SIO206: ContraPoints and Cancel Culture

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:30 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is Thomas. That over there is Jamie. How are you doing Jamie?

0:00:35 Jamie: I'm all right how are you doing?

0:00:37 Thomas: I'm so excited to be back. Not only that, not only excited to be back with you, I'm excited to announce, this is great, that we will be doing a little recording right after the debates tomorrow. I don't know why I said debates. We only have to do one. We only to sit through one Jamie. It's amazing.

0:00:54 Jamie: Yay! I I know they finally needled it down to 10! I

0:00:57 Thomas: So That's going to be awesome. We both looked at our schedules and realized that we could pull off a late night recording tomorrow and get a little rapid response going. I cannot wait to finally see all the candidates that I am fond of and the candidate that I really don't like. Well, actually, there's a couple I don't on the same stage and see how they fare in that context. So I'm excited. What do you think?

0:01:25 Jamie: I am so excited for tomorrow. I am especially hopeful to see Bernie and Elizabeth Warren kind of tag team Joe Biden.

0:01:31 Thomas: That would be nice.

0:01:32 Jamie: That is, that's really what I'm looking forward to. I kind of feel like a kid on Christmas Eve and like tomorrow's the day and my presents are going to get delivered, so I'm very excited. So

0:01:42 Thomas: Yeah, that would be nice. Cause yeah, Elizabeth Warren, not a big fan of Joe Biden, not a, not huge fan throughout the lab history. So that could, uh, could be cool. All right. Well, that said, that's going to be exciting. So look for that. If you want to, you know, if you're dying for that late night content, stay up, we'll try to do like one of those unedited livey type things so I can get it right up, but, uh, or, you either way. But for today, we wanted to talk about, quote unquote, I don't know if it should be in scare quotes or not, cancel culture, because of several things that have happened. But the most recent that put it on my radar, I guess, was ContraPoints, who I've referenced on the show. I'm a big fan of ContraPoints. Natalie Wynn is her name. And I think her videos are really cool, and she tweeted some stuff and got a reaction and then quit Twitter, and I wanted to talk about it. Know, I don't know if, do you want to break down the tweets of what happened? Um.

0:02:40 Jamie: I only have a screenshot available of some of the tweets before she was gone, before she had deleted her account And sort of disappeared from Twitter. What stood out to me as what seemed to get people the most upset is where she seemed to be kind of dismissive about gender fluid, nonconforming, non-binary members of the transgender community. And some people took that to mean that she was saying that they weren't valid as trans people and that they were, you know, sort of inventing new genders, because she had said that, you know, trans people are roughly about point three percent of the population. But then on some Discord or Facebook group, there was 20 to 30 percent identify as some flavor of trans and specifically that

0:02:48 Thomas: Oh, whoops.

0:03:35 Jamie: They were not conventional binary transsexuals. And so that was what got her into the hot water. Yeah.

0:03:40 Thomas: Um, I think it's the hot water I want to talk about, you know, because it's not so much, I, I'm not here for one to kind of adjudicate this trans pronoun issue. Um, what she had said was actually a retweet of someone else's tweet that started it all off. That was about, you know, uh, one thing that's hard for, um, I guess you would say passing trans peoples.

I think the wording she used, which is, uh, sometimes in hyper-woke spaces where, you now, there's, it's just Natalie Wynn and a bunch of cis women. They all decide they need to go around and say their pronouns, and for her, she finds that really uncomfortable because they're only doing it for her, and she feels like she should just be passing as, and people should assume that she's, she, uh, her, and, um, that causes her discomfort.

And it's one of those things where, like, know, reading that as somebody who would maybe be one of those, like, woke people trying to make sure you're, you know, not offending anybody and and saying the right stuff, it kind of felt like, oh, shoot, is that another thing that, you know, that you could screw up, like trying to be too considerate about pronouns, and that might actually have a reverse effect for some people. So, from my standpoint, I just saw it as like, okay, this is something that can happen. This is something that can make some people feel uncomfortable. Maybe I'll just keep that in mind, you know, in the future. But it seemed to me to, I don't know, just be Natalie venting.

What I wanted to talk about was, was not exactly adjudicating, you know, how pissed should anybody be? Or, or, uh, I don't want to speak for non-binary people. I've, I've seen some good sources on this. I mean, I, I couple of good YouTube videos that I can put in the show notes that I've watched to kind of make sure that, you know, we're listening we're to non-binary people on this, but for me I wanted to talk about this idea of Natalie just quitting Twitter, you know.

0:05:32 Thomas: There's so much that goes into this, but one thing that's a very negative consequence, and I wonder, Jamie, if you saw this, is right away when ContraPoints Natalie Wynn leaves Twitter because of this, all of a sudden she's the Intellectual Dark Web's favorite person of all time, and they're all like, well, I cannot believe that the left with their pitchforks again came for Natalie Wynn, a moderate, you know, and they kind of rewrite what happened and like make her, and Christina Hoff Summers totally misread this, I don't know if you saw that, but they have no understanding of what's actually happening. Christina Hoff Summer said, oh, Natalie was just expressing her anti neutral pronoun opinion and you all canceled her for it. And it's like, no, that's actually not at all what happened.

