Who Gets to Talk?
I've been writing about Coyote and Crow recently. (Start with the Overview.) It's a cool game, but it raises some very sticky issues. The more I think about them, the more I believe they connect with some wider trends, and those trends are going to make even more trouble if we don't fix them. That's what I do, I connect the dots; I'm a generalist with some areas of expertise. And I'm a bard, so I talk about things. A lot.
Who gets to talk?
That's a huge issue in this game. The rules keep telling non-Native American players not to do or say things, while Native American players are given extra options. This presents the premise that, because the game has a tribal theme, people who are tribe members have more rights to play with it and talk about topics and make choices, while people who are not tribe members have less rights. Well, any time you divide people by race, you're on thin ice; and when you go beyond that to giving people more or less rights because of it, that causes problems. But it's really the talking part that bothers me the most right now.
EDIT 12/7/21 -- Another reader has decided to avoid Coyote and Crow on the basis of racial divisions.
Because I just tussling with that, in a different context, not long before my PDF of the gamebook arrived. See The Problem of "Woke Racism." At that time, I was mainly focused on lip service vs. concrete actions and how saying you're against racism isn't the same as working against racism.
I talked about how, if people of color ask you for something, and you support them, then you should do it.
Coyote and Crow rules, written by an almost-entirely-Native American design team, ask for things that violate my ethics. The rules tell non-Native Americans not to play "two spirit" characters, and in providing no alternative, would leave those players only able to play heteronormative, gender-conforming characters. That simultaneously tells me I can't play a character like myself, I can't let other QUILTBAG folks do so, and it's okay to divide people by race and then give them different amounts of the game. I don't agree with any of that. It makes me unhappy when a group of people I generally like, respect, and admire does something so embarrassingly bad.
What's worse, the general message in the racially divided sidebars is that non-Native Americans should sit down, shut up, and stay out of the way of the Native Americans. Their opinions are not wanted and not welcome, and they are absolutely not trusted to be competent with research or roleplaying. Or apparently even basic manners. More confusingly, other parts of the prerelease materials and the book encourage non-Native American people to play the game and not be afraid of it. This conflict is making some people anxious enough to back away, while the "don't" stream is driving off others.
And that's the same thing I see in "woke racism" and all the other woke-isms. Their leading tactic is to shut people up. Now, I get why. Who hasn't wanted to tell the mouthy mansplaining asshole to shut the fuck up? But here's the problem. Telling him to shut up because he is a man is completely different than telling him to shut up because he's an asshole and his actions are derailing an important conversation other people want to have. The former is based on a group affinity that he didn't choose; the latter are individual things that he has at least some choice over. The former is not okay, and the latter are.
I've done it, sometimes. I've said "If you don't have a uterus, you don't get an opinion on abortion." It's tempting. It seems reasonable. But what about the guy who lost a child to his girlfriend's abortion? The one whose girlfriend stuck a pin through his condoms and then stuck him for child support? The woman who doesn't have a uterus? Don't they have a dog in this fight, even if their exact concerns or lived experiences are different from the main group?
When I was looking at the problematic sidebars in Coyote and Crow, I kept asking myself: What problems could this cause? Who does this hurt? Are there any people in this group who have grounds to speak up? What are the exceptions? What are the specific reasons for and against letting someone participate fully? Are there better solutions than this one? And I didn't have to go far before getting to some nasty answers. It's really important to ask what are the reasons for including or excluding someone, the justification for doing things. If you can't find the details, the argument is probably not solid.
What I see is woke-isms spreading the idea that it's laudable to exclude people from public conversation, and to deny their rights to opinions, because of who and what they are, rather than just what they are doing. When you deny people's right to free expression, you are putting a sealed pot on a hot stove, and sooner or later something is going to explode. This is a bad idea.
Plus you're undermining your own right to speech and opinions, because in politics and activism, every weapon you get to use, your opponents also get to use. Never bring to the field anything you can't handle being aimed at you.
Furthermore, when you shut down discussion, you make it harder to solve problems, which is not helping your cause, no matter what it is. Problems don't get solved in an echo chamber. They get solved in the groan zone. Everyone hates the groan zone, which is how it gets its name, but that's where civilization figures out solutions.
