It's a bar!

It's a party!

And everyone will leave at exactly the same time!

https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/30/politics/supreme-court-gay-marriage-obamacare-poll/



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I didn't realize Disney was doing cosplay fascism now. Hey kids, isn't this marching down the street in an intimidating fashion really cool?

Like, Disney does have to know that Star Wars largely took its imagery from Nazism, as in literally much of it was designed purposefully on WWII, and that they may want to think a little bit about putting that fascist imagery in a positive, "cool" light at their theme park?

Though what do I know, I have no idea how to run a successful theme park.

What really gets me is the kind of random attacks on innocent stormtroopers this kind of display inevitably provokes.

Are you also offended by World War 2-themed video games?

IDK, do you know of any games which attempt to portray the Nazis as unerringly cool? That might offend me.

Battlefront

It's actually incredibly fulfilling to march down a street when you are really good at marching. Makes you feel really cool. Like a smelly robot.

True that. I had to march down on a bunch of rioters at a school one time. Shield and baton and helmet and everything. If I were on the other side of the street I would have pissed myself. We looked scary.

All of them

was thinking the same thing!

Protesting Star Wars because the antagonists evoke Nazi imagery is the future that liberals want

Hannity presented this as a list of the "awful" things Ocasio-Cortez wants.

Hmm..

I have to wonder: what is the actual argument for civility in politics? Not just some "common sense" thing, but like a real, fleshed-out discussion of the role of civility. It seems that it's just an unquestioned ideal that students are told is right when they take philosophy 101, but nobody ever thinks about the practical implications of civility, or ever discusses its scope or when it's appropriate. Given how relevant it is today, I think it's important.

Of course, anyone with half a brain can imagine why civility is good in some settings (good faith interlocutor, low stakes topic) and bad in others (imagine enforcing civility on Jews during the ghettoization of their communities). So trying to hash out some guidelines of when we should demand civility or not would be interesting.

Also I don't mean just linking some op-ed written by some nerd just lamenting how politics are so uncivil.

I ask in part because of this incredibly prescient article from 2014 on how all political fighting in the future will be similar to GamerGate:

https://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-and-its-gamerga-1646145844

The author makes this assertion:



It got me thinking about whether this assumption really exists (I think it does, to some extent), why it exists, and whether it still makes sense to follow this ideal today, or whether our political situation is more desperate than that.

Civility creates room for compromise and teaches the public by example to respect officials even when their chosen candidate is not the one who won. As far as civics go, I would say that civility between political adversaries is relatively important.

Well, unless your goal is to obstruct and debase the country, that is.

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don't expect me to act civil until we stop the white genocide

/s

That's great and all until you get to the point where you might have leaders who will do genuinely awful things. At some point, you can't be civil towards a leader you expect will do moral wrongs. (Don't read this too much as a commentary on Trump). When are people supposed to know the difference between compromise and respect for their opponents vs. a political problem which is serious enough to transcend civil politics?

Because, you know, it can happen, but people act as if it can't. And we might even be there today, with how balls-out the business party is engaging in class war.

well don't expect ME to act civil until after the mayocide has been fully enacted!

This current iteration of the "civility" debate is going along with an overly inclusive conception of the term that encapsulates things that, I believe, don't actually fall under the heading of civility in the strict sense. It's gotten to a point where I think that many critics of "civility" are criticizing things that don't really fall under the definition of civility, in my view.

But this is what I think the assumption behind civility is: being able to discuss ideas dispassionately is a necessary condition for free speech. If you believe that someone will respond to your ideas coercively, you will not be inclined to share your ideas (because there is a potential cost involved), nor will others who share beliefs similar to yours, and so the range of ideas permitted in the discourse will contract. That's antithetical to the idea of an open debate. So the idea is that there are certain norms of behavior -or a certain decorum, a certain set of social conventions, whatever - that ought to govern behavior associated with discourse, so that there can be an equality of voices, and inequalities of power (many of which have to do with brute, physical strength) don't determine whose voices and opinions are heard and whose aren't, and ideas can be judged on the basis of their persuasiveness rather than on extraneous factors.

So, in short: civility is the norms of behavior that make it possible for speech and persuasion rather than force to be the dominant means through which disagreement and personal difference are resolved.



What, are you opposed to reading or something?

/cue Hannity ranting about 'La Raza'

What do you envision when you speak of "transcend[ing] civil politics"?

