See also: 4chan.org/pol (NSFW)

This is like trying to herd cats. Nobody really has control over what these people think and say. My advice is on a micro scale, how to respond to these kinds of things:



Most of these comments are inappropriate, I personally disapprove. They really are said to provoke a reaction much of the time, so really, don't feed into it in an emotional way. It's the only correct response. I spent too long on 4chan to respond any other way.

Also, yeah, /pol/ and internet racists drive people away from Trump. The radicals always have and always will do that. Unless the Democrats start promoting these ideas or hiring them on as campaign staffers, it's not really their fault.

Continuing to be really mad about random internet people puts us in this situation:

What if my "response" to Sara Jeong's "trolling" is to vote for Donald Trump in 2020?

Does it make me a "bad" voter if I feel disenfranchised by the liberal elite for coddling people who represent condescending double standards?

I think if you weigh those comments more important than any of the other **** going on, yeah, you're a "bad voter". I highly disagree with how you prioritize your votes.

As Eversor said, the only thing making me raise my eyebrows is a few liberal journalists wrote some pretty poor defenses of her. I don't know why they did, but I do think too many people look "up" to the media. I have a hard time caring about what these people think already, so it doesn't really bother me when they give these ****ty defenses.

In fact, that's a big thing the Trumpy people I know obsess over that I can't wrap my mind around. A friend from high school would constantly post to Facebook about how awful and biased CNN was. I couldn't imagine who would ****ing care. Where do these people get all this energy to be really mad about this kind of thing?

If someone cares, they should write a Medium article. In there they can express their views on why Sarah Jeong's tweets can't be adequately justified as sarcasm. Then they can share it. Or something, I don't know, something where they lay out some really solid reasoning and don't just give emotional, short rhetoric. I subconsciously just said "get the **** off Twitter", but it applies across all media.

Wait, they're doing exactly not really this, all over Facebook. Haven't you seen all the long ass rants by conservative Facebook friends?

tl;dr: voters should just be more literate and less emotional about things they care about.

Isn't this kind of like telling black people they should just calm down and just stop shooting each other? Your expectations of the average voter are way, way too high.

That all said, I will fault the conservative media for whipping their audience into a frenzy in order to increase ratings or clicks. Unregulated for-profit news media FTW!

Like that Naomi Wu article. I didn't read the whole thing because I had no context. I appreciate so much so her style of writing, though. Really dispassionate, carefully expressed, informed. We need more of that.

If people could respond to people like Sarah Jeong more like Naomi Wu, and less like Twitter mobs, I think their comments could be responded to fairly and critically, and the authors held to account by public opinion. Which means, instead of taking that lump in your throat and writing short rants on Twitter, you sit down, collect yourself and write a more thoughtful piece on your opinions.

Delete social media.

Rants are rants, I don't read them.



What I really feel is social media should be deleted. If sensible gun control can help stop shootings, deleting social media can help people be more literate and less emotional in how they react to this stuff.

Apparently there was a time when Youtube became a haven for the politically deranged to make hours-long videos getting really mad about stupid ****. Which is basically ~the internet~ now.

Rather than presupposing a utopian society of purely polite and reasoned voters and social media users (lmao), wouldn't it just be easier to hold accountable the people who are in a position to know better than to behave just as irresponsibly as a 4chan troll, rather than letting elite institutions coddle their own when caught doing so?

Or am I now the one being condescending to conservative voters and social media users because I took away their agency when I presumed that every single one of them didn't have time to go educate themselves at some Ivy League university so they could make their opinions known in a more literate and coherent fashion by writing essays rather than tweets, so that Reid and I might find more palatable to consume?

Uh, yes? What I'm saying is, if you care about this enough, pressure the NYT in an adult and reasoned way. I'm not advocating utopia, I'm advocating you personally act better than the people around you. Everything I'm suggesting is at an individual level.

It's just really hard to understand who you are talking about here, because in most of your posts that concern individual conduct, I can't decide whether or not I should be reading your advice as intending to be received by people responding to Sara Jeong, to Sara Jeong herself, or pretty much any other possible person on the internet engaging in bad, 4chan-style behavior.

And yeah, Twitter is mildly to blame for existing in the first place, but then again, I'm pretty sure this woman was educated enough to know how to use it responsibly (compared to how she was actually using it).

