Category: Short Essays

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Argumentation Politics Short Essays Writings

Cancel Culture vs. Fence Pissing

For the sake of argument, let’s say something called “cancel culture” exists as a 21st-century specific example of collective, reactionary shunning of an undesirable person or viewpoint, perpetuated by leftists, and primarily preying on right-of-center viewpoints.

Such behavior would be nothing new. Every culture is constantly trying to push its adherents to conform, and wielding its own specialized form of ostracism to enforce this conformity.

But if this “cancel culture” is reactionary, what is it reacting to? Isn’t being reactionary the traditional tactic (and duty) of conservatives who are, by definition, trying to “conserve” a unitary culture?

I would suggest here that “cancel culture,” is a reaction to an argumentative tactic for which I have yet to see a clear definition. For the lack of a better term, let’s call this tactic, to which “cancel culture” is a reaction, something appropriate to its nature: fence pissing.

Two examples may suffice. Please note that I am not attempting to describe “troll” or “wedge issue” or their many variants. This is something different.

Example 1:

Imagine you own a piece of property. Lucky you, right, in this day and age? You share a boundary with a neighbor. This boundary is marked by a physical fence. The fence doesn’t actually stop anyone from crossing; it serve chiefly as a marker and a reminder of the legal status of the two plots. This side is mine, that side is yours. You do your business there, I do my business here. A social-capitalist boundary. All is good.

Until one day you wake up, survey your domain, and note that the fence is soaked in piss. It stinks awful as it’s so saturated. The fence itself is largely ruined. Perhaps you could wait for the sun to dry it out. You tell your neighbor about this, knowing all the while that they pissed on the fence, and they smirk and only agree to help replace the fence if the fence is re-positioned a little further onto your property. After all, they argue, that’s where it should have been in the first place, and perhaps even claiming that the new proposed position reflects where it was originally.

Without much choice, you agree and the fence is replaced, and you have slightly less land than before.

The next day you wake up and the fence is soaked in piss again.

Example 2:

Let’s say “Steve” is prejudiced against transgendered people, and motivated to do something about it rather than keep such thoughts to himself. The reason for this prejudice is irrelevant. More important for this example is that Steve knows quite well that he cannot say his opinion about transgendered people aloud in most settings without negative consequences. He feels hemmed in and constricted. How dare society muzzle him? Whatever happened to freedom?

Steve notes, however, that there is a peripheral way to act on his prejudice that is far more socially acceptable; he can wax at length about how transgender athletes should not compete in women’s sports. This doesn’t attract as much ire because he can frame his objection through notions of fair play and equity for women, which are also legally protected and offer a strong counterargument. He can also gain allies for this argument that he would not have gained if he simply stated he doesn’t like transgendered people. Steve doesn’t really give a damn about the specific issue he’s chosen; it’s primarily a way for him to express his prejudice without much risk to himself and make life a little more difficult for those he dislikes – not just transgendered people, but the people who support them as people with rights like all others.

Note that everyone who expresses concern about transgendered athletes having an unfair sporting advantage does not necessarily share such a deep-seated bias; rather, I’m saying that the peripheral issue allows Steve a relatively safe outlet to express his prejudice as his bias is cloaked by the presence of those focused on the competitive aspects, who, again, may not be fully aware of the beliefs and motivations of their apparent allies such as Steve.

I’ve called the issue of transgender athletes a “peripheral” one because it sits at the boundary (or “periphery,” around the edge, much like, say, “cough” a fence) of more centralized and difficult issues of sex and gender; namely, what is a “man” and “woman,” who gets (or is allowed) to be called a “man” and “woman,” and what benefits, responsibilities, and complications are respectively attached to these concepts. Sport competition is important, but it’s only one way that those core issues manifest.

