@gearboxtheory

This response to my post inspired me to actually look up what Roko’s Basilisk is supposed to be all about, and holy hell, all I can say is that people really don’t like it when you expose the dystopian underbelly of their supposed utopian ideas and their supposed all-encompassing philosophical theories.

Further to @argumate’s semi-recent post on how all spoken-of forms of “soft power” are really hard power in disguise and/or dressed up in fancy wording, I’ve started to wonder if this is true about anything else that we take for granted as a subtle yet meaningful distinction.

Obviously “institutional racism” is meaningfully distinct from non-institutional kinds, but it led me to think, what about “Implicit Bias”? How many actual forms of Implicit Bias are there that aren’t just very diplomatically disguised Explicit Bias?

How many times has Implicit Bias cast such a wide net over, say, a super-progressive university campus, that the results are fundamentally meaningless? Oh, you say we ALL have Implicit Bias which has gone unchecked despite my very own attempts to counteract racism on a large scale in society? (That’s the “Robin DiAngelo” definition)

Of course, despite DiAngleo’s best attempts to make it so, that definition is not actionable - by her own admission, white people in her seminars on tackling racism are neither allowed to ask questions, nor to stay silent, nor to attempt to find solutions within or without themselves. So, the definition of Implicit Bias gets shrunk a little, to tackle, you know, the actually harmful and supposedly address-able issues, like *checks notes* microaggressions such as telling people their command of the English language is very good.

But at what point to Implicit Biases just become Explicit Biases That We Do Not Talk About In Polite Company? In fact, surely the question of whether something is or is not racist lies in the unsaid intentions behind the action or statement, and racism will almost always unearth an Explicit Bias, not an Implicit one. Imagine you had an Interrogation Chamber where you could press someone on psychoanalyzing their biases and motives for a genuinely honest answer every time. What are the options for possible assumptions and biases a person might have, if they say “Your English is really good for an immigrant”?

You might find them saying “Well I have found myself more conscious than some of the plight of immigrants and the challenges they face upon settling in a new country, and perhaps my assumption that this person was not born in this country due to their skin colour/accent/whatever was perhaps an overcorrection towards attempting to help such people and encourage them as much as possible.” Or “my assumption was that learning a language that is not one’s birth language is terribly difficult even under ideal circumstances unless you have an uncommon talent for it, not to imply that no people who immigrate from other countries can speak English.”

These reasons are distinctly not racist, and to categorize them under the umbrella of Implicit Biases is foolish.

But what do you find under the category of actually racist that is only an Implicit Bias? “Well I just found it difficult to believe that someone with their skin colour could have been born in this country” or “I assumed that a person immigrating from that country would have naturally inferior language skills to someone born in this country” … those are just regular old racism. There’s nothing especially implicit about them and to call them implicit bias just blunts the criticism of those ideas.

You can say “Yes well there’s a huge difference between throwing slurs at someone because they’re foreign and assuming that English would be spoken fluently only by people who look a certain way” and that’s true! But that’s just called “Good behaviour”. People can hide all kinds of messed up beliefs beneath a veneer of politeness. Politicians do it all the time, but we don’t say they have “implicit bias” just because they don’t use the N-word while screwing over vast populations of people with their latest proposals.

There’s not actually racist, and there is racist. Not racist can be broken down into “Plain old not racist” and “well-intentioned but badly informed”. Racist people are either open about it, or they hide it well.

The trick of framing the narrative around “Implicit Bias” is that it lumps in far, far too many of the well-intentioned people with the people who just hide their racist beliefs well enough to function in polite society. Then makes the former feel guilty for the misdeeds of the latter.

argumate:

eightyonekilograms:

generallemarc:

argumate:

generallemarc:

argumate:

while coronavirus plays into anti-China ideas worldwide, it’s also difficult to explain what’s so great about democracy when you’re being absolutely ravaged by a virus that China and Vietnam have already handled.

The great thing about democracy is that you don’t have religious dissidents being harvested for their organs. The great thing about democracy is that you don’t have over a million citizens tossed into gulags for the crime of not being born as ethnic Hans and revering God over the Party. The great thing about democracy is that you have independent entities that can keep you honest and prevent the government from lying to the WHO about human-to-human transmission, thereby exponentially worsening the pandemic.

