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A Discussion about Ethical Consumerism
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Like part of the the Roy Edorso response from a ways back was
I feel like the whole interpretation can be argued with but it hits the high points:
- Douthat is THIS type of deeply shitty person, not THAT one
- He thinks he's being clever
- He's bad at that though, so he's not really being clever.
Most shit I read about it covered those points, because Douthat's been such a persistent fixture as a specific type of jerk.
I feel like you're just very invested in the argument by not giant ridiculous assholes that he's abusing, and you're over-worried about the response to this having a knock-on effect on thinkers you feel are reasonable. Which like... it didn't.
I entirely reject your notion that a writer has sole determination over what they "meant" to say, that they bear no moral responsibility for how people read their work. Nietzsche was brilliant yes, but the fact remains that year after year, first year philosophy students completely misunderstand his writing, because he wrote in this trollish, idiosyncratic way (also because they're reading English translations), fucking up Philosophy class discussions and making Philosophy professors roll their eyes all over North America. This is part of his legacy, that his work and style spawned entire generations of wrong-headed young thinkers, including a younger Hitler, who read the ubermensch as justification that he should form a racially superior Aryan nation of ubermensch-es. And in fact, this was a part of his legacy that he himself saw unfold and fought as he grew old, publicly exclaiming his Polish heritage and arguing that Germany was great only because of the Polish blood that ran through the blood of Germans. Nietzsche's influence on the Nazis, whether he intended it or not, remains a stain on his legacy and a point of substantial debate amongst philosophers and historians, not to mention his current influence on the American alt-right.
There is no just world in which Douthat gets to escape the legacy of his writing but Nietzsche does not.
You don't get to go to the airport and mumble incomprehensibly about bombs and then say, "Whoa whoa whoa, I was just being tongue-in-cheek!" You can be clear or you can be not clear. I could dissect the language of the column here, except that'd likely cause us to veer extremely off-topic, but when your first sentence is this: "Sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane," in the aftermath of an incel terrorist attack, in a column discussing the validity of incel ideology, yeah, people do get to note that this is normalizing incel ideology. That's not misreading anything. It's true regardless of the author's intent to be tongue-in-cheek or not. Your work had this impact; you can't just walk away from that, regardless of what your intent was, and after a long enough history of scumbag writing, the expectation is that, yes, you should be realising that and dealing with it.
You say his execution is extremely shallow. Well, I'd say that execution is everything. He makes innumerable errors of, at least, omission in the article, including, for example, suggesting that incels would be satisfied with sex robots and/or legal prostitution. This is, rather immediately, a factual misrepresentation of the incel movement, which is focused on the status around sex. Srinivasan also doesn't say that "who is desired and who isn’t is a political question;" she notes that this is part of the contemporary, mainstream, liberal feminist ideology, part of its contradictions, and a problem to be solved, not her proposed answer to the question as Douthat suggests. She is challenging the mainstream feminist depoliticization of desire, which should be obvious to anybody familiar with radical feminism:*
So yeah, if people are saying this is a shit column, then they're entirely on point. And if you're surprised that they're taking it so seriously, well, it's because it's in the New York Times, and the criticism is as much of the Times for publishing it as it is of Douthat for writing it, and it propagates some serious factual errors. And if you're confused as to how people might be "misreading" it, in your words, well maybe that's because it's an utter garbage column, trying to compact extremely complex ideas into a couple of convoluted sentences, and often incorrectly. I've had to read the two paragraphs on Srinivasan something like 8 times to try and figure out exactly what he's saying about the Srinivasan essay, which I've actually previously read, and I'm still somewhat confounded and possibly gaslit.
* And of course, I'd like to highlight the irony of you complaining that people are misreading a Douthat column that itself misreads Srinivasan. Which is actually a great essay, and people should go read it for its own value, not because Douthat made a goddamned trashhat out of it.
I note, very specifically, that he chooses the words "might sound." Not "might be," nor "is"; "might sound." The only place I'm remotely picking up the suggestion that sex is sacred is:
And even then, that's only if I'm looking for it really hard, and then I can see the hint of regret.
