A Watched Pot

I'm curious about this: "[Trump]’s given up trying to expand his appeal to women, minorities and college-educated Republicans. Instead he’ll tear into Mrs. Clinton in an attempt to demoralize her voters and motivate his." Does that really work? Will Trump's attacks "demoralize her voters," or will it just get their backs up? Is this a damned pro-wrestling match? (Well ... yes, I knew that.) Is that how voting works? (Well, yes, I guess I knew that too.) How damn hard is it, one you've chosen your candidate, to go to your polling place, sign in, get your ballot and cast your vote? How much morale does that take? 

It seems to me that if anything is "demoralizing," it's the endless media coverage that treats the campaign as a horse race, and of course the hysterical babbling of the partisans, which we can now hear / see every day on Facebook and other social media. If I find anything demoralizing (but don't worry, I've already voted -- absentee), it has been the vicious, almost demented squabbling of the Democrats I know. I already knew that Republicans are vicious and demented, and to be honest, I knew from past elections how bad the Dems were. But it's even worse this year, truly.

Here's another example of what I'm talking about. The SF writer and blogger and Twitterer John Scalzi wrote today that this election cycle has hurt his productivity because he spends so much time reading election coverage, including 538.com and the polls. Many of his readers agree: it's the polls. I can't think of anything less useful than following the polls. It's like thinking that the stock market is a sign of economic health and watching the Dow Jones when you're not even an investor.

For example, this commenter:

It’s so distressing that Trump has even been considered a serious candidate that I’m constantly checking my Google Now feed to see if he’s made any new stupid or damning statements, and when he does, I check FiveThirtyEight.com in hopes of seeing his estimated chances of winning dwindle some more.

Or the guy who wrote that he doesn't "have time to read all the comments because I’m too busy jumping back and forth to 538, HuffPost Pollster, TPM Polltracker, and RCP." All this seems to me like picking endlessly at a scab to see if it has healed yet.

One person commented as follows: "... it was because the opposition to my personal ideals was making me physically ill." I think I know what she's talking about, but knowing that there is opposition to your personal ideals is the price you pay for living in a more or less free and pluralistic society. I think a lot of Trump fans could say the same thing, though: even knowing that there are people who don't share their beliefs makes them ill. I sympathize with both sides, but in this case they are the problem, not the people who oppose their personal ideals.

Similarly, a commenter wrote "I gather that Muslim is a very uncomfortable thing to be, just now" -- as if the past 35 years hadn't happened. Yeah, Trump's campaign has probably made things worse, but Muslims (and people mistaken for Muslims) have been under attack in this country at least since the fall of the Shah in 1979.

Personally, I agreed more with another commenter:

It has been a serious distraction. On the positive side, all the research I’ve done to rebut fallacies seen on social media has made me a better informed person (as if I wasn’t already) with a much more complete set of data source bookmarks and reaction gif memes.

A number of the commenters (like the one who's physically ill) have written about the fear they feel. Some are immigrants, some are trans, some are trans immigrants, some are Muslim or ethnic/racial minorities. They have good reason to be afraid, but Scalzi and most of his commenters don't fall into any of those categories. Something else must be going on.

In the early 1990s, a study of media coverage of the First Gulf War found that the more people relied on TV news, the more misinformed they were.

While most respondents had difficulty answering questions about the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, 81 percent of the sample could identify the missile used to shoot down the Iraqi Scuds as the Patriot. That media consumers know facts relating to successful U.S. weapons but not about inconsistencies in U.S. foreign policy, the researchers argued, “suggests that the public are not generally ignorant—rather, they are selectively misinformed.”

"Selectively misinformed" is ambiguous.  Since people are not merely passive receptacles of information, even from the media, I think it's fair to suspect that people selectively misinform themselves, choosing what they want to know.  Where a war is happening, the events that led up to it, even that the people on the receiving end of our bombs and missiles are people with interests of their own rather than mere obstinate obstacles to American interests, just don't interest most people.  "Facts relating to [more or less] successful American weapons" do.

You can see this not just in supposedly uneducated, emotional Trump supporters but in supposedly educated, rational Clinton supporters.  Mention Libya to a Clinton loyalist, for example, and they will immediately assume you are talking about Benghazi, not about the validity of the NATO bombing itself.  The Podesta emails are both obvious forgeries and trivial reminders that a Clinton presidency will be business as usual -- nothing to see here, folks, move along.  What is important is that, contrary to the sinister Putin-funded corporate media conspiracy to try to convince you that she's unlikable, Clinton is really cool, adorable, and progressive.  Voters are idiots who know nothing about the issue and care less, while elite Democrats care about important issues like hot and dreamy Barack is, and how "he and Michelle really adorn the White House. As a couple they are just...well...magnificent"; the gnarly old Rethuglicans are just jealous.

