Blog Sep 18 2017
I went out drinking the other night with someone who punches Nazis.
Certainly, ever since Charlottesville, there’s been no shortage of people who advocate Nazi-punching. For a while there, my Facebook feed was awash with the emissions of people jizzing all over their keyboards at the prospect of punching Nazis. People who argued—generally with more passion than eloquence—that the usual rules of engagement and free speech don’t apply when dealing with Nazis, because, well, they’re Nazis. People who, in fits of righteous anger, unfriended other people who didn’t believe that it was okay to punch Nazis. I haven’t seen such a torrent of unfriending since all those die-hard supporters of fracking, omnipresent state surveillance, and extra-judicial assassination-by-drone rose up and unfriended everyone who hadn’t voted for Hillary Clinton in the last election. Even the ACLU has been bitch-slapped into “rethinking” its support for “Free speech”1.
So, no shortage of Big Talk. But this was the first person I’d hung with who actually seemed to have walked the walk. She attributes it to her Mohawk heritage; not knowing any other Mohawks, I can’t speak to that. But I’ve known the lady for most of this century, and she doesn’t take shit from anyone.
I gotta say, I found it refreshing. So many of these self-proclaimed Nazi-punchers don’t seem to have a clue.
It’s not that I have anything against violence per se. I’m no principled pacifist: I’m the guy who openly muses about shooting heads of state and selecting random cops for assassination. If anything, I’m more into the healing power of cathartic violence than most. But even I had to roll my eyes when I saw so many of those same would-be Nazi-punchers retweeting the most popular tweet of all time, courtesy of Barack Obama—a quote lifted from Martin Luther King Jr:
No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
As far as I could tell, all the likers and retweeters weren’t even doing this ironically. They actually didn’t seem to grasp the contradiction.
It only got worse when a bunch of right-wing 4channers repurposed a handful of domestic-violence posters, hoaxing up a fake Antifa campaign that took the Punch-a-Nazi meme and ran with it2. Servers across the globe are still smoking from the outrage engendered by that little prank.
And yet—once you get past the fact that those images originated not from the left, but from right-wing trolls impersonating them—the hoax does not, in fact, misrepresent the position it’s trolling. It would utterly fail as satire or parody; it doesn’t even exaggerate for effect. It pretty much just echoes what the whole Nazi-punching brigade has been going on about these past weeks, using attractive females instead of homely males to represent the Nazi Other. And yet, people got really pissed about it.
What’s the take-home message here? That it’s only okay to punch Nazis if they’re male, or unattractive? (A couple weeks back I actually asked this on one of the Facebook threads that was spluttering indignantly about the whole thing; so far, no one’s answered.) Or is the take-home, rather, that what’s said doesn’t matter so much as who’s saying it? When you get right down to it, is this just a matter of skin cream vs. gun control?
I guess that last reference could use some context.
It relates to a 2013 study out of Yale by Dan Kahan et al3, a study for which I conveniently happen to have some illustrative slides because I mentioned it in a recent talk at Concordia. Kahan et al showed data to over a thousand people—some right-wingers, some left, some statistically savvy, others functionally innumerate. Sometimes these data showed that a particular skin cream helped cure a rash; sometimes they showed the cream made the rash worse. Sometimes the data showed clearly that gun control reduced crime rate; other times, it showed the exact opposite.
Here’s the trick: it was all exactly the same data. All Kahan et al did was switch the labels.
What they discovered was that your ability to correctly interpret these data comes down to how statistically smart you are, regardless of political leanings—but only when you think you’re dealing with rashes and skin creams. If you think you’re looking at gun control data, suddenly politics matter. If you’re a numerically-smart conservative, you’ll have no trouble parsing the data so long as they show that gun control results in increased crime; but if they show that gun control reduces crime, suddenly your ability to read those numbers drops to the level of a complete innumerate. You’ll only be able to interpret the data correctly if they conform to your pre-existing biases.
Smart liberals are just as stupid as smart conservatives, but in the opposite direction. Show a numerically-savvy left-winger that gun control reduces crime, they’ll be all over it; show them the opposite and, once again, their performance drops to the point where they might as well not have any statistical smarts at all.
Note that this is not a case of people rejecting a pattern they don’t agree with. This is more subtle, and more pernicious: this is people literally not being able to perceive the pattern to begin with, if it’s too threatening to their beliefs.
Ideology compromises your ability to do basic math.
You’ve seen this story a dozen times in a dozen guises. Fitting in with the tribe has more fitness value than independent thought. Conformers leave more genes behind than independent loners, so our brains evolved in service to conformity. In fact, we’ll be lucky if reflexive conformity is as bad as the malfunction gets: recent machine-learning research out of Carnegie Mellon hints that we may actually be wired for genocide4.
Tribalism Trumps Truth. ’Twas ever thus; a smaller, pettier iteration took place not so long ago in our own so-called SF “community”.
God knows I’ve no sympathy for Nazis. I have enough trouble keeping my lunch down when I reflect upon the Tea Party. I do have doubts about the effectiveness of Nazi-punching as a coherent strategy, but I’ve never been one to rule out violence as a tool in the box. And as for my friend, she’s on firm footing. She’s not only punched Nazis, she’s punched female ones, and she doesn’t compromise the integrity of her position by retweeting any love-is-the-answer pablum from Obama or anyone else. She’s cool, at least. She knows which side she’s on.
But all those other incoherent people ranting on Facebook? I just can’t bring myself to line up with people so resistant to cognitive dissonance that they honestly don’t seem to realize they’re talking out of both sides of their mouth at the same time.
I swear to God. It makes me want to punch someone.
1 See: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/charlottesville-violence-prompts-aclu-change-policy-hate-groups-protesting-guns/, https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazis-charlottesville, https://theintercept.com/2017/08/13/the-misguided-attacks-on-aclu-for-defending-neo-nazis-free-speech-rights-in-charlottesville/, and https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/nyregion/aclu-free-speech-rights-charlottesville-skokie-rally.html?mcubz=0
2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-41036631
3 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992
4 http://nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/is-tribalism-a-natural-malfunction
