Testing Chat V: The Final Mysterious Island: Miami Beach

[Losonti Tokash]

(also as an aside I do like the suggestion that the term "ally" be changed to "sidekick" because it just works so much better and makes our place clearer)

I ain't your sidekick

Respecting you isn't a job, it's just a function of being a human being.

i spent forever trying to write something like this but man

i guess i don't get tumblr anymore because it seems like some angels on pinheads shit, repeated forever

[zhaktronz]

Some people would cut off their nose to spite their face

[Infinity Biscuit]

recognising that people who don't deal firsthand with the oppression should take a secondary role in discussion and action against that oppression compared to those who actually have to deal with it is cutting off one's nose to spite one's face ??

[zhaktronz]

Saying "fuck you guys how dare you care about, or be upset by the negativities my situation when you aren't in my situation" is

[zhaktronz]

Dehumanising is dehumanising regardless of who it's directed at

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

Guys don't take what I just said as some kind of opening for other gripes because they're not interesting and you can't articulate them in a useful way anyway

ps tumblr is awesome because it represents the democratisation of a social justice movement and that is super fascinating and cool

[zhaktronz]

Guys don't take what I just said as some kind of opening for other gripes because they're not interesting and you can't articulate them in a useful way anyway

ps tumblr is awesome because it represents the democratisation of a social justice movement and that is super fascinating and cool

Look ford I will repeat my tactless platitudes and axioms as much as I want and you will pretend they have meaning and insight

[Infinity Biscuit]

Saying "fuck you guys how dare you care about, or be upset by the negativities my situation when you aren't in my situation" is

uhhhh how is "let people who deal with the situation lead the discussion because the privileged have a history of dominating perspectives despite having less experience with the situation" at all similar to what you're saying there

[zhaktronz]

That's not what's happening. The perspectives of the privileged are being actively lessened regardless of truth purely because they come from the privileged.

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

That's not what's really happening either

Or even at all reflective of the material referred to in the original post I quoted, causing this catastrophic chain of events

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

Like jesus is the cause of the wyld stallyns going to be undone by something as trivial as people talking past each other

[zhaktronz]

As a visibly straight mostly white male I do not understand what it's like to be afraid and will bow out of the conversation now having recognised that this is the key part I neglected

Sorry ib

[Infinity Biscuit]

no problem <3

I honestly can't tell if I'm coming off more abrasive or trigger happy than usual I'm pretty damn emotional tonight so yeah if that's going on I apologise too

[zhaktronz]

Read some more of lookatthisfuckingcisgender

Trans people have legitimate reasons to feel scared of cigs people they don't know, especially when meeting them for the first time/revealing their trans for the first time.

Does it seem like the author of that blog is trapped in a vicious feedback loop to you IB?

Author is scared legitimately
Tars too wide a brush
People jump down her throat for this
Author takes as evidence for all Cis bad
People jump down her throat more



I want to just tell the author to break the cycle but that's my orthodoxy talking, there's no point for her to break the cycle when it would just be restarted by the legitimate fear that trans people have.

Social justice complicated

Far more so than than the privileged reflex to making it

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

I remember somehow ending up on some tumblr from some chick ostensibly standing up for the rights of the oppressed. Like feminist and trans stuff, mostly. Yet a lot of her posts were stuff about being incredibly violent to her opposition and not in that 'har har I'm seven years old' slapstick kind of way but actually really quite worrying amounts of venom*. 'I heard this girl in my real life say some thing about some show and I wanted to scratch her eyes out' is a paraphrase but substantially something I actually read.

That sticks out in my head because it was so exaggerated but you know there are a lot of people who have suffered and are angry and so aren't interested in sugar coating stuff. And that's fine, free expression and all that. Inevitably though it's going to create friction and tension for one reason or the other, whether it's just personal hurt or the belief that is damages the prospects of success of a righteous cause, but honestly that's more a thing for cisgender people to build a bridge and get over.

Anyway stuff like above violence girl or stuff about gay people using 'breeders' as an assault or stuff about people identifying as binary star clusters just kind of gets magnified out of proportion. I have a black friend who once complained that no effort was made on the part of feminists to address all the stiletto heel dick stomping stuff (because for him personally there's a Reverend King to the Black Panthers), but even setting aside how there's no unified global feminist dialogue control board that sort of thing just gets traded around more because it creates strong emotions in people and they feel the need to gripe. But that sort of thing doesn't really change the overall quality of the core message.