But Steve doesn’t want to participate in any core debate. For him, there is nothing to debate or discuss. So he pisses on the fence itself, the social boundary where differences are negotiated and society itself is held together. If anyone confronts him on what he’s doing, he cries foul, notes that the fence is technically intact, and he is a strong support of rights of women, even, and refuses to compromise unless he gains something from the exchange. For him, any rules of discourse are for fools, and a poisoned debate is an advantage.

But. What if. Back to Example 1.

Let’s say you choose to ignore Steve the fence-pisser instead of playing their loaded game. The fence, albeit rather smelly and damp, remains in place. The sun begins to do its important work.

Impatient with the lack of progress and attention, Steve makes a selfie of themselves pissing on the fence and posts it to social media. Or the new media equivalent. Perhaps he dumps a truck full of manure on the property line. Use your vivid imagination.

Other fence-pissers are suitably impressed. This is now pretty close to classic “troll” behavior. People with social investments in intact fences are outraged. Collective shame is applied, as no one with a good fence wants it ruined; to allow such behavior to go without comment is unthinkable. If an apology is extracted, fence owners rejoice. If it is declined, fence-pissers are emboldened to piss further.

Cancel culture, then, would be a reaction borne not of encroaching new ideas, but a defense of a preexisting boundary in the face of trolling.

Or is it? What if it’s the other way around?

What if the “left” is actually the side engaged in fence-pissing behaviors, pushing all sorts of newfangled ideas like the normalization of transgendered rights, and the right is… umm… cancelling…

Yep.

In any heated rhetorical dispute, either of these two tactics may be in use by any given side. They aren’t new 21st-century things, but behaviors that would arise in any complex community where people live close together and share some basic assumptions about acceptable behavior. The common denominator is the fence, the boundary area, the periphery where the struggle for meaning takes place. We’ve seen this play out many times before. Fence pissing is therefore a tactical maneuver to push the acceptable spectrum of opinion on an issue, sometimes referred to as the Overton Window, in a desired direction. However, it is an innately destructive maneuver, as it corrupts the nature of the boundary itself that could otherwise be changed peacefully through respectful negotiation. It makes the use of a given logical fallacy look halfway respectable.

Ideally, a careful dialectic would be the only behavior that takes place at the fence; two neighbors, talking with respect, keeping in mind that the legal boundary between their lands has always been a fiction, and making sure their zippers are firmly closed.

But if the opening gambit is to piss on the fence, to destroy the very arena of meaning for a momentary advantage, standing there and insisting on respectful dialectic is a tough sell. This has always been the weakness of systems of rhetoric and dialectic that insist on rules of conduct – anyone willing to break them has an advantage.

Think about your options for response to a soaked fence. The structure of society itself, perhaps, has been defiled. No one wants to stand there and be disrespected. That only leads to more of the same. A strong “fight” reaction seems appropriate. But the reaction is what the fence pisser wants. Attention and respect and a chance to move the fence. They are not building a fence, or planting a field, or raising a child. All they have to offer to society is a stream of urine.

The smart move is, if you can afford it, silence.

But maybe we can’t always wait for the sun to do its disinfectant work.

In some situations, maybe even more, a silent treatment reaction to fence-pissing is not enough, especially if shame has no effect.

A stronger reaction is needed. You pissed on my fence? Oh, look, your barn seems to be on fire. Try pissing on that. Conflict resolution via the Chicago way, as Sean Connery once put it.

Thus he effective strategy against fence-pissing is about the same as the winning strategy against a bully. Disregard if you can; fight like hell if you cannot. This principle scales up well. Ukraine is giving a class to the entire world on how the second option works, after years of Putin fence-pissing.

I’ll admit “cancel culture” as a term still has a bit of that new-car smell, but once that wears off, there’s a more familiar odor. That said, either side of “fence pissing” and “cancel culture” don’t neatly fit into the rhetorical systems I’ve seen, which tend to concentrate on fallacies, emotional appeals, and scapegoating when they do discuss “bad” rhetoric, if at all.

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Politics Short Essays Writings

The Casus Belli and the White Peace

Now that the Cold War is turning Warm again for good, some thoughts.

