almostcoralchaos.tumblr.com

[shameshack]

Imagine hating yourself this much

[404selfesteem]

I dont know, we can’t really argue against feminist saying that women who disagree hate themselves by saying white people who disagree hate themselves. I mean its a little different in this example but I mean, hey.

[libertariancrusader]

I don’t really see the two as comparable. Feminism is a political ideology that people belong to by choice, not a trivial factor people are born with. Furthermore, it’s a political ideology that has been taken over by a radical element and has evolved from a movement supporting equality to a movement supporting female supremacy. The woman saying they are against feminism are disagreeing with the female supremacy narrative. They aren’t out there saying “As a woman, I’m here to tell you women suck! Fuck all women!”

The equivalent for white people would be to say “The KKK sucks. Fuck the KKK!”, but the vast majority of white people do feel that way.

[reformed-roark]

[isaacsapphire]

So, wtf is going on with those White people? Is it that they adhere to the ideology that says White people are morally inferior, like self-hating feminist men (“as a man, let me tell you that men are scum” is a thing I’ve seen a fair number of times)? Are they trying to curry favor from other people? “Woke” Whites or Black people? Is this an academic class thing? A general purpose self-hatred?

[brazenautomaton]

It’s not self-hatred at all. It’s popularity. These “woke” white men who can’t shut up about how evil white people are tend to be attractive, well-off, upper-middle-class, and most important of all, popular. Inherently popular. Other people instinctively align themselves with their goals and desires, because they are popular. Because they are popular, their goals and desires are “Punish unpopular people”.

If you are well-off, attractive, upper-middle-class, and popular, you have very very little to fear from social punishment, because people will not WANT to punish you. They want to punish unpopular people. One of the best ways you can find unpopular people so you can punish them, is to just start trying to punish everyone in your zone of perception – the other popular people will remain unpunished, the middling people will suffer a bit but you don’t care, and the unpopular people will be revealed by how much punishment rains upon them because they do not have popularity and thus are unable to stop it from happening. Then, once you have located the unpopular people by seeing who actually gets punished from your omnidirectional punishment attempts, you can continue to punish them. Forever and ever and ever, because it will never end, and they will not stop, and they will not be stopped. 

[arjan-de-lumens]

Agreed, I think.

For this kind of phenomenon, where members of a particular group - whites in this case - make such a big deal of proudly proclaiming the horribleness of their own group, the usual go-to article for explaining it is probably SSC’s “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup”; Freddie deBoer’s “it eats everything” also seems very relevant, e.g.

Second, when the linguistic becomes the only means through which to understand the world, the linguistic rejection of privilege becomes an arbiter of who gets sorted into which camp. Curiously, the most effective way to undermine one’s place of privilege is to announce it; “I know I am privileged” becomes a tool with which to force others to see you as something else.

and

“Talking about “whiteness,” administrators say, gives white students a way into conversations about equity and prejudice that previous diversity efforts at their schools may have excluded them from.”

Thus the white person who rails the loudest about white privilege feels themselves to be least vulnerable to the accusation of being so.

And yeah, it very much is a popularity/status move, where these people, by painting their own group as horrible, are effectively trying to display themselves as in some sense more morally aware - “woke” - than their group in general, and thereby display themselves as morally superior, worthy of a position of moral authority over the hoi polloi. And yeah, it’s a marker of social status and … unchecked privilege, I think, since the people proclaiming the horribleness of their own group like that are invariably the ones that are least likely to actually *lose* anything from having their group recognized as horrible and the most to gain from labelling other, lower-status, members of their group as horrible.

It’s pretty similar to the role “humility” tends to take in religious contexts, where people proclaim their inherently sinful nature - “original sin” - and make a big deal of flaunting how humble they are before God or whatever - which very often becomes a way to prove/demonstrate their moral authority. Overuse of this kind of social tactic is, as it looks to me, a major part of why there exists a stereotype of religious leaders as deeply sanctimonious.

[thiswasdumbme]

The sad irony too is that Zamaron (and no doubt the others) misunderstood solarropes’ reply to begin with.

Like, they did not mean “if you’re not nice to me I’m going to turn around and hate/hurt you”. What they meant was “if you’re not nice to me then I’m likely not going to bother going out of my way to help you”.

Because SJWs kind of have a hard time understanding that “hurting” and “not actively helping” are two very different things.

Just because I don’t hate you or won’t vote against you or won’t discriminate against you, does not obligate me to help you, vote in favor of you, or speak up if you’re being discriminated against. Nor does refusing to do those latter things mean I’m “oppressing” you.

All that not being a bigot truly obligates me to is living my life in a way that doesn’t deliberately hurt you. And that’s it. That’s the entirely of my actual obligation.

Meanwhile, if you want my help, if you want me to put my blood and sweat and tears into actively putting in an effort doing things for you versus just worrying about my own life, then you need to at minimum not be an asshole to me. You need to instead at minimum show me some basic decency.

And newsflash, going “fuck white people” is not basic decent behavior, it is asshole behavior. I mean, seriously, would a minority person want to help out someone who goes “fuck black people” or “fuck gays” or “fuck immigrants” or the like? I highly doubt it. So why should I be obligated to help out someone who goes “fuck white people”?

I mean, cause, sure, I’ll be happy to fuck off if you want. But that means fucking off with my help too, not just with my “oppression” of you.

