick over the blocks of other people’s harmony is violent and unpleasant. Some harmonies in the short term are beneficial, and some harmonies are repressive and unacceptable. (In the long term, all harmonies collapse, but so does life.) What matters is not putting “harmony” entirely in one ethical box, but taking the non-normative stance that “if harmony exists, and matters, then distortion exists, and matters.”

One positive example of distortion is the stranger who comes to town and tells the underclass and slaves to no longer accept their position, but to strive for equal treatment. One negative example of distortion is the spouse who is having an affair so they lie about where they were last night so they have to ask their friends to cover an alibi for them so their friends have to lie to their spouses about what they were doing and so on and so on.

While very different ethically, in both cases we see a dynamic of something that cuts across typical categorizations and separations (where a problem is contained to one box), and creates a weight that affects everything around it, if only a little. It’s like Einstein’s ball on a bedsheet, bending spacetime around it.

Identified this way, we can see there are many sources of distortion in our lives. A deeply held disagreement that two friends can not talk about. Someone who often shows extreme and volatile emotions. A superior constantly asking too much of their subordinate. A dramatic mismatch between what we want and what we feel allowed to express. (For this reason, distortion is very much tied up with “legibility”, the domain of what society understands and finds legitimate reason for grievance.) Gay people in the closet experienced distortion this way. If someone clearly has a strong crush on you but never acts on it, your nervousness around them and how to deal with it could be distortion.

Almost always, distortion blurs lines of liberal ontology. If civil society is built on “these matters are the domain of the job, and these of the family” or “this is the way you voice complaint about approved matters” and above all the restraint to not let your personal feelings interfere with your institutional duties, then distortion mocks all of the above. It is the repressed howl, and is powerful exactly to the degree that the superego doesn’t accept it. (If the rules of society gave your complaint voice, then it would no longer be distortion.)

It is useful to have an ethically neutral term here because then you can point at something and say “that’s distortion.” A community may be changing due to an influx of new members with different beliefs, or a friend may be burdened under too many emotional demands that they have committed to all of them freely, and normal moral language only allows us to say whether these things are good or bad. We can take note “these scenarios have weight and will create many smaller changes around them.” We can avoid the denial that “nothing unpleasant will happen” while still admitting in some cases this distortion is good (maybe the community needed change) or in some cases the distortion is bad (maybe the friend’s friends need to adjust their expectations even if the person is not asking for it.)

(Distortion and unexplainable crying jags basically go hand in hand.)

Obviously, there’s no easy guide for how to deal with distortion. Sometimes you *should* use it as a signal to address important and neglected matters. Sometimes you *should* push it down because it’s not worth destroying a harmony you depend on, and it’s not that hard to deal with. It has a lot to do with the context, the nature of the distortion, and the value of the harmony. Anyone trying to sell you a one-size fits all approach is… well selling their own simplistic harmony that our unique and varied experiences will inevitably distort. (It is tragically true that even if someone might believe that the costs of distortion are worth it for the harmony they want to preserve, as a practical matter the distortion *just might not let them do that*. That’s how it works after all, even if we don’t want it to.)

But understanding, as a first step, is a maneuver of strength, and it can be easier to do without ethically loading the answer from the outset.

Distortion comes up a lot for me when I am thinking about societies with high inequality or winner-take-all lottery professions (movie stars, academia, etc). By and large the participants of those economies follow the liberal, systemized rules for behavior (or when they don’t, their failures are clearly prosecutable.) But the huge power differential between two different participants of a system creates incentives and desires that distorts normal action. It’s hard to be a genuine friend, or express honest critique, or legibly give consent in these structures. If you desperately need someone to recommend or vouch for you or just give you charity and mentorship, then saying no to or disappointing them becomes very difficult, and that problem then spreads into other problems involving bad communication or repressed feelings. However, it’s not as easy to say “because you had power over this person, it’s your fault they weren’t honest with you” (well some people do say it but it always makes me flinch for how simplistic and callow it is.)

***

*Disgust* is always used in a morally-loaded sense. Either we are talking about something that disgusts us - rotten food, cruel behavior, a violation of our boundaries - and our loathing is so strong that it needs to claim a moral dimension. OR we’re talking about someone’s objection we disapprove of, such as a Trumpian hatred of immigrants, and we say they have disgust, and it is phrased as if their disgust is immoral and something they need to purge themselves of. I agree with both these takes, I’m just noting that disgust is usually moral or immoral but not amoral.