0:06:17 Thomas: Uh, but she became all of a sudden ContraPoints became like this mascot for this anti-cancel culture crowd. Uh, and that kind of sucks because now that, that must put Natalie in a real bind, you know, she's feeling like, all right, I don't want to be on this, you know, online space anymore for whatever reasons. Uh, all of a sudden she's being used as a weapon against the left. It's the whole thing's a mess. Um, I have some thoughts, but I've been talking for a while. So why don't I let you jump in if you want to say anything about that thus far?

0:06:49 Jamie: So there are a number of moving pieces. And I just want to throw this out there because it stood out to me that you mentioned you were going to maybe put up some YouTube videos. I also have some papers that I can provide links to for trans philosophers and queer philosophers who are working on some of these issues.

If anybody is interested to do any deep digging into the reading, that's sort of supplying the theoretical framework for the ideas that Natalie and others are talking about as we navigate this. So I didn't see what Christina Summers had said, because I try not to look too much into the abyss for fear that it will stare back into me. Um, so my general policy is like just to not get too deep into the IDW, LSIB tainted. Um, they're, you know, obviously not acting in good faith.

Um, they will have no use for Natalie once she emerges from this and continues to advocate for trans rights and trans acceptance. They will be very, very happy to discard her. And I'm sure that she is, you know, self aware enough and politically aware enough to realize that that's how they intend to use her. So I'm not really worried that she's going to be misused by the IDW, because I suspect she's far smarter than any of them have given her credit for yet, and that she will not be their useful tool. And, you you know, fingers crossed, you know, I don't get proven wrong for that.

0:08:21 Jamie: As you know, as a cis woman I definitely want to stay very far away from even attempting to adjudicate any of these issues. But you know to weigh in on cancel culture it's one not evident to me yet that she's actually been canceled. She still has her Patreon, she still has her YouTube channel, which I think when I checked it this afternoon was at 730,000 subscribers.

0:08:50 Jamie: And if anything, I imagine that this controversy, now that it's taken place, will only increase the likelihood that people will be tuning in to her next video to see just exactly what she has to say. So I don't think, in in a way, that she's been canceled or she's been deplatformed, although there, there is a sense here, we don't know the particulars, right, we don't know what's going through her mind, you know, for all we know she may have simultaneously gotten bad family news that caused her to just kind of unplug from Twitter to focus on what really matters, but if it is the result of this sort of pile on that she received, you know, this is what Christy Dotson talks about when she talks about testimonial smothering, that Natalie has decided to sort of self-censor herself because she doesn't feel like her audience is receptive to the sort of knowledge she wants to communicate. Because, as you pointed out, this began with her saying her preference for what it's like to be in a room where pronouns are being disclosed.

0:09:01 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah, I think that's all right. And from, I, the, the reason I want to talk about it is cause like, I feel like I have some perspective on this, you know, like having, uh, you Know, the podcast and some amount of audience and being on Twitter and stuff. And it, it does feel tough sometimes. And I, I think I've gone through some amount Of this, uh given that I, you know, pissed off Carl Sagan, something, something Jamie probably knows nothing about. That's okay.

No one tell her, uh, and got, you know, got a lot of that stuff for a while. And I've kind of come out of the other side of that. It's not exactly analogous because most of that was from, you know, people who I eventually realized, oh, these are right wing, alt right, alt light assholes that I don't care about. Out.

But initially, since it was just as as an atheist and they were just other atheists, this was what I thought my people were, you know, so like for a while it was receiving a lot of harsh stuff, especially because there were some very, very large Twitter accounts, including the Godless Spellchecker and the amazing atheist, that guy who piled on during that time, who

0:11:07 Thomas: I'd rather not, who have, you know, hundreds of thousands of followers. And it was, it was rough. And I in no way ever want to minimize, especially, you know, sitting on a on a mountain of privilege, especially the experience of a trans person who I'm sure gets all that kind of harassment times a thousand. So it's not to minimize it. But I, but I did eventually gain the insight that I think that when you get to a a certain point, I really think that Natalie, if I were to, you know, ever to just speak to her and try to give any sort of like friendly advice, I think she's just got to not look at the mentions. I think when you get to a certain level of fame, and she is certainly that, she has a lot of followers and she's been covered in the New York Times and mainstream sources, that that means that like she's not even going to know when it's good faith or not.

0:11:06 Jamie: Think

0:11:59 Thomas: You know, when you get to a certain level of reach, sure, there are people who have genuine disagreements with her and I don't want to minimize that. That's all fine. But also, you don't even know how many people are just cynically trying to make you feel bad by posing as someone on the left who's giving you a hard time. You know, when you have a million followers or whatever she was up to, I think it's like Ezra Klein actually said this on his show, that he just literally does not look, look at mentions anymore. It's, it's kind of over. Like he just tweets out what he wants to say or share or whatever. And then you just don't even look at the mentions. And I really think it's unfortunate, but I kind of think that's how it has to be when you get to a certain level of fame, because you just do not know who these people are and you can do your best to stay out of it.

0:12:46 Thomas: But I think what's happened for Natalie, as you've said, I do not think she's been quote unquote canceled. She has canceled herself right now. She is self-censored. But as you said, there was, yes, she's getting some criticism, but it could very well be a very vocal, but a very small group, corner of the internet.

And maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but she still had every option to just let that be and to just say, all right, sorry, either sorry or I was wrong or I was right and this is why, and then still have her, you know, almost a million subscribers and still have her patrons and all that and very much not be deplatformed. Now I don't want to be read as saying that she has any obligation to stay on Twitter or anything like that.