So I don't know. I like to think I'm pretty good at reading. I've gone through this column four plus times today, with your prompting, and I'm still barely picking up what you say it's putting down with great clarity.
Edit: And I'm not doing this in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.
Quelle horreur.
It is remarkable how little it seems to matter what I actually say.
Here you take me to be calling out the left for being too partisan. It’s true that in making my point I used an example in which some (but not other) left wing commentators got egg on their face. This is because I mostly read left wing commentators, and so I saw this example play out when it happened. Note that never did I say this was characteristic of the left wing, or that it was more common on the left wing, or anything along those lines at all. I do not, in fact, believe that it is. I used the redistribution of sex teapot tempest as an example of one thing: a case where a lack of deliberate detachment and fairmindedness made people act more stupidly, which they did. But yet this partisan spin keeps getting put in my mouth. I suspect it’s a function of assuming that everything has to be about taking a side; so if someone uses an example where a liberal did something dumb, it must be about how liberals are dumb, and they must be trying to own the libs. This is pure projection. It’s not in what I wrote, which, strange beast, was about neither owning the libs nor the conservatives.
And, to hippofant at the top of this page: you similarly act like I am saying something that I not only never said, but which I have explicitly denied, multiple times. I have never said that the conservative writers in my example are good writers, good thinkers, or good people—in fact, I clarified this point with an analogy to Hitler and Mein Kampf (which seems not to have registered at all). Yet you give a long discussion of writers’ responsibility for their works via Neitzsche’s dismal legacy. You say that even if their intent is otherwise, they have in fact normalized incel ideology and are responsible for that. So what? I never said otherwise!
Take your closing note: you say that it is ironic that I would complain about people misreading Douthat, given that he misreads Srinivasan. Why is there anything at all ironic about that? It would be ironic if I was claiming Douthat was an aggrevied victim, because then I would be ignoring that he had committed he very same crime. But I didn’t say he was. All I said was that he had been misread. I said that in service of the point: here’s something that leads people to misread one another, and if people have a practical interest in avoiding that—in avoiding making mistakes, when they read—then it seems relevant to keep that in mind. That has flat out nothing to do with “but he did it first!”
Enough about what I didn’t say. What I did say was this: in addition to thinking about how we treat others in terms of what they deserve, or thinking about it in terms of the messages it sends to third parties, we can also think of the effects that treating other people in those ways has on us, ourselves. That this CAN matter shouldn’t be controversial. If there is controversy, it should be over how much it matters in any given case, or what effect it is having in any given case. Instead, and perhaps depressingly predictably, this has been ignored entirely to focus on how not good conservatives are, which even if true is ??? as a response to a general point about how the way we treat people depends on more than just how good or bad they are.
That's literally the only acceptable measure by which to treat people.
By the content of their character, and a measure of their actions.
Hitler doesn't get the benefit of the doubt, or kind treatment anywhere, and that's fine... he's a fuckin monster. It's okay to not be nice to monsters. My being nice and lending them aid and comfort says only one thing about me... that I'm totally fine with the monsters, and might not give a shit about all the harm they have caused.
No one cares or thinks it has a net negative effect when deciding to boycott a business that supports horrific policies.
You keep on arguing that these individuals were unfairly misread by liberal commentators, but don't really defend the argument beyond "seriously, didn't they realize that this was all a joke?"
There are three points to keep in mind here. First, there's the point that hippofant made - like the tango, it takes two to misread. When someone publishes a piece that sounds like a bog standard incel screed, right after a massacre caused by an incel, it is not surprising that such a piece would be taken seriously, because there is no reason otherwise to not do so. Satire is tricky, and it's easy to fall off the tightrope, so to speak.
Which leads into the second point: the failure mode of "clever" is "asshole". If you're going to try to engage in clever satire, you need to be very careful to hit your mark. Because if you don't, you don't come off as saying something interesting, but just look like an ass. And again, a large part of that is "reading the room", so to speak - as was pointed out, A Modest Proposal would read a lot differently if there were widespread reports of the Irish falling into cannibalism as a response to the Famine. The fact that these pieces could be read as earnest easily is a sign of a failure to do the prerequisite homework.