P.S. And it once again it occurs to me that for people who like to accuse others of being wrongfully entitled, that actually more accurately describes how SJWs act. In this case, feeling wrongfully entitled to active effort from people you just treated poorly.

[loki-zen]

Also there’s another thing SJ-discourse conflates/binarizes, which @jeysiec alluded to, which is that your options are not:

1: saying fuck white people all the time

2: being unfailingly nice and deferential to white people and not pointing out their bad behaviour ever

You can talk about problematic trends and behaviours and such among white people and the downright evil behaviour some of us have and still do get up to without reducing this to ‘fuck white people’.

At the same time, I get that there is sometimes a need for a space and a time when you don’t have to engage with the diversity and humanity of a group that’s hurt you; a place to say ‘fuck men’ and ‘fuck white people’ just like, for instance, people recovering from a terrible experience with religion/ deconverting sometimes need a time and a place to talk about how all religions are stupid and evil and rape victims need a time and a place for their rapist to literally be the devil without you bringing up how he fed a puppy one time. That’s an emotional need that people have.

But at the same time, if the face of the atheist movement is ‘lol sky fairies are dumb’ no one will take them seriously. If anti-rape activism doesn’t acknowledge that rapists are human it can’t properly engage with the task of reducing rape. And if the face and mainstream of your movement is that it’s a place for saying ‘fuck white people’ and no one is allowed to dislike that, you’re not going to be good at picking up and keeping white allies, and the ones you have won’t be very effective because white guilt is a destructive emotion that clouds rationality and doesn’t help anybody get anything done.

[sinesalvatorem]

It occurs to me that one of the things about Blanchard’s ‘homosexual transsexual’ idea actually fits my experience.

His idea is that super femme gay men have a hard time getting other gay men to date them, because potential gay partners want someone more masculine, so they transition so they can date straight men instead.

I won’t go into what’s problematic about this here. What I will say is that the outcome described seems to fit what happened with me as someone attracted to women?

Like, when I was trying and failing at being male, I never once caught the eye of a straight girl, because I was generally femmer than they were. However, since transitioning, I seem to attract gays better than a flannel sale.

Obviously this isn’t /why/ I transitioned, because I had no clue this would happen until after I transitioned (my working theory was that I was incredibly unattractive and would die alone), but it is indeed a thing that happened. It makes me wonder if there are lonely GNC people who would benefit from transitioning, but that’s your own call, of course.

[loki-zen]

I wonder if this has to do with where you were, though?

Might counterfactual feminine straight man version of Alison done better in a country that wasn’t super homophobic, given that this tends to lead to also hating on non-GNC men? I know a lot of girls who like a pretty boy.

[argumate]

other convenient superweapons: find a lack of representation in the governing body of any organisation you dislike. find an affiliated person and see if they’ve ever published anything using a word that is no longer considered appropriate, this includes social media. or at a stretch, see if they’ve ever corresponded publicly with a person or organisation that fails these criteria.

[penicillium-pusher]

It’s 2016, dressing as the opposite gender as a party theme shouldn’t exist anymore.

[kai-skai]

I don’t know about this. On brief reflection, such a party seems to have some benefit: it’s a great opportunity to explore gender-nonconforming presentations in a socially accepted way that provides people with plausible deniability who might want to present in gender-nonconforming ways (whether due to unacknowledged, unexplored transness or “just because”), and it might teach people a thing or two about opposite-gender clothing and its limitations (such as “oh wow no wonder purses are so important to women, this thing doesn’t have pockets/these pockets are tiny”).

Objections I can come up with are mostly that trans people might feel excluded/unable to participate because they need to present as their gender to get read correctly/it makes them dysphoric, and maaaybe some people would say it promotes thinking of trans people as people playing dress-up, but that doesn’t seem to hold up, since it’s not about trans people. (Oh, and maybe that people might see them on their way and think they’re trans and then take that as evidence that “you can always recognize trans people, just look at that guy in a dress over there”, but tbh fuck that, most clueless people think that anyway, and if there are lots of people dressed up around that might not happen anyway.)

(Also maybe something about “opposite” gender there. And I don’t know how mandatory that stuff is. What would happen if e.g. a cis woman normally dressing quite masculine turned up there in a dress instead because that’s more “opposite” for them?)

We sometimes had events with dressing in “drag” at my old high school - they mostly seemed to be fun for everyone (me included, and I do think that dressing in “guy” clothes and just feeling myself and not dressed up at all might have helped me). I might not be perfectly representative, but I also don’t remember ever connecting that to the notion of trrans people.

If you have the time and energy to drop a line or two about your reasons to disapprove, I’d appreciate it :)

[queenshulamit-deactivated201602]

The rats should be on regular amphetamine, not meth, because meth is neurotoxic

(via queenshulamit)

No, they should be on heroin. Goddammit, we discussed this.

(via wirehead-wannabe)

Actually this was in a discussion about the specific problem of rats developing heroin tolerance.

(via queenshulamit)

I can’t help feeling the scientists are enabling the rats substance abuse problems, if not encouraging them, and we really need to break the toxic relationship between scientist and rat to make progress on this issue.

[funereal-disease]

You mentioned in a recent post that a big part of why you're hesitant towards social justice is that you have multiple disabilities which SJ batters you for. I'm pretty new here and I'd be interested to hear you expand on that, if you're willing to share.

Hi anon! I’m glad you asked. This is one of my favorite things to talk about, so settle in.

