Like a story can literally beat someone over the head with a theme or moral and people somehow come to the opposite conclusion?
It’s like “Tyler Durden is so manly and cool” except every bit of media feels like it’s misinterpreted like that now.
Like a story can literally beat someone over the head with a theme or moral and people somehow come to the opposite conclusion?
It’s like “Tyler Durden is so manly and cool” except every bit of media feels like it’s misinterpreted like that now.
There’s a lot behind this and I don’t want to come off as if I’m pinning it all on a younger generation or [current fad] but it seems to have reached its peak to this point with the anti-intellectual tropes of “it ain’t that deep bro” and “sometimes the curtains are just blue.”
This is the culmination of a ton of factors in the west, especially the US, where decades upon decades of underfunding of education has finally had a cumulative effect a lot like deindustrialization. I know that sounds ridiculous but hear me out. For a long time as the US outsourced manufacturing, there was a skeleton structure of holdover manufacturing and logistics that kept things ticking over. Not like in the previous eras but enough that the problems as a consequence of deindustrialization didn’t manifest until later. It’s only as the last vestiges really fell away that it became apparent with the covid outbreak and the block in the Panama canal and soon after, the block in the Suez canal to a lesser extent (for the US) that it was obvious how bad things got. (That’s when there was the knee jerk CHIPs act under Trump to try and reshore semiconductor fabrication, but that’s a story for another time.) Anyway, a similar thing has happened with education and media literacy - there’s a genuine literacy crisis in the US that forms the backdrop of the media literacy crisis but both of these have been coming down the pipeline for decades. As education outcomes dropped, older people could kinda keep things ticking over and they could impart a degree of literacy in all modes just by encouraging it and setting a higher standard, and workplace expectations also set the bar to a certain extent. This has gradually slipped away though. These days it’s getting so bad that online people are getting AI to summarize content or a comment, then getting AI to generate a response, copy-pasting that, and then the next person responds by using AI to interpret and respond. This is because for some people their literacy muscles (literacy literacy or media literacy) are so underdeveloped or so atrophied that they aren’t able to engage properly and they need a crutch to lean on. It’s not all AI though, that’s just a symptom of the literacy crisis.
This is also where a lot of vibes-based analysis comes in too. People struggle to actually advance a thesis and, when they state a position, it often lacks anything to back it up and if the person gets pressed on it usually their argument crumbles like wet cardboard. You see this with people throwing out weird allusions where they just rely on a “thing bad” response. One example that comes to mind is that I criticized Mamdani for being a Zionist online. A person responded that he absolutely was not one. I explained that he openly supports the existence of modern-day Israel as a state given he advocates for a two-state solution and thus that makes him a Zionist categorically. The person rejected this argument reflexively but couldn’t actually offer anything more than “nuh-uh.” When I paraphrased Wikipedia and said that Zionism is advocating for the political project of an Israeli state and that Mamdani fits this definition to a tee, they couldn’t respond. But it didn’t feel right to them. They were wholly unable to engage with the discussion though and they couldn’t actually manage to talk definitions or principles and they were unwilling for me to dogwalk them to the point.
There’s also a sort of siege mentality amongst progressive libs. The conservative libs have been very anti-intellectual for a long time, longer than I’ve been alive, and the old guard of erudite conservative libs is long dead. As a whole they aren’t able to engage with anything to significant depth. But in the Trump/Qanon era, the progressive libs have been rudderless and they’ve been unable to defend the gains in the culture war, let alone getting their shitty candidates elected, and amongst them I see this sort of Weimar Republic progressive flavor of latent terror at the awareness that they aren’t able to fight back, let alone win. So they seem to have shut down and closed themselves off in response to the rise of (more extreme) reactionary politics. This siege mentality makes progressive libs incapable of engaging with literacy on any serious level. (Idk I’m not really doing my point justice here but hopefully it suffices, I’m tired.)
