But when you see people cut through bullshit about how no-platforming is not censorship because nobody has the right to a platform and more bullshit about how there is no cancel culture because people are just being criticised and held accountable so well and with such sound ethical reasoning, then make the same claims for people who disagree with them and so already KNOW they understand the very fallacies they are engaging in, it does tend to make one despair of humanity. Maybe I am naive, but I just don't see how people can do that and maintain any self-respect at all. Some people were always clearly dishonest, but others? They argued well, They were consistent. They stood up even for those with whom they disagreed. Now they don't. Why? Culture war fatigue? Just giving into the pull towards simplistic narratives? I'm depressed. It's unusual to write anything so harsh, but I'm so disheartened by it.
I know exactly how you feel, believe me. The last year or so I have felt a combination of deja-vu and whiplash for a variety of reasons.
It reminds me a bit of how people get angry with comedians. You see them in the comedy club, so they presumably bought or accepted tickets. They knew someone would be onstage trying to make people laugh by saying outrageous and clever things, and have been sitting there laughing along with everyone else the entire time. But then the comedian shifts to a topic this person is sensitive about, and all that context and buy-in and understanding goes out the window. Now the comedian isn't a comedian doing comedy at a comedy show, he's a speaker making statements at rally, and this person gets angry.
There are some topics that reliably get people too emotional to think clearly, or for which they are beholden to other commitments—tribal, communal, familial, etc.—that force them to find ways to split the difference between the principles they claim to hold and the allegiances they can't compromise.
It's disheartening, but I have to realize that I'm very strange in the sense that I don't care if my own mother is angry with me for standing on principle. If my brother came to me asking to bury a body with him, I'd turn him in to the police. Not a lot of people will do that, even though they "know" it's "the right thing to do."
And of course there are also monetary and social incentives. Audience capture. The fear of losing one's social standing or social circle, etc. I'm fortunate that I've carved out a place for myself where the only thing that would cause me to lose face with my friends or lose my livelihood is to suddenly advocate for censorship—which I'm constitutionally incapable of doing. Not everyone is so fortunate.
I share your constitutional inability to do anything other than I am doing but unfortunately not the ability to not care that it pisses people off or upsets them, even when I know I shouldn’t care. This may be why my mental & physical health needs rebooting so often.
I also care that it upsets people in my orbit, but I have somehow recognized that the only way for me to truly respect and love the people I respect and love is to be unfailingly honest and principled with them. In my view, if I sacrifice my principles on their behalf, I'm corrupting not only myself but also our friendship, because it is now built on bullshit.
It's tough, though, because that means having to let people go if they want to leave, and I love them!
Helen, I completely understand why you have decided to "name no names because I still, perhaps naively, hold out hopes that some of you whom I have held in esteem will return to your senses ...".
But for the rest of us who (thankfully!) are not denizens of the on-line world that you personally know so well (probably to the detriment of your own health, as you say), it would have been useful to have *precise references*, so that we could see explicitly (and judge for ourselves) what these people are saying -- to see whether their arguments as hypocritical as you say, or perhaps even more so.
Yes, it can be quite difficult to reference online discourse because it's thousands of people referencing shifting speaking points and creating trend shifts in the 'speaking points' on the discourse. What my publisher and I decided with my last book was to either reference large, influential accounts with thousands of likes that have gone viral (which is what I also do here when I am speaking of one particular issue & can grab enough screenshots to illustrate it without exceeding my space) or grab some key words & put them in a search and then link the search so people can go to it and scroll through to see how thick and fast the fallacious speaking points are coming.
Even then, it's hard to get enough for it to demonstrate shifts in speaking points because you could find 1000 people saying the earth is flat this way and that's not a commonly held position that I worry about much.
It's not very satisfactory or helpful to people who aren't online, I know. I am largely speaking directly to those engaging with the culture wars regularly and already see what I am talking about regularly. Sam Harris has been good on tracing this and Claire Lehman.
"Speaking points" can't be hypocrites, it takes particular conflicting points being expressed by the same individual to make a hypocrite. A charge of hypocrisy is already an accusation against a person rather than a criticism of an idea. Without an actual person to reference, who knows if you're accurately portraying what any existing individual actually believes? There could be nuance in their beliefs that you aren't fairly representing, or they could in full self-awareness be weighing lesser evils, or they may not have thought about the particular contradictions you consider so self-evident, or maybe they're bald-faced hypocrites.
And the reason you give for not naming names doesn't make sense. You naming a name will not prevent anyone from "returning to their senses." Neither will refraining from naming a name encourage anyone to "return to their senses." If there really are public intellectuals that your audience might hold in esteem that you believe are engaging in such hypocrisy, you should be naming them and inviting dialogue on the topic.
But I hazard a guess that what's actually happening here is that these stances would be hypocritical if _you_ held them, because of your very particular personal take on "evidence-based epistemology, critical thinking, consistently liberal principles and ability to engage in civil and reasoned debate." But rather than engaging in the difficult work of discovering how people with similar values could nonetheless come to such different conclusions, you just want to take your particulars as given and frame the conversation as being about the hypocrisy of others.
Grabbing a couple talking points from a "side" and highlighting their hypocrisy is one of the easiest things in the world. Real engagement with individuals and their innumerable possible combinations of beliefs and values requires naming names.
Sam is an elitist who wants to dictate which Very Smart People get to be listened to, who has openly stated that he doesn't care about media withholding factual information as long as it hurts Trump, he literally lacks principles. Claire is a victim blamer who literally lacks principles. https://x.com/clairlemon/status/1902141206710382898
Something else both Sam and Claire have in common is that they were both absurdly wrong about covid and they both endorsed absurdly authoritarian measures. They're both horrible examples to use if you want to make an argument about supporting consistent liberal principles.
Helen, I read your Note responding to my comment from earlier today, and I just wanted to clarify, because I think you missed my point. This isn't about attack-ideas-instead-of-people, i.e. the difference between calling someone a hypocrite versus calling their ideas hypocritical (though I agree with you, that is a worthwhile distinction to consider.) Rather, my point was that if you're talking about hypocrisy at all, you need to be talking about ideas as believed by a particular person. Otherwise, you've just got ideas that sound contradictory to you, and would be hypocritical if held by you, but might be reconcilable based on even slight differences in nuance and values if held by someone else. To put it bluntly, in the absence of any particular person claiming to hold specifically contradictory beliefs, all you're doing in this article is calling out straw men.
Well, I disagree. I don't think 'strawman' is the right term because then I'd have to take a stated position from an individual and misrepresent it rather than speak to a general phenomenon.
I think I will leave it to readers to decide whether this is a trend that is happening - that many of the anti-woke are engaging in behaviours that they have themselves condemned - that can be usefully be addressed as a general phenomenon.
Some people will think not, of course, as they did when I spoke generally to the phenomenon of rising wokeness. They said I was having a moral panic when I addressed it generally and when I identified examples said that I was aiming at low-hanging fruit. Whether I spoke generally or specifically, many said that the progressive left was not having a significant problem such as I described and that could be identified as a general phenomenon and addressed as such.
You might well think I was correct to see wokeness as a phenomenon that really existed, but wrong about the anti-woke backlash and the problems I see with the ethics of some of its manifestations, of course. People can always be right in identifying one troubling cultural shift and not another. For more specific and detailed writing on this phenomenon, you could have a look at my two-parter "What is going wrong with the anti-woke" and "Seriously, what is going wrong with the anti-woke" and for specific responses to specific arguments made by specific members of the anti-woke, you can see probably a majority of my other pieces. I cite the individual first and then respond to them.
I have already explained why I don't think hypocrisy is the way to understand it and conceded that I am speaking to my own principles and people who share them while those who have different ones cannot be considered inconsistent at all because they weren't trying to live up to those principles in the first place.
I defend my decision to write this general rant (which I described as 'unusually ranty for me' when I posted it as well as my specific responses to individuals and more detailed analysis of specific issues. I don't intend to stop doing the latter two. I accept that you might not find it useful or convincing but other people who are also concerned about this and do think it is a phenomenon that exists are finding it so. I'll hope to convince you this really is a thing by consistently plugging away at it on a variety of levels.
"I don't think 'strawman' is the right term because then I'd have to take a stated position from an individual and misrepresent it rather than speak to a general phenomenon."
It's strawman-adjacent enough that you should be able to see my point. You're stringing up a bunch of "inconsistencies" and you seem to believe it's individuals being inconsistent.
A "general phenomena" is always going to have inconsistencies, because it's made up of innumerable people who will certainly not agree on everything. Munging up a bunch of inconsistent ideas from one side and speaking as if _any_ individual on that side holds them all is the straw that most strawmen are made of. And I'm sorry, but doing that sort of thing is such a source of heat-and-not-light in our discourse, it's why I'm pushing the point. Naming names and engaging in discourse with actual individuals rather than "phenomena" is actually a big part of keeping things civil, reasonable and productive.
