Saturday, July 2, 2022

How do you know you're not an extremist?

I saw some of Michael Shermer's transphobic tweets and picked up a copy of his 2000 book Denying History to try to figure out what's going on there.

Below, emphasis mine:

"We all write our own ideological scripts, of course, so what is the difference between our scripts and the scripts of extremists? If we assume that the underlying beliefs of all extremists are false, we have to admit that at some point in our lives most of us qualify as extremists. But, Goertzel explains, the 'true beliefs' of extremist ideological thinking are often so amorphous and ambiguous that it is difficult to refute them. Further, when these beliefs form the basis of group cohesion, when they create in their followers a passionate, almost obsessional attachment to them, that is another sign of extremism, as is the polarization of the world into unambiguous categories, biased rhetorical and semantic argumentation, all-inclusive systems that offer the key to wisdom and truth, the dogmatic use of texts where the leader's words become hallowed, and the denial of contradictory information. Each of these characteristics is a necessary but not sufficient delimiter of extremist ideology. It is the combination of many of these indicators that makes an ideology extreme. The belief that the Holocaust did not happen, for example, is most certainly cohesive for the denier movement — the entire ideology revolves around it. The followers are deeply passionate, indeed, almost obsessive about their belief. They have polarized their world into Jews and non-Jews, exterminationists and revisionists, lies and truth. Their bias, as we shall see, drives them to select evidence, analogies, and documents that fit their belief and ignore those that do not." (p. 91)
Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (University of California Press, 2000)

This interests me because (1) I blogged here about political polarization in 2017 (2) some of it sounds not unlike what it feels like to be on the receiving end of transphobia. When cis people start worrying about the existence of trans people and try to stop people from being trans, it becomes a consuming belief for them.

I wrote more about this book and my reflections on transphobia. See: "Transphobia is a Form of Denialism". It's a 10-minute read on Medium. Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.



Matt Walsh tweets Jul 26, 2023: So-called “gender critical” feminists like HJoyceGender fail to understand how feminism itself set the stage for trans ideology. The trans mania never would have taken hold of our society without feminists setting the stage for it. Michael Shermer tweets Jul 26, 2023: I disagree w/ MattWalshBlog here. The current trans phenomena did not follow immediately on the heels of the feminist movement (which was decades ago); it exploded on the scene a few years ago, likely the result of GenZ mental issues (depression, anxiety etc.) + social contagion belief transitioning will solve those issues. But we don't know for sure the cause. Determining causality in social movements like this is very difficult & blaming it on 'feminism' is too big a causal variable—there's no way to operationally define the independent variable. HJoyceGender

https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1684279589600735239


Relatedly, in genocide denial:

...in response to this...

Barbara Kay on March 31, 2023 tweets: Very excited to announce launch of a new website published by the 'Indian Residential Schools Research Group' where I am a board member 'at large'. This site deals with all evidence in the round - including the bad stuff; this isn't about laundering known deficits - but not narratives, myths and unverified 'knowings.' Please visit: irsrg.ca To which ashley fairbanks @ziibiing replied: I wish your research could include hearing my grandmother, a residential school survivor, scream in her sleep every night. It was haunting, a reminder of the abuse she endured without seeing her family for nine years. Barbara Kay replied: Children in the schools did normally go home for the summer.

...Florence Ashley (@ButNotTheCity) tweeted: Barbara Kay, seeing the success of her son’s race science outlet Quillette, officially announces her genocide denialism era. (April 1, 2023)


Thomas Lecaque is referring to this Ohio Capital Journal story.

Thomas Lecaque
@tlecaque: May 26, 2023: Fuck this nonsense. You come heiling and Holocaust denying in my classroom you will be ejected from the fucking class. Genocide is not disagreement, genocide denial or promotion is not an 'uncomfortable view.' https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/briefs/when-asked-about-holocaust-deniers-sen-cirino-said-colleges-should-be-about-accepting-even-views-that-are-uncomfortable/ via 
@OhioCapJournal

"“Normalization” might be an overused trope – but here it applies. Religious zealotry is presented as the outgrowth of a worldview shaped by 'faith and family,' those widely accepted pillars of American culture; a professional life spent in rightwing activist circles and among partisan extremists is reinterpreted as a career of service and leadership; a radical political agenda is sanitized as the manifestation of the worries and desires of 'regular folks.'

