> The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat.
This reminds me of the Buzzfeed story circa 2012 about how Christians were campaigning against Starbucks for their holiday cups unadorned with Christmas paraphernalia. It became a meme right away to the delight of people who already weren't very fond of Christians. I thought this was particularly strange because even my most conservative Christian friends held opinions in the vein of "If you're a Christian and are getting upset about these cups, you're way off". I was really curious to figure out who all of these Christians were that held this opinion and, lo-and-behold, it was one single Christian from Arizona. This particular "weak man" argument was the basis for much criticism of Christian culture for a couple of years.
Maybe this seems less significant nowadays after the media has shown us consistently over the better part of the last decade exactly what level of depravity it will sink to in order to gain a click, but at the time it was really surprising.
The New York Times (and other outlets, I'm sure) is notorious for writing trend pieces based on the fact that two or three people the reporter knows are doing some thing. Which then often turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In political stories it constantly happens that someone is quoted as a man on the street, but then you look them up and they're actually the head of the state party or some such thing. It's surprising that the writer would lie about their credential but still leave their real names in.
Sure, but there is bound to be someone who sincerely believes that the person you imagined is themselves, and they will take up that mantle out of some peculiar mix of indignation and gullibility and no doubt, recruit others to their cause with your tweet as their touchstone. Belief does not subscribe to the first law of thermodynamics. It is not a preexisting condition with neatly defined boundaries. People have no need for consistency in their beliefs, or even any understanding of why they hold them or where they came from.
Point being, it is not just the systemic political issue of being for or against that SA suggests shores up the Weak Man, but their beliefs themselves which shift and flow and pop in and out of existence. The only antidote to not fall in with the politics or the belief is to maintaina sense of self doubt and empathy. (And i say that as someone who also self diagnosed with much research, but also doubts).
And even that doesn't protect you from other peoples' beliefs. Has no one read Foucault's Pendulum?
I don't know if this is a great example, because Fox News actually incorporated Starbucks' lack of Christmas messaging into the weird "War on Christmas" narrative it tries to manufacture every year.
I don't know how that would invalidate the example; that still doesn't show that there were Christians who felt that way, rather that Fox believed the BuzzFeed story and leaned into it.
Yeah, assuming that Fox News is representative voice for Christians seems way off. They are just as hungry for manufactured outrage and clicks at everyone else.
Fox running a bit telling their viewers they should be angry about something isn’t evidence that anyone was actually angry.
In fact you could just about say the opposite. It is arguably Fox News’s primary business model to tell people what newly manufactured outrage they should be angry about today.
Yeah, but I would argue that Fox news is seeding that rage and making it mainstream. I guarantee that my grandparents would never ever give even a second thought to a starbucks cup that they will never see in their life and if they did come across would would not get offended on their own, but the second they get fed that story from Fox News, it becomes "holy hell look what them damn liberals are doing to christianity, I'd rather die then vote for them!!". This manufactured rage creates extremism by a thousand paper cuts.
I found that whole story quite amusing. A group of people are supposedly upset that symbols of pagan idolatry are absent from a business whose logo is a bare-breasted sea hag/siren exposing her unmentionables.
Even if the kernel of the story isn't true there are a lot of people who are easily manipulated by this sort of outrage journalism.
This particular "weak man" argument was the basis for much criticism of Christian culture for a couple of years.
When I see my neighborhood adorned in coroplast signs every year reminding me that "it's okay to say Merry Christmas", it becomes believable that someone will get butt-hurt about a Starbucks cup. Then again, perhaps the weak man argument here is of those that are against saying "merry xmas".
As a Brit it seems a standard and odd thing that American businesses don't seem able to say "merry xmas" and have to make it happy holidays. I don't fully get why mentioning christmas is discriminatory when mentioning hanukkah or eid or Chinese new year isn't?
The argument is that because Christians were so numerous, their culture needed to be policed to keep it from infringing on the hegemony that secular liberalism enjoyed. No significant number of religious minorities objected to "merry Christmas", but rather "it's offensive to religious minorities" was a false pretense employed by these "radical secularists" (or whatever we might call them) similar to how some (mostly white, probably anarchist) folks in America today are arguing that we need to abolish police for the sake of black Americans even though this opinion is fringe among black Americans.
If you live in rural areas plenty of people tout the "bring merry Christmas back" mantra. The origin of the cups story may be one person but it's reflective of a larger group.
It's not clear to me whether this is the cause or effect though.
I don't know how to present this theory in a falsifiable way, but I get the distinct feeling that a lot of these culture war battles are conjured up out "weak man" arguments in a hyper-real manner.
Buzzfeed writes an article about how conservative nuts (more properly a single conservative nut) is boycotting Starbucks because there's no Madonna in their latte foam. Blue tribe clicks the article and laughs at Red Tribe for being so stupid. Red tribe clicks the article and decides "Blue tribe is laughing, at us!". Red tribe grifter starts accepting donations to buy Starbucks cups and throw them into a paper shredder. Blue tribe starts a Foundation for Freedom from Religious Latte Art demanding depictions of Satan in their lattes. Suddenly everyone has extremely strong feelings about something as absurd as whether or not there should be a Madonna depicted in their latte.
In many cases, it seems the original nut turns out to be someone who spent most of their life at reality TV auditions.
This is literally what the article is describing. It's worse than 'the other tribe is laughing at us.' It's, 'if i don't fight my battle here, even though I don't really agree with it, we'll lose the war'
That's why weakmen are super weapons. You have to use them. If you do look at your own tribe and say 'yeah that person is a loon' then you risk the whole tribe itself, and you can't have that.
There's a common theme in a lot of these "you can't trust what you see" replies that it's specifically being amplified by the liberal side, to make conservatives look stupid.
If you take that one step further down the sequence of events, though, we'd be aiming that critique at the Christian side of the media that's been making hay about the "War on Christmas" for decades. Find one person saying something, or one company doing something you can take the wrong way, use it to tell your audience they're under attack; lather, rinse, repeat. Growing up in it, I'd hear about this stuff in youth group, in chapel in school, even in not-officially-religious classes like History. Before the internet, it wasn't easy to escape that bubble if your parents were deep into it.
Or do posters here really think there really are a lot of people out there trying to eliminate Christmas?