I mean I try to live by everyone being excellent to one another so in a personal context me and some girl being sneeringly referred to as 'breeders' I'm obviously going to give whoever said it shit because that's just not kosher. But a gay person talking about 'things straight people do' or whatever isn't a personal indictment about me or any other individual straight people. But a lot of straight people won't make that distinction because human beings are generally pretty easy to offend.

uh anyway that is the piece i had to say about a thing i guess

*requires only that you hate is also like 98% burning vitriol per unit mass but her wielding of the iceburn is so masterful that you can only watch and awe

[Jung]

The narrative that it's the allies who are the real heavy lifters is pretty widespread and corrosive, and actually pretty well-pushed by those who wish to maintain the status quo (look at the farcical mythology of the civil rights movement for a great example)

Well when you're a really small minority like trans people are (~700,000 people in the whole USA IIRC) your cause pretty much does live or die on its ability to convince the majority.

[Infinity Biscuit]

I've never really understood the issue with "too wide a brush". I mean I'm white as hell but people of colour complaining about about white people as a whole it's never upset me? Like, if I'm doing shit that's problematic, I need to figure that out, and if I'm managing to avoid that, then that's where it stops I shouldn't have to worry about getting a reassuring pat on the head. I mean race is such a gigantic divide in America and I have no real way of grasping how pervasively it affects lives and I think I'm kinda rambling here

Like I do this sort of thing myself; I have certain issues about men and often complain about men as a whole, but there's obviously guys I like and I def recognise that not every man is part of sexist oppression. But I don't think it's important for me to have to always talk about MOST men or BAD men or anything like that. And I feel that people who'd be turned off to feminism because of that stuff aren't really going to have brought much to the table anyway?

As to latfc in specific, well, he (I think the mod uses masculine pronouns but not positive) knows exactly what he's getting into by running a public blog calling out privileged people, like, and I don't think this sort of reaction in specific is bringing anything new to the table. Like, for someone who's trans or black or other groups really treated like shit by society I think it'd be harder to avoid seeing all these examples of why to fear or distrust people than to see them a lot. And he gets a lot of shit just for being trans, just for openly talking about social justice issues, for calling people out, all this stuff already before specifically talking about distrusting cis people as a whole due to definitely legitimate reasons.

i'm kinda trailing off here it's 230AM where I am so I dunno

[Infinity Biscuit]

fuck meant to put this in my post but

my generalisations against men I do see some issues there in that like men of colour get attacked in this way by feminism a lot and that's something that definitely should be avoided

I want to talk about this more but I can't pieces sentences together much rn

[Jung]

I've never really understood the issue with "too wide a brush". I mean I'm white as hell but people of colour complaining about about white people as a whole it's never upset me? Like, if I'm doing shit that's problematic, I need to figure that out, and if I'm managing to avoid that, then that's where it stops I shouldn't have to worry about getting a reassuring pat on the head.

People tend to react defensively when they hear stuff that sounds like it's implying they're evil. It's just basic human nature.

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

IB just out of curiousity how did you react to the whole Dawkins tweet about Muslims and nobel prizes if you heard about it?

[Infinity Biscuit]

I hadn't but I looked it up and my reaction is basically "dawkins is an asshole" :L

I mean it's pretty obvious the flaw in his logic (nobel prizes aren't awarded by an objective god being) but I don't see much going on here besides dawkins being a dick to muslims per usual

hahaha

“Would Dawkins have tweeted another fact, which is that Trinity also has twice as many Nobel prizes as all black people put together? It’s just as true, but presumably he doesn’t believe that it’s because black people aren’t as clever. Yet he is willing to make the equivalent inference about Muslims, without further evidence,” Chivers added.

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

I hadn't but I looked it up and my reaction is basically "dawkins is an asshole" :L

I mean it's pretty obvious the flaw in his logic (nobel prizes aren't awarded by an objective god being) but I don't see much going on here besides dawkins being a dick to muslims per usual

i just thought it might help you unlock the mystery of the broad brush

[Jung]

To expand on what I just said a bit, I think part of the issue is we have a culture that tends toward a Manichean and "all the fault of a few bad apples" conception of evil. We tend to Otherize evil, and think of racism, sexism etc. as things associated with alien figures we don't sympathize or identify much with (Southern slave-owners, KKK, rednecks, rich white CEOs etc.). Look at the way this stuff works in a lot of our fiction - the problems come from the villain, and the solution to them is to kick the villain's butt. Think of how our fiction bombards us with that implicit worldview.

When you suggest that people may not be Totally Enlightened Not-Bigoted People what they hear is you suggesting they are one of the villains in the movie of life.

[zhaktronz]

I see a lot of the oppressed/minority using the language of oppression back at their oppressors/majority, and I'm not sure thatmusing the language of oppression is ever ok?

[Infinity Biscuit]

what jung's talking about is one reason I think couching language in stuff like "most guys" or "bad white people" is bad because people always see the problem as someone else. it's always the problem of the bad apples not the ordinary/good people like me

like yeah it's going to alienate some people but at the same time if you put in all those modifiers it lets people get by without confronting the fact that everyone's the problem in some way, everyone needs to work on stuff like that

so either way you're losing out on a lot it's not just casting it aside by being harsh with words towards privileged potential allies