Not being held hostage by accusations of elitism

[christos200]

It may be due to the fact English is not my first language, but by free speech I mean the freedom to express their opinions. I do not see how tax returns have anything to do with free speech.

 

[Traitorfish]

The issue remains, at what point does it stop being an opinion and start being something more substantial? Is hanging a noose an expression of opinion, or is it a threat?

 

[warpus]

Why not both?

 

[Commodore]

That pretty much ignores the entire argument. Because as I said, it isn't hypocritical to say that, whilst view A should be censured, view B should not be

But what is hypocritical is crying foul when proponents of view A say the same thing about view B. If you are allowed to attempt to silence views you don't disagree with through social pressure, then other people should be free to do the same with your views.

 

[Hygro]

Taxes are theft, generate money by product. Come on Tfish, where's your fightin' spirit.

 

[Camikaze]

But what is hypocritical is crying foul when proponents of view A say the same thing about view B. If you are allowed to attempt to silence views you don't disagree with through social pressure, then other people should be free to do the same with your views.

No, because inherent to the idea that view A should be tolerated, but view B should not receive the same level of toleration, is a degree of objectivity. If you accept that the expression of view A is perfectly compatible with the principles of liberal democracy, but the expression of view B is not, it is not hypocritical to insist that proponents of view B nonetheless tolerate view A. So for instance, if I say that whilst comment in the public interest should be protected, but maliciously defamatory statements should not be, I'm not being hypocritical if I deny the right of someone who believes in a more fluid concept of truth to engage in malicious defamation, whilst insisting they respect comments made in the public interest. Directly to the point here, it's not hypocritical to say that liberals should not be required to respect the views of racists at the same time that they insist racists respect those views which are entirely compatible with a liberal democracy. Again, there's an asymmetry, whereas you're presenting the situation as entirely symmetrical.

 

[Commodore]

No, because inherent to the idea that view A should be tolerated, but view B should not receive the same level of toleration, is a degree of objectivity. If you accept that the expression of view A is perfectly compatible with the principles of liberal democracy, but the expression of view B is not, it is not hypocritical to insist that proponents of view B nonetheless tolerate view A. So for instance, if I say that whilst comment in the public interest should be protected, but maliciously defamatory statements should not be, I'm not being hypocritical if I deny the right of someone who believes in a more fluid concept of truth to engage in malicious defamation, whilst insisting they respect comments made in the public interest. Directly to the point here, it's not hypocritical to say that liberals should not be required to respect the views of racists at the same time that they insist racists respect those views which are entirely compatible with a liberal democracy. Again, there's an asymmetry, whereas you're presenting the situation as entirely symmetrical.

Just sounds like a bunch of excuses to treat people you don't agree with like dirt to me.

 

[Camikaze]

It's fine if you disagree with the idea, but my issue is with how you're claiming hypocrisy where it doesn't exist. Hypocrisy requires a symmetry which doesn't exist in this case. It requires a denial of internal logic, but that internal logic very much exists. I'm trying to explain that internal logic, even if you happen to disagree with it.

I'd note as well that what you're disagreeing with is enshrined in the legal systems of many western liberal democracies, which outlaw forms of racist speech without also outlawing forms of anti-racist speech. Now again, it's fine for you to strongly prefer the 1st amendment arrangements to those found in other countries, but it's probably worth reconsidering whether it's correct to label all those other perfectly functional systems as 'hypocritical'. Those legal systems are really obviously not being hypocritical.

 

[christos200]

Why should the government outlaw forms of speech, even if it is racist? Because some people believe that it is against liberal democracy? So is Marxism and communist rhetoric, but I do not see anyone here advocating its ban. So, yes, you are hypocrite if you believe in outlawing racist speech as being against liberal democratic values but being fine with communist rhetoric.

If you want to not be an hypocrite, you should support outlawing of both.

