Ordinary people Twitter is not a slur

Recently, I've begun to think more and more about this phrase. Ordinary people twitter is not a slur. As a slogan, it lacks the necessary brutal directness of impact. As a subtle statement, it creeps up on you and surprises you when you least expect it.

In order to understand this phrase, it is necessary to understand what this mythical "ordinary people twitter" is. Who are these people, and what do they want?

Thing is. It is more of a negative identity than anything else. That is to say, it's easier to say what it is not in order to gradually approach an understanding of it, than to approach it head on with a declarative statement such as "ordinary people twitter is".

Ordinary people twitter does not have an emergency strategy for when hundreds of angry young men emerge in your mentions and threaten to spill over to your friends and family. It does not have such strategies for the very good reason that it does not need them. The thought of needing these strategies is absurd on the face of it - yet there it is.

But what do you do when your notifications are all about how much people hate you? What do you do when your family texts you to say that strange people are calling them? What do you do when they are outside your home, after learning the address from a public posting?

If you scratch your head in confusion at these questions and their relevance to twitter - congratulations. You are a solid member of ordinary people twitter.

The phrase "ordinary people twitter is not a slur" is a very nostalgic statement. It reminds of a time when you could post that you were getting a sandwich and get at most one fav. Nothing much happened, and that was okay. You posted ordinary things about ordinary things, and that was that. Life moved on.

Being a member of ordinary people twitter is not a bad thing. It is a good thing.

But it suggests the extraordinary nature of the situation the rest of us find ourselves in. The extraordinary twitter. Those who keep a watchful eye open for people acting in explicit bad faith, and live with the awareness that twitter admins - working on the assumption that ordinary people twitter is the only twitter - won't do pretty much of anything to help when the raging hordes come hording.

This is not a healthy state of mind. And it is not a healthy state of things. For anyone involved.

How to speedrun Twitter in ten easy steps

1. Don't be yourself. You're a nobody, and nobodies are not interesting.  Be someone else. Better yet: be a concept. The more immediately recognizable a concept, the better. The aim is not to be a genuine expression of anything related to you; the aim is to speedrun twitter, as fast as possible.

2. Be interesting. Latch on to some existing or emerging trend, and position yourself in relation to it. Become a source of information, amusement or familiarity. Enthuse your followers. Whatever you do, don't be boring.

3. Be about something. A thing. One singular, well defined, utterly overanalyzed thing. Stick to this thing religiously. Think the thing. Be the thing. Tweet the thing.

4. Be relevant. Stay on top of things. Help your followers stay on top of things. Generate a feedback loop that makes your followers help you stay on top of things. Become an up to date resource. Be a goto source.

5. Be useful. Provide tangible benefits to you followers. Be a voice worthy of being listened to. Post relevant links. Make your followers know more by virtue of following you. Help them along.

6. Be partisan. Being impartial and neutral takes a lot of time and effort, and has a poor return on investment. Take a stance and stick to it. Loudly and often.

7. Get into a lot of fights, but never participate. Getting into fights generates a lot of attention. Participating in fights generates a lot of badwill. Tweak this to your advantage.

8. Retweet like a mofo. Creating things on your own takes time, energy and effort, and chances are you'll only create one or two things at a time. Retweeting, however, takes less effort and even less time. Plus, there's a lot of interesting and useful things out there in need of more retweets. Make it happen.

9. Don't be afraid to meme. Memes are your friend. Everyone likes memes. Memes.

10. Be afraid to be boring, uninteresting and irrelevant. Make every effort to avoid these things. There is simply no time to waste, and being either of these things wastes more time than you or your followers have.

Identity politics for everyone

At times, I hear people decrying the horrors of identity politics. It's optional, they say. It distracts from real political issues, they say. Dividing people up is divisive, they say.

Okay then.

Let's reverse things. Let's remove all pretenses of division and focus on a unifying aspects that cuts across all intersectional barriers. Let's get back to basics.

Citizenship.

A fundamental part of citizenship is that any given citizen has the same rights and obligations as any other citizen. It doesn't matter who you are, where you were born or what you do for a living. The laws are uniformly applied across the board, and there are no distinctions between citizen A and citizen B. Both are citizens, and both are equal before the law.

Simple, easy, undivisive. It cannot become less identitarian than that.

But.

Complications arise when a particular group of citizens demand that they be treated like all other citizens. That their rights, beholden to them due to their status as citizens, are respected and enforced in practice, rather than just on paper. Is this an instance of identity politics, or just a simple assertion of citizenship?