Beyond that, I don't know what to say to the rest of your responses except that, insomuch as it was directed at me, you're projecting a hell of a lot onto me that I don't think or believe. And insomuch as you were just picking bits of what I said, combining them with bits of things others have said and responding to that...well, that's what I'm talking about, innit?
But for what it's worth, I wouldn't be a subscriber or bother commenting at all if I didn't see value in what you write.
"Munging up a bunch of inconsistent ideas from one side and speaking as if _any_ individual on that side holds them all is the straw that most strawmen are made of."
Yes, it would be, but I am not speaking of a "side" and claiming them all to have certain views. What side? The anti-woke? I am anti-woke. I don't claim we all agree. Here's a piece on how we don't.
I am criticising behaviours specifically in those who have claimed to value consistently liberal principles and what is true when people who disagree with them are going against that but not when people they agree with do. This is a very common phenomenon related to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias and I am urging anti-woke liberals not to do it.
I have tried to answer you as directly and as literally as I possibly can and address everything you have said and spent several hours doing so at great length. If you still feel that I have missed the point, not answered what you said and answered things you did not say, I don't know what I can do about that. I've done everything in my power not to. This is the best I can do. You'll have to accept that you've exceeded the limitations of my intelligence and reading comprehension and move on to someone who can better meet your standards, I'm afraid, because I can't.
I'm going to go back to break and one hour online engagement limit now.
Yes, the anti-woke. You are munging up a bunch of inconsistent ideas from the anti-woke and speaking as if any anti-woke individual holds really any particular combination of them. You're divorcing the ideas from the individuals holding them, then rearranging the ideas in a way that suits your points.
Helen, I largely agree with your sentiments. One of the most disappointing things for me in the past ten years or so has been recognising that all political movements are just as prone to dismissing classical liberal principles when their own part of the culture is in charge.
But one of the problems with some of the arguments you make is that they're clearly not evidence-based- it's like waving a red flag to a bull, inviting the criticisms of those most prone to motivational bias, the culture warriors.
Let me give you an example: 'any due process to determine that they are not law-abiding American citizens with every right to be there, but when challenged on the ethics of this, claim that this is simply the ‘deportation’ of illegal and criminal immigrants back to their homeland.'
As of now, there is no credible evidence that American citizens have been deported to El Salvador in the highly publicised Trump deportations. It's the sort of thing a culture warrior is going to pounce on for the simple reason that it's inaccurate. Obama deported three million people using due process laws stripped of all but the bare minimal protections afforded non-citizens. Immigration judges are not Article III judges. The primary difference is El Salvador. The only thing which has changed in America in relation to deportations is the political and media climate.
'
A better argument would be something along the lines of:
Trump used a very arcane legal argument to justify the removal of the very minimal due process protections illegal non-citizens enjoy. It may be expedient, but expediency shouldn't undermine the ethics a country like America, with its Constitution, aspires to. And whilst the Trump admin has at least been close to legal in its creative application of past laws meant for entirely different circumstances, there is a grave concern that in order for a non-citizen to be ethically deported to their country of origin, the country of origin should at least have a pretence of due process of law for its citizens. El Salvador is in a 'State of Exception'. The Bukele government has used mass proceedings called "mega-trials". Mass trials were introduced in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and copied by Mao's China and Castro's Cuba.
Now, there is a fair argument that the Bukele government was right to declare it's 'State of Exception'. The murder rates from gangs in El Salvador were medieval, and the impact on the economy of their activities was such that El Salvadorians were forced to remain in poverty because of their privations. Trump has all but closed the borders, and for that he deserves praise, but regardless of how convenient it might be to deport 'mostly' foreign criminals to jail without a fair trial, what does it say about the morals of a once great nation, when it values convenience over justice?
Do you see what I mean? One of the reasons why you keep getting snotty feedback from the Culture warrior types is because you blend genuine ethical considerations with statements which are rhetorically ridiculous or partisan filtered to the point of being strawmen. I think you're actually oversampling through elicitation. Generally, your observation holds though- people are decidedly less liberal when it comes to protecting or preserving their own sacred cows.
Here's the basic problem- what percentage of people would concede the following two points?
Anti-Zionism is not always anti-Semitism, even though the two are highly correlated.
There is no such thing as Islamophobia because in order for a fear to be classified a phobia it has to be irrational, although there is certainly anti-Muslim bigotry which unfairly targets and discriminates against Muslims.
It's my guess that not many people would agree with both statements, but it's a good illustration of myside bias.
It may be more complicated than that. People don’t just want to have the right opinion, they also want to be part of something bigger that has some power and often they have a which-side-are-you-on complex.
In the 1970s, I’ve seen hippie-like people become members of the, rather authoritarian and more or less pro-Russian, Dutch Communist Party. Not because they all of a sudden turned intolerant, but to become part of a movement that internationally seemed to defeat American and western imperialism everywhere, while their former circles got no further than dope, free love and ecological food shops. Once a communist, they started defending things they never had defended before.
As a parallel, you can feel yourself a liberal anti-woke for a few years, but it gets exhausting. You have no results, you’re not even part of a discussion more than a handful of people know about. Who is really gonna do something about woke? Areo? Quillette? Heterodox Academy? Come on. The GOP will, too bad a jerk like Trump is needed to do the dirty work, but he’s DOING it! Once coming to that conclusion, people are willing to support Trump on more issues, afraid to spoil the momentum of the thing.
It’s bad reasoning, it’s rather stupid, but especially in a two-party-system it’s bound to happen regularly and it’s not the same as having been illiberal all along.
Uh... well. Unfortunately the left is much better armed with "facts" conveniently lifted from material done by the left. They are also people much better trained in rhetorical debate. Lastly, they are supported by a wealthy captured media, nonprofit and legal Indusry.
But bullshit is bullshit and most people outside their elite academic bubble can eventually smell it.
Your claimed deficit in spacial reasoning capability is also a common malady of left people. They simply cannot effectively gage future consequences. They are myopic thinkers obsessed with historical and present. It derives a scarcity mindset and a craving for control over fatalistic fear of the unknown. They are largely Malthusians.
Yeah, I'm well aware of the problem on the left. I just dedicated a decade exclusively to addressing it and half of this piece does too.
Spacial reasoning has nothing to gauging future consequences. It's about the ability to visualise the position, size, and relationships of objects in space and mentally manipulate shapes in the abstract, work out where things are in relation to each other and navigate directions.
I'm not much interested in 'Everybody who disagrees with me is Hitler' reasoning, thanks. Even if the entirety of the left were as you describe which we are not, whataboutism to avoid addressing the problem on the right is yet more fallacious, children reasoning.
Maybe I am wrong, but I believe lower spacial reasoning capability has been linked with lower visualization capability. My observation is that there are word people vs picture people. My related observation, and it is of course a generalization just based on my life experience, is that word people tend to be more of the scarcity mindset and more often lean left. Word people are also much better at debate. They can develop significant rhetorical skills to sell an inaccurate point. Most attorneys lean left. Journalists lean left. Academics in general lean left. Engineers tend to lean right.
We certainly experienced this during the global pandemic. How many "facts" from the "experts" have been proven wrong and the claims of those dumb uneducated MAGA people have been proven right? Too many to count. The lack of visualization capability resulted in greater fear of the unknown to the point that real facts were ignored, refuted and denied for a dataset that better backed actions and policies satiated the fear.
Again, no. The visualisation is literal. I cannot visualise images in my head. This is not a political thing. It's an atypicality called 'aphantasia' and it's more common in systemising thinkers like engineers, techies, physicists etc. It's more common in autistic people which is probably why I have it. It is less common in people in the arts and humanities.
The rest of it is bizarre ideological woo that makes no sense. "Experts" are not all left-wing. The right-wing is not defined by being dumb and uneducated. How are people "proven" right? Please, try to unthink yourself from such narrow tribalistic narratives and engage with the complexity of reality. I'm out.
Maga was never right about the pandemic. The epidemiologists, virologists and others who worked day and night were dealing with a situation that was rapidly changing every minute. Have you any experience with novel viruses? The public wanted answers when it was too early to have any. The medical scientists did their best, but yes, communication was poor. Some of the research nerds used language that only people in their field would understand, so the public was confused. Plus they wanted to err on the side of caution. Better to over-do precautions than not do enough, because the consequences of the latter would be too horrible to contemplate. Sorry, because my own background is in biosciences and medicine, I still get irked when people so carelessly dismiss the blood, sweat and tears of the scientific community during the pandemic.
Yeah, we just don’t usually get to see the trial and error process of medical testing, do we? When we do, some people will say “Why can’t scientists make up their mind? Why should we trust them?” which really misses the point of how medical research works.
Some people tried to use our “grievance studies” project to claim we showed that “scientific” papers and peer review cannot be trusted so I wrote a rebuttal to that. In the process, I looked at research papers on covid. Every fourth one was a correction or qualification of an earlier one and they all had sections on limitations and what needed to be done before being too confident of anything. Critical Social Justice papers never, ever do that. Because they can’t. They can’t find themselves and others to be wrong because they don’t have criteria by which to test whether they are right or wrong.