I don’t think anyone thinks people are out to eliminate Christmas in the sense you seem to mean it, which is kind of the point. Or rather, I’m sure some people do, but they are rare and not representative of Christians in general despite the generalization.
To be clear there are people who take offense to the phrase “Merry Christmas”, which is what some traditionalists (Christian or not) take issue with, but no one is making a weak man argument about them either, i.e., no one says most people take offense to Merry Christmas.
I'm actually an atheist who likes saying "Merry Christmas", not that I really care very much. But the small sliver of people who'd be outraged over cups at a hipster coffee chain are not reflective of the broader group, is the point.
"the cups story may be one person but it's reflective of a larger group" is exactly the "weak man" fallacy/mode of group stigmatization that the blog post is about.
If someone chooses to say "happy holidays" rather than "merry Christmas" out of sensitivity or political correctness, that does not constitute cancelling. The term cancelling is usually used for deliberate and sustained social pressure and boycotting campaigns. As far as I am aware this has not occurred on any significant scale to try to stop people from saying "merry Christmas".
In the other direction, however, this has very much happened. Conservative Christian organizations have called for boycotts of companies who don't mention Christmas in their Christmas marketing (or, in some cases, even just for mentioning non-Christian holidays) repeatedly over the last two decades. [0]
To avoid weak-manning here: I'm sure this is a pretty fringe group and not at all representative of Christians in general. But it is clear that the campaign to force people to use traditional Christmas greetings and imagery has always been more prominent and aggressive than the campaign to abolish traditional Christmas greetings.
Many companies don't allow their employees to say Merry Christmas, because it could offend customers.
When you interact with public employees and 10 out of 10 say "Happy Holidays", it becomes a social norm. Breaking that norm then feels uncomfortable, and people who are already biased against Christians will seize the opportunity to say that Merry Christmas is insensitive.
You can only say that the messaging for "Bring Back Merry Christmas" is more aggressive - the tactics on the Happy Holidays side are certainly ruthless, because there's a profit motive behind it.
You can find that frustrating, but that doesn't make it cancelling. To be cancelling, it has to be a deliberately sustained campaign.
In this case, as you said yourself, it's just a plain and simple profit motive. Companies want as broad appeal as possible, so they instruct their employees to use neutral greetings. There is no intent there to destroy the traditional greeting, so it's clearly not cancelling.
We can certainly debate on the intent, but ultimately, the result is the same - no one says Merry Christmas anymore, and Christians are sometimes sad about this.
I think it feeds into the feeling of victimhood. It seems all-encompassing. Which makes these people sternly-pro-Merry-Christmas.
I don't know about the US, but I say "merry Christmas" to people I see before the 24th and that I will for sure see before the 1rst,and a "happy holidays" equivalent if won't met between the two days. Are you sure it's only profit motivated and not a will to be semantically correct?
I think this is so weird. I live in a "democrat-run city" to use a phrase popularized by the weird right, and people here say Merry Christmas if someone says Merry Christmas to them or they know each other from church, and say Happy Holidays if you don't know the holiday someone celebrates and they're not wearing a Christmas tree sweater. It's a pretty easy algorithm. I don't think anyone feels like Christmas spirit is lacking.
Your last few sentences are right: the people I know who are outraged about the war on Christmas are Christians of a certain type who feel like they have not received what has been promised to them. They're well-off, have houses built for them in nice new suburban developments, have a couple cars, don't seem like they're hurting for money or jobs, but they've just really got a chip on their shoulder about other people getting what they deserve.
I'm probably re-centering a category right now :) This was a very interesting article and it's fun to try to find all the examples of this I can.
You have every right to lament or protest a trend that you don't like, but by claiming you're being cancelled, you are making a very strong claim about intent ("they" want to destroy our tradition), one that you fail to back up.
That's not Walmart being politically correct though, it's Walmart being a commercial enterprise that has 1 preference (higher revenues).
They do other dumb things, like for a long time plenty of people wouldn't buy any music there, because they censored it. Here's the New York Times making a parallel argument to yours, 25 years ago:
Try replacing "politically correct voices" with a proper noun. Who specifically is it that tried to cancel Christmas? And if you asked them if they are actually trying to cancel Christmas, would they say yes?
We’re talking about the greeting, not Christmas in general. I don’t think it’s controversial that it’s considered rude now to wish a stranger Merry Christmas, but here’s a Huffington Post article that argues against it for just one example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/happy-holidays-instead-of_1_b...
There are good reasons to know your audience before using the greeting, but it’s very rare to hear it at all in many parts of the US, which does seem strange when 90% of the country celebrates Christmas. Since Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Halloween are completely fine to say to a stranger I think it’s fair to say the greeting has been canceled, for better or worse, regardless of original intent.
> I don’t think it’s controversial that it’s considered rude now to wish a stranger Merry Christmas
Yes, its very controversial to claim that is the general view.
> here’s a Huffington Post article that argues against it
But…it doesn’t argue either against saying Merry Christmas or that it is “rude” to say it (or that anything is “rude”.) It argues that it is illegal (a form of workplace religious discrimination) for your boss to compel you to say it, outside of narrow circumstances where it may be a bona fide job requirement.
This confusion of arguments that being compelled by government, an employer, etc. to do X is improper and/or illegal with arguments that choosing on your own to do X is immoral, rude, etc. is sadly common.
“If you do celebrate Christmas, then please don’t forget that there are many other religious holidays being celebrated in December. Some of your customers and coworkers may not want to have Christmas shoved down their throats.”
It definitely might be clickbait but it was one of the first Google results. Clearly at least some people think the greeting is “shoving Christmas down their throats”
So, you've heard (from the right) that this is widespread opinion on the left, but when you looked at what the left says, you only found fairly minor voices expounding a somewhat weaker version of that claim? That sounds exactly like the 'weak man' thing we're discussing, doesn't it?
There are two views here, broadly, about canceling 'Merry Christmas':
a) it's a popular view on the left
b) it's not a popular view on the left, but some on the right have acted as if it is
View b) is equivalent to agreeing that this whole thing is an example of a 'weak man' argument, and a) is equivalent to disagreeing with it. I struggle to see how anyone could read camjohnson26's comments and conclude that they meant b). They cited a link as evidence of a) and complained when I suggested it wasn't persuasive.
