Smart thoughts from Dahlia Lithwick, at Slate :
… Last month, after I wrote about misogyny and Donald Trump, I got a note from a progressive friend asking why I would possibly drive any more media attention toward a nonserious noncandidate who was simply feeding off all the news stories about his shocking behavior. A good point. And around that time, I suddenly had notes from several readers wondering why the media was elevating Kim Davis to a weeklong front-page story and why I was posting about her on Facebook. Her legal claims were unserious, and the sheep in the press were giving her precisely what she wanted: unending, slavish attention to a single holdout dissenter. Ignore her and she’ll go away, I was advised. We didn’t elevate every racist principal to a front-page media phenomenon post–Brown v. Board of Education…
My objection was that if we—as consumers and producers and purveyors of news—decide that we will simply ignore the existence and arguments of every pundit, candidate, or religious dissenter to whom we object, it doesn’t in fact make them go away. It simply takes us out of the conversation. If I made it a policy to never post on Facebook or write articles about hugely popular public figures or movements simply because I don’t want to make them look more serious, or make their crazy worldview look legitimate, I would be elevating what we call “epistemic closure” to DEFCON 4.
To be sure, it’s not even fair to compare Coulter, Davis, and Trump. The first can rather easily be dismissed, and her racist followers are probably not going to change their minds. The second is a proxy for an important constitutional debate, and the latter is a front-runner for the GOP nomination. But the larger principle threading through all of this “ignore them” admonishment really worries me: that in a moment when capturing the news cycle is enough to make you a prominent national figure, the corrective is to shut off the news cycle, rather than engage in the debate. This is precisely why we have a liberal media and a conservative media that cannot agree on even demonstrable facts….
Don’t misunderstand me: The high ground is an attractive place to want to live, and if I never have to think about the Coulters of the world again, I will not be impoverished in any way. But the aggregate effect of persisting in thinking that we are too sophisticated and intelligent to even acknowledge arguments and characters on the other side is always going to be even more isolation and vilification. And I can’t bring myself to believe that this will yield anything positive in the long run.
Look: The media is absurd. It’s driven by extreme personalities and momentary outrage. The impulse to starve those personalities of their media oxygen is not wrongheaded. But those personalities and outrages are very real to half of this nation, and we need to engage and debate, even when they say hateful things, and not shame one another for feeding the trolls. So I am going to go ahead and write about people who may not seem real or serious or important. Because they speak to other people who are real and serious and important, and ignoring our way to a better discourse does not seem to be a recipe for meaningful political engagement; it’s its own form of solipsism, and we have quite enough of that already.
mtiffany
What conversation is she talking about? Coulter and Trump are bomb-throwers and race-baiters with books to sell and egos and public profiles to puff up and Kim Davis is the equivalent of an adult-sized toddler having a tantrum in a restaurant.
When the ‘news cycle’ is broken, yes, the absolutely correct thing to do is to shut it off.
srv
Well, you never talk about Hillary’s scandals, the crashing economy or trade, so what else is there to talk about?
AxelFoley
Bingo.
greennotGreen
What “important constitutional debate”? Whether it’s okay to use religion as an excuse not to do your job? We’ve already had the debate and determined that employers must make a reasonable accommodation for an employee’s religious beliefs which doesn’t involve not doing the job they’re being paid for.
Amir Khalid
@srv:
Anne Laurie also never talks abut what an awesome, yoooge and classy president Donald Trump is going to be. She’s so biased!
Omnes Omnibus
@Amir Khalid: Interesting. In a thread about trolls and the advisability of responding to them, you chose to respond to the nihilist troll.
eemom
What a masterpiece of oversimplified, self-aggrandizing bullshit.
Sure Dahlia — every single morsel of right wing lunacy out there is totally created equal in terms of its impact on political reality, and therefore every single idiot meme the emmessemm click guzzling machine cranks out needs to be studiously debunked. Because, you know, people who are actually concerned about elections and their consequences have no better use for their time.
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom: She didn’t actually say that.
Mike J
We’re supposed to respoind to every conspiracy theory they dream up? OK.
You will never know how disappointed I’ve been with Obama’s lack of FEMA camps. I was going to set up a sailing contest with the snooty FEMA camp on the other side of the lake, take them down a notch, show our underdog FEMA campers they’re as good as anyone, and maybe finally win the heart of that attractive counselor before the summer was over. Thanks Obama.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike J: No, but completely ignoring their bullshit doesn’t work either. Kerry’s understandably disdainful response to the Swift Boat assholes is an example. One has to counter- how one counters is what is significant.
