Arabic can get you a long way in large parts of the world.
I was once asked to help a friend research a project about a fictional agency which went around the world investigating alien contacts. It turns out that if you want a language which allows you to walk into a village in any given random spot on earth and communicate with at least somebody in town, Arabic (specially Classical Arabic) should be your go-to.
I’m going to try to post the rest tonight, I’m doing some holiday stuff with my wife. I apologize for underestimating the amount of time that it would take but it’s a complicated matter trying to pull out the information and organize it into this form. While this is a skill I have been working on for two decades it’s only the last couple of years that I have been consciously trying to treat it like this. On top of that at least a part of it is enabled by Tourette’s Syndrome related language sensitivity. It’s comparable the sensory hypersensitivity that people with autism experience except that it’s at a different level of cognition (like two “flavors” of a category).
@Leda Atomica
Thank you! I have to make sure though, did you mean 5-7 or where I talked about how it looks like physical conflict? The analogy to grappling matches on more than one dimension, and it’s likely the case that the same system we use for physical conflict also works for social conflict. I try to harmonize this stuff with what I read in brain science.
@Kat
Thank you!
It’s interesting because when I started taking what I learned about privilege from others seriously I started seeing patterns that can’t be unseen. It’s tricky to do right but I think that privilege can be used ethically when it comes to seeing the things that were previously invisible. Many of those little differences in behavior, attitude and communication that I have done unconsciously in are now patterns that I am consciously aware of and that means I can choose how to use them. This includes undermining and negating them in social situations.
One of those is a divide between rules for “winning” and rules for “being consistent with reality”. When it comes to social justice related conflicts the rules for “winning” are different for the historically dominant group when it comes to how the historically subordinate groups are perceived. Even if the outrage is manufactured by trolls that know what they are doing, it’s worth keeping in mind that they use this outrage because it works on people in their in-group. I have a lot of bookmarked examples of people, mostly white and male, that act outraged and accept one another’s outrage. For example the outrage at the idea of safe zones, outrage at having racist/sexist behavior called out, outrage at tone. It’s part of how the social conflict works. The historically dominant group has an effect on what is considered outrageous and that can take some time to unlearn.
@EJ
I have been very tempted to start a site like that but I have to admit that I am somewhat intimidated by the prospect. One of the things about having an authoritarian personality and trying to manage it can result in some rather specific OCDs. I tend to agonize about the consequences of things relating to all of this and frankly that has been a good thing (google tourettes and rage attacks). But it still makes organizing something like that challenging. I can think of about a dozen things that I would want to control for in such an effort (emphasis on defense, controls to complicate using it to become better at trolling, getting enough perspectives on each “form” to make it accurate, outlining attack/defense/deception/obfuscation properly, avoiding becoming what we hate…).
Any opinions on a place to propose it and encourage constructive criticism of the idea? Even the form is something to think about. Blog with a post for each item? Wiki due to the better ability to create hierarchies for things?
@opposablethumbs
Yeah but like I mentioned above I’ve been agonizing over the details. The idea is one thing, preventing problems associated with disseminating knowledge about textual martial arts is another. I’m willing, but my muses also tend to be my furies.
14) “Impossible request”: Troll tells you to do something related to what they assert that is not possible based on what they have provided. Example.
FS tells PI to “get some perspective” which is impossible given the information provided. A perspective requires information to form a picture and at this point (and later) such information is not provided unless FS simply wants PI to do what they say because they say so.
15) “Irrational self-aggrandizing”: Troll makes claims about themselves for to: attempt a strategic increase of reputation, falsely claim authority relevant to an argument and/or hide actual lack of authority from damaged reputation Example.
This one has a title that is true when it comes to being consistent with reality, but there is a rationale when it comes to social conflict. FS knows (consciously or otherwise) that they are offering nothing but opinion. So in order to increase their reputation they claim that they have expertise and toss up some information that sounds like it might have to do with legal experience. But this is just another unsupported claim and and worth as much as the others. Claims about tracking chan-Trump connections and similar can also be here as well.
16) “Ignore my offense!”: Troll attempts to redirect, distract or assert no responsibility for an offense(s) by different means. Examples include meaningless unintended offense (offense always happens anyway), claims that the offense does not/should not exist, and offense at claims of offense. Example. The offense still remains and there is little to do in a social justice context but address the offense directly, understand what it is, what it means to the offended, why it happened and how to avoid it.
17) “Humor as a pleasant poison”: The troll attempts to use humor to strategically reduce, redirect or transform negative feelings related to something. Example.
The narrative that the Legal system failed is just wrong in this case: it failed because there’s no real bite to online harassment and so on. ZQ might state she stopped the case due to reasons X, but it’s actually more useful to address the legal aspects of the case.
As a feminist. As a woman. As a dog owner. (eek).
Humor has a purpose and a big chunk of this is the suppression or transformation of negative emotion (google “Emotional structure of jokes: a corpus-based investigation” for an interesting paper). Note that this joke tried to reduce the tension associated with the trauma from online harassment.
