Sometimes the kafkatrap is presented in less direct forms. A common variant, which I’ll call the Model C, is to assert something like this: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, …}, you are guilty because you have benefited from the {sinful, racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive, …} behavior of others in the system.” The aim of the Model C is to induce the subject to self-condemnation not on the basis of anything the individual subject has actually done, but on the basis of choices by others which the subject typically had no power to affect. The subject must at all costs be prevented from noticing that it is not ultimately possible to be responsible for the behavior of other free human beings.
A close variant of the model C is the model P: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, …}, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the {sinful, racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive, …} system.” For the model P to work, the subject must be prevented from noticing that the demand to self-condemn is not based on the subject’s own actions or choices or feelings, but rather on an in-group identification ascribed by the operator of the kafkatrap.
It is essential to the operation of all three of the variants of the kafkatrap so far described that the subject’s attention be deflected away from the fact that no wrongdoing by the subject, about which the subject need feel personally guilty, has actually been specified. The kafkatrapper’s objective is to hook into chronic self-doubt in the subject and inflate it, in much the same way an emotional abuser convinces a victim that the abuse is deserved – in fact, the mechanism is identical. Thus kafkatrapping tends to work best on weak and emotionally vulnerable personalities, and poorly on personalities with a strong internalized ethos.
In addition, the success of a model P kafkatrap depends on the subject not realizing that the group ascription pinned on by the operator can be rejected. The subject must be prevented from asserting his or her individuality and individual agency; better, the subject must be convinced that asserting individuality is yet another demonstration of denial and guilt. Need it be pointed out how ironic this is, given that kafkatrappers (other than old-fashioned religious authoritarians) generally claim to be against group stereotyping?
There are, of course, other variants. Consider the model S: “Skepticism about any particular anecdotal account of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, …}, or any attempt to deny that the particular anecdote implies a systemic problem in which you are one of the guilty parties, is itself sufficient to establish your guilt.” Again, the common theme here is that questioning the discourse that condemns you, condemns you. This variant differs from the model A and model P in that a specific crime against an actual person usually is in fact alleged. The operator of the kafkatrap relies on the subject’s emotional revulsion against the crime to sweep away all questions of representativeness and the basic fact that the subject didn’t do it.
Eric S. Raymond, “Kafkatrapping”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-07-18.
October 14, 2018
QotD: Variant forms of Kafkatrapping
October 7, 2018
QotD: Hitler’s over-arching “grand strategy”
… on the internal evidence of Mein Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change has taken place in Hitler’s aims and opinions. When one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics. Probably, in Hitler’s own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when England is out of the picture — that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a different question.
Suppose that Hitler’s programme could be put into effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of “living room” (i.e. stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder. How was it that he was able to put this monstrous vision across? It is easy to say that at one stage of his career he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. They would not have backed him, however, if he had not talked a great movement into existence already. Again, the situation in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was obviously favourable for demagogues. But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches …. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs — and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.
George Orwell, “Review of Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler”, 1940.
October 4, 2018
The True Frontier – Cordwainer Smith – Extra Sci Fi
Extra Credits
Published on 2 Oct 2018The godson of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, Paul Linebarger led an exciting life of unusual achievements well before he got into writing science fiction — including setting up one of the United States’ first psychological warfare units. Under his pen name, he wrote the trend-bucking work Scanners Live in Vain.
September 27, 2018
France moves toward the Soviet system of psychological “treatment” for dissidents
You may not agree with much that prominent French nationalist politician Marine Le Pen stands for, but the recent court order that she must undergo a psychological evaluation as part of the investigation of a “hate crime” should worry everyone. Jacob Sullum writes:
Marine Le Pen speaking in Lille during the 2017 French presidential election
Photo by Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick via Wikimedia Commons
France ranked 12 notches above the United States in this year’s World Press Freedom Index, produced by Reporters Without Borders. But such ratings can be misleading, as illustrated by the prosecution of Marine Le Pen, head of the right-wing National Rally party (formerly the National Front), for posting images of ISIS atrocities on Twitter. Last week Le Pen revealed that she had been ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination as part of the investigation into her speech crime, which added another layer of Soviet-style thought control to the story.
