Never mind Ukraine what about trans people?
A Russian-Canadian academic (he emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union) writes a public Facebook post about Putin’s absurd invocation of JK Rowling:
Earlier today, Putin railed against the alleged “Russophobia” in the West and, moronically enough, attempted to compare Russia to J.K. Rowling in that context.
He shared JKR’s prompt response. The rop comment on his post? Rebecca Solnit libeling JKR.
What a stunningly ugly and untrue thing to say – especially to a Russian-born critic of Putin at this particular time.
She goes on in the same vein, on and on. Kill the witch blah blah blah kill her some more.
She recommends a piece by Laurie Penny of all people.
More from Solnit:
Leaving aside that this is a sarcastic remark, I wouldn’t say that at all, because obviously she’s not commanding any armies or slaughter, but she is advocating for harm against vulnerable people with distortions of fact, and those views do result in real violence and death. (Americans think she’s a solo act; as a feminist who gets interviewed by Europeans regularly, I know her views are quite widespread there.) Putin is a homophobe who has pushed violence and persecution of gay men and other queer people, so they have some things in common.
Disgusting lie. She is not “advocating for harm against vulnerable people.”
We don’t have to choose. There are millions of advocates for Ukraine who are not advocating harm and discrimination elsewhere.
She’s not “advocating harm and discrimination.”
Iossel points out what you’d think Solnit could have thought of herself.
Rebecca Solnit This is not about us. Not about us at all. The absolute majority of people in Russia have no idea what this argument is about. It’s a luxury, discussing this now.
It’s a luxury and on the part of Solnit it’s rude and intrusive and callous. I used to admire her writing.
Solnit replies, still rudely intrusively callously:
This is a conversation taking place in North America where trans people are also dying of violence and being targeted for hate. Which is why I think it’s worth rethinking highlighting her as a hero.
Trans people aren’t “dying of violence” more than other people; that’s a myth. Russia’s war on Ukraine is a more significant issue right now than what JK Rowling has said about women and trans women, especially when discussing a post by a Russian-born academic talking about that war.
Solnit continues her lecturing until Iossel tells everyone to take it elsewhere and limits who can comment. What a shitshow.
It is amazing that so many people who you’d have thought were sensible have gone crazy. I’d say bring on the giant meteor strike on Earth but I will likely have to settle for the 2022 U.S. midterm elections.
Jesus, has someone taken over her account? Shocking behaviour from her (but of course she’s not the only one who’s been infected by these brain worms).
In fact, stats suggest they are dying of violence less than other people. Less than women. Less than men. Much, much less than people of color.
I would be surprised if Solnit has heard anything but what the trans advocates say, both on this and on JKR. I get this feeling about most people. They have no idea what JKR said, because they get all their information from the TAs. It horrifies me that people usually so intelligent as Solnit and P.Z. don’t realize the problems inherent in living within an information bubble like that, and ignoring all other evidence.
Solnit is comparing an actual war – with actual people dying to actual bullets – to the feelings of persecution claimed by bullied that lie about statistics. I can’t think of a worse comparison.
I saw some guy make a snide pseudo clever swipe at JKR the other day. Virtually all the comments praised him for being clever (it really wasn’t). One person enquired what JKR had done that was so bad. A reply said “read her Twitter”. They replied they had, and what specifically was bad and why? Outrage, but no facts ensued.
You know, 10 years ago I was happy to wear the label SJW, be cause it involved fighting to improve the lives of people who were disadvantaged due to sex, sexual orientation, race, poverty, religion or the the absence of religion. Ensuring the some kind of “right” and “justice”, however you defined them were enacted. Sure there were a few weirdos in the camp, but there always are. Now the movement is dominated by introspective idiots with no sense of perspective who seem to be interested in nothing but shouting and outrage, more directed at former allies than political opponents, and nothing of real substance is getting achieved. I’m politically homeless as a result.