I died, it's not at all, like very many times I almost left, left all the social media, was just like, this is the worst, I don't wanna do it anymore. And I in no way mean to say that people have some like duty or they had a tough it out, it's not that, but, but it is to say that she had the option of, she hasn't been canceled. I agree with you. Like she hadthe option to not be canceled. Maybe she doesn't want to, you know, utilize that option currently, but it's not as though she was forcibly removed from the internet or something. She did it to herself, really.

0:14:03 Jamie: At the end of the day, whether or not that was a good or bad thing is going to be an empirical question that we can answer. Well, in terms of this conversation, I'm talking about for her, right?

0:14:13 Thomas: Well, and good and good or bad for who to like relative for her or for us or for what do you mean? Okay.

0:14:22 Jamie: Because this was a choice that she made. And I think it's not dissimilar from Ezra Klein saying that he doesn't check his mentions. And a really good way to not check your mentions is to make sure you're not getting any until it sort of blows over. And you know, that you can sort of take the mental space that you need to, you know filter out what's legitimate criticism from what's, You know, trolls and what's, you know, right-wing internet personalities trying to leverage you for their own nefarious purposes. And so I would like to think that that's, you know, what she's doing now. Um, some of the criticism or some of the pushback that she got, I do you think is legitimate, um, and is worth addressing. And hopefully, you know, that will be the focus of a future video where she engages

0:14:36 Thomas: Get rid of mention.

0:14:47 Thomas: Mm hmm. Mm

0:15:15 Jamie: Some of The More substantive criticism that she got in response to these statements. And that she comes out of this, you know, more knowledgeable, stronger and more determined to continue to be, you know, a face to normalize trans people in our communities. Yeah,

0:15:16 Thomas: Hmm, yeah.

0:15:34 Thomas: And so I guess the point I'm trying to make, and I agree with all that, but the point I'm to speak simplistically, I think there are two variables to speak very simplistically. I think There's the variable of what is the actual amount and the quality of crap you're getting on social media. And then the other variable is you and people are in different places. And that's totally fine. There are people for whom, you know, one bad tweet is enough or maybe it's just a bad enough tweet, whatever, to where they're like, I don't want to do this. I hate this. I'm out. And that's totally valid. And I'm absolutely making no judgment either way because I've been there. I've Been Everywhere on this spectrum. But like there's also people who it just rolls right over them. And it's interesting.

0:16:20 Thomas: I'm amazed at those people because I'm definitely not there. I'm somewhere somewhere in between. But I think what I guess conceptually what I'm worried about is blending those variables together, you know, and saying, well, if she quit, it must be because the hate she was getting from her own side, the left, was so big that she just could not even be on the space. Face. And from my view, it's like, I don't, I don't really think it was all that bad. I mean, there's, I'm sure she's getting a lot of horrible stuff from people on the right and from anti-trans people. Don't mean to minimize that, but that's kind of a constant. Like that's just always going to be there for her because of who she is, which is horrible. But when we're talking about whether or not the left is engaging in like a cancel culture, that's, that's not the variable I'm looking at, you know, like her baseline hate she gets from anti trans people, which

0:17:12 Jamie: So I think we have to be really careful about adopting that narrative. One, I'm just not really sure that it's true. And two, I think the people who are pushing that narrative have a vested interest in it being true. Because so long as they can continue to push a narrative that the left is canceling people, the left is deplatforming people, they're censoring people through criticism, they can continue to exist in this narrative, where the real reason their ideas aren't getting purchased isn't because they're terrible, no good garbage ideas nobody should adopt, but because there's this villainous left that's out to get them. And I think we need to be really skeptical about that.

0:18:01 Thomas: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think if people are taking this, what was Natalie's response and sort of using it to assume there was this great universal leftist canceling that didn't happen. That's what I want to just clear up and say, I don't really think that is what happened. And, you you, were you around on Twitter back in the, well, you've been there for a while, but I don't know how active you've Been necessarily. Do you remember when Ta-Nehisi Coates quit Twitter?

0:18:27 Jamie: I don't know.

0:18:29 Thomas: So he quit and there's interesting thing he quit over and I'm pretty sure he's never been back. This has been, I want to say two or three years. Uh, he quit just over one thing and it was, um. A, a kind of a, a fight with Cornell West and yeah, it's so interesting. Um, because he just said, all right, I'm out. I'm gone. I didn't, this is not what I want to be here for. And he had 1.25 million followers and I'm pretty sure he's never been back. I mean, we can search now, but I think he's maybe, that's probably a smart thing, honestly, frankly. But that's interesting because it was somebody quitting Twitter, you know, who has a million point two five followers there over a single person, you know, like and I imagine that also Cornel West's fans probably got in there and, you know, complicated it there. But it wasn't really as though it was like this leftist canceling more than it was kind of a feud between two people.

0:18:44 Jamie: I knew it was going to be Cornel West. I know that. Right.

0:19:35 Thomas: It's, we got to be careful separating people's personal choices of whether they find it worthwhile to continue on a platform like Twitter or Facebook or whatever it may be versus somebody's been actually canceled in a in a horrific way.