Amir Khalid
@Omnes Omnibus:
I was merely following Dahlia Lithwick’s advice that one shouldn’t refuse to engage with them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Amir Khalid: I don’t think that she was suggesting that one engage with every idiocy that pops up.
piratedan
@Omnes Omnibus: agreed, to cede the field and allow them to set the narrative and the framing sure as hell doesn’t do us any favors. I understand the need to refrain from playing whackamole on each and every GOP faux pas, but for chrissakes, Davis was invited to spread her idiocy on Good Morning America, Coulter gets face time whenever she wants is on Sunday morning or CNN and Faux. Trump dominates the news cycles as if he was a missing aircraft on CNN. You have to fight the battles as they are there which has always been one of my pet peeves with the MSM, the power wielded by those who get to decide what is newsworthy and the cycles that they consume instead of talking about what is really in need of discussion and debate.
Amir Khalid
@Omnes Omnibus:
I only engaged with one little idiocy, and then I was done.
Omnes Omnibus
@piratedan: The liberal media reputation stems from Watergate – an aberration. The MSM is owned by and responds to the establishment. And the establishment is interested in making money and not being disturbed.
Major Major Major Major
Me explaing a Koan (what do you do if you meet
The Buddha?)
http://imgur.com/qcbaYz3
There’s a reason i am not a monk
Omnes Omnibus
@Major Major Major Major: I have no idea what that means….
Jewish Steel
@Amir Khalid: …and I can quit any time I want.
Major Major Major Major
@Omnes Omnibus: read the edit for the prompt
Omnes Omnibus
@Major Major Major Major:Doesn’t take me anywhere new.
kdaug
@Omnes Omnibus: Counter by feeding?
Major Major Major Major
@Omnes Omnibus: I congratulate you on being unmoved by something from Koans 102. Should you want more advanced koans, you know who to call :)
Omnes Omnibus
@kdaug: DL does suggest engaging. I think one needs to determine the difference between a person who disagrees and engages and a true troll.
Omnes Omnibus
@Major Major Major Major: I hope it makes you happy.
notorious JRT
Behold: SufferPup
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/23/explorers-save-abandoned-puppy/
cokane
I think that essay is just an excuse for laziness. Yes, she can write hot takes about the latest outrage du jour, or you know, she could go out and do some real reporting on issues. I know she does do some of that, however, here she is just defending writing unnecessary dreck about quickly forgotten horseshit news stories.
mclaren
The essential choice boils down to democracy or epistemic closure.
Do we want to take the foolishly ignorant path of Cleek? Or do we want to expose ourselves to ideas that we might not like, and find ourselves forced to debate people we find unpleasant?
We have seen where Cleek’s approach leads — the GOP has sealed itself off in a hermetically closed bubble, impervious to outside information. Any facts not approved by the GOP Fox News/talk radio diktats get rejected as “trolling,” and as a result the GOP audience winds up colossally misinformed. Global warming? Trolls. No WMDs in Iraq? Trolls. 9/11 happened under Bush as a result of his negligence? Trolls. No skyrocketing inflation as a result of the TARP bailout of the economy? Trolls.
The result is clear in the Republican presidential candidates. This is a set of intellectual lepers and goose-stepping ignorami unexampled since the fall of the Ottoman empire. Republican presidential candidates haven’t got a clue about the real world because they are products a completely sealed intellectual environment in which unwanted facts are not permitted to intrude.
Cleek’s pie filter offers us the same kind of isolation from reality, and it’s fatal.
If Democrats wind up retreating from observed reality the same way Republicans have done, it’s all over — neither side will be able to engage the real world. Democrats will drift away into a lala-land in which GMOs cause cancer and nuclear power creates death clouds from accidents like Fukushima that kills millions of people. Meanwhile, all the available evidence showed that zero people died from radiation after Fukushima, but thousands of people were killed by panic about nonexistent radiation dangers.
Source: “When Radiation Isn’t the Real Risk,” The New York Times, 21 September 2015.
Source: “Why People Oppose GMOs Even Though Science Says They Are Safe,” Scientific American, 18 August 2015.
Sealing ourselves off from reality (as Cleek has done) is a recipe for craziness and extremism. Look at the Republican party, see how it’s turned into a crackpot cult sequestered from the real world, and you can see the future of the Democratic party if we refuse to engage with even unpleasant people and ideas in the real world.
