#sj malarkey

[earlgraytay]

it is bleakly, bitterly amusing to me how many people will not accept common sense and decency unless you word it in a very specific way that gets around whatever bumper stickers they’ve been programmed with

(frankly this includes me; I Am Not Immune To Smug Garfield + etc.)

[earlgraytay]

this post has got me thinking about... hm... 

a lot of woke internet rhetoric about race, especially rhetoric aimed at white people, uses forced teaming to make itself seem more convincing

as in “all white people believe this; you are a white person, therefore you believe this, even if it’s only subconsciously.” 

i feel like this has the potential to set up implicit biases in people that weren’t there before, especially if the person being told this crap is young and impressionable. if you’re repeatedly told that you believe something, whether or not you do, you’re going to connect “this thing that I am that I cannot change” to “this thing I am supposed to believe”, and you are going to subconsciously start thinking of the thing you’re “supposed” to believe more often. regardless if it’s a thing you want to think, or a thing that’s good for you to be thinking, or a thing that’s healthy for you to think. 

I think this is part of why people say “woke-ism made me more ra//cist”. it’s not just that they became aware of biases they didn’t know they had in the first place, it’s that it gave them implicit biases that they wouldn’t have had in the first place 

[earlgraytay]

i wonder how many of the ~millenials~ and ~zoomers~ who are getting super enthusiastic about their gods-given right to say ‘okay boomer’...

have... any friends who are older than they are. at all. 

[earlgraytay]

/post/186309158643/ i sorta get that it's wrong but i can't put my finger on it? if you could help i would appreciate that !

(the post in question:)

okay, so. this is positioning logic, reason, and objectivity as a) the opposite of empathy, b) inherently male, c) vices. 

i don’t know if the OPs meant to imply any of these things- the odds are good that they just meant “ugh, That One Dude In My Philosophy 101 Class Who Thinks He’s A Paragon Of Logic Because He’s Read Atlas Shrugged is a Jagoff And I Wish I Never Had To Hear Him Again”- but that is what they’re implying. and these are all really really bad things to be implying for so many goddamn reasons. we’re talking “we don’t have time to unpack this let’s throw away the whole damn suitcase” kinda way.

so first off. when you imply that logic is the opposite of empathy, you are implying that feeling for other people is always an irrational thing to do. You are basically saying that helping other people is never the best or wisest course of action, that it would be wiser to let other people suffer. You are saying it is immoral to try to figure out the best solution to a problem instead of going with your gut and instinctively HELPING!!!!!

this is the kind of attitude that breeds benevolent sexism and white saviourism. no, really. feeling bad for people who are hurting is good and important. but unless you’re willing to sit down, detach yourself from your emotions to a degree, look at the actual problem space and not just at how you feel about it, and talk to the people who are hurting to see what they need-- in short, unless you use some degree of logic and reasoning-- you’re going to do what makes you feel better and not what solves the problem. 

it is good to empathize with other people, don’t get me wrong. but it’s also often the logical thing to do-- when people are hurting, it’s natural to want to help. positioning empathy as the opposite of logic means that you actively discourage people from trying to solve problems and encourage them to do things that make them feel better about problems. 

second of all. when you position logic, objectivity, and common sense as male traits, you are reinforcing the old sexist stereotype that men are ‘logical’ and women are ‘emotional’. it’s not great to reinforce sexist stereotypes even if you flip them over and say ‘being logical is bad actually’. 

setting aside the fact that you’re giving your enemies ammo-- which, you know, fine, I’ll grant that respectability politics are bullshit-- there are plenty of women who have systematizing/overly-logical/low-empathy brains. saying that ‘logic’ is a male trait kinda implies that these women are Being Women Wrong and that to be a woman you have to be Froofy and Emotional and Empathetic and Nurturing. 

i’m h/t-ing funereal-disease for this one (not tagging because she said she’s low on spoons)- basically, lately there’s been this push to define Womanhood as something stricter again, coming from the Left as much as the Right. There’s this idea that if you’re a woman but you’re not froofy and empathetic and emotional, well, you must be NB, right? 

liiiiiiiike you shouldn’t have to believe in astrology and enjoy Sisterhood (TM) to be able to call yourself a woman, but a disturbingly growing number of people seem to think that’s the case. >_

third, and finally... when you discard logic, reason, and common sense, you are much easier to radicalize and therefore control.  

there’s a reason so many cults and high-demand groups are, well, religious in nature. religion kinda demands you leave your common sense at the door, because some things are Ineffable. the gods are gods, mortals are mortals, and you will never be able to fully understand them. 

...I don’t think this is inherently wrong, but... when you’ve abandoned logic and reason and common sense, it becomes much easier for other people to tell you to do things that you would normally agree are bullshit. in the tumblr pagan community i met someone who was encouraging other people to worship him as a god. and people did it. because this person leaned on their religious beliefs and encouraged them to ignore their common sense. (you know, ‘people who demand to be worshipped are, generally, Bad News’). 

 if you want to radicalize people-- if you want them to believe dogma and hate the outgroup, rather than feeling empathy for everyone and acting based on their own ethical principles- you have to convince them to abandon reason. if your followers argue with your dogma, they’re not going to do what you say. if your followers won’t hate who you want them to hate on cue because “it doesn’t make sense”, you won’t have a small army of people to harass people into submission.

so you have to get them to abandon reason and focus only on dogma. you have to convince them that members of the outgroup can’t be objective about their own experiences and that the ingroup is always right. you have to convince them that any evidence the dogma might be wrong is false, it’s Enemy Lies or them Not Being Woke Enough. 