Anyway, my argument against "incivility" (for lack of a better word -- maybe "direct action", is better) is that you can't justify tactics that involve threatening or harming people on the basis that 1) you have the morally superior cause and 2) the ends justify the means. It wouldn't work as a universalized maxim: you wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone believes that their moral convictions (or whatever else) entitle them to disrupt violently the lives of others, or to disseminate falsehoods that serve their political interests. If you accept, for instance, that Time Magazine can lie about a photograph on its cover because they like the message that it conveys, you probably need to accept that so-and-so right-wing pundit can play fast and loose with the truth when he wants to, just to take one totally banal example.

Right, like: punching Nazis is bad, not because they don't deserve it, but because there's no acceptable universalizable, formalizable rule that says you can punch Nazis and they can't punch you. The reason why they presumably are legitimate punching bags is because you've decided, by virtue of your belief that you hold the moral high ground, that they should be an exception. But you don't want to live in a world where a universalizable rule is: "there are exceptions to who in society is entitled to basic protections," because you might find that someday someone thinks that you fall into a category of exception.

It also happens that, when you introduce violence and threats into political discourse, you're creating the world that extreme elements on the right want to live in: a world in which power and hierarchy -- rather than right and equality -- determine who is entitled to safety and who isn't. The same is true when a person takes an ends-justify-the-means approach to the truth: you legitimize their efforts to do the same by legitimizing the tactic (or, in other words, by mainstreaming it, or normalizing it -- whatever your preferred lingo is).

Politeness (and respect, although to a lesser extent) here are only means to an end: they're conditions that make possible a certain kind of discourse. I think that's something that many critics of "civility" get wrong. Many critics of civility make fun of advocates of it, claiming that all they want is for people to be polite, as if advocates of civility champion politeness as an end in itself. I obviously can't speak for everyone, but I don't think that's generally the case. I think advocates of civility are concerned that increased antagonism will deepen fissures between elements within civil society and promote further extremism (since antagonism makes the different elements within society feel threatened and therefore more justified in taking extreme actions to protect itself, and also less willing to compromise on its moral and political prescriptions).

I guess I have to ask: what's the upshot of "incivility"? What is there to gain from it? What good will come from it? How does it help us win?

I think many people equivocate on the meanings of civil. I'm referring strictly to the sort of "play nice" civility, as in the sort where you're supposed to be really nice to someone like John McCain because he's polite, even though he'll vote for things which might harm your family.

This is different from the civil of the civil rights movement, which was actually really uncivil in the sense above.



Hold up. Are you saying the opposite of being civil is coercing people? I don't see that as following necessarily.



How do you think we should solve the issue that there is inequality of voices? Since Citizens United, your voice is as loud as your pocketbook. Doesn't this outright kill civil speech? Why should we police civility when the game is rigged against us?

Like, I get this is a fine ideal, but this is the exact opposite of the world we live in. Voices and opinions are suppressed, and are not judged on persuasiveness. In my opinion, that's not because people randomly decided to stop trying these things, either.



Okay, so, again, in an ideal political world, debates will be solved this way. What is the response when one group begins to subvert this? What happens when one group suddenly begins using different kinds of force to alter the political landscape, through propaganda and outright force?

Something killed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.



To rephrase the above, there are multiple uses of "civil" at work here. I'm not talking about "civil resistance" in the form of Martin Luther King Jr. nonviolence, the actions of which would be screeched about as "uncivil" in the sense I mean it. As in people who police the discourse incessantly.

I definitely mean civil in the sense that we're supposed to debate people in a forum or something, that extralegal political action in the MLK/OWS/BLM sense is "bad". There's also another way in which "civility policing" itself becomes a problem, which is better described here:





I mean, I think you actually could, you could say like, it's fine to punch people who openly advocate for ethnic discrimination. I don't think I'd be punched under that ruleset.

Think about this from the logic of an individual. The media around you is giving a platform to Richard Spencer, whom you despise and (in my view, rightly) view as dangerous. According to the "civil" ruleset, your only choice to fight this person who you perceive as threatening is to, what, schedule a Youtube debate? Because the media is more concerned with baiting people than informing people, they'll never let you on to speak against his rhetoric. What avenues of combating Richard Spencer's ideology exist in your situation? Not very much. People perceive many of the rapid unification of right-wing forces, its increased presence in media and its hostility, and the advocacy of civic violence threatening. (I define "civic violence" as encouraging politically codified force against other groups. When Richard Spencer advocates white nationalism, he's advocating force against nonwhites. It's abstracted, but it's still legitimately perceived as threatening)

Yah yah yah "all sides".