And yet, knowing this word disgust can encompass both good and bad disgust, we can talk about it in an ethnically neutral way, and open its usage for some important middle ground. Disgust after all is an instinctive, emotional reaction. We can then build rational structures over it to justify it, but the reaction comes before those structures. What can we say of the purely emotional reaction then?

Well it’s unlikely to be always correct. Things we feel at least sometimes we want to reconsider in the light of reflection and more evidence. But it’s also a powerful preference, and we shouldn’t always dismiss it based on “this does not accord with my principles and rational thought” anymore than whether we like pizza and pineapple needs a reasoned justification to be respected.

For example, I play a lot of Hearthstone and watch a lot of Hearthstone tournaments. After one tournament, a winning player in his interview endorsed revolution in Hong Kong. Afraid of Chinese reaction to that, the company that ran the show, Blizzard: deleted the interview, banned the player for a year, revoked his prize money, and banned the broadcasters that interviewed him. It was roundly derided as political cowardice by the company.

I felt disgust at Blizzard’s actions. I felt myself unable to watch their tournaments in the following days. Now I had two options. One, I could build on that disgust to boycott Blizzard, and find reasons they were worse than other profit-oriented videogame companies (or quit videogames altogether), and always find justifications to link anything this company does in the future to that one bad decision. Or two, I could decide that in the grand scheme the decisions of this PR department were not outside the norm for other profit-oriented videogames, that the amusement of animations or the quality of card balance had nothing to do with this decision, and I could just suck it up and force myself to watch Hearthstone even as my stomach felt uncomfortable at it.

Neither of these were really satisfactory to me. I just didn’t watch Hearthstone for a week, and I got over it. This is not at all ethically consistent. (You could make some pragmatic argument that *this week* was the way to show Blizzard my disappointment, but I can’t claim that was my clever aim.) I allowed the moral feeling to guide me at one time period, but I didn’t try to adhere to it in the long term. In some ways this is unfortunate, as I’d rather be ethically consistent. But the two options were worse, and in the long run, lead to you molding your own beliefs in bad ways just to satisfy a temporary gut feeling.

***

With both distortion and disgust it’s very useful to have a term that encompasses clear empirical phenomenon without necessarily having to come to an ethical judgment right away. In response to one of the unending accusations of immoral behavior among videogame developers, you can categorize your disgust as making you not want to engage with their game currently and talk about it, before making long term pronouncements about whether they are deserving a boycott. You can say that something bad happened in that distortionary environment, and acknowledge the serious pain of that, before you figure out if a crime that broke established norms happened.

Cops & Robbers, Left & Right

One of the most important attitudes that dominates our, American, and almost all Western discourse is how the left is held to a higher standard of behavior. I certainly do it.

Harassment, epistemological ignorance, take your pick: if someone on the right does it it gets a shrug, but if someone on the left does it’s a dire concern for our principles. Donald Trump can insult every group in the country all day long, but Hillary Clinton calls half of her opponents “deplorable” and it gets pretty much equal coverage and outrage. Who even notices if a Walmart manager sexually harassed their staff -- but a producer at NPR, oh my.

Now this isn’t to say “everyone hates the left.” Obviously there are still many partisans who will defend social justice or communism against any attacks, cherry picking right wing examples to make themselves look bad. But I guess that’s just it: they’re being mindless and just ignoring inconvenient data. Anyone who engages in actual discussion, and holds both sides to any accountability at all, holds the left to much higher standards.

And yes, for this discussion I am going to state the overall assumption up front: viewed in aggregate, the left’s behavior in this century (culturally or politically) is nowhere near as bad as the right’s. There is no statement by any politician, activist, or star on the left that you can not find something worse by an equivalent or higher-profile person on the right. We have Anita Sarkesian, you have Rush Limbaugh. We have Bernie Sanders, you have Rick Santorum. HRC vs DJT.

This isn’t to say the double standard is bad. I definitely hold the left to a higher standard. Some right-twitters use bad logic and statistics, I’ll laugh before blocking them. Some left-twitters use a bad statistical framework for looking at gun violence/pay gap discrimination, and I won’t stop fuming until I’ve composed a six page tumblr essay. But why do I do it?

The imbalance is so widespread that there are many explanations for it, but they fall short to me.