Stop worshipping Xi pal-he’d still disappear you if you actually lived in his hellhole of a country.

that’s the thing, when it comes to accusing innocent Muslims of being terrorists and imprisoning them in camps that ship has already sailed to Guantanamo some time ago, the War on Terror provides a perfect justification for anything that can be framed as taming Islamic radicalism, and China can reasonably claim that (forced) Mandarin lessons are surely less egregious crimes against humanity than Apache helicopters firing at Iraqi civilians.

if we go a little further back to French Algeria we see an example of a notionally democratic republic committing the most appalling abuses against a breakaway province populated by an ethnic minority, so it’s clear that system of governance alone can’t guarantee humane outcomes.

the strength of the US is that it can elect a president as unfit for the office as Trump without collapsing into civil war (yet), the weakness of course is that he was nominated in the first place, a nation of three hundred million people choosing a bankrupt casino developer to head the executive branch.

when America sends in the national guard to enforce curfew and the cops are delivering beat downs and rubber bullets against journalists the rest of the world sees that and says huh, guess those precious freedoms are fake then, your democracy is just fancy words around the authoritarian fist like everybody else.

there might be a difference, but it’s subtle! your financial assets are probably more secure in America, so it’s the destination of choice if you’re rich (don’t carry cash in your car though, the cops can steal it without repercussions).

I’d hate to be railroaded by a secretive court and end up in a Chinese prison, but then I don’t think the American justice system is particularly good at delivering justice either, and the reputation of American prisons is not great.

now personally I believe in the strength of democracy and rule of law, but maintaining it in practice is difficult, and trying to paint China and the US as polar opposites isn’t very convincing.

rather than wanting China to be more like the US, I think I would rather that China and the US be more like a country should be, and that’s something we’re still dimly fumbling towards after all these years.

China is objectively worse than the US, you’re defending re-education camps run by China by saying America did some other stuff that was worse(because that’s how judging guilt and impact of crimes works), the national guard and police are paraplegic kittens compared to the PLA and MSS, and the difference is so vast that it’s almost too obvious to say. Guantanmo Bay holding a few dozen terrorists, of whom some maybe didn’t massacre civilians, is not the same thing as the Uighyr gulags. Guantanamo is also not on the level of the government re-writing of the Quran to reflect socialist values, which is also being done to the Bible. Clashes between protesters and cops are not the same as a complete repression of democratic ideas Hong-Kong style and the use of dissidents as organ farms. 

You are so impossibly ignorant of this situation that I can’t possibly imagine what combination of drugs and MotherJones articles you had to endure in order to have this warped a perception of reality. China should be more like the US, because China is a tyrannical Orwellian nightmare, and the US isn’t. No amount of anti-American hatebonering can change that.

Golly I sure am glad I don’t live in a tyrannical Orwellian nightmare like China.

yeah, I’m not here to defend China, one country committing war crimes and torturing prisoners doesn’t justify another country committing genocide, that isn’t how justice works.

but if you’re trying to convince Chinese people that democracy is a superior system, which I believe it is, it certainly doesn’t help to have democracies running around committing war crimes and torturing prisoners!

imagine if Chelsea Manning was imprisoned for seven years for releasing evidence of Chinese war crimes, she’d be an American national hero.

the Hong Kong cops are acting in defense of tyranny and yet somehow still manage to be more professional and restrained in doing so than American cops who are apparently upholding rule of law and yet can murder people and steal shit with impunity; people see this! people know this! so when you tell them that they should be more like the US they demur and go well I don’t want to be shot by a cop for no reason, and it’s tough to argue with that.

we have to recognise Chinese government crimes, but not at the cost of ignoring US government crimes, or French government crimes, or Australian government crimes (turns out Australian troops have been executing civilians in Afghanistan, one more thing that the PLA hasn’t been doing).

painting the Chinese government as uniquely flawed isn’t just inaccurate, it’s also unhelpful, as it plays into narrative of America talking up the crimes of others as a partisan ploy to distract from its own misdeeds.

Xi Jinping was roasted for staying silent on the coronavirus for two weeks, but compare that with the utter clowning of Boris Johnson or Trump or Bolsonaro and naturally you might start to wonder exactly what benefit democracy has conferred on these countries.

if China is that bad and you still can’t outperform it, that’s appalling!

Good post Argumate.

generalchelseamayhem:

Holy hell

Turns out, if you ever want to experience Essence of Gaslighting, the best place to go for it is forums where parents talk about their estranged children.

