New Testingstan

F.J. Prefect, Esq wrote:

Infinity Biscuit wrote:who cares if it's conscious and malicious

is that going to make effects any better?

'wow shit sorry, I didn't know and/or understand, I'll avoid that in future'

or

'lol do I look like I give a shit how that makes you feel????'

Sadly that actually ends up being the exception more often than not in my experience

Like so many people will do shitty stuff not out of malice but because they don't know better but when confronted on it they double down to try to lessen the perceived importance of what they did instead of admitting error and improving

and from what I can see this is obviously because they want to avoid the stigma of being labeled racist/etc. and prioritise that over the consequences of their actions

but like I feel that heavy focus on intent helps solidify that maybe? because it pushes the issue to more dealing with the person doing the actions rather than the actions themselves, and then also it gives people wiggle room where they can argue "oh I didn't mean it that way I'm not a bigot" in their defensiveness rather than just confronting that they did something harmful

but to boil it down to the specific context I was talking about, for someone who is only having a momentary encounter with someone, and who has to deal with a lot of shit in their life, I don't think it's very necessary for them to worry about whether or not the bigotry hurled their way has malice or not

Like, someone who's not affected by that bigotry, especially if they have more interaction with the harmful party, yeah then there's probably some responsibility there if you're taking it as a chance to push improvement on the person. but I don't think people who are the targets of bigotries ever have a personal responsibility to do that sort of thing

Bakustra, I was thinking about a few things you said... are you treating Kinsey as a philosopher or something? because for the most part she's not; she's someone who, regardless of how she has a moderately sized spotlight on her, is just talking about and dealing with her own life and the pressures on it rather than someone discussing the subject academically, and the two are very different experiences and you can't examine them the same way

I don't think you need to be a philosopher before 'I would like to bathe someone in lye' becomes the mark of a shitty person.

whatever

I don't think someone who deals with daily harassment and is friends with people who are so mistreated by society that they have to avoid cops to keep themselves alive responding to yet another instance of harassment to that group with something like that is shitty I mean yeah it's not great but

maybe we could focus our criticism more on the systems that create that kind of reaction rather than those who react less than ideally to those systems?

anyway baks was talking about like "no matter how terrible she is doesn't make her wrong" and that with the comparison to beauvoir struck me as kinda weird for someone who runs a personal tumblr that's more what I meant

What are the statistics on the attacks against transgendered people? Is it prevalent enough to warrant such distrust of society?

Jovial Jeff wrote:Is it prevalent enough to warrant such distrust of society?

Yes.

Regardless, gleefully imagining an incredibly gruesome and painful death of another actual person is still actually pretty messed up.

It doesn't take hate crimes to inspire that kind of thing

I couldn't count the number of times I've heard vegans say people who eat meat deserve to die (painfully at that)

Are you saying they don't?

The knowledge that I should be subject to summary execution for eating meat makes every meal more harrowing and exciting!

We get justice, you get excitement. We win all around!


Except for the beings you eat. They're definitely losing out here.

Infinity Biscuit wrote:The only Butler I've read so far is Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, where she talks about gender as a performance and traditional femininity as largely a performance of submission (I disagree with a lot of her essay). But I've heard Gender Trouble shows a shift from her earlier work, and in the lecture it was mentioned her later material went broader than the feminist biopolitics she started writing about. The impression I got from the essay I read before was that she was at the least sympathetic to gender abolition, which I find a very dangerous philosophy in its current state, so I may be reading things into her work she did not actually put into it, though.

Do you feel I still over-essentialise masculinity and femininity if I clarify that I was talking about traditional definitions of the two?

I kinda posted this mainly for you to respond so thanks Straha

So, let's have the fuller response I promised:

Butler isn't sympathetic to gender abolition in the way the average person imagines it, and she does regard traditional femininity with a great deal of askance but doesn't think it should be tossed out completely. Butler thinks that our identities are constructed against shared norms that operate, differently, at many levels. I should clarify that you can never be the norm (there is no quasi-platonic 'woman' or 'man' inside a Butlerian ontology) because it always a question of how you differ from these norms that create your identity whether or not you identify with them or not. These norms are not static, but rather constantly in flux and changing depending on how we relate and understand them and ourselves. This leads to a couple interesting things, firstly there is not possibility of a 'genuine' anything, because everything is being judged by how you approach a wide set of norms everything you do is, in her words, a performance. Conversely, because norms and identities are always in flux, the norm itself doesn't matter as much as the performances that perpetuate them but the performances always have to be understood in context of those norms. Finally, because the performance changes norms and vice-versa norms are always in the process of being subverted even by people who do not wish to subvert them, and are being upheld and perpetuated by people who genuinely wish to challenge them.

