Words, usages, and phrases that annoy the shit out of you...

afaict very few published uses of "callout culture" are not pejorative strawman articles whose authors are contemptuous of the groups/communities/movements under discussion in the first place.

― ﴿→ ☺ (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, 11 July 2017 16:42

It's difficult to really gauge any of these things. There are thousands of online communities and it's hard to take anybody's word for how bad or how exaggerated a problem is.

Woke douches are a problem but I'm less worried about them than the really vicious bullies that use a good cause to excuse their actions. They're fewer and further between than alt-right trolls but they can have a chilling effect on communities.

Ye Mad Puffin- I wouldn't say putting on a rainbow profile counts for nothing but virtue signalling is supposed to be a more obnoxious display, like some person taking every opportunity to tell you how many black and gay friends they've got.

there are lots of legit reasons to call out bullshit and shitty behavior that are not reducible to "i want to stroke my own ego" or "i think this will lead directly to change of the thing i am calling out."

????

if you're not doing it to effect change and you're not doing it to stroke your ego why are you doing it???

I think Doctor Casino was describing those who act as if their criticisms will deal out a killing or penultimate blow to a problem.

in reviews: "one of the pleasures of..." this novel/movie/album/restaurant.

too lofty and grand-sounding, just get to the point

if you're not doing it to effect change and you're not doing it to stroke your ego why are you doing it???

― Mordy, Tuesday, July 11, 2017 9:53 AM (nine minutes ago)

getting laid, avoiding being called out as complicit/silent on a subject, looking busy at work

the first 2 are for sure virtue signaling!!!

Would be funny if someone's whole online persona was just the result of trying to look busy at work.

@ Mordy - your original statement was pretty much all callout culture is "virtue signaling" since yelling at someone on twitter has yet in history to produce any effect beyond self-aggrandizement. I did add "directly" to suggest that there might be indirect paths to change through verbalizing and articulating why something is not okay. because otherwise one might as well say "going to the anti-trump inaugural protests was only about ego since yelling at a president on park avenue has yet in history to produce any effect beyond self-aggrandizement." like obviously there are all kinds of "effects" going on there, like a group of people affirming to each other that they are not alone, building interpersonal connections (or phatic infrastructure, to borrow from julia elyachar) that lead to other kinds of organizing/resistance/whatever, or just conjuring up a very visible and strong symbol to others not in attendance that the trumpist narrative is not the only one, etc. etc. i could be wrong but i feel like you'd probably be with me on protest participation in this sense, so the emphasis on "producing any effect" seems odd to me.

but you've also sort of blurred together "callout culture" and "yelling at someone on twitter" which means we're already within an oddly delimited version of calling-shit-out - the only way to call shit out is to yell at someone on twitter? really? but even if we're just talking about virtual spaces though, calling shit out can do all kinds of practical work that's not directly related to making the person who's being bad stop doing what they're doing. for example, it might be a way of reaffirming the shared values of a community for the benefit of new arrivals. like if FlamePoster69 shows up here and starts swearing in all caps and flaming people, other people taking the time to post "hey that's not cool" or "i'm flagging FlamePoster69's post, this is not the kind of board where we do this kind of thing," rather than just letting it pass or trusting that the mods will delete anything really offensive... it may not cause FlamePoster69 to knock it off, but maybe a lurking 13-year-old, reading this exchange, is learning what's good and bad etiquette here. i might be biased by my own life experience here - i was talking about this on the gamergate thread a while ago i think, how helpful it was to me to read stuff like this as i was first getting online in 1992, 1993, oh okay there are these things called 'flames' and the respected members of this community are saying 'don't do this.' flash forward to the present day, post-gamergate, and yeah i do think it's very important that people don't sit by and let things go un-called-out in fan communities, it's an important way that new 13-year-olds learn that not only is harassment Not Okay, but also that behaviors X Y and Z which would not have occurred to them to be harassment, might be on that continuum.

those are just examples close to my experience, and virtual ones (to fit with your "twitter" thing), but there are other, real-world spaces where this is much more pressing and urgent, not just about campaigning for certain behavioral norms but about establishing real safety, e.g. in kink communities where establishing some standards around consent and safe practices, and calling out sketchy/creepy/assaulty behavior is a tool available to actually protect people from real harm, by giving them a heads up that a given event's moderators are really lax about safety and screening or whatever. that's a space where physical intimacy/vulnerability kind of ups the potential for people to be in danger but maybe that could be put on a continuum with lots of other kinds of spaces where it's good to have some guideposts for your own safety.

or maybe a much much more mild version is, you're at an organizing meeting and there is a cis dude there being just terrible, interrupting everybody, shutting down non-cis-dudes' ideas with sexist language or something. (note, i've probably been on the continuum of that-cis-dudeness at points in my life.) there are tons of ways of handling something like that that are going to depend on diplomacy, people's relationships, the vibe in the room, the overall mission of the organization, whatever, but i don't think it's inherently wrong or purposeless or ego-based to take the approach of calling it out, whether in that room or on the listserv later, for the same reasons as you call out the flaming newbie poster. because otherwise you let it slide and the bad shit becomes the norm for the group, shutting things down and pushing all kinds of people out of the picture. to critics this probably looks like "policing" but i mean if a group or community has any hard limits on its values ("no racist hate-mongering is permitted") then some degree of "policing," even through informal and voluntary action, is inevitable and not inherently problematic.

