{"id":7645,"date":"2017-09-18T12:53:21","date_gmt":"2017-09-18T20:53:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=7645"},"modified":"2017-09-18T15:28:17","modified_gmt":"2017-09-18T23:28:17","slug":"skin-cream-gun-control-and-the-punching-of-nazis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=7645","title":{"rendered":"Nazis and Skin Cream"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

I went out drinking the other night with someone who punches Nazis.<\/p>\n

Certainly, ever since Charlottesville, there’s been no shortage of people who advocate <\/em>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\u2014 generally with more passion than eloquence\u2014 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<\/em> believe that it was okay to punch Nazis.\u00a0 I haven’t seen such a torrent of unfriending since all those die-hard supporters of frakking, 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<\/a> into “rethinking<\/a>” its support<\/a> for “Free speech<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I gotta say, I found it refreshing. So many of these self-proclaimed Nazi-punchers don’t seem to have a clue.<\/p>\n

It’s not that I have anything against violence per se<\/em>. I’m no principled pacifist: I’m the guy who openly muses about shooting heads of state<\/a> and selecting random cops for assassination<\/a>. 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 Nazipunchers retweeting the most popular tweet of all time<\/a>, courtesy of Barack Obama\u2014 a quote lifted from Martin Luther King Jr:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It only got worse when a bunch of right-wing 4channers repurposed a handful of domestic-violence posters, hoaxing up a fake Antifa campaign<\/a> that took the Punch-a-Nazi meme and ran with it. Servers across the globe are still smoking from the outrage engendered by that <\/em>little prank.<\/p>\n

And yet\u2014 once you get past the fact that those images originated not from the left, but from right-wing trolls impersonating them\u2014 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 female models instead of males for illustrative purposes. And yet, people got really<\/em> pissed about it.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The main difference seems to be that the trolls have higher production values.<\/p><\/div>\n

What’s the take-home message here? That it’s only okay to punch Nazis if they’re male, or unattractive?\u00a0 (A couple weeks back I actually asked this on on 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?<\/p>\n

I guess that last reference could use some context.<\/p>\n

It relates to a 2013 study out of Yale by Dan Kahan et al<\/em><\/a>, 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 <\/em>\u00a0showed data to over a thousand people\u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Here’s the trick: it was all exactly the same data<\/em>. All Kahan et al<\/em> did was switch the labels.<\/p>\n

\"Turns<\/a>

Turns out skin cream is not a hot-button topic.<\/p><\/div>\n

What they discovered was that your ability to correctly interpret these data comes down to how statistically smart you are, regardless of political leanings\u2014 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<\/em>.\u00a0 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

\"Gun<\/a>

Gun control? Little more testy.<\/p><\/div>\n

Smart liberals are just as stupid as smart conservatives, but in the opposite direction.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 In fact,we’ll be lucky if reflexive conformity is as bad as the malfunction gets: recent machine-learning research<\/a> out of Carnegie Melon hints that we may actually be wired for genocide (hat tip to Ray Nielson for that link, by the way).<\/p>\n

\"Illo<\/a>

Illo credit: Mother Jones<\/p><\/div>\n

Tribalism Trumps Truth. ‘Twas ever thus; a smaller, pettier iteration took place not so long ago<\/a> in our own so-called community.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 And as for my friend, she’s on firm footing. She’s not only punched Nazis, she’s punched female<\/em> ones, and she\u00a0 doesn’t compromise the integrity of her position by retweeting any love-is-the-answer pablum from Obama or anyone else. She’s<\/em> cool, at least. She knows which side she’s on.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I swear to God. It makes me want to punch someone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2014 generally with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7645"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7674,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7645\/revisions\/7674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}