Stevesplaining Gotchas, or how we all want to be Perry Mason

Been a while, yes.  I never promised consistency!

Popular culture is always an influence on how we behave. It's not always for the worse, but we should at least be aware of that influence.  And I think we're seeing a potentially malign influence in online discussion and content discussion culture with that beloved moment: the Gotcha.

In the canons of literature, you can often find these moments. Whether it's in the sitting room at 221B Baker Street, the parlor of a country mansion where Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple hold the attention of a country squire's guests, or a courtroom where the likes of Perry Mason, Benjamin Matlock, or Jack McCoy seek justice, it's that magical moment where the protagonist employs hard-earned knowledge to catch their quarry in a trap of some form.  The truth crashes upon the tissue of lie, obfuscation, or uncertainty the antagonist has formed to protect themselves, all is revealed, and in some cases, the antagonist is compelled to confess to their crimes, assuming the protagonist has not made their admission irrelevant.  Performers like Raymond Burr and Sam Waterston have often made these moments of revelation compelling in the visual media.  And like anything else in mass visual media, the idea has wormed its way into our cognitive spaces.

The issue comes now with how much people want to pull this off in their day-to-day interactions. Some of us find ourselves unable to resist that urge, we want to be able to unleash The Truth, a veritable Mjolnir of crackling facts, upon someone's ignorance or falsity, to the stunned silence of our foes and the applause of those witnessing.  And that makes us susceptible to bad debating practice.

I mean, sometimes you do get such moments.  Sometimes, you have someone who expresses falsehoods with certainty and who can be revealed as wrong with some swift application of fact.  But it's not always a clear-cut thing.  Facts alone are not truth, they can be twisted into fortifying untruth through misunderstanding of what they mean.  Some facts are heavily reliant upon a wider context that, stripped from that context, are not so easily marshaled towards the ends of a crushing truth.  Focusing on special facts specifically for Gotcha! moments is more likely to distort the argument as a whole, as your entire approach is based entirely on hoping to get your foe to step into your perceived trap.  But if the rest of your argument has been perfunctory or weak, a more knowledgeable foe, even one who has an inconvenient fact thrown at them, can turn that weak overall argument against you. Arguments need a wider structure than just that special "Gotcha!"

The Gotcha is itself a narrative construct.  It's a moment for drama, not exchange of information or discussion of ideas.  The desire to seek and spring that "Gotcha!" on someone has a limited role in such and is, obviously, primarily in adversarial situations like witness cross-examination (hence how popular it is in legal drama).  Trying to create a Gotcha in other environments is wasting your time and everyone else's.

But perhaps most of all, seeking the Gotcha makes you prone to accepting distorted facts, even outright lies, because they fit your worldview and would make for a great Gotcha.

You are not Perry Mason, you are not Hercule Poirot.  You shouldn't want to be.  If you have a position on any topic you feel you need to defend, vigorously, make sure your research for it and argument for it is something sturdy, something that works.  Ignore the siren call of the Gotcha.

P.S. To clarify, a Gotcha isn't just some fact expressed with a slight bit of dramatic flair or other form of emphasis, making a sarcastic rejoinder isn't a Gotcha, it's just (potentially bad, likely rude) wit.  A Gotcha is not just a matter of  presentation but a purported fact with it, wielded to utterly ruin an opposing position in one blow.

Post 1 - Stevesplaining Weighing Principles versus Outcomes, or when to be a shrill Purist or a wishy-washy Compromiser. Now with 100% more Shitlib!

So.  John McCloy is spared my wrath once more.  I was in a discussion in a Discord and this bit, and reactions to it, provoked some discussion that echoes in my befogged noggin.

The following tweets are from a YouTube commentator/influencer/whatever-you-call-it known as "Shaun", he of the cranial bone avatar and prim English-accented delivery as dry as the Sahara.  I have seen (well, listened) to a few of his videos.  I do not always agree with him but he is at least thought provoking.  And has spared me any interest in reading or watching Harry Potter, which my overburdened Need-to-Watch/Need-to-Read list is very grateful for.

Anyway, to the main point.



Now, I think you can probably guess Shaun's political persuasions by this twitter thread.  He is, by my experience, on the left side of the aisle.  Significantly so.  And here he is, advocating people to refuse to vote for Biden next year if Biden does not call for a ceasefire in Gaza.  Now, you might be thinking that as he is British Shaun may not be aware of how the US political system works, but I'm fairly certain he understands it enough to recognize the likely outcome of Biden losing key swing states: the victory of Trump.  Not exactly the preferred choice for the left wing, right?  So why?


