Outrage Porn for Everyone
Can any of us resist?
let’s say when the high school sophomore clicks Tabroom she sees that her judge is Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, whose paradigm reads, “Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”
Fishback gives several other examples of high school debate judges who promise to score debates in part based on their political biases.
In The Three Languages of Politics and elsewhere, I have cited high school debate as a model of how arguments ought to be conducted. I point out that straw-manning, ad hominem, and other abusive tactics that are commonly used in social media would lose points in a high school debate.
Like Fishback, I always thought that high school debate was an excellent activity for teaching students how to think. That is the opposite of imposing on them a politically correct catechism of what to think.
So Fishback succeeded in stimulating my outrage. And I expect that his essay stimulates outrage in my readers and many others.
And this shows you that I am susceptible to the phenomenon of outrage porn. In fact, I have to work very hard to filter outrage porn. Does a story that portrays things as going to hell in a handbasket deserve to be taken at face value, or is it playing to my primitive impulses and overstimulating them?
Consider the following examples, where you have to ask yourself whether you are succumbing to outrage porn:
Matt Taibbi describing the depredations of the deep state. Or Michael Shellenberger and others on that topic.
Alice Evans describing the popularity of an avowed misogynist.
Freddie deBoer describing the luxury beliefs of Stanford Law students.
Martin Gurri or Jean Twenge describing Gen Z and the impact of social media.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar describing Ron DeSantis.
I myself notice that the closer my posts get to an outrage erogenous zone, the more traffic I get, and the more new free subscribers I acquire (I also lose more, but the net gain is always strongly positive).
And here is an article on how The Daily Wire turns outrage porn into a business model. Pointer from Rob Henderson.
It’s hard for any of us to resist outrage porn. But I think that we should try to make the effort.
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Seems like the boundary between “outrage porn” and “reporting that gets people highly motivated” can be gray at times (Assuming the outrage porn is actually honest reporting).
I first explored joining debate team like twenty years ago. Already at that point it was a complete farce.
In order to make judging "scientific" they would "graph" the arguments. Each "point" someone made was a line on the graph, and the opposition had to counter each "point". This led to a dominant strategy of "gerbil speech". Talking as fast as humanely possible to get as many points on the board as possible and hope your opponent misses one.
In short, debate got subject to the same ruthless systematization and optimization that ruins a lot of things.
That its gone from that to ideological nonsense isn't much of a loss.