I still don’t see where in the thread that anyone is suggesting that this is a “widespread” view. The parent notes that some people hold it, and we can imply that enough people hold it (and with enough collective influence) that businesses were coerced into changing their policies, but that doesn’t suggest any kind of majority or even a sizable minority. Indeed, the whole idea behind “tyranny of the minority” is that it takes only a very small minority to drive broad-reaching change in cases like these. I think one of us has misread the thread, but I’ve now triple checked and I don’t think the error is mine in this particular instance.
Then I beg you to read it a fourth time, because you've mixed up the two opposing 'weak man' claims:
1) The left saying: "Those silly righties are mad at Starbucks because they won't put Christmas decorations on their cups!"
2) The right saying: "Those silly lefties hate religion so much that they get mad if you tell them merry christmas!"
You started this thread by mentioning the first one. Someone replied to you that 'bring merry christmas back' was indeed a thing. Then camjohnson26 replied to them, saying "They wouldn’t feel like they need to bring Merry Christmas back if the overly politically correct voices hadn’t tried to cancel it in the first place."
Note that the first half of that (people trying to bring the greeting back) is a reference to weak man 1, and the second half (people trying to cancel the greeting) suggests that weak man 2) wasn't an exaggeration, it really happened. It is that latter half that I responded to.
Does the left think it enough to meet some arbitrary threshhold that allows us to call it 'widespread'? I dunno, that sounds totally subjective and semantic. Luckily that's not what we're arguing about (I just used that term as a short way of saying 'as widespread as the right has claimed'). What we are arguing about is: were the claims from the right about the left being against 'merry christmast' roughly accurate, or a big exaggeration? I claim the latter, and camjohnson26 (I'm fairly sure they would agree) was saying the former.
How many examples would I need to provide? Discounting this one as a minor voice is getting into “No True Scotsman” territory. And this was just the top Google result, definitely not the only result.
I'm a liberal, living in a very liberal city. I don't need you to tell me what the left thinks. Believe me, I've heard plenty of politically correct stuff from my side that I think is silly (and presumably you would agree). This just isn't one. You can go to a collectivist bookstore with BLM posters in the window, where the History section is labeled "Herstory," and still be wished a Merry Christmas by the person running the register.
You're welcome to disagree of course but this might be a good time to step back and remember where the goalposts started. You didn't set out thinking this was something you would have to prove with evidence. You said, "I don't think it's controversial that..." and then a bunch of people said it was.
In any event, I don't think it's super important; this seems like it is clearly an example of a 'weak man', because however strongly the left does or doesn't think it's rude to say Merry Christmas, it seems incontrovertible to say that Fox News presented us as believing it somewhat more than we do, and for the reasons discussed in the article.
> I don’t think it’s controversial that it’s considered rude now to wish a stranger Merry Christmas...
Strongly disagree. Also, the first sentence of the article you link kind of contradicts you here. Please consider the possibility that this is one of those ginned-up-for-clicks things.
I'm not American. And I'm an atheist. Are there actually people who object to "Merry Christmas"? This seems so bizarre to me, I always assumed it wasn't a real thing.
There are some (but not many people) who will get upset at you if you tell them "Merry Christmas". These are generally people who dislike Christianity or another, and/or whom dislike its pervasiveness in American culture over other religions.
Likely more prevalent are the people who don't like corporations, public services, etc. wishing everyone Merry Christmas year after year while ignoring the holidays of other religions.
To avoid all of this, many places are switching to "Happy Holidays", except there are a not-insignificant number of people who are upset by this and feel that companies/governments should be saying "Merry Christmas" because they should be aligned with Christianity.
Not really. Very nearly 100% of the examples of "objections" to Christmas are just people or corporations choosing to say "Happy Holidays" or something instead.
As in the OP, there's probably somebody you can point to who holds any dumb position you want to argue against, but there isn't really an anti-Christmas side of the public discourse in America.
What's worse: There are some people who celebrate Christmas but who choose not to wish others a "Merry Christmas" out of fear of offending them. Peak woke.
I think the problem is with our hyper polarized culture, the single Christian from Arizona snowballs into a real movement, because we reflexively and reliably take up our respective corners no matter how absurd. One of my concerns is that journalists (especially center-left types) seem to be unwilling to acknowledge their role in creating these movements rather than merely reporting on them.
I think this is very possible as well. An amusing/sad example is how 4chan trolled the left into thinking the “ok” gesture actually means “white power”. The left took the bait and started policing this gesture, and then right-wing folks would start using it to trigger them—which the left wing folks took to be “proof” that the symbol was a white power symbol (look! the right is using this symbol! vindication!) and indeed even had a hispanic utility worker fired for absent-mindlessly making the gesture. Self fulfilling prophesy.
> This reminds me of the Buzzfeed story circa 2012
2015, and, like, every media outlet in the country, not just Buzzfeed.
> I was really curious to figure out who all of these Christians were that held this opinion and, lo-and-behold, it was one single Christian from Arizona.
No, it wasn’t.
Now, sure, it became a controversy because of one internet (and former radio and TV) evangelist in Arizona, who already had substantial attention because of other campaigns he’d launched that year, but it got picked up by a lot of the publicly Christian political and media voices already engaged in the “Christians victimized by secular society” narrative, (including eventually President Trump, because it was active that long.)
> Whether an aversion to using the word “Christmas” extends beyond Starbucks is difficult to measure. But in 2017, President Trump tweeted on Christmas Eve that Americans were “proud to be saying Merry Christmas again,” since he took office.
It's nice that your conservative Christian friends aren't so easily triggered, but that Trump quote points to the views of a sizable set of their peers.
I don't find "it could have been true!" to be a very good justification for publishing caricatures, moreover I don't think "the Trump Supporter" was a breed that existed in 2012. Not only was Trump not a conceivable candidate at the time, but even the caricatures of conservatives (never mind Christians) didn't resemble our caricature of Trump supporters.
The story was 2015, not 2012, so Trump supporters definitely existed. And Trump wouldn't be speaking to his base in 2017 about "bringing back Christmas" if that wasn't an issue that had existed long before him.
If we're even less lazy, we can click through to more 2015 articles, such as this other Fox one https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/not-everyone-thinks-starb... which does the "both sides" thing in a nice convenient not-just-an-example-from-Arizona-dude way:
> An article posted to Breitbart London even called the plain red cups part of the “War on Christmas.”
> “This is a denial of historical reality and the great Christian heritage behind the American Dream that has so benefitted Starbucks," wrote Andrea Williams of the U.K.'s Christian Concern.