 

[Camikaze]

It's not about the speech being against liberal democracy, in the sense that the speech says it doesn't like liberal democracy. It's about the speech being incompatible with the peaceful continuance of liberal democracy. The argument goes that, whilst someone spouting off communist views doesn't really have any effect on the continuance of liberal democracy (it just tends to be ignored), engaging in racist speech which (inter alia) 'humiliates or intimidates', does directly impact upon the fundamental conditions necessary for equal participation by all in society. That is, if someone yells a communist slogan at you, it's unlikely to have any sort of impact on how you participate in society. If someone yells something racist at you as a racial minority, it is likely to have a real psychological effect ,both in terms of political participation and in terms of medical condition. Again, that's something you might disagree with. But it's an internally logical position which doesn't involve hypocrisy. Jeremy Waldron's written a very accessible book on this topic, if you're interested.

Again, though, this thread isn't about banning speech. It is about the manner in which speech is responded to. And the point being made is that it isn't hypocritical to e.g. refuse to give racist views the time of day, whilst simultaneously being happy to tolerate the expression of the views of communists.

 

[christos200]

I would say that advocating for class struggle, violent revolution and discriminating against middle class and rich people is incompatible with democracy in my view. Nevertheless, I tolerate the right the communists have to express their opinions in the same way I tolerate those who are racist.

Also, regarding your point about racism, who is going to decide what is racist? Some people say that it is racist to criticize Islam strongly, to give an example, yet in the opinion of many people it is not racist. Who is going to decide which opinion is correct? The leftists?

 

[Tahuti]

Some people say that it is racist to criticize Islam strongly, to give an example, yet in the opinion of many people it is not racist.

It strongly depends on how you define "Islam". It can be defined as a set of practices in the Qu'ran and a number of other Islamic writings such as the Hadith, or it can be defined as synonymous with the Ummah, the Muslim community. I lean towards the latter, as do Muslims in fact.

Writings can be interpreted as people please, as they will be responsible for it. Now, if Islam also is an affinity group, it becomes a lot more difficult to avoid getting into conflict with people (in this case Muslims) bsaed on their cultural and religious heritage.

I'm not opposed to Islam as such, though I do think that since the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate by Atatürk, Islam is getting more troublesome as a political entity. It is degenerating. Atatürk thought he was modernising his country, though he didn't thought of the effects on Islam in the world by abolishing the Caliphate, who was a moderating influence. He kinda was the inverse of the Pope for Catholics: While both were "leaders" of their religious group, the Caliph was less conservative than the average Muslim.

 

[Camikaze]

I would say that advocating for class struggle, violent revolution and discriminating against middle class and rich people is incompatible with democracy in my view. Nevertheless, I tolerate the right the communists have to express their opinions in the same way I tolerate those who are racist.

That's a nice opinion, but it says nothing of the internal logic of the position I was explaining. You're quite welcome to disagree with that position; I'm just trying to get at a recognition of its consistency.

Also, regarding your point about racism, who is going to decide what is racist? Some people say that it is racist to criticize Islam strongly, to give an example, yet in the opinion of many people it is not racist. Who is going to decide which opinion is correct? The leftists?

Deciding which particular views should not be respected is a tricky issue. It's probably looking at it backwards to ask 'who decides what is racist?' because that substitutes the category 'racist' for the more correct 'views which should not be respected'. Those two categories don't precisely overlap, so it's theoretically possible to have a racist view that receive some degree of protection and respect, and it's definitely possible for there to be non-racist views which should not be protected and respected. A useful starting point is probably to take the extreme - comments which label Jewish people as sub-human and call for their extermination. Now of course, that's probably pretty easy to accept as a view that we should shun. But why? According to whom? Those same questions arise at the extreme; it's just easier to provide an answer, namely, that those who abide by, honour, and cherish basic tenets of the right ideology, whatever that is considered to be. Numerous groups might stake a claim to this, of course. I suspect aelf isn't going to agree that it's the proponents of liberal ideology who should be the ultimate arbiters of which views should not find their place within society. But if we accept that such society is rightly a liberal democratic society, then it's perfectly consistent with the principles of that society so constituted, to use those very principles as the guide according to which certain views may be intersubjectively rated. Of course, liberalism isn't a monolithic ideology, so that still leaves a contest. But no-one ever said that deciding on the precise scope of the views that ought to be accorded full respect would be entirely non-contentious. When it's said that we can pretty readily accept that labelling Jewish people as sub-human and calling for their extermination is a view that should not be responded to with the same degree of politeness as other less offensive views, there's a necessary implication that the 'we' which finds it 'offensive' are on the right side of the argument. Isaiah Berlin's warnings definitely spring to mind, but difficulty with the penumbra shouldn't paralyse action in relation to the core. That is, the problems that arise with deciding whether Mr Rust Belt is just worried about local jobs or is actually just a closet xenophobe, doesn't mean we should force ourselves to recognise the alt-right as socially acceptable.