First off, I am autistic. What this means for me personally is that even though I am a woman, I experience the world in stereotypically male ways, chiefly: 

preferring facts over feelings

tending to wax at length about my special interests, sometimes in a way that others find condescending 

dominating conversations because I can’t tell when I’m supposed to tone it down

splaying my limbs and possessions everywhere, as my proprioception is rather lacking

In other words, exhibiting pretty much every behavior that modern feminism attributes to entitled white males. I can’t take a goddamn breath in a feminist space without hearing about how the way I move through the world is inherently oppressive. Which, coming from people who consistently vow to “protect me at all costs”, is pretty, uh, rich. Sometimes such people qualify their rhetoric with “but of course autistic women get a pass”, which I find frankly just as abhorrent. Either my ways of existing in the world are okay or they’re not. Don’t tokenize me; don’t put me on a pedestal. That’s exactly as dehumanizing as the opposite. 

Second off, I have a history of eating disorders. I’ve been in recovery for over a year now (I still can’t believe it!), but it used to be pretty freaking bad. And one of the worst things I experienced as a result of it was the onslaught of seriously appalling ableism, which is well hidden to most of the world and all too obvious when you’re struggling with an eating disorder. During the years I dealt with it, I watched SJ folks:

insist that the eating disordered ought to be institutionalized for the benefit of those around us (because we’ll influence others, you see)

applaud a French law that restricts the right of eating disordered women to work in the fashion industry 

attempt to shut down some of the only spaces we have to vent our disordered thoughts honestly, because “vulnerable people might find it”

consistently reiterate that “healthy is beautiful”, because fuck sick people who might like some reassurance 

insist that our visibility is inherently toxic and we ought to be kept from public view until we’ve recovered 

generally speak of us as victims of societal oppression rather than as disabled people trying to manage our conditions with dignity 

This was especially bad for my mental health, even more so than the autism thing. At least autistic people have a defined movement and a plethora of spaces; there’s room for variety. When it comes to eating disorders, feminism all but defines the conversation. When you’re bulimic and you want a community space that isn’t SJ-inflected, there is nowhere to go. 

Everywhere you turn, you’ll find groups and rhetoric that take for granted our enfeebled victimhood, our toxicity to other, realer women. You’ll find people who otherwise fight tooth and nail for disability rights applauding legal restrictions on our ability to work. You’ll find people who otherwise laud “safe spaces” shutting down the only ones eating disordered people have. It is pervasive. It is everywhere. And it explicitly made my recovery a lot harder than it should have been. I will not count myself a part of the social justice community as long as one part of me is thrown under the bus for benefit of another. People can’t be carved up that way. 

[testblogdontupvote]

While I definitely agree that a lot (if not most) of the social justice is ableist as heck (and in general expresses all sorts of prejudice - racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. - so long as they can do mental tricks to convince themselves that they’re punching up), I wonder if there’s a way to steelman what they’re complaining about rather than completely discard it?

For example, compare what you’re saying about stereotypically male or actually autistic behaviors to donating to charity. Even the strongest proponents of “child in a pond” argument seem to believe that not only the absolute amount, but even the percent of income that one can reasonably be expected to donate to charity scaled down massively for poor people. And while it’s not commonly brought up, I think most would also agree that it scaled down with the number of people this income sustains, with some of them needing expensive medical care, etc. Likewise, I think one could reasonably argue that it would be nice if people who can easily do that, but perhaps don’t bother to because they’re aware that it can even be an issue, abstained from doing things that annoy other people and/or contribute to the problems they’re already systematically experiencing. But if someone can’t do that, or can at the cost of massively limiting their social life and spinning into spirals of self-hatred, anxiety, and depression, then clearly they have no responsibility to do that, because making people that miserable is a shitty thing to do, and also it’s absolutely unreasonable to expect people to help others when it hurts them more than it benefits the recipients of help.

I’m not sure how one can organize that in practice. Perhaps one could try stopping yelling at people who aren’t doing “good enough” and starting complimenting people who are doing just good, and politely suggesting ways to do better. I understand that it can be very hard, and feel deeply unfair. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people who are at the moment feeling hurt to be extremely polite, but one can totally expect movements as whole to be considerate in their choice of rhetoric.

[funereal-disease]

Epistemic status: not entirely sure I understand what you’re getting at, and therefore responding to what is perhaps a strawman or just a complete misrepresentation of it.

My issue with that particular line of rhetoric - much kinder than mainstream SJ though it is - is that it still posits autistic ways of being and thinking as sort of a defective version of the neurotypical complement. There’s nothing inherently inferior about communicating through infodumps or preferring logic to emotion, and I worry that “politely suggesting ways to do better” will reinforce flawed ideas of what “better” is.

Are there often incompatibilities in communication style that leave people feeling frustrated and unheard? Absolutely! I’m all for finding ways to bridge that gap and hook people up with communities whose norms work for them. But an incompatibility doesn’t mean that anyone is doing anything wrong. If my focus on logic frustrates more emotional people around me, neither of us is broken. Neither of us needs to apologize for the way we think. And if we’re going to compromise, the responsibility of that adaptation has to fall on the more “conventional” person as well as the weird one.

I don’t want feminists to tell me “it’s okay that you communicate this way because you can’t help it”. I want it to be okay to communicate this way, full stop.

[dataandphilosophy]

Point: Mentioning that I am only a fan of the foreign version of a film makes me seem kind of pretentious.

