Redirected

I heard a story on NPR's Here and Now today, an interview with a man named Patrick Berlinquette, who just published an piece in the New York Times about a project he initiated to save lives.

Berlinquette had heard the story of a man named Kevin Hines, a man who had attempted suicide by walking off of the Golden Gate Bridge. After surviving the fall, Hines wrote an article about his experience. One passage stood out to Berlinquette:

If someone had intervened that day [the day he jumped], things would have absolutely been different. Due to my psychosis on that day, I could not say aloud “I need help now.” Yet, I desperately wanted someone to say to me, “Are you OK? Is something wrong?” or “Can I help you?”

Had any one of the hundreds of passersby engaged with me, it would have given me permission to share my darkness, and potentially have showed me that I had the ability on that day to choose life.

What if, Berlinquette asked himself, there were a way to intervene with someone considering suicide or self-harm? What kind of intervention would work?

Having worked for Google previously, Berlinquette was familiar with a different kind of intervention strategy, The Redirect Method (RM). RM was an anti-radicalization initiative aiming to interrupt ISIS's ability to recruit and radicalize people online. Using Google Adwords (now Google Ads), RM made use of the same tools that advertisers use to make their company's ads appear in response to a user's Google search. I search for "foam mattresses," and then I magically see "sponsored" results from foam mattress companies mixed in--even listed above--legitimate search results. 

RM wanted to use that power to resist ISIS recruitment. They successfully curated a set of preexisting videos and webpages that made ISIS and radicalization look unattractive. Using Adwords, they managed to get those counter-ISIS results mixed in with "authentic" (or "organic") search results from certain key words or phrases. The tactic appears to have worked, at least for some potential ISIS recruits. Typing something like "join ISIS" into Google yielded the anti-ISIS results.

Could something similar work to prevent people from delving further into suicidal ideation? Berlinquette wondered. To find out, he followed the blueprint that RM laid out (ostensibly for like-minded anti-radicalization groups). He whipped up a webpage that had the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline's number on it, purchasing (for a few hundred bucks) the ability to have that website listed when a user would enter certain phrases (such as "I want to end it all"). Results were quite promising. "Nearly one in three searchers who clicked my ad dialed the hotline — a conversion rate of 28 percent," he reports. "The average Google Ads conversion rate is 4 percent." When that campaign ended, he started another one to redirect potential mass shooters. That too seemed to work.

Great job, Berlinquette. Right? 

Yet Berlinquette's own success, the ease with which he found himself able to manipulate Google results, gave him pause. His advertising background taught him the power of micro-moments, instances where people reflexively turn to a device or screen to divert or occupy themselves. At such moments, users make themselves open to influence. A Google search for a product (an initial step in the purchasing process) often coincides with such micro-moments. An ad argeted at such a micro-moment and tailored to the searcher's input has incredible potential to shape or, as it were, redirect a user's purchase/attention. 

Half of all Google's users, Berlinquette writes, cannot readily distinguish between ad results and organic results. That's good if you're leading someone away from a dangerous path. It's a good thing that the Redirect Project and Berlinquette's variations on it capitalize on micro-moments' openness. 

But, Berlinquette notes, nothing in Google's infrastructure checks or ensures that such micro-momentary redirects route users in beneficent directions. "Google let me run the ads with no issue." he writes. "It didn’t seem to care what the language on my website was, or what phone number I directed people to. There was no vetting process to become a redirector. I didn’t need qualifications to be a conduit of peoples’ fates"

And if he can follow RM's blueprint, he warns, just about anyone can. So, in an effort to do more good, Berlinquette raises the alarm about the microtemporal avenues of advertisements salted throughout Google search results. He has no easy solutions, of course. It's unlikely, he tells interviewer Robin Young, that Google or the companies involved would support making advertisements seem less like authentic search results. Doing so would snap people out of the micro-moment. Some other kind of intervention (cough, cough, government) must happen instead.

Until it does, perhaps I'll start using DuckDuckGo.

More tomorrow,

JF

The Litany Against Anxiety

It's been a day of emotional labor, receiving others' anxiety and handing back calm support. It's normal friend stuff. I rely on others doing it regularly. Today there was just a lot of it, though, and it's left me a little drained.

As it happens, I have some anxiety about other stuff going on in my life. For whatever reason, when I expressed those worries to different folk today, I got, well, less than gentle support. You need to get on that and stop worrying so much about it.