Indeed, it seems such an obvious case of fooling oneself. Convincing yourself it’s “being kind” and for a “good cause” probably helps to ease whatever cognitive dissonance might arise. Still, I wonder. What information bubble(s) might those of us here be inhabiting? We can’t be any more immune to this than others, can we? What subjects are we fooling ourselves about? How does the obvious/oblivious divide shake out with us, and how do we avoid being trapped, or get out if we are?
I think one information bubble we live in is to do with an empty space where intelligent Republican/conservative policies and ideas should be, because the Lauren Boeberts and Jim Jordans drown them out. Although it also cuts the other way: during Trump’s reign of terror I paid more attention to people like David Frum and Bill Kristol than I had before.
ikn @3 “…people usually so intelligent as Solnit and P.Z. don’t realize the problems inherent in living within an information bubble like that…”
I give people the benefit of the doubt that they are reasonably intelligent, but sometimes an issue like this will expose a person’s lack of reasoning skill or common sense (or both). I then become doubtful of their overall intelligence.
As one check on my commenting here, I draft each comment in an RTF file (including this one). For a long comment, my file typically ends with a section of references that might save links I might cite. For a short comment, I can edit my comment to be shorter (on a principle Jerry Seinfeld said, that shorter is faster, and faster is funnier).
But my drafting also stretches out my thinking in time. I might draft a comment with a pen and paper over breakfast at a diner, then drive home and type that draft into a file, and see how it goes. Sometimes I draft a comment and I don’t post it. In any case, by the time I click [Submit], I feel calm, and I’m not giving myself an emotional payoff like justified anger.
This is my way; other commenters have other ways. And I am not guaranteed free of bubbles. But my way keeps me from being blinded by anger and reflexive action that might keep me in a bubble. And it keeps me from acting the way Rebecca Solnit did.
Dave @9 That’s wise, and as an occasional angry blurter I am taking this under advisement. :) I do wish there was a self edit function on the site, but your process is the next best thing.
OB, #7, my bubble on that wasn’t empty until recently, because I knew a number of those people. Most of them have slid to the Trump end of the spectrum, or have totally shut up, so I don’t know if they are still reasonable. My husband used to fall into that camp, but he no longer identifies as Republican; he is changing his registration when we move, but his voting record has been a straight non-Republican one for more than 20 years (since before we met, if you’re wondering how I married a Republican. At one time, that wasn’t impossible.)
I find a bubble I tend to live in is the one where there are no liberal, intelligent Catholics. I hear about the American Catholics being much more liberal than the leadership. That isn’t the case where I live; the only liberal Catholics I run into are in Lincoln. So I tend to be in that bubble.
@ Rob #5
They are not “introspective.idiots.”. They may be idiots, but introspective they are not. A very large component of their idiocy is the entire lack of introspection or insight, except in the sense that they have a primitive, infantile awareness of their own base impulses and desires. They have as much introspection as psychopaths.
I pay attention to what other people are saying, especially people that I disagree with.
Our town transfer station (dump) has a table where people can put discarded books, and other people can take them. I was there today and saw a screed about the evils of gay marriage. Calling this thing a book is charitable: it’s thin, with big margins and a big typeface. But by the same token, I realized I could read the whole thing in maybe an hour, so I took it. I want to know what this guy has to say. I want to see how he says it. Does he have any cogent arguments? Are there fallacies to be identified and picked apart? Or is it just 50 pages of incoherent ranting? It’s on my shelf now; someday when I have time I’ll take a look.
It’s probably not helpful to make this about intelligence. I have been interested in cults for a while now*, and one particularly pernicious myth is that only weak or stupid people (or at the very least people who suffer from other major problems) join cults, when in fact cults are usually not interested in “damaged goods”: They are mainly interested in strong, healthy, intelligent, highly functional people who can go out there and recruit others (not a simple task!) and put down countless hours of voluntary work (including some highly specialized tasks that require great skill and competence) for the cults. In fact, I seem to remember former cult-member turned anti-cult activist and exit-counselor Steven Hassan once saying that when he was recruiting for the Moonies back in the 1970s, the ideal recruit was someone who thought they were too clever to be recruited by a cult. So, at the risk of sounding like a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nut, that’s what they (i.e. cult recruiters) want you to think. It’s a mindset that only works in the cults favor and to your disadvantage.