Counterpoint: I am really pretentious, and someone who can’t handle that is not going to like dating me. 

[raginrayguns]

why’s the nih want my personal email address and my birthday. They gonna send me best wishes?

[atapi]

crecrecrecreature

[funereal-disease]

You mentioned in a recent post that a big part of why you're hesitant towards social justice is that you have multiple disabilities which SJ batters you for. I'm pretty new here and I'd be interested to hear you expand on that, if you're willing to share.

Hi anon! I’m glad you asked. This is one of my favorite things to talk about, so settle in.

First off, I am autistic. What this means for me personally is that even though I am a woman, I experience the world in stereotypically male ways, chiefly: 

preferring facts over feelings

tending to wax at length about my special interests, sometimes in a way that others find condescending 

dominating conversations because I can’t tell when I’m supposed to tone it down

splaying my limbs and possessions everywhere, as my proprioception is rather lacking

In other words, exhibiting pretty much every behavior that modern feminism attributes to entitled white males. I can’t take a goddamn breath in a feminist space without hearing about how the way I move through the world is inherently oppressive. Which, coming from people who consistently vow to “protect me at all costs”, is pretty, uh, rich. Sometimes such people qualify their rhetoric with “but of course autistic women get a pass”, which I find frankly just as abhorrent. Either my ways of existing in the world are okay or they’re not. Don’t tokenize me; don’t put me on a pedestal. That’s exactly as dehumanizing as the opposite. 

Second off, I have a history of eating disorders. I’ve been in recovery for over a year now (I still can’t believe it!), but it used to be pretty freaking bad. And one of the worst things I experienced as a result of it was the onslaught of seriously appalling ableism, which is well hidden to most of the world and all too obvious when you’re struggling with an eating disorder. During the years I dealt with it, I watched SJ folks:

insist that the eating disordered ought to be institutionalized for the benefit of those around us (because we’ll influence others, you see)

applaud a French law that restricts the right of eating disordered women to work in the fashion industry 

attempt to shut down some of the only spaces we have to vent our disordered thoughts honestly, because “vulnerable people might find it”

consistently reiterate that “healthy is beautiful”, because fuck sick people who might like some reassurance 

insist that our visibility is inherently toxic and we ought to be kept from public view until we’ve recovered 

generally speak of us as victims of societal oppression rather than as disabled people trying to manage our conditions with dignity 

This was especially bad for my mental health, even more so than the autism thing. At least autistic people have a defined movement and a plethora of spaces; there’s room for variety. When it comes to eating disorders, feminism all but defines the conversation. When you’re bulimic and you want a community space that isn’t SJ-inflected, there is nowhere to go. 

Everywhere you turn, you’ll find groups and rhetoric that take for granted our enfeebled victimhood, our toxicity to other, realer women. You’ll find people who otherwise fight tooth and nail for disability rights applauding legal restrictions on our ability to work. You’ll find people who otherwise laud “safe spaces” shutting down the only ones eating disordered people have. It is pervasive. It is everywhere. And it explicitly made my recovery a lot harder than it should have been. I will not count myself a part of the social justice community as long as one part of me is thrown under the bus for benefit of another. People can’t be carved up that way. 

[testblogdontupvote]

While I definitely agree that a lot (if not most) of the social justice is ableist as heck (and in general expresses all sorts of prejudice - racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. - so long as they can do mental tricks to convince themselves that they’re punching up), I wonder if there’s a way to steelman what they’re complaining about rather than completely discard it?

For example, compare what you’re saying about stereotypically male or actually autistic behaviors to donating to charity. Even the strongest proponents of “child in a pond” argument seem to believe that not only the absolute amount, but even the percent of income that one can reasonably be expected to donate to charity scaled down massively for poor people. And while it’s not commonly brought up, I think most would also agree that it scaled down with the number of people this income sustains, with some of them needing expensive medical care, etc. Likewise, I think one could reasonably argue that it would be nice if people who can easily do that, but perhaps don’t bother to because they’re aware that it can even be an issue, abstained from doing things that annoy other people and/or contribute to the problems they’re already systematically experiencing. But if someone can’t do that, or can at the cost of massively limiting their social life and spinning into spirals of self-hatred, anxiety, and depression, then clearly they have no responsibility to do that, because making people that miserable is a shitty thing to do, and also it’s absolutely unreasonable to expect people to help others when it hurts them more than it benefits the recipients of help.

I’m not sure how one can organize that in practice. Perhaps one could try stopping yelling at people who aren’t doing “good enough” and starting complimenting people who are doing just good, and politely suggesting ways to do better. I understand that it can be very hard, and feel deeply unfair. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people who are at the moment feeling hurt to be extremely polite, but one can totally expect movements as whole to be considerate in their choice of rhetoric.

[soundlogic2236]

So, there are two issues I have with this:

Some things are bad, but not moral failings: For example, not having enough money is bad, but not (at least generally) a moral failing. Limited executive functioning is rather like limited money-if you have very a very limited supply this is unfortunate. If you snapped your fingers and give me unlimited money I would be pleased. If you snapped your fingers and gave me unlimited executive functioning I would be pleased. 