Those papers and all the corrections and qualifications and acknowledgments of limitation ms gave me more confidence in the processes of medical science, because that’s what it should look like when scholars and researchers of any kind are doing all they can not to be wrong and self-correct when they are so it’s for as short a time as possible.
Thanks for that acknowledgment. Today I was reading an article written by a man who reviews research papers that have been rescinded or retracted, looking for trends. Regarding Covid, all the retracted papers purported to show vaccine morbidity, but were in fact plagued with faulty methods, bad statistical analyses, and more. He noted however, that they had been released and seen by millions of people who of course believed them, while the retractions went unnoticed and buried.
In fairness, 'pro science' or 'pro expert' voices bear some responsibility for this problem. When people say things like 'science says XYZ' this suggests that 'science' is a set of conclusions, as opposed to a method for reaching conclusions that will always be open to revision in principle.
There's also a tendency to conflate questions of what scientific research tells us about empirical reality with questions about what we ought to do with that information. So people will seek to defend their policy preferences by claiming that they are 'following the science'. Someone who disagrees with the policy proposal but who hasn't noticed the sleight of hand/ is-ought fallacy is then tempted to resist the policy proposal by rejecting its evidence base.
Yes, thank you for that, Kate! I think these are two important issues that get overlooked. People who make blanket claims on behalf of 'the science' as a set of truth claims rather than a method undermine science perhaps more than anyone and then rigorous scientists get held responsible for it. And the conflation of the results of scientific research and policies based on it also gets blamed on the methods of science and scientists themselves. (But you put it better)
Some people think reading a few abstracts is “following the science”. It’s a very biased way of using research, because it allows you to cherry-pick your pre-determined conclusion.
Naw. So much has been proven knowingly lied about that the science profession needs to self-destruct and rebuild. It was an authoritarian power grab, and a big corporate money grab... including grant money for research and money from clicks and followers in the new "see me the scientist, I am a celebrity" bullshit that has devolved with social media. And the fearful that supported all the crap still dream of those special days where people were forced to wear (ineffective) masks, forced to take an untested novel non-vaccine, forced to ineffectively social distance & ineffectively shelter in place, ineffectively close and destroy millions of small business, ineffectively destroy the lives of millions of school children.
And what did we know early on that these dicks still would not admit? That the virus was less deadly than the seasonal influenza except for old people and people with more than one comorbidity.
Yes, MAGA had it right and the "educated experts" did everything wrong.
It is not unreasonable to take a "wait and see" approach when the current US administration has only been in power for a few months, and it may not be reasonable to jump to the conclusion of "Trump bad" when there are indications of things that are going well, at the very least the sky is not actually falling. Earlier this month CNN reported inflation and consumer prices are dropping for the first time since Covid. The S&P 500 went green again after a week or so of volatility.
Trump has made multiple high profile deals to bring hundreds of billions into the USA to make the USA a leader in AI. A deal and partnership with the Japanese multinational holding company SoftBank, OpenAI, and other partners to bring in $500 billion into the USA to develop AI, which also means jobs for Americans.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to spend $100 billion over 4 years to develop chip manufacturing in the USA, which also means jobs for Americans. (And first nation to AGI would be a significant achievement).
In regards to tariffs Kaizen Asiedu has a post on X laying out examples of what Trump and the USA gets out of tariff negotiations. Mexico deployed 10,000 troops to the border, Vietnam cut tariffs on U.S. goods, Argentina met 9/16 tariff requirements, etc. https://x.com/thatsKAIZEN/status/1910094712679334113
DOGE has saved the US tax payer $160 billion from waste and fraud.
You see the candles go red and you're all too ready to assume the worst and you're all too ready to assume people not jumping on your doom and gloom bandwagon have abandoned their principles or are not thinking evidence based. I say there's evidence you're overlooking, that you're lacking big picture thinking that perhaps you're underestimating in others like Trump and Musk, and "wait and see" is reasonable because if Trump's decisions are right it will take more time for it to fully reflect (like the hundreds of billions going into USA to develop AI will take time to reflect in the economy).
You once said you didn't know much about Elon (I suspect he's one of the unnamed people you think is lacking principles) and I still recommend reading the works of Isaac Asimov as a method for better understanding how Elon thinks about things. He genuinely thinks his approach is what's best for humanity 10 years down the line, 50 years down the line, a hundred years down the line, etc.
In regards to your naysaying of people defending Trump in light of market volatility. There is more to it. He could very well be playing 4D chess. You don't know.
That still wouldn’t make the fallacious reasoning and ethical inconsistency any less fallacious, would it? That’s what the piece is about. I said at the end that there were non-fallacious and ethically consistent ways to argue for any of those positions.
I have come to think that intellectual dishonesty, where you judge others by a different standard than you do yourself and your own group, is the default human condition and that people like you or I must have some sort of autism or mental defect.
After the FWS Scotland win at the Supreme Court, the media falls over itself with sympathy for the gender distressed, barring the occasional 30 seconds with Rosie Duffield for balance. British Transport Police and 8 ball pool walk back their policies, to a deafening silence from everyone else. EHRC and NHS new guidelines will be ignored by the woke elite who still rule us, children will still have the fifty genders nonsense forced on them in their formative years.
Right at this point I’m not overly concerned at the anti woke backlash.
Helen, I appreciate the article and have seen a good number of similar pieces lately calling out the hypocrisy of the Right for abandoning what they claimed was principled outrage against the illiberalism of the social-justice Left. But, with due respect, there does seem to be a bit of willful naïveté here. I say this as an admirer of your writing (I read and enjoyed the astute analysis of Cynical Theories). The excesses and authoritarianism of the “woke” movement was first recognized and denounced by classical liberals, principled (non-MAGA) conservatives, and other centrists. In other words, people like you. This criticism was cynically taken up by the new, Trump-led Right, not on grounds of principled political philosophy, but to be used as a cudgel. This always seemed obvious to me. So I find it a little disingenuous that classical liberals are now shocked (Shocked!) to find out the Right never meant it. Who ever really expected a second Trump presidency to be a defender of civil liberties. Of course there was always going to be an overreaction to woke, because History, and the chances of that overreaction not being exploited by a Trump administration were always effectively zero. So, while I don’t disagree with the points you’re making, it seems to me that the truly principled classical liberals who first recognized the threat of woke should have seen all along the hypocritical grifting of the Right.
I don't know what you mean? This would make sense if I'd written a piece saying "Oh no! There's an illiberal right-wing opposition to woke too! Who could ever have imagined that?" But it doesn't. I'm very explicitly criticising those of the anti-woke who claim to be liberal and evidenced based for not being so and sliding towards the illiberal right. I'm trying to bring them back and I think I'm in a good position to do that, because I have been so critical of the woke myself.
Warning about the illiberal right and the way woke could feed into and empower that has been part of my writing since I've been writing about it. The first essay explicitly about that was in 2017. You say you've read Cynical Theories so you'll know Chapter 10 has a section on that. So too does the final chapter of The Counterweight Handbook. My forthcoming book "Reformers, Revolutionaries and Reactionaries: Has liberalism failed or are we failing to be liberal" that I've been writing for two years is entirely about that, although I appreciate that you have no way of knowing this.
What did I say that made you read, "I am suddenly surprised and shocked to find that an illiberal right exists?"
I also have a piece forthcoming called "Please Stop Assuming That People Criticising Illiberalism are Surprised or Naive" which may well be relevant here. There is a deluge of people who keep asking me why I am surprised that various kinds of illiberalism exist and it's utterly bizarre. How is unclear that I am a liberal who criticises illiberalism and not somebody who has just noticed illiberalism exists and am surprised and shocked by it?
I don’t think you’re understanding my point and maybe I didn’t express it clearly enough. There was always an element of the Right who claimed to be outraged by the woke Left, but it was all just a grift. Of course, the existence of the illiberal, authoritarian Right has always been in plain view. I’m not saying you haven’t always realized this. My point is, hasn’t the grift always been obvious and that the grifters would renege on their principles when it became advantageous. But then maybe I don’t know exactly who you’re referring to. We may be talking at cross purposes. Who are the "anti-woke who claim to be liberal and evidenced based for not being so and sliding towards the illiberal right”? Are there specific writers, academics, etc. worth calling out? Without knowing who you’re referring to, I can’t be sure we’re not talking past each other.
Yes, in some cases and no, in others. Some people have always been insincere and ethically consistent or ethically consistent and in illiberal right-wing ways. But others I have trusted and respected and been inspired by and they have slid away from being those people I thought I knew and I want to bring them back. Yes, you are right. I am not naming names, because I don't want to give up on people. Also, most of them don't have names anybody would know. They are just people I have been connected to on Twitter with a few hundred followers and I am watching them slide away from ethical consistency and into self-serving motivated reasoning and confirmation bias and become radicalised. That's what Reformers, revolutionaries and reactionaries is about. The revolutionaries are those who have become so beaten up by everything and despairing that they are exploding and wanting to burn everything down and start again. They think they are still liberal and can rebuild a liberal order following an illiberal armageddon but they're illiberal and reactive and lost in the narrative. The reactionaries have gone full radical right and want to give up on the liberal project altogether. That's not very clear either. I am tired and worn down by it all. I feel as though I am trying to hold things steady and get us all to self-correct and people I liked and respected keep going nuts all over the place. This is why I am meant to be having a break.
