Laurie Penny's Spiteful, Censorious Take On Milo

As I hope I made clear Wednesday, Milo Yiannopoulos has earned the social opprobrium that has resulted in rather severe commercial consequences for his career, i.e. it appears extinct. Yet whenever I read anything by Laurie Penny and agree with large parts of it, my immediate reflex is to ask whether I've missed something. I can answer that now with a "no" with respect to Milo's behavior, but in nearly every other aspect, Penny's analysis is plainly wrong.

First, it's important to lay out the areas of agreement. They are two:

•  Yiannopoulos is a bomb-thrower who will say anything for attention, as we saw when Twitter finally (but without explanation) decided to kick him off the service.
• He largely brought this on himself, and there is no sympathy for his public humiliation.

But that is the end of it. The serial misandrist employs the worst epithet in her arsenal against his camp followers, labeling them "sweaty teenage trolls". Men are bad enough, but in their protean form, intolerable, something she emphasizes with a snide, cheap shot at Dungeons & Dragons players. She imagines a deeply, obviously wrong reason why an openly gay man might find acceptance among religious conservatives — "for all that the American right likes to show off pet homosexuals to prove its modernity, it turns out that it still hates gays" — which fails to consider how it is that such a flamboyantly open homosexual could have gotten where he is in the first place. (Walter Olson's explanation makes the most sense of any: briefly, Yiannopoulos confesses his sin but embraces the mother church, which plays better with certain religious conservatives than culturally-conservative-but-not-sinning Log Cabin Republicans.) She looks deep into the soul of a Milo fan, and sees only bigotry (emboldening mine, as usual):

It is horribly ironic that of all the disgusting nonsense Yiannopoulos has said — about women, about Muslims, about transgender people, about immigrants — it is only now that the moderate right appears to have reached the limits of what it will tolerate in the name of free speech. The hypocrisy is clarion-clear: This was never, in fact, about free speech at all. It was about making it OK to say racist, sexist, transphobic, and xenophobic things, about tolerating the public expression of those views right up to the point where it becomes financially unwise to do so.

How is it that the "moderate right" was responsible for expelling him from a CPAC address? Were they the same ones who threatened to resign from Breitbart if he didn't?  In the end, it's just another label for her to feel superior to, just as she declares "Milo Yiannopolous [sic], possibly alone of all the smug white people in the world, is not a racist", as though the rest of them are. (Presumably, Penny feels guilty about her racism, and of course we need not ask her about sexism.) Too, she fails at understanding what it is that finally felled Milo. She chalks it all up to moral conservatism, rather than Milo's ambiguity and indifference to appearance. Even in apology, he failed to understand what he appeared to defend.

But what is most puzzling about that passage is her claim that Milo was never about free speech. We see this directly here:

Rewind two weeks. It’s a wet night in Berkeley, California, and Yiannopoulos is running away from the left. He was scheduled to speak at the University of California–Berkeley, but the event has been shut down. It was shut down because thousands of anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters decided that there should be no platform for what they called white supremacy. They are marching to say that free speech does not extend to hate speech, that the First Amendment should not oblige institutions to invite professional trolls to spout an auto-generated word-salad of Internet bigotry just for fun, and that, if the institutions disagree, students and allies are entitled to throw fireworks and smash things until the trolls run away. Which is exactly what has happened.

 People actually smashing things, exercising the heckler's veto, silencing the "trolls" — these people receive not a word of vituperation or contempt from her, unlike everyone else in this essay. Does her conception of "free speech" include "hate speech", whatever that is? For all she claims she opposes "no platforming", she clearly granted herself some wiggle room when she wrote, "I think no-platforming is a bad tactic in almost all circumstances." Almost all. We do not know the precise dimensions of that space, but we can guess them, and they fill a void near the size of Milo Yiannopoulos. Why does she think she should be able to demand, at some website where the user base clearly opposes her opinions (viciously and crudely), she should be able to moderate comments out of existence she finds offensive? Hers is the voice of an expansionist and totalitarian view of speech that uses "safe spaces" as a sword; it is not the voice of tolerance. As with Anita Sarkeesian, whose censorious tendencies only became explicit censorship advocacy through her work with the ITU, the answer may come eventually, whenever an opportunity arises.

Update 2017-02-27: this is good:

So why are conservatives cozying up to such hideousness? The best explanation they offer is that inviting someone so beyond the pale will shatter the tight boundaries drawn by political correctness and open the space for a wider airing of ideas. But the problem is that by using a stink bomb like Yiannopoulos they'll make their own ideas malodorous. Who will take conservative praise of civility, tradition, family values, manners, honor, moderation, and dignity seriously if a 31-year-old, out-of-control adolescent is their champion?