One thing that SJ rhetoric often does is comparable to the following: Imagine your donating to charity bit-now imagine that someone goes to multiple minority groups and says “Don’t worry, I know you probably don’t have enough money to give a lot to charity. Don’t worry about it.” and then goes up to a homeless white guy and says “How dare you not give five thousand dollars to charity! I know you aren’t facing the economic oppression against African Americans!”. Now, the homeless white guy almost certainly is not facing the economic oppression against black individuals. None the less, the proposal that the homeless white guy is in a position where he should be yelled at for failing to give five thousand dollars to charity is preposterous, since he is in fact impoverished to the point of homelessness, regardless of cause.

This is how I feel about certain things like “Oh, you have trouble keeping track of which words are ‘in’? Don’t worry, that is probably connected to your autism”. That is plausible-I have trouble keeping track of lots of social nonsenses. But a super old guy who can’t remember what year it is but remembers working with his [insert group here] friends to create banners saying “Give [insert something currently a slur here] rights now!” (slogans are not my specialty), and so sometimes refers to people using said slur? Well, he may not have autism, but if you shout at him I’ll honestly feel rather like I’m being used as a weapon against him. I will have objections. Strong objections.

Secondly, somethings are neither bad nor moral failings. A statement like “Oh, I don’t understand why anyone would want to harm the gay community-they can’t help being sexually deviant evil demons” is rather homophobic. My love of careful logic and reasoning? Not evil. In fact, I’m so much in favor of it and think it is so important and identify so much with it that I named myself after it. If someone opposes it they are in direct opposition to me. A statement like “Oh, I don’t understand why anyone would want to punch soundlogic-they can’t help defending something as terrible and misogynistic as logic”? I will have objections. Strong objections.

[alarajrogers]

In general, the reason why “entitled white men” get shit for dominating conversations, being condescending, and so forth, is that the only excuse they have for behaving that way is that they weren’t taught not to behave that way, not that it is physiologically difficult not to behave that way.

I have all of the same issues mentioned up top by the OP as far as my behavior goes, except for the part about sprawling out and taking up space. I dominate conversations, I go on and on about my special interests, I have been frequently accused of condescending to people or lecturing them, I prefer facts over feelings. And I have never had a problem in social justice spaces, because it is understood that I don’t behave that way due to a society that gives me a free pass for doing it and I only do it to my social “inferiors”; I do it to everyone, and people have been calling me on it my whole life. 

The individual behaving in X way is never the problem, in social justice theory. The pattern is the problem. If white cis men engage in a pattern of behavior, and non-white people, trans people, and female people do not in general engage in this pattern, but in general autistic people of all races and genders do, then either all white cis men are autistic, which is not true, or all autistic people share something in common with white cis men, which seems really implausible due to the fact that race is a social construct and genetically/biologically has no significance… or autistic people are doing it for a different reason. When you consider that the primary defining characteristic of us is that we’re a lot less sensitive to social cues warning us not to do the thing, and the primary defining characteristic of white cis men is that they have enough social power that they are not required to avoid doing the thing… well, there’s a huge difference between “you’re socially inappropriate because the nature of your brain structure makes it difficult for you to notice” and “you’re socially inappropriate because you can get away with it because you’re powerful.” For one thing, it means that those of us who do it because we don’t notice we’re doing it get much, much more shit for it in our lives than people who do it because they can get away with it. (SJWs are not the only ones who will call you out for talking over other people or dominating the conversation… they’re just the only ones who’ll do it if you’re a white man doing it to people who aren’t white men.)

Obviously there’s an intersection set because a large number of autistics are, in fact, white cis men. But I would argue that because they don’t pick up on social cues, they also get shit for it, because they do it under circumstances where neurotypical white cis men would know better – such as doing it to their bosses, or a white male recognized expert in a subject. For all of us, therefore, there’s actually a penalty for this behavior, whereas the only penalty NT white cis men ever suffer for it comes from SJWs. And if I were an autistic man, I’d push back and say “Sorry I did that, but I do it because I’m autistic and I don’t pick up that I’m doing it so please let me know if I’m doing it while I’m in a conversation with you”, whereas the traditional response from the neurotypical white cis man is to say no he wasn’t, and anyway, you do it too, and anyway, “mansplaining” is a sexist term. One of these behaviors comes from an aspect of our condition that is functionally a disability, and one of them comes from feeling entitled to the point where you don’t even need to recognize that you’re doing it because there are no social consequences. 

As for slurs, I think the SJW movement pays waaaaay too much attention to slurs. Declaring that no word meaning “less intelligent” can be used as an insult because they were all synonyms for “retarded” at one point (which is itself falling out of clinical use because it’s become a slur), declaring that words which sound like slurs cannot be used when they are appropriate (a shitstorm over a person using the term “niggardly” to mean penny-pinching, a word that etymologically has no relationship to a slur used against African-Americans, because it sounds like it does), declaring that anything bearing any resemblance to a cultural negative stereotype is one (I just today saw a rant calling A Christmas Carol anti-Semitic because what could a penny-pinching asshole who hates Christmas be but a Jew? Except Scrooge is established to be Christian, and assuming that rich person who is stingy with money = Jew in all circumstances is itself promoting that stereotype.) And language changes, so yeah, I think the appropriate thing to do with someone who used the wrong word because they’re old and that’s the word they know, if languge has changed, is to kindly point it out to them. If their heart is in the right place, they’ll gladly fix their language, You don’t give someone who’s trying to do the right thing a ton of shit for it because they did it slightly wrong.

[soundlogic2236]

I disagree (except the bit about slurs).

