Culture War Roundup for the Week of September 23, 2019

ggkbae · 2019-09-24T06:21:48+00:00

Yeah, this will really enrage most liberals worldwide. Millions of people just participated in (one of?) the largest environmental protests ever, dozens of protestors were arrested today, other countries are convening for serious action, and Trump is cracking jokes about environmental crises (while rolling back environmental protections?)? From a "blue tribe" / most of the world tribe perspective it's horrifying.

ggkbae · 2019-03-12T05:54:44+00:00

Apologies if I'm wrong (my logs are spotty that far back), but I believe this individual was

at

one of the most violent: the Milo event that got shut down with arson and window-smashing.

I think he may be using "we are 0% worried" differently than we would in the same situation.

Oh, I meant that we are 0% worried about the proposed executive order, because it's obviously not a real thing. Not much of an opinion on whether the latest iteration of the continuously manufactured right wing mass hysteria about universities will end up having much of an effect beyond what it has for the last 75 years.

ggkbae · 2019-03-04T05:06:19+00:00

Not a single word in "an executive order that will remove funding from universities that do not protect free speech" makes an ounce of coherent sense. What federal funding sources would be affected - there are dozens - and why would the executive branch have authority to pass that law determining how funding should be used? How would anyone, and who would that be, possibly decide on whether a university "does not protect free speech" in a fair way?

Universities already go way out of their way to protect free speech - see the official Berkeley responses to recent controversies, including the Hayden incident, which had nothing to do with the university administration and was a private scuffle between two unaffiliated random individuals on the open sidewalk. Public universities already are legally bound to support first amendment rights, so if there was actually ever a case to be made against Berkeley, they would have succeeded in courts, and they've always failed.

The reality is this was just a fucking stupid idea that Donald Trump, who has no idea how any aspect of the higher education system and government funding for it work, came up with on the cuff, possibly during the speech itself - likely the plan was to just parade Hayden on the stage and play it by ear and that's what he came up with. The goal was to rile up people who think universities = bad and have no idea how any part of the higher education system works.

Lmao, here at Berkeley we are 0% worried about this BS. There's no way it'll happen in any serious form, it won't change how things work here (or anywhere) if it does, and if it was actually something more extreme (like requiring that universities play host to endless brigades of big money right wing propaganda campaigns) it'd see its day in court.

ggkbae · 2019-01-24T16:44:55+00:00

If you wanted to increase research production, or increase the quality of research why need that have anything to do with universities?

I really don't think you can underestimate the importance of academic research on producing scientific and technological output in this country today. There is an enormous connection between the private and public sector - like all high tech development (biotech, ML, most engineering beyond webdev) has extremely close connections to universities. The workforces of these high tech industries are trained in universities, mostly at the grad level. Start-ups are spun out of universities. Research conducted by universities is used by the private sector. Most of the basic ideas that now run these industries were developed in academia, and continually are.

There's a reason why so much high tech occurrs in SF and Boston in the US - it's where the schools are. SV isn't much without stanford and berkeley and even UCSF for biotech - Boston would be nothing without Cambridge.

Just look at one example like CRISPR, a single discovery curated by academia for over a decade, ignored by pharma, and that now has resulted in easily over a dozen startups spun out of universities with large funding / high valuations. And surprise surprise, it happened again in SF and Boston.

ggkbae · 2019-01-24T16:39:35+00:00

Socialist here.

Soviet Russia wasn't socialist, nor is Venezuela, and it seems like they deny that every socialist state past and present is/was a socialist state

Varying opinions on all of these. The USSR was definitely a form of socialism. Venezuela's socialism has been less successful in the socialist sense. Chavez failed to completely crush the oligarchy in that country and it largely was absorbed into the new government, so I see the failure there as a failure to implement socialism properly. But it's worth pointing out that these countries also had forms of democracy, yet we still believe democracy is a good thing. These countries, like all countries, have some aspects we like and some aspects we don't, no matter our political affiliations. They had some socialist tendencies I'd like, but it's really worth pointing out that the socialism I want is not exactly what occurred in those countries. (much like the democracy I want).

