The Internet, smart phones, and social media (ISS) have set human communication back about 20,000 years. That is, we now rely more on gossip than we have since we lived in small tribes.
1. Human evolution produced gossip. Cultural anthropology sees gossip as an informal way of enforcing group norms. It is effective in small groups. But gossip is not the search for truth. It is a search for approval by attacking the perceived flaws of others.
2. As a social enforcement mechanism, gossip does not scale. Large societies need other enforcement mechanisms: government, religion, written codes.
3. Our ISS technology changes this. It makes it possible to gossip effectively at large scale. This in turn has revived our propensity to rely on gossip. Beliefs spread without being tested for truth.
4. We have increased the power of gossip-mongers and correspondingly reduced the power of elite institutions of the 20th century, including politicians, mainstream media, and scientists.
5. The result is that we are living through a period of chaos. Symptoms include conspiracy theories, information bubbles, cancel culture, President Trump’s tweets, and widespread institutional decay and dysfunction.
6. To escape from the chaos, we will need new norms of behavior that incline us away from gossip.
I will elaborate more below.
In a small-scale prehistoric society, gossip is a useful tool for enforcing group norms. I want my reputation in the tribe to be good. If the tribe decides that I am a cheater, then I may be subject to group punishment. I have to be careful not to be caught taking too much food or being a sexual deviant or being cowardly in conflicts with other tribes.
Someone who is skilled at acquiring and spreading information can have high status in the tribe. As receivers of gossip, we are excited to be “in on the secret.” The gossip-monger does not necessarily need to speak the truth. Telling lies may eventually get you in trouble, but not necessarily. If the victims of a false rumor are unable to fight back effectively, people who engage in false gossip may be successful.
As society scales up, gossip becomes ineffective. Rumors don’t spread easily from village to village, so I can get away with violating norms when I venture out and deal with strangers. In order to keep this from happening, societies evolve institutions that control behavior in impersonal interactions. Government. Religion. Written codes.
The solution that our society arrived at is what we call the liberal order. It includes tolerance for innovation, free speech, and individual preferences. It includes the rule of law. It includes formal institutions for resolving disputes, such as elections, courts, and scientific peer review. I worry that gossip at scale is what is undermining liberal values.
With ISS, gossip can scale. You can start a rumor, and if you are skillful, you can get it to spread. You can achieve viral spreading with a graphic video or with a tweet that is edgy and catchy.
As with small-scale gossip, large-scale gossip does not necessarily have to be true. If it makes people feel that they are “in on a secret,” a false rumor can take hold. Hence QAnon. Hence the claim that Michael Brown of Ferguson was killed by racism.
Skills that gave one status in Analog City, including the use of reason and the scientific method to sift through evidence, are less effective in achieving status in the gossip-laden environment of Digital City. Meanwhile, skill at dressing up rumors and creating what Jason Riley termed “poetic truth” (i.e., a falsehood that is appealing to believe) has increased in effectiveness.
I should note that we have never had social defense mechanisms that worked perfectly against “poetic truth.” For example, for many Germans after World War I, “stabbed in the back by the Jews” was a poetic truth.
In principle, by giving us better access to information, ISS gives us stronger defense mechanisms against gossip than we had before. But in practice, this advantage is more than offset by the greater power that ISS gives to rumor-mongers.
We are immersed in gossip. Many people believe that George Floyd was murdered by a racist cop. But others believe that Floyd was not killed because of his race, and some believe that he died of a drug overdose. All is gossip.
We live like teenage girls. We hate to be left out of the gossip circle. We want to be talked about (get liked, shared). We want to check our phones constantly in order to make sure we are aware of the latest rumors. And we live in fear of being subjected to adverse rumors about ourselves.
In The Transparent Society, David Brin argued that in a world where surveillance technologies would become nearly impossible to evade, that we would have to develop forbearance as a social norm. In his metaphor of a restaurant, although technically I can overhear the conversation at another table, I choose not to.
I believe that we will need to adopt norms that restrain our urge to trade in gossip. Otherwise, our descent into chaos will go further.
Very insightful analysis. And the elites are just as gossip prone as everybody else.
The Conquering Great Alliance of Jacobites and Jacobins must crush the populist uprising and The New God Joe will rule the land and his elite minions will have full dominance. Chaos will be dissipated and the Natural Order restored. Authority will descend from the Superior to the inferior so that everyone can flourish. And if this utopia fails, we will condemn democracy and the crowd, once again, having nothing more to offer.