For starters, the ‘socially inappropriate’ argument strikes me as EXTREMELY problematic. Consider the following hypothetical: Imagine an extremely sexist world (I REALLY hope I don’t wind up describing our world. That would be depressing). In it, women are expected to give sexual favors to their bosses. An autistic woman fails to notice this. An excuse of “Well, she is autistic, so it is fine that she didn’t offer sexual favors” entirely misses the point-not offering sexual favors is a reasonable thing for anyone to do! I maintain that some of the requirements that autistic people are failing to notice are in fact unreasonable-probably not as unreasonable as in the world described, but unreasonable none the less. The statement “The fact that they do it for their bosses but not to people who lack power over them” entirely fails to show the desired conclusion, as it applies equally well to “Well, the person punches random people on the street but doesn’t punch their boss” as “Well, the person doesn’t offer sexual favors to random people on the street but offers them to their boss”.

For example, I think my attitude of “You have a problem. I shall attempt to figure out how to fix it.” is a great attitude! Now, due to my autism I’ve applied it to people who then got angry and punished me. While fortunately at my work place this tendency is accepted and appreciated (one of the things i love about it), in school I learned to restrain myself more around those who could punish me and I didn’t trust, but for someone who doesn’t have the power to punish me I’m more likely to offer it even if I don’t trust them, since I maintain that it working is worth more than the cases where people get irritated by it, even if I’m not willing to suffer punishment for this benefit. If someone had better innate social skills and managed to do that by default I would not see a reason to hold it against them.

As for the traditional neurotypical white cis man response, while I wouldn’t reply as described I would certainly be likely to reply in a way that people might describe like that: “Given a reasonable set of standards, no I didn’t. Given a more lax set of standards I didn’t but you did. Given a truly unreasonable set of standards I did, but so did everyone on the planet above the age of two” sounds entirely like my sort of thought process. I often restrain myself for fear of social consequences, and in fact do so even to the determent of others-failure to speak up when I think it might help those who are being harmed (this is perhaps somewhat selfish, though I think in a lot of the cases the aid I could offer would actually be insufficient to justify the harm to me even without selfishness-me giving up all my money to give one homeless person a penny would simply be foolish), the assertion that someone with more resistance to harms causing more offense must be a bad thing entirely fails in such a case. 

As for ‘mansplaning’ being a sexist term, the arguments against it being so have struck me as extremely thin, sufficiently thin in fact that I have heard a more plausible argument that given the most reasonable non-explicitly-sexist definition of ‘mansplaning’ I have heard the statistics may be such that the most common source of mansplaning is in fact women.

[thenatsdorf]

Traferret jam.

[ferretix]

this. this is the most beautiful thing i have ever seen in my life.

[isaac-blank]

@afeastforsamwell

[earthboundricochet]

@formerbishie

[bambamramfan]

Sexism and Objectification

Tumblrites are talking about how men rarely feel objectified, both the negative and positive parts of that, so I thought now was a good time to post my essay on men and women, subjects and objected.

Keep reading

[cromulentenough]

The wording i’ve seen used is ‘hyperagency’ for men and ‘hypoagency’ for women. but yes, agree with most of this.

[bambamramfan]

I haven’t seen that wording, but yes, it sounds appealing.

My concern would be that it implies a normal level of agency somewhere in the middle, when I think a lot of this is driven by the natural (or at least grammatical) distinction that is a duality with no middle.

[girlcalledwasp]

Okay, I usually try not to post Things That Could Be Construed As Political on this tumblr (though I’ve failed in the past), but damn, son. I’m a self-identified subject (to use your terms) and this puts into words far more succinctly than I ever have both why I identify as a scimitar-wielding feminist and why I often feel like in battling the Kyriarchy, I end up fighting other firebreathing feminists far more often than I’d like to. I am not a reward, I am not a number, I am not a Precious Porcelain Doll who Needs Protection. I am not The Feminine, I am not some fucking abstraction, I am myself with all my strange and wily complexity and honestly, in a world just jam-packed with “What Women Want” and “What Women Need” I wish more people would look at me and see not a woman first and foremost but a human fucking being. 

[bambamramfan]

Yeah, I think a lot of people reading this who really appreciate it are those who feel at odds with their gender but not the gender so much that they want to go trans, but with the other dualities implicit in it. Like I think there are a lot of women who feel “I am still a woman but I want to be treated as a subject even if that means being held responsible for my actions” and men who feel “I am still a man but I want to be treated as an object even if that means I’ll never be alpha-male.” 

Both of whom are pretty underserved by current discourse, among either traditionalists or anti-oppression liberals.

[multiheaded1793]

This is so fucking important, please read it.

[sinesalvatorem]

COME TO GUESS CULTURE WE HAVE COOKIES AND THE ASSUMPTION THAT YOU WANT THEM

@serinemolecule (via shacklesburst)

[brainsforbabyjesus]

I have seen a number of harry potter posts that go something like, “If there was magic and wizards in (country) they’d _____.”  Usually there are also long discussions that go along with these about how each country deals with the statute of secrecy.

And all I can think is, Canada wouldn’t even bother trying to enforce the statute of secrecy. Because what is the point? How would you even know if it was a magic thing or just a Canada thing?

Is that guy just taking a regular old moose through a drive thru to get coffee or is it animagus?

Was that prime minister crazy or did he actually talk to ghosts?

How do you steal 20 000 litres of maple syrup? Trucks or portkeys?

The minister of immigration formally gave Santa Claus citizenship and a passport.

House hippos.

