The civility trap

Most of us recognized this problem long ago (who else remembers the “tone wars” on ScienceBlogs?), but it’s good to have a good summary of the problem with emphasizing politeness.

When used as a political rallying point, appeals to civility are often a trap, particularly when forwarded in response to critical, dissenting speech. Sidestepping the content of a critique in order to police the tone of that critique—a strategy employed with particular vigor during the Kavanaugh hearings, and which frequently factors into hand-wringing over anti-racist activism—serves to falsey equate civility with politeness, and politeness with the democratic ideal. In short: you are being civil when you don’t ruffle my feathers, which is to say, when I don’t have to hear your grievance.

Besides their tendency to be adopted as bad faith, rhetorical sleights-of-hand, calls for civility have another, perhaps more insidious, consequence: deflecting blame. It’s everybody else’s behavior, they’re the ones who need to start acting right. They’re the ones who need to control themselves. In these instances, “We need to restore civility” becomes an exercise in finger pointing. You’re the one who isn’t being civil. Indeed, the above NPR survey explicitly asked respondents to identify who was to blame for the lack of civility in Washington, with four possible choices: President Trump, Republicans in Congress, Democrats in Congress, or the media. Whose fault is it: this is how the civility question tends to be framed.

Just remember, Nazis can be civil. It’s not how they say it that matters, but what they say.

Family! This week!

Prepare for Thanksgiving week by listening to Public Radio! WHYY has an episode this week on families that includes me, which at least in the recorded bit was me arguing that human families are best looked at as social constructs, rather than predestined genetic assemblies. I’m not sure what parts the edited version retains, because I haven’t listened to it yet. I really can’t stand listening to myself. (Those YouTube videos I’ve been making are killing me, because I have to listen to me in order to edit them, which is one reason I’m late making another one. Editing my voice makes me cringe.)

Unfortunately, for Thanksgiving, two thirds of my children are too far away, and too busy with babies, to share a table with their feeble old parents. But on Wednesday I’m fetching my oldest boy and forcing him to comfort us in our dotage for a day. I’ll make a big ol’ Thanksgiving dinner, but he’s the kid who doesn’t eat. Skin and bones he is, I’ll have to nag him to put on a few ounces.

Humanity works hard to find ways to disappoint

Monday mornings are already bad, but can you handle even more horrible news? Orangutans are being captured in Borneo and sold into prostitution.

In an interview published in Taringa the veterinarian Karmele Llano denounced the finding in Borneo of a 12-year-old female orangutan named Pony, which had been completely shaved, washed and perfumed, and which had even been painted on her lips. The animal was chained to a bed, to allow it to be abused by customers of the brothel in a town in central Borneo (Indonesia) called Keremgpangi. According to Karmele Llano, they are mainly workers from the logging companies and palm oil plantations in the area.

The veterinarian recalls in her interview the difficult rescue of the animal: “When we tried to free her there was a revolt,They threatened us with knives and machetes. We had to resort to the state police, which sent about 30 agents to take Pony. “

Orangutans are also used in boxing matches.

So…humans are destroying their habitat, raping them, and forcing them to fight each other for our amusement. Wretched humanity, that we should bring such shame on our species.

This is what it takes to wake people up to the fact that Bill Maher is a jerk?

He finally crossed a line: Maher finally sneered at something white men like, and the outrage has started to bubble to the surface. How dare he criticize Stan Lee and comic books?

That he’s an anti-vaxxer, that his whole smug schtick is to salt his panels with a couple of assholes and fan the flames…nah, that doesn’t matter. He can keep on inviting Jack Kingston, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, and all the other people he loves because they’re famous, all fine. That he’s a not very funny talk show host who was never in the running for any of the big broadcast late night shows, even with their relatively low standards of humor, tells you he’s kind of a flop who ought, at best, to be running an unexceptional podcast with a declining audience, instead of getting his blah words highlighted on Raw Story as if they’re news every goddamn weekend.

I thought it was good that he fought back, briefly, against the bizarre popular notion that terrorists are cowards who hate freedom, but those glory days are done. Retire, Maher.

The backlash against debate is in full throttle

Good. Here’s another article exposing the facile shallowness of the “debate me” crowd.

A famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language — of all the endless combinations of words in all of history — “debate me” is the most badass.

Or that’s what a cohort of online dudes appear to believe. The way a drunk roughneck might square up to you for a fight in a seedy roadhouse, the “debate me” dude pops into your Twitter mentions to demand a formal argument. Ignoring that people debate shit on the internet as automatically as one might breathe or blink, he is oddly constrained by the notion that disagreement has rules, or at least a chivalrous code of honor befitting a pistol duel in the countryside. Simply tussling over this or that question is beneath him. Debate, meanwhile, is a gentleman’s contract, holy ground, a noble anachronism.

I also appreciate the categorization of two kinds of debates: the ones where it’s solely an appeal to emotion (ironically, most of the online objective reality gang’s outcomes rely entirely on emotion — see Ben Shapiro for on-point examples), and the ones that rely on formal technicalities.

Besides, it’s not as if the lad insistent on a volley of conflicting ideas is willing to be convinced by his rival. He wouldn’t be doing this if he weren’t assured a victory, and so the provocation signals the egoist’s pride — as well as the almost charmingly naive certainty that competing ideologies can be vanquished by scoring enough points in a virtual joust. Of the two main models for American debate — political and extracurricular — he favors the airless academicism of the high school debate club, where he first learned some of his favorite fallacies: straw man, ad hominem, the appeal to authority. Whereas a presidential debate is decided on the intangibles, with voters swayed by gut reaction, the after-school debates play out in the technicalities, with naturally quarrelsome young men learning to fetishize what they consider their powers of logic and deduction. If they do well, they may conclude that others lack such faculties. Indeed, the “debate me” dude often behaves as if he’s the last “rational” person on Earth.

Ultimately, that’s the problem with debate: it turns discussion into a contest that requires some method of tallying up “points” to determine who “wins”, and the methods never rest on substance. Shouldn’t there be the equivalent of a TKO when someone lies or misinterprets a source, or doesn’t provide verifiable evidence, or just yells a conclusion? There are an awful lot of creationists and Republicans who’d be lying flat on the mat immediately after the opening bell, so no, those will never be criteria for success.

Now struggling to avoid falling for the naturalistic fallacy

The last two years have coarsened me. I read this story of the demise of a chimpanzee leader, and realized I’ve changed.

Chimps have been spotted killing and then eating their former tyrannical leader.

Jill Pruetz, an professor of anthropology, said that she found it “very difficult and quite gruesome to watch” the group of chimpanzees kill a member of their own community and then abuse the animal’s dead body.

Professor Pruetz has described how she saw a group of the animals discover the body of a chimp called Foudouko, a former leader of the Fongoli community who had since been exiled for five years and who was probably killed by members of the group. After they came across the dead body, they abused and ate it for nearly four hours, the Iowa State University anthropologist described.

Once I would have been horrified and thought this was a terrible, awful act.

Now I’m thinking, well, maybe this was a reasonable response. Perhaps this is simply a normal group of young chimps reacting appropriately. Maybe this is how state funerals ought to be conducted in the future.

Both sides. Both sides on this issue would have good people.

(Warning: there is video at the link.)