Sam Harris has been good on this.
"In recent years, I’ve watched several friends who I once believed to be good, or at least good enough, become ethically grotesque. This has been disconcerting, for many reasons. I’m at a stage in life when one imagines that one better understands, and accepts, human frailty. It is, therefore, startling to realize that the list of people with whom I can no longer safely share a dinner table is growing, rather than shrinking.
It says in the Gospel that one shouldn’t worry about the speck in another’s eye when there is a beam in one’s own. I admit that there is some generic wisdom in this, but I can’t pretend to believe that I have less integrity than the people I am now judging—for it simply isn’t so. These former friends are saying and doing things that are unethical. Knowing this, I believe I am right to find their behavior contemptible.
It's possible, however, that my friends didn’t change, or didn’t change much, and that I just happen to be a terrible judge of character. If so, I’m not sure what to do with this bit of self-knowledge, apart from becoming slower to decide that I like people—which seems like a depressing lesson to learn."
It's not that people were always like this and I'm just naive and didn't realise it. They are people who fully saw the problem and were with me in the need to oppose the illiberal left for many reasons but including that they will give strength to the illiberal right. Now they are the illiberal right.
Helen, thanks for the thoughtful commentary and personal reflections. I do think my hunch that we were talking past each other is correct. You, given your profession, are in touch with a different universe of people than me. I’m aware of isolated examples of the phenomenon your article calls out and in my initial response thought of mentioning this with a reference to Elon. And as a Sam Harris fan, I’ve heard him speak at length on the topic. It’s just that I haven’t personally been exposed to that much of the phenomenon you describe. I can understand how that would grind you down. It’s troubling enough to witness the parade of illiberalism coming from the left and the right over the last 10 or so years. When it’s coming from individuals you previously thought to be principled in their beliefs, I can understand how dispiriting that must be.
Premise: I agree with all you said and I'm very left wing.
On US deportations, though, I'm a little torn. Morally, there is no doubt you shouldn't treat those on visas as less-than-citizens. That's the law, though, and not just in the US: most countries reserve the right of expelling those who aren't citizen without due process, because it's not that they have committed some infractions, it's that being in a country that is not "yours" is generally NOT a right.
So while I fear the slippery slope and I don't doubt it is done excessively and disingenuously, I find it difficult to challenge the legal premise.
Or at least, I think one should criticize the very law that "permits" this even more than the usage the current administration is doing (I believe other countries give more rights to non-citizen thant the US does).
But you have repeated the misdirection. You've gone to 'people are complaining about the deportation of illegal immigrants' jumping over the 'to a concentration camp where people are crammed in inhumane conditions, tortured, never released & frequently die of poor nutrition & lack of health care.' And they may not have committed any crime & any who are American citizens have no process to prove this.
That was the motte and bailey I am referring to:
Like "Why do you hate people addressing racism" while people are actually objecting to being forced into unconscious bias training programmes and coerced into affirming their white supremacy at threat of losing their jobs and are fully onboard with ethical anti-discrimination policies.
If you are American and were somewhere else, I think you'd see a difference between a process that checked you did not, in fact, live or work there legally and, if not, deported you back onto American soil where you were free and able to build a life and one that just scooped you up without giving you the chance to show you were there legally & then handed you over to some modern day slavery ring where you'd never see freedom again.
We have a travel warning to the US now after a British backpacker ended up spending three weeks in a detention centre before being deported in chains because she'd got a tourist visa but had also arranged to do housework for a family she was staying with and the tattoo'd arm of a normal, middle-aged family man from Derbyshire appeared on a US database saying that this indicated he was a violent gang member border security was to detain. How could he show that he wasn't if there isn't any process? How could anybody who visits America or lives in America or whose ancestors have been in America since the Mayflower.
I don't think it's misdirection nor do I think you actually engaged with what I wrote. You are now highliting the conditions in the country of destination. I'm Italian, here we have a law (that is not always respected in practice) that you can't expel people if the destination country is not a safe one. Do USA have a similar law? I don't think so. They simply say if you're not a citizen I can expel you. If that's the case, then the problem is that the law allows you to expel people without checking if they'll be safe in the destination country. And I'm not surprised at all, since I remember people 40 years ago not allowed to enter the country because they had been to Cuba or even if they were wearing a shirt with Che Guevara's face. USA has not been a liberal country for as long as I have lived. I don't act surprised now because of Trump.
Then, I don't know how to answer you. You spoke of countries having the right to deport people without due process in response to me saying that when people talk about them being deported to torture prisons, people respond by saying countries having the right to deport people without due process.
That was the motte and bailey move I was very explicitly objecting to in the first place. People deflecting from the conditions people are being dumped into by talking about the right to deport people. I'm not NOW highlighting it. That was the point.
Later, I say that people can disagree on what to do about illegal immigration without that move and, if you are simply doing that, OK. You're torn on it.
Look, I don't understand what very tiresome tendency I have.
It just seems to me that we speak past each other. Maybe I don't understand or write english well enough. You say your point about destination conditions was clear. I actually (mis)understood the point you were making was about (apart from motte and bailey) the absence of due process. So I thought I was engaging with points you made. Meanwhile, my answer was meant to highlight that *IF* the US law allows that, the problem is not Trump using the law, or MAGAs doing motte and bailey, the problem is the law itself. Which I still don't think you have engaged with.
By the way, another commenter said similar things in a much more eloquent way, I didn't saw a reply there.
Of course you don't have to, and I don't intend to insist on tiring you, but I have a problem with letting things go when I feel what I intended was misunderstood. I admit I may have been unpolite, but I find it difficult when I am being accused of behaving like MAGAs, that's why I replied with the tone I did.
Oh and while we're here, I'd like to complain about UK too. A friend of mine was there doing a phD 20 years ago. A guard at the airport called on him but he didn't hear it. When they finally stopped him, they asked him with bad manners why he didn't stop before, he was pissed by the tone, and thinking it was obvious that the only motive one could have is that they hadn't heard, he replied "maybe because I have a bomb in my backpack". Admittedly not very funny, but he was then arrested and couldn't leave the country for TWO YEARS, without having any source of income, because the policemen appealed the first "not guilty" sentence just to piss him off more. Tell me about liberal countries again.
Again, you are all over the place. I haven't made any claims about the UK being perfectly liberal. I have spent more time criticising ways in which it is not because I live here.
But the UK detaining your friend for claiming to have a bomb in the airport does not have any bearing on any of the points in the essay. It's not as though, if that were clearly an illiberal act, it would make any difference to my argument that the anti-woke are engaging in the same behaviours they criticised the woke for.
You have a tendency to do this and it is very tiresome. Please try to engage with the points of an essay in your replies.
(I don't know the case you spoke of so I don't know whether it was illiberal or not. Usually, when someone claims to have a bomb in an airport, they have to clear the airport and cancel all the flights until it is confirmed that there is no bomb, even if the person says they were joking and thinks it should have been clear that they were joking, because the cost of assuming someone to have been joking when they were not is just too high. They should perhaps have signs making this quite clear. They do in Australia. It says "Joking about bombs in an airport is not funny" in big print and then explains that they always have to take this seriously & how many people's flights get cancelled and at what cost. I've actually thought about this a lot because I was very badly affected by OCD intrusive thoughts in my twenties and could not fly because I'd be terrified that I'd blurt out "I have a bomb" in the airport)
“Some people are just not very bright or have brains that are very good at some things but making or even recognising evidence-based, reasoned arguments is not one of them.”
Yes. Intelligence often seems to be very narrowly focused, particularly with savants. I think of the broligarchy who are convinced because they’re software geniuses or venture capitalists, they know everything there is to know and it is therefore their duty to rule over us. Elon’s pontificating on childbirth was the last straw for me.
Yes! Why don't people know what they don't know? I would have thought that when you are good at one thing or know abouit one thing that is complicated, it makes you aware of the things you are not good at or how complicated things you don't know about are likely to be and have more humility in addressing it, if you do at all. It seems this is far from consistently the case.
It turns out the problem a lot of anti-woke people had with motivated reasoning was disagreeing with the motivation rather than the reasoning.
Nicely put!
The thing is that a lot of these “anti-woke” and “heterodox” types were only right these last five years by accident.
For many of them it was never principled opposition. It was simply opposition, happy to dress itself in principle.
