Quillette and the Other Side of Toxoplasma

Before George Floyd, policemen in the USA killed many people in traffic stops, or when they raided the wrong home, or while they were already subdued or in custody. They shot more white people than any European country, even relative to the population of the USA, and vastly more black people than white people, relative to the populations of black and white people in the USA. In his “Toxoplasma of Rage“ post, Scott Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle McGraw puts forward an explanation of how the public reactions to the shooting of Michael Brown were so much bigger than the reactions to the cases where there was clear-cut video evidence of the whole event. With Michael Brown, there was ambiguity - and to be clear here, I’m not saying anybody should be shot for stealing cigars - and there were people on both sides - and to be clear again, I’m not talking about Michael Brown or the policeman who shot him - who made quite the reach in order to push their narrative. Even the difference between “he was shot in self-defence“ and “he had it coming for robbing the liquor store“ was often not clear in writing, so people assumed the worst, and then it wasn’t about the shooting any more, but about whatever dishonest thing the most dishonest people on the other side said, and the least charitable way to interpret it.

But a clear-cut case like Eric Garner, Philando Castile, or George Floyd, in the world of the toxoplasma idea, doesn‘t lead to public outrage, raised awareness, or trending hashtags - but riots and anarchist communes do. In a clear-cut case, if you present a clear-cut case to a supporter of police militarisation in the name of anti-terrorism, they might not say more than “oh well, that’s bad, what can I even say”.

Every so often, I see a clear-cut case of PC gone mad, power-tripping mods, cancel culture, or witch hunts started by people with a hidden self-serving agenda. And I think I can’t possibly share this post with people, they will just say “oh well, that’s bad, what can I even say”.

To be clear, it’s not as bad as the police choking a man to death, not by a long shot, but if you have a story about, say, somebody who definitely wasn’t choked to death by the police, and power-hungry mods delete that story from a facebook comments under a gofundme link, that’s definitely PC gone mad. There have been clear-cut cases of people perpetuating a false narrative not out of malice, but out of ignorance, because they agreed with the sentiment, but as soon as somebody tries to correct the record and posts receipts that this thing is literally false, the people who posted it doubled down against the doubters.

Wait, I have something that is “as bad“: Rotherham. The sexual abuse in Rotherham was, at least locally, as bad, morally, as police brutality in the USA.

And when you mention Rotherham, people go “oh well, that’s bad, what can I even say” and that’s it. No more conversation, no more controversy. Something like Carry That Weight (Mattress Performance) or A Rape On Campus created endless controversy, because somebody must have done something to somebody, and we were not there, but 1500 cases of pimping out little girls aren’t arguable any more.

Or take #Pizzagate (no, not Brian Wansink): There was more media coverage and discourse about that pizzeria in Washington than about Dennis Hastert, and for a while there was more media coverage about that stupid pizzeria than about Jeffrey Epstein.

Even with transgender children, there is more coverage of this one custody battle where one parent wants to prevent the child from transitioning than of any of the (not more than half a dozen worldwide) much more compelling and well-documented cases where the psychiatrists just prescribed hormones instead of Prozac, and didn’t ask children about their home life and gender role models.

Like, if you look at the front page of Quillette, you might think “we get it, it’s a PC gone mad kind of world, I know what you Quillette readers think.“

But what I see is “Huh, toxoplasma works both ways. This site is full of PC-gone-mad stories, TERFs, TERF apologist apologists (not a typo, people who beg you to take radfem ideas seriously instead of dismissing them as TERF rhetoric, even if you ultimately disagree) and ever so slightly outside-of-mainstream biologists having ideas of Coronavirus“.

Now Quillette hasn’t been “good“ since about three months after it was founded, because the editorial staff ran out of material quickly, and have since run the same boring “it happened to me“ stories from academics who got cancelled by the woke mob (for reasons that have everything to do with funding and rivalries for tenured jobs but were ostensibly all about political correctness).

But when you look at Quillette, you should‘t think “Of course anti-SJWs are going to talk about PC gone mad bullshit“, you should think “Holy shit, toxoplasma works both ways.“

And once you realise this, notice how nobody on tumblr is actually talking about un-controversial criminal justice reform ideas any more, everybody is talking about CHAZ and prison abolition, because that‘s arguable.