The difference may appear subtle, but it has clear consequences for how such assertions are treated. If it is seen as identity politics, it is usually scoffed at and ignored, regarded as of little consequence. If it is seen as a proper assertion of citizenship, it is seen as the right thing to do and a correction of injustice.

The question is: how to tell the difference between the one and the other?

You wouldn't want to make a mistake and scoff at a group of citizens claiming their legitimate rights, now would you? That would divide the citizenry into two groups - those who have rights and those who do not - and that would be the opposite of an undivided whole. You would end up with identity politics, even as you try to keep it off the table while focusing on the real issues.

Identity politics is tricky like that.

Performing critiques of religion

The honorable Rothstein recently wrote a debate article, which was given the title "Religion does not contribute to a better society". Which to be sure is the main thesis of the article, and the main argument for this thesis is that it can be shown using statistics. The argument ends there, without going into specifics, but we have to be understanding of the limited space afforded by such articles.

The honorable Bengtson wrote a reply to this article, given the title "Religion does not exist in general!". The main thesis is that the concept of "religion" is about as wide as the Atlantic Ocean, and that it follows from this that it's hard to draw conclusions about it. That is not to say that it cannot be done, but the concept has to be used in a more specific and explicit manner before embarking on such conclusionary endeavors.

To use an analogy: both football and Starcraft are sports. There are similarities between them. There are also differences, and these differences are of a nature that those things that apply to Starcraft do not automagically also apply to football, and vice versa. It is possible to pontificate on sports in general, but it helps everyone involved to specify whether the discoursing is related to Starcraft, football or some other sport. Just to keep everyone on the same page, as it were.

Before things get heated, I want to apologize to any potential readers with strong religious feelings about sports. Just in case.

We live in a time where many are engaged in criticism of religion. Or, rather, what they think is criticism of religion. Specifically against Islam, which for reasons inexplicable is deemed more in need of criticism than other religions. "It must be allowed to criticize Islam!" they bellow repeatedly, and it's hard to deny that the feelings surrounding this issue are both strong and upset.

But. Do they understand what they mean when they use the words "criticism of religion"?

As stated above, "religion" as a concept is both unspecific and unwieldy. The same goes for the concept of "critique" - even more so since it's one of the least understood concepts of our time.

To simply bellow "ISLAM IS A SHITTY RELIGION THAT DOES NOT BELONG HERE" is not to perform critique. It's just uncouth, inarticulate and headless. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of people who refer to such bellowing when they say they have to be allowed to criticize Islam. While it would be far from me to imply that these people are uncouth, inarticulate and headless, they are indeed wrong.

Critique is something that takes time. And space. Literally. To critique something is to analyze this something (preferably in detail), to relate this something to something else (which preferably also is analyzed in detail), and to then proceed to describe the similarities, differences and points of contact between the two. All the while keeping the readers informed of the steps taken by the analysis, with the aim of having conveyed an understanding of both the analysis and the things analyzed. The purpose of critique is not to find faults and flaws, but to convey an understanding of the thing critiqued - an understanding that includes such faults and flaws.

Which, as you might imagine, requires many words to perform properly. Critiques and understandings are not done in a hurry.

Those who want to critique Islam has a formidable challenge ahead of them. First, they have to grok Islam, its contexts, its core values and its everyday practices. Then they have to build a framework to relate and compare this understanding to. Then begins the hard work of comparing, relating and contrasting, all the while presenting these efforts in such a way that one's understanding of Islam, the framework and eventual conclusions are made explicit to the reader.

It would not be unfair to propose that those who energetically claim their right to criticize Islam does not have this in mind. They do not have criticism in mind at all. They have a completely different verb in mind.

But, if you ever meet someone who energetically claims such a right, point them towards this post. To give them a sportsmanlike chance to say what they actually mean. -

Originally published March 3, 2015

The most useless knowledge in academia

A while ago, I completed my BA in education. It is, by far, one of the least useful degrees imaginable.

Now, don't get me wrong. It's useful in terms of marketable skills, personal growth and insights into the mysteries of being human. All the good jazz you expect from a degree. But.

There is a but.

The thing about education is that everyone has opinions about it. What it should be, how it should be conducted and what the end results of it ought to be. Everyone, from all walks of life, from all political camps, from all everything. Everyone has opinions. Everyone.

The thing about these opinions is that they very rarely are based on any particular knowledge about education. Or, rather, they are based on very particular pieces of knowledge, without much context to support them. Just to keep things in balance, this lack of context is made up for by an overflow of emotion and passion when it comes to discussing the issue.

Just the one, mind. One issue at a time.