In the context of a large corporation, gossip seems to proliferate when employees think that the upper management is lying, or at least not telling the full truth.
For example, occasionally someone is fired, and people naturally want to know why. But it “is our policy not to comment on HR matters.” Gossip flourishes.
An interesting double feature from ASK today:
Post 1) a highly speculative analysis (read: gossip) on the neuroticism of the left.
Post 2) gossip is bad.
2) But gossip was good when it was restricted to the likes of George Will parlaying a couple of months at Oxford into a lucrative career sitting on Sunday talk shows looking constipated and babbling gossipy banalities that the rest of us were supposed to be awestruck by. No sir, those were the good old days of Order. Personally I would take the chaos of today over the High Order of Received Sunday Talk Show Wisdom any day.
Bingo.
It’s debatable whether such a thing as objective journalism ever existed.
Gossip is an “inferior good” if you believe there is objective news out there to be had. But the “wokies” took over the Big Media about the time of the Bush-43 administration, so if there was any objective news, it’s gone. The best an informed consumer can do now is to listen to as many divergent sources of biased information as he can stand, and distill them.
A good case can be made that it is not the little people chattering on the internet that is doing the real damage but the conniving elites. Jeff Giesa writes: “Establishment disinformation, more than any other form of disinformation, is killing Western democracy.”
https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/17/establishment-disinformation-is-killing-western-democracy/
Look at all the examples he lists: WMD, the Mueller Investigation, the Racist Police Wantonly Murdering Minorities narrative, etc., etc., Notice that in nearly every case as part of their great crusade to restore the Royal Republican Establishment, the Jacobite Republicans lay down with the Jacobin Democrat dogs.
The Jacobites most likely will succeed in driving the upstart outsider and Scary Menace of the Century Trump from office, but, that does not a Restoration make. The rank and file must punish the sinister deeds of the greasy Dump-on-Trumper opportunists in the primaries and in the pocketbook.
Why? For the welfare of the rank and file of course. The lower income groups got wealthier under Trump policies. In its most recent annual report on global wealth, Credit Suisse reports that in 2019 27 percent of USA households had less than $10,000 in net assets, 31 percent had between $10,000 and $100,00, 35 percent had between $100,000 and $1,000,000 and 8 percent over a million.
In the 2016 report, the distribution for the same categories was 34.6, 28.6, 31.3 and 5.5 percent, but in 2013 the figures were 30.7, 33, 30.7, and 5.5 percent. Some day I will get around to doing the numbers in constant dollars, but even discounting for inflation one can see that the percentage of families in the least wealth bracket increased during Obama’s second term increased and decreased in the second worse off while only only going from 30.7 to 31.3 in the second wealthiest bracket while the percentage of millionaire households stayed constant. Under Trump the trend towards poorer households was reversed and the numbers in all three of the wealthier brackets increased.
By laying down with the Jacobin dogs, the Jacobite schemers have elevated their career opportunism over the welfare of the rank and file. King Joe’s plans to crank up energy prices and raise taxes while devoting a vastly greater share of the economy to programs with negative fiscal multipliers will return many families to the days of decreasing wealth. The treachery must be punished and loyal republican Republicans rewarded.
Thanks for the link, edgar. Very interesting article.
From the article:
There’s still a segment of disinformation researchers who are earnest, fair, and professional. But these folks almost all lean Left and exist in institutional environments that prevent pushing back on establishment narratives. This is why we haven’t seen reports on the Steele dossier or WMDs as disinformation case studies. And this is why we never hear BLM discussed in the same way QAnon is, even though any neutral definition would label them both conspiracy movements—with BLM causing dramatically more offline harm. Meanwhile, challenging the First Amendment has become part of the zeitgeist for many of these people, an argument Emily Bazelon articulates in a recent New York Times Magazine essay.
“We are immersed in gossip. Many people believe that George Floyd was murdered by a racist cop. But others believe that Floyd was not killed because of his race, and some believe that he died of a drug overdose. All is gossip.”
1) when are we allowed to talk about it then? Not until after it is fully adjudicated?
2) I recall just as much gossip/speculation about OJ. This was 1994/1995, which was long before ISS. Yet, it didn’t represent a tearing apart of the country…which might suggest that gossip isn’t what ails us here in 2020.
Good point. Maybe what has changed is the ability of groups of people to create a self-sustaining alternate reality.
“Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” —Voltaire
I’m going with the boredom argument.
1) people stuck at home due to lockdowns (and endless time to check social media)
2) lackluster job prospects for many college graduates with silly majors, but a sense of entitlement from those folks for having gotten a degree.
3) a strong need to belong ideologically to a group or tribe, which was previously provided by religion and a stable job.
4) a significant portion of the population that is unemployed and unemployable. They have nothing else do do, other than to collect welfare checks and whine about grievances.
Feel free to pushback, I’m not wedded to this. But, seems much more plausible than gossip.
I think this is almost completely correct, Hans. I expressed a similar thought in the previous thread just now.
Your comments are (of course) more eloquent than mine. So, please keep commenting and know that your deep thoughts are appreciated as I work through this stuff.
Here is my pushback.
I don’t think the quasi-anonymous 4-chan or QAnon types are really the problem. I agree that a lot of these people are bored and have too much time on their hands.
I think the real problem comes from the elites with the blue check marks. These are the people who create and sustain false narratives like Michael Brown being gunned down in cold blood by racist cops and that Donald Trump is a puppet of Russia.
So, is the deck stacked? Is this a fair enough representation?
Team A: all of the major media outlets (except one) + academia + Hollywood + the social media companies (e.g. suppressing Biden/Ukraine payoffs vs. not suppressing Trump/Russia collusion)
Team B: Fox News + a few mom-and-pop media outlets (e.g. Quillette).
If this is an accurate portrayal, then of course I see this as a major problem. Ironically, the one person that doesn’t is our host, ASK.
So take boredom + a heavily biased media narrative and what do we get? It probably doesn’t look good.
Let me reply by asking a question.
Let’s take Trump’s comments after Charlottesville, including the “good people on both sides,” remark.
The question is, do the people who keep saying that Trump was referring to white supremacists as “good people” actually believe this, or are they deliberately lying?
@Lysander
I’m going to defer to the few lefties on this blog to answer this one. Much more interesting than anything I have to say.
My guess is that the blue checks are deliberately lying, and that lots of low information people actually believe it.
So, at the end of the day, I think the real problem comes down to the mendacity and spinelessness of our elites. Maybe this has always been true, but it is now on display for all to see.
I have to disagree. I think the problem in our current moment is not the mass effect of gossip but the online disinhibition effect:
Online disinhibition is the lack of restraint one feels when communicating online in comparison to communicating in-person.[1] People feel safer saying things online which they would not say in real life because they have the ability to remain completely anonymous and invisible behind the computer screen.[2] Apart from anonymity, other factors such as asynchronous communication, empathy deficit or individual personality and cultural factors also contribute to online disinhibition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect
I think the basic mechanism here is that people from different groups, whether they be racial, political, gender or sexual orientation, etc., say really nasty things about their outgroup(s) online and get into flame wars and so forth because of this disinhibition effect, which inflates animosity between these groups, and that animosity is spilling over into the real world. There is of course also the issue where online echo chambers form and individuals seek status by making ever more fervent denunciations of some outgroup, which creates more polarization and pushes individuals towards more extreme views, away from the center.
To end this, we need norms that mitigate the disinhibition effect. Perhaps we should all begin using avatars of small children’s school pictures on social media sites, as a way to promote empathy. That way it feels like you’re berating a smiling five year old on Twitter or something about his views on gun control and you’ll start to feel slightly ridiculous. I don’t know, just spit-balling.
Online disinhibition may well be a real problem but it is unlikely to be rooted in anonymity, or else Facebook’s real names policy would have made it less toxic than it is.
I think people have a built-in filter that governs face to face communication and which tends to strain out provocative or insulting thoughts which could precipitate a confrontation for no great purpose. Hence the expression in vino veritas (or at least this is one phenomenon being referred to by that phrase). I think not seeing someone’s face and instead just responding to some disembodied voice, as in most online communications means the filter doesn’t get activated.
I should say I’ve experienced/been guilty of this myself. I’m a generally polite and affable individual who doesn’t typically enjoy arguing with people in real life…and yet, I’ve said some pretty nasty stuff to people over the years on the internet.
I’m not gonna object to any of the points that you’ve made – they are good (thank you).
But, how profound is in-person vs. virtual in terms of what ails us?
Example: I’ve read some exchanges between Nikole Hannah-Jones and James Lindsay over on Twitter.