Calling out behavior in smaller communities can serve useful purposes but doing it on Twitter doesn't. Also I said "pretty much all" which I hope admits rare examples where it can be useful. But tbph 99% of the "call outs" I've seen over the last decade have been entirely about virtue signaling and had nothing to do with a) cleaning up the space or b) changing hearts + minds.

personally i am extremely skeptical of the effectiveness of more "helpful" or dialogic approaches to "calling out" online. sure irl in a face to face setting you may be able to have such conversations and they may be fruitful etc. but online is just not the medium (well social media, blogging etc. emails may be more useful i suppose if you're carrying on a personal correspondence with someone).

the political and online are both inherently agonistic basically, the only alternative to "virtue signaling" is quietism

(which is why people should realize that online isn't anything and if they want to be politically engaged they should do it irl)

but back to ronan's point - virtue signaling is used all the time on uk internet to decry any leftist saying anything remotely left-wing - recently saw someone complain about virtue signaling when someone was bemoaning the high rate of sexual violence in glasgow for instance.

fwiw, as my own contribution to the norms of this board, I think it might be a happier and more fun space if this thread remained the preserve of complaining about "yumsies" etc, and those folks who are recurrently annoyed by "political correctness" etc take it to one of the several crypto-conservative threads where these arguments have already been hashed out. but this is only my opinion.

but I'm glad Mordy concedes that when he says pretty much all callout culture, he actually only means stuff he's personally seen on twitter.

pretty sure when the person above complained about "virtue signaling" they were complaining about people who are "recurrently annoyed by 'political correctness'" but if u include them in yr critique then i don't disagree

i just want to add one thing re this idea that these neologisms criticizing the left are fouled by their prevalent use on the right: the left in 2017 engages in a lot of bad faith, destructive and shitty behavior. a lot of it is about ostracization, thought policing, social targeting, shibboleths, and virtue signaling. some of it is useful! but a lot of it is toxic and self-destructive. getting rid of the terminology used to describe it, bc u don't like some of the ppl who criticize the left, isn't going to fix the problems. just bc the right has found a handy club with which to blunt their historical political opponents doesn't mean the club is fake.

but (sorry, that posted before I was done and probably looks a little snarkier than intended), I also don't think it's self-evident that things posted on twitter or elsewhere online don't serve any of these same useful purposes, or other ones. citation needed for that. again I think virtual communities like ILX or various video game fandoms might be totally appropriate spaces for calling shit out. would the gamergate situation have been the same, or better, if all the people criticizing harassment or speaking up for the victims had just stayed silent?

since these are the real examples that come to mind maybe I do get a little touchy about this, because in that saga, the people complaining about "SJWs" and "virtue signalling" were on the side of unrestricted harassment under the pretexts of concerns about ethics in video game journalism, and the "virtue signallers" and out-callers were those trying to let the victims know they were not alone, and let the harassers know they did not define the hobby or the community. i'm not imagining you on the side of the bad guys here, to be clear, but these are my own anecdotal reference points.

anyway though 99% of everything posted on the internet/twitter is crap, and I wouldn't conclude, from seeing crap music criticism on twitter, that music criticism is pretty much all rotten.

sorry to derail here, back to the "yumsies" but my friend just got cancelled on for a show and this was the intro text:

"Hiiiiii so I've got bad newwwwws"

uh yeah

What's the difference between 'calling out' and 'criticism'? Is criticism virtue signaling?

You can criticize someone in private. I think most people have found that if you want to get a positive impact from criticism you should do it in private and in very soft, kind tones. Callout culture is angry public denouncement.

as we're recycling old conversations I should point out again that every major social movement has had moderates tell them they were putting ppl off with their strident tone

has every major social movement been criticized for being nasty spiteful jerks tho?

On original topic - Juno probe's view of the Great Red Spot occasioned the programme director to use the atavistic "up close and personal", upon which I discovered my 90s/00s rage against that phrase is intact.

xp .... almost certainly?