I also see a lot of people who can’t manage to engage in hypotheticals or, at the risk of coming off as a debate pervert, thought experiments. People genuinely seem to struggle with following through the logical extension of an argument. There’s a developmental milestone that comes to mind and I forget what it’s called but if you tell a younger child “Imagine gravity is reversed, so things fall upwards instead of downwards. If I drop an apple, what happens to it?” and a younger person who hasn’t reached that level of development can only use their experience as a reference and they can’t hold a frame where they consider the implications of a scenario where the imaginary rules have their own outcomes so they will respond that the apple will fall down to the ground, whereas the older child has reached the developmental milestone where they can respond with the counterintuitive answer of upwards. I’m not trying to pathologize this phenomenon by implying that people like this have developmental delays but if you don’t exercise engagement with these sorts of things, you lose your ability to deploy them. It’s a thing where it can hem in a person’s ability to engage in media literacy because if you argue that a character in media is basically a stand-in for Hitler, for example, people will respond with superficial rebuttals but when you defend your argument with “But there is no Germany in this story” they believe it vindicates their rejection of the argument instead of asking themselves what Hitler would look like in this fantasy setting where, instead of being a German in the 1930s, he is an elf in a high fantasy narrative - if you can’t hold the frame that there are different “rules” to the reality of a narrative, if you can’t engage in comparative analysis or symbolic analysis, if your whole engagement with the world is purely vibes-based then you’re gonna have very poor media literacy.
So imo it’s largely due to the education system buckling under decades of defunding as well as a political context where people are encouraged to be incurious coupled with technological crutches that make it easier to avoid engagement, but the tech aspect is very downstream of the cultural and political aspects (political including education policy here.)
That’s a reaction to bad teaching methods that teach that there is a single critical read to any piece of media. Sometimes it’s a good read, sometimes it’s isn’t. No matter, grading young people on the content of their read, rather than how they got their is bound to make many of them resentful.
This is actually a person engaging critically with a text (the media analysis). Maybe there is a lack of education, maybe they just enjoy being argumentative.
Engaging critical with critical texts is not only important but also transferable to other texts.
I don’t entirely disagree with what you’re saying here and it might be that I didn’t do a good job of explaining myself in the example but there’s an attitude or approach to media analysis where, purely hypothetically, you can lay out a case for why the Hitler-insert elf seized power after the burning down of Dorianeth tower and started vilifying and persecuting the half-elves is literally a play-by-play recounting of Hitler’s rise to power and how it’s a commentary on elven ethnonationalism in fantasy and how the fantasy genre lends itself directly to aristocratic beliefs that ultimately end in fascism (or something. I think I’m getting carried away here lol.)
But then a person will do a sort of poisoned, critical semi-engagement where they are responding but instead of genuine engagement with it they just seek to frustrate and shut down this analysis by saying something like “There’s no Germany in the story, wtf are you even talking about??” as a way of kind putting up a roadblock to the analysis rather than exploring where it goes, either by contributing to it or by critiquing it.
Not to be a dick about it but saying that the curtains are just blue is technically also a critical engagement with a text but generally I’d expect something more than that, although that’s not to say that it’s wrong; sometimes the curtains really are just blue and if you can make a convincing case for that then I’m on board with it even if I ultimately disagree. But I’m not gonna hold someone’s hand through articulating this position because I’ve got better things to do, especially if it’s being done as an alternative way of saying “shut up”.
I guess what I’m driving at is the anti-intellectual weaponizing of critical engagement to try and stymie deeper critical engagement here.
I mostly agree. I just think it’s useful to engage with people a lot more often than is appearant.
People oftentimes won’t tell you when you changed their mind even in small ways, because they have their pride.
I don’t think that recognizing something like a Nazi allegory is that trivial, as antifascists, we are just very practiced at it.
Yeah, I’m with you on that.
I think the cumulative effect of a lot of small discussions like this amount to qualitative change in people’s values and you’re right in that you don’t often see it. I believe that the person themselves often doesn’t even notice it, especially when it’s small, but over time if there’s enough of these moments then it can often set them down a different path or it can even bring on an epiphany.
I know for me, I was an anarchist for a very long time. I often say that finally reading Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? is what brought about the watershed moment for me but there’s a series of smaller events and experiences I had that led up to that point as well, and that’s only of the ones that I can definitely identify. I’m certain there are other ones that made an impact that I wouldn’t be able to recall that shifted my outlook in subtle ways too.
CHIPs act was Biden
Oh whoops. *Post Trump 1.0
My bad, thanks for the correction!
I’ve been complaining about the literacy issue in the west for awhile now. Its scary af
I have to remember to breathe.