Now in some cases you could think this makes him an "accelerationist" leftist.  That is, he wants the worst to win because they'll wreck things and give an opening for a more preferable system to arise from the ashes.  You can see this train of thought in various far left circles, epitomized arguably by the Posadists and the idea that a world-shattering nuclear war would be a good thing because the survivors could build a proper socialist society in the rubble (and make contact with the socialist space aliens the Posadists believed were already out there… no, that's not a joke).

But I am not convinced Shaun is a Posadist or an accelerationist of any stripe.  So we go back to the question: why would an avowed leftist promote an outcome where an avowedly right-wing leader like Trump would take power over the most powerful nation-state existing today?

While I cannot speak for Shaun, I imagine the answer would come down to a fundamental ethical conflict that you find in politics and other fields, which I will term as Principles versus Outcomes.  I'm sure actual political philosophers and other people who actually have degrees would have far more precise terminology for it, but I'm not one of those folks, so I'll go with this term.

Essentially… where do you draw the line between someone or something being too immoral to stomach even if it brings something you find preferable. In this example, Shaun's essentially arguing to others (particularly his fellow leftists) that Biden's refusal to call for a ceasefire is his line.  Biden's action, or lack thereof, is an act of moral cowardice or depravity too great for Shaun to believe he can be supported at the ballot box, and so he's calling for folks not to give Biden their votes.  Unsaid, though clearly implied, is that if you still vote for Biden, you too hold a degree of moral culpability over the US government's implicit approval of Israel's actions in Gaza.  You have chosen to still give Biden your support, after all.

Now, the theoretical Biden supporter could retort with the obvious consequences of not voting for Biden.  Trump winning will most likely not do anything for the Palestinians in Gaza or elsewhere, and his avowed plans for a second administration are unlikely to be healthy for American democracy or for the stability of the world.  In short, whether or not you like what Biden's doing in this crisis, Trump would be worse, so not voting for Biden means you would be contributing in some way to that "getting worse" part.

This is not a new conundrum for people.  It's undoubtedly why Bismarck once famously compared politics to sausages — "If you want to enjoy it, don't think about what goes inside" — and has long fueled debates. Off the top of my head, I can easily name the Garrisonians of the antebellum abolitionist movement, who spent years eschewing involvement in federal politics, with the Constitution derided as a 'covenant with Hell" and "No Union with slaveholders!" as a battle cry.  Because to them, slavery was inherently approved of and supported by the existing American federal power, ergo to involve yourself with it was to tacitly approve of its defense of slavery, even if you sought to overturn it.  And you're never going to do that within the system, with all its compromising and dealmaking.

Others tried, of course.  And arguably they did light a very long fuse that eventually exploded into the end of slavery with the American Civil War, given the sectionalism exacerbated by both their petitions and by the Southern reaction to these "Fiends of Hell".  So you can argue the Garrisonians were wrong to take the tack they did.  But were they?  It's not like the US ended slavery constitutionally through peaceful voting and the losers accepting the reform.  The US ended slavery through violence, unleashed by the sectional conflict the Garrisonians contributed to setting off, which was given a constitutional support after the fact through the 13th Amendment.  And while initially pacifists, even the Garrisonians had come over to the violent method by the time of the war, with Garrison himself supporting the Union's efforts.  Of course, this debate cropped up again during that war, with Garrison and many others venting furiously when Lincoln, making his own principles vs. outcome calculations, refused to embrace the abolitionist cause until strategy made it both unavoidable and survivable.  To sum it up, this was not merely a case of the outcome-focused people being right and the principles-focused ones being wrong.

I could cite other cases — German Communists refusing to caucus with the Social Democrats to oppose the Nazis in 1932 for instance — but I want to move on.  So far, I imagine I make the Outcome side look better.  And it's a natural reaction; principles aren't material after all.  As a Ray Liotta character put it in one movie, "Being right's not a bulletproof vest!"  Compromising your principles to achieve a superior outcome is altogether reasonable and logical, one would even argue a more ethical way to go about things. Saving lives or making things better should matter more than purity.