1. The left are our people. This essay about internecine harassment falls in that camp https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/01/08/37793831/think-online-head-from-your-enemies-is-bad-try-getting-it-from-your-friends

I’ve taken heat from both sides, and while hate mail and mean tweets from my ideological opponents are annoying, they’re also easy to dismiss. I criticize Trump, someone with a giant red X in their Twitter bio calls me a cunt, and I glance at it and move on. It’s like a fly buzzing around your head—you swat it away and soon forget its existence. But when I criticize my own side—for being, at times, intolerant and dogmatic—the mob is made up of people I agree with on the big issues (climate change exists, health care is a human right, Trump is a fool and a danger) but disagree with on some small specifics. In this case, the buzzing doesn’t just annoy; it actually stings. (Or, at least, it used to. Turns out, you can become inured to almost anything.)

Slatestarcodex describes it as our disagreement with the fargroup (who we barely know) being eclipsed by the imminence of the neargroup (who are threatening us right next door.)

Except no. People native to the right happily share this double standard. And when people leave left-wing circles, driven out by how much they see their allies fail to live up to their ideals, and fall into orthogonal or centrist movements (say, rationalism) or right wing movements (hello alt), as often as not *they still focus on the failings of the left*. The reaction as someone changes environments varies, and indeed sometimes ideological emigres are just as upset at their new allies… but the flaming, biased hatred towards the left stays alive often enough for me not to buy “it’s because these are the people who are around us.”

(This also goes for the inverse explanation: that we critique the left more because we are more likely to be able to influence it. Plenty of dissidents aren’t!)

2. The left holds the real power. In this explanation, the cultural and social power that the left holds, especially over professional matters, dwarfs the economic and political power the right often holds. Or local government (if you’re in a city) is terrifying compared to national government. Or the “Deep State” which is a bunch of left-friendly bureaucrats holds the real power, and not the conservative politicians holding nominal office. (One might even call them “the Cathedral.”) And since they actually hold power, we should be more critical of them.

As an explanation of convenience, this can be made to fit any situation. Power is amorphous and very hard to pin down. In any particular situation you can make up a story about why you are right to fear left-derived power than right-derived power.

But I can’t see any theory of power where it makes broad sense. Like how can you sit down, and tally up all the forces in America - voters, colleges, state governments, corporations, small employers - and come to the conclusion that progressives have the overwhelming advantage? Certainly how could you tally up all the DAMAGE wrought by various forces, and think there’s more danger from the left? These people are always conspicuously silent on the current goddamn President, or the largest employers in the nation, or the military culture.

3. Equal criticism to both sides will have to target the left unfairly. I mentioned Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump before, and there’s a cynical explanation that “well the news media is going to want to attack both to seem unbiased, and that’s going to mean pitting the worst scandals of each against each other, even if one is in absolute terms much, much worse.” There’s something to this - but outside political races, the different powers are so asymmetric that I don’t think that really resembles anyone’s thinking process. What would such a Thoth be balancing for? Colleges vs corporations? Intellectuals vs service members? Bosses vs workers? Urban vs rural? I don’t see anyone in the discourse really trying to apportion fault between wildly different groups like that equally.

***

The closest to an answer I’ve come you can tell from the title. It’s a mix of all three above explanations, but with a strong moral intuition that *the left should be the good guys* (whether you are right or left yourself.)

The feelings most discoursers have about the left and right, is like feelings we have about police and criminals.

Criminals kill and hurt more people than the police, easily. And yet, we talk about the conduct of police much more. Why?

Well, for one, supposedly the police work for us, and so should be taking feedback from the citizenry, whereas no one expects that of criminals, so moralizing about them is wasted breath. And that’s true to an extent, but this sort of anger is shared by radicals and activists who hold as very deep parts of their sociology that the police are a power unto themselves and answerable to no one, especially their victims. And if the cops aren’t going to be better, why even have them at all?

And different people react to this police anger differently. It would be very dumb indeed to think the police are so bad that it would be better if the criminals were put in charge of the police force - but some people get angry enough that they do think that way. Much the same as some liberals, well:

Not everyone reacts the same way of course. Some people criticize the left all day, but still reliably always vote for left over right. Whereas some people are so swayed by their critical emotions, that they buy in that the right must actually be preferable.

But underlying either response is just “these are the good guys!” We can’t ever separate our reaction to someone on the left from “I really expect better from you.” It’s not just about nearness to them, or the cultural power they wield, but an unconscious moral assumption about the world.

And that intuition can mean a lot. For one, it’s a lot harder to fight back against the good guys. When you fight back against progressives or cops, people who don’t know you well think you’re a villain. It’s an uphill demoralizing battle - much worse than complaining about how a conservative state legislature fired you or how a racist troll harassed you. And so some people want to stake out as hard as they can beforehand “these aren’t actually the good guys.” With, alas, mixed success.

