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Civility in Discourse: Mudslinging, Rhetoric, and the High Road
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I'm reminded of the a particular campaign several years back. The opposing candidate was running on a few different boilerplate issues. The finance director comes in one day waving an opposition press release on one such issue saying that we should go through it sentence by sentence because when you explain the facts to them, not even Republicans ought to believe (X).
My best friend from college is a psychologist who had just introduced me to the studies that were being done at University of Michigan on political opinion-making, so I pulled some of these papers that he'd passed me out and handed them to her, saying, "leading research strongly suggests that as much as we'd like to believe that, it's wrong. People create a cognitive schema for understanding the world around them. When they encounter a fact which doesn't fit easily into that schema, they tend to reject it because it's easier to not learn something new than it is to readjust your entire worldview, particularly if doing that is accompanied by the social pressure of having to admit that you were wrong."
She looks through the introduction to one of the papers while she sits in the corner. She looks up at me and says, "So you're saying that for the majority of people who hold a strong opinion about any given issue, if you given them a fact which contradicts that issue, they will pretend the fact doesn't exist rather than consider an alternative theory?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Even if you hand them independently-gathered, verifiable scientific research which suggest that their opinion is at least in need of adjustment?"
"Yep."
She bites her lip and shakes her head and says, "I don't believe that."
"I didn't expect you would. The scientific study I just handed you suggested you might feel that way."
I have some unpopular views, to say the least, but I am always open to discussing and reexamining them. For what it's worth, it is only the people who take the high road who have influenced my views.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
This is depressingly true.
Also for the longest time I though you were talking about TetraNitroCubane and not TheNomadicCircle
I'm sorry if I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but even in the case of in-fighting, this would only be of any use when it comes to the guys on the fence.
Its not that this strategy cannot possibly be used to great effect, but that you are effectively deciding from the get-go that, no, you are happy with just THIS part of the population and fuck the fuckers who aren't in it.
@Sammy:
I am very much familiar with the idea of cognitive dissonance and that its resolution tends to take the path of least resistance. With sufficient reframing, however, you can present any fact and anchor it on values that the person already supposedly values. Its deceitful, but mass rhetorics as a whole are deceitful.
I mean, if you can sell Jesus to the viking-oriented scandinavians as this awesome guy who rides to hell and fights hordes of demons to rescue souls evereh day and is totally more badass than that Odin guy you can sell anything.
But if persistent ridicule and incivility leads to the same end as banning people - ideological dissidents stop posting - it can still be an echo chamber without banning.
Perhaps. But we should be careful to distinguish between actual pervasive ridicule and the tendency for some people to feel that merely being exposed to views that run contrary to their own is tantamount to persecution.
Climate change "skeptics" hinge their entire world-view on the idea that the near-consensus among people who actually know their shit is not the cause of facts all pointing the same way, but rather the result of conscious or subconscious conspiracy to crowd out "brave dissenters".
But this can be claimed by anyone in the minortiy. We "leftists" could just as easily claim that the lack of diversity when it comes to certain political matters is how things should be, that the only thing that has pushed us all to such unseemly agreement and seemingly herd-like behavior is a more objective and reasonable approach to reality. It's just foolish back and forth until someone shows how we as a general, definable group has failed to hold a correct position due to this echo-chamber tendency that is supposedly rampant.
Yeah, we agree with one another and mock people like seroku, spool32 and Modern Man to varying degrees depending on how eloquent, humble and good-faith they are when they challenge certain opinions that are generally agreed-upon by the majority here. And? So?
As someone who will readily admit to having some strong biases that have been undermined by exposure to different people or more education about their cultures, I think it is clearly worth it to at least try. For example, I spent years thinking kids wearing hats with the sticker still on them looked like (and probably were) idiots. Then someone explained to me that they keep the stickers on to show the hat is new, which is apparently important in that subculture. I still think it looks dumb, but now that I understand it serves a purpose, I no longer dismiss people who wear them.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
When I find an earnest racist, I'll let you know.
My experiences with them on the internet have shown them to be belligerent trolls every. single. time.
Sure. I'm just saying your inference about this board not being an echo chamber doesn't follow from the premises.
I think there is ridicule against more extreme elements of ideologies here, with an extra helping for religious people. It doesn't necessarily make this an echo chamber (assuming my observation is correct), but it does limit the views we are exposed to here.
All you have to do is approach a significantly controversial topic contrary to what most people here agree is correct and they start reading what they want to argue against rather than whats being said. I think that tends to happen to the conservatives on this board, they're so outnumbered they often get pushed into saying things even they probably don't really agree with.
He lives on as cheezburger grease in our hearts.
By this point, the people who were going to change their minds about whether or not black people have natural predispositions towards crime already have. There are diminishing returns from continuing to engage with phrenology hold-outs in the 21st century.
Perhaps we spend too much time talking about specific policies or individual positions and not nearly enough time talking about values. There are some values that deserve to be rejected out of hand -- like those of the earnest racist posited by spacekungfuman -- but most of us here still probably share some fundamental values even when we disagree on a specific policy. For instance, Casual is certainly capable of believing that protecting the environment is important or that some environmental protections are necessary while disagreeing with the very specific set of protections and methodologies laid out by the Kyoto protocols. It's an unwarranted leap to presume that just because he disagreed with a specific position means that he doesn't share our values.