The Cold War reached its zenith when I was a kid in the 1980s, but it only manifested itself indirectly from my perspective.

One way was by the siren song of G.I. Joe toys, which thankfully failed to recruit me into the armed forces. They usually fought Cobra, but old school Joes who read the comics will remember the Joe’s frenemies, the October Guard, led by Colonel Brekhov. Any of those stalwart Soviets were always quick to point out that the Joes were only the running dogs of capitalist imperialism.

The second way was via a long series of history textbooks in public school that not only prepared me for division-level command through copious diagrams of the Battle of Chancellorsville and the D-Day invasion, but made clear that the Soviet Union and communism together constituted the antithesis of the American way of life. Whatever that was.

The third way was by film and television, as I don’t think there was a single instant in the decade when there was not a film in theaters that didn’t have a Russian bad guy. They were portrayed as honorable occasionally, but misguided, miserable cogs of the Soviet machine at best. 1987’s The Living Daylights comes to mind, where the default hero of the West, James Bond, saves the Russians from their own corruption – and in passing, Afghanistan from the opium trade. Yeah.

But those angles were all blatant. The fourth way was through actual books, not the standard drivel in school. On the pop end, there was stuff like 1986’s Red Storm Rising, where Tom Clancy laid out a fairly realistic scenario for how a conventional World War III might play out. This led to a pre-Wikipedia crash course on military matters. I learned about the Fulda Gap, where a doomed delaying action by the 3rd Armored and 8th Infantry would constitute the opening of NATO’s depressing game plan to hold West Germany or lose Europe. I noticed it might play out before I managed to enroll in college.

The dice were favorable, however. German reunification was followed by Soviet collapse, though I didn’t know yet that this collapse had started well before I was born, perhaps as early as the ’68 invasion of Czechoslovakia, of which the current Ukraine situation reminds me.

All of that was too distant to have much of an effect, though. Not until later did I grok that the obvious propaganda was not entirely propaganda. One can go back farther than the 19th century to offer further proof, but that’s far enough to note that the United States and Russia, as nations, have almost no strategic interests in common. Their respective economies and cultures are distant at best. Save for Alaska, they are on opposite ends of the world and have discrete spheres of influence with few overlaps. The WWII alliance did not even span the war – it ended in truth well before Berlin fell. This means that when either side ventures outside of those spheres, conflict is inevitable.

Chris Crawford’s classic PC game Balance of Power, another must-stop of the 1980s, is my first go-to when thinking about the U.S. and Russia. You score influence points by bluffing the Soviets to back down in external conflicts around the globe. However, the game rarely lasts long enough for those points to matter. If one side eventually refuses to back down – and this can happen over the slightest trifle anywhere on the globe – a nuclear exchange commences and you lose. It is very, very hard to get to the end of the game still intact (much less ‘win’) without learning a single and powerful lesson – the two superpowers had a hard limit on how much they can throw their weight around without destroying the world. Hence the endless proxy wars.

In real life, the U.S. ‘won’ the balance of power. The Fulda Gap scenario became obsolete when Germany reunified and Poland joined NATO. None of the former Soviet republics to this day can muster anything close to the endless divisions that would have stormed Germany in the 1970s. They don’t have the money or resources to maintain massive motor-rifle and tank divisions, or keep up with American military technology. Even Putin’s Russia.

Supposedly.

Watching Putin slowly push the West around and test what it’s willing to tolerate for the last fifteen years has been interesting. Russia is no conventional military threat to Europe anymore. But it retains its nukes, and this places it in the same category as North Korea, an entity that can never quite be confronted directly. However, Russia is far away, making it seem less pressing. The comparably tight geography of Korea makes removing the entire U.S. Eighth Army a bad idea – the 2nd Infantry is still there decades later – but there is no pressing need to garrison Europe with American troops to hedge against a Russian invasion, even today.

Not even after Georgia. Not even after Syria. Or even the annexation of Crimea.