> But not all Christian groups feel the same way. Paul Batura, vice president of communications at Focus on the Family, said snowflakes and carolers are not symbols of Christmas.
> "I wonder if we’re not overthinking or overanalyzing this,” he said. “Christmas isn’t found in a cup or in a snowflake. Instead, it’s found in the hearts and minds of those of us who believe that God sent His only son to earth in the form of an innocent, helpless baby."
Growing up in evangelical media, these aren't caricatures.
I don't know the extent to which this is a problem (i.e., I don't want to make this into a "weak man"), but there are some legitimate reasons to be concerned with the replacement and/or minimization of traditional holidays. At least one important motive for the replacement was to create the foundation for violent revolution: "the creation of its own series of holidays all underscored Karenga's premise that 'you must have a cultural revolution before the violent revolution. The cultural revolution gives identity, purpose, and direction.'" [0]
It's easy for people to laugh at such concerns when they don't see them as plausible, but when you also have people like Dick Costolo promising shootings and a violent revolution, it's hard to know who can be trusted. When the left spends a year "mostly peacefully" killing dozens of people and burning our cities, it becomes a lot easier to believe that they might want a full revolution. Again, not to say that these concerns are necessarily justified, but that it's very difficult to know whether they are or not. If one prefers to err on the side of caution and criticize Starbucks here, I think that's a legitimate position.
(Kind of hoping that someone can give me a good way to debunk these concerns, so I'm just going to ignore any troll responses).
We're moving on quite a bit from the original post here, which was claiming that there was an overreaction to a position that supposedly didn't actually exist outside of this one person. I think it's pretty clear that that position does exist, which your post lines up with ;).
However, I think something significant to note here about if it's an overreaction or not is that even these cups are still traditional Christmas colors. We're a really long way away from them saying something like "it's not a holiday season at all," or "the actual holidays are some other time."
So if on one side we have a "let's be a little more inclusive of our friends celebrating different holidays" and on the other side we have "let's replace your holidays to help encourage a future violent revolution" it seems to me that they've only taken the babiest of baby steps towards the former, not the latter. (One wonders what the reaction would be if they came out with Hanukkah colored cups - lets not forget that there are non-"replacement"-motivated other holidays out there...)
There’s a difference between being concerned about a little cultural erasure and the idea that Christians en masse would choose Starbucks as the hill to die on over that issue.
Of course, this is a lot more believable nowadays since we deal exclusively in caricatures but as I said earlier, it was novel at the time.
So, no, none of this was novel to me in 2015... you seem to be reading in the "en masse" part yourself. A substantial number of people believe in this War on Christmas stuff and do let it influence their behavior, including the 2015 cups. You seem to only be willing to accept that it's either just 1 person, or EVERYBODY.
I can show you more links if you want, but so far you're not even trying to consider the counter-evidence people have posted here... if you were actually curious, it's easy to Google. But - ironically, considering the claims of your original post - your mind seems made up.
Thanks for the honest reply. Sorry for getting off-topic. I'm trying to understand liberal thought a bit better, hopefully without getting flamed out too much.
I agree that the Starbucks choice of greeting is a "babiest of baby steps" which is probably why only one person really cared in a country of 300 million. But I really struggle to understand the justification here, and it seems to be related to other Culture War crusades. How is avoiding Christmas inclusive? Everyone knows what country we're in and that most people celebrate Christmas, so why would anybody be offended by saying "Merry Christmas"? This matters because if you don't see it as an "inclusive" move, then it just comes off as a way to snub people who do celebrate Christmas.
That is, I can kind of believe that many liberals honestly see these things as "inclusive", but from the outside they actually seem "exclusive". The whole liberal platform is supposedly to tolerate and include, but in practice they seem to hate and exclude about 40% of the country. I just can't see very much of the tolerance and inclusion from my perspective.
Sorry if I'm a bit all over the map, but I'm trying to understand, not debate.
> How is avoiding Christmas inclusive? Everyone knows what country we're in and that most people celebrate Christmas, so why would anybody be offended by saying "Merry Christmas"? This matters because if you don't see it as an "inclusive" move, then it just comes off as a way to snub people who do celebrate Christmas.
If I'm Jewish in America, I'm used to people talking about Christmas, so I'm probably not gonna be offended by it anymore, but if someone said something to me about the right holiday I would probably appreciate it.
Whether "happy holidays" vs "Merry Christmas" counts for much instead - since it's still no more personalized to me, especially when still wrapped in red and green - I can't really say myself, since I celebrate Christmas personally, but I don't have any reason to disbelieve the non-Christians who've told me they appreciate things like that. It's something to say "hey, we realize that you exist!"
> It's something to say "hey, we realize that you exist!"
It seems like there should be a way to do that without feeding into the whole Culture War thing. The holidays generally fall on different days. Why not say "Merry Christmas" on Dec 25 and say "Happy Hannukah" on the appropriate date(s), etc.? That would be more inclusive without appearing to snub anyone, and it would be interesting to hear about holidays you might not otherwise be aware of.
Maybe I'm cynical about the folks I grew up with, but I think if people got wished Merry Christmas by their barista on just 1 day, but Happy Hanukkah for 8 days, we'd suddenly see a lot more complaints about the War on Christmas... ;)
I've been immersed in both sides of this for different large parts of my life, but I find it hard to place the blame on both sides. The Christians who get upset seem to be demanding a right of exclusivity that I find unreasonable.
That is a bit "unfair", although not in a deliberate way. Maybe just say "Happy Hannukah" on one particular day? That serves the purpose of inclusion well enough. If someone objects to saying "Happy Hannukah" at all, then just ignore them I guess? That seems to be the status quo already.
I don't really care about placing blame. My objections are often because I don't feel that liberal ideas actually achieve what they claim to be for. I'm often for the stated ideal, but against the implementation. In this case I feel that the implementation is not very inclusive but does seem exclusive, and it could be done a lot better.
> Maybe just say "Happy Hannukah" on one particular day?
Hanukkah is an 8-day festival, not a 1-day holiday. Which day do you propose to be the "correct" one and what gives you the right to make that decision? Sometimes Christmas falls during Hanukkah; would it be okay to say Happy Hanukkah on Christmas?