Axiology / Morality / Law

Or the A/M/L distinction that comes up frequently.

From http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/

Axiology is the study of what’s good. If you want to get all reductive, think of it as comparing the values of world-states. A world-state where everybody is happy seems better than a world-state where everybody is sad. A world-state with lots of beautiful art is better than a world-state containing only featureless concrete cubes. Maybe some people think a world-state full of people living in harmony with nature is better than a world-state full of gleaming domed cities, and other people believe the opposite; when they debate the point, they’re debating axiology. 

Morality is the study of what the right thing to do is. If someone says “don’t murder”, they’re making a moral commandment. If someone says “Pirating music is wrong”, they’re making a moral claim. Maybe some people believe you should pull the lever on the trolley problem, and other people believe you shouldn’t; when they debate the point, they’re debating morality. 

(this definition elides a complicated distinction between individual conscience and social pressure; fixing that would be really hard and I’m going to keep eliding it) 

Law is – oh, come on, you know this one. If someone says “Don’t go above the speed limit, there’s a cop car behind that corner”, that’s law. If someone says “my state doesn’t allow recreational marijuana, but it will next year”, that’s law too. Maybe some people believe that zoning restrictions should ban skyscrapers in historic areas, and other people believe they shouldn’t; when they debate the point, they’re debating law.

I’ve been to write a lot more about this distinction and all its implications (like, write an entire book.) But to generalize it further – from an axiological perspective, the OP is correct that all social order no matter how unspoken is order and we should not deny that.

But from a morality/community perspective, we prefer something more concrete in defining social order. We still understand there are unspoken rules and ambiguities, but we acknowledge some unofficial rules like “the family patriarch” or “the gossipy sewing circle.”

And on the legal level, we don’t want to acknowledge any order than what is explicitly written down and we can pretend is objectively verifiable.

Where most Marxists go astray is that they are so committed to axiological values (like “no one should go hungry, even if that’s not one of your written down civil rights”) that they lose sight of how much normal people really really like having a distinction between that and the moral and social orders. It may be “good” to wish everyone in the world is well taken care of and loved, but almost no one wants the responsibility for doing that for the whole world themselves, and when you make people have that responsibility they become extremely unhappy and anxious.

 kenny-evitt
Are you not a consequentialist with respect to your ideal axiology?

Consequentialism is always the axiology answer. It does not care about the community or law, except as tools to achieve an optimal result, but always judged by your axiology. This is one of the many ways the True answer of a question will be the axiological one, and axiology can back itself up with facts and arguments the best.

That being said, you would have to be a bull-headed social engineer or philosopher to not realize that people are not pure axiology. They do not care just what the “best” action is, but what is allowed by the community and what is legal under the law.

(Imagine a law saying you are forced to marry… the person who will make you the happiest. Yes in some sense that encourages “more happiness”, but people would rebel over that coercion over the private sphere in a split second. I would rebel.)

Understanding how these three types of morality intersect are not really valuable as an ethical matter – since yeah, consequentialist axiology still wins the ethics – but they are key for building an accurate model of how people work and what will make them happy.

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.

Atheism, MTD, and Liberal Ideology

@isaacsapphire​ , @discoursedrome​, and @ranma-official​ are discussing “Why is the Left anti-atheist” in a few other threads. This deserves some response, though most of the discussion is just-so story-making about reasons the Left dislikes Atheists.

For one, no, atheists are not the outgroup for even the most cliche social justice progressives. Social justice ideology is still a coalition of many different groups, beliefs, and experiences and there are definitely many atheists among them. It’s not like if you met an avowed feminist, and it came up she was atheist, any of us would really be shocked. 

There are not purity squads going around testing whether people believe in god and pouncing on any sign of atheism, the way they are for libertarians, or HBD, or ever having voted Republican. (Well there may be some, the world is wide and surprising, but they’re certainly less conspicuous than the other varieties.)

Atheism is not the official belief of progressive ideology these days, and in some ways it may be less cool than Suffi Islam or extremely non-specific spirituality, but it’s still a real part of the coalition.

So what’s going on here?

Well to some degree the answer is “cool liberalism doesn’t hate atheism, it just hates Richard Dawkins”, which is pretty self-explanatory. But I do think there is something more generalizable at issue.