(To see this last point in action, look at the gay marriage debate. The people who most staunchly defend and support 'traditional' marriage are the ones who say love can only truly exist inside a marriage. This makes it so that people who imagine themselves in love in nontraditional ways, i.e. in terms of a homosexual relationship, imagine themselves inside a marriage which changes how we understand marriage. The flipside is that by imagining themselves as inside a 'gay' marriage they still perpetuate the idea that love needs to be validated by a marriage.)

To get back to the beginning then. She doesn't seek to abolish gender and remove it from existence. Rather, she seeks to recognize that gender is artificial, always in some way made and not inherent. So, yes, Gender as we know it is abolished, but gender can still exist in different, and largely personal, ways.
It also means that she doesn't see femininity as something that needs to be destroyed, but rather something that needs to be understood in the context of often being violently imposed on others to their harm and detriment. That said, there are performances of femininity that can be 'productive' and helpful in that while embracing core tenets of femininity they also break them down or, at least, render the violent parts inoperative. Butler herself specifically isolates transvestite performances as being particularly worthy of recognition here.

There's more, a lot more, to say. Especially about precarity and privilege, but that would take more preparation to write about on my part and I don't want to get overly text-dumpy here.

Also, Spock's death is on TV now. And I think I need to go have a good silent weep.

Unfortunately despite all the ethical and moral quandaries surrounding meat production, such as the harm caused to animals, damage to the environment, the consequences of cessation and so on I just cannot survive an argument with my more callous friends because they will be like 'lol you want to have a steak anyway' and I will be like 'yes god it is just too delicious'

Bakustra wrote:

Darth Tedious wrote:Tanj

people say that the golden age of sci-fi is 14, but that's actually just the age at which larry niven isn't embarrassing to read

Like.

It's funny because it's so painfully true.

Infinity Biscuit wrote: Bakustra, I was thinking about a few things you said... are you treating Kinsey as a philosopher or something? because for the most part she's not; she's someone who, regardless of how she has a moderately sized spotlight on her, is just talking about and dealing with her own life and the pressures on it rather than someone discussing the subject academically, and the two are very different experiences and you can't examine them the same way

I think that there is something to be said on where Baks is coming from. The rhetoric she (and a huge section of tumblr) uses is an academic one with an intensely academically loaded background and context. The word privilege, for instance, comes from a really long and intricate debate and is used in specific, and usually very limited, circumstances. The idea of using the phrase "non incest privilege' in a non-ironic/joking way just... makes no sense to me. To use academic language begs an academic understanding and response and I'm not sure why that would be a bad idea.

I also think there's an element of dismissiveness to the idea that her ideas don't deserve being weighed like 'a philosophers'. When does someone's rhetoric begin to deserve that sort of understanding/reading? What criteria do they need to meet?

Straha wrote:Are you saying they don't?

I don't actually think anyone does or doesn't deserve to die as such

Death is just an inevitable reality

Which is a part of why I agree with Ford on the idea that wishing death upon people is an unhealthy state of mind (amongst other reasons)

Wishing death upon people is just a complete waste of energy in my books

Darth Tedious wrote:

Straha wrote:Are you saying they don't?

I don't actually think anyone does or doesn't deserve to die as such

Death is just an inevitable reality

Which is a part of why I agree with Ford on the idea that wishing death upon people is an unhealthy state of mind (amongst other reasons)

Wishing death upon people is just a complete waste of energy in my books

Sometimes I doubt your commitment to sparkle motion animal liberation.

It's like you know me, dude

I only ever declared myself vegetarian so I'd get to cook my own meals (and avoid my mum's terrible cooking) until I moved out of home

Jovial Jeff wrote:

RogueIce wrote:Paul Walker Dies in Car Crash. If that's not irony I don't know what is.