Assuming that they could agree to an in-person debate, would I expect anything to go differently?
I’m thinking no.
Note: I’m pretty sure that Nikole would never agree to a debate, but James would, which just introduces another side topic.
This reminds me of that Louis CK bit where he talks about how amazingly nasty people can be towards each other in certain contexts when others are at a distance, such as when driving, as opposed to when people are right next to each other.
True. Many named people, including high profile commentators seem to cultivate pretty striking double personalities cultivate. Of course a classic examples is Paul Krugman; listen to him do an interview for a podcast with a free market-leaning economist, and he sounds normal and composed, but read his blog and he’s off the rails. Justin Wolfers can have a civil debate with another economist about lockdowns in person, then on Twitter frivolously accuse him of sexism over a word cloud of his blog posts.
Maybe if people took other’s behavior online into account in how they treat them in real life, it would improve incentives (e.g., if someone insulted you on Twitter, and you confront them in real life when you meet or just refuse to associate with them, maybe they’ll apply real life norms to Twitter). Of course 99.99% of people one interacts with online one will never meet.
“I believe that we will need to adopt norms that restrain our urge to trade in gossip. ”
The problem is how to do this.
“I believe that we will need to adopt norms that restrain our urge to trade in gossip. Otherwise, our descent into chaos will go further.”
As long as partisan happy talk bulls**t continues to be the primary product that flows from our media guardians (both left and right), then gossip (both fantastic and factual) must and will flourish and the descent into chaos must and will continue.
Not that I believe that a sudden willingness to accept hard truths will save us, but, without hard truths, the impulse to “restrain” the urge to trade in gossip will only be as effective as disabling the relief valve on an overheated boiler – and will most likely result in the same sort of catastrophic explosion.
Beliefs spread without being tested for truth.
But gossip is not the search for truth. It is a search for approval by attacking the perceived flaws of others.
I worry that gossip at scale is what is undermining liberal values.”
Village gossip actually WAS the search for truth – who did what, when, where, how … and why. Just like “objective news” is supposed to be.
‘Yesterday I saw Nancy talking with Karen about Joe and where he was last Friday and with who and what they doing…’
There is seldom a single, or simple “fact” about why. George Floyd was black, was high on various drugs, also was Covid positive (nobody says his death is a Covid death), was held in what looks like a brutal police hold for over 8 minutes. He “couldn’t breathe” because his lungs were filling up with liquid due to his overdose, and he forcibly resisted the police pushing him into the police car while stating he couldn’t breathe then.
The facts are not gossip, but the observable facts of who, what, when, where and how almost never unambiguously answer the most meaningful question – WHY.
We don’t really “know” why, and we can’t know – it’s all belief.
Belief, not gossip.
Religions all include some beliefs about why – why are we here, why does evil exist.
The false idea that “why” is a fact-based question, rather than a gossipy belief, is part of why liberal values are being undermined. Why question answers, like this one, are always just opinions.
Yet a bigger reason is the failure of the elite power structure to defend two key pillars of liberal values.
1) Free speech.
2) Rule of law, like the Fukuyama link of a few days ago. For those who don’t read old comment threads, let me repeat a bit of why he and Brooks are lousy about this.
Two kinds of justice mistake: wrongly punishing the innocent (false positive), and wrongly not punishing the guilty (false negative).
Both writers fail to discus how many of both types of justice fail have been happening, and especially how Trump & Reps are mostly innocent (not fully) but getting punished, while many Dems are guilty (Clinton emails, Comey Russion Hoax) without indictments; often with almost no investigation.
It’s not gossip, but failure to enforce Rule of Law on both Dems and Reps equally which undermines the liberal idea of rule of law.
Similary on (1) Free Speech. There was a Soviet Union/ communist joke:
America has Free Speech, we communists have Free Speech.
America has freedom AFTER free speech. Uhh, under communism, we don’t have freedom after free speech.
There are many examples of conservatives who lose their jobs, and status, after using free speech to speak. Especially speaking truth that goes against some PC narrative.
Such truths in the USA include:
a) 18 year blacks have lower IQs, on avg., than whites. Or Asians, Latinos, or Jews. People get fired for saying this truth.
b) Men are different than women. People get fired for saying this truth.
c) Colleges discriminate against hiring Republicans and pro-life people. << this seems so uncontroversial that a simple lying denial (by a Dem college dean or president or proff) "no we don't" is usually accepted.