This is another iteration of an apologist sleight of hand that is often deployed to provide cover for the Republican Party: If extremism is not defined by its ideological and political substance, but purely as 'something fringe,' then the minute it becomes GOP mainstream, it ceases to be regarded as extreme. Just like that, radical ideas and politicians get automatically legitimized: By definition, the Republican Party, regardless of how substantively extreme, gets treated as 'normal' simply because it is not fringe, because it is supported by almost half the country."

— Thomas Zimmer, “Faith and Family” vs Democracy, Democracy Americana (Substack), November 1, 2023


Only one side has moved.

Liberals continue to believe more or less the same thing they've always believed: people exist and should have basic rights, and that while we may sometimes be annoyed or unimpressed with each other, there's no sense making a big fuss about the fact that humans have sexuality and that individuals and groups are different in various ways.

Whereas the "conservatives" have radicalized and ratcheted up supremacist beliefs. They think that they are the real people, and that their nation is theirs to control.

If you say "no," they think you're part of the conspiracy.

If you provide facts and reasons, they deflect with whataboutisms.

Their hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug.

Here are the consequences

If you believe that you deserve to exist and others don't, you'll start to act that way.

"I don’t know how you believe that most people deserve to die except for you without starting to arrange power in ways that will make people die. I don’t know how you can believe that the death of the planet and the eternal punishment of others is tied to your own eternal profit without becoming inherently genocidal in your spirit, without believing that you deserve to live and other people deserve to die, that your comfort is more important than everyone else’ lives, that the satisfaction of your whims are worth their pain."

— A.R. Moxon, "An Appropriate Anger," The Reframe (Substack), October 29, 2023

People who lean into GC beliefs of course say that GC isn't bigoted

An example: In the UK, Wes Streeting, a Labour MP and the shadow Health Secretary, told The Sun on April 10, 2024 that he used to believe "trans men are men, trans women are women," but that, over the past "few years," influenced by ideas from people like JK Rowling and Labour MP Rosie Duffield, he's changed his mind. Instead he "think[s] there are lots of complexities." (Complexities, here, may be a euphemism. It's commonly used as such in anti-trans rhetoric. It means: I'm aware of many facts and I have reasons for holding my opinion, and the information may be evolving, and my opinion will evolve in humility, and therefore I cannot possibly be a bigot — but I won't tell you what facts and arguments I'm aware of because everything is just really quite complex. Meanwhile, I don't believe trans people are who they say they are.)

In May, he told the Hay Festival: "I genuinely think there is a way through this toxic conversation where trans people can live with dignity, respect and inclusion, and women can have their sex-based rights protected."

The problem is that we don't know what he means by "dignity, respect and inclusion" — if indeed he means anything at all, which he probably does not. Pink News probably would have given details, had Streeting given any. If trans people aren't being listened to or believed, and are only receiving "dignity, respect and inclusion" in the abstract according to whatever cis people would like to congratulate themselves for pretending to give us, while 'GC' anti-trans people are being listened to, believed, and handed specific policy wins that materially restrict trans people's lives, that's not balance.

Streeting said it was "wrong" and "counterproductive" for "gender-critical feminists and women who have been raising concerns about women-only spaces or erasure from NHS documents...[to be] written off as bigots and prejudiced...people sort of shut them down. Please I would like to ask him if any trans people's opinions have been written off as extremist and biased and if any trans people have been shut down.

— "Labour’s Wes Streeting says it’s ‘wrong’ to write off ‘gender-critical’ people as bigots," Amelia Hansford, May 29, 2024

lightning
Image by Oimheidi from Pixabay

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