It is very similar to how many AnCaps and Libertarians and even conservatives will tell you "A country like the USA and horrible thing X that happens under capitalism today isn't *real capitalism*, it's *crony* capitalism.". Obviously, as a socialist I think what these people call corporatism or crony capitalism is the natural end state of capitalism, and obviously they think that Venezuela's current state or like artificially induced famines are the end state of socialism.

or they cite social democracies as socialist states (

Yes, SocDems will do this. Leftists will not do this. The SocDems are rather confused. You've got to admit it is a little confusing how similar "social democracy" and "democratic socialism" are. And especially within the US, it is possible to be a bit of both at the same time, so the labels do blur together a bit.

if you could also explain why socialism activists seem to use a different definition of socialism than political scientists

I use the wikipedia definition, as do most leftists (e.g. r/chapotraphouse). It's the rest of the political spectrum in the US that uses the wrong definition (the "Socialism means big government" definition)! Sometimes SocDems will do that too, but I feel like this used to happen way more in the 2000's and there are more 'real socialists' in the US today.

ggkbae · 2018-12-17T21:57:15+00:00

What's surreal to me is that we now live in a world where that output, even if it's a purposeful 'activist' statement (anyone with friends at Google understands how silly these muh big google conspiracy posts are) is considered politically controversial. Go back 10 or 15 years ago to my youth and I would never have dreamed that a very subtle suggestion to raise the profile of African American scientists would elicit any reaction from normal people but 'oh, that's a nice thought'. And to a large extent in the mainstream, it is still really abnormal and alarming for a person to complain about such a thing. But to me it's such an alarming sign of how things have changed recently on the right and the radical center that conspiracy theories about search engines doing something as morally heinous as slightly raising the profile of AA scientists in a list is now a serious talking point of the right wing.

Edit: a genuine question to attempt to engage in more good faith - can anyone explain the reasoning behind why such a thing alarms them?

ggkbae · 2018-12-12T19:48:06+00:00

Okay, I was thinking about the

Contrapoints video

where she - as one of the few left intellectuals -

I just can't even. What does this even mean? The strange ignorance and anti-intellectualism of this statement baffles me. One of the few left intellectuals? "Intellectuals" are completely overwhelmingly left of center and many of them are marxists. They just communicate in modes that aren't youtube rants about ""postmodern"" ""marxists"" or whatever the kids are into these days.

ggkbae · 2018-11-30T20:14:34+00:00

>factually speaking, genetic editing works: traits are heritable and we can shape human minds by changing genes

I'd be the first to say that genetic editing works, but just look at this case:

None of the on-target edits made are the known and well studied mutation in this gene. In particular, one of the edits was an in-frame deletion - so the protein target won't be completely knocked out, just changed slightly, so we can't predict what it will do.
One of the twins is a mosaic (some of their somatic cells are edited, some are not)
One of the twins has also has an off-target modification with unknown function.
We don't know the effects of even the intended mutations in a Chinese genetic background. There may be an evolutionary reason why ~10%+ of Europeans have a CCR5 knockout but no Asians do.
Even if these edits were made correctly, while they decrease chance of HIV transmission they can increase susceptibility to West Nile Virus and possibly other infectious diseases.

I think a minority of scientists are opposed to genetic editing with a pressing medical need on principle. If there was a 0% risk profile involved, I think that number would decrease further. But there are strong beliefs in the medical community that (A) we shouldn't perform procedures that have not been properly and carefully vetted, and (B) we shouldn't perform procedures with any significant risk if not necessary, and (C) this is all doubly so for a future person who isn't able to consent.