 

[cardgame]

Just sounds like a bunch of excuses to treat people you don't agree with like dirt to me.

Intolerance cannot be tolerated. Tolerance of intolerance is not a virtue; it is only cowardice. "All that is required for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing."

This is in no way hypocritical. A better example of what some might call 'leftist hypocrisy' would be racist generalizations about white people. For example a twitter post directly blaming white men for electing Trump, while technically accurate given polling statistics, is likely to be negatively and racially charged.

 

[Tahuti]

Tolerance of intolerance is not a virtue; it is only cowardice.

Tolerance of people is not a virtue, only tolerance of adverse circumstances is. If you have to to "tolerate" certain people, it means that covertly, you still hate them. Tolerance is a form of dishonesty. And while dishonesty is sometimes a necessary vice, it is not outright good.

You either respect or dislike people, while tolerance is the middle way which no one wishes to take. Tolerance is only good as in, for example, tolerating stress.

 

[Kyriakos]

Tbh i think "elitism" is abused in this context. I mean, it makes sort of sense to speak of economic elite (cause it just means they have loads of money), or political elite (political power), but cultural or intelligentsia-type "elite" is really very subjective to begin with.

 

[Bootstoots]

Anybody who's interested in a critical 10,000 word essay that covers the whole "tolerating anything except intolerance" thing along with a whole lot of other ground related to ingroups and outgroups should read I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup. I can't really summarize it and do it justice, and I only partially agree with it, but no matter your stance, reading this essay will make you better about thinking about ingroup-outgroup behavior. I'll drop two giant excerpts in spoiler tags, but they are still only three of eleven parts of the essay.

Spoiler Parts II and III :

II.

If I had to define “tolerance” it would be something like “respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup”.

And today we have an almost unprecedented situation.

We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.

This is really surprising. It’s a total reversal of everything we know about human psychology up to this point. No one did any genetic engineering. No one passed out weird glowing pills in the public schools. And yet suddenly we get an entire group of people who conspicuously promote and defend their outgroups, the outer the better.

What is going on here?

Let’s start by asking what exactly an outgroup is.

There’s a very boring sense in which, assuming the Emperor’s straight, gays are part of his “outgroup” ie a group that he is not a member of. But if the Emperor has curly hair, are straight-haired people part of his outgroup? If the Emperor’s name starts with the letter ‘A’, are people whose names start with the letter ‘B’ part of his outgroup?

Nah. I would differentiate between multiple different meanings of outgroup, where one is “a group you are not a part of” and the other is…something stronger.

I want to avoid a very easy trap, which is saying that outgroups are about how different you are, or how hostile you are. I don’t think that’s quite right.

Compare the Nazis to the German Jews and to the Japanese. The Nazis were very similar to the German Jews: they looked the same, spoke the same language, came from a similar culture. The Nazis were totally different from the Japanese: different race, different language, vast cultural gap. But the Nazis and Japanese mostly got along pretty well. Heck, the Nazis were actually moderately positively disposed to the Chinese, even when they were technically at war. Meanwhile, the conflict between the Nazis and the German Jews – some of whom didn’t even realize they were anything other than German until they checked their grandparents’ birth certificate – is the stuff of history and nightmares. Any theory of outgroupishness that naively assumes the Nazis’ natural outgroup is Japanese or Chinese people will be totally inadequate.

And this isn’t a weird exception. Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other”. Nazis and German Jews. Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics. Hutus and Tutsis. South African whites and South African blacks. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Anyone in the former Yugoslavia and anyone else in the former Yugoslavia.

So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences. If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.

What makes an unexpected in-group? The answer with Germans and Japanese is obvious – a strategic alliance. In fact, the World Wars forged a lot of unexpected temporary pseudo-friendships. A recent article from War Nerdpoints out that the British, after spending centuries subjugating and despising the Irish and Sikhs, suddenly needed Irish and Sikh soldiers for World Wars I and II respectively. “Crush them beneath our boots” quickly changed to fawning songs about how “there never was a coward where the shamrock grows” and endless paeans to Sikh military prowess.