Recently Bodhipaksa at Fake Buddha Quotes noted that "some Buddhists are preferentially drawn to Fake Buddha Quotes. When they do blog posts based on the Buddha’s sayings, or when they quote the Buddha in an article, they’re far more likely to post fake quotes than those found in the scriptures."  I've noticed this too, and not just among Buddhists -- you'll have seen this coming of course -- but in discussions of US politics; and not just among the drooling masses but among the wise elites whose job it is to be informed.

I'm with the commenter who jeered "You guys are going to make Trump TV really popular…"  Yup, and he was addressing people who oppose Trump.  Even after the election, even after Trump has been defeated, people will still obsess.  Pick that scab.  And after it's healed despite your best efforts, keep scratching at it until you've opened it up again.

Moderation

The worst thing about Donald Trump is the same as the worst thing about the late Fred Phelps: he's so obnoxious that other extremists can use him to seem moderate and reasonable by comparison.  So, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham has just denounced Trump as a "race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot" who "doesn't represent my party."  Now, any observer of the American political scene knows that race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigots are the backbone of the GOP, which deliberately wooed them away from the Democrats during the Nixon administration.  Just to limit myself to Graham, in 2010 the New York Times called him "this year's maverick," which is corporate media code for a frothing, shamelessly warmongering bigot that the paper wants, for some reason, to cultivate.  So, of course, my Right Wing Acquaintance No. 1 linked to Graham's denunciation of Trump, adding, "Trump is, indeed, a fascist."  RWA1 likes people like Trump and Phelps, for the same reason: he can use them to present himself as a reasonable, moderate person.

The second worst thing about Trump is that he's a safe target for liberal Democrats, who are flooding the Intertoobz with abuse of him.  As my new meme, above, suggests, this no doubt makes them feel better, but has no useful effect that I can see.  Admittedly, it's hard to know what would have a useful effect.  But I saw one enlightened soul refer to Trump as a "retard" the other day, thereby showing his vast moral and intellectual superiority to Trump and his supporters; a fair amount of the anti-Trump stuff does help drag down the level of discourse in our nation, as if it weren't already low enough.

Here's a better reaction to Trump, from an interview with the leftist Anglo-Pakistani writer Tariq Ali on Democracy Now! this morning.  Amy Goodman asked him what he thought of the move in Parliament to ban Donald Trump from England.  Ali replied:

And I, myself—Amy, I have to say that, you know, I’m not in favor of banning people, because once you start banning people from the right who are mouthing extreme-right rubbish, this then leads to similar bans against progressive people, people on the left accused of being terrorists, etc. It’s better to debate these people out rather than to ban them. That’s my opinion.

Mine too.  It's funny to imagine Trump hoist on his own petard, but liberals never seem to remember that the repressive actions they favor will eventually be used against them.

My Grandfather Didn't Flee the Potato Famine for America to See This Country Overrun by Refugees

John Scalzi's got another post up about the refugee question, this one titled "Frightened, Ignorant and Cowardly Is No Way to Go Through Life, Son."  (I don't know about that: it seems to work for a lot of people.)  One commenter especially amused me, by saying that "Refugees are less likely, statistically, to commit mass murder than white people are." I love the assumption embedded there, that refugees aren't white; it's similar to the popular assumption, now being challenged, that terrorists aren't white.  (Or that "Hispanics" or Mexicans aren't white.)  It's not even clear that Syrians aren't "white," but then such words mean what we choose them to mean.

Along the same lines, a meme I saw today features Ron Paul saying "Here is the solution to the refugee problem: stop meddling in the the affairs of other countries."  Once again Paul shows his great knowledge, wisdom, and compassion.  Leave aside that the issue right now is what to do with the refugees we and others have already created.  Refugees can be generated simply by oppressive government action within a country. An obvious example: Nazi Germany created many refugees. The US created internal refugees by its treatment of Indians and people of African descent. So yes, not interfering in other countries' affairs is a good idea, though it's not always easy to determine what is interference and what is wise interaction. But it won't solve "the refugee problem."