The Cultural Parasite

So the new Ghostbusters trailer came out a few days ago. The distaff casting of the leads has turned into a culture war flashpoint, with its obvious, tedious "girl power" message front and center. Predictably, Salon has slings and arrows for the doubters (an earlier version of the headline apparently called them "angry baby men"). I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the film itself when released may have funny moments in it, but is not funny in its entirety. This is hard to do when one's form is dictated by Maoist denunciation. That this is not likely to produce good results should come as no surprise, and we can pretty readily predict the form of the destructor when it comes to any ensuing criticism:

Amazing. 😂 by @plebcomics pic.twitter.com/8oUzm6Dpe6

— RIP America (@LibertarianHoe) March 7, 2016

It seems to me there's a common thread here between this reboot and Anita Sarkeesian, and it is the demand to insinuate oneself in and hijack a successful franchise and inject dogma into it for entirely political reasons. The business of making a film or a TV show or a video game are all acts that require financing and courage, two items culture critics such as Sarkeesian notably lack. Such are also, notably, philistines, which is to say they oppose the very process of making art. But there is no guarantee the public will lap up the output of such efforts. I have a rule that if a comedy can't generate enough good material to make me laugh in a trailer, it's not worth seeing, and this appears to be no exception. The problem with the Ghostbusters reboot is precisely that it has been sold as feminist agitprop, and now that the filmgoing public has figured this out (thanks to an uninspiring trailer featuring bored actors and limp deliveries), the search for villains has begun.

STEM And Competence Vs. Credentialism

Scott Alexander wrote and then disappeared a great, long, rambling rant about various matters, in part related to credentials vs. competence. This sparked a spirited conversation in the comments, which is all we have of it now. (I suspect he plans eventually on trimming it down to fighting weight, and republishing it then.) I wanted to focus here on this snippet (quoted parts are from Alexander's original):

The Blue Tribe protects its own and wants to impoverish anyone who doesn’t kowtow to their institutions. For the same reason, we get bizarre occupational licensing restrictions like needing two years of training to braid people’s hair, which have been proven time and time again not to work or improve quality.

The opposite of credentialism is meritocracy—the belief that the best person should get the job whether or not they’ve given $200,000 to Yale. In my crazy conspiracy theory, social justice is the attack arm of the educated/urban/sophisticated/academic Blue Tribe, which works by constantly insisting all competing tribes are racist and sexist and therefore need to be dismantled/taken over/put under Blue Tribe supervision for their own good. So we get told that meritocracy is racist and sexist. Colleges have pronounced talking about meritocracy to be a microaggression, and the media has declared that supporting meritocracy is inherently racist. Likewise, we are all told that standardized tests and especially IQ are racist and hurt minorities, even though in reality this testing helps advance minorities better than the current system.

As we saw when Asians rose up to block Democratic efforts to reinstate affirmative action at the University of California,  the winners and losers in such efforts are not always readily discernible. But when that same UC pronounces meritocracy as microaggression, you know which direction the system's overlords intend to take the discussion: toward more credentials, and less actual aptitude. Popehat collective blogger @ClarkHat* suggested why progressives have a love/hate relationship with STEM disciplines:

This is why progs hate / love STEM: it's a juicy target that hasn't yet fallen to credentialism that privileges them https://t.co/nwyYtlKn20

— Grim Dark Future Hat (@ClarkHat) February 19, 2016

I seem to recall Alexander mentioning a "Silicon Valley 2.0" as a place taken over by credentialists, which would be a field day for people like the censorious Anita Sarkeesian (who lately seems to have snuck into Twitter's censorship board) and naked lunatics like Shanley Kane, whose editorial stance is that competence is the new sexism. I would hope it goes without saying that these people must be resisted with every tool at our disposal.

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* I've since been informed that ClarkHat no longer writes for Popehat.

The Censor, Anita Sarkeesian

I recently had cause to discuss whether Anita Sarkeesian's "Feminist Frequency" videos amounted to censorship or not. By a strict definition, no they are not, because she had not at that point demanded state action, i.e. prior restraint on video game publishers. Criticism, of course, is not the same thing as censorship, but with Sarkeesian, there have been a number of "tells" that she has a strong itch in that direction, the principle one being that she demands the right to direct the course of video game production — of which she is not, by her own admission, much of a customer. It would be one thing to play video games and want something better. (For a parallel example in the related world of comics, see my brief remarks about Barbara Randall Kesel.) It's quite another to see content she is only peripherally interested in (or worse, demands others pay for) and then expects producers thereof will hew to her cloistered thinking. She has also been unwilling to take the stage with any opponent (most notably the firebrand journalist Milo Yiannopoulos) to debate her ideas; she appears to want a megaphone, not exchange, which again suggests she has a totalitarian's indifference to anyone else's opinion.

But charitably, the question remained at least until recently an open one, when she somehow got a report published through the United Nations on "cyber violence". (The full report can be found here (PDF), because the link from the title page appears to be broken.) This includes

Cyber VAWG includes hate speech (publishing a blasphemous libel), hacking (intercepting private communications), identity theft, online stalking (criminal harassment) and uttering threats.

 Sarkeesian expanded on those goals considerably:

According to feminist culture critic Anita Sarkeesian, who spoke at the event, online “harassment” doesn’t simply consist of what is “legal and illegal,” but “also the day-to-day grind of ‘you’re a liar’ and ‘you suck,’ including all of these hate videos that attack us on a regular basis.”

