I completely agree with all of this.

And then when someone demonstrates there's no basis for hating him, "Well, I can still hate him, because it's still his fault for being so stupid as to say something I misinterpreted."

The worst bit is probably when you demonstrate that there's no basis for hating him, and the other person replies with something vague and impossible-to-refute like "maybe that comment could be read in a harmless way, but knowing this person, it's still misogynistic". Which could, admittedly, be a reasonable claim if you knew for sure that the person had a long history of unquestionable misogyny, but comments like this tend to get thrown around even when the speaker is merely commenting on the blog post of somebody they were just linked to and had never heard about before.

Or "maybe that comment could be read harmlessly, but in the overall context it's clearly misogynistic", with no better explanation than this. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH.

Evidence is not their friend.

I think it is wrong to annalogise hating on Mitt Romney to hating on the smelly unpopular kid. The smelly unpopular kid is friendless and alone, he has no-one to turn to who will help (the adults in these situations often join in or condone the bullying) or understand him. Mitt Romney on the other hand is a very successful business man and politician, he has a lot of support - although probably not in the liberal corners of the internet.

Also, pulling away from the Romney issue.

I think when you do When some white male politician makes a remark that sort of out-of-context sounds racist, I pattern-match this to the smelly kid saying "You're ugly". you shouldn't pattern-match to the smelly kid saying "You're ugly" but rather to the popular kid saying "You smell". Because of who has powerful friends, who suffers more often from bullying, etc etc

I do not think it is right to turn the tactics of the bullies right back on them.

On the other hand I do think it is right (and NOT BULLYING) to stand up and say "you bullied me, your words and actions have caused me pain". Except that it seems so very often a tactic of the bully to say "WAH SHE CALLED ME A BULLY THAT HURTS".

The focus of the post is not on the "bully" but on the behavior that surrounds them, the circle of hate. If you and all your friends get together to make fun of Mitt Romney, who you know you all hate, it's much closer to the smelly kid being picked on than the popular kid.

Yes.

Let us consider two scenarios:

1) A giant group of popular powerful people called Bob go round smashing in people's windows. Most people ignore this, because if you try to stand up to the Bobs they are more likely to smash your windows. One small brave person called Susy says to the Bobs 'You are Evil and Wrong to smash in people's windows'. This probably achieves very little, except maybe Susy gets her windows smashed, but presumably a) Susy gets to be proud to have stood up for what is Right, b) some of the Bobs may have their conscience pricked and stop, and there is a remote chance c) that other people might see that Susy is brave and also rise up against the Bob-window-smashing-problem. In this Susy is good (if naive) and the Bobs are bad.

2) A fairly useless, unpopular, clumsy guy called Bob accidentally falls through Susy's window. Susy rallies her 90 million bitchy friends, and they all spend the next week publically and painfully telling Bob, Bob's family and anyone else who will listen 'Bob is Evil and Wrong and smashes windows'. Bob is actually incredibly sorry he smashed Susy's window, tries his best to apologise, but Susy's hate circle is unstoppable, and for the rest of his life when Bob meets new people they say 'oh _Bob_? The window smashing guy?'

I think there is an interesting continuum between (1) and (2), and I think Scott's attempt to define Mitt Romney as (2) is a bit disingenuous. Clearly it is all a bit of a factor of how many Bobs and how many Susies and how much power they have. I think in our happy liberal corners of the internet, it is easy to see things as (2), because there is one Mitt Romney and all our friends hate him. But actually in the world as a whole, about half of America will vote for him, and the percentage of people you can talk to about privilege and sexism and positive discrimination in an informed and rational way is vanishingly small. I _think_ the actual situation is that Mitt Romney -as-Bob is part of a big and powerful group, but there is more than one Susy finally being able to stand up to the Bob's together, and because Scott is in the middle of the group of Susy's and a long way away from the Bobs he sees a Susy-hate-fest that looks like (2).

[On the other hand, I really agree with Scott that when there are so many things to rationally get worked up about, piling on bandwagons and taking extreme positions is a bit annoying. Then again, when someone has been smashing your windows for the past 30 years, you probably have quite a need to vent.]