Liberalism used to be about truth, and reality.
We are finding out that imperfect "meritocracy" has undesirable group avg consequences. Lots of people can't seem to handle this truth, or these a, b, c truths above.
My suggestion is to focus on (c), and take tax-exempt status and all Fed loans and Fed research away from colleges that have been discriminating against hiring Reps. There should be a new act to Support All Free Expression (SAFE) that requires diversity by including political affiliation and support among the affected groups in various anti-discrimination laws.
The polarization and current violence is primarily because Reps have been accepting, for decades since before the 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, this Dem domination and discrimination in colleges, which has already take over K-12 school administrators.
The gossip problems are a form of virtue signaling and competitive putting-down The Other, the out group. Who puts down Trump better “wins” the most likes for the day. This would be much less of a problem with more Reps in colleges.
For a smile, see Kurt:
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2020/10/19/conservatism-now-means-defeating-the-establishment-n2578287
“there’s the media – well, we knew it was trash, but the last week has even boggled the minds of the most cynical critics. A few weeks ago, there was a collective spasm over the “losers and suckers” claims by four anonymous sources that were refuted by 25 on-the-record sources. This week, there was hard evidence of Biden business badness and the mainstream media swung into action to actively deny and excuse the evidence. The biggest corruption story of all time – a vice president running an influence peddling ring for foreigners – and the media’s response is to tell us there’s nothing to see. And then, when the tech fascists decided to suppress the news, the media actively supported this censorship.”
The college indoctrinated graduates who control the vast majority of “news” distribution. Their Liberal censorship, not gossip, is undermining “liberalism”, and even giving it a bad name.
How to counter-act this primal urge? should we restrict all conversations to the people we spend time with personally and all the other information should be peer-reviewed? or is there a way to incoporate strangers in our information diet?
You can’t do anything about the urge. It seems to me that, historically, the best any civilization has ever been able to do about this problem is, judging from experience, to identify the most personally and collectively harmful and antisocial varieties of gossip (e.g., defamation), and to suppress these statements by increasing the expected value of negative consequences, to include serious criminal punishments.
The problem with our current system and state of affairs is that statements which should be suppressed are given free reign, while statements which should be freely expressable are suppressed. The trouble is that there are no non-radical ways remaining that can solve that problem.
Yes, yes, and yes.
But i think gossipers are doing more than seeking approval and enforcing norms. Gossip often is bargaining about norms. Reporting that so-n-so is cheating on his spouse or stealing yams from another can be endorsing norms about cheating or stealing, and those listening need take this into account in future dealings with the gossiper and others. The hearer might also respond in a way that he or she thinks the norm should be relaxed of stiffened. In an early section of Apt Feelings, Wise Choices, Allan Gibbard has an interesting discussion of implicit bargaining over norms.
I’m working on a theory of human history based on the two ideas of containing our dark side and promoting our bright side and on the extent to which the first one is a necessary condition for the second. Your post refers to the idea of containing our dark side, both at the individual and the social level. At the individual level, the key idea is self-control (I’m not familiar with Brin’s forbearance). At the social level, the key idea is authority, that is, the power to enforce rules or give orders (yes, the idea of authority implies a degree of submission and that is why it’s so difficult to accept it). If we want to be free to take advantage of our bright side we should learn to be self-controlled and, to some degree, submissive. As Wonder Woman, Zeus’ daughter, recognized before starting the final battle against her half-brother: humans have a dark side that needs to be contained to let their bright side flourish.
In the post, you argue that in prehistory, gossip was used to deter people from breaking rules. Yes, some anthropologists have claimed gossip played that role, but others rejected the idea. The introductory paragraphs of Wikipedia’s entry on gossip relate the concept to evolutionary psychology, “which has found gossip to be an important means for people to monitor cooperative reputations and so maintain widespread indirect reciprocity”, and evolutionary biology “as aiding social bonding in large groups”. Yes, to the extent that the concept of gossip implies the exchange of dubious information, it can deter people with a good reputation from breaking some rules, but its relevance depends on alternative means of communicating information and verifying its authenticity.
Moving forward to our world, we can argue that due to ISS, many forms of misinformation (on the supply side of information) have increased sharply. The cost of verifying the authenticity of any piece of information has increased and contrary to expectations a large amount of information has led to extraordinary levels of misperception (on the demand side of information). To assess how costly is to authenticate ideas —to determine facts— just remember what happened in recent confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominees and in the failed investigations of Trump (and what may happen on the investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden).