Now, when I think about my audience, they're all like-minded people in that we get along well and each has something(s) in common with me. But you're not all like each other. Each of you matches different parts of me. You're young and old, big and small, abled or with a variety of disabilities, diverse neurotypes and intelligences, assorted religions and ethnicities, pretty much the whole QUILTBAG and all sorts of family geometries, living all over the globe, with a truly impressive array of careers and hobbies. We don't always agree on everything. We do usually manage to discuss things without sparking a flamewar. And the diversity of your lived experience, your research, your observations, gives me a parallax of viewpoints approximating the sainted Arecibo telescope. I don't want to shut down any of it. Heck, I usually don't even say "Cool it down some" unless somebody says "Ouch." Because shutting down the discussion, blocking out a viewpoint, would obscure part of what I can see through you and you through each other and all of us together.
Granted, you're intelligent folks who are civil more than 99% of the time. (I have maybe 1-2 times a year when things really heat up, which is well under 1% of days, let alone posts or comments.) It's a lot harder to keep things open when the signal-to-noise ratio is bad, or someone's signal is interfering with other people's signals. I just don't think that shutting down is a good general solution. Spot-quashing, yes, if you've tried other methods first and they haven't worked. But shutting down whole groups, telling them their ideas aren't welcome and they don't deserve as much as other people, that's a problem. Modeling and otherwise teaching communication and people skills is better.
Even more obnoxious is the wokeist tactic of saying that, if you disagree with them, you are the problem. They say that disagreeing with them, because they've claimed to be anti-badthing, makes you the badthing they are anti. This is not logic, it's a form of ad hominem attack and usually also name calling, and they don't want to hear your logic. They're not answering your arguments, whatever those were, at all. When people aren't talking about specific facts or opinions or other arguments, but are instead talking about the "isness" of individuals or groups, the conversation has gone off the rails. When they're using group membership to quash speech and opinions, that's a form of oppression and it causes problems. Doesn't matter if you're on the bottom, if you manage to get on top and use that vantage to stomp someone else, it is going to cause problems no matter how good you think it feels. And whenever a group opposes all disagreement, you get groupthink, and that's really a problem.
I see another thread of this tangle in social media. Right now, that's where most people do a lot of talking, about things of small or large important. Getting shut out of that, therefore, is a serious problem. It impairs communication. And the corporations who own that sort-of-public space where so much of the world's talking now happens -- they wield the banhammer with a heavy and often invisible hand. There's no appeal. Because we're treating paid, private services like a public plaza, and they don't think they have to respect the same rights there. So that's a problem. Yes, I know, trolls and lies are also big problems. But when you start banning people in general for irritating people, instead of giving individual users tools to say "I want nothing to do with username Asshole," that causes problems. Inevitably it's not just individual assholes who get banned. It's groups. It's unpopular ideas. Sure it's nice when someone I disagree with gets shut down, but that also alarms me, because it's a reminder that I and people I agree with and our unpopular ideas could just as easily be shut down. And we have been; push too hard on some climate issues, you cost people money, you can get kicked out of places. &c&c. That's the devil of censorship and exclusion from public discourse. Along with the bathwater of trolls, the baby of activists gets tossed out. Along with the bathwater of deepfakes tend to go the baby of inconvenient truths. The whole point of free expression is to protect unpopular expression, because of some of that shit is actually needed, and often you can't tell which until well after people quit arguing about it.
So in a whole lot of different places and ways, people are telling each other to sit down and shut up, and denying each other's rights to opinions and expressions and just a different problem-solving approach. That guts the problem-solving process and while we're at it ethical decision making processes.
We need to talk. Everyone needs to talk. Everyone needs to defend everyone else's right to talk. We need to find better ways of improving the signal-to-noise ratio and solving problems than trying to shut up people we disagree with.
How Can We Talk?
So if we need to talk about touchy topics, which happens a lot, what can we do to improve signal to noise ratio, lower tension, and otherwise improve the chances of success? I have some ideas.
* Teach communication skills. Instead of nagging, model desired behavior. Improve your communication skills. Know how to have difficult conversations. The more people do this, the more we create a culture of healthy and effective communication. We need that if we're going to survive.
* Teach about logical fallacies and minimize their use. However, be aware that what is a fallacy in a logical argument may not always be a fallacy in other contexts. "Slippery slope" is a logical fallacy, but a political tactic, used to pass incremental laws that eventually bring down the main target -- and the best way to stop it is to know that and block the early attempts.
* Break down big problems into smaller, manageable parts. Write the book one bird at a time. Fixing broken communication is a big problem. Learning a communication skill, moderating a pleasant blog, or teaching a class on validation are all smaller steps toward that goal.
* Distinguish between people who don't know and people who don't care, and people who just want to make trouble for the hell of it. A lack of knowledge is easily fixed with education. A lack of fucks to give is much harder to fix. The challenge is that these can be really hard to tell apart, they require different solutions, and they often need close examination to distinguish, which is about as fun as pouring water on the dead skunk frozen to the porch so you can pry it off. But if somebody doesn't do it, that skunk is staying there until spring thaw.
