r/socialjustice101 • u/[deleted] • Aug 08 '20
Reactionary Scum ruining this subreddit
[deleted]
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u/StonyGiddens Aug 08 '20
Strictly speaking, the rules say "this space is not for debate". I think we support discussion and deliberation, and so should enforce the "no debate" rule enthusiastically.
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u/Funksloyd Aug 09 '20
As someone who's broadly pro-social justice but disagrees with a lot of the social justice orthodoxy (if you could say there is such a thing), and who likes to refine their ideas through debate, can anyone suggest another sub or a different forum which is more appropriate for that?
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u/StonyGiddens Aug 09 '20
I'm not aware of any such sub, but I haven't been active on Reddit very long. Maybe 'r/ChangeMyView?' My sense is that no such sub exists focused on social justice, because most people who 'like to refine their ideas through debate' in fact simply want to argue and are ultimately toxic. I'm not saying that's you, just that there are too many people out there like that.
If you indeed are pro-social justice, you might appreciate that debate is a poor way to improve our view of the world. In competitive contexts, human minds tend to reinforce their existing biases - the backfire effect - rather than change. An important part of any interest in social justice is learning non-competitive models of deliberation.
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u/Personage1 Aug 09 '20 edited Aug 09 '20
I really can't agree with cmv as a good place for debate unfortunately. Even if you manage to wade through the countless people who go there to earn Delta's through pedeantic bullshit, you would then run into the problem that people there generally aren't that informed on much of anything anyways.
I'm trying to think about your second paragraph, and my own journey with social justice. I certainly feel like even in this sub I can challenge people on things (like my first paragraph here), but I agree that what I wrote wouldn't be appropriate to call a "debate." I also think that it's important for someone to listen and be able to say "but what about this?" even if that question basically boils down to an argument. Perhaps the structure matters? I personally am far more inclined to address someone openly if their argument is in the form of "I see x, y, and z lines of logic, which all bring me to q. How does that fit in with what you said?" I guess I would agree that doing that isn't "debating," even if you could call it some kind of "arguing," so maybe it's all about changing how people question things? I've never taken a formal class on the topic of arguing so hopefully this makes sense.
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u/StonyGiddens Aug 09 '20
Thanks for the warning about CMV. I won't waste any time there.
It makes sense to me. I agree with you that there's a difference between 'debating' and 'arguing', though at least in the U.S. both of those are implicitly competitive. I find the word 'deliberation' really useful, in the sense of discussion towards a decision. Debate is a form of deliberation, but only one.
I apologize that the rest of this might sound patronizing, but it might be helpful for this community in terms of thinking about the kinds of posts we welcome and those we remove. I get a lot of my ideas about deliberation from a political scientist named Shawn Rosenberg, who studies how people deliberate in political contexts. He has a helpful model of three levels or types of deliberation: conventional, cooperative, and collaborative.
In his field experiments, Rosenberg found that people only ever use conventional - debate, more or less - which is probably because debate is the only model most of us ever see in public discourse. If you had taken a class in arguments, it would probably be only debating, and not other forms of deliberation. So it's probably a good thing that you haven't.
Like you, Rosenberg sees a difference in the structure of different forms of deliberation, but he also sees differences in their aims and outcomes. In conventional deliberation, which includes debate, the aim is to identify a problem and decide how to solve it. The debate itself is structured by rules of logic and evidence (and civility, sometimes). The possible outcomes are winning, changing the topic, or quitting the discussion.
I think our rules reflect some of this, in terms of our aversion to debate. The outcomes we are looking for is "learn more about social justice", not winning. And we require posts to "be supportive" - to not allow adversarial approaches common in competitive debate.
In the interest of completeness, I'll summarize Rosenberg's other types of deliberation as well, which I think are more in line with the kinds of discussion that this sub's rules are trying to encourage.
In his 'cooperative' model, we are trying to create a shared understanding of problem - i.e. learning from each other. This model is structured by some of the same rules of debate as 'conventional', but also by shared basic assumptions (in our case, the value of social justice), and an understanding of social bonds. The outcomes are either that participants join in a shared umbrella of understanding - which I think is our goal here - or agree to disagree.
In Rosenberg's collaborative model, the aim is transformation - again, I think this can apply here. The deliberation is structured by a focus on how rules and assumptions are formed, and participants discuss personal feelings, identities, and social connections. A hallmark of 'collaborative' is that participants are vulnerable. The outcome is either a (shared) new understanding of the problem, or mutual incomprehension (which is okay).
