#tearless rants

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Okay here’s the thing. Hashtag activism and secret symbols don’t work. If anything they make things worse. I get the appeal of rallying behind something like the green dot or safety pins, but it just isn’t going to work in real life because a) tumblr isn’t the super-secret social justice underground you think it is (and even if it were, pattern recognition is what humans do) and b) it worsens the us vs them dynamic we already have and makes it easy for your opposition to “other” you and your cause instead of trying to understand you and your actions on an individual level. It’s much more work to hate a bunch of people individually for specific actions than it is to hate a symbol and what you think it stands for. 

If you want to show solidarity in a way that can’t be hijacked or corrupted, voice your opinions in the open and back it up with action. I’m not talking about protests here. Step in to diffuse Islamophobia when you see it (in a way that actually helps, don’t just start fights), volunteer to walk with people to the restroom, whatever. Not only is it impossible for someone to do to that what they did to the safety pin, it normalizes that behavior and sends the message that anyone could/would do what you’re doing. Don’t just hold up a symbol and say “this is who I am,” and expect your allies to trust it and your opponents to respect it; anyone can do that and it means nothing. 

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In which I experience a momentary delusion that I can solve the world’s problems in a three paragraph text post, and am subsequently proven wrong. 

I know I have some beef with the current social justice climate and how it’s handled, but I have no clue whatsoever what to do about it or how to make it better. It’s frustrating. The problem with any system is that even if it works on paper or in practice at first, it will inevitably be escalated to its most extreme, exaggerated form until it doesn’t work anymore. That’s just what happens when a large number of people decide something is good; the obvious conclusion is that more thing = more good and we end up with teacup pugs and artificially escalated, unsustainable standards of social progress that result in things like Donald Trump having a greater-than-zero percent chance of becoming president because people aren’t willing to take a small loss and just accept that Clinton is the best bet at this point. We’ve come a long way, but change happens gradually, it just does. A lot of people exist, that’s a huge volume of minds for an idea to disperse through. The pendulum swings back and forth, the main thing is to make sure the average is moving in a positive direction. 

Shouting “why can’t we all just be reasonable” into the void is both unhelpful and pretentious so I’m out of ideas. 

It would also probably be good to quit Othering republicans and white men and such because once you stop recognizing a group of people as people, you stop being able to communicate properly with them. If you want to change their views, learn their language instead of demanding they go out of their way to learn yours so they can be more effectively lectured at. Trust me on this, I grew up in a community of Christian homeschoolers and I’ve seen it in action. It’s not a good strategy. As an example, the argument over which neutral pronoun is the most correct. The vast majority of the population is still getting the hang of the concept of more than two genders. If someone who wouldn’t have before is now willing to start calling someone they/them, that is NOT the time to complain that ze/zer is better. Let people catch up and consider new ideas, don’t scare them off by seeding the learning curve with land mines. 

And that individual level is important, because once one republican white dude is on board with it, his fellow republican white dudes are going to be more inclined to listen to and start to emulate him than they are the liberal nonbinary person who explained it to him, because Othering goes both ways. Over time it gets normalized, and yes you’ll still have people who refuse to accept it, but they’ll eventually become a minority and the overall cultural climate will change.

I’m just gonna stop now, this post is a mess. 

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why is literally everything just slightly not working

my laptop is fine but the cord is broken so I can’t use it, origin is acting weird but only just weird enough to make using anything associated with it really inconvenient, my pc’s wifi is suddenly crap for no clear reason when the laptop and phone are both fine with it (I have spent the past six hours trying to get through a one and a half hour movie), the clip on my freaking lamp randomly came slightly loose so it won’t stay up, tumblr is being sketchy about photos everywhere, the cassette adapter in my car stopped working (thing keeps ejecting it)

like none of it is serious but it’s all really annoying

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I love how almost every fictional matriarchal society I’ve ever encountered has either blatantly catered to the interests of a presumed male audience with a femdom fetish, or was clearly written based on what some guy who’s never spoken to a woman and believes 50s gender roles are biological thinks would happen if women were given any modicum of power. 