Online discourse is wild these days, and not in a good way. I can’t even use an analogy or propose the logical extension of an argument without people flipping out:
Yes, I know that the analogy isn’t a 1:1 representation of the reality; that’s the nature of an analogy. If the analogy was perfectly accurate it would cease to function as an analogy. You can dispute my framing of the analogy or you can elaborate to defend your position but pointing out that the analogy is an analogy does not dispute the point being made.
Yes, I know that when I said “By that logic, you can defend x or y using the same argument” I wasn’t representing your words. In fact, I was very explicitly not representing your words and, if I was, I would have just quoted you directly instead. I was literally telling you how I understand your position and inviting you to justify how you support one thing but oppose the other when your defence of one can be directly applied to the defence of the other.
I think your two examples are less about a lack of literacy and more about people defaulting to reddit-style pedantry because it’s easier than engaging the merits of whoever you’re talking to.
I bet 90% of “your analogy doesn’t work”-style comments aren’t people misunderstanding what analogies are, and probably aren’t even bad faith, but are people attacking the analogy because doing so is an easy way to disagree.
That’s a fair point but in my experience it’s not nearly as self-aware a form of deception because when I’ve gotten into the weeds with them, they actually can’t make the connection most of the time. I can usually detect the reddit-tier smuglords straight away because they almost always tip their hand by presuming they’re the smartest person in the room and they’ll use big words to try and impress their superior intellect and shit like that. And those ones are definitely capable of playing rhetorical tricks like you’ve described (I generally don’t bother with this group of people because they just want to “win”, they don’t actually care about anything beyond that and I’d prefer if they stay a lib because if it’s a choice between having them acting corrosively in the discourse as a radical or doing the same as a liberal, it’s worth more for my efforts if they stay right where they are and poison their own liberal political discourse. Not that it’s really worth the effort trying to rehabilitate someone who is deep in that mentality anyway.)
With this other group it’s characterized by this underdeveloped position. If I can get them to engage long enough, then for example they will justify Israel’s actions and I’ll say that everything they’re saying can be used to justify the genocide of native Americans by the US and they’ll reject it. Then I’ll quote their arguments either word for word in “defence” of the genocide of native Americans or I’ll slightly adapt the wording. They respond by telling me why that’s wrong and it’s not okay. Then I will use their counterargument to say that what Israel is doing is also wrong and they’ll refute it, at which point I’ll take their refutation and use it to justify the genocide of native Americans. It can go round and round like that for quite a while. Sometimes they even get angry at me because they think I’m genuinely defending the genocide of native Americans rather than trying to highlight the contradictions in their own beliefs, even when I’ve been explicit about doing as much. And the thing is, at least in my experience, they just don’t get it. Like I can see them not connecting what I’m telling them because they aren’t able to engage with the meta level of the argument, they just argue from the place of their beliefs being right and not actually being able/willing to see where they are inconsistent.
(Caveat to say that I don’t like doing this and I’d much rather argue principles or facts but if it gets down to it, I’ll do it if it’s necessary. I find it tedious as fuck and honestly I do anything to avoid it getting to that place if I can because I loathe it so much.)
I had someone get in my DMs on another site and the way they interacted made me question what humans are. They refused to let me actually talk about the argument that they were making or paraphrase anything because I was “putting words in their mouth” to literally just describe their position. And I don’t mean that I called them a bourgeois chauvinist supporting white supremacy, I literally mean describing something on the most basic level of “The Earth is round” being a claim about astronomy, or “Evolution is impossible” being a biological claim. No, I was just putting words in their mouth and avoiding talking about the subject itself. I cannot stress enough that I made a claim of exactly that structure and somehow got that response, and then only got doubling-down after that.
I know complaining about an internet argument is lame as fuck, but I seriously was baffled by it in a way that I can’t even begin to articulate, and that’s despite the fact that assessing arguments is probably one of the only things that I’m genuinely good at, and trying to understand motivated reasoning is one of my biggest interests. Like, their actual position was just dogwater chauvinism and not remotely interesting, but the way that they talked about it has put a fucking parasite in my brain.
I think this is different, although I’m pretty partial to complaining about internet arguments so maybe I’m biased but I think it’s valuable to examine what’s going on in culture and to discuss the trends. If you’re going online to do victory laps or to lick your wounds over an internet argument then that’s pretty cringey but if it’s in service of making sense of culture and discourse or furnishing people with arguments then it takes on a very different quality.
