House of Eratosthenes

Hunters and gatherers were at far less risk for infectious disease because they didn’t encounter very many new people very often. Their exposure was low, and contact among such bands was sporadic enough that diseases couldn’t spread very fast.

It wasn’t until you crowded thousands, or tens of thousands of them, along with their animals, into small dense areas with poor sanitation that disease outbreaks took off. Instead of meeting dozens of new people per year, an urban dweller probably encountered hundreds per day…Likewise, in recent years we’ve gone from an era when ideas spread comparatively slowly, to one in which social media in particular allow them to spread like wildfire. Sometimes that’s good, when they’re good ideas. But most ideas are probably bad; certainly 90% of ideas aren’t in the top 10%. Maybe we don’t know the mental disease vectors that we’re inadvertently unleashing.

It took three things to help control the spread of disease in cities: sanitation, acclimation and better nutrition…Maybe there are some lessons for us here…
:
Where we can do something right away is with the equivalent of nutrition. Traditional training in critical thinking — the sort of thing the humanities used to revolve around, before they became focused on “social justice” — seems like it would be a useful protective. A skepticism regarding groupthink, ad hominem arguments and virtue signaling would likely offer considerable protection… [emphasis mine]

Helen Andrews tells of her personal experience…

No grand lesson presented itself…I couldn’t tell myself it had happened because I was a woman. Had the genders been reversed, I probably would have received less sympathy than I did…I could not even blame the prospective employers who demonstrated a marked reluctance to bring me in for interviews. If I had to choose between a candidate whom no one had ever called a sociopath on national television, and one who probably wasn’t a psycho but might be, I would play it safe, too, even if the probability was only a fraction of a percent.
:
The solution, then, is not to try to make shame storms well targeted, but to make it so they happen as infrequently as possible. Editors should refuse to run stories that have no value except humiliation, and readers should refuse to click on them. It is, after all, the moral equivalent of contributing your rock to a public stoning. We should all develop a robust sense of what is and is not any of our business. Shame can be useful — and even necessary — but it is toxic unless a relationship exists between two people first. A Twitter mob is no more a basis for salutary shaming than an actual mob is for reasoned discussion. [emphasis mine]

Via Reynolds’ famous site Instapundit, where the comments are interesting…

Seems the only people susceptible to online shame cycles are those who put themselves out on the internet as some sort of celebrity, authority, or pundit.

Chances are they all, each and every one, deserve what they get.

No, look at Julian from Columbia, he’s being shamed out of future employment for saying white people have done good things.

I wonder at times if the whole shaming business isn’t a wild pendulum swing at the fact we have not had a shame culture for years. A whole lot of people who should be embarrassed being seen in public live their lives like nothing happened….see Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, Anthony Weiner, et al.

I”m reminded of Clint Eastwood’s line in Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” But this is not frontier justice borne of a necessary roughness and isolated desert-town living. More like a maelstrom of Reynolds’ “groupthink, ad hominem arguments and virtue signaling” borne of snowflake tenderness and world-in-an-instant inner-connectivity.

I’m inclined to think it will get worse before it gets better. The solution is to make it so these things happen as infrequently as possible, right? That would necessarily translate to, not saying or writing anything that could be taken the wrong way — by anybody, anywhere, within any overly-sensitive local culture, anywhere on the globe. Mundane wins and remarkable loses.

When the pendulum of sense and sensibility swings, it makes the least sense at the end-points of its trajectory, where it’s slowing to a stop and reversing course, furthest away from the center.

The only thing that will make it (temporarily, always temporarily) stop is: Guaranteed massive retaliation in kind.

The combatants in WW2 didn’t use chemical weapons because they were banned — Commies and Nazis both laugh at international law. Nor were they unused because Hitler, Stalin, and Tojo were such sterling gentlemen. Only the sure knowledge that the other side would respond in kind kept the mustard gas on the shelf.

The same applies here. If the Right did to the Media what the Media does to the Right, civility would return tomorrow. If it were Anderson Cooper getting hounded out of a restaurant, not Sarah Sanders; or if Rachel Maddow’s home were getting invaded instead of Tucker Carlson’s, none of this would be a problem.
- Severian | 12/14/2018 @ 10:19

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Social Media Shame StormingFriday, December 14th, 2018

Social Media Shame Storming
Friday, December 14th, 2018