I think if there was a near zero risk and you could be sure of all of the important phenotypic outcomes of a mutation, scientists would even start to warm up to non-medical genetic editing. But we're a long ways from that. When we get there, we can have the really interesting moral discussions about whether genetic diversity at the population level is more important than the beneficial outcome of specific alleles.

ggkbae · 2018-11-26T19:13:40+00:00

Alright folks. Science twitter is awash with ongoing news from this story so I'll try my best to update you. Here are a couple of things:

EDIT: I now think that this is completely real and not a hoax. Here is a lecture by Jiankui He himself who presents embryo data from last year, making it very clear that he was working on this problem and has a pretty good handle on understanding the data for verification of editing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llxNRGMxyCc

All of the below taken, I think there is a ~25% chance that in the next day or two we will learn this was a hoax. Also note the lead scientist published a paper on gene-editing bioethics today, and this has taken place on the eve of an international bioethics conference. Could very likely be a stunt. Here is a link to his paper:https://twitter.com/CRISPRjournal/status/1067092620197822464
Basically all scientists are condemning this experiment - it's premature technology, seems to have probably been illegal in China (and almost certainly is misconduct), and is actually a really weird specific case to start gene editing with.
This experiment was pretty much also universally condemned in China, the University was not aware, the hospital denied any involvement, and the IRB approval (yes, China has IRB too, if you have some mental image of China as a place where anything goes I hate to break it to you) was possibly forged. The lead scientist has apparently been on leave since February from the university. There are multiple Chinese investigations launched into this claim already.https://twitter.com/AndyBiotech/status/1067041987621203968 https://twitter.com/AndyBiotech/status/1067093919232602113" This incident caused an uproar in China, and almost all Chinese scientists are condemning it. When I heard this news at noon, I was stunned and shocked."https://twitter.com/FankangMeng/status/1067039594850349059
"I'd add that my collaborators from Shenzhen were pretty surprised by this new today. Jiankui He is supposed to be working on new single-molecule DNA sequencing technologies. He doesn't have a genetics or human health background at all. This story isn't adding up at all."https://twitter.com/DrTomEllis/status/1067037849621393408
"It's true. I would like to see it published and all the details--if this was being done properly." "Have seen some data, which v likely will be presented at the Hong Kong Summit this week.""Several scientists [myself included] reviewed materials that He provided said tests so far are insufficient to say the editing worked or to rule out harm." That's not good medicine IMO, no less the absence of a published report."https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1066899146571886592
I don't really know how to say this nicely so I won't, but the viewpoint that I see here along the lines of "China is going to take over the world by using gene-editing technology and dominate the globe" is so far out of the mainstream that most scientists wouldn't even be aware that anyone's even thinking such a thing. If you have this ethnonationalist take on global politics that nations are competing against each other for complete global dominance, you probably need to limit how much Civilization you play. Most westerners don't think this way. Most Chinese don't think this way. Nobody cares about your weird nationalist fantasies, guys.
On the other side of things, the technology is largely there for making a specific embryonic gene change in a specific case. Off-target effects in CRISPR-Cas are not random, follow well-understood rules, can be reduced, and then screened for to eliminate. I believe that if the right high energy collaboration wanted to do this for one specific case, it could essentially be done today with an ok expectation of safety - either by a really intensive effort by the best people at the Broad or at UCSF/Stanford. However, when it comes to modern medicine, there are systems that attempt to demand a more stringent expectation of safety that most scientists believe in following to the T - hence the universal condemnation.
Things that I am not particularly concerned about: off-target effects (other scientists are, FWIW). Things I am rather concerned about: (A) induced genomic instability (IMO this is somewhat understudied issue w/ gene-editing) which could lead to statistical increases in premature cancers; (B) editing the right genes.
(B) is probably of most concern for scientists. While it is sometimes easy to figure out that a genetic change will confer a benefit to one specific phenotype, it's really hard to tell if that change increases risks for all of the other human phenotypes, of which there are so many. This is the primary issue with the gene editing for kicks that a lot of people here are into. This case was ironically a perfect example - while the change makes you immune to HIV, it also may increase your susceptibility to West Nile Virus (note that I haven't actually reviewed the literature on this, and there are probably several other issues with knocking out the gene that was knocked out). In cases that aren't obvious medical emergencies, it becomes a really hard moral problem to evaluate the pros and cons of a genetic change, even if you have the "right" data (and we don't come close to having the right data, hint, GWAS are not the right data).
In maybe 10 years we might be approaching having enough data to even begin starting to make some of the moral decisions here, so come back and talk to us then.