It is inconceivable that an American politician, no matter how extreme his views, would be prosecuted for doing what Le Pen did, because a law like the one she is charged with violating would be clearly inconsistent with the First Amendment. That law, Article 227-24 of the French Criminal Code, makes it a crime, punishable by a fine of €75,000 (about $88,000) and up to three years in prison, to distribute “a message bearing a pornographic or violent character or a character seriously violating human dignity…where the message may be seen or perceived by a minor.” Le Pen allegedly ran afoul of that prohibition in 2015 by posting three pictures of men murdered by ISIS—one beheaded, one burned alive, and one run over by a tank—in response to a Twitter user who likened her party to the terrorist organization. “Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] is this!” she tweeted.
This case vividly illustrates why Article 227-24 would never pass constitutional muster in the United States. Le Pen’s tweet is indisputably political speech, sitting at the core of the expression protected by the First Amendment. The terms of Article 227-24 (especially the phrase “seriously violating human dignity”) are broad and vague, encouraging self-censorship and inviting politically motivated prosecution of people who irk the powers that be. Le Pen, who unsuccessfully ran against Emmanuel Macron in a presidential runoff last year, was stripped of her parliamentary immunity six months later, leaving her open to prosecution.
September 4, 2018
Grad school mafia
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrea Long Chu recounts her experience as a teaching assistant to Professor Avital Ronell, and the disturbing psychological world inhabited by grad students at New York University:
Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people. You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers. That sounds simple, which is why so many academics hate it. When scholars defend Avital — or “complicate the narrative,” as we like to say — in part this is because we cannot stand believing what most people believe. The need to feel smarter is deep. Intelligence is a hungry god.
In this way, Avital’s case has become a strange referendum on literary study. Generations of scholars have been suckled at the teat of interpretation: We spend our days parsing commas and decoding metaphors. We get high on finding meaning others can’t. We hoard it, like dragons. We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain: that Avital quite simply sexually harassed her student, just as described. Sometimes analysis is simply denial with more words. Sometimes, as a frustrated student in a first-year literature course always mutters, the text just means what it says it means.
My department has been largely silent since the news broke. Faculty members have said nothing to us. Upset and ashamed, my fellow graduate students and I speak with one another cautiously. We heal, or don’t, alone. People I know are afraid to make any public comment, even on Facebook, where they are friends with older, richer scholars who might one day control their fates. Even I, who have by extraordinary luck options outside of academia, fear what being vocal will bring.
A culture of critics in name only, where genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold. Graduate students know this intuitively; it is written on their bones. They’ve watched as their professors play favorites, as their colleagues get punished for citing an adviser’s rival, as funding, jobs, and prestige are doled out to the most obedient and obsequious. The American university knows only the language of extortion. “Tell,” it purrs, curling its fingers around your IV drip, “and we’ll eat you alive.”
Avital conducts herself as if someone somewhere is always persecuting her. She learned this, I imagine, in graduate school. No woman escapes the relentless misogyny of the academy. The humanities are sadistic for most people, especially when you aren’t a white man. This is understood to be normal. When students in my department asked for more advising, we were told we were being needy. “Graduate school should destroy you,” one professor laughed.
The irony is that those who survive this destruction often do so at the cost of inflicting the same trauma on their own students. Avital, now a grande dame of literary studies, who Reitman alleges bragged to him of a “mafia”-like ability to make or break the careers of others, still feels persecuted. She makes it the job of those around her to protect her from that persecution: to fawn, appease, coddle. The lawsuit against her reads as a portrait, not of a macho predator type, but of a desperately lonely person with the power to coerce others, on pain of professional and psychic obliteration, into being her friends, or worse.
September 1, 2018
August 31, 2018
QotD: Victim mentality
Does feeling like a victim make one behave more or less selfishly? Imagine that an individual feels wronged by an everyday event: An executive sees a colleague receive a promotion that she feels she deserved instead; an academic finds out that he is once more assigned to a tedious committee, whereas his colleagues seem miraculously spared; an author is about to send off a manuscript when a computer glitch erases weeks’ worth of work, and she is penalized for missing her deadline.