Sure, scratch the paeans even a little bit and you find condescension as strong as ever. But eight hundred years of the British committing genocide against the Irish and considering them literally subhuman turned into smiles and songs about shamrocks once the Irish started looking like useful cannon fodder for a larger fight. And the Sikhs, dark-skinned people with turbans and beards who pretty much exemplify the European stereotype of “scary foreigner”, were lauded by everyone from the news media all the way up to Winston Churchill.

In other words, outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and scary foreigner types can become the in-group on a moment’s notice when it seems convenient.

III.

There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.

This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.

I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.

People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.

I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.

To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.

Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position. He figured he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated user base in the tens of millions.

It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.

There were a bunch of posts saying “I of course support gay marriage but here are some reasons some other people might be against it,” a bunch of others saying “my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn’t be involved in the marriage business at all”, and several more saying “why would you even ask this question, there’s no possible good argument and you’re wasting your time”. About halfway through the thread someone started saying homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one to actually answer the question, but at the end they added “But it’s not my place to decide what is or isn’t natural, I’m still pro-gay marriage.”

In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this…”

But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW [Bootstoots note: Less Wrong, a "rationalist" site].

On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.

But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?

When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.

It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed about 90-10 liberal to conservative – and we can bet that, like LW, even those few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n’-guns types. I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the most liberal restaurant in the United States.

I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45 bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.

(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest and it would be canceled.)

Spoiler Part IX :

IX.

Imagine hearing that a liberal talk show host and comedian was so enraged by the actions of ISIS that he’d recorded and posted a video in which he shouts at them for ten minutes, cursing the “fanatical terrorists” and calling them “utter savages” with “savage values”.

If I heard that, I’d be kind of surprised. It doesn’t fit my model of what liberal talk show hosts do.

But the story I’m actually referring to is liberal talk show host / comedian Russell Brand making that same rant against Fox News for supporting war against the Islamic State, adding at the end that “Fox is worse than ISIS”.

That fits my model perfectly. You wouldn’t celebrate Osama’s death, only Thatcher’s. And you wouldn’t call ISIS savages, only Fox News. Fox is the outgroup, ISIS is just some random people off in a desert. You hate the outgroup, you don’t hate random desert people.

I would go further. Not only does Brand not feel much like hating ISIS, he has a strong incentive not to. That incentive is: the Red Tribe is known to hate ISIS loudly and conspicuously. Hating ISIS would signal Red Tribe membership, would be the equivalent of going into Crips territory with a big Bloods gang sign tattooed on your shoulder.

But this might be unfair. What would Russell Brand answer, if we asked him to justify his decision to be much angrier at Fox than ISIS?

He might say something like “Obviously Fox News is not literally worse than ISIS. But here I am, talking to my audience, who are mostly white British people and Americans. These people already know that ISIS is bad; they don’t need to be told that any further. In fact, at this point being angry about how bad ISIS is, is less likely to genuinely change someone’s mind about ISIS, and more likely to promote Islamophobia. The sort of people in my audience are at zero risk of becoming ISIS supporters, but at a very real risk of Islamophobia. So ranting against ISIS would be counterproductive and dangerous.

On the other hand, my audience of white British people and Americans is very likely to contain many Fox News viewers and supporters. And Fox, while not quite as evil as ISIS, is still pretty bad. So here’s somewhere I have a genuine chance to reach people at risk and change minds. Therefore, I think my decision to rant against Fox News, and maybe hyperbolically say they were ‘worse than ISIS’ is justified under the circumstances.”

I have a lot of sympathy to hypothetical-Brand, especially to the part about Islamophobia. It does seem really possible to denounce ISIS’ atrocities to a population that already hates them in order to weak-man a couple of already-marginalized Muslims. We need to fight terrorism and atrocities – therefore it’s okay to shout at a poor girl ten thousand miles from home for wearing a headscarf in public. Christians are being executed for their faith in Sudan, therefore let’s picket the people trying to build a mosque next door.