I don't celebrate holidays. I play along for friend & family gatherings. I'm frequently told "Merry Christmas" several days in advance, and several days following, December 25. I hear Christmas music for an entire month leading up to the day, and frequently for weeks afterwards. Why should "happy Hanukkah" be limited to a single day?
The stated aim was to be inclusive and give people 'something to say "hey, we realize that you exist!"'. A way to be inclusive without coming off like you hate American culture. I don't really care if "Merry Christmas" has just one day and "Happy Hanukkah" has 8. I'm fine either way. It just seems more likely to get broader acceptance if each group is allotted equal time. A compromise of sorts.
Ohoh!! Here's the money quote: "American culture". How is American culture relevant here? I thought we were talking about a religious holiday (Christmas), and that if the religion is sincere then you're trying to lead people by your witness to find Christ, beyond nationality and even culture. Christmas as such is simply a symbol, rather than an aim in itself.
It seems as if you're operating from an axiom that many other discussants do not agree on. No wonder the conversation seems like it's folks talking past each other.
You know, I'm back, because the more I think about this, the more it bugs me.
You compare Christmas to Halloween and Thanksgiving, which are in the US secular holidays. The most common argument I've heard for wishing everyone "Merry Christmas" is that many people celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday. That's fine for anyone who does so, but it's not a correct assumption in general. I celebrate Christmas because it is one of a set of holidays that tells the story of Christ's birth, and it's an important part of the liturgical calendar. I do not want Christmas to be secularized. I know I do not share my approach to Christmas with random coworkers, and in particular with non-Christians, and I do not want to pretend I do. It's a religious holiday for me and it irks me to treat it otherwise.
So it seems like you're trying to cheapen or appropriate my religious observance to be a cultural marker instead, a marker of "being American". But the colonies were established in large part by religious dissenters, including in particular Puritans, who were highly critical of the secular Christmas. So you betray the roots of the American nation in forcing secular observance of Christmas on people.
Having abandoned both American ideals of religious liberty and Christian ideals of sincere and sober religious observance of the birth of Christ, what, exactly, are you left with?
I'm with you, as an agnostic with Christ-inspired morals. I know folks believe in it, I don't; so I don't even like to attend mass 'cause it feels disrespectful. And the capitalization is gross for reasons manifold.
Christmas is considered part of American culture. Whether it should be is not relevant. Given how liberals widely seem to hate "America"[0], I was remarking that avoiding mentioning Christmas (by a well-known woke company) comes off as being motivated by hatred of American culture. If one's motive is really to be inclusive rather than to display hatred, there are ways to be inclusive that don't look like hate.
If it's a religious holiday to you, then that's great. That's a good reason for not wanting it to be considered part of American culture, but it doesn't change the fact that it is.
Well that’s the problem with one version of tolerance that thinks that tolerance means minimizing our differences and avoiding anything that might offend another person. A better approach is embracing our cultural differences and trying to find ways that we compliment each other and work toward common goals, while respecting the goals we disagree on instead of demonizing the other side.
Do you say Happy Birthday to people when you know it's not their birthday?
It's pretty much that simple. It's just good manners and common sense.
As someone whose heritage comes from a fairly radical side of European Christianity, the overworship of Christmas itself is idolatry, so I have no sympathy from that point of view either.
> Over the past five years there has been no reduction in the racial disparity in fatal police shooting victims despite increased use of body cameras and closer media scrutiny, according to a new report by researchers at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
...
> Among unarmed victims, Black people were killed at three times the rate (218 total killed), and Hispanics at 1.45 times the rate of white people (146 total killed).
Unfortunately I don't see anyone successfully publishing a study critical of BLM when you can get fired merely for mentioning a past study, as David Shor did[0]. I don't think studies are going to change anyone's mind when the allowed outcomes are politically determined.
We're limited to collections of news stories. The collections seem pretty broad - the criteria is basically "killed during a BLM protest"[1][2]. PolitiFact goes with 12-19 by June[3]. The Guardian counts "at least 25" by October[4]. (I don't have a count for the past three months). This counting of deaths of course opens the door to all kinds of quibbles over which deaths "count", e.g. it's not possible to prove one way or the other whether this woman in Minneapolis[5] would have been raped and killed without the cover of the rioting.
Is this sourcing acceptable to you, or do you really need a proper study?
I did emphasize the criteria, and it seems reasonable to expect any informed person to already know that there was violence from police, protesters, and counter-protesters. But the Guardian source says "All but one were killed by fellow citizens.", so I didn't find it particularly worth emphasizing that 4%.
How do we know that it’s police racism and not some other factor that correlates with race which drives this disparity? For example, I would expect violent criminal behavior to significantly increase one’s chance of being shot by police, and as I understand it, criminologists pretty much agree that black Americans commit violent crimes at considerably higher rates even than white Americans. And no doubt there are good reasons for why black Americans commit more crimes; legacy of systemic racism and all that, but that doesn’t suggest that they are dying due to police racism, which is the whole BLM thesis (ACAB and so on). Surely we would answer this question decisively and publicly before we would go marching through the streets and burning neighborhoods to the ground (or perhaps for those in the higher social classes, merely cheering on or justifying the violence—perhaps with miscontextualized MLK quotes—on social media)?
That is a good example of weak man. Also, your post is a good example of how devious the weak man is. You're using one to criticize another (the implication that the people criticizing the people who are antagonistically defensive of Christmas are largely criticizing Christians in general, and further, are doing so in large part because of a single Arizona man's actions, and further, that they are "not fond of Christians", which is not required to criticize something that occurred in the Christian world).
This "weak man," tactic is taught in undergrad, the idea is to destabilize an opposing view to neutralize the person holding it. The emphasis is on "neutralize," because the underlying strategy is based on the premise that there is no truth, only power, and for an opponent to be neutral, or do nothing, means there is no resistance to your agenda.
When "everything is political," it is sufficient to isolate an opponent from a conversation because in that view, all power comes from attention and approval of others, because they have been trained to be psychologically actuated by shame. It's why, "not a good look," has become a standard put down, even among some men. This idea of litigating for power is why many people don't like lawyers, and when half the middle class is educated to act like the seediest of prosecutors, you get that thing that's wrong with someone you just can't put your finger on. I have some actual friends like this, and we find a way, but part of why there is so much hostility in the culture is because one side never thought they would need a new bare-metal up critical framework to conceive of how awful we've educated some people to become. One of the SSC rules was "be charitable," which is the value that the weak-man style of argument throws out. It's basically being uncharitable. So glad to see Alexander articles on HN lately.