I've gotten great support from these same sources before; I'll get it again. They were just stressed out and not in a place to pay out some emotion work. It's worth noting, also, that their advice was probably on point. But I wasn't needing advice; I needed support.

It reminds me to put a clamp on my own tendency to fix through advice. When someone presents me with anxiety, my first instinct is to banish the anxiety--through Brilliant Solutions! That reaction derives not from a sense that my advice would actually work. What do I know about other people's problems? It's about my own discomfort with anxiety generally. I hate being anxious. I hate for my loved ones to be anxious. I really hate getting handed others' anxiety as a problem for me to fix, a burden for me to carry, or a drama for me to act in. It takes energy, upsets my zen thing, which I don't have but aspire to.

Of course, as previously mentioned, I hand out my own anxiety freely.

But still.

The wiser way, I think, lies close to the "litany of fear" from Frank Herbert's Dune:

I must not fear. 
Fear is the mind-killer. 
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. 
I will face my fear. 
I will permit it to pass over me and through me. 
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. 
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. 
Only I will remain. 
-Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.

Change fear to anxiety. I don't mean "I must not be anxious." You can hardly help that. But you can say I must not participate in anxiety. I must not spread anxiety. I must not return anxiety for anxiety.

I will face anxiety (my own and others'). I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

That last part is key. I have to let myself feel the anxiety, the cringe, the gulp, the yikes, the everything. (So much of my energy, I recognize, I spend on dodging and weaving and ducking anxiety or awkwardness--much more than actually experiencing anxiety would burn up.) And I have to face it not as a permanent state but as an experience, a process with a beginning, middle, and end. The knowing it will end, I find, makes the middle more endurable.

Obviously this is an ideal. I don't do it well, I'm afraid. But I try.

Where the anxiety has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I, and my friends.

More tomorrow,

JF

Appeal to Anger-Injury

I hate anger. I'm angry at anger.


Let me specify: I hate how, in the (valuable! necessary!) renaissance of anger-appreciation, we've seen the validation of argumentum ad iram--I am right because I am angry. Emotion--righteous indignation especially--replaces evidence and reasoning. In online discourse, you see a related issue: alignments between one's anger and one's having been injured or harmed (argumentum ad injuriam?). The basic steps involved here might be as follows:

• I was injured (usually by some malicious or neglectful act).
• I am angry (at those I view as responsible for the act).
• Therefore, my stance (in whatever present context) is correct.

Or, to use ground this in a realistic example:

• I was mugged at knifepoint on campus.
• I'm furious at the university for denying me the right to carry a loaded gun.
• Therefore, concealed carry should be legal on campus.

In practice (online forums, mainly), this kind of argument has several negative effects. It skips over a lot of rhetorical ground. (You got mugged because of the campus antigun laws? Having a gun would have prevented your injury? Legalizing concealed carry would remedy your injury and/or prevent future muggings?) It also shifts the locus of debate from the ostensible object (the wisdom of concealed carry laws on campus) to the arguer (the reality of the my injury, my right to feel anger about it). This shift poisons the well of good-faith argument, setting up a field in which taking issues with my argument constitutes a direct or indirect slight against me personally. I protect myself from counterargument, in other words, by wrapping myself in a cloak of injury.

Have I been injured? Of course! Am I angry? Very much so! Am I right to be angry? Not the point!

And yes, my history and emotions inform my stance. My experience is a possible part of a greater argument for concealed carry laws. I was mugged on campus once at knifepoint, an experience that left me feeling scared and furious. I feel like if I had had my gun with me, the mugging would never have happened. Fair enough. But by offering that experience as an argument I open my interpretation of that experience up to questioning. Does evidence show that knifepoint muggings end better when the victim has a concealed gun? Would you have been able to reach for the hidden gun in time? Are the benefits of knife-wielding muggers thinking twice before mugging possible gun-owners greater than the costs of a campus full of people packing heat? It's not fair of me to respond to such questions with, "Well, if you'd been mugged, you'd think differently" or "How dare you suggest I don't have a right to be angry at the university?"

Another negative aspect to argumentum ad iram/injuriam arguments, though, is that they open you to the exact same arguments from the other side:

• I was hit by a stray bullet from some idiot shooting at a mugger.
• I'm furious that idiot was allowed to have and fire a gun.
• Therefore, concealed carry should be illegal on campus.