But back to Scalzi.  He wrote that, "as many have noted, there is irony in the freakout about Syrian refugees coming into a season which celebrates a notable middle eastern family who famously were refugees at one point in their history, according to some tales."  This trope has been popular among liberals on social media lately, but it has problems.

Scalzi presumably was referring to Joseph and Mary, who indeed could be viewed as refugees at one point in their lives.  That would be when King Herod, alerted by the Three Wise Men that his replacement had been born in Bethlehem, ordered the killing of all male children two years old and younger in Bethlehem and its vicinity (Matthew 2:16).  An angel warned Joseph and Mary of the coming trouble, and they decamped to Egypt, where they remained until Herod died.  One might ask why Yahweh couldn't have somehow prevented the Slaughter of the Innocents altogether, perhaps by giving Herod an embolism; killing turbulent kings is certainly in his repertoire.  The answer is that the killing was Yahweh's plan and will, in order to fulfill a prophecy of Jeremiah's (Matthew 2:17-18).  Otherwise prophecy would not be fulfilled, which would undermine God's credibility.  When Herod died, an angel let Joseph know it was safe for the Holy Family to go back home.

On this analogy, we should suppose that ISIS is an instrument of the Lord, carrying out his murky and mysterious intentions.  Who knows?  If Babylon was doing his work by conquering Jerusalem, destroying Solomon's temple, and carrying the children of Israel into exile, then perhaps ISIS is doing the same.

But as the meme I posted above shows, the Flight into Egypt isn't what these folks have in mind.  When I've seen Joseph and Mary referred to as refugees (or, sometimes, "homeless"), it has always been in connection with the Nativity as told by the gospel of Luke, which depicts Mary depositing the baby Jesus in a manger, "because there was no room for them in the inn" (Luke 2:16).  Luke, who doesn't seem to know about the Slaughter of the Innocents or the Flight into Egypt, isn't depicting Joseph and Mary as refugees.  According to him, they were in Bethlehem because Caesar Augustus had ordered a census of the Empire, which required that "all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.  And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David) ..." (2:3-4).  So he wasn't in Bethlehem to seek refuge from state violence, nor was he homeless; he had a home in Nazareth.

It seems odd that Joseph had no relatives to stay with in Bethlehem, but according to Luke he had to go there because he was remotely descended from King David.  Also, Yahweh couldn't arrange housing for his only begotten son, though he could send vast heavenly choirs to announce the blessed event and send shepherds to pay homage.  None of this makes any sense, and there is no evidence either of a Roman census at the time Jesus was probably born, nor that men had to uproot their households and travel to the hometowns of their distant ancestors to be counted.  Luke's Nativity story is almost certainly a fiction he invented, as is Matthew's.  Matthew, by the way, has the baby Jesus and his parents staying in a house in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:11).  Why they moved to Nazareth when they returned from Egypt is not explained, unless it's to fulfill a bogus prophecy that Teh Christ would be a "Nazarene."  (I say "bogus" because there's no such prophecy in the Hebrew Bible.)

Still, both Matthew and Luke probably intended to move their audiences with the pathos of the Messiah, the Son of God, passing his infancy in humble, even difficult circumstances, just as Scalzi and other people today want to move us with the plight of Syrian and other refugees.  And of course it's hypocritical of American right-wing Christians to try to gin up panic about people who are refugees as a direct result of US policy and aggression in the Middle East.  If you're going to mock their ignorance and distortion of the Bible, though, you need to be more scrupulous in your own account than they are in theirs.  After all, there are plenty of other Biblical passages that could be used, on the theme "Do not oppress or mistreat a foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 22:21; compare Exodus 23:9, Deuteronomy 10:19, Leviticus 19:34) This fine sentiment was honored by Israel more in the breach than in the observance, like most of the Torah's ethical teachings; especially when you consider that Israel occupied its land by massacring and enslaving its inhabitants rather than coexisting with them.  And besides, Christians are free from the restrictive Old Testament law.

It's fun to throw Christians' hypocrisy in their faces, as long as they're the right Christians.  (Liberals aren't hypocrites by definition.)  As Christmas approaches we're going to see more convenient distortions of biblical material by all and sundry; I figure it's not too early to start the corrections.