* Use honeybumping. Honeybees head-butt each other to discourage a forager from directing more bees to a dangerous or drained location. They don't attack the waggle-dancer or shove her out of the hive. They just try to correct that one message. We have an advantage because our language technology is better than honeybee language technology; we have the ability to explain with logical arguments why a given message is flawed. If we use it. So use it. You are smarter than a freaking bee.
* Your right to free speech does not guarantee you a captive audience. This is an incentive to deliver your message in a way that your audience can grasp and tolerate. If someone else's message is intolerable to you, then you can leave. It's usually better to walk away than start a brawl.
* Be careful about ignoring each other, though. Like suppressing ideas, it can put a sealed pot on a hot stove. When people are ignored, they tend to try harder to get attention. They also try harder to solve problems. Ignore peaceful protests long enough, you get riots. Ignore riots long enough, you get revolutions. Let's try to solve problems higher up the scale while we're still in rational, legal range rather than "Fuck it, gimme that torch" range.
* Sometimes people do need different messages or lessons. Maybe their perspective is different, maybe their skills or knowledge is different, it could be anything. Treating everyone identically doesn't always work, but it should work toward getting together.
Back in college, I worked with a great program, Campus Acquaintance Rape Education. It acknowledged that talking about sex/gender dynamics was hard, and the different socialization of men and women made it really hard to talk about that in a mixed audience. So we split them up, and did the first session in gendered groups, then after they all had a helpful grounding, we brought them together and they were able to have a mature discussion that usually gave some productive ideas and steps. (Today I would ask if we needed a third group for nonbinary folks in the audience; in the past, people weren't really receptive to adding a whole nother section. We actually got by effectively with just the two, and that was general campus audiences not just the Women's Studies department.)
Separating groups according to needs can be helpful, and allow you to bring them to the same page for a later discussion. It's important not to exacerbate divisions or make new ones. The point is to assist the process of collective communication and problem solving. It can work. You do need a careful plan. CARE was a whole semester class and we busted our asses. It was a lot of hard, often uncomfortable and exhausting work. But we didn't want our college to keep being America's rape capitol, and they wouldn't cancel the Greek system, so we had to do something. It didn't solve the whole problem but it did help, and in the starfish metaphor, we definitely got some clues into some individual people that improved their sex/gender relations.
You may not be able to save the world, but you can pick up the nearest starfish and throw it back in the ocean.
Who gets to talk?
That's a huge issue in this game. The rules keep telling non-Native American players not to do or say things, while Native American players are given extra options. This presents the premise that, because the game has a tribal theme, people who are tribe members have more rights to play with it and talk about topics and make choices, while people who are not tribe members have less rights. Well, any time you divide people by race, you're on thin ice; and when you go beyond that to giving people more or less rights because of it, that causes problems. But it's really the talking part that bothers me the most right now.
EDIT 12/7/21 -- Another reader has decided to avoid Coyote and Crow on the basis of racial divisions.
Because I just tussling with that, in a different context, not long before my PDF of the gamebook arrived. See The Problem of "Woke Racism." At that time, I was mainly focused on lip service vs. concrete actions and how saying you're against racism isn't the same as working against racism.
I talked about how, if people of color ask you for something, and you support them, then you should do it.
Coyote and Crow rules, written by an almost-entirely-Native American design team, ask for things that violate my ethics. The rules tell non-Native Americans not to play "two spirit" characters, and in providing no alternative, would leave those players only able to play heteronormative, gender-conforming characters. That simultaneously tells me I can't play a character like myself, I can't let other QUILTBAG folks do so, and it's okay to divide people by race and then give them different amounts of the game. I don't agree with any of that. It makes me unhappy when a group of people I generally like, respect, and admire does something so embarrassingly bad.
What's worse, the general message in the racially divided sidebars is that non-Native Americans should sit down, shut up, and stay out of the way of the Native Americans. Their opinions are not wanted and not welcome, and they are absolutely not trusted to be competent with research or roleplaying. Or apparently even basic manners. More confusingly, other parts of the prerelease materials and the book encourage non-Native American people to play the game and not be afraid of it. This conflict is making some people anxious enough to back away, while the "don't" stream is driving off others.
And that's the same thing I see in "woke racism" and all the other woke-isms. Their leading tactic is to shut people up. Now, I get why. Who hasn't wanted to tell the mouthy mansplaining asshole to shut the fuck up? But here's the problem. Telling him to shut up because he is a man is completely different than telling him to shut up because he's an asshole and his actions are derailing an important conversation other people want to have. The former is based on a group affinity that he didn't choose; the latter are individual things that he has at least some choice over. The former is not okay, and the latter are.