It's not explicitly taught, it's Girardian mimetic desire to destroy anyone with -ist or -phobic thought, as those sorts of people are who are preventing us from creating a utopia.
You're doing the thing in the article. The truth is enough people regardless of political stance struggle to explicitly negotiate with ideas that are counter to their own world-view. That's not an unfortunate trait of any one demographic.
I'm sure we all use this rhetorical strategy often. I know I do. But I also think it's fair to call it out, because the implications of half the middle class feeling this way are very different from say, half of left-twitter.
To be fair to OP, I wasn't meaning to call them out (in the sense of shaming or other effects). I legitimately found it amusing that they used, or appeared to use, rhetorical methods like the one in the article.
But look at half (or more by the time I click 'reply') the comments here. They're discussing whether or not there is a War on the War on Christmas, they fell into the same rhetorical trap the article itself is discussing. This is great entertainment and a wonderful way to clear my mind at the end of work on a slow Friday.
I don't think I hear "not a good look" the same way you do. in particular, I don't hear it as a putdown, more of a cynical comment that expresses something like "I don't necessarily oppose what you are saying/doing, but I hope for your sake that other people don't notice".
> This "weak man," tactic is taught in undergrad, the idea is to destabilize an opposing view to neutralize the person holding it. The emphasis is on "neutralize," because the underlying strategy is based on the premise that there is no truth, only power, and for an opponent to be neutral, or do nothing, means there is no resistance to your agenda.
I'm having trouble fitting this in with what I currently see in the world. it doesn't seem like either "side" would be content with my neutrality/silence. they seem to want nothing less than full and vocal alignment on every issue.
The way to “win” an argument these days is to make a claim which is more complex to refute than the attention span of the audience. You achieve this by making claims which are somewhat true and not particularly representative of reality.
These tend to be the vast majority of arguments that people see because controversy gets clicks and the more reasonable people are straight up afraid to appear to support the other side by disagreeing with the more unreasonable folks with a shared alignment.
I don't necessarily disagree, but there's a certain irony in presenting a claim of "how things are these days" in such a matter-of-fact way. I certainly wouldn't know how to refute your statement in a sufficiently short way. Thus, is it the presentation of claims that is the issue, or is it their content? Or both? I struggle with avoiding hypocrisy when trying to pinpoint the underlying problem.
Well somebody could try to do a representative study, but this is a HN comment, not a scientific publication.
I could also try to deconstruct some of the common complex-to-refute arguments, but I'm afraid the message would get lost in the following controversy.
What I'm saying is my perceptions following experiences I have had myself.
I suppose one could disagree with me by showing counterexamples of generally recognized public arguments for this and that and how they can be refuted simply. You have a point though. I'm not sure how I could avoid that criticism and still make an effective argument.
> I could also try to deconstruct some of the common complex-to-refute arguments, but I'm afraid the message would get lost in the following controversy.
That would be quite interesting to read nonetheless, if you’re willing to do so.
I had to look it up again to check, but does this not fall under the dictionary definition of sophistry[1]? It seems especially appropriate to call it that given the 2nd definition of sophisticated[2] as something at a high degree of complexity, and "sophisticate"'s common root with "sophistry".
By making a complex argument, you deceive others into thinking that you have refuted another argument, when in fact you have not done so; the fallacy of your argument was hidden by it's complexity.
1. "the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving." -- Oxford languages, via Google; https://www.google.com/search?q=sophistry (retrieved 2021-01-22)
2. "(of a machine, system, or technique) developed to a high degree of complexity." -- Same as [1], above.
Eh, the whole sophist thing is a 2500 year old beef that philosophers (i.e. aristotle, plato, socrates) had with professional teachers hired by upper class people, for everything but especially rhetoric. So it took on this meaning of an insult insinuating the target was a second rate intellectual teaching a cheap bag of tricks to rich idiots.
I’m never a big fan of using these words that take some ancient group of people or school of thought and turn the name into an adjective which has at best a loose connection with the reality of what they were.
Does the dictionary definition fit? Somewhat, but maybe not the best choice.
Thank you for saying this out loud. I've had the same visceral reaction to words like "sophistry" but have never taken the time to process why or articulate it. This is exactly how I feel about it, as well.
Well clearly you’re wrong and don’t understand Karl Popper’s “Theory of Falsification” or the ways that radical mid 18th century propaganda groups led to a rise in authoritarian group think.
to a degree i think zoomers parody this phenomenon with memes using a wall of text/dense and almost indecipherable text with the caption of "leftist memes be like"
This is very perceptive. Attempts at honest discussion often seem to be derailed in exactly this way. Discussion of the actual issue is avoided by loud assertions that take a lot of time to refute. Which "side" derails it does seem to depend on who the "weak man" would hurt.
Just don’t participate once the conversation gets derailed. Learn to exit gracefully, and usually if you did make a point addressing the complexity, likely someone got something out of it.
Surround yourself with people who disagree with you, but are good at it.
I would say bring back empiricism as a big component of knowing if something is true, or at least before you discuss it as something that is right.
People are aligning with complex theories with no underlying basis, other than their feelings and utopian visions, and then getting emotional about it.
It doesn't seem to me that its most often making a "more complex" claims, but making so many claims as to overwhelm any attempt to refute them, aka "Gish gallop".
To clarify, perhaps confusing language, I don't mean the claim must be complicated, it can be a simple claim.
In order to refute the claim though requires an appreciation for subtlety which the people doing the arguing don't often have. The refutation is complicated, the claim doesn't need to be.
The only solution I think is to not engage. Focus on long-lived relationships with people who actually have gotten/will get to know you. Save your complex and nuanced thoughts and feelings for those people; random strangers will always see you through a cartoonized lens. When you do have micro-interactions with strangers - which, never forget, includes all public social media posts whether you want it to or not - keep things inoffensive. If someone else inflames the situation, quietly and diplomatically withdraw from it.
Beyond just being a strategy for individuals, doing this contributes in a tiny way to lowering the temperature of the whole room.
The article addresses with a chain of events of small concessions that eventually lead to so much splash damage that the public mind is swayed against you.
The conclusion is that people must always fight to defend against splash damage because as left unchecked it is a "super weapon."