... yeah there are diminishing returns, but when the extent of your input is thoughtful conversation it seems to me that any returns are worth it. Even if there isn't any return, at the very least you've probably increased and clarified your own understanding, but probably also gained useful knowledge about the ins and outs of some of those that disagree with you.
--LeVar Burton
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
Certainly not. I often skip a conversation if I don't think anything useful will come from it. But if I am going to engage in conversation it seems silly to torpedo it through mockery.
It is also very common for people to surprise me. There are plenty of threads or conversations that I've thought were irreversibly hobbled, but then one thoughtful post brings it right around and people that were doing nothing but sniping at each other start really talking.
Additionally I've never seen a conversation stalled through too much understanding. Through double checking for clarification, or trying to separate out different premises and conclusions to evaluate them separately. But you see them stalled all the time because someone just couldn't help but compare the other guy to a slow grade schooler. So to speak.
--LeVar Burton
The way you've described the scenario, I would try to reasonably engage with him for a bit.
He's actually set up an argument, with logic, relating to evidence. His logic might be faulty, his evidence unsupported, and his conclusions false, but what you've described is a complete train of thought. That's something that can be reasoned with.
Ever heard that Avenue Q song, "Everybody's a Little Bit Racist?"
It's true. Everybody's a little bit racist. And a little bit sexist, a little bit classist, a little bit ageist. The human mind has natural pattern-identifying heuristics that make it easy to draw generalizations about people from the limited, nonrepresentative sample of data that we each experience daily.
So while I haven't met many overt malicious racists, I think it's very easy for a well-meaning person to think or say something about a class of people that just isn't really true. Or maybe it is true, but it's more complicated than that person's comment implies.
I think polite, sensitive, respectful discourse is the order of the day in these situations.
I don't consider it depressing, necessarily.
There's a philosopher named WVO Quine who elucidated an idea called the web of belief. Every truth or fact you believe in forms a web with other truths or facts. I believe in gravity because 1) I can see objects falling with my own eyes, 2) I can feel its action on my body, 3) it has been verified by other people, 4) forms a basis for much of our knowledge of the world. So the thought {gravity is true} is connected in this web to {my senses of sight and touch are reasonably accurate}, {other people are mostly telling the truth}, and a bunch of other beliefs about the nature of the world.
And this is actually kind of okay, because this is what lets our bullshit detectors function. If I witness a magician levitating an object in midair, I should not immediately come to the conclusion that {gravity is false} or even that {my sense of sight is hopelessly inaccurate} (ie, I'm vividly hallucinating). These are kind of silly conclusions to come to based on a single piece of information. It's a bit more reasonable to insert another possibility, perhaps {the object is suspended by a thread I cannot see}. (This would be connected to another fact, that {even though my sense of sight is mostly accurate, it's easy for me to miss small details like thin threads or mirrors}.)
If one piece of data pushes a bit on an established belief, then it might be wise to briefly consider the possibility that our established belief is wrong, but most of the time, these ideas can be reasonably incorporated into our worldview without upsetting the whole apple cart. Even some of the biggest revolutionary ideas in recent history - say, general relativity, or quantum mechanics - don't change that much about our day-to-day belief structures. Objects still exist and move in discrete Newtonian ways at the scales at which we're used to viewing things. When one piece of data pushes a bit on an established belief, and then another, and then yet another, and then yet another; and when all of these new beliefs can be moved or removed to accommodate a new theory, that's when we need to seriously consider the possibility that we might be wrong.
Quine imagined that the threads in this web based on logic and evidence where black, and the ones based on faith or convention are white. (Actually, he imagined that all of the threads were gray, because no single belief is completely factual or completely faith-based, they were just differing shades of grey.) When a person's belief is mostly dark grey, that's when we can discuss the matter academically with logic and evidence. When a person's belief looks like it's mostly suspended by white, that's when logical discussion problem isn't going to get us very far.
I'm glad you responded to this instead of me, because my post would have been very much dumbed down from this.
I also think you can still have a good conversation with white line guy, and possibly even change his mind. It just takes a different approach.
--LeVar Burton
For example, The question of Israel. For the longest time, basically since I can remember being little, Israel was the most important thing. The Jewish state was paramount and all arabs were dirty, ruthless, murdering poopyheads. Not to be trusted in any circumstance. Ever. My Overly prejudiced self became slightly apparent to me when Yitzakh Rabin was killed and I immediately thought that it was Hamas or Hezbollah. When I was proven wrong, I started to examine my beliefs about what I knew, but that got pushed to the side for school and university and things. It never was a big deal for me. It still really isn't.
But from hanging out here and reading through threads filled with information and discussion, and granted not all of the discussion about israel is polite or comfortable for me but I read it anyway, I began to seriously think about what I knew and what I thought I knew. Now any thread around here that touches on Israel is still a thread that I'm likely to avoid, purely because I'm not completely sure of my opinion, or confident in where I have landed, there are still old ties and beliefs to question and answer. But because of the reasoned (for the most part) discussions that I've seen here, I've finally settled a few things in my mind.