But my sympathy with Brand ends when he acts like his audience is likely to be fans of Fox News.

In a world where a negligible number of Redditors oppose gay marriage and 1% of Less Wrongers identify conservative and I know 0/150 creationists, how many of the people who visit the YouTube channel of a well-known liberal activist with a Che-inspired banner, a channel whose episode names are things like “War: What Is It Good For?” and “Sarah Silverman Talks Feminism” – how many of them do you think are big Fox News fans?

In a way, Russell Brand would have been braver taking a stand against ISIS than against Fox. If he attacked ISIS, his viewers would just be a little confused and uncomfortable. Whereas every moment he’s attacking Fox his viewers are like “HA HA! YEAH! GET ‘EM! SHOW THOSE IGNORANT BIGOTS IN THE outgroup WHO’S BOSS!”

Brand acts as if there are just these countries called “Britain” and “America” who are receiving his material. Wrong. There are two parallel universes, and he’s only broadcasting to one of them.

The result is exactly what we predicted would happen in the case of Islam. Bombard people with images of a far-off land they already hate and tell them to hate it more, and the result is ramping up the intolerance on the couple of dazed and marginalized representatives of that culture who have ended up stuck on your half of the divide. Sure enough, if industry or culture or community gets Blue enough, Red Tribe members start getting harassed, fired from their jobs (Brendan Eich being the obvious example) or otherwise shown the door.

Think of Brendan Eich as a member of a tiny religious minority surrounded by people who hate that minority. Suddenly firing him doesn’t seem very noble.

If you mix together Podunk, Texas and Mosul, Iraq, you can prove that Muslims are scary and very powerful people who are executing Christians all the time – and so we have a great excuse for kicking the one remaining Muslim family, random people who never hurt anyone, out of town.

And if you mix together the open-source tech industry and the parallel universe where you can’t wear a FreeBSD t-shirt without risking someone trying to exorcise you, you can prove that Christians are scary and very powerful people who are persecuting everyone else all the time, and you have a great excuse for kicking one of the few people willing to affiliate with the Red Tribe, a guy who never hurt anyone, out of town.

When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn’t see anything wrong with it. “I can tolerate anything except intolerance,” she said.

“Intolerance” is starting to look like another one of those words like “white” and “American”.

“I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?

 

[Kyriakos]

Anybody who's interested in a critical 10,000 word essay that covers the whole "tolerating anything except intolerance" thing along with a whole lot of other ground related to ingroups and outgroups should read I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup. I can't really summarize it and do it justice, and I only partially agree with it, but no matter your stance, reading this essay will make you better about thinking about ingroup-outgroup behavior. I'll drop two giant excerpts in spoiler tags, but they are still only three of eleven parts of the essay.

Spoiler Parts II and III :

II.

If I had to define “tolerance” it would be something like “respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup”.

And today we have an almost unprecedented situation.

We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.

This is really surprising. It’s a total reversal of everything we know about human psychology up to this point. No one did any genetic engineering. No one passed out weird glowing pills in the public schools. And yet suddenly we get an entire group of people who conspicuously promote and defend their outgroups, the outer the better.

What is going on here?

Let’s start by asking what exactly an outgroup is.

There’s a very boring sense in which, assuming the Emperor’s straight, gays are part of his “outgroup” ie a group that he is not a member of. But if the Emperor has curly hair, are straight-haired people part of his outgroup? If the Emperor’s name starts with the letter ‘A’, are people whose names start with the letter ‘B’ part of his outgroup?

Nah. I would differentiate between multiple different meanings of outgroup, where one is “a group you are not a part of” and the other is…something stronger.

I want to avoid a very easy trap, which is saying that outgroups are about how different you are, or how hostile you are. I don’t think that’s quite right.

Compare the Nazis to the German Jews and to the Japanese. The Nazis were very similar to the German Jews: they looked the same, spoke the same language, came from a similar culture. The Nazis were totally different from the Japanese: different race, different language, vast cultural gap. But the Nazis and Japanese mostly got along pretty well. Heck, the Nazis were actually moderately positively disposed to the Chinese, even when they were technically at war. Meanwhile, the conflict between the Nazis and the German Jews – some of whom didn’t even realize they were anything other than German until they checked their grandparents’ birth certificate – is the stuff of history and nightmares. Any theory of outgroupishness that naively assumes the Nazis’ natural outgroup is Japanese or Chinese people will be totally inadequate.