As these individuals contemplate their unfortunate lot, how motivated would they be to help others? One could imagine that individuals who have received the short end of the stick would be especially motivated to help others, to redress other wrongs, or to make themselves feel better with the warm glow that comes from doing good. In this article, we make the opposite prediction: We propose instead that feeling wronged gives people a sense of entitlement to obtain positive outcomes — and to avoid negative ones — that frees them from the usual requirements of social life. Whereas individuals typically contend with a strong norm of benevolence that encourages helping and curbs egoism, we propose that wronged individuals, because of their heightened sense of entitlement, feel relieved from this communal obligation and therefore exhibit more selfish intentions and behavior.
[…]
Our research has shown that people who have just been wronged or reminded of a time when they were wronged feel entitled to positive outcomes, leading them to behave selfishly. They no longer feel obligated to suffer for others and therefore pass up opportunities to be helpful. By contributing to our general understanding of the determinants of selfishness, this research points toward one possible impediment to people’s engagement in charitable behavior. Future research in this vein thus has the potential to identify novel methods to encourage altruism in people who feel wronged, thereby stemming the cycle of suffering-to-selfishness suggested by our research.
Emily M. Zitek, et. al., “Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010-02.
August 28, 2018
The darker side of those cute, playful dolphins
David Warren considers the parallels between certain dolphin behaviour and its human equivalent:
Spinner dolphins
Photo by Philippe Bourjon via Wikimedia Commons.
I am, let me confess, no expert on dolphins, nor on any other member of the cetacean paraphyly. Nor, for that matter, on anything at all, in my current recollection. I do however know that dolphins can swim very fast, can leap high out of the water, can be as long as thirty feet, and that even small dolphins, no longer than a man, are very strong. I would not mess with one in the water. Before assuming that their behaviour, in the state of nature, is entirely benign, one should ask some fish. Even a porpoise could tell you: they have their dark side. Especially a porpoise: for dolphins have been known to murder hundreds of them, for no stated reason. They can take a dislike to each other, too; and for reasons that we may darkly surmise, act upon what we take for their emotions.
Example: when they throw each other’s children in the air, they are not being playful.
On at least one occasion I have had to explain to an environmentalist that the sob-story he was telling, about dolphins found dead or dying on a Virginia beach, had nought to do with capitalist perfidy. On forensic examination, all the beached dolphins were found to have suffered severe blunt-force trauma — administered by other dolphins.
They have also been known to dislike humans, for instance pulling them under the water until they stop making bubbles. Brooding, “loner” dolphins are particularly noted for the sort of behaviour that we might be inclined to characterize as evil.
Smiley-face, bottlenose dolphins, of the Tursiops genus, are among those sexually dimorphic, which is to say, the males are decidedly bigger than the females. They are very smart, in both sexes, but not nearly as sentimental as our New Age propagandists have advertised. I cannot imagine a feminist being pleased with their courting rituals, which closely resemble entrapment and rape. I take an unsentimental view of the dolphins myself, though I am prepared to admire their skills. I cannot believe male dolphins are gentlemen.
A story forwarded to me this morning from the London Telegraph tells a commonplace tale. A bottlenose dolphin has been terrorizing swimmers off a beach in Brittany. A loner male, with a marked preference for human females, has alas “progressed” from being a source of entertainment. The theory is that he is sexually frustrated. This strikes me as possible, but possibly narrow. I have read several stories before — from different continents — in which just such a loner male dolphin graduates from public entertainer, to public nuisance, to public danger, around a specific beach. In every case it seems the dolphin is believed to be sexually “aroused.” I would not be surprised to learn that the same symptoms accompany psychopathic behaviour in dolphins, as they often (if not always) do in rogue loner humans.
August 24, 2018
QotD: Kafkatrapping
One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap. In this essay, I will show that the kafkatrap is a form of argument that is so fallacious and manipulative that those subjected to it are entitled to reject it based entirely on the form of the argument, without reference to whatever particular sin or thoughtcrime is being alleged. I will also attempt to show that kafkatrapping is so self-destructive to the causes that employ it that change activists should root it out of their own speech and thoughts.