To be clear, I don't think punching one of them randomly, for no reason, makes sense. If they're currently in the process of advocating force, then I think there's some justification for using violence. I don't condemn people for punching Nazis at Charlottesville when they were shouting "Jews will not replace us", for instance.

This isn't a strategic judgment, by the way. It may be a bad idea strategically, but I don't think it's a bad thing morally.



Okay, when you introduce it: who's introducing violence and threats into political discourse?

I'm curious whether you think we do live in a world of right and equality over one of power and hierarchy. The world to me seems dominated by power and hierarchy - in America, if you don't have money or good connections, get bent. And it also seems simple things like where police actually police highly correlates with tax revenues, so like, yeah, power and hierarchy equals safety? Like the problem I have is none of what you says even remotely applies to a huge amount of Americans. What are poor Americans to do? They are effectively disenfranchised, I don't think we can pretend they aren't. As their lives get worse, do you think they only moral choice they have is to give better and better rhetoric or push through bull**** voting requirements en masse?



The upshot is, some uncivil things might actually work when all civil avenues have been exhausted. I think for many Americans, civility simply does nothing, and they will be flatly ignored for using civil means.

>makes a career out of complaining about how totalitarian leftists are

>complains about being banned from services

>was banned from PayPal for sending a Jewish journalist $14.88

https://www.timesofisrael.com/paypal-suspends-milo-yiannopoulos-over-nazi-based-trolling-of-jewish-journalist/

gee, this alt-right stuff is really hard to comprehend

Say more. It seems like, at the very least, being "un-civil" means that you are willing to use tactics aside from participating in a dispassionate back-and-forth conversation. If your goal is to achieve some political outcome involving others not through persuasion but through some other means, it seems as if the tactic used will be force.

I don't think I was clear about this before, but I think this civility debate is incredibly stupid. It's very unclear what the word even means. You can't really have a coherent discussion about the value of something if you don't even know what it is. It's better, I think, to talk about what are the phenomena you're actually referring to when you talk about civility (or its opposite, whatever that is). That's what I tried to do in my post: I tried to discuss what my concerns are about trends in the discourse, and what outcomes I want to avoid. Are those things civility or not? I don't know. I don't think it matters.

With that in mind, there's something I don't think I got a satisfactory answer from you about my last question about the upshot. (Maybe it's implicit in other things you wrote, but i'm not going to go in and try to infer it. I'd rather let you speak for yourself.) You basically said that you think incivility is worthwhile because civility can't go far enough to achieve the outcomes you want. But I find that quite circular, because I have no idea what civility and incivility even are! So when you defend incivility, what are you actually advocating? What tactics?

I think it's mutual, actually. When Michael Flynn led the crowd at the Republican national convention through cheers of lock her up, it was seen as a deeply scandalous, outrageous display of authoritarianism. It's now not even controversial to say that Trump and his sons should be thrown in jail. Nobody even bats an eye when it happens.

Some Republicans might claim: "you hypocrites! Don't you remember how much you criticized us when we said lock her up! Now you're doing it to our guy!" But it doesn't matter: Democrats don't care. To many Democrats, "yeah, but you guys did this at the RNC in 2016" is actually a defense. In some respect, some of them feel entitled to do it, in part because, as they see it: it's only fair.

The other side does it! So I think these things are mutually enforcing. When the right "normalizes" certain behaviors, they don't only normalize them for the right. They normalize them for everyone. And I see you doing that too. Your defense of using violence is "well, the right is doing it". Well, look what's just happened: the right just normalized violence, and you let them do it. You helped them do it.

I mean, I've got to ask: what's the goal of "uncivil" action? Is it catharsis, or is it change? If it's change, what behaviors and actions that you consider "uncivil" will overturn Citizens United?

As far as inequality of voices goes, at least as far as various minorities go, I think we've actually made massive, massive strides on this in the past half decade or so, and those advances have little to do with incivility. It has more to do with the rise of a new conception of inclusion that demands that people be more cognizant of how their speech may contain prejudice and bias that they may not be entirely conscious of. It has to do more with displacing a white, middle class, heteronormative experience as the norm. Those advances, I don't think, weren't brought about by incivility (again, whatever that means).