I've done it, sometimes. I've said "If you don't have a uterus, you don't get an opinion on abortion." It's tempting. It seems reasonable. But what about the guy who lost a child to his girlfriend's abortion? The one whose girlfriend stuck a pin through his condoms and then stuck him for child support? The woman who doesn't have a uterus? Don't they have a dog in this fight, even if their exact concerns or lived experiences are different from the main group?
When I was looking at the problematic sidebars in Coyote and Crow, I kept asking myself: What problems could this cause? Who does this hurt? Are there any people in this group who have grounds to speak up? What are the exceptions? What are the specific reasons for and against letting someone participate fully? Are there better solutions than this one? And I didn't have to go far before getting to some nasty answers. It's really important to ask what are the reasons for including or excluding someone, the justification for doing things. If you can't find the details, the argument is probably not solid.
What I see is woke-isms spreading the idea that it's laudable to exclude people from public conversation, and to deny their rights to opinions, because of who and what they are, rather than just what they are doing. When you deny people's right to free expression, you are putting a sealed pot on a hot stove, and sooner or later something is going to explode. This is a bad idea.
Plus you're undermining your own right to speech and opinions, because in politics and activism, every weapon you get to use, your opponents also get to use. Never bring to the field anything you can't handle being aimed at you.
Furthermore, when you shut down discussion, you make it harder to solve problems, which is not helping your cause, no matter what it is. Problems don't get solved in an echo chamber. They get solved in the groan zone. Everyone hates the groan zone, which is how it gets its name, but that's where civilization figures out solutions.
Now, when I think about my audience, they're all like-minded people in that we get along well and each has something(s) in common with me. But you're not all like each other. Each of you matches different parts of me. You're young and old, big and small, abled or with a variety of disabilities, diverse neurotypes and intelligences, assorted religions and ethnicities, pretty much the whole QUILTBAG and all sorts of family geometries, living all over the globe, with a truly impressive array of careers and hobbies. We don't always agree on everything. We do usually manage to discuss things without sparking a flamewar. And the diversity of your lived experience, your research, your observations, gives me a parallax of viewpoints approximating the sainted Arecibo telescope. I don't want to shut down any of it. Heck, I usually don't even say "Cool it down some" unless somebody says "Ouch." Because shutting down the discussion, blocking out a viewpoint, would obscure part of what I can see through you and you through each other and all of us together.
Granted, you're intelligent folks who are civil more than 99% of the time. (I have maybe 1-2 times a year when things really heat up, which is well under 1% of days, let alone posts or comments.) It's a lot harder to keep things open when the signal-to-noise ratio is bad, or someone's signal is interfering with other people's signals. I just don't think that shutting down is a good general solution. Spot-quashing, yes, if you've tried other methods first and they haven't worked. But shutting down whole groups, telling them their ideas aren't welcome and they don't deserve as much as other people, that's a problem. Modeling and otherwise teaching communication and people skills is better.
Even more obnoxious is the wokeist tactic of saying that, if you disagree with them, you are the problem. They say that disagreeing with them, because they've claimed to be anti-badthing, makes you the badthing they are anti. This is not logic, it's a form of ad hominem attack and usually also name calling, and they don't want to hear your logic. They're not answering your arguments, whatever those were, at all. When people aren't talking about specific facts or opinions or other arguments, but are instead talking about the "isness" of individuals or groups, the conversation has gone off the rails. When they're using group membership to quash speech and opinions, that's a form of oppression and it causes problems. Doesn't matter if you're on the bottom, if you manage to get on top and use that vantage to stomp someone else, it is going to cause problems no matter how good you think it feels. And whenever a group opposes all disagreement, you get groupthink, and that's really a problem.
I see another thread of this tangle in social media. Right now, that's where most people do a lot of talking, about things of small or large important. Getting shut out of that, therefore, is a serious problem. It impairs communication. And the corporations who own that sort-of-public space where so much of the world's talking now happens -- they wield the banhammer with a heavy and often invisible hand. There's no appeal. Because we're treating paid, private services like a public plaza, and they don't think they have to respect the same rights there. So that's a problem. Yes, I know, trolls and lies are also big problems. But when you start banning people in general for irritating people, instead of giving individual users tools to say "I want nothing to do with username Asshole," that causes problems. Inevitably it's not just individual assholes who get banned. It's groups. It's unpopular ideas. Sure it's nice when someone I disagree with gets shut down, but that also alarms me, because it's a reminder that I and people I agree with and our unpopular ideas could just as easily be shut down. And we have been; push too hard on some climate issues, you cost people money, you can get kicked out of places. &c&c. That's the devil of censorship and exclusion from public discourse. Along with the bathwater of trolls, the baby of activists gets tossed out. Along with the bathwater of deepfakes tend to go the baby of inconvenient truths. The whole point of free expression is to protect unpopular expression, because of some of that shit is actually needed, and often you can't tell which until well after people quit arguing about it.