All magic would do to Canada is make the internet about 90% more sure that Canada isn’t a real place.

[nyxelestia]

That would explain a few things.

[sinesalvatorem]

Oooh! Is this article where you get your “#do you guys not have flying bears?” tag from?

[mrrrrps-deactivated20201225]

get on her mcfucking level

[another-normal-anomaly]

https://xkcd.com/262/

[ursaeinsilviscacant-blog]

I literally flapped my hands and made enthusiastic thumbs up at the screen.

This is a Blessed Image.

Bode

[thewinterotter]

I’m watching a documentary about rats and this guy is like “they say there’s a rat for every single person in New York City” and I know he’s talking about like population numbers but it kind of sounds like he’s trying to tell everyone in New York that they have an individually assigned rodent friend and I think that’s beautiful.

[bewaretheides315]

The next big thing in fandom: Rat Soulmates

[voxmyriad]

Well I’m here, when do I get to meet my Buddy Rat?

[usedtobehmc]

As I approached the near-empty parking lot that practically hung out over the Hudson, I took my 78th look at the pamphlet that had arrived on my doorstep yesterday: my 16th birthday.  The pamphlet said, 

Congratulations on the 16th anniversary of your birth. Please report to: Rodent Assignment Terminus #1 13th Avenue Manhattan, NY 

Honest to God, I had no idea there even was a 13th Avenue on Manhattan but here I was.  After about two minutes of look around, I spotted the ramshackle little kiosk in the corner of the floating block of asphalt and pavement.  It was surrounded by mini traffic cones forming an impromptu runway that led right to the small window carved in the side of the slanted hut.  I knocked on the window sill and waited.

The tiny window slid open and the wizened face of an old lady appeared.  By my rough estimate, she was approximately 170 years old.  “Name?”  She croaked, taking a drag off her cigarette with shriveled lips.  

“Uh… Addison.  Addison Sharpe.”  I held up the pamphlet with my eyebrows up, letting her know I also did not know why I was here.  

The window slammed shut and I heard the bustle and groaning of the old lady getting up out of her seat.  

To my surprise, she appeared outside the kiosk with a metal wire hanger-looking device with a hook hammered into the end.  She shuffled three feet to a tiny, manhole cover and slipped the hook through one of its holes.  I rushed forward to offer to do it myself but to my utter shock, she lifted the manhole up and to the side with no more effort than it took her to slam the small window of her kiosk.  She removed her cigarette with one hand and cupped her mouth with the other.  “Addison Sharpe!”

A low, unholy sound emerged from the depths of the hole in the ground.  It sounded like 8 million chairs squeaking across a poorly-waxed floor.  It sounded like 32 million claws clicking and clacking their way across a cement car port.  It sounded like the asthmatic breathing of a mass of nightmares.  It got closer… and closer to the top of the hole.

A single rat, about the size of a small chiuahua, emerged from the hole.

“Look, he got dressed up for you,” the old lady wheezed affectionately, and casually moved the manhole cover back into place.

The rat in question appeared to have a pink bow on his head, stuck there with what I can only assume (and hope) was gum.  He regarded me, whiskers twitching, beady eyes staring. 

“I like your bow,” I offered.

The rat hobbled towards me, latching onto my pant leg with sharp little claws and climbing until he reached my hoodie pocket, where he settled with a decisive sigh.  

I turned to thank the old lady, but she slammed the door of the kiosk in my face.

[thewinterotter]

This is the most magical thing that’s ever happened in response to dumb shit I said on tumblr. I love you. And I like the bow, too.

[jathis]

This is beautiful

[napoleanbonerfart]

@doctor-segmentium

[rat-cyng]

this is my ultimate dream

[voxette-vk]

by Thomas C. Leonard

Ross’s (1901b) theory was that the “native” Anglo-Saxon stock was biologically well-adapted to rural, traditional life, but less well-suited to the new urban milieu of industrial capitalism. In his view, the racially inferior immigrant races, “Latins, Slavs, Asiatics, and Hebrews,” were better adapted to the conditions of industrial capitalism and thus would outbreed the superior Anglo-Saxon race. The race-suicide proposition that persons of inferior stock outbreed their biological betters turns Darwinism on its head, since Darwinism defines fitness as relative reproductive success. Progressive Era eugenics, in contrast argued that fitness comprised attributes, such as race, that could be judged independently of reproductive success. Indeed, race-suicide theory was predicated on what Darwinism denies, what eugenicists called the “elimination of the fit.” […]

The Eugenic Effects of Minimum Wage Laws

During the second half of the Progressive Era, beginning roughly in 1908, progressive economists and their reform allies achieved many statutory victories, including state laws that regulated working conditions, banned child labor, instituted “mothers’ pensions,” capped working hours and, the sine qua non, fixed minimum wages. In using eugenics to justify exclusionary immigration legislation, the race-suicide theorists offered a model to economists advocating labor reforms, notably those affiliated with the American Association for Labor Legislation, the organization of academic economists that Orloff and Skocpol (1984, p. 726) call the “leading association of U.S. social reform advocates in the Progressive Era.”

Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics, believed that binding minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it performed the eugenic service ridding the labor force of the “unemployable.” Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1897 [1920], p. 785) put it plainly: “With regard to certain sections of the population [the “unemployable”], this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.” “[O]f all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” Sidney Webb (1912, p. 992) opined in the Journal of Political Economy, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly compete as wage earners.” A minimum wage was seen to operate eugenically through two channels: by deterring prospective immigrants (Henderson, 1900) and also by removing from employment the “unemployable,” who, thus identified, could be, for example, segregated in rural communities or sterilized.