At that level, the debate becomes less "are concealed carry laws good" and more "whose anger/injury is greater? Whose is more righteous?" I could see variations that would nudge the argument either way: "My child was killed by a stray bullet..." or "My child was killed by a knife-wielding mugger..."

There's no possibility of evidence- or reason-based arguments here, only a clash of righteous indignations. Righteous indignation is by nature resistant to the kind of self-critical vulnerability that argument necessitates.

More tomorrow,

JF

Infinity Gauntlets

Today I led a special, all-church Sunday School session. My topic was "Christian Witness in a Polarized Age." In practice, it was Better Angels but with a Christian twist.

It went over well, I think. I need to try to arrange a formal Better Angels workshop soon.

One illustration that isn't Better Angels but that I find endlessly useful concerns the Infinity Gauntlet created and wielded by the supervillain Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. I really loved those movies. In particular, I liked how they gave Josh Brolin's Thanos a relatively rational, sensible motivation. In contrast to the 1990s comic book Thanos (who is in love with Death), the movies' Thanos believes that suffering comes from universal overpopulation. His solution involves creating a weapon hat combines the power of the "infinity stones," ancient artifacts of immense power. The result is the Infinity Gauntlet, which I described to my mainly non-superhero-savvy Sunday Schoolers as "a kind of magic glove that lets you destroy your enemies with a snap."

I simplify. But, essentially, that's what it is.

 

SPOILER FOR THE MOVIES--

At the end of Infinity War, Thanos achieves his goal, snaps his fingers--and half of all living things disintegrate into dust. It's pretty shocking, especially watching Tom Holland's Spider Man jabber in terror to Robert Downy, Jr.'s Tony Stark, who watches the young man vanish. Fast-forward to the sequel, and (long story short), Tony Stark makes his own gauntlet, snaps his fingers, and Thanos and his minions vanish.

I'm a sucker for superhero movies, and these are done especially well. (How I wish I could send a message back in time to young, nerdy me in the 80s and 90s: Just wait! All the stuff you're a nerd for liking becomes mainstream and cool in 25 years!)

But the Infinity Gauntlet is an especially cool metaphor for my work. Specifically, it's a fantasy of perfect victory--and perfect threat. You defeat your opponents, and they disappear. OR your opponents win--and you disappear.

In class today, I explained the "magic glove that destroys your foes."

"I gotta say," I admitted, "I'd be awfully tempted, especially after reading the latest newsfeeds. I held up my hand, poising my fingers to snap. "Uh-uh!" someone said.

I nearly snapped, and nearly snapped, sorely tempted.

But I didn't.

"But see," I said, "what if I'm certain that 'they'--the other team--wouldn't hesitate to use the gauntlet if they got their hands on one? What if they're very close to having one even now?"

That feeling underlies a lot of affective polarization: a zero-sum contest with existential stakes. We must destroy them before they destroy us.

But it is fantasy. Within liberal democracies, at least, political defeats never result in the losing side's mass evaporation. They persist, stubbornly, to return and fight again. The best we can hope for is that the force of our side's ideas eventually wins over a stable majority and the contestable becomes common sense. Only then are political battles fully won (and even then, the potential for re-politicizing issues exists). We don't get the tidy victory of a superhero movie.

Nor would we want that to be the case. In Endgame, it's a high-point, a cheer-moment, when Tony Stark snaps his fingers and Thanos sighs in defeat before blowing away to so much ash.

But Thanos's forces were inhuman monsters. We're dramaturgically primed not to see their existence as mattering. In real life, we face actual human beings. They may do monstrous things and act in inhuman ways. But they are nevertheless human. Destroying  them all as a group--well, that's something a Thanos would do.

I loved the Avengers movies. But I wonder what would have been different had Stark and the other Avengers had a conversation about the Gauntlet similar to Gandalf's warnings about the Ring of Power. The Ring cannot be used for good, he says. IT would do too much evil through the desire for good.

Endgame skirts around this by having an unimpeachable character--Captain America--dispose of the gauntlet. But Captain America is as fictional as Thanos. I do not have an unimpeachable character. And the other side can sometimes look to me very much like monsters, my struggle against them very much like, well, an endgame, an infinity war.