But there's a trap on this consequentialist path, a trap that can and has turned plenty of people into agents of injustice and far worse.  It's the trap of assuming the outcome is all that matters; that there's no consequences to crossing llines in your own morality or view of ethics in the name of a superior outcome.  That's the path of justification for all kinds of crimes: torturing prisoners, killing civilians that get in your way, supporting brutality you ordinarily condemn.  Depending on the scope of your perceived outcome and the alternatives, this mindset can even blind you to calculating the actual merits of a situation so that you sacrifice principle for outcome needlessly.  And the next thing you know, you decide that the current situation means that maybe this guy who was convicted for crimes against humanity involving mass enslavement and the abuse of the slaves is useful for resisting another totalitarian system. So you act and instead of making him serve his sentence, you manipulate courts and ensure he gets his sentence vacated, and lo and behold, Alfried Krupp is free to reclaim his family company before the decade ends, and you're that rat bastard John McCloy who worked to free him… what, did you think I was letting you walk away McCloy?  Fool, my wrath is not so easily escaped!

…Where was I?

This is a complicated topic for precisely this reason.  It's easy to say "the outcome is what matters, if you have to sacrifice your principles for it, that's just life".  But principles matter.  They're a part of who we are, and the more we compromise them, the more we damage ourselves mentally and spiritually.  More than that, the easier we make it to self-justify doing terrible things, and the easier we lose sight of any principle.  Not only does this enable us to be corrupted, it makes us easier to manipulate.  There's nothing we can't be talked into supporting in the name of that superior result that everything else is being sacrificed for.

There is no easy answer to this.  Both sides of the line are dangerous if pushed too far.  You can become such a purist you cause evil because you've let perfect become the enemy of good enough, or you become such a compromiser that you'll swallow any evil because it's the practical thing to do.  Every situation, every issue, is different, unique, and shifts.  Today compromise may be the best choice but tomorrow standing fast may merit the best result.  All you can do, in the end, is make the choice and own the results.  To return to the above example, you can choose to agree with Shaun and not vote for Biden, accepting the consequence may be Donald Trump becoming President of the United States once more even if you consider such a terrible thing.  Or you can choose to disagree, which means accepting that the lives of Palestinians and Israelis in Gaza is not as important to you as the outcome of the upcoming US elections.  Choose, accept what it means honestly, and hope for the best.


Post-Script: Yes, we can probably argue whether Biden calling for a ceasefire publicly would lead to Bibi being influenced, but I wanted to focus on the structural issue of favoring principles or favoring outcomes.  As of latest reporting at time of writing, November 19th, the US may be close to brokering a ceasefire, but it's still uncertain.  I'll leave it to the future to see whether this happens and whether we ever learn the truth of what Biden's been doing behind the scenes to influence this matter.


Post-Post-Script: Having read and tweaked this a couple of times, I'm not pleased with it, but I've no idea on how to improve it.  I think I've hit the salient points, and I'm not sure how to better explain the mechanics involved in the choice being referenced.  So I'm a bit disappointed and I'm on the fence about whether to bother posting it tonight, though I likely will since itt's already written and the "Well, why not?" effect will sway me.

Introduction - Stevesplaining Mansplaining (Say that six times fast)

My name is Steve.  I am a security guard, fiction writer, and avid, sometimes voracious reader.  I play video games and write fiction and books and argue online about things I will never have direct control or power over because I don't know any better.  I am, as an old term would put it, something of an autodidact.  Recovering biblioholic, perhaps.  Maybe not recovering… look, I can quit when I want to, alright?!

So.  Blogs.  They're a thing.  I am the internet equivalent of an old man shaking a fist at the clouds so I can be behind the times here and there.  I have no reddit account (though Google means I can use it anyway), I use FB sparingly to interact with family who don't use Discord or such, and I use Discord because AIM shut down and ICQ is long gone.  I registered on Twitter and promptly ignored it and now laugh quietly in schadenfreude as a spoiled brat billionaire burns it down.  No sir, social media and I are, at best, passing acquaintances, and I have harsh opinions as to their lifestyle.

Now, another thing about me is my mind never wants to shut up.  Going to sleep can be a challenge unless I'm tired because my brain likes to keep running, even through the fog of sleep apnea.  Whenever I don't have something actively demanding mental power, I find my mind wandering to begin considering things.  Many things.  All sorts of subjects.  And then I kinda do this mental equivalent of masticating them, chewing and testing the ideas, thinking about them and thinking about the thinking. Then I have this tendency to just go into explanations about this or that to people as a part of conversation, which is how talking on Discord about  the current issues in Gaza led to me talking about the Nuremberg Trials and how Alfried Krupp got away with slavery and mass murder. (Go read William Manchester's The Arms of Krupp).