The notion that minimum-wage induced disemployment is a social benefit distinguishes its progressive proponents from their neoclassical critics, such as Alfred Marshall (1897), Philip Wicksteed (1913), A. C. Pigou (1913) and John Bates Clark (1913), who regarded job loss as a social cost of minimum wages, not as a putative social benefit (Leonard, 2000).

Columbia’s Henry Rogers Seager, a leading progressive economist who served as president of the AEA in 1922, provides an example. Worthy wage-earners, Seager (1913a, p. 12) argued, need protection from the “wearing competition of the casual worker and the drifter” and from the other “unemployable” who unfairly drag down the wages of more deserving workers (1913b, pp. 82–83). The minimum wage protects deserving workers from the competition of the unfit by making it illegal to work for less. Seager (1913a, p. 9) wrote: “The operation of the minimum wage requirement would merely extend the definition of defectives to embrace all individuals, who even after having received special training, remain incapable of adequate self-support.” Seager (p. 10) made clear what should happen to those who, even after remedial training, could not earn the legal minimum: “If we are to maintain a race that is to be made of up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by isolation or sterilization … .”

The unemployable were thus those workers who earned less than some measure of an adequate standard of living, a standard the British called a “decent maintenance” and Americans referred to as a “living wage.” For labor reformers, firms that paid workers less than the living wage to which they were entitled were deemed parasitic, as were the workers who accepted such wages—on grounds that someone (charity, state, other members of the household) would need to make up the difference.

For progressives, a legal minimum wage had the useful property of sorting the unfit, who would lose their jobs, from the deserving workers, who would retain their jobs. Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist who served as Woodrow Wilson’s U.S. Commissioner of Labor, opposed a proposal to subsidize the wages of poor workers for this reason. Meeker preferred a wage floor because it would disemploy unfit workers and thereby enable their culling from the work force. “It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work,” argued Meeker (1910, p. 554). “Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.” A. B. Wolfe (1917, p. 278), an American progressive economist who would later become president of the AEA in 1943, also argued for the eugenic virtues of removing from employment those who “are a burden on society.”

In his Principles of Economics, Frank Taussig (1921, pp. 332–333) asked rhetorically, “how to deal with the unemployable?” Taussig identified two classes of unemployable worker, distinguishing the aged, infirm and disabled from the “feebleminded … those saturated with alcohol or tainted with hereditary disease … [and] the irretrievable criminals and tramps… .” The latter class, Taussig proposed, “should simply be stamped out.” “We have not reached the stage,” Taussig allowed, “where we can proceed to chloroform them once and for all; but at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.”5

The progressive idea that the unemployable could not earn a living wage was bound up with the progressive view of wage determination. Unlike the economists who pioneered the still-novel marginal productivity theory, most progressives agreed that wages should be determined by the amount that was necessary to provide a reasonable standard of living, not by productivity, and that the cost of this entitlement should fall on firms.6

But how should a living wage be determined? Were workers with more dependents, and thus higher living expenses, thereby entitled to higher wages? Arguing that wages should be a matter of an appropriate standard of living opened the door, in this era of eugenics, to theories of wage determination that were grounded in biology, in particular to the idea that “low-wage races” were biologically predisposed to low wages, or “under-living.”7 Edward A. Ross (1936, p. 70), the proponent of race-suicide theory, argued that “the Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.” “Native” workers have higher productivity, claimed Ross, but because Chinese immigrants are racially disposed to work for lower wages, they displace the native workers.

In his Races and Immigrants, the University of Wisconsin economist and social reformer John R. Commons argued that wage competition not only lowers wages, it also selects for the unfit races. “The competition has no respect for the superior races,” said Commons (1907, p. 151), “the race with lowest necessities displaces others.” Because race rather than productivity determined living standards, Commons could populate his low-wage-races category with the industrious and lazy alike. African Americans were, for Commons (p. 136), “indolent and fickle,” which explained why, Commons argued, slavery was required: “The negro could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come as a free man … [I ]f such races are to adopt that industrious life which is second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion.” Similarly, Wharton School reformer Scott Nearing (1915, p. 22), volunteered that if “an employer has a Scotchman working for him at $3 a day [and] an equally efficient Lithuanian offers to the same work for $2 … the work is given to the low bidder.”

When U.S. labor reformers reported on labor legislation in countries more precocious with respect to labor reform, they favorably commented on the eugenic efficacy of minimum wages in excluding the “low-wage races” from work. Harvard’s Arthur Holcombe (1912, p. 21), a member of the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission, referred approvingly to the intent of Australia’s minimum wage law to “protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese.” Florence Kelley (1911, p. 304), perhaps the most influential U.S. labor reformer of the day, also endorsed the Australian minimum-wage law as “redeeming the sweated trades” by preventing the “unbridled competition” of the unemployable, the “women, children, and Chinese [who] were reducing all the employees to starvation …”

For these progressives, race determined the standard of living, and the standard of living determined the wage. Thus were immigration restriction and labor legislation, especially minimum wages, justified for their eugenic effects. Invidious distinction, whether founded on the putatively greater fertility of the unfit, or upon their putatively greater predisposition to low wages, lay at the heart of the reforms we today see as the hallmark of the Progressive Era.