We don’t want to do that unless it involves helping a victim (and even then only if they are ok with it). It’s informative to see that FS first denied the pain associated with online harassment, and then tried to shift associated discomfort away from that.
@Brony:
I think the best form would be a series of posts on wordpress- or tumblr-like framework, with a front page that acts as a table of contents linking directly to each. That’ll be easy to add content to but also easy for casual viewers to engage with and/or link to.
After some introspection I think I know why I’m hesitant in more detail. A critical reason for why I can even tear apart argument like this is because of a lot of effort to understand how and why they should be torn apart based on the perspectives and experiences of non-white, male, cis people. If I were to do this I need to have a session where I propose the idea and I get others to tell me what they need from such a resource so I can design and organize it right.
One of the biggest ways an ally can fail is to fight for their reasons and not the reasons of the people they want to help. While there will be a lot of general human shapes to how these things work, the reason I can see them is because I’m essentially consciously aware of how these techniques have been applied to different minority groups and finding common denominators between them. Such a site has to have a social justice focus.
Do you think that this would be an acceptable activity in one of the open threads (I’ll email David but I’m curious about thoughts here)?
Does anyone have any comments so far?
EJ (The Other One)
8 years ago
You asked for opinions so let me give you mine:
Trolling (as distinct from harassment, which confusingly is often called that) is a silencing tactic. It works by crowding out good-faith communication, and by making good-faith communicators waste enormous amounts of time and energy engaging with a person who isn’t actually listening. It works because the total energy that trolls have available to them for trolling is greater than the total energy that good-faith people have available for response. Trolling is Gresham’s Law of communication, if you will.
Anything that can be done to make this equation more balanced is inherently a social justice focused activity because it prevents soft voices from being crowded out by bad-faith communication. If you teach people to recognise trolling and enable them to respond to it in a brief and dismissive manner rather than expending enormous energy on it, then you have empowered their voices.
The power of such a method is that, unlike many other things which are supposed to empower minority voices, it can’t easily be turned around and used to uphold the status quo because disempowered voices are saying things that are genuinely heartfelt and have not been said before, and thus will not fall within a dictionary of common troll tactics.
Therefore:
– It needs to be written in accessible language (that is, not by wordy white cis male people like ourselves.)
– It needs to have wide categories rather than narrow ones, so people can easily remember them.
– It needs to be written in a funny manner, so people will read it, recommend it and remember it.
– It needs to ridicule trolls, so that people feel embarrassed to be seen to be making the arguments contained within it.
– ETA: It needs to be apolitical insofar as is possible, so as not to alienate people who agree with 90% of it but not the remainder. For example, I am a pacifist, but I would try to avoid mentioning violence negatively within such a context so as to avoid making the resource inaccessible to underprivileged people who do not have the luxury of pacifism.
We Hunted The Mammoth
I was once asked to help a friend research a project about a fictional agency which went around the world investigating alien contacts. It turns out that if you want a language which allows you to walk into a village in any given random spot on earth and communicate with at least somebody in town, Arabic (specially Classical Arabic) should be your go-to.
I’m going to try to post the rest tonight, I’m doing some holiday stuff with my wife. I apologize for underestimating the amount of time that it would take but it’s a complicated matter trying to pull out the information and organize it into this form. While this is a skill I have been working on for two decades it’s only the last couple of years that I have been consciously trying to treat it like this. On top of that at least a part of it is enabled by Tourette’s Syndrome related language sensitivity. It’s comparable the sensory hypersensitivity that people with autism experience except that it’s at a different level of cognition (like two “flavors” of a category).
@Leda Atomica
Thank you! I have to make sure though, did you mean 5-7 or where I talked about how it looks like physical conflict? The analogy to grappling matches on more than one dimension, and it’s likely the case that the same system we use for physical conflict also works for social conflict. I try to harmonize this stuff with what I read in brain science.
@Kat
Thank you!
It’s interesting because when I started taking what I learned about privilege from others seriously I started seeing patterns that can’t be unseen. It’s tricky to do right but I think that privilege can be used ethically when it comes to seeing the things that were previously invisible. Many of those little differences in behavior, attitude and communication that I have done unconsciously in are now patterns that I am consciously aware of and that means I can choose how to use them. This includes undermining and negating them in social situations.
One of those is a divide between rules for “winning” and rules for “being consistent with reality”. When it comes to social justice related conflicts the rules for “winning” are different for the historically dominant group when it comes to how the historically subordinate groups are perceived. Even if the outrage is manufactured by trolls that know what they are doing, it’s worth keeping in mind that they use this outrage because it works on people in their in-group. I have a lot of bookmarked examples of people, mostly white and male, that act outraged and accept one another’s outrage. For example the outrage at the idea of safe zones, outrage at having racist/sexist behavior called out, outrage at tone. It’s part of how the social conflict works. The historically dominant group has an effect on what is considered outrageous and that can take some time to unlearn.
