Tribal Comments
I have commented in past posts on the tendency of people, online and elsewhere, to treat arguments as declarations of tribal affinity, to assume that people can be classified and their views determined, by tribal membership, hence that someone who disagrees with them on one political issue must hold the same views as everyone else who disagrees on that issue.
I noticed the pattern a long time ago in a variety of contexts. If, arguing climate issues on Facebook, I expressed skepticism over the claim that sea level rise would flood multiple cities, I was assumed to also believe that climate change wasn’t happening. Arguments about climate change on a part of Facebook dedicated to that issue tended to wander off to issues such as gun control. Earlier still, after I said something positive about Obama,1 then running for president, I found myself described in a variety of places as an Obamacon, a conservative supporter of the candidate. There seem to be quite a lot of people who do not believe one can say anything positive about a candidate one does not support or anything negative about a candidate one does.
The pattern is not limited to Facebook or the media. It shows up in my comment threads. Consider responses to my post discussing my feelings about the 2024 election, then current, whose first sentence was:
My opinion of the election is “a plague on both your houses.”
Comments assuming that I supported Trump included a diatribe against him concluding:
I'm sorry, you want to put some people back into power that support, and I think, will implement "Project 2025".
Another, with reference to my classifying Trump in my fargroup:
I do see the appeal of distancing it affords, along with other rationalizations, like "lawfare", "TDS", and the idea that he can break the law as long as he does it in his official capacity.
Other commenters complained about my not supporting Trump:
They are locking people for tweets and you’re talking about how we need to go back to the Romney-ism of 2012 (that lost).
The Democrats on the other hand have clearly become the fascist party that Orwell was trying to warn us about. … I can’t really respect people who are so far above petty politics that things like pure evil don’t bother them.
It isn’t quite the same thing, but in a later post I quoted someone who viewed the Trump movement as the lower class equivalent of a pride parade, a way for people who felt they were being looked down on “to say "f*** you" to their tormentors.” I interpreted that as on the whole a positive description, a revolt of the people in flyover country against the coastal elites who looked down on them. Two of the comments on that post, from people who were pretty clearly Trump supporters, interpreted it as a put down.
A more recent post mentioned utilitarianism and the Effective Altruism movement in the context of the tension between average and total utilitarianism, an issue I got interested in more than forty years ago when writing about population issues. Multiple comments took that as an opportunity to attack utilitarianism and Effective Altruism as linked to central planning:
The actual practical problem with EA is that it's fundamentally an attempt to centrally calculate utility and thus suffers from the same lack of local knowledge, and perverse incentives, problems as all forms of central planning.
If I want to light my gold fish on fire, that's my business, they aren't people. There is no utilitarian function, beyond taste which I assume isn't counted, where utility goes up jailing me for said BBQ
Who's to say that these "effective" donations don't go into the hands of the picayune warlords in Africa who confiscate them to feed their armies, to hold them over their miserable citizens like a Pavlovian chunk of meat? Those countries are PERPETUATED in their abysmal wretchedness by these donations, which exist PRIMARILY to assuage the guilty conscience of the givers, not to fix root causes. Ahhh, don't it feel GOOD to be righteous!
My main conclusion was that animal rights is a dicey subject, and PETA is full of idiots who think animals should have the vote and be able to own property, all with PETA as their guardians and interpreters, of course.
Should not animal rights be treated the same, the right to own animals, not the rights animals have?
There was not a word in my post about animal rights.
Another example of the same pattern appeared on a forum where I was active. Someone posted that at Harvard a student might get expelled for saying “It’s all right to be white.” I expressed skepticism. A different poster replied to me with a list of hostile responses by universities to discovering right wing posters, including “It’s all right to be white,” put up on campus, with the implication that I must be implausibly ignorant of such outrages or pretending to be. I pointed out that none of her examples were responses to a student merely saying something, got a second equally hostile response.
I am pretty sure that what I was observing was a tribal interpretation of my post. I had questioned a red tribe claim hence must be a defender of the blue tribe, could properly be accused of ignoring or defending blue tribe abuses. Whether the particular claim I had questioned was true was irrelevant.
The most recent examples were in responses to Arguments with Interesting Leftists. The comment thread contained 227 comments, I think the largest number of comments on any of my posts. About fifteen of them were responses to the post. Some others were about market anarchy, mentioned but not discussed in the post but at least a subject I have written about elsewhere. The largest cluster consisted of right wing posters attacking imaginary left wing opponents for their purported views in defense of sex change operations, a subject that appeared nowhere in the post or, I think, anything else I had written. At least one commenter appeared to believe that left wingers supported puberty blockers and genital surgery for two-year-olds — at the child’s request — and attacked them ferociously for it. Another managed to reverse the point of one comment, interpret it as arguing for the position it was arguing against, in order to question its author about its implications for his views on abortion, another issue which appeared nowhere in the post.
Experiences like this make me suspect that my upbringing may have left me with a distorted view of the world, the belief that arguments are about what is true — not just a way of cheering for your team and trashing their opposition.
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“At this point, I regard Obama as pretty clearly the least bad of the candidates [for the Democratic nomination].
More than that, I think there is at least an outside chance that he might improve things, shift American politics very slightly in the direction I want it to go. (Thoughts on the Democratic Nomination)
This post diagnoses a deep frustration--the leap from a single opinion to a full stereotype of a person's views. The individual disappears, replaced by a tribal strawman built to be attacked, while the substance of what was said is ignored.
Your examples reveal this is a tactic and not a misunderstanding. The problem isn’t just bias, but the preference for a simple caricature over the complexity of reality. This isn't a failure of perception, but a failure of character--choosing to dismiss the person in favor of a more convenient target.
Thank you for writing this. Your work consistently embodies the discipline to put truth above tribe, which is why I respect it so deeply, perhaps especially when I reach different conclusions.
As with too many conversations, they are not really listening to what you are saying, or reading with an attempt at comprehension, but merely awaiting an opening into which they can assert their views on something perhaps remotely connected in some way that you neither said nor wrote.
It is tiresome at best.