To Lose One Stereotyping Tendency May Be Regarded As Carelessness

John Scalzi wrote a sober, sensible, responsible, "Can't-we-all-get-along?" post about the Paris attacks for his blog.  Specifically, he wrote about Americans' reactions to the Paris attacks, and argued against stereotyping all Muslims because of ISIS' crimes.  As usual, he warned at the outset that he would be monitoring the discussion in the comments; as one would expect in a hot-button topic like this one, there were numerous commenters who tried to test his resolve.

One commenter whose contribution wasn't deleted wrote under the name of Mark.  He announced that he's highly educated ("three postsecondary degrees"!), took numerous courses on Islam and the history of the middle east, and has continued to read about these matters since then.

And yet yesterday evening I found myself thinking “what the f*** is wrong with those people”, and I’d be lying if said I meant just the murdering a*******. I should know better. I DO know better. And yet… I don’t know any muslims. It’s so easy to slip into that lazy, wrongheaded thinking, even when you know better. Hence, this was thought provoking, even though it shouldn’t have been.

How odd.  I lack Mark's great educational advantages — not even one undergraduate degree to my name — but while I did think something like “what the fuck is wrong with those people” when I heard of the Paris attacks, it never occurred to me to mean “all Muslims” by “those people.” I meant the people who did this thing.  I feel the same way about US soldiers who welcomed the chance to kill Hajis in Iraq because 9/11.  Maybe it's because I do know some Muslims; I also know some US veterans of our past several wars.  (It seems strange that Mark apparently never met any while studying middle eastern history at the college level, but I don't know where he studied.)  But I don't really think that's why.  Somewhere along the line I lost that particular stereotyping tendency, I guess.

I'm not claiming any great moral superiority here, because I haven't entirely lost that stereotyping tendency, but I don’t see what is so difficult about recognizing that the misdeeds of some are not necessarily the deeds of all of a group.  Yet many (most?) people do find it, not merely difficult, but impossible to do so.  Mark must know, better than most people, something of the range of cultures and attitudes among Muslims around the world, and that the Paris killers are not representative of all of them. I think that most people are quite capable of this recognition about their own group, though that’s less a sign of rationality than a weasely defensive move, in the mode of #NotAllMen, #AllLivesMatter, and the like. I think it basically accepts the They-All-Do-It stereotype, while still trying to carve out an exception for one’s own side.

And yet I’m also wary of the reflexive NotAllMuslims move, for similar reasons. I recently read a book called Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, published by Gallup Press in 2008, using international polling data, and while I learned a lot from it, I also was not entirely reassured.  For example, Esposito and Mogahed write:

Forty-six percent of Americans say that the Bible should be “a” source, and 9% believe it should be the “only” source of legislation.

Perhaps even more surprising, 42% of Americans want religious leaders to have a direct role in writing a constitution, while 55% of want them to play no role at all.  These numbers are almost identical to those in Iran [49].

I think there's cause for concern in both cases.  Muslims are no worse as a group than Christians on many issues, but that’s not saying much.  I don’t have any numbers for atheists, but I don’t assume that we’re much better, if at all.  Of course it's unfair to speak of Muslims, or Christians, or atheists, or anyone "as a group."  I don't assume that someone like Noam Chomsky is more representative of atheists than, say, Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins.  It's simple enough, I think, to address the person or persons whose words or actions concern you.

Esposito and Mogahed’s book ought to be read by everyone who generalizes ignorantly about Islam (or Christianity), whether positively or negatively.  It should be read critically, though, and there's a lot to criticize, as when they write that "The majority in the Muslim world see Islam through different eyes – as a moderate, peaceful religion that is central to their self-understanding and their success" (46), and quote "one 20-year-old female engineering student at the University of Jordan" to the effect that "There should be rules and law to respect people of other religions and not make fun of them.  We must endeavor to relay the accurate picture of Islam to the West – showing that Islam is a religion of goodness and love, and not terrorism.  The West must be willing to accept the true picture of Islam and not hold on to the negative picture that serves terrorists" (87).

Most Americans, after all, see America through different eyes: as a moderate, peaceful country whose values are central to its success; and many Americans would advocate rules and law to enforce respect for their nation and their religion.  While the young engineer should be free to advocate laws mandating respect for people of other religions, etc., she doesn't really value freedom of speech or religion.  Disrespect for and mockery of people of other religions is a core aspect of most religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -- but also the "pagan" religions that many moderns ignorantly believe to have been more tolerant than the Yahwist cults.  I don't believe that the young engineer really wants to "relay the accurate picture of Islam to the West"; I believe she wants a positive propaganda image to be relayed and accepted.  That's not sinister, of course; it's all too human.  Substitute "Christianity" or "America" or "Israel" or "France" for "Islam" in her words, and many would agree with her.  But, like many Christians (or patriotic Americans), I think she would be surprised to find that what she considers an accurate, true, and positive picture would still be open to skepticism and criticism.  As the political philosopher Michael Neumann wrote on this subject:

Respect is not a duty; it is not even desirable in many cases. Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt. To call this sort of restraint ‘respect’ is to disguise clear moral values in gummy slush.