But spreading the blame around to everyone else involved seems to me to be a recipe for weakest of sauces...

idk, I'm speaking to the cloud and to nobody in particular. If anything I ever said convinced someone to Tweet less, I'd feel my job was done. If we're being genuine about trying to fix the discourse, that can only happen if we change how we interact with the internet. Twitter and Facebook are, imo, the primary things destroying how people communicate their ideas to each other, and they bring out the worst in people. If I can convince anyone to use those platforms less, then I feel it's helping soften their impact, even if it's a drop in the bucket.



Twitter is literally designed to get you saying stupid ****, through the attention slot machine mechanism. The platform itself actively discourages discourse, and promotes inflammatory ****posting.

I like the idea that an Ivy League Education (or any advanced education) is the thing that would teach someone how to wield power responsibly.

If you'd like to get out your message to the world that people should Tweet less to the largest number of people, then you should Tweet it.

Source that explains how Twitter was "literally designed" to do that rather than being an emergent property?

Or is this just another example of nonsensical use of the word "literal" that has become so widespread.

I know, right? People esteem Ivy Leagues as high as the media, apparently. Spoiled trust fund kids, Ben Shapiros, and all other manner of people with their heads up their asses.



The fact that this would possibly work makes me want to punch a wall.

Well, okay, it's an emergent property. They weren't designed that way, I should say they're effective because of it.

Whatever you do, don't express that anger in a Tweet: that leads to the Breitbart side of the political spectrum. Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing.

Speaking of general disarray and the sowing of seeds of chaos, there's a Buzzfeed News article suggesting that the whole QAnon thing might itself be a big prank, based on Italian novel called Q published in the ’90s by an Italian leftist activist collective called the Wu Ming Foundation.

I totally agree with the sentiment here, but the particular argument I made is not a fringe view. It's a pervasive one, and it's prominently featured in some of the most prominent organs in the Democratic Party establishment, such as Vox, or even Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

In embracing identity politics so tightly, some prominent figures in the establishment actually come across as more radical than many so-called populists. It's a striking thing to see happening in intermural leftist debate.

Hey, I agree that the Democrats should focus more on class war than racial issues myself. I just don't see what your solution is for people like Sarah Jeong or the media response.

White people have spent the last hundred years learning not to be racist. By that I don't mean being told that racism is bad, I mean actually learning it; the vast majority of white people don't like racism and don't want to be racist. It's an on-going process and none of us are perfect, but it is on-going.

So, that's one problem with laughing about white people being sensitive to racism: white people been taught to care about racism writ large. We might not always recognize it when it's happening to other people, but if we did I don't think we'd be any less outraged about it. Racism is bad, no matter who is doing it. Obviously Sarah Jeong disagrees.

The second problem with laughing about white people being sensitive to racism: discourages white people from being sensitive about racism. And that's a problem because, when white people decide that racism is ok, we tend to be pretty comprehensive about it.



Important difference to keep in mind:

Naomi Wu can't respond emotionally because she lives in an oppressive hellhole that will use her ~feminine hysteria~ to publicly discredit her (just as they've already started using her personal relationships to discredit her, thanks to Vice). She has no choice but to be dispassionate, informed, and careful in her choice of words.

Sarah Jeong is a beneficiary of decades of social progress on free speech, gender and racial equality. She uses that freedom to act poorly.

I bet that's why Ocasio-Cortez's victory has been such an upset. Because she's a woman, and a minority, they can't call her a brocialist or use any of the same anti-Bernie tactics, and they're at a loss for what to do.

“Being married to a white guy isn’t a big deal in China” - Sarah Jeong

But conspiring with a foreign national to foment social change kinda is though, and if Sarah Jeong were as reasonable and informed as a journalist should be, she’d know that.

If someone feels as though they're being "driven away" from good causes because of a portion of the population behaves poorly on social media then I think they need to step back and reevaluate their priorities.

Talk about punishing the whole class for the actions of the class clown.

I see forgiveness for these types of issues constantly in my own political circles, and in my social media streams, all of which are heavily left-leaning.

A few articles poorly defending her obviously don't represent the entire left. Not to play the "not everyone" card but come on, I'm surprised that I feel the need to be point this out.