So in a whole lot of different places and ways, people are telling each other to sit down and shut up, and denying each other's rights to opinions and expressions and just a different problem-solving approach. That guts the problem-solving process and while we're at it ethical decision making processes.
We need to talk. Everyone needs to talk. Everyone needs to defend everyone else's right to talk. We need to find better ways of improving the signal-to-noise ratio and solving problems than trying to shut up people we disagree with.
How Can We Talk?
So if we need to talk about touchy topics, which happens a lot, what can we do to improve signal to noise ratio, lower tension, and otherwise improve the chances of success? I have some ideas.
* Teach communication skills. Instead of nagging, model desired behavior. Improve your communication skills. Know how to have difficult conversations. The more people do this, the more we create a culture of healthy and effective communication. We need that if we're going to survive.
* Teach about logical fallacies and minimize their use. However, be aware that what is a fallacy in a logical argument may not always be a fallacy in other contexts. "Slippery slope" is a logical fallacy, but a political tactic, used to pass incremental laws that eventually bring down the main target -- and the best way to stop it is to know that and block the early attempts.
* Break down big problems into smaller, manageable parts. Write the book one bird at a time. Fixing broken communication is a big problem. Learning a communication skill, moderating a pleasant blog, or teaching a class on validation are all smaller steps toward that goal.
* Distinguish between people who don't know and people who don't care, and people who just want to make trouble for the hell of it. A lack of knowledge is easily fixed with education. A lack of fucks to give is much harder to fix. The challenge is that these can be really hard to tell apart, they require different solutions, and they often need close examination to distinguish, which is about as fun as pouring water on the dead skunk frozen to the porch so you can pry it off. But if somebody doesn't do it, that skunk is staying there until spring thaw.
* Use honeybumping. Honeybees head-butt each other to discourage a forager from directing more bees to a dangerous or drained location. They don't attack the waggle-dancer or shove her out of the hive. They just try to correct that one message. We have an advantage because our language technology is better than honeybee language technology; we have the ability to explain with logical arguments why a given message is flawed. If we use it. So use it. You are smarter than a freaking bee.
* Your right to free speech does not guarantee you a captive audience. This is an incentive to deliver your message in a way that your audience can grasp and tolerate. If someone else's message is intolerable to you, then you can leave. It's usually better to walk away than start a brawl.
* Be careful about ignoring each other, though. Like suppressing ideas, it can put a sealed pot on a hot stove. When people are ignored, they tend to try harder to get attention. They also try harder to solve problems. Ignore peaceful protests long enough, you get riots. Ignore riots long enough, you get revolutions. Let's try to solve problems higher up the scale while we're still in rational, legal range rather than "Fuck it, gimme that torch" range.
* Sometimes people do need different messages or lessons. Maybe their perspective is different, maybe their skills or knowledge is different, it could be anything. Treating everyone identically doesn't always work, but it should work toward getting together.
Back in college, I worked with a great program, Campus Acquaintance Rape Education. It acknowledged that talking about sex/gender dynamics was hard, and the different socialization of men and women made it really hard to talk about that in a mixed audience. So we split them up, and did the first session in gendered groups, then after they all had a helpful grounding, we brought them together and they were able to have a mature discussion that usually gave some productive ideas and steps. (Today I would ask if we needed a third group for nonbinary folks in the audience; in the past, people weren't really receptive to adding a whole nother section. We actually got by effectively with just the two, and that was general campus audiences not just the Women's Studies department.)
Separating groups according to needs can be helpful, and allow you to bring them to the same page for a later discussion. It's important not to exacerbate divisions or make new ones. The point is to assist the process of collective communication and problem solving. It can work. You do need a careful plan. CARE was a whole semester class and we busted our asses. It was a lot of hard, often uncomfortable and exhausting work. But we didn't want our college to keep being America's rape capitol, and they wouldn't cancel the Greek system, so we had to do something. It didn't solve the whole problem but it did help, and in the starfish metaphor, we definitely got some clues into some individual people that improved their sex/gender relations.
You may not be able to save the world, but you can pick up the nearest starfish and throw it back in the ocean.