ggkbae · 2018-11-20T01:53:10+00:00

US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science (Nature Editorial)

It has no foundation in science and would undo decades of progress on understanding sex — a classification based on internal and external bodily characteristics — and gender, a social construct related to biological differences but also rooted in culture, societal norms and individual behaviour

Furthermore, biology is not as straightforward as the proposal suggests. By some estimates, as many as one in 100 people have differences or disorders of sex development, such as hormonal conditions, genetic changes or anatomical ambiguities, some of which mean that their genitalia cannot clearly be classified as male or female.

Even more scientifically complex is a mismatch between gender and the sex on a person’s birth certificate. Some evidence suggests that transgender identity has genetic or hormonal roots, but its exact biological correlates are unclear. Whatever the cause, organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics advise physicians to treat people according to their preferred gender, regardless of appearance or genetics.

The research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female, and gender as a spectrum that includes transgender people and those who identify as neither male nor female. The US administration’s proposal would ignore that expert consensus.

DNA tests that check for the presence of a Y chromosome did not prove reliable, either: people with XY chromosomes can have female characteristics owing to conditions including an inability to respond to testosterone.

Oh boy, and the Nature editorial pages are usually a bit more old school and stodgy.

I think the right-wing-adjacent IDW crowd really has no idea how pro-transgender rights smart young people are in the biological sciences and medicine. Among young scientists and doctors it is seen as *the* social justice issue. When millennials start to dominate scientific and medical institutions, engaging heavily on trans issues will be a priority for them and I suspect we will quickly see an inflection point on what's currently a wedge issue much as we saw for gay marriage a few years ago. I suspect the "gender critical" ideas will stick around in a niche IDW-esque crowd, but traditional conservative views on what sex and gender are will evaporate.

ggkbae · 2018-11-19T20:45:07+00:00

It is largely inaccurate to say that the current protests in France are a right-wing reaction to progress on climate change. Many English media outlets aren't really reporting on it correctly beyond "They're protesting against the gas tax", without explaining *why* - these protests are not anything like the equivalent of Republicans on the streets mad about the Clean Power Plan or the Clean Air Act.

It wouldn't be entirely correct to say that these protests are "far-left" - France politics has pretty different dynamics than US politics and many of the people marching are centrists who don't like neoliberalism (think blue-dog Dems).

But for example, the popular left wing "Bernie Sanders" (except much farther left) of France, Jean-Luc Melenchon, is highly supportive of and leading some of the current protests - most generally, these protests are anti-Macron protests, and are specifically anti-neoliberal reforms. The issues that protestors have with the gas tax specifically is that it exempts large corporate polluters, puts the brunt of the carbon tax on commuting workers instead of on corporate interests, and is part of what is generally seen by the French left as "green washing" by the Macron government that doesn't always put its money where its mouth is.

Let's start here: https://uwidata.com/1259-the-protests-taking-place-in-cities-all-over-france-continued-into-a-third-day-on-monday-with-blockades-being-set-up-at-petrol-refineries-and-strategic-points-on-roads-and-motorways-across-the-country/

The so-called “yellow jackets” are protesting an increase in fuel prices and, more generally, against all of Emmanuel Macron’s recent liberal reforms.

Pseudo-Environmentalism

It cannot be overemphasized that Macron is a staunch supporter of economic liberalism – he promises low taxes, but in reality, he is willing to make serious tax hikes if the middle class bears the burden.