With that in mind, let's look at one area the Gallup pollsters explored:

A recent study shows that only 46% of Americans think that “bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” are “never justified,” while 24% believe these attacks are “often or sometimes justified.”

Contrast this with data taken the same year from some of the largest majority Muslim nations, in which 74% of respondents in Indonesia that terrorist attacks are “never justified”; in Pakistan, that figure is 86%; in Bangladesh, 81%; and in Iran, 80%.

Similarly, 6% of the American public thinks that attacks in which civilians are targets are “completely justified.”  As points of comparison, in both Lebanon and Iran, this figure is 2%, and in Saudi Arabia, it’s 4% ... [Esposito and Mogahed, 95]

I don’t consider any religion to be positive overall, so I reserve the right to criticize Islam just as I criticize Christianity, Judaism, paganism, and atheism. If I actually criticize Islam less often, it’s because I know less about it, and I prefer that my critiques be well-informed.  For well-meaning liberals to swerve to the other extreme, and eulogize Islam as a peaceful, tolerant, moderate "faith," is an overcorrection.  One should always ask: Which Islam? (Or which Christianity / Hinduism / Buddhism / Judaism / Atheism etc.?)  Which Muslims?  In which country and culture?  Are we talking about their words, deployed for public relations and self-esteem purposes, or their actions?  Only then can one begin to talk sensibly.

Mensa for Dummies

John Scalzi posted a grab of one of his tweets this morning:

It was prompted by the ongoing Sad Puppies vs. Social Justice Warriors "kerfuffles surrounding science fiction and its awards, there have been a couple of people (and their spouses, declaiming about their beloved) who have been slapping down Mensa cards as proof that they (or their spouse) are smart."  Scalzi explained, in his trademark style, why doing this tends to prove the opposite.  For example:

Your Mensa card does not mean you know how to argue. Your Mensa card does not mean you do not make errors or lapses in judgment. Your Mensa card is not a “get out of jail free” card when someone pokes holes in your thesis. Your Mensa card does not mean that you can’t be racist or sexist or otherwise bigoted. You may not say “I have a Mensa card, therefore my logic is irrefutable.”

Good enough.  The comments under his post are another matter, however.  They fell into two main groups. In one group, the commenter would mention that he or she had attended Mensa meetings, even joined for a while, and found the people in the organization to be mostly pretty nice people.  The other group declared that they'd never joined or gone to a meeting, but all the Mensa members they'd met were jerks.  I found this latter group fascinating, because despite their evident conviction of their own superior intelligence, they were making a fundamental logical mistake, one that Scalzi himself didn't: they were generalizing an entire group based on their experience of a few, probably unrepresentative, members.  Analogous stereotypes are "All the Christian fundamentalists I know are hypocrites," "Did you ever see a fag who wasn't effeminate?" (actual example), "All heroin addicts started out on pot, so smoking pot will turn you into a heroin addict."

(Just for disclosure's sake, I have never joined Mensa or gone to a meeting.  The Mensa members I know in person are quite nice and bright people, and the Mensa jerks I've encountered were all online, trying to establish their intellectual credentials by bragging about their IQ scores or their Mensa membership.)

Some of the discussion focused on IQ tests and SATs.  Several commenters pointed out the uselessness of IQ tests as a measure of intelligence.  One riposted:

IQ tests (what Mensa uses) are tests of aptitude. They are basically measuring how easily and quickly you will learn and absorb concepts of all types, and solve new problems. How accurate they are is almost beside the point because really they are irrelevant in most situations including arguments about topics.

How easily you could learn is not a measure of how much you know.
If two people sit down to learn a skill and one can attain expertise in 1 hour and the other needs 1.5 hours that is interesting. However if the first person never spends the hour learning the skill then the second person is absolutely the one you want around when you need that skill set.