And this isn’t a weird exception. Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other”. Nazis and German Jews. Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics. Hutus and Tutsis. South African whites and South African blacks. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Anyone in the former Yugoslavia and anyone else in the former Yugoslavia.

So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences. If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.

What makes an unexpected in-group? The answer with Germans and Japanese is obvious – a strategic alliance. In fact, the World Wars forged a lot of unexpected temporary pseudo-friendships. A recent article from War Nerdpoints out that the British, after spending centuries subjugating and despising the Irish and Sikhs, suddenly needed Irish and Sikh soldiers for World Wars I and II respectively. “Crush them beneath our boots” quickly changed to fawning songs about how “there never was a coward where the shamrock grows” and endless paeans to Sikh military prowess.

Sure, scratch the paeans even a little bit and you find condescension as strong as ever. But eight hundred years of the British committing genocide against the Irish and considering them literally subhuman turned into smiles and songs about shamrocks once the Irish started looking like useful cannon fodder for a larger fight. And the Sikhs, dark-skinned people with turbans and beards who pretty much exemplify the European stereotype of “scary foreigner”, were lauded by everyone from the news media all the way up to Winston Churchill.

In other words, outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and scary foreigner types can become the in-group on a moment’s notice when it seems convenient.

III.

There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.

This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.

I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.

People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.

I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.

To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.

Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position. He figured he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated user base in the tens of millions.

It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.

There were a bunch of posts saying “I of course support gay marriage but here are some reasons some other people might be against it,” a bunch of others saying “my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn’t be involved in the marriage business at all”, and several more saying “why would you even ask this question, there’s no possible good argument and you’re wasting your time”. About halfway through the thread someone started saying homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one to actually answer the question, but at the end they added “But it’s not my place to decide what is or isn’t natural, I’m still pro-gay marriage.”

In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this…”

But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW [Bootstoots note: Less Wrong, a "rationalist" site].

On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.

But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?

When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.

It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed about 90-10 liberal to conservative – and we can bet that, like LW, even those few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n’-guns types. I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the most liberal restaurant in the United States.

I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45 bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.

(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest and it would be canceled.)

Spoiler Part IX :

IX.

Imagine hearing that a liberal talk show host and comedian was so enraged by the actions of ISIS that he’d recorded and posted a video in which he shouts at them for ten minutes, cursing the “fanatical terrorists” and calling them “utter savages” with “savage values”.

If I heard that, I’d be kind of surprised. It doesn’t fit my model of what liberal talk show hosts do.

But the story I’m actually referring to is liberal talk show host / comedian Russell Brand making that same rant against Fox News for supporting war against the Islamic State, adding at the end that “Fox is worse than ISIS”.

That fits my model perfectly. You wouldn’t celebrate Osama’s death, only Thatcher’s. And you wouldn’t call ISIS savages, only Fox News. Fox is the outgroup, ISIS is just some random people off in a desert. You hate the outgroup, you don’t hate random desert people.

I would go further. Not only does Brand not feel much like hating ISIS, he has a strong incentive not to. That incentive is: the Red Tribe is known to hate ISIS loudly and conspicuously. Hating ISIS would signal Red Tribe membership, would be the equivalent of going into Crips territory with a big Bloods gang sign tattooed on your shoulder.

But this might be unfair. What would Russell Brand answer, if we asked him to justify his decision to be much angrier at Fox than ISIS?

He might say something like “Obviously Fox News is not literally worse than ISIS. But here I am, talking to my audience, who are mostly white British people and Americans. These people already know that ISIS is bad; they don’t need to be told that any further. In fact, at this point being angry about how bad ISIS is, is less likely to genuinely change someone’s mind about ISIS, and more likely to promote Islamophobia. The sort of people in my audience are at zero risk of becoming ISIS supporters, but at a very real risk of Islamophobia. So ranting against ISIS would be counterproductive and dangerous.