I'm glad there's no gauntlet.

More tomorrow,

JF

The Event Horizon of Pessimism

A 2019 Pew Research survey on views of race in America demonstrates, once again, that white and black USAmericans see racism very differently. Majorities of both groups agree that race relations in American are "generally bad," but the gap is telling: 56% of white people versus 71% of black people. Similar gaps persist for questions about whether Trump has made those relations worse (49% white versus 73% black agreement) and whether the legacy of slavery "affects the position of black people in American society today a great amount" (58% white versus 84% black agreement).

The survey registers broader gaps between the two groups' responses on two other questions. Asked whether they agree with the statement, "America hasn't gone far enough in giving blacks equal rights with whites," only 37% of white respondents agreed, contrasted with 78% black agreement. The most disturbing statistic for me, however, concerned the statement, that it is "Not too/Not at all likely that black people will eventually have equal rights." Only 7% of the white respondents agreed with that. Half the black respondents (50%) agreed.

I confess that last one stunned me. I had no idea that (if Pew is accurate here) half of the African-American population shares a view roughly analogous to certain strands of Afro-pessimism. In such thinking, anti-blackness is so baked into the cake of white supremacist society that nothing short of a radical revolution (think along the lines of Killmonger's plan from the film Black Panther). Whiteness as currently lived out cannot--will never--allow black and brown people to have equal standing in post-slavery, white supremacist, settler colonialist society.

As a critical practice, Afro-pessimism works productively to resist sunny (and usually white-produced) narratives of puppies-and-rainbows racial reconciliation. It forces us to grapple with the fact that fighting racism cannot be a matter of defeating individual cartoon racists or magically transforming hearts and minds. It must (also) be a structural, comprehensive transformation--a much taller, more difficult order. Like most potent activist affects, however, pessimism carries some risks. It can curdle into preemptive defeatism and withdrawal from struggle. Things will never change; why even try? 

I don't know enough to tell whether the 50% figure reflects a grim realism, hopeless resignation, or something else altogether. It is, however, sobering for me to see.

And, just as I was thinking about that, I heard this story on NPR. Three college students at Ole Miss  had gone to the site of Emmett Till's murder, shot up the memorial sign, and posed proudly for a pic in front of their vandalism, brandishing their rifles and smiling. They posted the photo on Instagram, where it apparently received over two hundred "likes." The boys have been kicked out of their fraternity. The University condemns the actions (but has declined to take action against the boys).

It's a shockingly vile act, what they did. It's beyond disturbing that they got so much cheering for doing it.

I should amend: it's shocking to me. I suspect that for a lot of black people--maybe 50%--it's no great surprise. What can you expect? They're white people in white supremacist society. Hating black people is inevitable, natural for them.

And I don't know whether to feel grimly realistic or hopelessly resigned. Either way, it's an occasion for pessimism.

More tomorrow,

JF

Performative Certainty

I've just made my brain pour out a big long response to my peers on a roundtable, so I'm a bit like a flat tire currently. Here's some B-side--stuff I wrote last night but ended up not sharing in quite the same way. Also--I wrote this on 7-26 but forgot to press "publish" until the 27th. Oops. Anyway:

A framing concept that kept imposing itself on my thoughts as I reflected on your papers comes from philosopher Amy Olberding. For years, Olberding had been a regular contributor to the influential (in philosophy) blog Feminist Philosophers. In late 2018, though, she retired from blogging there, posting an explanation on her personal page. The post is worth reading in full, but I’ll give a TL;DR snippet here:

Reading both social media and blog conversations among philosophers, I often feel demoralized. The people who speak most and most insistently seem not only to be absolutely clear about what they think, but think there is no other legitimate, respectable, or even moral way to think. My trouble is usually not that I think otherwise, but that I don’t entirely know what I think. And not knowing what to think is itself sometimes cast as shameful. In too many contexts, to confess confusion or uncertainty is to confess deficiency – sometimes in philosophical acumen, sometimes in “smarts,” sometimes in moral clarity, sometimes even in basic humanity.