@EJ
I have been very tempted to start a site like that but I have to admit that I am somewhat intimidated by the prospect. One of the things about having an authoritarian personality and trying to manage it can result in some rather specific OCDs. I tend to agonize about the consequences of things relating to all of this and frankly that has been a good thing (google tourettes and rage attacks). But it still makes organizing something like that challenging. I can think of about a dozen things that I would want to control for in such an effort (emphasis on defense, controls to complicate using it to become better at trolling, getting enough perspectives on each “form” to make it accurate, outlining attack/defense/deception/obfuscation properly, avoiding becoming what we hate…).
Any opinions on a place to propose it and encourage constructive criticism of the idea? Even the form is something to think about. Blog with a post for each item? Wiki due to the better ability to create hierarchies for things?
@opposablethumbs
Yeah but like I mentioned above I’ve been agonizing over the details. The idea is one thing, preventing problems associated with disseminating knowledge about textual martial arts is another. I’m willing, but my muses also tend to be my furies.
14) “Impossible request”: Troll tells you to do something related to what they assert that is not possible based on what they have provided.
Example.
FS tells PI to “get some perspective” which is impossible given the information provided. A perspective requires information to form a picture and at this point (and later) such information is not provided unless FS simply wants PI to do what they say because they say so.
15) “Irrational self-aggrandizing”: Troll makes claims about themselves for to: attempt a strategic increase of reputation, falsely claim authority relevant to an argument and/or hide actual lack of authority from damaged reputation
Example.
This one has a title that is true when it comes to being consistent with reality, but there is a rationale when it comes to social conflict. FS knows (consciously or otherwise) that they are offering nothing but opinion. So in order to increase their reputation they claim that they have expertise and toss up some information that sounds like it might have to do with legal experience. But this is just another unsupported claim and and worth as much as the others. Claims about tracking chan-Trump connections and similar can also be here as well.
16) “Ignore my offense!”: Troll attempts to redirect, distract or assert no responsibility for an offense(s) by different means. Examples include meaningless unintended offense (offense always happens anyway), claims that the offense does not/should not exist, and offense at claims of offense.
Example. The offense still remains and there is little to do in a social justice context but address the offense directly, understand what it is, what it means to the offended, why it happened and how to avoid it.
17) “Humor as a pleasant poison”: The troll attempts to use humor to strategically reduce, redirect or transform negative feelings related to something.
Example.
Humor has a purpose and a big chunk of this is the suppression or transformation of negative emotion (google “Emotional structure of jokes: a corpus-based investigation” for an interesting paper). Note that this joke tried to reduce the tension associated with the trauma from online harassment.
We don’t want to do that unless it involves helping a victim (and even then only if they are ok with it). It’s informative to see that FS first denied the pain associated with online harassment, and then tried to shift associated discomfort away from that.
@Brony:
I think the best form would be a series of posts on wordpress- or tumblr-like framework, with a front page that acts as a table of contents linking directly to each. That’ll be easy to add content to but also easy for casual viewers to engage with and/or link to.
@EJ
Yeah I think I want to do this.
After some introspection I think I know why I’m hesitant in more detail. A critical reason for why I can even tear apart argument like this is because of a lot of effort to understand how and why they should be torn apart based on the perspectives and experiences of non-white, male, cis people. If I were to do this I need to have a session where I propose the idea and I get others to tell me what they need from such a resource so I can design and organize it right.
One of the biggest ways an ally can fail is to fight for their reasons and not the reasons of the people they want to help. While there will be a lot of general human shapes to how these things work, the reason I can see them is because I’m essentially consciously aware of how these techniques have been applied to different minority groups and finding common denominators between them. Such a site has to have a social justice focus.
Do you think that this would be an acceptable activity in one of the open threads (I’ll email David but I’m curious about thoughts here)?
Does anyone have any comments so far?
You asked for opinions so let me give you mine:
Trolling (as distinct from harassment, which confusingly is often called that) is a silencing tactic. It works by crowding out good-faith communication, and by making good-faith communicators waste enormous amounts of time and energy engaging with a person who isn’t actually listening. It works because the total energy that trolls have available to them for trolling is greater than the total energy that good-faith people have available for response. Trolling is Gresham’s Law of communication, if you will.
Anything that can be done to make this equation more balanced is inherently a social justice focused activity because it prevents soft voices from being crowded out by bad-faith communication. If you teach people to recognise trolling and enable them to respond to it in a brief and dismissive manner rather than expending enormous energy on it, then you have empowered their voices.
The power of such a method is that, unlike many other things which are supposed to empower minority voices, it can’t easily be turned around and used to uphold the status quo because disempowered voices are saying things that are genuinely heartfelt and have not been said before, and thus will not fall within a dictionary of common troll tactics.
Therefore:
– It needs to be written in accessible language (that is, not by wordy white cis male people like ourselves.)
– It needs to have wide categories rather than narrow ones, so people can easily remember them.
– It needs to be written in a funny manner, so people will read it, recommend it and remember it.
– It needs to ridicule trolls, so that people feel embarrassed to be seen to be making the arguments contained within it.
– ETA: It needs to be apolitical insofar as is possible, so as not to alienate people who agree with 90% of it but not the remainder. For example, I am a pacifist, but I would try to avoid mentioning violence negatively within such a context so as to avoid making the resource inaccessible to underprivileged people who do not have the luxury of pacifism.