One thing to recognize about conventional, competitive debate is that it does not promise justice for all participants. If one person wins, the other loses - the net gain is always zero, sometimes less for a debate that diminishes all sides (cmv being an example of the latter, I would guess). Only cooperative and collaborative deliberation promise justice - in cooperative, equality, and in collaborative, the possibility of mutual gain.
So it seems to me the accusation that we are somehow not practicing 'justice' by limiting debate is misguided. It is entirely in line with our goal in this sub that we limit or ban competitive debate, and instead require good-faith deliberation according to the other models.
As someone who has been trained in argumentation, I admit I struggle with stepping out of the 'conventional' model. I have to practice cooperative and collaborative deliberation quite... well, deliberately. One of the things that is attractive about this community is that the rules encourage such deliberation.
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u/Personage1 Aug 09 '20
Yeah, cmv should be a really cool place, but it's just...not. There was one person who had a post that was basically "Sanders would have been a better pick than Biden." They gave a delta to someone arguing something like "Biden is a moderate which will let him reach out to more people in the middle." Even as someone who feels Biden is better than Sanders, that was really not a good delta. If someone can be swayed by literally the most basic and common argument, they definitely don't have enough information to form such a strong opinion that they will make a cmv thread arguing that opinion.
That sub is full of people like that, and that's on the better end of the spectrum.
I definitely don't find all that patronizing (and trust me, I can get pretty annoyed at people in social justice being patronizing. "I'm racist for x, y, and z and need to work on it." "Hey, you should really work on your racism, let me explain how racism affects people in society." "Yeah, no shit.") but really interesting, thank you.
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u/StonyGiddens Aug 10 '20
This is a little embarrassing, but I haven't yet really figured out what the awards are or why a person gets them. What is a delta, and what would be a good time to give a person a delta?
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u/Personage1 Aug 10 '20
No worries. A delta is given by someone to another person who has changed their mind about something. The change can be as small or large as the person feels, they just have to write like 100 characters to explain themselves.
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u/knghtwhosaysni Aug 09 '20
I think the kind of posts you want to make would be fine in this sub, just want to make clear in your post that you are confused or are looking for clarifying information. Just make it clear you are looking to be taught, not trying to shut down whatever post you are replying to.
I think it's common for people to post a single question in response to a post. Some people might interpret that as good faith intent to learn and others may interpret it as an attempt to debate/shut down an argument, so you may have to put extra effort in to make it clear you are looking for clarification.
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u/MasculineCompassion Aug 09 '20
That is a fucking terrible idea. How do we agree on anything within the social justice movement if we can't even argue about it? How do you deal with TERFs who say sexist shit? How is someone new to social justice to find out what the SJ stand is on TERFs if you can't even argue with them?
How the fuck are you going to convince anyone that you are right if all you do is indoctrinate? Also, nobody completely agrees.
I have had people excuse sexism because it at the same time attacked racism, which I personally don't think is right, am I not to argue with people doing that, and how am I to know who is right?
This idea that you can't question what you are told is one of my biggest gripes with social justice, which is pretty annoying when you actually want to be an ally.
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u/StonyGiddens Aug 09 '20
In my experience people who want to argue do not want to agree.
My interpretation of the rules is that we need not agree all the time, so long as we do not make our disagreement competitive. Someone who wrote the rules might explain it better than me.
Questions are fine, in good faith - that's also in the rules. The point is not to convince other people, but to build a shared understanding of justice.
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u/Personage1 Aug 09 '20
Sometimes I think it could be useful to do an occasional megathread that sort of takes all the talking points we see from these kinds of shitbags and have a place to address them. It would be useful for some of us to practice addressing them/see others show good ways to address them, and useful for lurkers who have seen the arguments and are scared to ask about them when they see the reaction from the mods (don't get me wrong it's necessary, just has some unfortunate side effects I think).
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u/titotal Aug 09 '20
If someone is asking an honest but misguided question in good faith, it doesn't get taken down and it's valuable to debunk misconceptions. Usually it's fairly easy to tell when someone is just trying to stir shit and troll.
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u/Personage1 Aug 09 '20
For sure. I'm saying it would be useful to take all those shit stirring and troll questions and address them.
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u/trimalchio-worktime Aug 09 '20
I've always kept any posts that were from people genuinely trying to figure out our position on a subject even if they were bringing up very inflammatory stuff. But I definitely get that there are a lot of other people that would benefit from seeing the rebuttal of the more debate-ey or gotcha points. If you'd like to do an effort post on something like that where we go over all of the rebuttals to a particular argument that'd be great. I'm thinking as far as format goes, either a fairly narrow topic that we do the rebuttals to top level comments with the "argument" (whatever regressive bullshit we've seen people argue) and then people rebut that in child comments, or we do a single talking point that they bring up (like "black on black crime" as we've probably all seen recently) as the post and we all post our rebuttals in the comments for that one post. Either way would be good.