But when you see people cut through bullshit about how no-platforming is not censorship because nobody has the right to a platform and more bullshit about how there is no cancel culture because people are just being criticised and held accountable so well and with such sound ethical reasoning, then make the same claims for people who disagree with them and so already KNOW they understand the very fallacies they are engaging in, it does tend to make one despair of humanity. Maybe I am naive, but I just don't see how people can do that and maintain any self-respect at all. Some people were always clearly dishonest, but others? They argued well, They were consistent. They stood up even for those with whom they disagreed. Now they don't. Why? Culture war fatigue? Just giving into the pull towards simplistic narratives? I'm depressed. It's unusual to write anything so harsh, but I'm so disheartened by it.
I know exactly how you feel, believe me. The last year or so I have felt a combination of deja-vu and whiplash for a variety of reasons.
It reminds me a bit of how people get angry with comedians. You see them in the comedy club, so they presumably bought or accepted tickets. They knew someone would be onstage trying to make people laugh by saying outrageous and clever things, and have been sitting there laughing along with everyone else the entire time. But then the comedian shifts to a topic this person is sensitive about, and all that context and buy-in and understanding goes out the window. Now the comedian isn't a comedian doing comedy at a comedy show, he's a speaker making statements at rally, and this person gets angry.
There are some topics that reliably get people too emotional to think clearly, or for which they are beholden to other commitments—tribal, communal, familial, etc.—that force them to find ways to split the difference between the principles they claim to hold and the allegiances they can't compromise.
It's disheartening, but I have to realize that I'm very strange in the sense that I don't care if my own mother is angry with me for standing on principle. If my brother came to me asking to bury a body with him, I'd turn him in to the police. Not a lot of people will do that, even though they "know" it's "the right thing to do."
And of course there are also monetary and social incentives. Audience capture. The fear of losing one's social standing or social circle, etc. I'm fortunate that I've carved out a place for myself where the only thing that would cause me to lose face with my friends or lose my livelihood is to suddenly advocate for censorship—which I'm constitutionally incapable of doing. Not everyone is so fortunate.
I share your constitutional inability to do anything other than I am doing but unfortunately not the ability to not care that it pisses people off or upsets them, even when I know I shouldn’t care. This may be why my mental & physical health needs rebooting so often.
I also care that it upsets people in my orbit, but I have somehow recognized that the only way for me to truly respect and love the people I respect and love is to be unfailingly honest and principled with them. In my view, if I sacrifice my principles on their behalf, I'm corrupting not only myself but also our friendship, because it is now built on bullshit.
It's tough, though, because that means having to let people go if they want to leave, and I love them!
Well said and very focused on an open learning conversationionsl stance rather
Helen, I completely understand why you have decided to "name no names because I still, perhaps naively, hold out hopes that some of you whom I have held in esteem will return to your senses ...".
But for the rest of us who (thankfully!) are not denizens of the on-line world that you personally know so well (probably to the detriment of your own health, as you say), it would have been useful to have *precise references*, so that we could see explicitly (and judge for ourselves) what these people are saying -- to see whether their arguments as hypocritical as you say, or perhaps even more so.
Hey, Alan.
Yes, it can be quite difficult to reference online discourse because it's thousands of people referencing shifting speaking points and creating trend shifts in the 'speaking points' on the discourse. What my publisher and I decided with my last book was to either reference large, influential accounts with thousands of likes that have gone viral (which is what I also do here when I am speaking of one particular issue & can grab enough screenshots to illustrate it without exceeding my space) or grab some key words & put them in a search and then link the search so people can go to it and scroll through to see how thick and fast the fallacious speaking points are coming.
https://x.com/TheQuartering/status/1907814179173490782/quotes
Even then, it's hard to get enough for it to demonstrate shifts in speaking points because you could find 1000 people saying the earth is flat this way and that's not a commonly held position that I worry about much.
It's not very satisfactory or helpful to people who aren't online, I know. I am largely speaking directly to those engaging with the culture wars regularly and already see what I am talking about regularly. Sam Harris has been good on tracing this and Claire Lehman.
"Speaking points" can't be hypocrites, it takes particular conflicting points being expressed by the same individual to make a hypocrite. A charge of hypocrisy is already an accusation against a person rather than a criticism of an idea. Without an actual person to reference, who knows if you're accurately portraying what any existing individual actually believes? There could be nuance in their beliefs that you aren't fairly representing, or they could in full self-awareness be weighing lesser evils, or they may not have thought about the particular contradictions you consider so self-evident, or maybe they're bald-faced hypocrites.
And the reason you give for not naming names doesn't make sense. You naming a name will not prevent anyone from "returning to their senses." Neither will refraining from naming a name encourage anyone to "return to their senses." If there really are public intellectuals that your audience might hold in esteem that you believe are engaging in such hypocrisy, you should be naming them and inviting dialogue on the topic.
But I hazard a guess that what's actually happening here is that these stances would be hypocritical if _you_ held them, because of your very particular personal take on "evidence-based epistemology, critical thinking, consistently liberal principles and ability to engage in civil and reasoned debate." But rather than engaging in the difficult work of discovering how people with similar values could nonetheless come to such different conclusions, you just want to take your particulars as given and frame the conversation as being about the hypocrisy of others.
Grabbing a couple talking points from a "side" and highlighting their hypocrisy is one of the easiest things in the world. Real engagement with individuals and their innumerable possible combinations of beliefs and values requires naming names.
Sam is an elitist who wants to dictate which Very Smart People get to be listened to, who has openly stated that he doesn't care about media withholding factual information as long as it hurts Trump, he literally lacks principles. Claire is a victim blamer who literally lacks principles. https://x.com/clairlemon/status/1902141206710382898
Please go away if you can’t engage with ideas and arguments at all. It’s a tedious and pointless waste of time.
Something else both Sam and Claire have in common is that they were both absurdly wrong about covid and they both endorsed absurdly authoritarian measures. They're both horrible examples to use if you want to make an argument about supporting consistent liberal principles.
Helen, I read your Note responding to my comment from earlier today, and I just wanted to clarify, because I think you missed my point. This isn't about attack-ideas-instead-of-people, i.e. the difference between calling someone a hypocrite versus calling their ideas hypocritical (though I agree with you, that is a worthwhile distinction to consider.) Rather, my point was that if you're talking about hypocrisy at all, you need to be talking about ideas as believed by a particular person. Otherwise, you've just got ideas that sound contradictory to you, and would be hypocritical if held by you, but might be reconcilable based on even slight differences in nuance and values if held by someone else. To put it bluntly, in the absence of any particular person claiming to hold specifically contradictory beliefs, all you're doing in this article is calling out straw men.
Well, I disagree. I don't think 'strawman' is the right term because then I'd have to take a stated position from an individual and misrepresent it rather than speak to a general phenomenon.
I think I will leave it to readers to decide whether this is a trend that is happening - that many of the anti-woke are engaging in behaviours that they have themselves condemned - that can be usefully be addressed as a general phenomenon.
Some people will think not, of course, as they did when I spoke generally to the phenomenon of rising wokeness. They said I was having a moral panic when I addressed it generally and when I identified examples said that I was aiming at low-hanging fruit. Whether I spoke generally or specifically, many said that the progressive left was not having a significant problem such as I described and that could be identified as a general phenomenon and addressed as such.
You might well think I was correct to see wokeness as a phenomenon that really existed, but wrong about the anti-woke backlash and the problems I see with the ethics of some of its manifestations, of course. People can always be right in identifying one troubling cultural shift and not another. For more specific and detailed writing on this phenomenon, you could have a look at my two-parter "What is going wrong with the anti-woke" and "Seriously, what is going wrong with the anti-woke" and for specific responses to specific arguments made by specific members of the anti-woke, you can see probably a majority of my other pieces. I cite the individual first and then respond to them.
I have already explained why I don't think hypocrisy is the way to understand it and conceded that I am speaking to my own principles and people who share them while those who have different ones cannot be considered inconsistent at all because they weren't trying to live up to those principles in the first place.
I defend my decision to write this general rant (which I described as 'unusually ranty for me' when I posted it as well as my specific responses to individuals and more detailed analysis of specific issues. I don't intend to stop doing the latter two. I accept that you might not find it useful or convincing but other people who are also concerned about this and do think it is a phenomenon that exists are finding it so. I'll hope to convince you this really is a thing by consistently plugging away at it on a variety of levels.
"I don't think 'strawman' is the right term because then I'd have to take a stated position from an individual and misrepresent it rather than speak to a general phenomenon."
It's strawman-adjacent enough that you should be able to see my point. You're stringing up a bunch of "inconsistencies" and you seem to believe it's individuals being inconsistent.
A "general phenomena" is always going to have inconsistencies, because it's made up of innumerable people who will certainly not agree on everything. Munging up a bunch of inconsistent ideas from one side and speaking as if _any_ individual on that side holds them all is the straw that most strawmen are made of. And I'm sorry, but doing that sort of thing is such a source of heat-and-not-light in our discourse, it's why I'm pushing the point. Naming names and engaging in discourse with actual individuals rather than "phenomena" is actually a big part of keeping things civil, reasonable and productive.
Beyond that, I don't know what to say to the rest of your responses except that, insomuch as it was directed at me, you're projecting a hell of a lot onto me that I don't think or believe. And insomuch as you were just picking bits of what I said, combining them with bits of things others have said and responding to that...well, that's what I'm talking about, innit?