As for my name for this blog about an autodidact blathering about random subjects to occupy spare brain power (which may end up with a vlog adjacent since I do a lot of this thinking driving home from work or walking, points where I am not typing - assuming I decide to inflict my nasally-pitched voice upon your tender ears anyway), as you can guess it is rooted in my own self-aware tendency to sometimes talk about something like the other person does not know what is being discussed.  It's like mansplaining, but broader.

Namely, if I can sum up the concept of mansplaining as being rooted in this idea:

"I, a man, know X, and I assume you, a woman, do not know X because you are not a man, ergo I shall explain it to you"

 

…then "Stevesplaining" amounts to this:

"I, Steve, know X, and I assume you, Person Who Is Not Steve, do not know X because you are not me, ergo I shall explain it to you".

It's very annoying. I catch myself sometimes doing this. I blame it on a lingering eagerness to sound learned and smart and a tendency to just blather ideas at people regardless of whether they want to hear them or if they know what I'm talking about, perhaps better than I do.  So I'm naming this blog after this concept because A) I will be blathering and B) it's both funny and self-deprecating, and I'm assuming that will make people laugh and not do the internet equivalent of throwing rotten vegetables at me.

A vain hope, but it is there.

Anyway, this is my rambling introduction.  I may edit the aforementioned Krupp thing to be a followup post soon but other than that, I have no set schedule or content consideration.  But I do have something of a mission statement.

I'm not out to persuade you.  Lots of people write blogs or do vlogs or other things to persuade others that their way is right.  I'd just be one of many.  I'm out for the purpose of getting folks to think.  Think about things, think about thinking.  Not just "what is that" but "why do I think about it this way?".  Self-reflection and recognition of personal biases can help people avoid falling into terrible ideas through manipulation of their emotions and perceptions, and I feel this is vital in our current mutual cognitive space where social media algorithms keep feeding us free dopamine hits through confirmation bias.

Let's see how well I do.

…..what, you're still here?  Why?  You can't want me to exercise this concept on the idea of "Mansplaining", can you?... you do, don't you.  sigh Alright.

The word itself just invokes an image.  This douchebro slouched beside a woman, yammering away about a subject as if she's utterly ignorant of it and yet she's wearing a lab coat that says "phlebotomist" while he's explaining blood chemistry to her as if she's a particularly dull eight year old.  The idea of a man who condescendingly tells people things he knows as if he is the only person alive who has this knowledge and has deigned to provide you the fruit of this unique resource.  You half expect him to raise a sign saying "now applause" the moment his monologue ends.

It's a striking image.  And given the nature of people, it's certainly happened before.  But then you start to think about it and you wonder how common this particular sequence is, then you start to wonder just how you define it.  Where does mansplaining begin and end?  Does it apply every time some guy starts confidently talking about a subject without determining the listener's knowledge?  Is confidence in any form integral to the concept of mansplaining, or can someone be mansplaining simply because they're speaking of the subject in any tone?  For that matter, what is it if it's a woman explaining a subject confidently to a man as if he is ignorant, without verifying whether or not he is? Is that "womansplaining"?  "Ladysplaining?"  It's still as arrogant and condescending, but it doesn't feel the same, I imagine.  Or maybe it does to you.

It's an interesting subject to consider because the concept of mansplaining is rooted into wider matters of how the sexes interact.  The presumption of male superiority, of subjects that are just inherently masculine in the knowledge, of course a woman (or someone insufficiently masculine) wouldn't know it.  The general concept of a culture being patriarchal has this potential social interaction baked right in, whatever the actual truth of who would know what.

Maybe it's also a form of pickup attempt in some cases?  "See how much I know?  I'm smart, you should be interested in me."

Either way, it's something people should be self-aware of when deciding they want to show someone how smart they are.  You may just be the one confidently explaining to an expert your not-so-deep understanding of a subject they've made their career out of.  I'd recommend venturing for someone's knowledge on a subject before commencing your dissertation.

Or be like me and just develop a bizarre tendency to verbalize your thoughts.

Hopefully, the next entry of this blog will be more interesting.  Or it'll be me shaking my fist and screaming "CURSE YOU, JOHN MCCLOY!  CUUUUUUUURSE YOOOOOU!!!"