0:19:50 Jamie: And I'm gonna mispronounce his name because I'm a terrible no good person and can can never pronounce anything correctly. But again, Coates has not been canceled. He's still writing, He's still giving talks, he's still publishing, he is still very much a public intellectual. And this was a personal decision where he decided this was not the right medium for him to communicate his ideas to his fans. It wasn't what was most effective. And it was probably interfering in his ability to do what was most effective, and so, at the end of the day, he's a very smart man and decided, you know, after a cost-benefit analysis, it just wasn't worth it. And to be honest, I'm like, I'm kind of jealous that he's got that like level of commitment that he just like made this decision and was like done and that was it and never looked back.

Um, you know, I think for us mere mortals, we, you know, I think we need to think about social media seriously about how we use it. And if it's, you know, a source of more pain for you, like, don't do it. Like, just, just, and I guess it's really easy to say, right? Like, just stop. But if there's a thing in your life that on average is bringing you more suffering than is bringing your joy, that is, that is not a thing you should be keeping around. You need to find something to replace that fixation. Because this world is full of enough bullshit. Social media should not be another place that it enters your world.

0:20:02 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. I want to, I guess from my perspective, the thing I would say is what would help me, and I think it's going to be very specific to the circumstances, you know, is I realized that everybody trolling me was just the same incel piece of shit. It like it, and I was like, oh, these are all the same guy and I don't care about them. So it, that got actually kind of easy. But there are definitely times where, uh, and and uh, there's... there's a great book on it, I've referenced it before, I'm looking over on my shelf to see what it is because I have the worst memory for names in the history of time. So yeah, I've referenced it before, but, uh, you know, John Ronson wrote the book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, and he's actually pretty, I don't know what you would call it, I don't think there is really a distinction there, but he's been maybe more, um, reticent to engage in any kind of online shame.

0:22:11 Thomas: He's been very against online shaming after writing that book, uh, because he does, he did find, you know, there are examples of, and the famous one that maybe you've heard of was the the woman who got on a flight, do you remember this, she tweeted a joke about like, "Oh, traveling to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS, just kidding, I'm white," which was a joke, clearly a joke, and it also isn't, isn't really clear, like, I don't know what stance she's taking, you know, like sometimes people are being ironic or people are like targeting a group. It's not even really clear from the tweet that whether or not she was being ironic or actually targeting anybody. But anyway, she gets on the plane, she gets off the plane and she's lost her job and everybody's gone nuts. It's gone super viral.

There are definitely examples of, okay, this crap's gone way too far, this is actually bad, it's taking people's jobs maybe in an unjustified way. And if, if maybe you don't think that's a good example, there are others in the book where it's, sure, it might be someone making a bad joke or making a bad comment or whatever it is, but the idea that that then ruins their lives is a very real thing.

0:22:33 Jamie: Yes. Well,

0:23:22 Thomas: And I think it's a bad thing. But I guess the main point I want to get to is Colin freaking Kaepernick. Like, this is not a left eating itself thing. People, everybody is invested in this being a left wing issue, like both left and like a lot of people in the center want the left to be this way so that they can have that narrative. People on the right want the right to be left way, so they can bash the left and say, oh, look, it's so impossible to be on the left because you just can't live up to those standards, so why don't you be an Intellectual Dark Web centrist a-hole, that kind of thing. Like, there are so many people with divested interests. I think you were referencing this earlier, that in that narrative, that it's frustrating because it's just not the case. Like, Colin Kaepernick doesn't have a job because he in the NFL anyway, which, which is a big sacrifice that he made, you know, because he knelt, literally the least thing you could do.

0:24:20 Thomas: Almost. He knelt during the national anthem and the right decided he's not a person anymore, more so, like, this is not a left-wing issue. Yeah.

0:24:29 Jamie: So this is so interesting to me, because this is a debate I've sort of been watching from the sidelines. And there is a philosopher at Yale, who is currently working on fascism, and he's had a previous book out on how propaganda works. His name is Jason Stanley. And he's been talking about this recently, this idea of, you know, deplatforming and censoring. And there certainly is this narrative, right, that the left is out of control, we're uninviting speakers from, you Know, campuses, because they espouse Nazi adjacent views. And And there's, you know, this sort of impulse to say, well, you know, both sides are doing it. And it's kind of, you know, all over the place.

0:25:18 Jamie: And I don't have all of the details handy, but he does like an empirical analysis of this, and what he finds actually is that it just really isn't the case that the speakers or the people who are holding views on the right are actually getting deplatformed in any way that corresponds with the outrage rage they feel for not having these opportunities to speak. But when people do end up being on the receiving end of being deplatformed or losing their jobs, they overwhelmingly tend to be articulating what we would consider more left-leaning views. For example, there was, I think it was a dean at the University of Alabama who was recently forced to resign because he dared to suggest that police violence may have a racist element to it.

0:26:10 Jamie: And this, you know, offended the powers that be. It offended the board of directors. It offended the donors. And so he was pushed out of the university. And you mentioned Kaepernick, right? Again, same sort of thing, right? Just, you know, kneeling, right, which is a sign of respect. It's literally how you genuflect in church to give deference to God. And this cost him his job. And so there really isn't this symmetry in place, at least according to people who are studying this, that the left really isn't doing this to the right, the way that the right is claiming it. And actually, in fact, it looks like if anybody's going to be victim of this, it's usually the right wing that pushes back on people espousing more left-leaning views.