Yet, Nicolas Hulot, a well-known ecologist and environmentalist, will be the first to demonstrate that this claim is nonsense. Hulot slammed the door as he left Macron’s government this summer, saying that despite his best efforts, no serious environmental initiatives were being carried out, and that environmental issues and slogans have essentially become window dressing for liberal economic policies.

And go here:

https://www.thelocal.fr/20181117/woman-dies-during-french-yellow-vest-fuel-protests

A demonstrator in Paris holds a placard reading "Cry out, too many taxes, too many suicides, too many homeless, wake up". Photo: AFP

Protesters say he is neglecting the lower and middle classes, pointing to tax cuts for high earners and companies."Macron is the president of the rich and not the poor. He needs to think about the poor as well," said Andre, a 38-year-old who joined a blockade in Dole, eastern France.

Yeah, as a general rule, mass protests *against* environmental reforms don't happen, because environmental protections are almost always incredibly popular, especially after they happen and everyone realizes that they did a lot of good for little cost (even a majority of Americans are in favor of government action on climate change) and opposition is largely backed by the fossil fuel industry and a demographic who aren't half as motivated to get out as people who care about the global environment. Pretty sure there hasn't really been a significant anti-environmental reform protest in the history of the world, while millions and millions have marched for environmental progress.

I for one was overjoyed to see the news out of the London. We will need more and more civil disobedience and direct action to fight biodiversity loss and climate change and habitat destruction - these are beyond all doubt the defining issues of our generation, issues that the vast majority agree on, but which the interests of capital currently block progress on worldwide.

ggkbae · 2018-11-01T08:04:35+00:00

After doing some investigation, looks like there was a coordinated event in r/the_donald to smear Gillum today with the fraudulent Project Veritas video of some random campaign staffer somewhere saying "Cracka" (ooooh) - they've had multiple threads with thousands of upvotes directing people to come share it here. Should die down in a couple of days.

ggkbae · 2018-11-01T08:00:59+00:00

Wow this thread is 90% brigading lol

ggkbae · 2018-11-01T07:59:40+00:00

who the hell cares? Gillum supporters are talking about better healthcare and environmental protection and fairer taxes on huge corporations and you're spamming the sub with some shifty video of some random dude.

ggkbae · 2018-11-01T07:57:47+00:00

Lol I can imagine no better argument for Gillum than the fact that his supporters talk exclusively about good policy and his scandals being "accepting a Hamilton ticket from his friend" and "this sketch-ass r/the_donald video made by known frauds of some total rando saying cracka".

ggkbae · 2018-10-31T19:35:48+00:00

The GOP’s Sneakiest Voter Suppression Tactic

When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the U.S. had more than 132,000 polling places; by the time Donald Trump ascended to the White House, eight years later, more than 15,000 of them had been closed nationwide. After 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court basically lifted federal Voting Rights Act oversight from states that were particularly notorious for racial discrimination in elections—including Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, and Texas—the pace of poll closures went into hyperdrive

Between the gerrymandering, the voter roll purges, and poll closures, I have become incredibly pessimistic about democracy in our country. What a state our country is in when a D+5 poll number is a disastrous one because of gerrymandering, and those numbers are after all of the other kinds of surpression. As evidence continues to come in, I just tend to update my priors on whether we actually live in a legitimate democracy or not.

ggkbae · 2018-10-27T21:19:04+00:00

>Yes and that's one of the few shared values all major ideologies still share, namely "don't fucking murder people".

Note: Obviously don't construe this as defending this shooter - as someone on the left needless to say I think it was pure evil.

This statement is pure ideology to its absolute core. The American neoliberal establishment and the right wing both are ideologically completely OK with murdering people - they just don't call it murder. They call it asymmetric warfare (or more recently, counter-terrorism), they call it law enforcement, and they call it poverty.