IQ tests do not measure aptitude.  As far as I know, no one knows how to do that.  IQ tests mostly measure what you already know, or know how to do.  I last took an IQ test in high school, and I don't recall any part of it devoted to how quickly I could learn a skill; nor, from what I've read about the IQ controversies, has such an exercise become part of the test since then.

Similarly, the SAT, which was based on the Stanford-Binet IQ tests, was originally "called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, then the Scholastic Assessment Test, then the SAT Reasoning Test, and now simply the SAT."  The College Board. who owns the franchise, explains that it "tests the skills you’re learning in school: reading, writing and math. Your strength in these subjects is important for success in college and throughout your life," which sounds like what used to be called an achievement test.  It is not an aptitude test, and it's not even a very good predictor of college success, though that's its usual rationale.  This commenter's confident assertions are interesting; they seem to have no basis in fact, and I wonder where he or she got them.

Another commenter, a former Mensa member, wrote:

I studied rhetoric in school and my mom was a physicist; what I learned from this background is that the way to persuade people is to provide relevant and verifiable evidence.

I think this person may be confusing "is" and "ought."  I also value relevant and verifiable evidence, but I've learned to my disappointment that many, even most people, don't.  The way to persuade people in the real world appears to be to assert, as loudly as possible, that your opponent is fat or Republican or a libtard or a funditard or an asshole.  This approach is more "natural," and much easier.  It's also more effective, from what I see.

For example, this morning a liberal / progressive friend of a friend shared this meme on Facebook:

According to Snopes, Palin didn't say this and wasn't even on Hannity on that date.  I pointed this out in a comment on the Facebook post, exulting sarcastically that liberals aren't gullible or dishonest like Republitards.  Of course the person who'd posted was displeased -- she reacted exactly like the right-wingers I know react when I point out that they've posted something bogus, asking why I was on her timeline and getting indignant about my meddling.  Mockery is a very private thing, especially when you're posting it in public on Facebook.  One hears that social media are an echo chamber, that people want to engage only with people who share their politics; to a great extent that's true, as this person showed.  And I suppose we need places where we can find others who share our opinions and prejudices, but we also need to engage with people who don't, or the social and political changes this person hopes for will never happen.

Back at Scalzi's blog, the same commenter continued:

Anti-intellectualism is hardly the worst form of prejudice, but I know people who have been hurt. Also it’s like fat-shaming; we’re not a protected class and some people think it’s okay to show disrespect.

This lament was oddly off-topic.  The Sad Puppies clearly see themselves as intelligent, and intelligence of certain kinds as important and a sign of one's value.  They may well be anti-intellectual, since they associate what they call Social Justice Warriors with a kind of pointy-headed intellectualism that is widely devalued and mocked by people who think themselves intelligent.  "And let’s be honest — we all know someone who’s pretty book-smart and pretty life-stupid," wrote another commenter, providing an example of this distinction.  I can't recall where, but not too long ago I read something where the writer distinguished between being intelligent and being an intellectual.  I think of an intellectual as someone who works with more or less abstract ideas; an engineer or other scientist may be highly intelligent but no good at dealing with ideas, and dismissive of those who can.

As for the rest of his remarks: Being in “a protected class” doesn’t mean that others can’t “show disrespect” to you, nor should it. “Protected class” is a problematic legal term which means that the law will protect you from certain specified and more-or-less carefully defined forms of discrimination. But showing disrespect is fine, and hardly anyone really believes that it isn’t — except disrespect to themselves. For example, almost everybody wants respect for their religious affiliation, and discrimination based on religion is forbidden by Civil Rights law in certain spheres. But just about everybody has some religious class — liberals, fundamentalists, “Cafeteria Christians,” etc. — they love to mock and disrespect, and they’d be outraged if anyone told them not to. And the other part of the First Amendment guarantees our right to do so, as it should.

So sure, it’s perfectly okay to show disrespect to intellectuals, or to the intelligent.  It's not necessary to define bookish kids as a "protected class" to protect them from the bullying they too often face at school.  But kids who aren't "smart" also face bullying and contempt at school, including from their teachers, and they also need help from those around them.  If anything, they are probably more vulnerable than the smart kids: I know people who've been hurt.

I've mentioned before the graduate student I once knew who told me, sweetly and almost shyly, “I don’t say this to many people, but I think of you as my intellectual equal.” I thanked him, embarrassed, because I realized that though I hadn’t thought about it before, and don’t go around making such comparisons in the first place, I didn’t consider him my intellectual equal.  But, as Scalzi noted this morning, what he said revealed more about him than it did about me.