0:26:20 Thomas: And I'll do you one better. Oh, sorry, I didn't want to cut in if you had more. I

0:26:56 Jamie: Well, no, I do want to say, so that woman on the airplane, like, that's complicated. This is not a public person, this is not an official. And I'm sort of of the opinion that whatever you do in your personal life should not impact your job if your job isn't in any way connected to those sorts of comments, right? And so if this was a nurse treating AIDS patients, I might feel differently. Um, or if she were maybe, I don't know, maybe even a teacher, there are some, there are some overlap, um, because to me, I, I don't think it's quite right to just sort of dismiss it as a joke. Um, it's that, that sort of a joke to me seems egregiously vulgar, um, and is predicated on this assumption that, like, oh, it's funny when black, black people die in large numbers because we've historically, systematically ignored the diseases they suffer from. And I think white people should really be careful about joking about that kind of stuff.

0:27:52 Thomas: I I agree but then like there's There's the counter argument, and that's what's hard with, if, if you're taking an ironic stance, and we can, you know, that this person could have bickered about this, I don't know, but if they're taking a ironic stance, like this joke is to highlight that it sucks that there's a racial disparity in this, you know, like, where do, do you draw that line? I guess what bothers me about that situation is I feel like it should be handled like you would handle it in an actual workplace thing where it's, hey, your co-worker found this joke offensive, and then it's their responsibility to, like, apologize, make sure they've learned their lesson, do that kind of thing. But because, like, the internet now, all of a sudden there's this knee jerk, no, well, clearly we have to fire this person because they tweeted, did something, and a lot of people saw it. It's just, it's weird, and it ends up being unjust a lot of the time, but it's certainly good

0:28:45 Jamie: Yeah, so I generally agree with that. I think there's lot of things that intersect here, because when somebody loses their job, particularly in the United States of America, they're also going to lose their health care. Um, they're, you know, going to lose their income, which means, you know, they may miss their mortgage payment, which means they may lose their house. Um, and there isn't really a social safety net here in a meaningful sense, um, to catch people when these sorts of things happen. And I don't want to make excuses for people who do bad things, um, but, you know, I was, I was at a talk yesterday about Simone de Beauvoir, and we were mentioning that the novel She Came to Stay.

And one of the questions is, you know, fundamentally about, like, is a person fundamentally their worst moment? Who, like what makes a person? Are you your worst mistake, or can you recover from that? Can you be more than that? And I think, you know, the way that our system is set up where it's focused on punishing and extracting retribution, we have a tendency, I think, to prevent people from moving beyond their worst mistakes, because the way that we respond to their worst mistake very often puts them in circumstances that leaves them so few choices that

0:28:56 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:30:04 Jamie: The options available to them are pretty shitty.

0:30:07 Thomas: I, I think it's all, it's, it's such a game of luck oftentimes, that sad, that for some people a mistake they made ruins their life, to you know, whereas if I did the same thing, but like got lucky, you know, if I was distracted driving one time and I just happened to not, there just didn't happen to be like some old lady crossing the road or something, you know, like the same action could either end, just ruin your life, or you get lucky and it's nothing, like it literally does nothing to you.

It's, it's, uh, it's, I, I guess we could all use to be a bit more charitable, you know, when it comes to people making a big mistake. Fake. But yeah, I was going to say earlier to bolster your point about this not being a left wing issue and specifically often being worse for people on the left. I just have to point this out. Like when we're talking about right wing cancel culture, John Bolton just got fired, right? John Bolton, and the right is calling him like a liberal now.

They've decided he, yes, he's on Fox, Fox News, it might have been Tucker Carlson, was one of those people, you know, like, which is the right, you're like, that's a mainstream right-wing voice. Now, they've decided that John Bolton, oh, he had to get out of there because he's always been this like progressive, like faux, whatever. He's not really conservative. So that, that's how bad right-wing cancel culture is, it's gotten to point where if you just disagree with their furor, you know, their president, they're, they're like deity, in president Trump, if you just disagree you're all of a sudden not a person and you're a liberal, actually you've gone so far, John

0:30:46 Jamie: Yeah. Wait, what? Well, I mean,

0:31:43 Thomas: Bolton, yeah.

0:31:45 Jamie: That's insane. I think that's why we need to be especially careful and skeptical about any claims on anybody on the right, and especially anybody from the intellectual dark web, when they start talking about the left being out of control, because I think these moral equivocations really are troubling, because they obscure our ability to identify what should be the center and what should be a neutral point, insofar as such a thing exists. If we are now going to turn John Bolton into a liberal because he disagreed with Donald Trump, we are doomed. If John Bolton is a liberal, being a liberal doesn't mean anything.

0:32:31 Thomas: Fortunately, I don't think any liberals were buying that, it was just uh, just, just Fox News, the propaganda network.

0:32:36 Jamie: But so, well, so this is what's so interesting, right? Because the point of saying things like this isn't even to try to convince viewers that on any fact of the matter, it's to strip from them the very notion that there's even such a thing as true. And that, what that's what makes this kind of propaganda so scary. And I think, given that this is happening on a national political scale, we need to be extra mindful when other bad actors are doing that, with Natalie about her being canceled by the left for, you know, just saying her first person experience is that, you know, when I'm in a room and I'm the only trans person and everybody is, you know, sharing their pronouns, it feels very othering to me because it highlights the fact that I'm different, um, I think we've just got to be careful, so

0:33:29 Thomas: Yeah, so as somebody who, you know, considers himself progressive and has has proudly done the label SJW at times, you know, and that's for, that's for everybody to decide where they are, where they consider themselves. And it's also for other people to decide, you know, whether or not I actually fulfill that. I don't know. But anyway, as somebody who's been in that sphere online, you know, I think everybody has their limits. I think that a lot of time, a lot of the time we want to assume that, or at least I see this in some interactions online where there's just no too far for certain things, you know, and, and I think for me, I had to, it took me some time to dial that in of like, okay, when do I not care about this disagreement?