This has been my strategy for a long time, and it works.
The hard part is the bar for opening up is impossibly high. There's also the chicken/egg problem: someone can't get to know you without you opening up, and you can't open up until someone gets to know you.
I feel like this is a big factor in increasing loneliness among adults.
Interesting, and not what I expected. I presumed it was something about slave morality ala Nietzsche's Will to Power. Useful idiots and all that.
It seems the strongest way to win arguments nowadays is to simply go on the offensive and ignore their claims. The opposite side has millions of tricks.
First, they hope you are stupid. If not, they will pretend to be stupid, and not understand what you are talking about. And even if you refute them, they may come back the very next day and claim that they won the argument.
When you post online, hundreds of lurkers may read your comment. If you don't even dignify the enemy with a response, they are much more likely to buy in to your emotional rhetoric.
I don't think the take on feminism in this article is particularly good. The author discusses feminism as "a memeplex that provides a bunch of pattern-matching opportunities where a man is in the wrong and a woman is in the right", but feminism is about analysing the power dynamic between the _classes_ of 'man' and 'woman'. Any system of class-based power analysis can be abused by supposed adherents to attack _individuals_ in a given class, but that doesn't mean that the system isn't itself valuable as a critique of power dynamic that exists between the classes.
Unless the system is actually open to inverting the power relationship, then it's just pattern matching and isn't anything more powerful than a slightly fancier way of saying "X > Y". Everything else is window dressing and post-hoc vindication.
Or to put this another way, there are people in my orbit who feel perfectly comfortable spouting "Men are the worst!" and "all men are stupid!", but would be extremely upset with you if you swapped the gender in those statements.
I don't have particularly strong opinions on feminism, but it's many things to many people. You've listed two of those things, but both seem like good characterisations of different aspects. I don't think he's criticising the academic aspect that analyses the power dynamic between men and women, I think he's criticising the everyday aspect that caused a woman to feel so offended when he asked her out that she cut off all contact with him and then told his friends he was being a jerk.
Him choosing that specific aspect might itself be a weak man.
>but feminism is about analysing the power dynamic between the _classes_ of 'man' and 'woman'. Any system of class-based power analysis can be abused by supposed adherents to attack _individuals_ in a given class, but that doesn't mean that the system isn't itself valuable as a critique of power dynamic that exists between the classes.
I’ve actually thought for a long time that this cognitive bias is very near a root cause of so many of the problems in the world, especially in the social media era. Once you know what to look for, you can see it absolutely everywhere. Virtually all political discourse, nearly all journalism, casual conversation, it all feels tainted by misrepresentation and overgeneralization.
I think this is the most salient point for the increasingly polarized discourse we have online nowadays:
> So the one problem is that people have a right not to have unfair below- the-belt tactics used to discredit them without ever responding to their real arguments. [i.e., the Jew in czarist Russia or "not all men are like that"]
> And the other problem is that victims of non-representative members of a group have the right to complain, even though those complaints will unfairly rebound upon the other members of that group. [i.e., the guy that complains about the Westboro Baptist church]
So how can one hold bad actors accountable without discrediting the larger group? For that to be possible, I think one has to know the critic is acting purely in good faith, to know that their aims are just, e.g., to target Westboro and not as a wedge to undermine organized religion. Unfortunately, most of Twitter seems to be bad faith by people seeking affirmation for call-outs and satisfaction from venting.
Yes, it seems to me that you can always count on some people to act in bad faith. If you go to that feminist tumbler blog her links within the article, you'll see great examples of it. People want to make a difference, but are not disciplined enough to do so without doing splash damage to hurt those who don't deserve it. I think the only way to combat the issue that the author discusses is for everyone to discourage bad faith discussions at all times.
Social media gives tribes a battlefield to fight on and it gives them something to win. At first it was Clicks, Likes, Hearts. Then they figured out how to turn those things into money, and money begets power.
We're not going to find a way to punish a bad actor because the cost of risking the tribe is too great.
I found this enlightening, and disheartening at the same time. Is there any further discussion on how we can evolve past this, as individuals and as a society?
Individually, by being aware of it you can recognize it in your own statements more readily (though probably requiring deliberate attention). Then you can choose to use the form of argument or rewrite to avoid it.
When seeing it in others you may be able to present better responses, especially if you're aware of how your response might be perceived.
(Not disagreeing with your post, just discussing a complication.)
Looking at this thread and how people are (respectfully) pointing fingers at each others (and their own) arguments, it seems clear to me that avoiding such arguments is generally hard.
When you want to support or illustrate an assertion you make with an example, the example will virtually never apply to everything the assertion covers. Often it might not even be possible to find an example that covers the majority of some group/trend/phenomenon (or know what constitutes a majority in the first place).
Maybe this means to be more judicious in making general statements (probably not a bad idea). But in some respects, for example a trend among recent occurrences of something, you have nothing but isolated events to discuss in the first place. Even if there is some objective quality behind it, requiring yourself to never refer to individual data points (as that could be construed as weak-manning) might make it impossible to get at the core of it. And that's before going into how your arguments are perceived.
And yes, the above is intentionally (overly) general. Examples would help illustrating the argument, but are immediately subject to weak-manning. I wonder what others think on this.
The Atheism/religion examples are such a blast from the past. It seems like that whole conflict is no longer in the public consciousness at all, and instead we have some more directly politically aligned conflicts instead! Atheists vs religious people was not so cleanly split between Democrats and Republicans.
I must say reading this article evoked some nostalgia for that time, simply because the ideas were well-worn and comfortable. (I didn't feel nostalgic for the battles.)
This was probably the first time I began to think of the mid-2010s as a past time to reminisce about.
It's really unfortunate that SSC is gone, and somewhat ironic that the death-knell was the attraction of a kind of heat spoken about in this specific article. It is disappointing to see how quickly the climate of so much of the public commons has become so weaponized, so corrosive to participate in without some kind of a psychic jumpsuit. Maybe it was inevitable, anyways, with the rise of centralized social media.
When I think about centralized social media, I think about an ultra-fine grain subdivision and liquidation of human social interaction into a digitally mediated and transparently priced attention economy. I see an infinite screen pixelated by individual smartphones manned by individual human beings, being driven by a PageRank algorithm like a display controller. To visualize something like that is to visualize an incredible feat of human engineering. But it is also to visualize an intrinsically uncanny valley and a hellish cacophony of synthesized speech and high-strung puppets.