It’s not just that being that overconfident means your guard is down and you’re less vigilant. But, perhaps more importantly, if you’re that invested in your self-image as too clever to be recruited by a cult, then, if the cult can just get you to make some small concessions (perhaps in your sleep-deprived state at four o clock in the morning after hours of relentless guilt-tripping and peer-pressure), you are that much more prone to rationalize it. The idea that perhaps you weren’t too clever after all simply doesn’t compute (think “Syntax error”, think “This program has performed an illegal operation and is shutting down”, think the “Blue screen of death”), so if you did make those concessions it had to be the smart, rational, clever thing to do: “Only a weak-minded dolt could be persuaded to make such concessions because of peer pressure and simple sleazy sales-techniques. But I’m not a weak-minded dolt, and I did make those concessions. Therefore it had to be the smart, rational, clever thing to do!”
So you rationalize, i.e. you come up with some spurious, after the fact justification for why making those concessions were the smart, rational, clever thing to do. And of course, once made, those rationalizations don’t just exist in a vacuum: They now become part of the lens through which you view every other question. The same rationalizations used to justify concessions a,b,c make it very difficult to resist concessions d,e,f without looking inconsistent and hypocritical even to yourself (practically the definition of cognitive dissonance). And if the inconsistency and hypocrisy is not immediately obvious to you, you can be damned sure the cult leader (as well as every other person in the room) is going to point it out to you: “We didn’t force you to make these concessions! You have agreed that this is the right way to look at it! These are your own words! By your own logic, you should be making concessions d,e,f, and yet you won’t? I see… so that’s what your word is really worth etc.. etc…”
So you get caught in the logic of your own rationalizations (what some have called a “justification spiral”): Going back and admitting you shouldn’t have made concessions a,b,c leads to cognitive dissonance (i.e. “syntax error”/”illegal operation”/”Blue screen of death”), but staying where you are and going no further leads to charges of inconsistency and hypocrisy and hence more cognitive dissonance. The only way to go is forward, and so you make concessions d,e,f which, by the same logic, make it very hard to resist concessions g,h,i etc… etc… In the end, by the time you get to x,y,x, even forcing Kool-Aid mixed with cyanide down your children’s throats with syringes before drinking it yourself may appear less unacceptable than admitting to yourself “I have dedicated my life to an unworthy cause and a lie. And not only that, I have recruited others, and they are now in this same mess because of me. I have told malicious lies about others for telling the truth about the vicious cult I’m in. I have done inexcusable things and gotten my hands irredeemably dirty, all in the service of a lying megalomaniac, a psychopath, and a monster.” There is more too it, but ultimately I think this is how you get caught. This is when the cult owns you.
I think highly educated and intelligent people are often the easiest people to recruit, in part precisely because they think they’re too smart to be recruited, but also because their intelligence makes them even better at rationalization (according to Joachim Fest the one truly brilliant mind of the 3rd Reich was Josef Goebbels). Even back in my movement skeptic days I thought skeptics tended to over-emphasize logical fallacies and under-emphasize heuristics and biases, cognitive dissonance and rationalization, motivated reasoning and wishful thinking etc. It always seemed to be implicitly assumed that those things were limited to the “true believers” while skeptics were immune to that kind of thing. If you’re that surprised that people like Solnit and Myers could be persuaded to drink the Kool-Aid, it might mean it’s time to look closer at some of your own assumptions.
* I recently finished reading Tim Reiterman’s biography of Jim Jones The Raven. A real world horror-story if ever there was one!
** The cult Aum Shinrikyo, infamous for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, disproportionally recruited scientists.
That all makes sense and yet and yet – Solnit used to have a kind of sharpness, insight, way of nailing things, that I could only admire and envy. That’s the bit that makes me surprised to see her mouthing the stalest of stale formulas and libels. It just seems too crude for the Solnit she used to be.