But for what it's worth, I wouldn't be a subscriber or bother commenting at all if I didn't see value in what you write.
Jack, I'm going to leave it here.
"Munging up a bunch of inconsistent ideas from one side and speaking as if _any_ individual on that side holds them all is the straw that most strawmen are made of."
Yes, it would be, but I am not speaking of a "side" and claiming them all to have certain views. What side? The anti-woke? I am anti-woke. I don't claim we all agree. Here's a piece on how we don't.
https://www.hpluckrose.com/p/what-is-going-wrong-with-the-anti
I am criticising behaviours specifically in those who have claimed to value consistently liberal principles and what is true when people who disagree with them are going against that but not when people they agree with do. This is a very common phenomenon related to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias and I am urging anti-woke liberals not to do it.
I have tried to answer you as directly and as literally as I possibly can and address everything you have said and spent several hours doing so at great length. If you still feel that I have missed the point, not answered what you said and answered things you did not say, I don't know what I can do about that. I've done everything in my power not to. This is the best I can do. You'll have to accept that you've exceeded the limitations of my intelligence and reading comprehension and move on to someone who can better meet your standards, I'm afraid, because I can't.
I'm going to go back to break and one hour online engagement limit now.
“What side? The anti-woke?”
Yes, the anti-woke. You are munging up a bunch of inconsistent ideas from the anti-woke and speaking as if any anti-woke individual holds really any particular combination of them. You're divorcing the ideas from the individuals holding them, then rearranging the ideas in a way that suits your points.
Excellent.
Helen, I largely agree with your sentiments. One of the most disappointing things for me in the past ten years or so has been recognising that all political movements are just as prone to dismissing classical liberal principles when their own part of the culture is in charge.
But one of the problems with some of the arguments you make is that they're clearly not evidence-based- it's like waving a red flag to a bull, inviting the criticisms of those most prone to motivational bias, the culture warriors.
Let me give you an example: 'any due process to determine that they are not law-abiding American citizens with every right to be there, but when challenged on the ethics of this, claim that this is simply the ‘deportation’ of illegal and criminal immigrants back to their homeland.'
As of now, there is no credible evidence that American citizens have been deported to El Salvador in the highly publicised Trump deportations. It's the sort of thing a culture warrior is going to pounce on for the simple reason that it's inaccurate. Obama deported three million people using due process laws stripped of all but the bare minimal protections afforded non-citizens. Immigration judges are not Article III judges. The primary difference is El Salvador. The only thing which has changed in America in relation to deportations is the political and media climate.
'
A better argument would be something along the lines of:
Trump used a very arcane legal argument to justify the removal of the very minimal due process protections illegal non-citizens enjoy. It may be expedient, but expediency shouldn't undermine the ethics a country like America, with its Constitution, aspires to. And whilst the Trump admin has at least been close to legal in its creative application of past laws meant for entirely different circumstances, there is a grave concern that in order for a non-citizen to be ethically deported to their country of origin, the country of origin should at least have a pretence of due process of law for its citizens. El Salvador is in a 'State of Exception'. The Bukele government has used mass proceedings called "mega-trials". Mass trials were introduced in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and copied by Mao's China and Castro's Cuba.
Now, there is a fair argument that the Bukele government was right to declare it's 'State of Exception'. The murder rates from gangs in El Salvador were medieval, and the impact on the economy of their activities was such that El Salvadorians were forced to remain in poverty because of their privations. Trump has all but closed the borders, and for that he deserves praise, but regardless of how convenient it might be to deport 'mostly' foreign criminals to jail without a fair trial, what does it say about the morals of a once great nation, when it values convenience over justice?
Do you see what I mean? One of the reasons why you keep getting snotty feedback from the Culture warrior types is because you blend genuine ethical considerations with statements which are rhetorically ridiculous or partisan filtered to the point of being strawmen. I think you're actually oversampling through elicitation. Generally, your observation holds though- people are decidedly less liberal when it comes to protecting or preserving their own sacred cows.
Here's the basic problem- what percentage of people would concede the following two points?
Anti-Zionism is not always anti-Semitism, even though the two are highly correlated.
There is no such thing as Islamophobia because in order for a fear to be classified a phobia it has to be irrational, although there is certainly anti-Muslim bigotry which unfairly targets and discriminates against Muslims.
It's my guess that not many people would agree with both statements, but it's a good illustration of myside bias.
It may be more complicated than that. People don’t just want to have the right opinion, they also want to be part of something bigger that has some power and often they have a which-side-are-you-on complex.
In the 1970s, I’ve seen hippie-like people become members of the, rather authoritarian and more or less pro-Russian, Dutch Communist Party. Not because they all of a sudden turned intolerant, but to become part of a movement that internationally seemed to defeat American and western imperialism everywhere, while their former circles got no further than dope, free love and ecological food shops. Once a communist, they started defending things they never had defended before.
As a parallel, you can feel yourself a liberal anti-woke for a few years, but it gets exhausting. You have no results, you’re not even part of a discussion more than a handful of people know about. Who is really gonna do something about woke? Areo? Quillette? Heterodox Academy? Come on. The GOP will, too bad a jerk like Trump is needed to do the dirty work, but he’s DOING it! Once coming to that conclusion, people are willing to support Trump on more issues, afraid to spoil the momentum of the thing.
It’s bad reasoning, it’s rather stupid, but especially in a two-party-system it’s bound to happen regularly and it’s not the same as having been illiberal all along.
Uh... well. Unfortunately the left is much better armed with "facts" conveniently lifted from material done by the left. They are also people much better trained in rhetorical debate. Lastly, they are supported by a wealthy captured media, nonprofit and legal Indusry.
But bullshit is bullshit and most people outside their elite academic bubble can eventually smell it.
Your claimed deficit in spacial reasoning capability is also a common malady of left people. They simply cannot effectively gage future consequences. They are myopic thinkers obsessed with historical and present. It derives a scarcity mindset and a craving for control over fatalistic fear of the unknown. They are largely Malthusians.
Yeah, I'm well aware of the problem on the left. I just dedicated a decade exclusively to addressing it and half of this piece does too.
Spacial reasoning has nothing to gauging future consequences. It's about the ability to visualise the position, size, and relationships of objects in space and mentally manipulate shapes in the abstract, work out where things are in relation to each other and navigate directions.
I'm not much interested in 'Everybody who disagrees with me is Hitler' reasoning, thanks. Even if the entirety of the left were as you describe which we are not, whataboutism to avoid addressing the problem on the right is yet more fallacious, children reasoning.
https://www.hpluckrose.com/p/why-liberal-lefties-need-to-support-daf?utm_source=activity_item
Thanks for the clarification.
Maybe I am wrong, but I believe lower spacial reasoning capability has been linked with lower visualization capability. My observation is that there are word people vs picture people. My related observation, and it is of course a generalization just based on my life experience, is that word people tend to be more of the scarcity mindset and more often lean left. Word people are also much better at debate. They can develop significant rhetorical skills to sell an inaccurate point. Most attorneys lean left. Journalists lean left. Academics in general lean left. Engineers tend to lean right.
We certainly experienced this during the global pandemic. How many "facts" from the "experts" have been proven wrong and the claims of those dumb uneducated MAGA people have been proven right? Too many to count. The lack of visualization capability resulted in greater fear of the unknown to the point that real facts were ignored, refuted and denied for a dataset that better backed actions and policies satiated the fear.
Again, no. The visualisation is literal. I cannot visualise images in my head. This is not a political thing. It's an atypicality called 'aphantasia' and it's more common in systemising thinkers like engineers, techies, physicists etc. It's more common in autistic people which is probably why I have it. It is less common in people in the arts and humanities.
The rest of it is bizarre ideological woo that makes no sense. "Experts" are not all left-wing. The right-wing is not defined by being dumb and uneducated. How are people "proven" right? Please, try to unthink yourself from such narrow tribalistic narratives and engage with the complexity of reality. I'm out.
Maga was never right about the pandemic. The epidemiologists, virologists and others who worked day and night were dealing with a situation that was rapidly changing every minute. Have you any experience with novel viruses? The public wanted answers when it was too early to have any. The medical scientists did their best, but yes, communication was poor. Some of the research nerds used language that only people in their field would understand, so the public was confused. Plus they wanted to err on the side of caution. Better to over-do precautions than not do enough, because the consequences of the latter would be too horrible to contemplate. Sorry, because my own background is in biosciences and medicine, I still get irked when people so carelessly dismiss the blood, sweat and tears of the scientific community during the pandemic.
Yeah, we just don’t usually get to see the trial and error process of medical testing, do we? When we do, some people will say “Why can’t scientists make up their mind? Why should we trust them?” which really misses the point of how medical research works.