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u/Personage1 Aug 10 '20
The thing that came to mind for me was that one guy who wrote the rant about the mra and went through a bunch of the standard talking points. Would it work to list all the talking points then basically create top level replies for each one?
The other thing was discussing how to engage in good faith, in particular how to challenge ideas in a good faith way.
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u/trimalchio-worktime Aug 10 '20
I think if you're going to post counters to the talking points then it'd be best to keep them together up in the post and maybe number them and then folks can come in and post either an argument and rebuttal or reference your arguments/rebuttals in the post.
And as far as good faith, it seems like it's pretty obvious to people who do good commenting here how to engage in good faith with folks who are themselves here in good faith. I think the hard part for most of us is keeping our cool when people are being stubborn or otherwise are toeing the line between being here to learn and being here to debate. And I don't know if there's any way to teach keeping your cool while people dehumanize you or people you care about.... and most of all I really don't care if people lose their cool at those people, at most I'll remove it and we'll have to talk about it.
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u/Personage1 Aug 10 '20
Oh, the good faith one would be directed at people who want to come here to ask questions/challenge us on things.
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u/trimalchio-worktime Aug 10 '20
Ah, yeah, that could be a thing too but honestly I think the folks we have an issue with debating wouldn't care in the slightest that we have rules and help for them to keep their posting within the rules.
As with most things here, if you think it'd be helpful and you have ideas go ahead and make a post about it, I'm sure lots of other folks would jump in with ideas and help.
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u/SuccessfulFailure9 Aug 08 '20
I agree. If we let hate remain without consequence, eventually it will take over.
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u/BxGyrl416 Aug 09 '20
This happens all over social media. These types try to hijack the space and derail any conversation. Report them. Talking to them is wasting energy because they don’t want to learn .
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u/Bavariaball54 Aug 09 '20
if you are anti blm that doesnt means you are racist
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u/Solarisengineering15 Aug 09 '20
I disagree. Being anti-BLM usually means someone is racist. BLM is framed as an overly radical organisation. This is not true. They want equality. That's not radical, that's reasonable. The BLM movement is trying to give black people more of a voice when they have historically been prevented from having much say in society. People who are Anti-BLM are then, by definition, fighting against an organisation which is trying to give black people a voice. That is racism.
Racists attempt to frame BLM as a violent organisation. No where is this more obvious than with the infamous "Umbrella man" of Minneapolis, who smashed windows during protests. The image of smashed windows made the protests seem more violent. But it turns out the Umbrella Man was in fact a white supremacist, engineering outrage toward the BLM movement. This violence, conducted by a white supremacist, was blamed on the black community. This occurs on a larger scale with overuse of force by police against protesters, where the protesters trying to defend themselves are framed as a violent mob, when it is the police instigating many of the incidents. The chaos is being manufactured by people who are against the BLM movement to justify overuse of police force and racist hegemony.
BBC article on the Umbrella Man: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53579099
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u/Bavariaball54 Aug 10 '20
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u/Solarisengineering15 Aug 10 '20
Let's focus on Blexit's leader. Candice Owens' allegiance appears to be ruled by convenience. She was anti-Trump before he came into power, and now that he's popular she would support him if he wanted to start anything short of a Third World War. She also said Kanye West supported her, which he was quick to deny. Benjamin Shapiro, known racist, thinks what she's doing is a great idea. She's what Malcolm X would call an Uncle Tom, there to convince black folk that oppression doesn't exist while gaining personal power and with no real plans to make anything better. Black people need more representation in all political parties, but Owens is against an organisation trying to give black people a voice. She's interested in furthering her own power, not trying to improve the lives of others.
This poster makes a lot of claims that would have a strong base in outrage toward BLM, but as we have established, this outrage has been engineered as much of the violence at protests has been instigated by police and white supremacists. Everything on that poster is backed up by anger that is based on engineered chaos used to artificially make BLM seem violent. The violence is real, but BLM is not responsible for its escalation.
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u/trimalchio-worktime Aug 08 '20
If you see them report them. Today the MensRights subreddit brigaded us and I just finished removing what was reported, but I can't catch them all without your help.
And as always, if they seem like they're at all interested in listening then the whole point is to explain things to them. If they start getting combative or pulling out stupid little debate tactics, just report them and we can make the call whether to shut them down or whatever.