My reference, of course, is to Franz Kafka’s The Trial, in which the protagonist Josef K. is accused of crimes the nature of which are never actually specified, and enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all. The only way out of the trap is for him to acquiesce in his own destruction; indeed, forcing him to that point of acquiescence and the collapse of his will to live as a free human being seems to be the only point of the process, if it has one at all.
This is almost exactly the way the kafkatrap operates in religious and political argument. Real crimes – actual transgressions against flesh-and-blood individuals – are generally not specified. The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator’s personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others.
Eric S. Raymond, “Kafkatrapping”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-07-18.
August 10, 2018
“The banality of evil”
Anthony Daniels in the most recent issue of Quadrant:
“The banality of evil” is a phrase that suddenly entered the English language, probably for ever, in 1963, on the publication of Hannah Arendt’s book about Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
It hardly matters that Hannah Arendt, after much arduous study and conscientious effort, got Eichmann entirely wrong, and had the wool pulled comprehensively over her eyes by the man she thought an utter mediocrity. Surely scum like him were no match for a much-garlanded political philosopher? But far from having been a faceless bureaucrat as she portrayed him, or mere pen-pusher who somehow, as if by accident, wandered into the organisation of genocide, Eichmann was an ardent and committed Nazi, an idealist of evil so to speak, who knew exactly what he was doing and regretted only that he had been unable to do more and finish the job. Bettina Stangneth’s book Eichmann Before Jerusalem should have put paid once and for all to the notion of Eichmann as a kind of sleep-walking little man, the post office clerk of extermination. But image often triumphs over reality, and in any case, the banality of evil could well survive as a concept, even if it had been grotesquely misapplied on its first outing.Recently, I seem to be surrounded by the banality of evil: in books, I mean, not in real life (assuming that books are not part of real life, that is). For example, I just picked up a book by the well-known French forensic psychiatrist Daniel Zagury, titled La Barbarie des hommes ordinaires: Ces criminels qui pourraient être nous (The Barbarity of Ordinary Men: These Criminals Who Could Be Us). The very title, of course, makes reference to Arendt’s famous phase, and I had not gone many pages into it when her name cropped up: because Zagury is writing about men (mainly men in contrast to women) who commit appalling violent crimes without being obviously mad, he makes reference to Arendt and her banality of evil. The banality lies in the absence of all thought or reflection, of foresight or imagination. The most atrocious acts occasion no more mental trouble than, say, that entailed in the making of a sandwich.
Before I took up Zagury, I had just read Behind the Shock Machine, a book by the Australian psychologist and writer Gina Perry, about the famous, or infamous, experiments carried out by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s at Yale on man’s obedience to authority. These experiments, as written up by Milgram in his book Obedience to Authority, have more or less entered common consciousness, at least that of intellectuals, as proving that there is in most of us an inner Eichmann, if not quite struggling to get out, at least prepared to obey the most frightful orders if authority gives them.
Milgram published his book in 1974, which was twelve years after the conclusion of his experiments and eleven years after the publication of Arendt’s book. He was, I surmise, much influenced by Arendt’s masterfully summarising — or one might say misleading — phrase, for the truth behind which he retrospectively tried to supply some psychological evidence. Gina Perry, by examining the records of his experiments in detail, found that Milgram had misrepresented his results, exaggerating his subjects’ willingness to comply with orders in his eagerness to show man’s tendency to obey, a tendency which demonstrates that the Holocaust could happen again — by implication anywhere.
July 30, 2018
QotD: Buying books but not reading them
Nick Carraway slinks away from Jay Gatsby’s party. In the library he comes across a drunken, bespectacled fat cat who starts going off about the books lining the walls. “They’re real,” he slurs, pointing to them. “What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too — didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?” Uncut pages! If you know how books used to be manufactured, this means one thing and one thing only: Gatsby wasn’t much of a reader. After all, until they’re cut, book pages can’t be turned.
Collecting books and not reading them is, shall we say, textbook behavior. At least for some of you, and you know who you are. Suffering from the condition of racking up book purchases of $100, $200 or $1,000 without ever bending a spine? There’s a Japanese word for you.
Prognosis: terminal. Stats reveal that e-reading doesn’t hold a candle to the joy of reading a physical book. Although e-book sales jumped 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, 2.71 billion physical books were sold in the U.S. alone in 2015, according to Statista. That’s compared with the 1.32 billion movie tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada. As if every American were reading an average of more than eight books annually.