Some people tried to use our “grievance studies” project to claim we showed that “scientific” papers and peer review cannot be trusted so I wrote a rebuttal to that. In the process, I looked at research papers on covid. Every fourth one was a correction or qualification of an earlier one and they all had sections on limitations and what needed to be done before being too confident of anything. Critical Social Justice papers never, ever do that. Because they can’t. They can’t find themselves and others to be wrong because they don’t have criteria by which to test whether they are right or wrong.
Those papers and all the corrections and qualifications and acknowledgments of limitation ms gave me more confidence in the processes of medical science, because that’s what it should look like when scholars and researchers of any kind are doing all they can not to be wrong and self-correct when they are so it’s for as short a time as possible.
Thanks for that acknowledgment. Today I was reading an article written by a man who reviews research papers that have been rescinded or retracted, looking for trends. Regarding Covid, all the retracted papers purported to show vaccine morbidity, but were in fact plagued with faulty methods, bad statistical analyses, and more. He noted however, that they had been released and seen by millions of people who of course believed them, while the retractions went unnoticed and buried.
This happens in so many contexts…
In fairness, 'pro science' or 'pro expert' voices bear some responsibility for this problem. When people say things like 'science says XYZ' this suggests that 'science' is a set of conclusions, as opposed to a method for reaching conclusions that will always be open to revision in principle.
There's also a tendency to conflate questions of what scientific research tells us about empirical reality with questions about what we ought to do with that information. So people will seek to defend their policy preferences by claiming that they are 'following the science'. Someone who disagrees with the policy proposal but who hasn't noticed the sleight of hand/ is-ought fallacy is then tempted to resist the policy proposal by rejecting its evidence base.
Yes, thank you for that, Kate! I think these are two important issues that get overlooked. People who make blanket claims on behalf of 'the science' as a set of truth claims rather than a method undermine science perhaps more than anyone and then rigorous scientists get held responsible for it. And the conflation of the results of scientific research and policies based on it also gets blamed on the methods of science and scientists themselves. (But you put it better)
Some people think reading a few abstracts is “following the science”. It’s a very biased way of using research, because it allows you to cherry-pick your pre-determined conclusion.
Naw. So much has been proven knowingly lied about that the science profession needs to self-destruct and rebuild. It was an authoritarian power grab, and a big corporate money grab... including grant money for research and money from clicks and followers in the new "see me the scientist, I am a celebrity" bullshit that has devolved with social media. And the fearful that supported all the crap still dream of those special days where people were forced to wear (ineffective) masks, forced to take an untested novel non-vaccine, forced to ineffectively social distance & ineffectively shelter in place, ineffectively close and destroy millions of small business, ineffectively destroy the lives of millions of school children.
And what did we know early on that these dicks still would not admit? That the virus was less deadly than the seasonal influenza except for old people and people with more than one comorbidity.
Yes, MAGA had it right and the "educated experts" did everything wrong.
You’re making some pretty extraordinary claims there without providing any evidence at all to support them.
And worse, science is white colonialism!
It is not unreasonable to take a "wait and see" approach when the current US administration has only been in power for a few months, and it may not be reasonable to jump to the conclusion of "Trump bad" when there are indications of things that are going well, at the very least the sky is not actually falling. Earlier this month CNN reported inflation and consumer prices are dropping for the first time since Covid. The S&P 500 went green again after a week or so of volatility.
Trump has made multiple high profile deals to bring hundreds of billions into the USA to make the USA a leader in AI. A deal and partnership with the Japanese multinational holding company SoftBank, OpenAI, and other partners to bring in $500 billion into the USA to develop AI, which also means jobs for Americans.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to spend $100 billion over 4 years to develop chip manufacturing in the USA, which also means jobs for Americans. (And first nation to AGI would be a significant achievement).
In regards to tariffs Kaizen Asiedu has a post on X laying out examples of what Trump and the USA gets out of tariff negotiations. Mexico deployed 10,000 troops to the border, Vietnam cut tariffs on U.S. goods, Argentina met 9/16 tariff requirements, etc. https://x.com/thatsKAIZEN/status/1910094712679334113
DOGE has saved the US tax payer $160 billion from waste and fraud.
You see the candles go red and you're all too ready to assume the worst and you're all too ready to assume people not jumping on your doom and gloom bandwagon have abandoned their principles or are not thinking evidence based. I say there's evidence you're overlooking, that you're lacking big picture thinking that perhaps you're underestimating in others like Trump and Musk, and "wait and see" is reasonable because if Trump's decisions are right it will take more time for it to fully reflect (like the hundreds of billions going into USA to develop AI will take time to reflect in the economy).
You once said you didn't know much about Elon (I suspect he's one of the unnamed people you think is lacking principles) and I still recommend reading the works of Isaac Asimov as a method for better understanding how Elon thinks about things. He genuinely thinks his approach is what's best for humanity 10 years down the line, 50 years down the line, a hundred years down the line, etc.
I’m not sure what you’re responding to. It’s not my piece, for sure
In regards to your naysaying of people defending Trump in light of market volatility. There is more to it. He could very well be playing 4D chess. You don't know.
That still wouldn’t make the fallacious reasoning and ethical inconsistency any less fallacious, would it? That’s what the piece is about. I said at the end that there were non-fallacious and ethically consistent ways to argue for any of those positions.
I have come to think that intellectual dishonesty, where you judge others by a different standard than you do yourself and your own group, is the default human condition and that people like you or I must have some sort of autism or mental defect.
Meanwhile in the UK …
After the FWS Scotland win at the Supreme Court, the media falls over itself with sympathy for the gender distressed, barring the occasional 30 seconds with Rosie Duffield for balance. British Transport Police and 8 ball pool walk back their policies, to a deafening silence from everyone else. EHRC and NHS new guidelines will be ignored by the woke elite who still rule us, children will still have the fifty genders nonsense forced on them in their formative years.
Right at this point I’m not overly concerned at the anti woke backlash.
Helen, I appreciate the article and have seen a good number of similar pieces lately calling out the hypocrisy of the Right for abandoning what they claimed was principled outrage against the illiberalism of the social-justice Left. But, with due respect, there does seem to be a bit of willful naïveté here. I say this as an admirer of your writing (I read and enjoyed the astute analysis of Cynical Theories). The excesses and authoritarianism of the “woke” movement was first recognized and denounced by classical liberals, principled (non-MAGA) conservatives, and other centrists. In other words, people like you. This criticism was cynically taken up by the new, Trump-led Right, not on grounds of principled political philosophy, but to be used as a cudgel. This always seemed obvious to me. So I find it a little disingenuous that classical liberals are now shocked (Shocked!) to find out the Right never meant it. Who ever really expected a second Trump presidency to be a defender of civil liberties. Of course there was always going to be an overreaction to woke, because History, and the chances of that overreaction not being exploited by a Trump administration were always effectively zero. So, while I don’t disagree with the points you’re making, it seems to me that the truly principled classical liberals who first recognized the threat of woke should have seen all along the hypocritical grifting of the Right.
I don't know what you mean? This would make sense if I'd written a piece saying "Oh no! There's an illiberal right-wing opposition to woke too! Who could ever have imagined that?" But it doesn't. I'm very explicitly criticising those of the anti-woke who claim to be liberal and evidenced based for not being so and sliding towards the illiberal right. I'm trying to bring them back and I think I'm in a good position to do that, because I have been so critical of the woke myself.
Warning about the illiberal right and the way woke could feed into and empower that has been part of my writing since I've been writing about it. The first essay explicitly about that was in 2017. You say you've read Cynical Theories so you'll know Chapter 10 has a section on that. So too does the final chapter of The Counterweight Handbook. My forthcoming book "Reformers, Revolutionaries and Reactionaries: Has liberalism failed or are we failing to be liberal" that I've been writing for two years is entirely about that, although I appreciate that you have no way of knowing this.
What did I say that made you read, "I am suddenly surprised and shocked to find that an illiberal right exists?"
I also have a piece forthcoming called "Please Stop Assuming That People Criticising Illiberalism are Surprised or Naive" which may well be relevant here. There is a deluge of people who keep asking me why I am surprised that various kinds of illiberalism exist and it's utterly bizarre. How is unclear that I am a liberal who criticises illiberalism and not somebody who has just noticed illiberalism exists and am surprised and shocked by it?
I don’t think you’re understanding my point and maybe I didn’t express it clearly enough. There was always an element of the Right who claimed to be outraged by the woke Left, but it was all just a grift. Of course, the existence of the illiberal, authoritarian Right has always been in plain view. I’m not saying you haven’t always realized this. My point is, hasn’t the grift always been obvious and that the grifters would renege on their principles when it became advantageous. But then maybe I don’t know exactly who you’re referring to. We may be talking at cross purposes. Who are the "anti-woke who claim to be liberal and evidenced based for not being so and sliding towards the illiberal right”? Are there specific writers, academics, etc. worth calling out? Without knowing who you’re referring to, I can’t be sure we’re not talking past each other.