Until maybe now.

Putin has been working for over a decade on a sufficient casus belli to give him control over Ukraine through annexation or puppetry, and thus move his western military border to Poland. He’s decided now, probably as he senses he can divide NATO enough with rhetoric to escape both a military confrontation and most of its sanctions, that the time is now to reclaim the biggest of the breakaway Soviet states.

Today, Feb. 21, as Russian troops invade southeast Ukraine, even the NYT won’t call it an invasion. But I think NATO has handled the situation surprisingly well so far. With the possible exception of Germany, the big players – the U.S., Britain, and France – are speaking mostly in unison, and sharing their intelligence gathering in an unusually public way, particularly Britain. The most important tool in their arsenal is not any threat of military intervention, though I think they could use their fleet-in-being powers more effectively; rather, it is their ability to collectively deny Putin any legitimacy. Even if Russia seized the eastern half of Ukraine and installed a puppet government, NATO could help turn the remainder into a heavily armed rump state and eventually force Russia out through attrition, not to mention gain a few new members, such as Sweden, Finland, and a rump Ukraine.

Thus there is no military solution for Putin here. He could occupy much of Ukraine, but he won’t be able to hold it very long, even if the buildup goes past 200k. The longer he keeps forces inside Ukraine’s borders, the more likely NATO will drop the sanction hammer, as they’ve already seen the possible tricks – the five-day war of Georgia, the proxy war in Syria, and the carving-off annexation of Crimea being the most obvious. All that’s left of the usual casus belli options is the hackneyed false-flag operation and the transparent claim of Ukraine actually being part of Russia all along, and we’ve seen multiple versions of both already. If his plan was to occupy the breakaway regions and offer to stand down in return for absorbing them, only to return next year to take more, we are already past that point.

The question, then, is if NATO can offer Putin an out that he will take that doesn’t allow him to claim yet another win. Eventually in the coming weeks, probably sooner than later, there should be a simple NATO ultimatum – withdraw Russian forces from Ukraine, or get the full sanctions treatment plus a Western supply chain at the disposal of west Ukraine.

I know, I’m dabbling in military matters here that I can’t possibly fully appreciate. But I do understand the language being employed, and in particular, that justification for war is always more than a legal fig leaf. It allows soldiers, diplomats, leaders, and common citizens the ability to think differently. Are my orders legitimate or a roadmap for war crimes? Is the other side acting in good faith when they negotiate, or are their intentions nefarious? Should I resist an invading force or capitulate? When people think differently via argumentation, they can act differently, even if the facts of the ground haven’t changed an iota. Thus the difference between a “legitimate” or “legal” Russian occupation of eastern Ukraine for “peacekeeping” to prevent “genocide,” and an autocrat’s reckless wielding of his nuclear arsenal as bald intimidation. The “winner” in Ukraine will be who tells the best story. I suggest that story should be one where Putin gets to show he pushed NATO around some, and NATO shows it can collectively stand up to Putin, but no territory changes hands. A white peace, in other words.

Unfortunately, I think we might be past that possibility now.

Categories
Argumentation Politics Short Essays Writings

The Authoritarian Mirage

Oh no! The Atlantic has revealed there are undiscovered authoritarians on the left! Hide the children!

I read bad studies all the time, but this one is particularly bad. Witness:

Costello and his colleagues started fresh. They developed what eventually became a list of 39 statements capturing sentiments such as “We need to replace the established order by any means necessary” and “I should have the right not to be exposed to offensive views.” Subjects were asked to score the statements on a scale of 1 to 7. They showed a trait that the researchers described as “anti-hierarchical aggression” by agreeing strongly that “If I could remake society, I would put people who currently have the most privilege at the bottom.” By agreeing with statements such as “Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called ‘right’ to free speech,” they showed an attitude called “top-down censorship.” And they showed what the research team called “anti-conventionalism” by endorsing statements such as “I cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative.”