Yeah idk about that ducking criticism behind "we are just too great our detractors are the reactionaries of history" isn't too great a look esp when there's evidence that you suck sitting right there like jacobins don't get to say sure the pile of heads but all of history the movers get backtalk

I'm not an activist but it's still obvious to me that a lot of discourse around social change follows predictable patterns & moderates telling radicals they'd have more luck and be more persuasive if only they'd be nicer is one of them. the politics of civility is obviously fraught (cf. plenty of ilx threads about rudeness, FP &c.) partly because it is another arena in which the same old class/political antagonisms are fought out in another guise. I think there is something gross and harmful in the crude trigger-happy piety that call-out culture can be at its worst, but the real social and political gulfs that it exposes seem like the more important issues to focus on

It's probably been upthread and on other threads but I'm really sick of people using "experts" as a dirty word. It's one of the ones that bothers me the most.

I can never take that word seriously after the experts exchange website

(it was an early google search optimized site for IT-related questions but their original domain was, no shit, expertsexchange.com)

the politics of civility is obviously fraught (cf. plenty of ilx threads about rudeness, FP &c.)

imo, ilx discourse on rudeness and the existence of FPs has little to do with politics and everything to do with personal rudeness that rises to the level of disgusting savagery. iow, the verbal equivalent of spitting or pissing on someone, and usually over opinions that are never on the order of neo-Nazism, white supremacy or similar causes that might justify such raw abuse.

xp

OK, so I'm biassed because I have (almost) consistently received highly qualified and accurate answers from E-E experts. Of those that were not quite so accurate or satisfactory, part of the blame was attributable to me not being specific enough in the way I structured my question.

That brings me to my point. If you ask a question poorly, then expect a poor answer.

Ask a question about horticulture in the equine care forum, and you will get pretty poor answers.

xp that sounds political to me! the people who oppose FP obviously do not see it just in terms of personal rudeness. etiquette and behavioural norms are politically & socially charged, that's implicit in your idea that it might be ok to break decorum for political reasons under some circumstances.

You can criticize someone in private. I think most people have found that if you want to get a positive impact from criticism you should do it in private and in very soft, kind tones. Callout culture is angry public denouncement.

Okay, but then should we not bother to post here and discuss articles in newspapers that analyse and critique government policies, etc? As in, you'd agree that there's a something else that is neither private personal criticism (agree this is the way to get a person to improve) nor public twitter callouts?

as we're recycling old conversations I should point out again that every major social movement has had moderates tell them they were putting ppl off with their strident tone

Yus

But also to open this one out a bit - e.g. - abolitionists would break into private property in order to free slaves; moderates of the time would criticise them for them going so far in following their ideals that they broke the law; looking back on it the slavery was clearly so bad as to more or less handwave the breaking and entering of slaver's plantations in order to end it and also it wouldn't have ended without direct action. I don't know what would be the equivalent of actually breaking into plantations to free slaves, for today's callout culture?

What I'm saying is, sure, almost every social movement got tone-policing from moderates, but that tone-policing looks silly in proportion to how much those movements actually achieved. Whereas if the twitter callouts don't achieve anything (I have no idea if they do! I don't know enough about it to say) then mebbe the tone critique is more valid?

xxpz Correct. Those are not the only two options. Criticizing powerful public figures in the press or whatever is a different beast entirely.

Shot, chaser

I... worked on this story for a year... and he... he just tweeted it out

Sooooo, I wrote a thing :)

I'm thinking now that a lot of the problem with some of this terminology today is that it's not specific enough, maybe doesn't have enough additions and variants.

You get people essentially saying

"It's only political correctness when I don't like it"

Or

"It's not cultural appropriation when I think it's okay"

"tone police"

Essentially anything that means "it's ok when I do it"

flappy bird getting back to the core, the heart usage

Yeah 'Tone policing' may be a loaded term itself I guess.

Overall, feels like having good control of tone is a great skill, definitely something to try and get locked down if you want to achieve anything, but also maybe something that can be very difficult, considering the varied nature of the 'audience' even when the audience is just another person face to face, and more so when the audience is online (millions of readers all with their own tendencies); and so the expectation that people express themselves with precision and an ear for how it's going to go over may sometimes be questionable imo

All that said I don't disagree that an awful lot of twitter callouts (that I've seen around anyway) have been pretty cloth-eared

(Although the large number of people who with great reliability come out with reactions such as 'Black lives matter? What about white lives, why are you saying white lives don't matter???' 'Women's rights, what, don't men have rights???' are themselves heading into supremely cloth-eared territory, no?)

flappy bird getting back to the core, the heart usage

they always stick me in the appendix because they don't think i'm the pretty one

"My arms and wrists are numb." God would people just shut the fuck up already?

Thats a phrase?

Don't forget "my face and lips are numb."

i'm old and am sick of political neologisms in the first place. oh, if we use new words maybe people won't notice that they're the same fucking ideas and we don't have to address the problematic implications of those ideas!

more political discourse should be framed in reference to issues surrounding the defenestration of prague. and that's my uncool conservative idea.