Most broadly, I despair of the quick condemnation, scorn, and contempt that so often animates the commentary offered by the certain, whatever the direction of their certainty. I worry that we incentivize both certainty and hiding confusion. Or, more accurately, that we encourage people to *perform* their engagement in online conversations as if their views are confidently, firmly settled – worse, as if all alternatives are justly derided and scorned. We also thereby suppress contributions by those who can’t or won’t do this.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of performative certainty, how especially in nonpersonal encounters (online but also in our written work) we use rhetorical certainty or vehemence as a stand-in for the strength of our argument. I recognize in many past conversations the degree to which I feel pressured to present my views as the only views—or the only acceptable views—on a particular subject. And part of this certainty performance involves condemning any heterodox views, including nuance or uncertainty. Or, more often, I find I come into a conversation already in progress. There I suss out the consensus among my peers, discerning what the “correct” (my side) view is. The pressure then involves performing certain conformity to that view, repeatedly.

The performative aspect comes in when I find myself more firmly committed to a belief after several exchanges asserting/defending that belief. It’s rarely the case that I earn that level of certainty (via long and careful study, fully consulting and considering possible alternative views). Rather, I become certain because I’ve repeatedly performed certainty. My performances summon into being an investment in that assertion.

Olberding had occasion to reflect on this dynamic again a few months ago. I mentioned yesterday about Justin Weinberg's post about trans philosophy on Daily Nous and about the ucky conversation that followed it.  Performative certainty on all sides abounded. Olberding’s notion of performing certainty was invoked.

She herself eventually weighed in (again, just a snippet):

One more discouraging aspect of these debates to me is how their implications launch out into my life at large. I often feel that the rhetoric of the debate demands much more than that we take a “side” or, rather, that what is required to be on a “side” is to exile, despise, and generally remove from our respect those on the other “side.” [. . .]To take [a] side is to commit to not respecting those on the other side, where “respect” just means to treat with ordinary courtesy, to assume that the other morally cares and struggles, to assume that the other suffers. So, to take the “side” is to take up a kind of arms against the other side, not only disagreeing but separating myself from those on it, treating them as enemies it would be traitorious to engage as people both serious and sincere, as if one is required to be unkind to “them” precisely to demonstrate one’s kindness to “us,” those on the “side” one takes.

The problem is, Olberding continues, is that this kind of performative certainty just does not, cannot translate to her real life (Olberding teaches at the University of Oklahoma). She notes that most everyone in her life (rural Oklahoma) operates well to the right of everyone involved in this debate. She suspects that “some philosophers would find my life, or me, morally monstrous because I decline to purify the company I keep to those whose views mirror my own.” Nor can she simply bracket off the reality that everyone participating in this debate is in fact a person, a colleague. She continues:

All of this is perhaps a roundabout way of saying that the disregard of civil norms in these conversations is not confined to these conversations’ subject matter. “Civility” is regularly derided, I know, but one of the things incivility is being used to signal across these conversations is just who among us can be tolerated among us, with incivility being a way to say that “these people” are pushed out beyond the pale, that we hold “these people” in contempt. We don’t count ourselves bound to them and we actively unbind from them by treating them or speaking of them in ways colleagues do not treat colleagues. But since these are not just colleagues but also people, the concern is that there are much, much wider normative claims being implicitly made here, ones about ethics in relationships, in one’s sociality, and so forth.

Olberding laments “the dissonance entailed in realizing that I can have more humane conversations with my rural conservative friends amidst profoundly deeper moral disagreements than I could expect with philosophers whose political distance from me is comparably microscopic.” She ends by reflecting that, were she to post a simple (certain, sure, strong) “Fuck you, you miserable aching asshole!” reply on her Facebook feed, she’d get tons of instant likes, supportive replies expanding on the insult, etc. Whereas if she did that in real life, her friends would think she was having an aneurism.  

I think you can (as several people in replies on the comment thread did) take issue with Olberding's response vis-a-vis the specific issue of trans identities in philosophy. But as a general account/lament of how online ucky conversations go, I think she captures my sentiments perfectly. 

I'd want to add, though, that I think there are occasions where some performative certainty or something like it is important--expressing sympathy for someone who is suffering, reassuring someone who needs it, setting a boundary with a difficult person. I learned early on as a teacher that having a gear of no-question-about-it certainty to shift into now and then was very useful. 

But reactive certainty, defensive certainty? The certainty I find myself sliding into when I feel the need to signal my belonging to a group? This is dangerous.