I’m more inclined to ascribe inconsistencies like this to compartmentalization rather than lack of intelligence. There are loads of people who are smarter than me who are religious. I’m not religious, but that doesn’t make me smarter than them, or them any less intelligent. We put different emphases on what we consider important and true, perhaps with different values of “true” if you come down to it. The context of inquiry might make a difference, too. You’re likely to respond to questioning of your beliefs and opinions quite differently in a private conversation, a public meeting, a blog post, or in court testimony. Add to that moral and political judgements and commitments, along with all the biases and pig-headedness which we humans bring to the table, and you can still have plenty of room for disagreement without having to cast aspersions on the intelligence of one’s correspondents. Certainly there are also bad faith actors too, in it for spite and sheer bloody-mindedness, and I will say that in the matter of trans “rights”* there does seem to be a marked asymmetry in this regard between the two sides.
I recall reading a story about people at a dinner party where a person listening to someone else misquoting something or other has to decide if it’s worthwhile or proper to correct that person for the sake of accuracy. Is it worth potentially ruining the dinner party to be right. If I remember correctly, the answer in this case was “no.” That’s not always going to be the case: that evaluation will vary with the situation, topics involved, and the potential consequences.
*There are many on the “other side” who would say that my use of scare quotes around “rights” in this instance is proof of bad faith and bloody-mindedness. I can live with that. If anyone cares to ask me why, I do this, I can tell them. I daresay they’ll get a clearer response frm me than have all the women who askrd trans activists exactly what JKR has said that actively calls for harm to trans people.
A great approach. Slowing down a bit and thinking a little longer would probably be good! There are times when I don’t finish a comment, or don’t hit “Submit.” Those are not bad things.
There’s still old fashioned tribalism and team spirit, both of which have huge performative components. I think the comparison of trans ideology to religious belief is more and more apt. I believe that “religious belief” which is not at all confined to religion and its followers, is capable of short-circuiting a lot of our critical faculties, just like art, music, etc. can bypass our thinking mind and can have a huge emotional impact whether we want it to or not. We might be able to explain it intellectually later on, but the direct, emotional connection is more immediate and visceral.
If you know your cause is just, and right, and good, you can avoid a lot of nuance and shades of grey. Hair-splitting and giving benefit of the doubt can look like collaboration and backsliding. To not “see” the allegedly “obvious” transphobia in JKR’s stance is a litmus test. Being able to “see through” her alleged dogwhistles is to show loyalty to the cause, whether you’ve seen through them or not. If you’ve internalized the verboten nature of the very concept of the material reality of sex and the need for women’s single-sex spaces, even if the word “trans” or “man” is never used, every feminist statement made in regards to either of these positions will see these as nothing but dogwhistle.
Before I’d looked into it, or put much thought into the issue, I was, briefly, a “reflexive” believer in trans rights. Until Ophelia’s hounding, and her departure from FTB, I would have uncritically accepted the idea that TWAW. It wasn’t until the shitshow surrounding the demands for Ophelia to accept this same formula that I started to examine exactly what was being claimed, and what was being asked through this deceptively simple phrase. Had I not been following Butterflies and Wheels at the time, I might not have taken this opportunity for reflection and examination. I ended up jumping off the bandwagon before I’d ridden it very far at all. Lucky me! Being a man, I had enjoyed the luxury of not having to face the consequences of accepting this doctrine. Women, of course are not so lucky.
That’s close to my own view. Things like analytical skills are essentially tools, and a tool doesn’t decide how we use it, we do. How we decide to use the tools at our disposal is in turn based on our own goals, self-serving and tribal as they are. It’s tempting to think that if someone is capable of the most razor-sharp analysis of the follies of the other side, then at least some of that should rub off on the way they deal with the follies of their own side, but tempting as it is, I can’t honestly say I have ever seen anything to support such a view.