Credit where credit's due: I stole this post's title from another of Scalzi's commenters.

The Multi That Owns Us

So I guess I'd better write something about the Great Mozilla Flap of 2014.  In case you haven't heard, Brendan Eich, the recently-elevated CEO of Mozilla, which produces the Firefox browser, came under attack because in 2008 he donated a thousand dollars to support the anti-same-sex-marriage Proposition 8 in California.  After a little more than a week of controversy, including calls to boycott Mozilla products, Eich stepped down.  Which was a relief for me, because after checking the main alternatives, I wasn't sure I was willing to switch to another browser; I have some problems with Firefox, but I'm used to it and I don't much like Chrome or IE.

Conor Friedersdorf summed up the controversy reasonably well here; I also liked this post by Ampersand at Alas, a Blog, which helped me sort out my own position.  It reminded me that I'd written much the same things in this post right after the success of Prop 8 at the polls in 2008. Entertainingly, Andrew Sullivan got upset over Brendan Eich's departure, though he helped lead the attack on the liberal gay-marriage supporter Alec Baldwin for using homophobic language, even unto Baldwin's losing his TV program. (Maybe because Baldwin is a high-profile Hollywood liberal and Eich is a right-wing libertarian who supported Ron Paul?)  Baldwin singled out Sullivan for contumely as part of the "fundamentalist wing of gay advocacy." And the fuss hasn't died down yet, as shown by xkcd's latest cartoon, linked above, which has been getting shared widely on the Intertoobz, including sf writer John Scalzi's blog.

For a computer/math geek and science cultist, xkcd has wandered off into irrationality with this cartoon. Part of what he says is fair enough, I guess: I agree that the First Amendment only applies to government censorship, so being fired for your political or other views is not a violation of your First Amendment rights.  This has been brought home repeatedly in the controversies over Paula Deen, Juan Williams, Phil Robertson, and others lately.  (Oddly, when the racist writer John Derbyshire was fired from the National Review two years ago for his expressed views, few right-wingers came to his defense.)  Nor is it a violation of your freedom of speech to be kicked out of an Internet forum, or if your letter to the editor of a newspaper isn't published, or if you're attacked in the "mainstream media" for attacking your political opponents.  So far so good.

But xkcd made some odd statements, starting with "It doesn't mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit" and climaxing with "It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door."  On a narrow literal level, the first statement is also true, but "bullshit" is perniciously irrelevant, as is "asshole."  It doesn't matter whether what you say or write is "bullshit," but the question arises: Who gets to decide that what you've said is bullshit, or that you're an asshole?  At Scalzi's blog I posted a comment, asking whether Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC in 2003 because he was an asshole?  And how many people who are grimly celebrating the fall of Brendan Eich now, threw hissyfits over Donahue's losing his TV show because he gave a forum to opponents of the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq?  Many liberals and progressives did at the time, and they're still upset a decade later; I'll cite Chris Hedges for special notice because of his overwrought claim that "TV news died" when Donahue was shown the door.  As if the corporate media had ever given a platform to critics of US wars; Hedges surely must know better.

Another commenter at Scalzi's blog bit.  They wrote:

@Duncan, more like MSNBC’s viewers were letting MSNBC know they thought he was an asshole, and MSNBC decided that it did not want to present programming by someone their viewers thought was an asshole. Unless you’re implying that he lost his show because the government applied pressure to MSNBC?

No, I wasn't implying anything of the kind; as far as I know, the government applied no pressure to MSNBC.  There was no need to.  The decision to get rid of Donahue seems not to have had anything to do with "viewers" thinking Donahue was an asshole; it came from the upper reaches of management, as revealed by a leaked internal memo which warned that Donahue presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."  The decision was framed in commercial terms, that at a time when MSNBC wanted to "reinvent itself", Donahue might put off an "anticipated larger audience who will tune in during a time of war" by linking pundits to war coverage, "particularly given his public stance on the advisability of the war effort."  So far I haven't seen any of Donahue's advocates acknowledging that a corporate network has the right to determine the face it shows to its audiences, and to dismiss employees like Donahue who don't fit its plans to reinvent itself.  But that was last year, after all.