Let’s go slowly here. Packing this much nonsense into a single paragraph requires the argumentative equivalent of swamp waders.

So. If I “agree strongly” with “If I could remake society, I would put people who currently have the most privilege at the bottom,” am I “authoritarian”? Well, that would depend on a few assumptions:

  1. Is the opposite response on this scale, the “disagree strongly,” considered to be an expression of declining to remake society at all, or is it an expression of keeping people with the “most privilege” exactly where they are? Yes, those are two very different decisions, even though in certain interpretations they might lead to a similar result.   
  2. But on a related note, is the middle of the 7-point scale here an expression of moving some people with “moderate privilege” to the bottom? Or to the top? Or is that a neutral “take no action” position, and the “disagree strongly” is to make the least privileged even less so? Hard to say, and again, too open to interpretation to garner a useful response. Are the respondents actually reading the question this closely?
  3. Likewise, would the respondents have picked “agree strongly” to the question “I would destroy the freedom of speech if I could get rid of inequality”? Put that way…
  4. If I “agree strongly,” does that mean I am serious enough to enact the said policy for “reals” in the zero chance that I would ever have the power to “remake society”?

Note that after point 4, if this was Law & Order, this is where I would add, “Withdrawn, nothing further.”

So it seems any response to this question could be considered “authoritarian.” Strip privilege away from the powerful and you’re “authoritarian.” Decline to change society, and you’ve reinforced the current hierarchy – but what could be more “authoritarian” than supporting a preexisting hierarchy? Split the difference and you’re both supporting a hierarchy and undercutting it by doing nothing…. it’s almost as if we’ve got a socioeconomic Catch-22 here that reflects a sharp critique of capitalism… good job, AEI! I think y’all might be actually “leftist” and not know it. Perhaps I should set up a study to show that there are secret Marxists in the right. The standards for method are pretty loose these days…

You are also “authoritarian” and a supporter of “top-down censorship” if you “agree strongly” with “Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called ‘right’ to free speech.” But this question only asks the respondent rank two values, not toss out the other. A belief that getting rid of inequality is not inherently “authoritarian” – in fact, I don’t think a single human being alive that is really concerned about inequality would also throw out free speech with the bathwater, as it’s kinda necessary to address inequality. Anyone can believe in both. But even with a Likert scale, the 4 is not a clear expression of a balanced position. Each point of the scale would need to be carefully teased out in a nuanced description, as in a pinch, I might have clicked “agree strongly” myself when my actual position is in the middle. This question, like many on these kinds of silly tests, pretends to address ethical dilemmas where values must be balanced against each other by pushing the respondents (who probably do not have a doctoral degree in political science) to take an extreme position that they may not actually have or ever act upon if they even did. Questions that pit free speech and equality against each other cannot be reduced to a linear scale. This isn’t a new problem with Likert, of course.

Finally, it’s “anti-conventionalism” to “agree strongly” with “I cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative.” So unless you can imagine yourself friends with a political conservative, you’re an authoritarian? I wonder how that would make for an icebreaker. “Be friends with me, or you’re an authoritarian!”

But there are two more serious problems with these results than the loaded questions. Those are just symptoms.

One, the responses are self-reported and completely untrustworthy. Someone who chooses “agree strongly” on all three questions is quite likely to violate their positions within the day, because there are no consequences for doing so, and no reward for being consistent.

The second is the most obvious problem – the author is an American Enterprise Institute affiliate, and the study, by virtue of its loaded questions and goofy analysis, is just attempting to smear some of the accumulated fascist mud off of conservative thought onto the nebulous left, as any “left” position can now be automagically rendered “authoritarian.” Cue the Onion: “Rotten Apples In Every Bunch, Claims Horde of Shambling Apples, All Rotten.”

If anything goes, by questioning the method of the study, I am clearly “authoritarian.” I find this unlikely, though, as I already spend too much effort making the trains run on time in Italy to be railroaded into a specific political station in life.