0:34:18 Thomas: You know, like a particular thing. If someone wants to take what I think is a bad faith interpretation of something I've said, and use that to do one of these like, oh, this person is practically a right winger, and da da da, and make one of those sort of, I guess, cancellation efforts. Efforts, I think everyone has their line of where they're going, where they are going to draw for themselves, and they need to draw that line, I think, of whether you think this is good faith and worthwhile or not. And if you think it's something that you said wrong, which has often been the case with me, I want to apologize and make it right as best I can. Or if I think like, okay, this is something who, this someone who, for whatever reason, like doesn't like me and would like to, you know, say bad things about me, and I feel like they're just taking a very bad faith reading of what I said.

0:35:08 Thomas: You, you have, I think the thing we have to try to do, which is really hard and which I try to doing now is you have to just realize you're not going to change their mind. You know, there's some people who they, they don't want to agree with you. Like they don'T, you know, they, They want to score a point on something or whatever. And, uh, you just have to let it sit. You Know, like I, I really think that I don't believe that ContraPoints needed to quit Twitter. I mean, if she wanted to for her own sake, that's always going to be her decision. But like, she could have just left this and said, okay, this is what I think. I said what I think. Some people disagree, you know, or change her mind and apologize. But, you know, I don't know.

0:35:49 Jamie: There, yeah, so there are a couple of different things there, I think. First, you know, when, when navigating any of these sort of dynamics, um, you need to be, be mindful of who your audience is, right? And so I have the great privilege of getting to teach philosophy for a living. And because of that experience, I know that arguments actually can change students' minds, that when you engage people's ideas, it really can expand their thinking. And people within a short period of time can radically alter their views. And that can only be done through dialogue.

Log That said, if it becomes obvious that someone is in no way interested in what the truth of the matter is and is just trying to score rhetorical points, that is a complete waste of your time, and by all means, you should check out, right, you may as well like pound salt, it's just not going to accomplish anything except your own frustration, and who needs more of that in their life, um. As it relates to, you know, self-identified progressive people navigating these kind of complicated spaces, where we're trying to make sense of changing norms and what should be appropriate, and especially when it's like a self-identified progressive person who's relatively privileged as it relates to other people, I think Rachel McKinnon has a paper out that encourages people to move from thinking of themselves as allies and encourages them to be what she calls active bystanders.

0:37:23 Jamie: Because she says, when we think of ourselves as allies, it becomes part of the identity we wear. And so when we get, you know, reasonable feedback from the very people we conceive of ourselves as being allied to, it threatens our identity in a way that can result in us being defensive. Whereas if we consider ourselves active bystanders, and we intercede on behalf of the people that we want to support in the midst of actual acts of oppression, then we're less defensive when someone says, oh, hey, actually, you know what? Being asked to announce my pronouns in a room full of cis people when I'm the only trans person doesn't feel so good for me, we might be less defensive and more receptive to what the needs of the community we're trying to help actually need.

0:38:13 Thomas: Yeah, and it's hard with that specific question, because I think non-binary people might say, okay but, you you know, we like this situation where people announce their pronoun. You know, it might just be a conflict that is not easily reconciled, because sometimes the things people need are in conflict, and it's hard. You know, that's, that's, if there are, there's a group of people that benefits and is made more comfortable, made more accepted, and all that by this pronoun practice of going around the room and doing all that, that but somebody else who's going to have the opposite reaction, like it might just be that there's not like some obvious answer that makes everybody happy, um, and in that case, like it's you know, people are saying what they think and they're saying how they feel, and we got to do our best, but I don't know that it's, one of the assumptions I think some people have is that there's some easy answer to this, and we might just have to be comfortable with the fact that sometimes there's tensions here and we got to do our best, yeah.

0:39:14 Jamie: You know, I think that's at the end of the day, what the answer is going to be most of the time, that most of the situations we're going to find ourselves in that require us to act in ways that we hope are moral, are going to be ambiguous. And it's going to depend on the particulars of that situation and who the person that you're interacting with is, what their preferences are, and there's not going to be these hard and fast rules. And so it can be totally valid for Natalie to say, actually, dear cis friends, I would prefer if you didn't do a pronoun exercise as a means of introduction when I'm the only trans person there.

You know what? What? When she's the only trans person there, that's it. That's the answer. And then it can also be equally true that when there are non-binary people in the room and they say, actually, I like the introduction of pronouns because I like being able to introduce myself as they. I like the opportunity to normalize that and break down the stigma. Then that can be the answer in that situation. And that'd be also just as correct and then not be in conflict just because they're different.

0:40:28 Thomas: I agree, and, and, uh, so yeah, this, this cancel culture thing is like, I, I think it's it, it definitely exists, but the main takeaway that I want people to get from this, I hope that you and I have both made this point, is that the idea that this is some left-wing problem and not anywhere else is just wrong, and it absolutely does harm to have that misconception. So that's the main thing.