Kim Davis matters because she had a real impact on people’s lives. She refused to obey the law. She prevented people from getting married. That’s a serious impact in the real world.
Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck don’t matter because they had no discernible impact on real events in the real world. They merely stoked hatred and hurled vacuous insults.
Trump is proposing to do crazy things in the real world, like mass-deporting Mexicans. That’s a real policy in the real world, and it’s dangerous as hell. Ann Coulter calling Democrats “traitors” isn’t a policy, it’s just empty name-calling.
I also agree with Nate Silver. Ideologues are only funny until they get into power. People considered Stalin a buffoon and Mussolini a joke — until they took power.
Democrats right now are the reality-based party. Giving up this advantage to hide behind Cleek’s foolish pie filter is a fatal mistake.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: You make up weird shit about people who disagree with you on any specific issue. You seal yourself off as avidly as anyone else.
ETA: If you respond to this comment, you will make baseless and defamatory accusations. It is what you do.
Amir Khalid
@mclaren:
The pie filter, while it can be foolishly used, isn’t foolish in itself. I don’t use it myself; I come to Balloon Juice as much for the foolishness (and foolery) to be had here as for the wisdom. But if another commenter’s persistent idiocy were such as to constantly try one’s patience, there is a case for pieing them.
That said, Cleek’s Pie Filter is a tool to be used sparingly. If you pie so many people that you can’t follow threads here anymore, you’re overdoing it.
Waspuppet
All the smart sensible liberals told me in 1993 to ignore Rush Limbaugh and he would dry up and disappear because he was just so self-evidently ridiculous. Rebutting him, they told me, would just give him the attention he wanted.
Obviously they were totally right, because you never hear of him anymore. I shudder to think what would’ve happened if we have him that attention – why, the GOP might’ve taken Congress in 1994, instituting two generations of aggressively stupid Republicans. And who knows? Maybe an entire TV network would’ve sprung up in his wake, inspired by his success, to spew fact-free bullshit into the air in support if a group of Republicans who would take the country into two ruinous wars, explode the deficit and then try to burn the country down rather than let a black Democrat try to fix it.
Man, I’m so glad nobody listened to me.
Amir Khalid
@cokane:
That doesn’t seem to me a fair criticism of Lithwick, who has covered the US Supreme Court for years at Slate and done an outstanding job.
Splitting Image
The problem with calling Kim Davis a “proxy for an important constitutional debate” is that a debate has two sides, and the TV bobbleheads have pointedly ignored the other side of this one: the many devout Christians in Davis’ position who have done their jobs, however begrudgingly. To hear the bobbleheads tell it, Davis is a flawed Everyman stuck in the middle of an argument between her religious principles and the pointy-headed liberal elites who thrust her into a no-win situation.
I don’t have the faintest idea how many people out there chose to issue licenses anyway because marriage equality is the new rule, even if they personally didn’t vote for it. There must be plenty, because Alabama county offices certainly aren’t stocked with hard-core liberals. I will probably never find out, because none of the bobbleheads are even vaguely interested in showing that side of the “debate”. The Narrative must be served, above all.
I agree with Lithwick that Coulter is worth ignoring at this point, while Trump does need to be covered. However, I think you could make a very good argument that the biggest reason Trump has taken up so much media space is precisely the fact that the bobbleheads want to ignore the worst elements of the other candidates. Bush, Walker, Huckabee, Graham, Jindal, Fiorina, and Carson have all said and done enough horrible things since the campaign began to completely disqualify them from the Presidency. “My brother kept us safe”, for example. “Darwin was being led on by Satan”, for another. “Iran was behind 9/11”, for a third. If they gave Huckabee as much attention as they’ve been giving Trump, they might have to admit that he is even crazier than the Donald.
cokane
@Amir Khalid: Wasn’t a criticism of Lithwick but her argument. You clearly failed to read my whole post.
Amir Khalid
@cokane:
What is this, if not a personal criticism of Lithwick?
magurakurin
@mclaren: If you honestly believe everything is just A-okay around the three leaking reactors in Fukushima then you should buy up property. You’d pick up stuff real cheap right now. I’ll help you with the Japanese if you need. I’m guessing you aren’t actually itching to live within sight of those crumbling hulks.
