The actually not even really a hatchet job NYT piece on SlateScott that mostly just called him a weird little guy has nonetheless created a festering psychic wound that oozes to this day. Here manifests as an interview with the author on LW. See also: discussion on reddit.
My favorite section, talking about how people are mad that be brought up Scott’s notorious race stuff™️:
CM: That’s great. That’s a valid position. There are other valid positions where people say, we need to not go so close to that, because it’s dangerous and there’s a slippery slope. The irony of this whole situation is that some people who feel that I should not have gone there, who think I should not explore the length and breadth of that situation, are the people who think you should always go there.
It’s “fun” to see them fail to grasp that a journalist (or outsider) doesn’t need to have read all their blogposts, and that “who talks to who” is basic journalism.
If only you read those glorious posts you would be enlightened, and if you somehow still disagree then you are either a liar, an NPC, or have not read them carefully enough, which I can prove by using shibboleths on our communities accepted doctrine.
It always boggles the mind when people fail to grasps others as being real.
and that “who talks to who” is basic journalism.
It’s always interesting to note when an apparently natural convention has metastasised and begun to sprout weird, ugly, distensions that no longer make sense. Sure, when the stakes are ideas, it’s important to stick to ideas and not over-focus on personalities! In fact you can take that principle fairly far, as when holding onto your ideals in the teeth of conflict which can abase you and cause you to lose all moral compass. But never talk about personalities? And in a big way we live in the century of metastasised conventions - the internet, but also everything else, both accelerates and robs us of any behavioural compass but strange and constantly shifting conventional guides for getting along (have a terrifying conversation with almost anyone in Gen Z for proof of that). In the same way “in-group/out-group” is hopelessly inadequate to capture this dynamic, but it’s another convention that this lot of have chosen to metastasise (and, paradoxically, it now looms larger in the rules governing their thinking than almost anywhere).
For them, it’s all become a strange conspiracy of the elect in which nobody knows who’s in charge and nobody is actually the elect, hence this constant bizarre resort to the counter-conspiracy whenever their strange values come into conflict with the outside: they no longer have a tool for reality-testing their values, because the rest of the world is either wrong or the enemy
It is very, very funny to see what is clearly “I have no interest in discussing this with you” get interpreted as “I am too evil and/or low-IQ to recognise the truth of your obviously correct ideas”. They really throw a fit when discussion isn’t 100% on their terms. They’re not even good sophists!