Certainly, it’s unlikely you’re going to hear the word tsundoku on the subway. But in a language where there are words for canceling an appointment at the last minute and the culture-specific condition of adult male shut-in syndrome, how can you be surprised? Other, similar words like tsūdoku (read through) and jukudoku (reading deeply) are in praise of sitting down with a book (doku means “to read”). But we think tsundoku is particularly special: Oku means to do something and leave it for a while, says Sahoko Ichikawa, a senior lecturer at Cornell University, and tsunde means to stack things.
Libby Coleman, “There’s a Word for Buying Books and Not Reading Them”, OZY, 2016-10-03.
July 12, 2018
Sometimes, the worst reporter is an eyewitness
In criminal cases — especially those dramatized for movies and TV — the strongest evidence against an accused is often an eyewitness to the crime. But as Dave Freer points out, what the person-on-the-spot saw isn’t always congruent with what objectively happened, especially when filtered through news reporting:
Back in the dark ages – 1980’s in South Africa the BBC Radio News reported on a labor dispute/picket protest led by the ANC aligned organizers in a fishing town up the West Coast of the Cape. The picket line had been savagely broken up by the police with dogs (the BBC reporter of the time was a passionate promoter of the anti-apartheid cause, and as his media was not within the country could report whatever he liked without any form of censorship.) The local Afrikaans press reported on the incident too. There wasn’t a lot to report on from one horse towns on the West Coast, and the Cape Town Riot squad dispersing a protest with dogs was news, if not big news. The one set of media carried it from their point of view as a bad thing, and the other as a good thing.
Now, as it happens I was – quite inadvertently – there, along with my pregnant wife. I wasn’t protesting, or with the police. I was just at the tail end of a long sampling trip, collecting shark vertebrae and gut contents –as well as measurements of said sharks – at various fish processing plants up the west coast. I was a very broke research scientist, and paying dog-sitters or putting our two hounds (a sloppy bull-terrier x keeshond cross and a dim-witted but loveable Old English Sheepdog) in kennels was just an expense that couldn’t be met. So they traveled with us, sleeping in the back of the truck. They loved the trips. My wife used to record for me – as it was a bloody, slimy, smelly dirty job, making writing difficult while you were doing it. Now, typically – as we were taking nothing of value, fish processors were quite obliging about us sampling the catch – as long as we didn’t get in the way. In this particular fishing town, that meant starting really early on the previous night’s landings, before work started. The track to the shark plant was a narrow alley next to and around the corner from the main only large employer in the town – they dealt with pilchards and anchovies.
We got there in the dark and had worked hard for several hours, and, tired, smelly, bloody and laden with sample buckets of vertebrae sections, (for age and grown studies) were glad to be heading for a coffee and giving the dogs a run before heading home. The dogs of course knew the pattern and were hyper with ‘walk-delight’, as always.
So: Barbara driving we headed around the corner and into the midst of a whole bunch of people. My dogs – confined to the back canopy — were barking. They were already excited for their walk and liked to tell the world… My wife, being herself, hooted and drove slowly towards the protestors –all we wanted was out of there… And, to be honest, we couldn’t actually turn around – and the sea was behind us.
Now, whether the protestors got freaked the idea that cops were somehow behind them, or just the noise of the two dogs was enough – people scattered in all directions running and screaming. We drove out, past the couple of local cops, having no idea what the hell we’d done, and wondering if we were in trouble.
A friend later told me the Cape Town Riot squad (we were about 2 hours away from the city) showed up about an hour and half after this, and were somewhat peeved at being called out for nothing.
The news media reported the event from their point of view. The essential facts were in a way true. A protest had been broken up by dogs. The riot squad had come up from Cape Town. The rest was the story that they wanted to tell their audience. They, or their sources, may have actually believed their version of events. Who knows? But I gave up on believing their reportage was overly accurate after that.