As argued in the final episode of the new Perry Mason series, we must first find the truth and then seek justice or any other value (the two stages are common to any attempt to pass moral or ethical judgment on human actions and speeches). The search for truth usually doesn’t go beyond a contest as to whether a burden of proof has been met. Seeking value is a different challenge because it has been increasingly difficult to negotiate a common, well-defined value, and in the end, we rely on the authority of a person or a committee for a decision, although we reserve the “right” to rebel against it. Thus, gossip may be relevant to find the truth, but not to seek justice or any other value.
Hence QAnon. Hence the claim that Michael Brown of Ferguson was killed by racism.
Putting these two on the same line is… something else. One is a conspiracy theory where people believe in cabal of Satan worshipping pedophiles traffic children… the other is a critique of a system that upholds property rights over the lives of black people. How disrespectful to a victim of a horrible murder.
At this point, it’s a full on conspiracy theory to believe that Michael Brown was killed due to racism.
And just to clarify, Michael Brown was not a murder victim. The matter has already been fully adjudicated at the state level and the Justice Department refused to bring any charges after a lengthy investigation under the Obama administration.
DoJ also published a report on systemic racism within the Ferguson police department. And while it’s impossible to say whether Michael Brown would have lost his life if Ferguson PD didn’t routinely disproportionately target black people for petty crimes, there’s a bit more source material based in reality than qanon…
It’s always interesting to see how you guys change the topics in your subsequent comments.
1) you claimed that our host was out-of-bounds for juxtaposing QAnon conspiracy theories with conspiracy theories about Michael Brown being killed due to racism. Both are silly conspiracy theories (obviously) and you haven’t provided any evidence against the latter claim.
2) you claimed that Michael Brown was murdered. There is no evidence to support such a claim.
Now, you are suggesting that the burglary and robbery crimes (both of which are felonies) committed by Michael Brown are “petty crimes.”
Can we please move on to something more interesting or are fixated on this for more rounds?
The DoJ did what it was told to do.
Did the DOJ report that Ferguson, MO became a destination for blacks being pushed out of inner city gentrifiers and they they basically took over the town as everyone else white flighted out to escape crime and other social problems associated with black dysfunction. Did it talk about how the introduction of blacks destroyed the local tax based, leading to a need to alternative revenue sources just to keep the books balanced.
In 1970 Ferguson was 99% white and 1% black. In 2010 its 67% black. It’s lost net population since the 1970s. A home sells for an astoundingly low 74k.
The big picture story here isn’t that a bankrupt police department gave out some tickets. The big picture is that a bunch of privileged progressive gentrifiers needed to dump some urban blacks somewhere and Feurgeson was the dumping ground.
What does a system look like which values lives absolutely over property? Do we have to tolerate billions of dollars of property destruction and widespread rioting over a single death? Especially deaths which were in large part caused by incredibly bad choices by the deceased? If you try to fight with police and steal their deadly weapon or appear to reach for your own deadly weapon, you really should expect to be shot.
Property can be rebuilt, lives can’t be resurrected. And “no justice, no peace” is pretty clear.
Why is it that we can’t hold cops to a higher standard? Plenty of service workers deescalate violent situations daily without killing people.
Why is it that we aren’t allowed to we hold suspected criminals to any standard whatsoever?
All I’m asking for is pretty simple…stop resisting arrest and let the courts adjudicate the matter. Seems like a natural win/win for all parties.
Cops are always asked to de-escalate everything, even when faced with grave bodily injury, but literally nothing is ever expected from the suspects. Seems like a rather lopsided expectation.
“Property can be rebuilt.”
This is just another variation of the broken window fallacy. For every dollar spent rebuilding, there is one less dollar available to go to some other cause.
Paging a mister Henry Hazlitt, please pickup a white courtesy telephone.
https://youtu.be/s0CYtHnkhXg
I do think we need some technological innovations that provide greater options for police short of lethal force.
Many years ago, when I was living in Santa Fe, there was a case which still bothers me. A guy had broken up with his girlfriend and was upset. He was drunk and running around in his underwear with a steak knife. He was surrounded by 8 cops. All they could figure out to do was to shoot him.
@ Lysander
I too wish that we had a magic technology that would easily incapacitate alleged assailants with less than lethal force and then let the courts settle the matter when cooler heads can prevail. Maybe we should be investing more in such technologies?