0:40:52 Jamie: Yeah. I think it's also really to point out, I think it's, it's sometimes too easy to forget that the people on the other end of like the Twitter handle are real people and you know, words hurt. I know like when we were kids, right? People used to say like sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me, but that's just false.

0:41:01 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that's not true.

0:41:12 Jamie: That's just not real. In fact, there, there's, there was a Harvard study that was done that found verbal abuse can be just as, and sometimes more painful than physical abuse, because physical abuse you can point to. You can see the black and blue, and you can say, this is bad, this wrong. And there's something sort of cathartic and healing about being able to point to something tangible and say, this is where the violation took place, and it's bad. Where words, because of their very intangibleness, have a way of lingering and sort of taking root in a person's psyche and can do real harm. And I think we'd all be better served by remembering that the person on the other end no matter how flippant or fun that their like online personality is, is a real human being carrying a history of, you know, traumas and insecurities and wounds. And like, you just never know how something that might be perfectly benign, if said to you, is like unloading some like deeply buried personal trauma. Like don't do that to people. Be kind. It's not that hard. So

0:41:12 Thomas: Absolutely false. Yeah I believe it.

0:42:13 Thomas: Yeah well I certainly have a lot of room to grow on that. I sometimes haven't been my best on Twitter. I try and I fail but I will still try. It's hard you know because Twitter for me is just like, you tend to be, it's not good. It's not a good place to like have an argument, honestly. Like I think it's best. And I only really try to engage with people who are, you know, ostensibly on my side. Like if we have some minor disagreement, like that's what I try to use it for. Because there is no use, I don't think, to going around and trying to argue with people who disagree with you on Twitter, if they substantially disagree with you.

0:43:00 Thomas: It's the worst possible form for that, I think. But that's a great point you make. I in no way mean to minimize the trauma of getting some of this this backlash online. I think it can be substantial. Absolutely. But I guess I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to outline like how my perspective shifted a little bit and it has helped for me, you know, to like, to, to try to look at it in terms of, okay, who are the people you actually care about? And what do they think? And you know if, if it's true, maybe it will be true that I've pissed off the people that I actually care about. And that could be absolutely true someday. Uh, and that will, that sucks. And I'll have to like, apologize, figure out where I went wrong or like, God forbid, I actually think I'm right. That makes it even worse.

0:43:46 Thomas: You know, um, that'd probably be the worst possible conflict is I think I'm right. And my whole audience thinks I'm wrong. That'd be, that'd be tough to reconcile. But like, for the most part, oftentimes in these anonymous spaces or pseudo anonymous spaces, you really don't know who is. And the problem with the alt-right especially is they love assuming fake identities and assuming positions that they don't even hold. It's the worst. I hate it. But once I knew that, I realized that you really have to care a lot less about some of these things. Like you can't just nut pick as the, the, the phrase was coined to find like, okay, who's this, who is the, what I think is the worst argument against me on Twitter and use that to formulate your whole worldview and kind of just react to that, which is what I think a lot of people do. And I think it's harmful.

0:44:35 Jamie: I, you know, I, I agree. I think part of the problem is that too few of us are willing to admit like how fragile we are. Right. And all of us, our senses of selves are far more fragile and vulnerable than we let on. And none of us. Are particularly great at dealing with criticism because yeah, so right, it's like, you know, oh my God, like, I'm, I'm barely being held together by like bubble gum and like miracle whip right and so right and so, like, if you, if you nudge me too hard, like, I may just like fall apart because like this is this is a, you know, high wire act going on and yeah, so I think one of the ways that Twitter and social media more broadly can be really toxic is that sometimes somebody may make a relatively benign criticism that's not intended to

0:44:57 Thomas: Me especially. Yeah, I know me too. I got some popsicle sticks taped together.

0:45:18 Thomas: I got a plunger for a leg.

0:45:33 Thomas: Yeah.

0:45:33 Jamie: Be harmful, but our immediate impulse is to get so defensive because we're so afraid that, oh my God, we're going to be seen as not good enough, and everything's going to fall apart, and everybody's going to know that I'm this fraud. And, you know, we sort of like spiral and we don't generally deal well with even mild criticism.

And so I think, you know, one possible opportunity that we can take from this in order to sort of propel ourselves forward in a more, you know, positive way is, you know, one, there are people who are just trolls, right, and we shouldn't, you shouldn't worry about trolls, um, but you know, when somebody criticizes you, like Marcus Aurelius has this line in the Meditations, right, there are two possible interpretations when somebody criticizes, either, you know, they've, they've, if they really knew you, I think actually Epictetus, he jokes, if they really knew you, they would have listed all of my other faults, right?

He's like, this ideal of being very flippant about criticism, but Marcus Aurelius says like there's... there's one of two ways that we can interpret this. On the one hand, they're just wrong and they don't know anything about us. And so why should I concern myself with things that aren't true? I can just set that aside and that's not my burden to bear. And then it's, well, if this is true about me, what makes it bad isn't that they've said it, it's that it's true.

And so I can use this opportunity as an impetus to improve and that they haven't done me any harm. In fact, what they've done is brought to my attention that which I need to focus on and improve on. And that's, you know, really easy to say and do when you're the emperor of, you know, the most powerful empire on earth at the time. And I don't expect anybody to be able to do that perfectly here and now.