The intuitive thing to do when these issues come up is to try to provide some context. Use that education to do some educating about education, as it were. More often than not, however, the passions are such that any attempt to educate will be met with fierce resistance and fiery disagreement. It discourages further attempts on the subject.

Which leads to interesting situations when things like trigger warning, safe spaces and campus politics come up. These things could be used as launch pads for discussions on curricula analysis, pedagogic philosophy or the role of educational institutions in contemporary society. They could be. But they aren't.

The thing is, of course, that these enthusiasts are not willing to learn. That's not the reason they engage in discussions about these issues, nor the reason they want to be seen publicly as engaged in discussions about these issues. Most discussions about education, it turns out, are not actually about education, but about broader issues that just happen to find purchase in popular perceptions about education.

Thus, knowing things about education is pretty much useless in such discussions. It's beside the point. It's like bringing a knife to a gunfight - no matter how fine the point is, it's just not relevant to the situation. And knowing a degree's worth about education is a degree of uselessness.

It does, however, save you from engaging in useless fights with posturing know-nothings. Which is a win in and of itself, no matter the subject.

And you get to brag that your BA thesis was all about how Quintilian's philosophy of education relates to modern day curricula, and the importance of remembering that the role of education is to teach the young ones to actualize themselves as social subjects. Good times all around.

The information complexity of bee sexuality

Recently I began to see people ambiently talking about bee sexuality. Which, as you might imagine, made me go wtf, until I stumbled upon the context (apparently, worker bees are all female, and Bee Movie got it wrong). Upon finding this out, the wtf factor disappeared, and so did my interest in the matter. But it did get me thinking about information processing.

Information processing happens in iteration cycles. The information differs from case to case, but the general process is the same every time, with up to five stages if the information is complex enough.

The first stage is the wtf stage. You have encountered something, and have no reference points for what it might be. The thing just exists, an intrusion into your ordinary mode of understanding the world around you. There are things that make sense, and there are things that do not. This thing is clearly in the latter category.

The second stage is the huh stage. You've been given or acquired some context to the thing, and started to make sense of it. You still don't understand it, but whenever you encounter it again, you can confidently go "huh, I've seen this before".

The third stage is the exploratory stage. You've begun to understand the thing, and are exploring the possibilities afforded by it. Thoughts that follow the lines of "if, then" are starting to enter your head, and you try it out just to see if the thens then. Just to see if you've actually understood the thing, and to satisfy your emerging curiosity.

The fourth stage is the experimental stage. You've grasped the thing, and now try to relate it to other things previously grasped. Using your accumulated body of knowledge, you try to find where the things belong and where it does not, and where it would produce interesting results if introduced. Some of your experiments will succeed, others will fail, some will fail spectacularly.

The fifth stage is the meh stage. You've understood the thing, done the thing, done the permutations of the thing, and know where to apply it to best effect. In short, you're rather bored with it, and can do it in your sleep or mindless working hours if called upon to do so.

Of course, this is not a thing that happens once and then never again. It happens all the time, all around us. Different people are at different stages, and that which engenders a wtf reaction in one person is a meh to another person. Nothing is static - everything is constantly processed.

The things to look out for are the iteration cycles. While these stages are pretty agnostic to the online/offline divide, the online has the advantage of faster iteration cycles. Things can go from wtf to meh faster than you think, and more things can undergo this transition in parallel than you imagine. Which means that, left to its own devices, the online can produce some spectacularly fast mehs, and generate demand for very particular wtfs that seem very far from the offline experience.

So the next time you stumble upon discussions of bee sexuality, remember this post. Introducing it to the context might produce some interesting results. -

My endorsement in the 2016 US presidential election

Sometimes people ask me who I'd vote for in the US presidential election. I always answer the same way: whoever wins will become the president.

This tends to confuse the askers rather than enlighten them. Yet, as a foreigner who is utterly unaffected by US domestic politics, it is my position. No matter who wins, they will become president, and the US foreign policy will remain unaffected. The drone killings will continue and the occupations of randomly chosen countries will go on. Guantanamo will remain open.

The institutional setup of the US is such that it doesn't really matter who's at the top. The trends and forces that eventually result in the state apparatus doing what it does are largely autonomous and uncaring. They might affect those in close proximity to a particular situation - such as, say, the person holding office - but the momentum built up by the sheer weight of institutional determinism makes the overall picture utterly predictable. No matter who this person might be, or how their new life situation suits them.

Thus, I'm not too invested in the comings and goings of the electoral shenanigans. There are only so many hours in a day, and so very many things to do in them.

But I must say that the dude that ran for president in 2008 would make a rather neat president. He said some neat things about hope and change. I wonder what happened to him.