However, as of now, we have only three less than lethal options available: tasers, pepper spray and beanbag rounds.
If you’ve ever seen these used in actual situations, then you will understand that they are less than ideal in protecting LEOs faced with a lethal threat.
Lastly, think about the empirical data from the Tueller drill. At 21 feet, a LEO has roughly 1.5 seconds to decide and then act upon a life or death decision when faced faced with lethal force (including and especially knives, which are quite deadly).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill
Given these constraints, it seems absolutely foolhardy to me to resist arrest, particularly with deadly weapons involved.
Good points, HG. I agree that we don’t have any good solutions right now.
One thing we could do is to reduce the number of silly laws on the books. Remember that Eric Garner was stopped by police for selling loose cigarettes.
People who want mask mandates should ask themselves if they really want police enforcing these mandates, and perhaps killing some people while doing so.
Regarding silly laws, the state has a right to tax goods like cigarettes and likewise the right to enforce the tax.
Do we just let people who don’t pay their taxes go if they don’t want to cooperate? That doesn’t seem like a sustainable system.
“Property can be rebuilt, lives can’t be resurrected.”
New lives are made all the time.
Property rights enabled the stupendous wealth and massive population expansion that we’ve observed over the last few centuries.
“plenty of service workers deescalate violent situations daily”
You know what those service workers do when the belligerent won’t de-escalate…they call the cops. That is literally what happened in the Michael Brown case when he assaulted the service worker.
People say they want cops held to a higher standard but I don’t believe it.
If the number of suspects dying during arrests fell 70% (which would be an incredible success story), people would still be outraged when the remaining incidences hit the news.
People want to hold cops to a perfect standard, which is a recipe for failure and disappointment. There are some situations in which a good outcome is more or less impossible without putting officers at unreasonable jeopardy of life and limb.
We can’t have civilization if every time a perceived injustice occurs, people take to the streets to riot, loot and destroy.
What Justin said plus…
QAnon hasn’t had a single affect on my life. I didn’t even know what it was until it was banned.
The narrative around “racism” has huge effects on my life every day. It shapes every single area of my life. Schooling, policing, hiring, free speech, zoning, etc.
Its obvious to me that BLM is worse than QAnon by a factor of infinity.
I still don’t know what it is, nor do I care. I rarely look at twitter, facebook, reddit, or 4chan or whatever.
I had a very awkward conversation with a mildly-progressive family member who watches that ‘news’ bubble, the other day, “Oh my, and all this QAnon stuff is just these crazy people …”
Knowing that I am, ahem, not as progressive, this was said in a way to set up the pins so that I could knock them down and distance, reject, disavow, etc.
I asked, “What even is QAnon. I literally have no idea.” – “Well … it’s this crazy conspiracy theory I think …” – “Ok, what’s the theory?” – “Well, I’m not sure, I don’t know. I thought you would know.” – “Looks like all we both know is that it’s a bad word about bad people, but we don’t know why.”
Do we need to know why? It doesn’t seem so.
“Poetic truth” is actually Shelby Steele’s line, from WSJ during the Trayvon Martin blowback (as Riley’s review of the documentary mentions). I believe the sentence went, paraphrase, “Poetic truth has the same relationship to truth, as does poetic justice to justice”
At the risk of sliding off topic a bit, may I suggest ordering the three items, internet, smart phones, and social media in a different order, or choosing some different way of initializing them?
In most use, ISS refers to the International Space Station, and making those letters do double duty will only serve to confuse and muddy search results.
Respectfully,
BRD
Saw the quote at Ace of Spaces and figured I’d check in.
Gossip didn’t take the clothes off the emperor. Gossip exposed that the emperor had no clothes. The informational chaos isn’t a cause, it’s a symptom. We currently have multiple incompatible value systems fighting for control of the geography in which the West resides. They play by different rules, value different things, communicate in different ways, etc.
If you want to reduce the chaos then ‘the liberal order’ value system will need to defeat or radically degrade competing value systems. The current chaos is the result of a coalition of competing value systems attempting to increase (or maintain) their control in the West. I will note that while ‘liberal order’ adherents value logic, the rule of law, and expertise, competing value systems don’t. So attempting to use those levers on adherents of competing value systems is doomed to frustrating failure.
‘Polite’ push back like the Tea Parties failed or was co-opted. So now there’s Trump, who is also a symptom not a cause.