Why? Why does that particular speech justify the use of violence? Is it because people who advocate force should be retaliated against as if they in fact used force? Is it even clear that that's what that sentence means?

Or is it because this speech is itself an act of violence (as thinkers such as, say, Levinas talk of certain speech being violent), and so it deserves physical violence as retribution? If so, who is it violence against?

And who do you think you'd be acting on behalf of by engaging in violence against such a person for saying such a thing? (To be clear, I'm asking because I can imagine several reasonable possible responses to... well, all of those questions.)

So you think that by using racial epithets a person is surrendering their legal right to be able to press charges for assault? (Obviously, you don't think that's literally the case, as in, you don't think that's what the laws are. But you think that it would at least be a more just, fair arrangement than what we currently have?)



The idea that "an individual" finds another individual dangerous and a threat to society shouldn't count for much as far as justifications for violence go. A "perceived threat" to oneself really should not be justification for violence. Whether rightly or wrongly, people on the right thought that Obama posed a "personal danger" to themselves. George Zimmerman thought that Trayvon Martin posed a threat to him. Why are you so insistent that vigilantism is the only recourse?

I suppose I find it pretty unpersuasive that the inherent defensive posture of the left gives it a special privilege to have recourse to violence that doesn't belong to the right. After all, people on the right believe that their victimhood entitles them to the use of violence too. And they're not even entirely wrong that they're disadvantaged. In many respects, the left often punches down when it attacks the right -- people on the left are generally better educated, have better career prospects, are generally are wealthier, live in better parts of the country, have more job security, etc. White suicides are up, white males in the workforce is low, birthrates are low, there's the opioid crisis, etc.

I'd also argue that many of the more radical forces on the right are actually significantly less prominent than they were a year ago. Richard Spencer, specifically, isn't anywhere near as prominent as he once was. At first I think the media was really attracted to making him the posterboy of Nazism in the Trump administration. I think they have since Charlottesville wizened up to why that narrative was a derogation of their civic responsibility (because even negative coverage still promoted him and increased his prominence).

And just to go back to this, I'm asking because I don't even know if we disagree about anything. In some ways, the civility debate is perfect for a raging Twitter fight because the term is so ambiguous. Two people who actually have the same ideas about what's wrong with American politics can fight endlessly about it because they're getting hung up on a word and its denotations.

Okay for realsies, last one:



Yeah I don't really disagree with you about the inequality here. It's still better, though, to live in your personal life as if we do live in a world of equality, to treat others with respect and dignity, not to diminish them, and to insist that they're entitled to those things (including basic protections) even when they deprived of them, etc.



I mean, again, what tactics that don't fall under civility do you think would make an appreciable difference improving the lives of America's poor? To me, it seems like constructive things, like getting poor people out to vote, would do more. Why not start or participate in an online campaign and try to make it go viral? Raise consciousness of the issue amongst a critical mass of people, so that it enters into the mainstream political debate? Invent a national "Poverty Recognition Day" on social media. People need to do this work. Would "uncivil" action really be more productive at improving the living conditions of the poor than all that?

Bye bye abortion? https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/overturn-roe-v-wade?utm_source=In%20Our%20Opinion_06/29/2018&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WEX_In%20Our%20Opinion

https://old.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/8uu9ud/a_new_media_bias_chart/



Some people are losing their minds over this chart. It's some loose approximation of reality, right, I mean not perfect, but not entirely wrong (and strongly suggests left-leaning media is more honest..). But seeing how people react to it is just.. muah I wish I had the free time to poke these people with a metaphorical cattle prod all evening.

By the way, the person who made that chart actually sat down, collected data and tried to come up with a way of account for personal biases, etc.


It's not perfect, but it's a legitimate attempt from a person in good faith. Which means I think it's semi-trustworthy. However it rustles feathers *super* hard, and seeing people with dumbass political views get their feathers ruffled makes me gleeful.

A year ago or so I recall that an experienced American diplomat said that you have to look to the foreign press to really know what's going on in the country. This is why I get my news exclusively from The Daily Mail.

Also, Eversor, plan to respond tonight. For now, I just realized people can't get over the tea leaf reading of trying to put these things on an axis. Everybody has an opinion on how to order things, everybody is wrong because it's a stupid-ass task.