Feb 25, 2017 06:57 AM
Social Media & Shaming
http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=10201
EXCERPT: While shaming was weaponized long ago as a means of punishment, social media has transformed it into a weapon of reversed mass destruction. Rather than a single weapon destroying masses, it is the social media masses that are destroying one person at a time. Perhaps the best known example of this is the destruction of Justine Sacco, the woman who tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” While Sacco is currently the best known victim of such shaming, the practice has become a common one and the list of casualties increases each day.
While it is tempting to issue a blanket condemnation of shaming, this would be a mistake. While shaming is abused, it can be a morally acceptable form of punishment. However, this requires that it be used properly and justly....
Milo and Tribal Politics
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/44...-tribalism
EXCERPT: Evolutionary psychologist John Tooby recently wrote that if he could explain one scientific concept to the public, it would be the “coalitional instinct.” In our natural habitat, to be alone was to be vulnerable. If “you had no coalition, you were nakedly at the mercy of everyone else, so the instinct to belong to a coalition has urgency, pre-existing and superseding any policy-driven basis for membership,” Tooby wrote on Edge.org. “This is why group beliefs are free to be so weird.”
We overlook the hypocrisies and shortcomings within our coalition out of a desire to protect ourselves from our enemies.
Today, the Right sees the Left as enemies — and, I should say, vice versa. Yiannopoulos is a hero for many because he fights political correctness and is transgressive. A flamboyant provocateur who wears his homosexuality on his sleeve and acts very much like a left-wing performance artist, Yiannopoulos gives the Right an edgy cultural avatar to pit against the Left. At a time when entertainment and celebrity matter more than facts and arguments, he is an entertaining celebrity.
Until recently, Yiannopoulos was also a self-described “fellow traveler” of the avowedly racist and anti-Semitic “alt-right.” [...] Last year, alt-righters got attention for hurling bigotry at Trump-skeptical journalists on social media. For instance, my National Review colleague David French was subjected almost daily to pictures of his adopted black daughter photoshopped into a gas chamber, with a Nazi uniform–clad Donald Trump poised to push the button.
Yiannopoulos’s defense of all this is that it is funny and rebellious: “Just as the kids of the ’60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock ’n’ roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations” with Holocaust jokes and Klan humor. It was, he and a colleague wrote for Breitbart, “undeniably hysterical.”
Well, I can deny it.
Countless conservatives defend Yiannopoulos (who admits he’s not a conservative) in much the same way Democrats defended the anti-Semitic “radio priest” Charles Coughlin as long as he supported the New Deal as “Christ’s Deal.” Conservatives cling to rationalizations to defend their champion. They say he “distanced” himself from the alt-right. Yiannopoulos did, cynically — only after “Daddy” (his term for Donald Trump) was elected. They credit Yiannopoulos’s claim that he can say anti-Semitic things because his grandmother was (supposedly) Jewish, and he can say racist things because he sleeps with black men.
These are the kinds of arguments a coalition accepts when it has lost its moral moorings and cares only about “winning....”
http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=10201
EXCERPT: While shaming was weaponized long ago as a means of punishment, social media has transformed it into a weapon of reversed mass destruction. Rather than a single weapon destroying masses, it is the social media masses that are destroying one person at a time. Perhaps the best known example of this is the destruction of Justine Sacco, the woman who tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” While Sacco is currently the best known victim of such shaming, the practice has become a common one and the list of casualties increases each day.
While it is tempting to issue a blanket condemnation of shaming, this would be a mistake. While shaming is abused, it can be a morally acceptable form of punishment. However, this requires that it be used properly and justly....
Milo and Tribal Politics
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/44...-tribalism
EXCERPT: Evolutionary psychologist John Tooby recently wrote that if he could explain one scientific concept to the public, it would be the “coalitional instinct.” In our natural habitat, to be alone was to be vulnerable. If “you had no coalition, you were nakedly at the mercy of everyone else, so the instinct to belong to a coalition has urgency, pre-existing and superseding any policy-driven basis for membership,” Tooby wrote on Edge.org. “This is why group beliefs are free to be so weird.”
We overlook the hypocrisies and shortcomings within our coalition out of a desire to protect ourselves from our enemies.
Today, the Right sees the Left as enemies — and, I should say, vice versa. Yiannopoulos is a hero for many because he fights political correctness and is transgressive. A flamboyant provocateur who wears his homosexuality on his sleeve and acts very much like a left-wing performance artist, Yiannopoulos gives the Right an edgy cultural avatar to pit against the Left. At a time when entertainment and celebrity matter more than facts and arguments, he is an entertaining celebrity.
Until recently, Yiannopoulos was also a self-described “fellow traveler” of the avowedly racist and anti-Semitic “alt-right.” [...] Last year, alt-righters got attention for hurling bigotry at Trump-skeptical journalists on social media. For instance, my National Review colleague David French was subjected almost daily to pictures of his adopted black daughter photoshopped into a gas chamber, with a Nazi uniform–clad Donald Trump poised to push the button.
Yiannopoulos’s defense of all this is that it is funny and rebellious: “Just as the kids of the ’60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock ’n’ roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations” with Holocaust jokes and Klan humor. It was, he and a colleague wrote for Breitbart, “undeniably hysterical.”
Well, I can deny it.
Countless conservatives defend Yiannopoulos (who admits he’s not a conservative) in much the same way Democrats defended the anti-Semitic “radio priest” Charles Coughlin as long as he supported the New Deal as “Christ’s Deal.” Conservatives cling to rationalizations to defend their champion. They say he “distanced” himself from the alt-right. Yiannopoulos did, cynically — only after “Daddy” (his term for Donald Trump) was elected. They credit Yiannopoulos’s claim that he can say anti-Semitic things because his grandmother was (supposedly) Jewish, and he can say racist things because he sleeps with black men.
These are the kinds of arguments a coalition accepts when it has lost its moral moorings and cares only about “winning....”