I will also note that pointing to ‘science’ or ‘media’ as a sort of ground truth is only valid if the individuals populating those roles share the liberal order preference for truth over dogma. If they don’t, then the feet of the liberal order are made of clay.
“In principle, by giving us better access to information, ISS gives us stronger defense mechanisms against gossip than we had before. But in practice, this advantage is more than offset by the greater power that ISS gives to rumor-mongers. … I believe that we will need to adopt norms that restrain our urge to trade in gossip. Otherwise, our descent into chaos will go further.”
I think this kind of “norms against antisocial speaking” idea is fraught with unintended consequences typical of good-intentions ideals, and that this should have become clear over the last forty years. Let me explain.
If human beings are driven by natural impulses and urges to do engage in certain anti-social behaviors, a norm against doing it doesn’t enforce itself. People must perceive and calculate negative expected values of the consequences for doing it.
It doesn’t really matter how that negative expected value comes about to deter them, but the it does matter *who* is doing the enforcement, because that inevitably determines *what* is being deterred and why. What begins as anti-social for everyone becomes anti-political for one side.
If we are deterring anti-social speech, that is obviously a form of power, and thus ripe for politicization and abuse. If there is going to be new norms, there is going to be enforcement, and if there is going to be enforcement, someone (or some mob) gets to decide which speech is norm-breaking and anti-social, and which isn’t. The real norm we need is that people should be fair when they do this, but since that norm also can’t enforce itself, they won’t be.
The temptation to bend the reasoning to answer the question of “How can I help my friends and our cause, and hurt our enemies and their cause,” is irresistible. One will just end up with a bunch of double standards: maximum charity and excuses for major transgression from my side, and maximum microscopic scrutiny and persecution for petty trivialities for their side. With whatever rationalizations and hand-waving is requires to barely get away with it within one’s social reference group. Which is what we have now.
If it’s not *self* regulation, then like Ahmari said, any enforced norm of this nature will inevitably just regulate compliance with orthodoxy.
So, we saw this starting about ten years ago with the whole “civility” push which had a recrudescence every few years until, well, Trump and TDS made everyone give up. Who can object to civility or decency or equity or justice? Who can favor exclusion or bullying? That’s the point of picking applause-lights words and boo words.
I remember when Howard County kicked this off nationally (naturally) and made the website and was handing out free “Choose Civility” bumper stickers by the tens of thousands, which is as good an indication of political valence coding as you should need.
Actually, it was Stephen Carter in his 1999 book (subtitle: “Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy” – Tocqueville’s term) that probably kicked off our 20 year round of commentary cycles if it’s not just eternal recurrence of a combination of o tempora, o mores and “this time is different”, but he didn’t blame the internet for obvious reasons and also the polarity was reversed back then, with Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy’s review being a good example of how the left was against it before they figured out how to co-opt it. (The only real principle is that it’s always cool for cool people to be rude and nasty to uncool pool, but never the other way around.)
This part seems kind of familiar.
How’s this for some tragi-comic obliviousness (from the point of view of 2020):
Victories in the culture war! Wins over political correctness! Democratic politician virtuecrats! “Bill Clinton has, for example, deployed the politics of civility against his Republican opponents in the 1992”. The past is a foreign country and familiar at the same time, like a “near abroad”.
As with civility, so with all the PC rules, which all end up in a biased mess of selective enforcement, and the only real question is who is doing the enforcing. It’s not ok to not wear masks at public gatherings, but .. well, it’s ok, it turns out it’s ok for some people to not wear masks at some big events. It’s not ok to disseminate hacked or personal material but … well, yeah, I guess it turns out it was ok the last ten times we did it, Glenn Greenwald gets an apology and we’ll clarify “””the rules””” after the fact.
There are no rules when there is only “who rules”. There is no civility when there is only “””civility””” as determined by one side, abusing it to regulate compliance with its orthodoxy.
The same goes for ‘gossip’, or any other kind of arguably anti-social information dissemination. Just like all the other attempts to impose new norms on speech, the whole idea is impossible without going upstream and preventing the plowshares of norms from being beaten into swords of power, held in the hands of fanatics.
A proposal for new norms without some mechanism to prevent this corruption and abuse is like a proposal for half a bridge. It’s worse than no bridge at all. With no bridge, no one would try to drive over the canyon. With half a bridge, the canyon fills up with wrecks.