Third, "just kidding" doesn't excuse hate. Even if the pieces were done "tongue-in-cheek", their contents along with their timing came across as normalizing the incel movement. Furthermore, the pieces came across as problematic because of the ham-fisted manner of conflation - someone who equates making the wealthy pay their fair share with forcing women to surrender their bodily autonomy does not have a healthy sexual worldview.
Finally, the reason your targeting of liberal commentators alone is taking notice is because there is a long, ignoble history of only liberal commentators getting singled out for this sort of policing. When liberal commentators "misread" conservative pieces, they are routinely taken to task - but when the inverse happens on a regular basis, the response seems to be "well that's how things are." After a while, it becomes noticible that only one side is being held to a standard.
“Listen, when I told a story about how sometimes dogs will bite you, I was just talking about biting, not dogs.” Nah, you picked that specific example and you shouldn’t be surprised or affronted when people read into that choice.
Anyway your underlying point about fairmindedness is still ridiculous. Maybe if you could come up with an example with greater stakes than “commentator gets egg on face”? Because if the worst thing not being fairminded enough to terrible, terrible ideas will result in is a little egg, I think that’s worth it.
That because the fire they are fighting is fascism, fighting fire with fire ought to have some dark overtones as a result, seems lost along the way.
You're correct. I place little value in forgiving people who seek to do actual harm to others and lie about the reasons they wish to do so.
It's damn near zero.
I feel like this extremely important point bears repeating. A lot of repeating. This isn't an HMO spat over what colour people are allowed to paint their windowframes.
exactly, this is far far more civil than an HMO spat.
You chose this example to make a point. You are extremely vague in your defense of Douthat - for example, you say that the piece is clearly tongue-in-cheek, and yet you provide zero evidence whatsoever that it is so, and have no response to my comments that I don't read into it at all what you claim it to hold.
Frankly, the example is half your original post. If the example is awful, I don't know why you chose it then, because I have no idea what your point is then. And despite your protesting that you don't support it, you continue to return to the well to defend it. I.e.:
And you know what, I see nothing wrong with the content of the responses, as far as my quick perusal of the web has shown, at least ignoring the random social media stuff. Most of them seemed to do quite adequately on the objective basic reasoning task, given how awful and obfuscant the original piece was. What is
if not a defense of your use of the example?
Now you say your point isn't about the Douthat column at all, but the responses of "intellectuals" to it, and furthermore the meta-response of said responders, but none of this jives with how much text you've spilled. You've said basically nothing about the responses of "intellectuals," other than to criticize them for misreading a column that you refuse to defend. Almost your entire second post is about this, about "brain poison", "negative partisanship," "fits of stupidity!" You claim that you won't defend the column for being awful, but you will attack its critics for being "distressingly stupid"?
I have no idea what you're trying to do here. There was a first half of your first post that had some interesting ideas, but you keep jamming this "Liberal critics of Douthat are drinking BRAIN POISON," button while at the same time claiming that you're not defending the Douthat column at all, all without actually breaking down either the Douthat column or the liberal criticisms you claim are "distressingly stupid," AND you're protesting that this is causing us to ignore your other comments, which this example was supposedly in support of. I have no idea how you expect people to react right now. You are supposedly "comfortable saying that... many people were able to discern the intent," and then not only do you provide no support for that claim, not only do you disagree with opposing claims, but you reject the very validity of responding to that claim that YOU MADE in a forum for discourse and debate as being entirely irrelevant.
Well, if it's so damn irrelevant, why did you make the claim in the first place, smugly dropping it like an irresistible, intellectual bomb? We're only supposed to respond to some of your comments and not others, even when you reply in defense of those comments that we're not supposed to respond to repeatedly? You come out at like power level 9000 attacking critics of Douthat, but then you're not actually willing to address these criticisms, and the people who start justifying these criticisms are the ones behaving in bizarre, inexplicable ways? You say we're not supposed to talk about things you didn't say, but you DID say these things, and I can't tell if you just had a huge brain fart or not,* and you keep going back to respond to criticisms of Douthat while simultaneously demanding that we not respond to your responses because they're out of line. The sheer irony in your engaging in this behaviour in a discussion about Douthat's column and the criticisms of it is so convolutedly meta, that this honestly could just be the weirdest, most high-effort trolling I've seen in a long time, and it'd make as much sense to me as whatever it is trying to figure out whatever it is you want from us right now.