---

@oligopsonoia​ was talking about Moral Therapeutic Deism as an important advance in philosophical/cultural technology. And indeed, it was great at getting people to stop killing each other over god.

MTD is the theology of cosmopolitan liberal ideology. Or it’s atheist version “Jesus may not have been the son of God, but I think he was a great moral teacher.” It’s very soft-hearted respect for all this “religion stuff” without fully buying into it. That way, our “Coalition of the Ascendent”, including both academic Leftists and Muslim immigrants, can all get along.

As passionate atheist writers and Christian philosophers both say, if God exists that is the most important fact ever. To them, everything you believe about the world should be derived from the existence of, or absence of God. This is a committed ethical stance.

Not only is that awkward for the coalition, that committed ethical stance is entirely antithetical to how ideology works. A mature ideology does not want people who take their philosophical commitments more seriously than anything else! Those people are inconvenient, annoying, and not easily moved.

Ideology wants reasonable people. It wants people who are part of the “broad movement” overall, much more than passionate commitment to one ideal. Social justice ideology wants investment in anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-imperialism, anti-bad-corporations, anti-traditional religion, and a lot of other things while never answering which of those is the most important if they ever come in conflict. It uses a great deal of social pressure to convince people to never ask that question.

Atheism as a cause might be able to make peace with all the other religious minorities, but it will never be in harmony with MTD. It takes God seriously, and taking something truly seriously, putting the intellectual foundation from first principles above any social necessity, is the predator to ideologies.

It’s not cool. It’s not harmonious. You can have your atheism, just don’t take it too seriously, and you be more on board making fun of Ivanka Trump’s fashion than trying to debate the source of morality in a God-less world, when you’re part of the ideological culture. (Dear lord, do not question “what is the source of our moral certainty.” That must always be assumed to be shared by everyone without any need for explanation or justification.)

Category A and B Problems

[This was written in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but really could apply to any ideologically tinged terrorist attack.]

There are two kinds of problems in the world. Problems and… problems.

Category A problems are things we know are bad, but more of a technocratic matter to fix - if at all. The common cold, death itself, losing keys, bad writing, bad weather, flaky colleagues. We don’t deny their existence, or the suffering they cause, but we don’t spend all day obsessing about them either. We can’t even really write good magazine articles about them.

Category B problems are bad things that come about from underlying issues that we feel a responsibility to solve. Lack of scientific funding, inequality, sexual harassment, Islamophobia, global warming, bullying, AIDS (or how we deal with it poorly). Whatever our worldview is, we see some problems that spring from our philosophy (or rather, what we seek to fight), and those problems - from small to big - demand a response. Generally, we feel that enough willpower by people can solve these Category B problems, and therefore our lack of willingness to do so makes us responsible for the suffering these problems cause. Category B problems make for great writing.

Everyone sorts anything bad they see into either Cat A or Cat B problems.

What we immediately realize, is that people have very different ideas of what goes in each bucket.

A pro-death penalty person may see rampant crime as a problem to be solved by sufficient determination, including using the most extreme methods of punishment. That said punishment sometimes is broken and mal-used, is a Category A problem that can be solved by making a technocratically better death penalty system. It’s a tragedy* to them that Texas sometimes kills an innocent, but that’s not a problem like rampant crime.

An anti-death penalty person sees the state executing people as a problem to be solved by a more pacifistic, less bloodthirsty outlook. The crime that the death penalty responds to can be solved in various technocratic ways (more police, more job opportunities), but the act of killing by the state - which represents us! - is a moral outrage that needs to be stopped immediately.

A lot of ideological arguments aren’t about whether a particular event is bad or not, but whether it is a problem or a problem.

***

Killing twelve people in a violent attack is wrong, full stop, regardless of the attitude towards free speech. But stopping there feels wrong somehow. It feels like we’ve treated a terrorist attack as a Category A problem, when the event is so politically charged that it must be a Category B problem. We must find further evidence behind it, that ties it to *some* ideological cause. We have to believe that there’s some chain of cause and effect by which “more willpower by us” will lead to this never happening again.

The first two responses that leap to mind are Islamophobia, and extreme defense of free speech. We can point to this senseless death as insufficient commitment by our society to either of those ideologies. “If only we kicked out all muslims” or “If only we convinced everyone to never get upset about a media depiction”, people think in fear and anger.

Or we can go for more subtle worldviews. Zizek writes that these totalitarian outbursts are a response to the ubiquity of liberal capitalism. I feel at the very least they are a result of the masculine proclivity to violence and mutual-escalation, which is the biggest problem in the history of the world. We all need some blanket to say “truly this is a Category B problem.”