More tomorrow,

JF

Ucky Conversations

I'm writing a response to others' papers in my roundtable about polarization. Something I'm trying to get into words is the notion of an "ucky" conversation. By "ucky" I mean those kind of (usually internet) debates that are certain to be messy, complicated, defined by strong feelings, and practically unavoidable.

Just about every domain or subdomain has longstanding internal debates that qualify as possible dealbreakers for a significant percentage of the participants. Airing out those debates fully can lead to schism; in the middle of it, you wonder how you were ever a coherent community to begin with.  There's polarization, ingroup/outgroup dynamics, virtue signalling (and its cousin, contempt signalling), biases up the wazoo. And above all there's that sinking, dreadful feeling of seeing people very close to you get extremely angry with each other--and maybe with you. Part of the dread is the knowledge that you yourself will eventually be asked to take a side. 

Or maybe you're already on a side, all-in by virtue of some facet of your identity. The conversation's still ucky, but it takes on a doomed, wearying tinge as well. Are we really still arguing about this? Is my continued participation in this community worth my time/energy/mental health? 

Ucky. 


The philosophy website Daily Nous recently hosted just such an ucky conversation about the tensions between female trans* philosophers and a group of feminist philosophers who are variously called "gender critical" (their term, which other feminists and gender theorists object to) or "trans-exclusionary radical feminists" (or TERFs, a term which they view as a slur).

Multiple issues intersect in this fight,and as an outsider to academic philosophy, my grasp of them is limited.  Is it ethical for cis-women to insist on cis-women-only spaces? What are the philosophical underpinnings of the statement, “Trans women are women”? Is asking that question an act of violence to trans* people? What kind of questions can philosophers pose about gender and trans identity without calling into question trans* folks’ lived experiences? Is that even a relevant consideration? What literature is relevant/required to cite/consult/master before writing about such issues? What kind of philosopher (cis or trans*) has the right to pose and address such questions?

It’s all very complicated. Lives and careers are at stake for the participants. Various trans* philosophers write that they feel pushed out of the field. Various trans-critical philosophers express the same feeling. The fight has become a lightning rod for multiple tensions in philosophy.

I have lots of feelings about this issue. But I have no wish to pretend like it's my place to weigh in on this debate, so I'm going to keep mum about it for now.

The point is that, a few months ago, Justin Weinberg, the founder of Daily Nous, attempted an irenic essay about how philosophers and Philosophy as a discipline could charitably but rigorously think about gender and identity. His post was long, thoughtful, perhaps painfully even-handed. The comment thread was—well, a flamethrower battle royale waged by advanced philosophers.

Ucky.

But fascinating. And yes, I realize I'm in a privileged position--as a non-philosopher and as a cis male person--to derive fascination from this debate. But I the dynamic in that argument isn't unique. Ucky conversations happen all the time, in and out of academia (the progressive/centrist-vs.- traditional UMC debate is ucky; the progressive-vs.-centrist debate about what to do is ucky). So yeah, such debates are things I feel the need to be curious about and not just upset by.

So, I'm trying to define some of the features of an ucky conversation. Here's a working list of some features of "uckiness":  

1.  Simmering tensions: extremely complicated, difficult, and overlapping histories and politics create longstanding tensions within a domain. Often these tensions have not fully been voiced in honest, direct, or sustained ways.
2. Precipitating scandal/crisis: These tensions culminate in a single precipitating event--a straw that breaks the camel's back--that provokes reaction, counter-reactions, counter-counter-reactions, etc.
3. Lightning rod: the reactions/counterreactions overload the precipitating scandal with all the affective baggage of those complicated tensions. The debate ends up being about more than what it's literally, ostensibly about.
4. Existential stakes: the prime participants on either side frame the stakes of the debate as existential struggle, a matter deeply tied to an aspect of their social selves.
5. Zero-sum: The identity struggle gets framed in zero-sum, winner-take-all terms. There can be only one. The existence/victory of one side means the obliteration of the other. There's no middle ground, and attempts to find one get branded as betrayal.
6. Affective polarization: Feelings run hot, and bad faith allegations (and bad-faith behavior) abound. The other side isn't just wrong but some version of wicked.
7. Splatter damage: in the debate/reaction/counterreaction (or even studious non-participation) comes at the price of marking oneself—or being marked—as a member of one “side” or the other. No one gets out clean.

Ucky.

I'll tweak this more. But it's a start, maybe.

More tomorrow,

JF