* E.g.
Edit:
No, the irony is that you pointed at a piece of godawful writing and said, look at all the people misreading this piece, it's soooo obvious what this piece is trying to say, and they're all drinking partisan "brain poison", which is why they're misunderstanding it. When really, the piece was goddamned awful and confusing, and it was itself misrepresenting other works that the author had read, but you didn't point at Douthat misreading a - I think - much better written, much clearer, though conceptually more difficult and contextually more demanding piece, by Srinivasan, and didn't at all suggest that it was partisan "brain poison" that caused him to misread it.
One might even note the double irony of this maybe being influenced by your political beliefs and partisanship: shitty conservative piece being misread -> liberal "brain poison"; comprehensive progressive piece being misread -> whatever NBD.
(For the record, I don't find the Douthat piece particularly offensive, except to my standards of good writing and my aggrievement at the obvious misrepresentational, factual error getting past editors and getting major play in a major newspaper. It has maybe one, maybe two intellectual kernels of interest within for me, but these is, at most, just mildly suggested, and then pretty much immediately after, the piece basically goes off the rails. The reasoning and argumentation is circuitous at best, the author seems unwilling or unable to tackle the very subject of his own writing head-on, there is little contextual background laid to frame the ideas yet a heavy demand on the author's conceptual background, and, obviously, he badly mis-cites another author in support of his idea. And as far as I can tell, this particular writer has habit of writing awfully like this, as I scanned his personal blog earlier when I was searching for this article, and the pattern of weakly supported, highly confused, but searingly contentious ideas expounded in hardly enough words to even advance the main thesis abounded. Author is just a bad writer, a weak intellectual, and/or a teenaged troll. I would be entirely unsurprised if many "misread" the piece, because it legitimately invites misreading.
So am I drinking the partisan "brain poison" too? Or is there a prohibition against my objecting to criticism of my objecting to the piece?)
I only read the Douthat column because I didn't understand what your first post was saying, and there seemed to be a lot of text devoted to it (and the other column, which I didn't choose for no particular reason). And in fact, I didn't even find the Douthat column the first time; I just found his blog and read a post I thought was being referenced. It was your second post in defense of the Douthat column that prompted me to go searching again, whereupon I read the Douthat column and some of the critical responses to it, none of which seemed to square with your descriptions of the Douthat column. I don't care that much about the Douthat column personally - as I said, I hadn't even read it, nor was I going to until you continued to defend it - but you seem to be using it as key evidence in making the point that political partisanship can lead to misreading, which would be a point I'd agree with, and you're using phrases like "brain poison" and "distressingly stupid," and even now you're continuing to say say the critics were not sufficiently "detatched" (in the wake of a terrorist attack) nor "fairminded," which simply is going to warrant a response, a response you claim not to want yet continue to invite.
This discussion is highly unlikely to move on until you just drop the Douthat example, because you just can't cite something that contentious using such inflammatory words, then demand people not respond to it.
Douthat describes the redistribution of sex as the "creepy" and "misogynistic" natural consequence of "redistributive" liberal policies
This strawman is there only to support Douthat's real point: "conservative" ideals like "monogamy and chastity" are preferable to the creepy natural consequences of liberal philosophy
Many commentators, as MrMister said, confused the strawman in Douthat's argument for Douthat's own argument
For myself, I'll at least say that I don't think anyone is doing himself any favors when he gets upset over his own basic reading comprehension error
Ah. I see. You separate liberal philosophy from the natural consequences of neoliberal policies. My focus was more on the first half of the column, wherein Douthat notes that liberal thinkers attacked Hanson for being creepy and misogynist. To me, the back half of the column was a musing addendum to the first half, which is where the meat is. I don't see sex robots, sex workers, nor pornography as "redistribution of sex," which is why I thought it rather disconnected; it seemed to me he was saying that the core idea of sex redistribution had merit, and these were some ways in which neoliberal orthodoxy were also trying to resolve those same issues, but not in a creepy nor misogynistic way - I note, at the end, he says that that they "work in service of a redistributive goal that seems creepy or misogynistic or radical"; in bold, I highlight the rhetorical outs he's seemed to build into the sentence to avoid saying that these developments are actually creepy and/or misogynistic.