Unable to prove that they are the victims of a wave of “misogynistic hate” – no bomb threat against a feminist critic of video games has ever been deemed credible and there are serious doubts about threats supposedly levelled at transsexual activist Brianna Wu – feminists are trying to redefine violence and harassment to include disobliging tweets and criticisms of their work.

In other words: someone said “you suck” to Anita Sarkeesian and now we have to censor the internet. Who could have predicted such a thing? It’s worth noting, by the way, that if Sarkeesian’s definition is correct, Donald Trump is the world’s greatest victim of “cyber-violence.” Someone should let him know.

As a bonus points follow-on, Yiannopoulos found a Redditor willing to slog through all 120 of the report's footnotes, concluding that 30% are broken, blank, duplicated, or nonexistent in some other way, with another 15% self-referentially linking back to UN documents. (Also, yikes, for Popehat phoning it in, though at least he recognized it at the time.) The benefit of the doubt no longer applies; schoolyard taunts provide sufficient cause for Sarkeesian to demand governments silence others, and that the mechanisms for doing this be built into the technical infrastructure of the Internet. Sarkeesian is nothing more than a schoolmarm with an overgrown ego.

The Rise Of "Commercial Feminism"

I've written damned near nothing about #GamerGate, with the justification that it's one of those culture war thingies that makes you always wrong no matter what side you take:

(Cathy Young's short course at Reason, the best there is on the subject, is worth reading, but even that makes my head spin.) But I read something today that came across my transom on Twitter via Ms. Young by one Chihiro Onitsuka at VGChartz entitled "Journalism Is Dead" providing an unusual perspective on the matter. Armored as she is against the charge of owning a penis, her interactions with various media outlets is telling:

As I am myself a woman in the games industry - one that has worked on a number of major blockbuster titles - I have been approached a number of times from news outlets such as the BBC and several US news stations requesting an interview, and each and every time this has happened I have been asked various questions about my experiences in the industry and "what I think about how Anita has been treated", and each and every time when I have made my opinions clear, the desire to interview me moves swiftly from wanting to nail down a specific day and time to conduct it to "thanks for your time, we'll be in touch", which is seemingly journalist lingo for "you don't have the right opinions we want to share, bye".

Onitsuka has a sharp take on the cultural reasons for the hostility of so-called "gaming journalism" sites covering that beat (Kotaku, TechCrunch, Polygon, even to some degree Ars Technica, etc.) to their purported audience versus that of the actual game publishers: it all comes down to dollars.

To developers and publishers, gamers are potential customers and something they need in order to stay in business, The gaming media, on the other hand, sees gamers as a commodity; a page impression and potential advertising click, and thus a revenue stream. By acting as the aggressor the resulting argument draws in both gamers and social warriors for a grand battle, all the while they stand back and watch with glee as their views and ad revenue both increase.

It's a cynical approach, but expanding the audience to taking the side of people who are in fact hostile to your nominal audience makes good business sense. I just can't think of a single place elsewhere this has been tried; imagine Daily Kos running essays favoring Donald Trump or Jeb Bush while decrying the state of the Democratic Party.  Onitsuka then turns her guns to Anita Sarkeesian and the gaming press that plays along with her; she claims (without linking to) Polygon's 5/10 rating for Mad Max was entirely due to political considerations, i.e. it contained scantily clad women, one of Sarkeesian's perpetual bugaboos. (In fairness, Philip Kollar does cite that consideration ["The closest thing Mad Max has to a female lead... is a concubine for the villain and a love interest for Max"], but other reviewers have been similarly harsh on the game and for reasons of tedious game play, e.g. Chris Suellentrop in Kotaku.)

To her credit, Onitsuka waded into the residual Twitter wars still lingering, and found label-based argumentation is bullshit, per usual, and on both sides, but then she dropped a phrase I hope will have real staying power:

All of this, combined with the lust for being in the news, on the news, and at the center of news reports themselves, has led me to coin this approach to "feminism" as "Commercial feminism", where the plight of feminism and equality is exploited for commercial gain.

She's on to something. Whether Title IX "rape" adjudication (which seeks ever more picayune dating fiascoes to police) or Anita Sarkeesian and her shrill, ceaseless criticisms of others' efforts that has remarkable staying power as a business model — both are parasitic attempts to garner sinecures atop or adjacent to others' work. Both are best thought of as jobs programs for their advocates, fueled by a shift to a victimhood culture that can only end badly. Predictably with both, the size of the offenses diminish over time; as Jonathan Haidt observes,

... [A]s progress is made toward a more equal and humane society, it takes a smaller and smaller offense to trigger a high level of outrage. The goalposts shift, allowing participants to maintain a constant level of anger and constant level of perceived victimization.

This ability to turn even the tiniest of faults into epic screechfests means Sarkeesian will be in the green for a good long while; patriarchy means never having to examine your first principles.