Reasoned, thoughtful, respectful conversation is good, it gives people something to learn from and latch onto. Belligerent, rude, and condescending conversation, while sometimes enjoyable to read from a schadenfreudian perspective is not necessarily good at convincing others to examine their views.
that's my piece.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
Whoa whoa whoa! Shouldn't you put NSFW spoiler tags around something like that?!
--LeVar Burton
I also think that if you avoid jumping down people's throats when they express these unpopular views, then you have a better shot at getting people to express more of their views, which is critical if you want to change them.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
It often seems to be a question of numbers. If you express an unpopular opinion you are buried under counter-arguments, even if they were all rational (and they won't be because internet, bitch!) because there's a lot of commenters.
Yeah but we're not talking about some mild prejudice everyone's got. Space provided an example of shit that we in the industry call "hella racist bullshit" and I'm with Regina in that I've never seen someone saying that shit in earnest(that wasn't also a huge dick an impervious to reason).
I don't think it's a very good use of anyone's time to engage someone when they're spouting that level of racist shit.
Also, that song is fucking bullshit.
I don't see why not. I mean, three quarters of the population of Egypt thinks Jews control the US government and media with an iron fist, but I'd be cool talking to an Egyptian about the topic.
edit: Yes, that three quarters number is entirely invented because I didn't feel the exact number was really important to the point.
--LeVar Burton
He insisted it wasn't racist at all. Then his dad chimed in to announce that it wasn't racist. And then I deleted him from my facebook, because you know what? Life is way too fucking short.
Casual racism, or ignorance is one thing. You can enlighten those people perhaps. Someone who wants to post a racist photoshop for shock value and then loudly claim that it's not racist?
You can't debate that shit.
What do you mean the song is bullshit? I think it is completely true that everyone makes some judgements based on race, even if they are harmless or innocuous.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
not very relevant to this thread, but still.
Yeah we basically must be a little bit prejudiced because of our psychological make-up, but that song is just fucking ridiculous. It drives the topic of racism into irrelevance by pretending that it's just this thing all humans got so we should just stop worrying about it.
I see it on occasion. Not often, but occasionally.
What I see pretty frequently is casual sexism. "Of course women are less likely to be business executives. Their bodies produce less testosterone, which means they're less ambitious and less suited to the cutthroat competition of the business world. They have natural nurturing instincts which makes them better at jobs like human resources manager."
And don't even get me started on transphobia or gender panic.
Not to suggest it's gone, or anything of the sort, but it's been a very long time for me.
No, sometimes not. But you didn't stay his facebook friend so you could throw mocking messages on his facebook wall once a week either.
--LeVar Burton
My mother works with a few women who routinely refer to Obama as "the monkey in office." And my mother, who is a staunch conservative, tells them every time "he's not a monkey, he is a man, stop being a racist asshole."
This is in Alamaba, of course.
This last sentence demonstrates the importance of not judging opinions so "clearly" wrong that you determine they are not worth taking seriously. I think there are a ton of people who have reached the point where they are very comfortable with gays and lesbians, but not at all comfortable with transgendered people. If you treat these people like they are not worth talking to, or you ridicule them, then they will never have the chance to consider if they should accept transgenders.
To be blunt, I am a person who was very uncomfortable with the idea of gay people when I was in high school, and it wasn't until I had a really amazing professor who happened to be gay in college that I really came to fully accept them. I don't have particularly positive views on transgenders right now, but I know that with more information, exposure, and thought I may change my mind here. If there is a thread on transgenders where I express my views and people insult me, that will not be helping the situation. . .
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Yeeeeeah. Please hifive your mom for me, one not-racist conservative to another.
Yeah, I agree with you, for the most part. Most of the time, when I encounter somebody who has problems with transgendered people, it's just due to a lack of exposure or information.
Even though I disagree, I can respect an opinion like, "I think it's a bad idea to get major invasive surgery on your genitals; transgendered people should learn how to accept what they were born with." I think it's a poor opinion, one that doesn't really reflect the real experiences of most transgendered people, but that's not an opinion borne of hatred or contempt. You may disagree with a transgendered person's life choices, but you're still going to recognize that the transgendered person is a human being with feelings. There is a possibility there for mature discussion. (I think the people here who know me can attest that I tend to put on my best manners when I approach this topic.)
Not all anti-trans comments are quite so neutrally phrased. Sometimes transgendered people are treated as something subhuman, and if somebody is being particularly nasty, I'm going to call him on it, and I'm not going to necessarily use polite language. (This sort of thing doesn't happen often on Penny Arcade. Once in a blue moon, maybe. But the mods here are pretty good at putting the kibosh on outright hatred. So I'm more talking about real life or other Internet sites than this one.)
And this doesn't just apply to trans people, but also to boys who just don't live up to a traditional male gender role, who can also be subject to ostracism.
See, I do have to admit that posts like this sometimes strain my resolve for civil discourse. I find this astonishingly judgemental and dismissive.
--LeVar Burton