Though maybe that's because I'm not a regular reader of Douthat and I have no idea what his background ideology is.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
I'm sorry; I didn't intend a substantive point by switching between "liberal policies" and "liberal philosophy", but I see the ambiguity there
Probably it would be most accurate (as far as restating Douthat's argument) to just say "liberal philosophy" in each sentence
Except that the "strawman" and the actual ideology are intertwined. Again, you don't get to "forcibly 'redistributing' sex is the logical endpoint of liberal sexual theory" unless you have some rather...fucked up views on sex and liberal philosophy. Even if the argument is a strawman, it still illustrates horribly flawed thinking underpinning it.
No one is saying Douthat is a good person or that he is making good points
I am also pretty good at reading and identified the basic position of Douthat.
wasn't hard to find, and I'd argue that not seeing this is pretty basic misreading. conservative hand-wringing about the inevitable results of modern ways of thinking is pretty standard.
No no, I see your perspective and how the column can be read the way you read it. It is, arguably, a more sensible reading than mine, because I found the piece quite ambiguous and particularly un-pointed. It seems to me that Douthat built in a lot of vague language that allowed for alternative interpretations - possibly intentionally, to get past the NYT editors?? - an example of which I edited in to my post, and which I'll edit in here as well.
Maybe if I was more familiar with Douthat's writing, I'd be more attuned to what he is hinting at. I.e. he says radical, and I don't think that's a pejorative, but maybe he does, so I should be reading "creepy or misogynistic or radical" as more negative than I would otherwise.
Well, I do think he was unclear.
He does spend most of the article being very mealy-mouthed: [x] said [y], but consider, on the other hand, that [1] said [2].
And I don't think he lays out a full-throated "we should [whatever]" argument anywhere.
But he does lament the regrettably "inevitable" result of our liberal social tendencies several times over, with negative adjectives, whereas he only brings up the "conservative" alternative in order to describe it as a good idea.
So, granting that this was not a very clear article!
I do think it's regrettable that professional commentators largely ended up saying: "Douthat is wrong to argue that we should redistribute sex!" when Douthat didn't say we should redistribute sex, and instead had implied the opposite.
Except that they didn't. Since they got namedropped earlier, here's LGM's take on the piece:
Which is exactly what you pointed out - he's not making the argument because he believes in it, but because he thinks he can use it to condemn liberal thought.
Except that, in the original argument, they were specifically named as individuals engaging in that misunderstanding. While I can imagine liberal Twitter not realizing what's going on, the people for whom Douthatology is part of their day job have long since had his number and knew what was up, as we've seen. And if we're going to complain about liberal Twitter, well...ever hear about QAnon?
If his core thesis is one sentence long, the 16th paragraph of the piece, the only and only mention of the word "conservative," the only response I have to complaints that it was not widely noticed is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Again, I note, I'm not an expert on Douthat's writings. I'm not going out of my way to look for conservative ideology secretly/subtly suggested in supposedly non-partisan thoughtpieces. That is quite literally also a sentence I could write, without championing the conservative position at all, just to acknowledge there exists an alternate viewpoint. I'm kinda feeling like I'm being chastised for not having drank the partisan brain poison, for not seeing the ideological sleeper hidden in this column.)
This is getting a bit far afield of the topic of this thread.
Let's try some new analogies and examples, the current one is about done to death I think.
Hedgie pls. When I mentioned a couple people at LGM I wasn't referring to Spencer. I was referring to her co-bloggers, Scott Lemieux and shakezula, both of whom gave their takes on Hanson/Douthat before Spencer, missed the point, and whom I can only imagine Spencer was gently correcting when she wrote the post you quoted.
(edit: apologies re: mod direction--I wanted to leave these links just to indicate the factual point that I did not just make up the original source materials I earlier referred to. I am more than happy to let this die.)