I'm actually surprised by the amount of blanket statements in these threads, you'd think with the amount of intelligence and critical thought people seem to exude here we'd be avoiding those, but I guess not.

That isn't what Eversor means. People aren't being reluctantly chased away from worthy causes because of a few bad actors, they're being convinced that good causes are actually bad because of pervasive rhetoric of the in-group.

I'm starting to think Eversor's communication style isn't compatible with me, because I fail to reach this conclusion from what he said.

Eh, there's reason I rarely comment on things.

It's like accents. You get used to it.

Oh I'm terrible with those too.

For what it's worth, I actually agree with what Eversor said. It's not even just a problem with malicious people: a lot of progressive jargon tends to be straight-up some of the most carelessly-chosen, alienating and polarizing-sounding language out there. Even well-meaning progressives trying to reach out and educate are gonna end up driving people away unless they are abnormally cautious.

Like mansplaining. Really important idea and observation, about the very real sexist belief held by the man who always knows better than any woman. I've never met a woman who hasn't had an encounter like that. But the shorthand sounds like a gendered insult (i.e. "condescending prick"), and Twitter *******s who learned progressivism wrong started using it as a gendered insult against their enemies, so now that's all it is: a gendered insult. And any text that contains it or talks about the phenomenon ends up discounted by the target audience because it's not constructive, it's just an insult.

Show me some. I'd be interested in seeing it. At the very least, it seems like an atypical behavior.

Jon did a good job at teasing out what I was getting at and restating it in more neutral terms, and I agree with everything that he wrote.

I expect that when people propagated this "white privilege" rhetoric, they had good intentions. They probably thought would be good to get rich white college kids to reflect on the "unearned" advantages that they receive; that it would make them more self-conscious, more empathetic to people unlike them. Perhaps to some extent it does do that. But the flip-side to it is that it also makes white people perceive their own whiteness as a salient identity (or even as the most salient one). And that's a real problem. When people start going around flippantly talking about how "white civilization is boring," inevitably you're going to get some people saying, "well, actually, white people have produced some pretty cool things." You really don't want people saying, "Well, actually, the American founding fathers were white, and that was good." You don't want people claiming these things as parochial "white achievements" -- ideally, you'd diminish the salience of whiteness -- and also, race -- altogether.

And if you tell people that whiteness is their salient identity, and that the Republican party is the party of white people, what then? If you keep challenging them, and berating them, and telling them that they're increasingly becoming irrelevant? I think that's why many people are annoyed about Sarah Jeong being hired. Not because they necessarily find her no noxious, but because they are frustrated because they see the NYT as endorsing her point of view. People find it frustrating, because one can no longer argue that a major institution doesn't find these sorts of views acceptable. Apparently, they're the sorts of opinions that the NYT thinks people need to hear more of (or something)? Her hiring demonstrates something about what the journalistic class takes to be acceptable, uncontroversial speech.

I agree that racism is bad no matter who does it. All of these people who define racism as not just prejudice but "power plus prejudice" get something really wrong, which is that you can talk about "punching up" and "punching down", but those things merely entrench racial hierarchy more deeply.

Unintended consequences aren't coincidences. Unintended consequences describe the phenomenon that a law or rule or system causes things to happen that you didn't expect because the system was more complex than you realized.

Here's an example. People want schools to be more racially integrated with the intention that kids get used to being around other races and to make it harder to neglect minority schools. But, as a result of that policy, most parents with the means move to the suburbs or send their kids to private schools, creating even greater segregation in the schools and the community. It's a real problem because it's easy to get self-righteous and angry about the ideology of regulation, but a lot harder to scrutinize the actual implementation. Partisanship is acting to protect lazy or corrupt implementations of ideas, because constituents are less willing to criticize those in their own party.

The real problem with the idea of "white privilege" is that it paints prosperity as an unjust advantage rather than painting poverty as an unjust disadvantage. The subtext is that, "middle class whites only have what they have at your expense, and you should tear them down." Not, "poor blacks need to be built up, because poverty is bad for everyone."

👍🏻

That said, there is a certain group that did enrich themselves unjustly at the expense of others, and in our countries it is predominately white and male (edit: but neither necessarily nor sufficiently). Fortunately, the solution to that problem is the same as the solution to the other.