Comments on "It's okay to be white, it's not great to troll about it"
Original post. I’ll be continuously updating this post with responses to comments I receive, mostly from Twitter. I am on Twitter as @getnormality if you want to join the conversation! Outside questions and comments will be in bold. Let’s get started:
This theory of trolling and scissor statements is too flexible. Anything can be a scissor statement if you want it to be.
Answer: You can try to make anything a scissor statement, but some statements cooperate much more than others. Suppose I say "there's been a lot of collective characterization of white people as bad lately. I understand why you would feel that way, but everyone, including white people, gets upset when you criticize them based on their racial identity group and not based on their individual actions. I think we should pause for a second to reinforce that we all agree it’s okay to be white." That's much harder to misunderstand, because it complies with Grice’s four maxims. It remediates the problems with relevance and quantity that made the previous slogan so problematic.
Slogans have to be short to communicate with a large audience. Doesn’t this mean Gricean norms on quantity and relevance need to be relaxed for slogans?
Short answer yes, long answer no. Slogans themselves have to be short, but the context in which they’re launched doesn’t have to be. When you first launch a slogan, there are many ways to explain what it’s about and set the tone for the resulting discourse:
Start with a longer message like the one I wrote above, and say “this is what we mean when we say this slogan”.
Add imagery that expresses the basic vibe of the message. A productive vibe for IOTBW would be something conciliatory: I’m OK you’re OK, people of all races singing kumbaya, that type of thing.
Workshop your message with a smaller audience. Talk to them and let them help you figure out how to come across in the right way.
If you do none of these things, people are more likely to misinterpret. Trolls can leverage this to their advantage to create confusion around the subtext, as 4chan’s /pol/ did with this campaign. Per Wikipedia, “a /pol/ user described [IOTBW] as a proof of concept that an otherwise innocuous message could be used maliciously to spark media backlash.”
But the other side plays the same game. They have slogans like Believe Women and White Fragility that are corrosive to liberal principles like judging individuals based on their actions, but can be superficially excused because slogans kind of have to have limited context. How do we respond if not in kind?
I don’t know. That’s part of what I’m trying to figure out with my Twitter account and with this Substack. I am a classical liberal raised by a society that taught me those values but is also drifting away from them, or at least needs to be continuously reminded of them. How do we do that?
A big guidepost for me is Scott Alexander’s concept of symmetric and asymmetric weapons. Symmetric weapons, like violence, can be used by both sides, but asymmetric weapons can’t. Asymmetric weapons are mostly or only used by one side because that side has a different perspective, values, or goals.
Think about the war in Ukraine. Both sides have to use the symmetric weapon of violence to further their goals. But the ideological war is asymmetric. For example, Putin’s rhetoric justifying the invasion of Ukraine can’t give the obvious reason he really did it — a drive for imperial revanchism by conquest — so he has to pretend Ukraine’s government is infested with Nazis, despite that being clearly false. Putin can’t use the truth. Only Ukraine can use the truth.
In a similar way, I think truth, beauty, and goodness mostly favor classical liberalism. Classical liberals should distinguish ourselves from illiberals by using these “weapons” as much as possible. We don’t need to troll. We’re persuasive. We need to have more faith in that.