Nuclear power is a dead man walking anyway. In a hundred years people will marvel at the stupidity of those in the past who wasted so much research talent, energy and funds on a bad idea. It isn’t so much that nuclear power needs to end, it will eventually because it just isn’t economically practical or environmentally sound(just the waste issues alone doom it). The question is why do we insist on throwing more good money after bad down the nuclear rathole. Better to sink the money and brain power into solar, wind, and more and more efficient and flexible grid systems. But we will some day. It’s just that most of us alive today probably won’t see it. But it will happen.
*and I know I’m responding to Mclaren, but Fukushima is a wee bit too close to my bedroom…
Starfish
@Splitting Image: What you are talking about is where the media has failed. Davis is not the only one who is refusing to issue marriage licenses. Numerous counties quit issuing marriage licenses. She may be one of the only ones attempting to hand out marriage licenses to people who fit her definition of who should be married.
Here is an organization that covers issues related to gay equality. And look “14 Alabama Counties Losing Thousands in Revenue Over Denial of Marriage Licenses.”
BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: I’m viewing this site using MS Edge. In the past, I’ve used Chrome and mclaren usually expounds on the wonders of pie.
cokane
@Amir Khalid: idiot
Amir Khalid
@cokane:
Bless your heart. I have the utmost respect for your opinions.
Zinsky
Great post, Anne! You are correct. We ignore these vile people at our own peril. One of my favorite quotes is, “All that it takes for evil to triumph, is for good men (or women), to do nothing”. Peace.
Schlemazel
Here’s how to troll. DEFCON 5 is absolutely the lowest level threat DEFCON 1 is the highest level of threat so when he says going to DEFCON level he is saying “not much of a big deal”
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Meh.
Hard and fast rules about when and when not to respond to trolling don’t seem to work.
Driftglass (and many others) gets upset that David Brooks has a column in the NY Times. But so does Charles Blow. There’s more to having an effect on the political conversation in the country than having a soap box at a particular corner. Brooks has people amplifying what he says (even if it’s in a negative way), while Blow doesn’t.
What seems to me to be harmful is not that there are trolls out there who spout nonsense, it’s that the thoughtful other side can’t get more than a sentence or two to counter their nonsense. (TV is the obvious example of this problem.) When I feel (as I sometimes do) that I must respond to a troll, I try to respond only once or twice and be done with it. Then try to talk about something else. Continuing to engage with them when they don’t want to address the issues in a way that brings understanding is a pointless task. It drives away persuadable people too.
But if this were an easily solvable problem, there wouldn’t be trolls any more… :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
SFAW
@Amir Khalid:
You must live in the southern part of Malaysia.
Tom
@srv: Speaking of ‘feeding the trolls’….
BruceFromOhio
Oh, Dahlia. To engage and debate requires something of a common ground or common purpose between parties, and at minimum a shared sense of what is, in fact, true. You can set belief, religion, politics, demographics completely aside and engage and debate almost anything *IF* two people can agree on a set of basic, irrefutable facts. When one party insists on tire rims and anthrax for dinner, you are done.
That’s from six years ago, and it hasn’t improved. At all.
Tom
@Omnes Omnibus: “Swift Boating” is an excellent example. What would have been the appropriate response from the Kerry campaign?
The problem, as I see it, is illustrated by the saying, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This is even more true with 24-hour news and short public memory spans.
Marc
We live in a nation where a majority of governors, senators and representatives are republicans, along with a large majority of members of the state legislatures. They’re not a powerless fringe; declaring republicans as a group as not worth engaging with really is sticking your head in the sand. And this starts with not bothering to understand why there are so many elected republicans. A lot of the folks on lefty blogs seem to think that it’s just because they’re sexist racist idiots, which isn’t exactly the sort of thing that you tell someone when you’re trying to change their mind. This manages to be both unfair and ineffective.
debbie
@Amir Khalid:
Sometimes it’s enough to just stand back and let them make fools of themselves.
debbie
@Tom:
An immediate response. The campaign’s initial silence allowed the accusations to sink in, to a point where they couldn’t be dislodged. One smart thing the Obama 2008 campaign did was to respond to every lie/accusation as soon as it became public.
boatboy_srq
@cokane:
Well put: the libprog VSPs and “journalists” would do well to actually report actual (and especially) relevant news rather than sit back and respond only when the Reichwhinge feeds them “stories”. We need to push back, true – but we’ll have less trouble pushing back when we’re actually reporting what good the ACA is doing, how successful the stimulus really was, how horrible sequestration has been from the start &c and not when we’re just responding to Conservatist stories. Libprog journalists need momentum – and right now it’s the Reichwhinge that has that instead. Push back; but push back with real content, original reporting and hard evidence, and stop letting the Murdochs of the press world walk all over the media.