0:46:23 Thomas: Yeah.

0:47:10 Jamie: But I think we would all do better to be less defensive to criticism, instead of, you know, going into overdrive defensive mode, and then people needing to get canceled. Because I don't think we have a good framework for dealing with our own vulnerability in these spaces right

0:47:25 Thomas: Well, I, I certainly agree with that. And as the boomer dad would say, I resemble that remark. Uh-huh. Uh, but I, uh, I do the one thing I do want to say is I do disagree with that quote, at least somewhat, because I think perhaps back then it wouldn't have been as much of an issue, but certainly today, trying to live out that quote and to try to live by that is very difficult if you're ever on the receiving end of somebody with like 100,000 followers saying something incorrect about you. It's very difficult to deal with. It was very hard for me. Me, I felt like, okay, this is, you know, it's hard to just be like, oh, I just want to, you know, that's not true.

0:48:12 Thomas: So I don't need to worry about that. Well, a whole bunch of people now think it's true, like a lot more than I even have as followers. So like, what does that mean? You know, maybe it becomes the truth.

0:48:20 Jamie: And so and I'm not, and I don't think, you know, um, you know, that the Stoics would say like that it's not hard, right? We're humans after all, like none of us are sages. We're all subject to our own, you know, psychological wiring. Of course it's a struggle, um, if it wasn't, it wouldn't be the sort of thing that we have to practice, right? But at the end of the day, right, if you turn off Twitter and you, you know, you wake. If you take care of your children, you record your podcast, you feed them dinner, you plan your next vacation, in what way materially has your life been altered by, you know, XYZ John Doe thinking whatever they think about you?

0:48:28 Thomas: Well I don'

0:49:02 Jamie: In what real way has your wife been changed?

0:49:02 Thomas: Think we just, I think we live in more than one realm now. I don't think it's true that we just live in this material stuff right in front of us world. I think we have, I think most people have an identity online that matters to them. And I, I agree, like, I agree 75% with the quote, the only thing I guess what I would say is, I don't personally, I disagree that you can just say, well, that's not a concern to me, even though far more people than I ever even have as listeners now think an incorrect thing about me. I'll just, that's not true, so I don't care. I think that you can still adopt a form of this though that maybe old Marcus Aurelius might approve of, which is like, correct the record in a non-flip out way as best as you can, put it out there, and then be like, okay, now I've done everything I can. Now, if people still want to believe that, I cannot do anything about it.

0:49:05 Jamie: Yeah.

0:49:52 Thomas: And that is what I had to go through. Let me know if Marcus Aurelius would approve. But that's what I did eventually was like, all right, I'm just going to counter it with what I think and say it in the in the best way I can. And there are people who are guaranteed to not accept that. And it was hard. It actually, I feel better now that I've gone through that because once you realize that there are people who just are not going to agree with you and are not, and they want, furthermore, they want to have like a gotcha takedown of you. This is specific to, you know, like the online 8chan type of person that they just want to hate you and you can't do anything about it. It eventually was okay. Now that's because I don't, you know, I haven't been like doxxed or whatever, and I'm not receiving death threats and all that. So I am definitely in, even, even in harassment circles and definitely in a relative position of privilege.

0:50:43 Thomas: Um, but it did help for me to realize like, well, I put it out there. That's the end of what I can do. Now I'll just have to accept that a hundred thousand people think a really wrong thing about me.

0:50:56 Jamie: So, I mean, what I think Aurelius would say is, right, like now we've got like 8 billion people on Earth. His answer would be like, well, there are, you know, 7.9 billion people who don't even even think you're significant enough to pay attention to, so why be upset about a hundred thousand people thinking this when there's 7.9 who can't be bothered, right. And or yeah I'm not, yeah. So you teach philosophy, not math.

0:51:05 Thomas: I think that leaves Leaves a hundred million people. Cool. Yeah. 7.999. Yeah. Yeah.

0:51:28 Jamie: But um, you know, but he also has this great passage, which is similar to what you just said, right? You can be the most beautiful emerald in the world and you're not, not less radiant because someone can't appreciate the way you sign. The, the, the fault is not in you being an inadequate emerald. You're still as great an emerald as an emerald can be. The fault lies in the person who's unable to appreciate your value. And so to not internalize their error in judgment as reflecting something about you. And I do think that it's, it's hard. Um, but I do think that if you sort of keep that in mind, it does make it a little bit easier to not take some of these criticisms, especially from, you know, strangers on the internet, so personally.

0:52:13 Thomas: Yep. Well, I know you're speaking generally, but I'm going to just pretend you called me a beautiful shining emerald and that'll make my day. And there you go. All right. Uh, I, uh, speaking of the tactile things in front of me, I've got kids yelling in the house that are home that I gotta go take care of, but this was a great discussion, Jamie. Thank you so much. As always. And I hope I hope all of you enjoyed it. I hope you've got if you've got questions or comments, I think we're getting to the point where, you know, we could do a nice Q&A with Jamie. That'd be really fun. And but if we're not there yet, maybe tomorrow when we do our debate episode, I'm sure there will be more questions and comments. Can't wait. Hey, tune in tomorrow after the debates or in the next morning. And it'll be a lot of fun. So thanks again, Jamie. And I'll talk to you tomorrow.

0:52:47 Jamie: See you tomorrow.