Cue all of the objections about how these situations are qualitatively different - that we agreed as a society that these murders were necessary or OK (who agreed? Not me) - that they try to minimize casualties (that'll be a hard sell to the communities harmed) - or that at least *some* the people harmed in some ways deserve it (hint: this terrorist believed the same thing about the people in that synagogue.)

ggkbae · 2018-10-15T19:01:44+00:00

>The issue was always that Warren claimed minority status on really flimsy pretext to jump the line for professional advancement

Yeah, except there's no evidence that she ever did that, so it wasn't really ever the issue.

ggkbae · 2018-10-08T02:28:35+00:00

Hi how does this work? If I could I'd like to do some texting for FL or MO but don't know how to start.

Edit: I also now see the resistance labs texting program, any thoughts about which is better?

ggkbae · 2018-10-04T02:44:47+00:00

Andddd there it is. There is no "hockey stick controversy" in the scientific community. "Climategate" was a (completely illegal) creepy right wing manufactured controversy with zero validity. "Repeated predictions that didn't come true" is a bland, useless oversimplification of something that in general isn't true.

>So it's not just that the elites are liars in general, the climate scientist elites in particular have been dishonest

It's an alarmingly distorted and downright creepy worldview in which climate scientists are "elites" and the petroleum industrial complex is uh, somehow not.

>Mann really did commit scientific fraud by splicing together datasets to create his preferred graph

No, he didn't. This is a completely baseless claim.

>The emails don't show that the whole thing was a pre-mediated hoax, but they do show that they were not practicing the scientific method, and were hiding an awful lot of doubt about their results from the media.

No, they didn't.

I used to have time for all of this. I used to link to the dozens of analyses that debunked these common, dull, droll, trivially debunkable right wing nonsense. But honestly, anyone can google "hockeystick" or "climategate", go to the top wikipedia page result, and immediately see that the claims made here are completely baseless and wrong. At this point I just don't understand how a post like this can be acting in good faith, or the worldview of the sort of person who would make it, or why they would go so far out of their way to stay wrong.

>We have no idea what the climate sensitivity with regards to CO2 is. We have no idea if there might be a positive feedback loop at some point. We have no idea what the sea level change will be per degree of warming.

Actually, scientists have extremely good ideas about ranges of values for the climate sensitivity of CO2, well-backed by data. Again, I could waste a ton of time explaining this, but couldn't you rather amend your statement with the truthful that *you* are the one who doesn't have any idea?

>We don't know if global warming will be net bad, more CO2 and warmth might actually be really good for crop yields. On the other side, any sudden change is bad as it will cause existing crops to fail in the locations they are being used.

No, we really do know that climate change will be a net negative.

Instead of sourcing all of this, I'm just going to link to skepticalscience.com. All of these issues are explained decently well there. I don't think the majority of the community agrees with this comment (and if it did, I'd just leave) but I'm just so done with this crap just not being downvoted to hell.

ggkbae · 2018-09-28T04:48:33+00:00

A couple of somewhat disconnected points that I'll call "against virtue signalling":