Yes, in some cases and no, in others. Some people have always been insincere and ethically consistent or ethically consistent and in illiberal right-wing ways. But others I have trusted and respected and been inspired by and they have slid away from being those people I thought I knew and I want to bring them back. Yes, you are right. I am not naming names, because I don't want to give up on people. Also, most of them don't have names anybody would know. They are just people I have been connected to on Twitter with a few hundred followers and I am watching them slide away from ethical consistency and into self-serving motivated reasoning and confirmation bias and become radicalised. That's what Reformers, revolutionaries and reactionaries is about. The revolutionaries are those who have become so beaten up by everything and despairing that they are exploding and wanting to burn everything down and start again. They think they are still liberal and can rebuild a liberal order following an illiberal armageddon but they're illiberal and reactive and lost in the narrative. The reactionaries have gone full radical right and want to give up on the liberal project altogether. That's not very clear either. I am tired and worn down by it all. I feel as though I am trying to hold things steady and get us all to self-correct and people I liked and respected keep going nuts all over the place. This is why I am meant to be having a break.
Sam Harris has been good on this.
"In recent years, I’ve watched several friends who I once believed to be good, or at least good enough, become ethically grotesque. This has been disconcerting, for many reasons. I’m at a stage in life when one imagines that one better understands, and accepts, human frailty. It is, therefore, startling to realize that the list of people with whom I can no longer safely share a dinner table is growing, rather than shrinking.
It says in the Gospel that one shouldn’t worry about the speck in another’s eye when there is a beam in one’s own. I admit that there is some generic wisdom in this, but I can’t pretend to believe that I have less integrity than the people I am now judging—for it simply isn’t so. These former friends are saying and doing things that are unethical. Knowing this, I believe I am right to find their behavior contemptible.
It's possible, however, that my friends didn’t change, or didn’t change much, and that I just happen to be a terrible judge of character. If so, I’m not sure what to do with this bit of self-knowledge, apart from becoming slower to decide that I like people—which seems like a depressing lesson to learn."
It's not that people were always like this and I'm just naive and didn't realise it. They are people who fully saw the problem and were with me in the need to oppose the illiberal left for many reasons but including that they will give strength to the illiberal right. Now they are the illiberal right.
Helen, thanks for the thoughtful commentary and personal reflections. I do think my hunch that we were talking past each other is correct. You, given your profession, are in touch with a different universe of people than me. I’m aware of isolated examples of the phenomenon your article calls out and in my initial response thought of mentioning this with a reference to Elon. And as a Sam Harris fan, I’ve heard him speak at length on the topic. It’s just that I haven’t personally been exposed to that much of the phenomenon you describe. I can understand how that would grind you down. It’s troubling enough to witness the parade of illiberalism coming from the left and the right over the last 10 or so years. When it’s coming from individuals you previously thought to be principled in their beliefs, I can understand how dispiriting that must be.
Yeah. Sorry, I bit your head off a bit at first. I've been getting a lot of people point-missing today. See latest note.
Premise: I agree with all you said and I'm very left wing.
On US deportations, though, I'm a little torn. Morally, there is no doubt you shouldn't treat those on visas as less-than-citizens. That's the law, though, and not just in the US: most countries reserve the right of expelling those who aren't citizen without due process, because it's not that they have committed some infractions, it's that being in a country that is not "yours" is generally NOT a right.
So while I fear the slippery slope and I don't doubt it is done excessively and disingenuously, I find it difficult to challenge the legal premise.
Or at least, I think one should criticize the very law that "permits" this even more than the usage the current administration is doing (I believe other countries give more rights to non-citizen thant the US does).
But you have repeated the misdirection. You've gone to 'people are complaining about the deportation of illegal immigrants' jumping over the 'to a concentration camp where people are crammed in inhumane conditions, tortured, never released & frequently die of poor nutrition & lack of health care.' And they may not have committed any crime & any who are American citizens have no process to prove this.
That was the motte and bailey I am referring to:
Like "Why do you hate people addressing racism" while people are actually objecting to being forced into unconscious bias training programmes and coerced into affirming their white supremacy at threat of losing their jobs and are fully onboard with ethical anti-discrimination policies.
If you are American and were somewhere else, I think you'd see a difference between a process that checked you did not, in fact, live or work there legally and, if not, deported you back onto American soil where you were free and able to build a life and one that just scooped you up without giving you the chance to show you were there legally & then handed you over to some modern day slavery ring where you'd never see freedom again.
We have a travel warning to the US now after a British backpacker ended up spending three weeks in a detention centre before being deported in chains because she'd got a tourist visa but had also arranged to do housework for a family she was staying with and the tattoo'd arm of a normal, middle-aged family man from Derbyshire appeared on a US database saying that this indicated he was a violent gang member border security was to detain. How could he show that he wasn't if there isn't any process? How could anybody who visits America or lives in America or whose ancestors have been in America since the Mayflower.
I don't think it's misdirection nor do I think you actually engaged with what I wrote. You are now highliting the conditions in the country of destination. I'm Italian, here we have a law (that is not always respected in practice) that you can't expel people if the destination country is not a safe one. Do USA have a similar law? I don't think so. They simply say if you're not a citizen I can expel you. If that's the case, then the problem is that the law allows you to expel people without checking if they'll be safe in the destination country. And I'm not surprised at all, since I remember people 40 years ago not allowed to enter the country because they had been to Cuba or even if they were wearing a shirt with Che Guevara's face. USA has not been a liberal country for as long as I have lived. I don't act surprised now because of Trump.
Then, I don't know how to answer you. You spoke of countries having the right to deport people without due process in response to me saying that when people talk about them being deported to torture prisons, people respond by saying countries having the right to deport people without due process.
That was the motte and bailey move I was very explicitly objecting to in the first place. People deflecting from the conditions people are being dumped into by talking about the right to deport people. I'm not NOW highlighting it. That was the point.
Later, I say that people can disagree on what to do about illegal immigration without that move and, if you are simply doing that, OK. You're torn on it.
Look, I don't understand what very tiresome tendency I have.
It just seems to me that we speak past each other. Maybe I don't understand or write english well enough. You say your point about destination conditions was clear. I actually (mis)understood the point you were making was about (apart from motte and bailey) the absence of due process. So I thought I was engaging with points you made. Meanwhile, my answer was meant to highlight that *IF* the US law allows that, the problem is not Trump using the law, or MAGAs doing motte and bailey, the problem is the law itself. Which I still don't think you have engaged with.
By the way, another commenter said similar things in a much more eloquent way, I didn't saw a reply there.
Of course you don't have to, and I don't intend to insist on tiring you, but I have a problem with letting things go when I feel what I intended was misunderstood. I admit I may have been unpolite, but I find it difficult when I am being accused of behaving like MAGAs, that's why I replied with the tone I did.
Peace, and have a nice evening.
Oh and while we're here, I'd like to complain about UK too. A friend of mine was there doing a phD 20 years ago. A guard at the airport called on him but he didn't hear it. When they finally stopped him, they asked him with bad manners why he didn't stop before, he was pissed by the tone, and thinking it was obvious that the only motive one could have is that they hadn't heard, he replied "maybe because I have a bomb in my backpack". Admittedly not very funny, but he was then arrested and couldn't leave the country for TWO YEARS, without having any source of income, because the policemen appealed the first "not guilty" sentence just to piss him off more. Tell me about liberal countries again.
Again, you are all over the place. I haven't made any claims about the UK being perfectly liberal. I have spent more time criticising ways in which it is not because I live here.
But the UK detaining your friend for claiming to have a bomb in the airport does not have any bearing on any of the points in the essay. It's not as though, if that were clearly an illiberal act, it would make any difference to my argument that the anti-woke are engaging in the same behaviours they criticised the woke for.
You have a tendency to do this and it is very tiresome. Please try to engage with the points of an essay in your replies.
(I don't know the case you spoke of so I don't know whether it was illiberal or not. Usually, when someone claims to have a bomb in an airport, they have to clear the airport and cancel all the flights until it is confirmed that there is no bomb, even if the person says they were joking and thinks it should have been clear that they were joking, because the cost of assuming someone to have been joking when they were not is just too high. They should perhaps have signs making this quite clear. They do in Australia. It says "Joking about bombs in an airport is not funny" in big print and then explains that they always have to take this seriously & how many people's flights get cancelled and at what cost. I've actually thought about this a lot because I was very badly affected by OCD intrusive thoughts in my twenties and could not fly because I'd be terrified that I'd blurt out "I have a bomb" in the airport)
“Some people are just not very bright or have brains that are very good at some things but making or even recognising evidence-based, reasoned arguments is not one of them.”
Yes. Intelligence often seems to be very narrowly focused, particularly with savants. I think of the broligarchy who are convinced because they’re software geniuses or venture capitalists, they know everything there is to know and it is therefore their duty to rule over us. Elon’s pontificating on childbirth was the last straw for me.
Yes! Why don't people know what they don't know? I would have thought that when you are good at one thing or know abouit one thing that is complicated, it makes you aware of the things you are not good at or how complicated things you don't know about are likely to be and have more humility in addressing it, if you do at all. It seems this is far from consistently the case.