There are other examples I could give.  Michael Moore, who is widely regarded as an asshole by conservatives and liberals alike, publicly opposed the Iraq war before it became safe to do so, and endured death threats, vandalism of his home, and (unsuccessful) physical attacks as a consequence.  (He was also harshly criticized by liberal heroes and Iraq war supporters Keith Olbermann and Al Franken, whom I consider assholes.)  But while I doubt that those who've justified the firing of various right-wing bigots would be comfortable defending the response Moore faced because of his 'bullshit,' I wonder how many of them are even aware of it?  And it's true, death threats and bomb plots go way beyond what xkcd is talking about.  But c'mon, the audience at the Academy Awards had every right to boo Moore because they didn't want to hear this asshole spout his bullshit, right?

I hope this points to the problem not only with xkcd's specific point about bullshit and assholes, but to the broader defense of private businesses demoting, firing, and otherwise showing the door to people whose opinions and political stances rile others.  After all, John Scalzi has been called an asshole often enough, and though he runs his own blog he doesn't own the Internet hardware that stores and transmits it -- it's in the hands of private companies, who then could reasonably give him the boot if enough people complained that he was an asshole and they didn't want to read his bullshit anymore.  A common argument used about Internet forums is that if your comments get deleted or you get banned from the comment section, you can always start your own blog.  And that's true, but what if you can't find a host for your bullshit?  This happened to Wikileaks a few years back, for example; and why not, since Julian Assange is widely considered an asshole by right-thinking people?  Why should they have to listen to his bullshit?  They were just showing him the door.

Throwing around words like "asshole" and "bullshit" in this situation is a rejection of rational debate.  I've pointed before to the way many people all over the political spectrum confuse a person's opinions with their style of presentation, which are separate issues.  And while it's convenient (which is to say, lazy) to dismiss free-speech issues by characterizing the offending speech as "bullshit," it's irrelevant.  It seems to me to echo the distaste for critical thinking I've seen exhibited by many good liberals and progressives, who want to impose, with varying degrees of force, their opinions on the benighted troglodytes who aren't as rational as they like to believe they are.  (And no, this has nothing to do with being "open-minded.") 

Many of Eich's critics argued that his offense went beyond speech into action: he donated a thousand dollars to support the campaign for Proposition 8 in 2008, to ban same-sex civil marriage in California.  I've seen quite a lot of GLBT people say that because he tried to take away their rights, he had no right to be CEO of Mozilla.  (I would agree that he doesn't have a right to be CEO of Mozilla, but that doesn't seem to be what these people meant -- I think it's more like the person who wanted Paula Deen to "lose everything.")  I suppose that case could be made, but matters of principle must apply across the board, not just to specific cases, so let's consider some analogous possibilities.  Can a company fire an employee who contributes to an organization seeking to raise taxes on businesses, or on the top income brackets?  Such an employee could reasonably be accused of trying to deprive businesses or rich individuals of their right to keep as much of their income as possible.  How about union organizers (to say nothing of strikers), who also seek to limit the power of business owners and management, thereby affecting them in their pocketbooks?  Though labor law has limited the freedom of workers to organize and strike, our society and the law recognizes at least in theory that people have the right to assert their rights at what may be the expense of their opponents.  Not all freedom is a zero-sum game, where one person gains only if another loses, but sometimes it is.  People have the right to advance themselves at others' expense in such situations.  It's certainly not true that a person who does so has automatically forfeited his freedom of speech or action.  And contrary to another liberal-left claim I've often seen, freedom of speech does extend to "hate speech" and advocating the diminution or removal of other people's rights.  Those others have the corresponding freedom to respond with more speech, including hateful speech as they often do.  That's part of the messiness of living in a free society.

I guess I should clarify that I'm not displeased that Brendan Eich stepped down; I think that the criticism of Mozilla and the pressure it produced were legitimate.  But I do think that some of those who agree with his demotion are not clear about what the issues are, what they were doing, or how the same tactics can and will legitimately be turned against people they support.

I don't think there's an easy answer to this problem, but I do think that the power corporations and other private, ostensibly non-government entities, can exercise over people's expression is a matter that ought to concern those who care about public debate.  It appears to me that many liberals and "progressives" and even leftists are all too accepting of corporate power over corporate employees, because it's not government power.  lt's just not possible to separate the public and the private that neatly.  And what these recent controversies -- not just Eich, but Deen and Robertson and others -- indicate to me is that for many if not people, their positions on any given case are determined by where they stand on the issue.  If they approve of the opinions of the person fired, they get indignant; if they don't, they celebrate and justify the firing.  Which is their right, of course; but it doesn't bespeak a principled commitment to freedom of expression.