On the other hand, my audience of white British people and Americans is very likely to contain many Fox News viewers and supporters. And Fox, while not quite as evil as ISIS, is still pretty bad. So here’s somewhere I have a genuine chance to reach people at risk and change minds. Therefore, I think my decision to rant against Fox News, and maybe hyperbolically say they were ‘worse than ISIS’ is justified under the circumstances.”

I have a lot of sympathy to hypothetical-Brand, especially to the part about Islamophobia. It does seem really possible to denounce ISIS’ atrocities to a population that already hates them in order to weak-man a couple of already-marginalized Muslims. We need to fight terrorism and atrocities – therefore it’s okay to shout at a poor girl ten thousand miles from home for wearing a headscarf in public. Christians are being executed for their faith in Sudan, therefore let’s picket the people trying to build a mosque next door.

But my sympathy with Brand ends when he acts like his audience is likely to be fans of Fox News.

In a world where a negligible number of Redditors oppose gay marriage and 1% of Less Wrongers identify conservative and I know 0/150 creationists, how many of the people who visit the YouTube channel of a well-known liberal activist with a Che-inspired banner, a channel whose episode names are things like “War: What Is It Good For?” and “Sarah Silverman Talks Feminism” – how many of them do you think are big Fox News fans?

In a way, Russell Brand would have been braver taking a stand against ISIS than against Fox. If he attacked ISIS, his viewers would just be a little confused and uncomfortable. Whereas every moment he’s attacking Fox his viewers are like “HA HA! YEAH! GET ‘EM! SHOW THOSE IGNORANT BIGOTS IN THE outgroup WHO’S BOSS!”

Brand acts as if there are just these countries called “Britain” and “America” who are receiving his material. Wrong. There are two parallel universes, and he’s only broadcasting to one of them.

The result is exactly what we predicted would happen in the case of Islam. Bombard people with images of a far-off land they already hate and tell them to hate it more, and the result is ramping up the intolerance on the couple of dazed and marginalized representatives of that culture who have ended up stuck on your half of the divide. Sure enough, if industry or culture or community gets Blue enough, Red Tribe members start getting harassed, fired from their jobs (Brendan Eich being the obvious example) or otherwise shown the door.

Think of Brendan Eich as a member of a tiny religious minority surrounded by people who hate that minority. Suddenly firing him doesn’t seem very noble.

If you mix together Podunk, Texas and Mosul, Iraq, you can prove that Muslims are scary and very powerful people who are executing Christians all the time – and so we have a great excuse for kicking the one remaining Muslim family, random people who never hurt anyone, out of town.

And if you mix together the open-source tech industry and the parallel universe where you can’t wear a FreeBSD t-shirt without risking someone trying to exorcise you, you can prove that Christians are scary and very powerful people who are persecuting everyone else all the time, and you have a great excuse for kicking one of the few people willing to affiliate with the Red Tribe, a guy who never hurt anyone, out of town.

When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn’t see anything wrong with it. “I can tolerate anything except intolerance,” she said.

“Intolerance” is starting to look like another one of those words like “white” and “American”.

“I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?

I read all of the first spoiler. I think it just isn't true that "half of americans are 'God, guns and not GeorgeIII' republicans". I suspect that considerably less than 40 or even 35% would be that, so they are easy to just not be on those sites or even the web forum thing overall. The rest would be libertarian and other in-betweens.

 

[Bootstoots]

Okay, let's say the proportion is something like 30% who really believe that stuff, and 20% otherwise (apathetic people who go along with what other people around them are doing but don't have beliefs of their own, or who vote based on personalities, or who are libertarians, or who never vote, etc).

It doesn't matter: His odds of not having any hardcore conservatives in his circle of 150 best-known people would then rise to (0.7)^150 = 6 x 10^-24. Those odds are similar to those of picking a specific random grain of sand from all the world's beaches and soil.

 

[Kyriakos]

It happens with everyone. I mean i am not very likely to be friends with a Korean pop-idol, am i? ^^ Nor with a street beggar here.

Besides, the odds don't really mean much this way, cause you use the 150 (as in 'friends'), but that is infinitesimal to begin with. It is like saying you never got a Six while throwing dice 20 times. Well, yeah, that can and does happen. Let alone that being a chance event, unlike the close social circle. So his using probability theory is more hipsterish and wrong than useful imo