I’ve had the same experience you’ve described and I think it’s a manifestation of that siege mentality that I didn’t do a good job of describing above, and it’s happened more often than for it to be some random event.
I can’t remember the exact discussions but as an example, someone makes a statement and I’ll ask them if they agree/disagree with an uncontroversial premise. Not like “So you think killing is wrong, that means you wish that Hitler never died. You’re a Nazi sympathizer.” kind of thing but like “So if there are colors that exist outside the visible spectrum, do you agree that humans aren’t able to accurately experience all of reality because the inherent limitations of our biology?” sort of thing.
And I’ve had multiple people flip out and accuse me of putting words in their mouth. My guy, I’m literally asking you a question - that’s the opposite of putting words in your mouth. Usually I’m trying to assess whether it’s worthwhile continuing the discussion or I’m trying to establish a foundation of points we agree upon so we can understand each other better, I’m not trying to “trick” you into saying the “wrong” thing.
I think it’s partly to do with how polarized the mainstream discourse and mainstream politics has become, partly to do with people being victims of debate pervertry (unironically), online culture being absolute garbage, and beneath it all I think it’s only capable of existing due to how hyper-alienated and atomized people are; if you have a community of people who value you and respect you then you’re gonna be pretty insulated from what some internet stranger thinks of you but if you’re really lacking in connection and community then you’re gonna be much more liable to amplify the importance of internet exchanges and you’re gonna feel like it’s life-or-death so you’re gonna respond that way. I’m not trying to be unsympathetic here and to tell people to just log off, although it would go a long way, but I see it as largely being a symptom of being socially disconnected and, to put it bluntly, a symptom of a fundamentally unwell society.
I mostly agree, though for reasons that I mostly hadn’t given you I think in the case I was talking about, as I think about it more, I have a really strong feeling that this person in my story was themselves a (very bad) debate pervert rather than just a victim of one.
This is highly speculative of me, but I struggle to make another coherent picture: I feel as though the issue is that they’re the sort of debate pervert who wasn’t actually in a debate club or who studied philosophy or even really studied anything at all, but literally are just a fan of Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk and want to act out the spectacle of being a debatelord without remotely understanding how people communicate even for the purpose of abusing good faith to harm people or something like that. One of the biggest problems with this is that these videos always model the debatelord having total control over the conversation all throughout, because times where they didn’t have total control were simply edited out. As you and I know, this is not how real arguments (let alone conversations) normally go, even when one side is plainly superior to the other, so it just sort of broke down over an incredibly mundane conversational element because they were unprepared to actually talk to someone, they were only prepared to perform in an “SJW owned” stage play that they decided to cast me in for some fucking reason. There is no other human with their own agency, just an NPC for you to perform combos and trickshots on.
I was reminded so much of “The Look” from Sartre, where the voyeur enjoys viewing others in secret, but feels horribly self-conscious when they realize that they too were being watched, because now they must confront themselves as an object of someone else’s perception rather than an invisible subject for whom others are merely something to be unilaterally experienced. The difference here of course is that our new voyeur can fully make eye contact with people and still not see their humanity such that they are confronted with self-consciousness, it requires intervention on the part of others to break them from this blissful self-obliviousness and even then, they first resist it with a siege mentality like you describe before ever confronting such a thing. So it’s not just mere intervention, but effectively being overpowered, at least momentarily.
Of course, this nonetheless produces your conclusion:
But again, this is extremely speculative and basically just my feelings on this after spending too long trying to make sense of it and failing to produce a good answer.
You’ve gotta trust your instincts on these things.
This is such a good way of putting it.
Ultimately you’re never gonna know exactly what was motivating that behavior in them and you’ll sooner go mad trying to make sense of it than you will arriving at a comprehensive and accurate understanding of it.