Do you get the sense that all the interaction is ginned up to seem more compelling than it really is, that it's sort of an arms race. Well, maybe it is. Maybe it is the same cold war which never really ended, simply accelerated in a new era with new weapons, and of course horrific new ways to enact the same old brutalities.
This article sounds convincing but I don't find it really hard to refute these weak man arguments:
“I hate people who frivolously
diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they’re ‘so speshul’ and go see a competent doctor.” - "you're so right! That is why I did a lot of research before I diagnosed myself. I'd really like to see a doctor about it as soon as I can."
"I am a proud atheist and I don’t like religion. Think of the terrible things done by religion, like the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church. They try to disturb the funerals of heroes because they think God hates everybody. But this is horrible. Religious people can’t justify why they do things like this. That’s why I’m proud to be an atheist.” - "these people are totally nuts! I as a Christian can not understand how they can justify their actions. No way this is something real Christians would do."
What would be your goal in "refuting" these arguments? Is it not just another form of taking the bait (albeit making it slightly harder for the other side)?
As the article states:
> Alice, for her part, didn’t bother bringing up that she never accused Beth of being careless, or that Beth had no stake in the matter. She saw no point in pretending that boxing in Beth and the other careful self- diagnosers in with the careless ones wasn’t her strategy all along.
The whole conversation is opened with the thinly-veiled intention of discrediting (all) self-diagnosed autists in an uncharitable bad-faith argument. Do you think you'd be somehow able to steer it away from this very specific intention of the original author?
I will admit that this opens the door for other readers to not be swayed by the original "argument" (at least not to the same degree). But overall the question remains how you avoid fighting a losing battle.
If weak men arguments are a struggle to re-center the conversation, it makes debate more like Sumo wrestling. This actually sounds like a great way to think about rhetoric. Each statement is an effort to center your own perspective and toss your opponents' out of the Overton ring.
In my view, there is one antidote to arguments that centralize a minority viewpoint, to borrow from the terminology of the article: People vote. I think this is one of the side benefits of democracy. When a party gets more than, say, 10% of the vote, then it can no longer be dismissed as a fringe party. Granted this is complicated by a two-party system giving people only two realistic choices, but the primaries within each party can similarly serve as a barometer of sentiment within that party.
If a "wing" of a party gains more than, say, 20% of the primary vote in that party, then it can no longer be dismissed as a fringe.
This seems true about smallish groups, like the example of a Jew in czarist Russia, but when the group is big enough to divide into multiple public-opinion subgroups, I'm not so sure. I think the feminism argument doesn't work here for that reason -- there are enough men that saying bad things about some of them doesn't necessarily disparage the rest.
I disagree. It's a mental association trick. If you say you don't like it when people do something, you are calling out a behavior. If you say you don't like it when men do something, you are (intentionally or not) causing the listener to associate men with that action when they may not have otherwise. You are proposing a negative association for them. It makes no difference how big the group is or how many subgroups there are.
There are definitely worse things that people can say about men than "I hate that some men do x", such as "all men are trash." (I've actually heard someone acting men should not be offended by this). I'm more offended by that sort of talk, but I think when people stop being careful about the words they choose, it will easily devolve into the latter.
I was all ready to read about the kind of people on 4chan, and all of a sudden I’m presented with the kind of argument made on 4chan. A surprise to be sure
Reminder that, regardless of what you see on the Internet, most people agree or at least understand each other on most issues when they meet in person.
A few of the details of the construction of this argument make me uneasy (in a roughly parallel way to the discomfort mentioned in section V). Particularly the assertion (end of section IV) that:
> Likewise, when a religious person attacks atheists who are moral relativists, or communists, or murderers, then all atheists have to band together to stop it somehow or they will have successfully poisoned people against atheism.
This seems like a bit of a major step. While I agree that "weak men" are a slippery trick to argue against a movement, I don't think that they necessitate a total defense of all aspects of the movement. Saying that atheists should defend murderers or Christians should defend the Westboro Baptist Church because they share the label of Christian is taking a good base idea and following it to false conclusions. What I took out of the argument around "weak men" was that communities need to be more self-policing rather than more broadly defensive. I was waiting for the point where Scott Alexander would say "thus Christians must declaim the Westboro Baptist Church instead of allowing themselves to be lumped under the same label." Additionally, there are parallels drawn between feminism and mens rights ideas that seem to be false-equivalencies, or at least false-parallels.
Yes, but the point is that people do this all the time. The catholic church covers up cases of priests who rape children because they know that it’s going to make the whole church look bad.
I am pretty sure that the person who orders the cover-up finds the rapists despicable. But they still do it, because scandals “splash” and tarnish way more than the peeople involved...
Our media industry industry operates this by virtue of Twitter.
"People are saying such-and-such" and then showing a Tweet from some random nobody (i.e. 'weak man') to validate the fact - is how so many narratives are created.
Or - by simply taking the tiniest, most innocuous bit of human interaction ('some guy on a plane did what?') and blowing it up into a national story, as though it is in any way representative of anything.
This is how in a sea of actual facts, the general truth can easily be distorted, and they are, all day long.
Part of the reason for this is because we connect with human stories, not data.
Steven Spielberg's advice to Mike Bay about Transformers, was 'It should be about the relationship between a teen boy and his car'.
We like Judge Judy and TMZ, just all frazzled up in ornamental ideology that makes us feel smart for reading the New Yorker.
If we were really boring and sober, the world would be a different place. (I'm looking at you, German politics, which someone maintains it's sanity even with 'actual Nazis' in the midst, not these America yahoo versions.)
This reminds me of the Buzzfeed story circa 2012 about how Christians were campaigning against Starbucks for their holiday cups unadorned with Christmas paraphernalia. It became a meme right away to the delight of people who already weren't very fond of Christians. I thought this was particularly strange because even my most conservative Christian friends held opinions in the vein of "If you're a Christian and are getting upset about these cups, you're way off". I was really curious to figure out who all of these Christians were that held this opinion and, lo-and-behold, it was one single Christian from Arizona. This particular "weak man" argument was the basis for much criticism of Christian culture for a couple of years.
Maybe this seems less significant nowadays after the media has shown us consistently over the better part of the last decade exactly what level of depravity it will sink to in order to gain a click, but at the time it was really surprising.