***

Were the cartoons racist? Should we get very defensive of violent attacks on art that are cruel to an oppressed community? (ie, does the racism in the cartoons demote the attacks from a Category B problem to a Category A problem.)

Here, I think we must learn some humility. We are not French. It is extremely tempting to export the lessons in America about racism and satire and religious tolerance, and feel those lessons apply everywhere. But the histories of all of those is different elsewhere.

America still deals with the legacy of slavery, and our sensitivity to the black community is an attempt to balance out their treatment as lower class for hundreds of years. France is dealing with a difficult immigration problem - one that might eventually lead to them just kicking everyone out. Both are bad, but the ideal responses to each aren’t the same. America must grapple with the failure of assimilationism, while France is still deciding whether it can even try assimilationism.

Even more relevantly, religion is very different in France. The mainstream right-wing is not as religious in France as in America. The immigrant community is separated more by their religion in France than they are in America.

If a liberal organization in America were to say “we oppose all religion in public life”, we would find them brave, and bold, and we would expect them to get lots of antagonism back from the mainstream. We might not agree with their stance, but we would understand their choice of enemies (ie, the Republicans).

But saying that in France might be very different. If they don’t expect any Christians to be offended by their evangelical atheism, then perhaps they are only picking on an impoverished minority when they say that. In which case we don’t respect claims of “neutral secularism” any more than we respect concerns about “inner city culture”.

Or maybe the two countries are much more similar and these differences don’t apply. I don’t know because I don’t know France.

***

So SSC presents their own short reading on the massacre:

I’ve been trying to avoid talking about Charlie Hebdo because it seems like classic toxoplasma. It’s something everyone should agree is terrible, and instead we’re desperately trying to figure out how to turn it into a controversy / a stick to hit one of various out-groups with. But I was impressed by some of the discussion of French double standards – a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist who said something mildly anti-Semitic was recently fired by the magazine, then charged with ‘inciting racial hatred’ by the government. And a Muslim comedian who used some arguably inflammatory language to describe how he felt about the attacks was charged and faces seven years in prison. If I had to justify the existence of Charlie Hebdo to a French Muslim, I would want to be able to say “Look, I know it offends you, but we hold freedom of speech absolutely sacred and we want you to join us in that”. Instead it’s going to look to them (maybe accurately) like Muslims are specifically singled out as a group it’s ok to offend even while everyone else gets “protection”. It’s good that this incident has gotten everyone excited about free speech, but now the French need to start making sure the realities match their newfound ideals.

He notices the desire to make this into a Category B problem, no matter what your ideology is, and then he immediately turns it into his Category B problem about free speech.

I’m not a free speech absolutist. I take speech, and art, seriously. They have the power to effect the world in ways both immediate and gradual. They matter. To treat all speech as value neutral is both empirically wrong and actually disrespectful to speech. If we actually know speech or art that we feel is wrong and bad, then of course we should discourage it.

Governments currently are very bad at regulating this sort of thing. They hit everything with hammers. And so for now we accept “governments, pretend speech doesn’t matter, okay?” But this doesn’t make it absolutely true. It’s just a hack.

I don’t think there’s anything valuable in the anti-Semitic comments, or Holocaust denial. I’m okay with them being chilled.

Here’s where they actually go wrong: speech might matter but it doesn’t always matter a lot. The retaliation against it shouldn’t be seven years. Seven years in jail, what the hell. When we do that we are inflicting a ton of suffering on a person, for the sake of a fairly minor mitigation against the world. When that happens I am very skeptical that utilitarian thinking is going on, and I am more suspicious that it’s actually posturing. Prove how much you care about the protected group by being willing to hurt someone disproportionately. The recipient of the punishment is regrettable collateral damage, but well, that’s a Category A problem, isn’t it?

I don’t care if anti-semitic free speech is chilled a little. I do care if a good person sits in jail for seven years. And when we think about it, yeah, obviously one of those is the more important one. But we get so caught up in pursuing our cause, that we dismiss the much more serious Cat A problems, just for the sake to point out a Cat B problem. This tendency worries me.

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*"Tragedy" is a word associated with Cat B problems, fairly often. "An outrage" is the term associated with Cat A problems instead.

The overuse of italics for problems and problems, is a joke about our existing language's inability to express important differences in some concepts, and the failure of symbolic knowledge overall. Such as in the difference between liking someone and liking them.