And this is going to make the seventh Fast and Furious movie somewhat awkward. Wonder if they finished filming his scenes yet?

I'm actually pretty saddened about this, my attempts to make light of it notwithstanding. He seemed like a decent enough fellow, though granted I only ever saw him on the silver screen and thus know nothing about him as a person. Very sad news all around, he was way too young.

I hope to Christ that some tryhard on another forum doesn't go all "he contributed to street tracing by being in those movies, so fuck him." Shitty year for celebrity deaths. Gandolfini crushed me and just the other day I was lamenting his death because The Sopranos was a huge influence on my love for art.

I was pushed into shock and genuine grief when I first read that Iain Banks had incurable cancer, even though I met him at just two book signings.

Jovial Jeff wrote:

RogueIce wrote:Paul Walker Dies in Car Crash. If that's not irony I don't know what is.

And this is going to make the seventh Fast and Furious movie somewhat awkward. Wonder if they finished filming his scenes yet?

I'm actually pretty saddened about this, my attempts to make light of it notwithstanding. He seemed like a decent enough fellow, though granted I only ever saw him on the silver screen and thus know nothing about him as a person. Very sad news all around, he was way too young.

I hope to Christ that some tryhard on another forum doesn't go all "he contributed to street tracing by being in those movies, so fuck him." Shitty year for celebrity deaths. Gandolfini crushed me and just the other day I was lamenting his death because The Sopranos was a huge influence on my love for art.

Well Flagg posted in the thread I made on SDN so you can guess how that went.

blargh so earlier today i was invited to dinner with an old friend's family. they gave me their address and phone number

i went to the address and knocked on the door, but no reply. now late and not certain if i had the right place i tried knocking again but nothing so i just went back to my house and figured i'd call and let them know i messed them and maybe next week

but the phone number has one digit i can't make out. is it a 5 written over a 7 that was in error? or a 7 written over a 5? or is it supposed to be an 8? i should have asked this morning.

i hate calling people in the first place, but doubly sure when i'm guessing at the number.... i told them i wasn't sure if i could make it tonight anyway so hopefully that's no prob but now i feel awfully rude not to follow up

oh how i wish people could still be found in the phone book. i guess there's not much i can do, either take a guess and hope it is right or let it slide and explain it to them next time i see them (most likely next sunday).

but blargh.

Simple solution: Call ten times or less until you get the right people.

Do you want me to call them? I have no problem talking to strangers.

i find it horribly terrifying to dial a wrong number.... and these people are actually almost strangers to me too. i said above 'old friend's family' but it is actually 'old friend's in-laws' and i just met them for the first time earlier today.

but it's ok, i'll catch up with them next sunday at the latest, they said it is an open invitation



in other news i was just asked by another friend's mother to pray for him.... and actually literally did, despite being home alone (well except for the small dog, but she doesn't care).

i could have just not and said i did and nobody would know... but i actually did it. maybe i'm spending a little too much time with the mormons, their habits are rubbing off on me. oh well, certainly no harm done at least.

Jovial Jeff wrote:

RogueIce wrote:Paul Walker Dies in Car Crash. If that's not irony I don't know what is.

And this is going to make the seventh Fast and Furious movie somewhat awkward. Wonder if they finished filming his scenes yet?

I'm actually pretty saddened about this, my attempts to make light of it notwithstanding. He seemed like a decent enough fellow, though granted I only ever saw him on the silver screen and thus know nothing about him as a person. Very sad news all around, he was way too young.

I hope to Christ that some tryhard on another forum doesn't go all "he contributed to street tracing by being in those movies, so fuck him." Shitty year for celebrity deaths. Gandolfini crushed me and just the other day I was lamenting his death because The Sopranos was a huge influence on my love for art.

It happened by the biggest tryhard on the board.

What struck me as ironic about this crash was that the car apparently exploded

Everyone says that only happens in Hollywood

It'll happen under certain conditions, which were apparently met.

I had a friend die in a fiery car accident, so I can attest from bitter personal experience that it is uncommon but not unheard of.