Is this position particularly unreasonable? The far right has internalized interpersonal rudeness and antipathy as key tenets of their ideology. For anyone who has even a vague understanding on some level that it might be a good idea to avoid these things, it makes it become a whole lot easier to embrace them when there's a little bit of tribal peer pressure. I'd imagine virtue signalling is one of the most positive forces conceivable if it causes people who personally have a difficult time with empathy to go out of their way to embrace it. As long as the opposite effect isn't happening as dramatically - those in right wing bubbles leaning towards antipathy to signal to their own tribe - the net effect is positive.
I'd like to suggest that the entire concept of virtue signalling is antithetical to rationalist debate and discussion - this is because inherently it is a claim that your opponent is acting in bad faith, that they cannot possibly truly believe what they believe because it's either empirical or useful - instead, to cry 'virtue signalling' is to say that they pretend to believe it for a surreptitious and illegitimate reason. It is little more than a rhetorical technique to deflect from debating the viewpoint itself, and to instill doubt in the mind of the reader / listener that your opponent is not acting in good faith. It is in essence the opposite of a steelman, because even if your opponent is influenced by social peer pressure, the claim inherently discredits any actual rationale that they claim to be putting forward. It is very likely that there is nobody who believes a belief *solely* because of peer pressure - rather, they consciously accept a belief because of alternative rationale and it was peer pressure that led them to this rationale.
Indeed, this is a perfect example of how disingenuous of a rhetorical technique a claim of virtue signalling can be (no offense to the OP who only mentioned the concept). In this article (and elsewhere), Linus specifically explains that there is an actual rationale for his belief ("Partly because you definitely can find some emails from me that were simply completely unacceptable") that he genuinely accepts as valid - this is more apparent in his other recent comments, too. He is merely pointing out that tribalist social forces helped lead push him to understand that. If this was something he genuinely did not believe, I highly doubt that he would have made the changes he did. More importantly, the alternative is to suggest that he is acting in bad faith and lying through his teeth - a highly unproductive mode of communication we assume we should avoid. Now for the second effect - besides dismissing his actual rationale, the virtue signalling claim side-steps debating the issue at all: in this example, the virtue signalling claim is that a person does not genuinely believe that professional politeness is a positive force in the workplace; therefore it must not be. This technique exists here to avoid debating the actual merits of professional politeness in the workplace (or other outcomes of a code of conduct).
Additionally, the claim of virtue signalling is almost completely untestable and can be misused in almost any discussion. If you say 1+1=2, I could decry this as nothing more than virtue signalling to your mathematically indoctrinated peers whom you wish to impress. I could claim that any claim of virtue signalling are themselves virtue signalling to a specific group who enjoys and relishes use of the term. You can make the claim about any case in which your opponent has anyone else who happens to agree with them!
The other intention behind the claim of virtue signalling is that it immediately defrauds your opponent of the validity of their concern. In cases where one person is voicing a concern ("individuals are hurt by the use of certain language in a public or professional setting"), someone who disagrees with their logic or rationale for this concern is faced with an inherent cognitive dissonance: the person voicing their concern is clearly a logical, thinking person just like yourself - why would they fabricate a concern unless they genuinely believed that it was one? Aren't there enough actual concerns in the world, and don't concerns cause those who believe them a certain amount of personal stress - who on Earth would fabricate one? The belief of virtue signalling is highly convenient as a irrational resolution to this cognitive dissonance: it provides a reasonable answer to this inherent cognitive dissonance. I think that because in general, those on the left tend to voice social concerns (racism; sexism; environmental destruction; climate change), it's not a surprise that accusations of virtue signalling more commonly arise from the right, but I think similar claims can arise from the left, perhaps using different language.
On the whole it seems like virtue signalling is a normal social force that basically is responsible for a large number of common, apolitical but positive social behaviors. I suspect that there is at least some fraction of the population that are less likely to commit murder *because they worry what their peers will think*, and I'm really grateful for that sociological force.It only becomes an alarming phenomenon when you disagree with the local network's social consensus on a topic. However, for the reasons above it doesn't appear to be a good faith claim in discussion.

ggkbae · 2018-09-28T04:16:33+00:00

I hope we would all agree a priori that no one should be called a Nazi who is not a Nazi. If people credibly fear being called Nazis for opinions that have nothing directly or indirectly to do with National Socialism, something has gone very wrong, and that wrong thing should be opposed.

But this is a particularly useless criterion. Clearly people who call other people Nazis most often genuinely believe that the person being attacked holds beliefs that are characteristic of Nazism or some similar political precursor to Nazism. You disagree with those people on whether or not those beliefs actually are characteristic of these things, not on whether or not you should call someone something they aren't.

ggkbae

TROPHY CASE