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I found myself getting very frustrated on Facebook seeing sloppy, lazy, and dismissive statements. These were not by people on any “other side” of an issue, but people I mostly agreed with. I generally try understand why people think a certain way (which helped me make sense of the objections that Ophelia and others had towards transgender trends.) If I didn’t do that, then perhaps I would be accepting still the claims of transactivists (while being appalled at the free acceptance punching TERFs* as a meme.)
I’ve deactivated my Facebook account.
I had an experience in 2009 that really made me think about how we approach arguing over politics. I was attending a rally by our Michele Bachmann during the run-up to Congressional debate over the ACA (Obama Care.) I was doing some journalism for the now-defunct Quiche Moraine blog that I led with Stephanie Zvan and Greg Laden. I left the presentation because it was a bunch of phony numbers and cries of socialism and warning of the horrors in Canada’s wait times for procedures. I went outside the hall to talk.
I actually wanted to talk to and Listen To people who were opposed to any sort of tinkering with our wonderful American Health System, to see what I may be missing in my own view that other people could see. I’m all about perspective, you know. But, as soon as I started talking to someone and having a conversation, there would be another anti-Bachmann protester listening on and they would decide to interect and interrupt and shorlty the conversations devolved into CNN-panel type interjections and interruptions and no one heard each other over their own voices. More than once I had to walk away.
(aside:) I grew up one of the youngest in a large family. The older siblings are talkative, and that’s being kind to them. During family conversations at the dinner table, we often talked about issues of the day including the Vietnam war, the various civil rights movements, and all that. But my younger siblins and I were admonished to not interrupt when we wanted to contribute, and by the time the olders took a breath, the subject had strayed far from the point I wanted to make, so I saw no point in contributing. I still find it difficult to interrupt people when they are talking and have to overcome the childhood training to let other people finish before I join. I don’t know why other peope find such courtesy so difficult, and I can’t stand watching any of the TV news discussion panels on CNN, BBC, Fox, MSNBC, and on and on. It’s dissonant sound and fury, and all that the viewer is left to do is to confirm that their own position is correct.
(People take my style as being passive, but I’m passionate. I’m just polite and have manners.)
Towards the end of the event as people were leaving, I had found someone to have a fruitful converstaion with and we were making progress in understanding each other. Until another man, on “my” side” came along and interrupted and interjected and talked in long phrases. And each time either of the two of us in the original conversation tried to engage while he took a breath, he would talk over us again. I did the only thing I could do and walked away.
He later came up and apologized, but again in long sentences and it was more of a monologue than a dialogue. I interrupted him to say “I have to go.” I drove off and was quite unsatisfied by the experience.
So, now when I meet people I am loathe to discuss politics even though I am active politically in my locall district. I would rather wait to get to know someone, and whether I can expect to have dialogue and interesting conversation before I bring it up. It’s not a “left V right” thing at all for me, even though I am a liberal. It’s a matter of trusting someone to have empathy and an ear.
@ YNNB?: Like traffic – when somene crosses over the center line you don’t try to tell them they are in the wrong lane, you get out of the way. Or at a roundabout, prepare to yield when someone comes in too fast. They may be in the wrong, but having your car in a body shop for a couple of weeks is no fun, either. If you’re having a good conversation, no need to interrupt with an “ahem, it’s ‘whomever.'” That sort of thing derails a conversation. A witty comment later not meant to embarrass the speaker may be in order.
* I could never understand the acceptance of “Punching NAZIs” except as self-defense. The concept that violence against those you think odious is contagious, and once you accept it, then you become the bully rather than the savior you think you are. Also, once you accept that it’s okay, then it is easy to re-define anyone you don’t like as a NAZI worth of punching. Feminazis, TERFs, transphobes. These are women, not “cunts” standing up for what they believe and it shocked me how many men that I had found common cause with over many of my friends were quite sanguine about transactivists posting threats agains such women. They are “too smart to be recruited.”
That thing of talking so much that people who disagree can’t make their points because it’s too late can be extremely passive-aggressive. It makes me twitch. Interrupting sucks and it makes me twitch too, but dominating a conversation also sucks. It’s a close relative of Trump’s disgusting trick of following Hillary Clinton around the stage during the debates.