On Sunday, I was the focus of a small group of not-very-bright racists (NVBRs), who decided housing was going to be their new angle for their anti-foreigner bile. It gave me a window into Twitter mobs and their strategies and also into how they think. (A thread)
In total, there were about 20-25 different accounts over the course of the day (and a trickle since) but it is reasonable to conclude from their behaviour that there is a mix of paid trolls (Clintons! Soros!), sock puppets and perhaps a small handful of real people.
It is clear that they coordinate. A random account posting on my timeline on a Sunday morning would never normally generate much follow-up. The coordination (and sock-puppetry) allow them to seem like a much larger group than they are, key to their bullying.
To maximise effect, they get personal. Politicians and activists (like @Colmogorman) no doubt try, as best they can, to be robust to the attacks. For those not used to it, though, it could become overwhelming. Frankly, I just found their attempts at trying to get at me hilarious.
For example, they tried without success to guess the nationality of not just of the cleaners in Trinity (answer: from Dublin) and my baristas (I don't drink coffee) but also my wife. They also tried to turn my youthful good looks against me!
By far the simplest strategy to deal with these people is to mute them. They are trying their best to waste your time, so allow them to waste theirs by screaming into the void. I left them rant for a day just to see the arguments they would try.
In doing so, I quickly learned that they are, as per above, not very bright. Precisely because they are people "worried" about immigration talking about housing, and not the opposite, they are remarkably fact free and seem unable to follow logic - as well as easy to spot.
To get to the issue itself, in a country that needs about 50,000 homes a year, net migration (excluding returning Irish) adds about 5,000 of that. It is simply not large enough to be the driving force behind housing demand. And more importantly, the problem is supply, not demand.
But that relatively clear set of facts was unfortunately too much for our NVBRs, let alone the more complicated fact that migrants bring both supply of as well as demand for services (like housing) - & indeed the opposite in the labour market: they bring demand as well as supply.
Perhaps the key takeaway for me, though, as you can see from this NVBR, they are somewhat astounded that non-racists can spot what they're up to so quickly. (Note also the irony of decrying apparent name-calling by calling someone names!)
I will now explain to them why I called them racists in my very first tweet (while happy to consider that xenophobes may be more accurate), through the parable of the babyists.
Suppose there a group of people who, no matter what the issue, always blamed new-born babies. Unemployment, high-school drop-out rates, pollution... as far as these babyists are concerned, the babies are always to blame.
And now suppose, that out of nowhere, health policy experts start getting contacted by concerned citizens worried that a lack of capacity in hospitals is due to the sheer volume of new-born babies.
To the uninitiated, this may seem reasonable, at least as a question. There were 62,000 babies born in Ireland alone last year. In the U.S., there were almost 4 million births! Think of all the hospital resources taken up!!
Now, suppose those health policy experts had a look at who was asking the question and found that, surprise surprise, these weren't genuine concerns from people with an interest in the capacity of the healthcare system. No, it was the babyists.
The same people who had previously blamed babies for unemployment, high school dropouts, the poor state of the environment, you name it, had now wandered over to healthcare and started their same old schtick.
Hopefully, even not-very-bright racists can see that anyone with half a brain knows what is going on: people using a pressure point for the wider public to try to get their single issue on the agenda.
This may also help explain to my new correspondents why policy experts, such as @danobrien20, can talk about migration and its impact on the housing market without being racist, while they cannot.
Thanks for listening and for those at risk of such an attack, hopefully there was something in there of use. For those who do these attacks, we can see what you're doing a mile off. And I'll be muting y'all from now on!