(you also have to get them to abandon empathy for the outgroup but that’s another story.) 

and OP is implying, whether or not they’re intending to, that that’s a good thing. that abandoning logic and reason means stripping yourself of unwoke social principles. that becoming more dogmatic is the only way to be empathetic. that anyone who wants to apply logic or reason to a complicated situation is ... That Fucking Guy. 

point is, yeah, i don’t think OP meant to say more than “ugh, fuck that guy in Phil 101″, but that’s the shit they were implying, and it bothers me. 

[earlgraytay]

so someone shared this post I made a while ago (content warning: trying to get into the heads of political opponents, frank discussion of toxic masculinity)

...I made it long, long before tumblr’s ~himbo~ thing really kicked off.

goddammit, sometimes I hate being right 

[earlgraytay]

I'm wondering how someone apparently came to the conclusion that the most effective way to fight transphobia is by harassing trans men for not screening the people with whom they have conversations about Harry Potter. Maybe my model of activism is outdated, but helping your uninsured friends get HRT, organizing a protest, volunteering for a candidate who supports trans rights, and spite donating to Mermaids in the name of actual male TERF Robert Webb all seem like better options.

[earlgraytay]

I will say that there are --also-- queer communities where trans women are treated like they're inherently regressive and unreliable narrators when it comes to gender, similar to what Julia Serano describes in her work. But yeah, I've encountered a lot of online communities where trans women position themselves as experts on transmasc experiences. And it does seem to correlate with support for some versions of feminism.

Yeah

Like I’ve said before this is one of those !!FUN!! intracommunity issues where everyone involved has been hurt in some way, so no one (myself included) can be rational or charitable

Being unsafe/excluded in a place that ought to be a haven for you brings out the worst in people

[earlgraytay]

[epistemic status: do as i say, not as i do]

So I was thinking about internet arguments earlier and specifically about that one Wondermark comic with the sealion.

Other people have said this before, but that comic is... kinda coming from a messed-up place.  We don’t have the full context of the conversation that Carriage Lady and Carriage Man are having before the Terrible Sealion shows up- all we see is that Carriage Lady says that she “could do without sea lions”. And then the sealion shows up and starts to bother her, and bother her, and bother her, trying to wear her down like an oh-so-polite pebble in her shoe. 

The message that we’re supposed to take away from this is that No One Likes Men Sea Lions Precisely Because They Act Like This and Carriage Lady was completely justified in complaining.  ... But divorced from that real-world context, what we’re shown is a woman saying “I don’t think this kind of creature (that even within the comic did not choose to be this way) should exist.” And then that kind of creature showing up to icily, politely inquire why the hell not. 

Now... okay, I have never been sealioned myself. I suspect this is because I present male and I do not suffer fools without a Wall O’ Text. It is hard to sealion someone who shoots six paragraphs your way every time you ask a question. But I’ve watched a couple take place, over a variety of subjects. 

The biggest one I’ve seen is the Empathy Discourse that occasionally crosses my dash- people in my end of the blogosphere like to debate over whether or not empathy is a good basis for morality, whether lacking empathy makes you more moral or less moral than other people, whether being uncomfortable with other people claiming to lack empathy is ableist or not. Things like that. And I’ve seen a couple of incredibly persistent anons in this discussion, asking “why do you think I’m bad? Could you show me any proof that people who have [no/yes] empathy have hurt you?” and so on and so on.

And the thing is... usually, when people sealion? When they really sealion hard, when they blow up someone else’s inbox with 50 messages and won’t take “please go away” for an answer? It’s because they feel like their worth as a person is under fire. They feel like they need to prove that they have the right to exist as the person they are, and that they’re not awful for being whatever demographic OP is complaining about. And yeah, sure, a lot of the time they grandstand and try to look Intellectual and Rational and make the other person look crazy, because they’re trying to Prove With Finality that they are rational for wanting this right. 

....this is not actually a bad thing to want. Even if you’re an “icky” demographic like a white person or a man. Everyone deserves to feel like they have the right to exist. Period, no exceptions, no matter what mind or body they have.

The problem is that a stranger on the internet cannot give you this validation. It’s something that has to come from inside. It’s a thing you need to build. It takes a lot of work and mental effort and if you’ve had it knocked down often enough it probably will take therapy. It’s not something someone else can give you.  

Moreover, a stranger on the internet who is angry at you will not give you this validation. They are already hacked off at you because you disagree with them, for chrissakes, they’re not gonna meet your deep psychological needs. You are probably not going to convince them that you’re right with one dazzlingly clever argument, let alone fifty. 

So the conversation goes round and round, and no one leaves happy. The sealion doesn’t get what they want out of it. At best, they might feel like they OWNED that asshole for an afternoon or so, but then they see Another Fucking Asshole and it starts all over again. Meanwhile, the person who got sealioned just had to deal with a bunch of annoying messages trying to Rational At Them that they were wrong, which took up a lot of their time and energy. 

....I guess what I’m saying is: be kind to sealions. The kindest thing you can do is just ignore them. Don’t casually say you hate an entire group of people if you can help it, because it will make insecure people want to sealion at you. 

 And if you feel the urge to start sealioning at someone... well, you’re not gonna get what you want out of it. If they want you to not exist, you’re probably better off leaving them alone. Because you’re not gonna prove to them that you deserve to exist.