[Mark McDonnell]

Ha! My wife recently took up knitting. She googled something like 'knitting community – problems' hoping to find a forum discussing things like problems with 'casting on' and dropped stitches. Instead she got this: the 'culture wars' in a nutshell. Two very different takes on a controversy in the unlikely world of internet knitting forums. One from from left-leaning Vox website and one (including links to previous related stories) from conservative and 'libertarian' website Quillette (sorry Andrew: and yes, they do seem obsessed with this sort of thing)...

...as I am in danger of appearing. I do find this stuff gruesomely fascinating, as is probably clear. It makes me glad I'm not on social media, apart from my 40 odd FB friends. But I'm just going to leave this here, then I promise I'll get a different obsession. Maybe not knitting though!

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2...tagram-stories

https://quillette.com/2019/07/28/kni...at-yarningham/

The problem is the polarisation of how and where this stuff is reported, the tribalism, it seems to me. The second website, whose take on this I agree with, is clearly a conservative one, which really rankles with me. Because then the messenger, rather than the topic, becomes the focus, as with my argument with Andrew S about Julius Eastman. Is there nobody writing on the left who thinks that these social media witch hunts are no longer just laughable but bullying and damaging? Or are they in fact perceived as morally righteous and justified?

[John Isbell]

I like vox.com, but I think they’ve repeatedly misused the term whitewashing in their article. To quote the Cambridge Urban Dictionary: “https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/...glish/practice
The article refers instead to viewers assuming an unseen actor is white, which is quite radically different.
I didn’t read the Quillette.

Cheers,
John

[Julie Steiner]

In a world in which attention is an increasingly precious commodity, people go too far because it works.

Peaceful protestors marching in a polite and orderly fashion with all the right permits rarely get the news coverage that a couple of jerks who break windows and throw water bottles at the police do.

Likewise, mutually respectful exchanges of opinions on knitting (or poetry) sites rarely go viral.

If you measure success in terms of how many people are paying attention to your very worthy message, then holding a public auto-da-fé that will cause thousands of bystanders to fear your wrath is a more successful strategy than attempting one-by-one conversions of misguided or oblivious individuals, about whose feelings and mental health you actually care.

[Jim Moonan]

x
Large chunks of news media and social media have been blurred into one. Entertainment is valued more than information. Public opinion has been hijacked (in my private opinion) by rogue hackers and trollers more interested in attaining Warholian fame than espousing principled ideas.

I still believe that, in time, the brightest minds will rule the day. It's just going to take some time for it (the mindless muddle that pollute the cyberverse of social and news media) to be separated from the more potent effect of social/global crowd sourcing. The money will follow those who offer solutions to problems; not the ignorant self-absorbed hackers and trollers (or the deplorables. Let's not take our eye off the deplorables.)
x
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[Erik Olson]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

In a world in which attention is an increasingly precious commodity, people go too far because it works.

Peaceful protestors marching in a polite and orderly fashion with all the right permits rarely get the news coverage that a couple of jerks who break windows and throw water bottles at the police do.

Likewise, mutually respectful exchanges of opinions on knitting (or poetry) sites rarely go viral.

If you were to measure success in terms of how many people are paying attention to your very worthy message, then holding a public auto-da-fé that will cause thousands of bystanders to fear your wrath is a more successful strategy than attempting one-by-one conversions of misguided or oblivious individuals, about whose feelings and mental health you actually care.

True enough, if you measure success by attention alone, negative attention is easier gained than positive. On the other hand, if you measure it by actual persuasion of the individuals to be persuaded, the misguided and oblivious, then I reckon you will have better chances of success through one-by-one conversions. Similarly, though a couple of jerks who break windows and throw water bottles at police may indeed get more attention overall than a hundred peaceful protesters with permits, the danger is that the kind of attention gained by that violence may be counterproductive to the cause of their protest. I should know—this scenario plays out time and again in Portland. Seeing as attention can also be counterproductive, I think it should not be considered as the sole index of success.

For an extremer example, take a radical fringe in the world of animal rights activism, who, having grown unsatisfied by the level of publicity achieved by passive means, resorted instead to acts of violence to protest. In June 1990, they exploded a bomb in the car of one veterinary surgeon at a research defense establishment, and then another in that of a professor of physiology at Bristol University. Baskerville, the first-mentioned victim, escaped with her life but only after jumping through the window of her jeep as the bomb turned fireball next to her fuel tank. These acts of theirs secured headlines, more attention than ever. So were they successful by them? If attention were the sole measure of success, then they were remarkably so. But that definition would make all terrorists who claim legitimate causes of grievance successful. Nay, I think that where a cause is at stake, the measure of success should count the kind of attention that helps but discount the attention, however great, that hinders the cause.

In this case, my concern would be that a movement otherwise legitimate might by overzealousness give themselves a bad rap and arm those who would discredit them with easy ammunition. Methinks.

[John Isbell]

Just to add that misusing a term like whitewashing, if indeed that happened in this article, would be both inflammatory and ignorant. Not the best basis for dialogue.

Cheers,
John

[Mark McDonnell]

I didn’t read the Quillette.

I really urge you to hold your nose and do so, John, including the two previous reports the writer links to at the start of her article. Yes, the website has a conservative agenda, but unless they've wildly bent the truth about all this (which I doubt) then it's pretty appalling.

Julie, I take your point about extreme tactics being needed, rightly or wrongly, to gain attention for just causes. The thing is, I genuinely don't see that the people here – the gay knitwear designer who wrote the poem, the woman who blogged about her trip to India, the other woman who posted a video defending her – did anything even close to deserving of the approbation they received.

To be clear, I know all this stuff can seem petty, and pales when compared to the antics of Trump's administration and the genuine threat from actual racism. But this social justice hysteria, this auto de fe atmosphere as you put it, increasingly it seems to me, is the image that many people have of the left. If only conservative news sources call it out it will drive more people to the right. More voices in the liberal media should disown it rather than, as Vox do, laud it. In my opinion.

Mainly it raises my hackles because it just seems like simple bullying in the guise of something morally virtuous.