I mean this isn’t just another RA Salvatore rant it’s freaking all of them. 

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okay I know it’s just because I’m stressed about finding a new place to live but I’m currently gripped by the sudden fear that I’ll never get a grip or live in a building that doesn’t slowly drain my life force when I’m in it and I’ll always be mentally stuck between what I actually want, what I think other people want me to want, and what I can actually achieve regardless. I’m either going to have to resign myself to living in a city or resign myself to working in some job I hate with mediocre pay and never really accomplish anything because apparently if you don’t like spending your entire working life in cities and all the noise, traffic, and lack of space that comes with them and aren’t prepared to be constantly competing and on top of everyone else in your field, accomplishing things is not for you. And what is even the point of pursuing that kind of success if I’m going to be miserable the entire time, but if I don’t what am I doing with my life. I didn’t ask for any of this, no one fucking asks for this we’re just born and go along with it because what else are we supposed to do

I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m in my twenties and I feel like I should be better at everything by now and I just want everything to stop. 

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OH FOR FUCKS SAKE that guy messaged me again. Despite my telling him as politely as I could that his questions were skeeving me out, and then he responded by asking another personal question about why they did, and I didn’t answer. And the fact that I unfriended him months ago. Nope apparently the thing to do in that situation is to randomly pop out of the blue again with no provocation to ask how it’s going. 

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tbh I’m having doubts about staying at evergreen, academically and in theory it’s a great concept for a school but culturally something about it just bothers me, especially the prevalence of outrage culture and the weird pseudo-safe-space vibe that makes it feel like a lot of the faculty are walking on eggshells all the time. As per one of my earlier rants, I feel like that’s the opposite of how social justice should work. I dunno, we’ll see how next quarter goes. It’s certainly not all bad and it’s possible the weird crap that’s gone on this quarter has skewed my perspective. 

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Boy am I ranting a lot lately. 

This one is significantly less personal though. 

One problem with Evergreen is that it’s making me increasingly cynical about the current social justice climate and the overall concept of safe spaces. Which is not really a good thing. In theory, those things is good. A campus environment that encourages that kind of thing should be good. I realize a lot of my problem is due to the fact that a large percentage of the students are technically still teenagers and just need to mellow out, but man is it exhausting to be around after a while. There are some people you look at and wonder how they’ll ever function off campus. I’m not gonna be that person who says “the real world is terrible, get used to it” because that’s an equally crappy outlook but I absolutely will say that change comes slowly, and you won’t help it along by demanding that the world immediately catch up to your own enlightened worldview that you think works perfectly because you’ve only tested it on a college campus full of liberal tumblr-using college students. You need to learn to compromise with the world as it actually is, right now, and you need to be able to speak the language of the people whose views you’re trying to change rather than demand that they learn yours. Otherwise what you’re doing is isolating yourself, because very few people will ever go out of their way to figure out how to communicate with you just so you can tell them all the things they’re doing wrong more effectively. If you’re gonna change things, you have to be okay with being uncomfortable sometimes. 

And seriously, we need to stop using several dozen different neutral pronouns. Until we agree on a standard it’s not gonna work on a mainstream level. We don’t need more than one. That’s the whole point of having a neutral pronoun. At this point I don’t even care what the standard is, if there’s one set in particular that catches on with the broader population that people are taking seriously I don’t care how much I personally dislike it, I’ll happily call people that to stop this ridiculousness.  

On a related note do you know how hard it is to get honest art critique here? Please, for the love of God, at the risk of sounding arrogant I already know the thing I drew looks cool, and I’m glad you like it but at this point I would be thrilled if one person was willing to straight-up tell me “that shoulder is wonky, here’s what might look better” or even just something like “the anatomy looks off” without worrying about hurting my feelings. It is not that easy to hurt my feelings; I grew up on a boat. You get used to being told bluntly when you have not done a thing correctly (because if you do things incorrectly enough the boat will sink and/or explode). I know some people have thin skin about their own art and I totally understand it, but we could really easily solve this by taking two seconds to ask “you want critique?”