Of course, that does mean that we need more people than just Colbert, Coates, Maddow and Stewart leading the charge. Good as they are, there’s just too much Reichwhinge material getting cranked out for the few big figures to counter.
SFAW
@Marc:
Not sure if the “sexist racist idiots” we allegedly think “they” are is aimed at the elected officials, or the voters; my read is that you mean those elected.
I think the general sentiment has been that the elected Rethugs get there in large part because they are highly skilled at getting people to “kick down.” In other words, that it’s the people worse off than the typical Rethug voter who are stealing from the voters, and the elected Rethugs will put a stop to that. It’s yet another variant of the “Othering” that has been going on for at least 35 years. There are certainly other variants: liberals are tax-and-spend commies who want to give free things to darkies, scientists are pointy-headed elitists who are lying or stupid (or both) about AGW, government is a bunch of lazy bureaucrats who look at pron and play Solitaire all day, public education is a bunch of liberals indoctrinating little Johnny to be a commie. The list keeps growing. One example of the success of Othering: more people like Obamacare if you tell them what it does, but don’t include Obama’s name, than if you call the exact same program “Obamacare.”
If there were still a strong manufacturing economy in this country, with well-paying jobs, a lot of this would go away, because people wouldn’t be so scared and frustrated. Far be it from me to suggest that the Rethugs are happy to keep things that way, as a way to maintain their hold on power. Similarly, it would be cynical of me to suggest that the Rethugs are intentionally destroying the public education system here, because (to put it nicely) it hinders their base’s efforts to become critical thinkers.
That the elected Rethugs appear to be “sexist racist idiots” is just a bonus.
SFAW
@SFAW:
Realized I didn’t respond to the “how do you change their minds” comment: it’s difficult, and probably requires the MSM not being shills — witting or unwitting — for the right-wing agenda. As mentioned in #51: studies and polling have shown that people prefer liberal policies, but only when you tell them what it does. The instant you attach the word “liberal” or “left” or “Democrat” to the policy (or what it does), support drops. I can recall George HW Bush using the word “liberal” in much the same way people have used (depending on their demography or situation) “Nazi,” “Commie,” “nigger,” and similar epithets/curses. And the MSM, having been beaten up as “liberal” by the Right for years, is now too scared to call bullshit. (Well, that, plus there are a lot more news outlets owned by right-leaning or -loving persons.)
It takes the MSM “growing a set,” and it takes the DNC constantly pointing out that the left side is the only side pushing or supporting policies and programs to make EVERYONE’S life easier, not just those the millionaires and billionaires.
It’s exceedingly difficult, and the Dems have shown little stomach for the long game, but there’s still hope.
VincentN
What’s with this either-or binary that some people here are throwing out? Journalists can talk about both silly people like Kim Davis and Donald Trump (and clearly people are interested in discussing them judging by how many posts and comments there have been on BJ about them) and do serious investigative journalism.
The problem isn’t the media talking about the former instead of ignoring them. It’s that it doesn’t spend enough time doing the latter.
Captain C
@Mike J: FEMeatballs!
Denali
I hate to agree with McClaren but he is on point here. If both the right and left close off debate over their favorite pet issues, it does no one any good. While an extreme position is attractive because it is so simple(abortion, the death penalty) it rarely works in reality.
It is too bad the world is such a complicated place; maybe Mars really has something on offer.
BruceFromOhio
@Denali: I give you Ed, from Gin and Tacos.
RaflW
I am generally in agreement with the arguments Lithwick presented. With one fairly serious quibble: “[Davis] is a proxy for an important constitutional debate.”
No, she’s not. She is a proxy for a still somewhat unsettled debate on the role of gay and lesbian people in a country with a large minority of religiously conservative people. She does represent the hurt fee-fees of quite a lot of people.
But the constitutional debate notion is, frankly, bullshit. It’s settled as a matter of law, just not as a matter of culture. I think she is actually a fairly good representative of the poorly informed, angry resisters, and isn’t doing ‘her side’ much good, but I also don’t think covering her is feeding trolls, if you will.
The Raven on the Hill
Rick Perlstein: “take demagogues seriously. Voters love them. And they’re only a joke until they win.”
But also, don’t be a channel for demagoguery. This might mean, for instance, limiting the amount of airtime granted to demagoguery. A short summary of what the crazies said today is probably sufficient, without giving them airtime.
Of course, wow are they going to attack you.