There’s another aspect I didn’t really go into where online discourse has degraded to often being symbolic, both in the sense that you’ve described above and in the sense of “I depicted you as the soyjak…” So much of what I see being used as placeholders for arguments that are articulated is “This is x” but people aren’t able to provide their justification for it and it’s just devoid of substance. I think that’s partly due to people not being expected to write out a decent essay justifying their take on a novel or movie in school anymore, partly due to the internet culture becoming very siloed into echo chambers so people become accustomed to getting praise and validation because they can just say something like “Vaush Derangement Syndrome” and they collect dozens of upvotes for just invoking the same old tired trope (algorithms have a lot to answer for in this respect), and partly because they aren’t capable of doing more than vibes-based analysis. (I’m gonna sound curmudgeonly, and maybe I am, but it feels like the art of discussion is becoming endangered.)
There was that video that dropped recently where some content creator on the progressive left claimed in a video essay that a few figures were “recruiting leftists to become Nazis by using dogwhistles.” Big if true. Now I’m loath to entertain peak breadtuber pseudointellectual content stretching where they read through a paraphrasing of the Wikipedia entry on dogwhistles and fascism but this creator made the accusation that The Kavernacle, amongst others, was a cryptofascist who was turning people into fascists. Their argument amounted to nothing besides “He has a colonizer accent, he speaks with a flat affect, and he interrupts his girlfriend on streams [with the implication that this is domestic abuse]”. There wasn’t any attempt to make criteria for the argument and to show how it was being met, it was basically just being asserted as self-evident fact.
I’m not a huge fan of The Kavernacle - he’s fine, just a bit 101 for my tastes and kinda uninteresting to me. But at no point did the creator elaborate how he was using dogwhistles or how you can turn a leftist into a Nazi by using dogwhistles or how he was a Nazi himself. It was all just throwing out buzzwords and doing really loose association (which is a charitable way of putting it because there basically wasn’t any through line at all imo.) He did use the term “Nebula elite” to refer to people like Lindsey Ellis in one tweet, which honestly is a pretty fucking accurate assessment, and the closest thing to an argument was that this is a dogwhistle because using the word “elite” here is basically invoking the antisemitic conspiracy theory that a cabal of Jewish elite globalists control the world. If The Kavernacle actually did make positive or veiled references to The Protocols of The Elders of Zion or something then I’d be more sympathetic to the argument but instead the next thing they very heavily implied was that this is basically him wanting to put Jews on trains to Auschwitz. The connecting thread between this argument was so tenuous that it might have not existed but it was brain-melting to see people praising the analysis because they basically just did the verbal equivalent of pointing to a picture of The Kavernacle then to a picture of the cover of The Protocols then to a picture of Auschwitz then nodding emphatically.
It’s pretty shocking to see people agree with things just because it feels truthy and salacious.
My take on this is that if you’re capable of being converted into becoming a fascist just because someone used dogwhistles on you then you have zero political principles. Ironically, the people who were won over to the idea that this is a real and significant enough phenomenon on the left worthy of being discussed were the ones who were being convinced of a political position based on vapid symbolism and thus they’re probably the most likely candidates for having their own political position subverted through the strategic use of dogwhistles. But I don’t think any of them are ready to hear that take.
God. This is exactly the bullshit my dad pulled on me when he tried convincing me it was reasonable for him to not gender me correctly.
transphobia, homophobia
His argument was that ahem being trans is bad because if you’re trans you won’t be accepted by society, therefore you will seek validation. You will find validation from gay people, and they’re gonna turn you gay, which is a sin.
Which honestly has to be my favorite transphobia of all time. It feels like it should win an award of some kind. I repeated this back to him basically verbatim and he said I strawmanned him lol. Like you can’t just claim strawman when you realize how fucking absurd your take is 😭
And like, the obvious solution here is for your dad to just accept you ans then he doesn’t have to worry about all of that. (Aside from the solution where you are unbothered by someone’s sexuality since it really doesn’t matter who a person is into and the world is gonna keep on spinning even if your kid turns out gay.)
Idk maybe I’m jaded or maybe I’m too autistic for this shit but I’d much rather if someone just tells me to my face that they don’t like queer people than trying to come up with tortured justifications like that. Obviously it’s different for people that you are close to but trying to navigate all those mental gymnastics is exhausting to me.
Anyway, keep at it and good luck with it. Your dad obviously cares for you which is a really important basis to work from. He’s also willing to talk it through with you so that’s a good sign. I hope that he’s willing to put in the work to become the dad you deserve, one who cares for you and genuinely appreciates you for who you are. It sounds like there’s a long road ahead before you get to that point but I’m wishing you all the best with this.