I would agree with that second point.

Once someone uses a silly phrase like "binders full of women" and hundreds of thousands of people call him a "human piece of shit", I think we're getting well beyond the "pointing out that your words are hurtful" level.

I agree that Romney is rich and famous and probably has friends somewhere. But I still think he has feelings and it probably really hurts to get attacked like that. I still think his friends aren't especially relevant here, in that I can't really imagine someone from his Mormon temple going to a feminist blog and saying "Actually, hear me out, Mitt is kind of an okay guy" and it going at all well. And it doesn't seem like a combination of pro-Romney and anti-Romney remarks. He might have friends somewhere in the general case, but in this case the entire media is devoting itself to making fun of him and his friends are nowhere to be seen.

Agreed. And it applies to racists and sexists in general; they're not lone smelly unforunates, these are major streams of the culture.

There might be some psychological similarity between picking on the smelly kid to mocking sexists in a safe space on the Internet, but there's some real situational differences.

Reading Kahneman, I think Scott's trying to fight the halo effect and our System 1 generated sense of coherence. If we think someone is good in one way we tend to think more highly of them in other ways; ditto for badness. Thus "Hitler loved animals and children" causes dissonance between "BAD MAN!" and "good traits", and Romney may be painted blacker than he fully deserves.

OTOH, he deserves plenty of black paint as is, and has higher stakes than usual what with federal elections coming up. I don't know that this is really the best use of limited time and attention.

Most of the internet political stuff I see is people trying to increase their status in and/or maintain their membership in one in-group by attacking the rival group. The "binder" meme is being grabbed by folks keeping a look-out for sticks to hit the other side with (cf "fifty-seven states" for something equally silly in the other direction). I think the most frantic efforts come from people who need the political group identification as their main status identity or are worried about being expelled for a heretical opinion. Example: a gun-owning liberal posting lots of I-hate-Republicans stuff.

Along the lines of 'patriarchy hurts teh menz too', it might be worth examining the matter of dogpiling from the perspective of the harm that it does to the dogpilers.

I think that a group that embraces the practice, even if they are righteous and justified at time T, is pretty much guaranteed to become evil at time T' > T.

Agreed. Dogpiling seems to harm intellectual honesty, and my experience is that intellectually dishonest groups degenerate fairly quickly in to evil >.>

Until you stop your attempts to reason people out of the positions they did not reason themselves into, AaaaaaaaAAAAAAAA is your modus operandi.

You get worried when people you don't know link here?

I guess I should admit I've linked here from my G+ a few times, but with the specific request not to share the links in case someone comes across your more controversial posts and labels you something rude, and if I'm problematic you can blame Leah Libresco for regularly linking here and getting me interested in the first place. :)

You are a remarkable man.

I hope that morality pays off for You some day as well. It is extraordinary and rare...but You have an extraordinary and rare mind and soul. Me and my friend are not simpletons by any means, but we regularly read Your posts and virtually turn to each other in mind-blown astonishment at Your grasp of human nature, Your ability to articulate it in a reasonable, coherent way, and Your pairing of IQ and EQ in a way I don't think I've ever really seen before. Your mind and proliferate expression of it is simply astonishing, and always encompassing of ten more perspectives than the average person is even capable of comprehending let alone assimilating into their reasoning. Your empathetic, intuitive, and supremely logical marriage of ideas is just magnificent. This may not be the place for this...but after reading this post I just couldn't be quiet anymore.

Thanks for...not being silent. Thanks for sharing Your perspectives and ideas. Even though I am a resolute believer in the idea that You really can't ever change anyone's mind truly, I think if anyone could...it would be You. I have no doubt that you have at the very least opened many people's minds to concepts they simply would not have entertained before. To me, that is nothing short of miraculous. Many people say they have an open mind, but one hand allows me to count how many I've met who are truly open. You are the most open I have ever seen. I hope You are able to open many more in at least small ways.

So yeah...thanks. :-)

I'd like to reiterate the other posters who have said "Yay for you doing this, you are awesome because of it" :)