July 7, 2018
The Incel Rebellion will (almost certainly) be streamed
Fraser Myers looks at the incel ?movement? (not quite sure if that’s the right word to encapsulate that group of people, honestly) and explains some of the more commonly used terms by and about incels:
Incels are ‘involuntary celibates’ – men frustrated with their inability to find a sexual partner. Estimates on the size of the incel community vary from thousands to hundreds of thousands. The forum ‘r/incels’ on Reddit had 41,000 members when it was banned in November 2017 for violating the site’s rules on violent content.
Incel forums, like the website incel.me and the message board /r9k/ on 4chan, are awash with anonymous declarations of self-pity, self-loathing and, at times, a violent misogyny directed at the women deemed responsible for their loneliness. Behind a great deal of mindless chatter and ‘shitposting’ is a shared understanding of how they came to be despised by the opposite sex, alongside a bewildering array of slang terms to describe and explain the various states of ‘inceldom’.
According to the incels, there is a ruthless sexual hierarchy, and as ‘beta males’, they find themselves at the bottom. The foil to the incel is a ‘Chad’ – a confident, attractive man with multiple sexual partners, comprising usually attractive but supposedly shallow women, known as ‘Stacys’. Chads are envied and despised in equal measure. Then there are the ‘normies’ (normal people), hated for their herd-like mentality and mocked for their ignorance of incel culture. ‘Blackpilling’ refers to the acceptance that the traits you are born with mean you are destined to be romantically unsuccessful. The term is a play on the moral dilemma presented by the 1999 film, The Matrix, in which Neo is offered a blue pill to remain in a world of illusion and a red pill to see the world as it truly is – ‘redpilling’ is a central trope in online men’s rights’ activism, while blackpilling is the incel equivalent. Physical traits such as height, facial features or penis size (sometimes posted with accompanying pictures), are said to play a big role in the incels’ low status, while a large number of them also blame self-diagnosed mental-health problems, particularly autism-spectrum disorders.
But while many incels are open about their flaws, ultimately the blame is laid on the women who overlook them. Women are seen as effectively slaves to their biology, guided by so-called ‘hypergamy’: an attraction to higher-status men linked to evolutionary psychology. Some parts of the so-called manosphere – a loose constellation of male-dominated online subcultures, including men’s rights activists and pick-up artists – believe that evolutionary psychology can be used to a man’s advantage, that certain techniques can be deployed to overcome a lack of attractiveness and confidence to manipulate women into bed or into a relationship. Incels reject even this bleak view and insist that beta males accept their place in the social-pecking order.
This belief in a rigid social hierarchy inevitably produces problems when it comes to race. ‘Ricecels’ (incels of Chinese and South East Asian origin) and ‘currycels’ (of South Asian descent) are often found posting photos of ‘proof’ of a theory called ‘JBW’, that in order for them to be successful with women they should ‘just be white’. Some white incels look upon black men with envy for their perceived sexual success, while a minority rail against any kind of ‘race mixing’ – even as a form of escape from inceldom.
In addition, incels speak of an ‘80:20 rule’ when it comes to sexual competition: the most attractive 20 per cent of men are said to be sought after by the most attractive 80 per cent of women, with the least attractive 80 per cent of men left to compete for the remaining 20 per cent of women. In previous eras, this situation would have supposedly been prevented by institutionalised monogamy. Some incels call explicitly for a return to a patriarchal society. Today’s world of relative sexual freedom, contraception, no-fault divorce and dating apps, on the other hand, is blamed for offering an abundance of opportunities for Chads and women, at the expense of incels.
July 4, 2018
Open office plans do not increase personal interaction among workers
From the abstract of a recent study:
Example of an open plan office
Photo by VeronicaTherese via Wikimedia Commons.
Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into ‘open’, transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes. In two intervention-based field studies of corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office spaces, we empirically examined — using digital data from advanced wearable devices and from electronic communication servers — the effect of open office architectures on employees’ face-to-face, email and instant messaging (IM) interaction patterns. Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM. This is the first study to empirically measure both face-to-face and electronic interaction before and after the adoption of open office architecture. The results inform our understanding of the impact on human behaviour of workspaces that trend towards fewer spatial boundaries.
This certainly matches my own experiences working at companies that changed their offices to more open or fully open spaces. The accountants may have loved the new spaces as being less expensive, but one of the key advantages claimed for open designs does not appear to be true.
H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.