Essence of Gaslighting deals 2d12 Psychic Damage every round, you have been warned.

@quills-and-fantasy At your own peril.

This isn’t an estranged-parent forum exactly, but it is a place where someone has painstakingly catalogued and collected the stories, the attitudes, and the overarching themes of those forums. The links in the post and in the sidebar are a goldmine, if your preferred kind of ‘gold’ is second-hand psychological trauma.

(I was sent down this aptly-named rabbit hole by @thirdtimecharmed.)

Holy hell

Turns out, if you ever want to experience Essence of Gaslighting, the best place to go for it is forums where parents talk about their estranged children.

Essence of Gaslighting deals 2d12 Psychic Damage every round, you have been warned.

earthly–truth:

generalchelseamayhem:

alaija:

cookingwithroxy:

earthly–truth:

cookingwithroxy:

earthly–truth:

cookingwithroxy:

earthly–truth:

cookingwithroxy:

earthly–truth:

What are people’s obsession with saying “retards”?

Like it’s just such a gross word.

Oh, oh, I know this one!

It’s that nobody asked anyone what they thought about banning the word, just a bunch of assholes decided that because they didn’t want to hear it ever again, and so declared that nobody should be allowed to say it.

Now, you’d know this if you listened to other people, honestly. God knows that there are plenty of people JUST LIKE ME, who were targeted with that term in our childhoods and just shrugged and moved on. None of us had any problem with the term ‘retard’ or ‘retarded’.

But then a bunch of assholes came out, said none of us could use it again or WE would suddenly be treated as monsters, and we’re left going who the FUCK do you think you are to make that decision FOR ME.

You didn’t ask. You didn’t float the idea around. You made the call and then acted like you had the absolute power to decide what words were good and what were bad.

And then you dared to claim that it was for our sake. That you were doing it for US, the people you never asked in the first fucking place.

We know you don’t care. That you literally never cared. If you cared there are a lot bigger, BETTER things one could push to get there to be acceptance and understanding for people with mental and physical disabilities. But getting a word banned gives you a feeling of power, and gives you the false appearance of being a ‘good’ person.

Honestly, I’d much prefer you just called me a slur and got it over with.

Dawg, this shit you just wrote is ridiculous.

ET, that you lack compassion or the basic ability to understand that other people do not share your life’s experiences?

yeah that doesn’t change that people other than yourself have had actual fucking lives and events in them that create the people that they are.

That you are not capable of understanding or empathising with someone else’s lived experiences does not mean that they never happened.

It just means you lack empathy and the ability to grow beyond the boundaries of your own limited world view.

What you’re suffering from is the concept of ‘Cognitive Dissonance’.

It’s literally not my fault your world view is this limited.

Yeah. I’m pretty certain that’s the kind of person you are, the kind that strains not to swear slurs at people you meet.

It’s not my fault your world view is THIS FUCKING LIMITED. Get over yourself and grow the fuck up. The world isn’t you against racist bigots, that’s just the coping mechanism you use to pretend you’re actually a good person instead of the piece of shit you keep acting like.

You just made two emotional rants because I said calling people “retards” is pretty disgusting. Get some air.

No, I made two emotional rants because people like you keep trying to define what other people can do, out of the false fucking conceptualization that you’re a good person by laying in dictates to others, without ever asking other people what they think.

I mean shit, you are a terrible person who does not actually read or understand what people say, you respond by assuming anyone who disagrees with you is some kind of bigoted monster.

YOU. ARE NOT. A GOOD PERSON.

And I’m tired, very fucking tired, of you in specific and people like you in general, of disregarding what people TELL YOU because it doesn’t fit into your very VERY small world view.

I think the politically correct term became person of retard.

That seems to be how it works now.

Fun story:

I was bullied in primary school by a bunch of girls who decided their go-to insult for me would be “retard”. They would say it every time they saw me, and to my 10-year-old brain there was no rhyme or reason to it. This continued for about a year and a half.

Now, I don’t like the word. I wouldn’t use it myself.

But I understand why other people feel the need to use it to describe people who aren’t me. I get their meaning, and sometimes I even think it’s a fitting descriptor.

It wasn’t until keyboard warriors got really into lazy unhelpful disability activism, and started banning regular degular insulting words like “stupid” and “crazy” and of course “retard”, on the basis that they definitely 100% related to actual cognitive disabilities and mental health issues, that I even considered the possibility that those girls might have been bullying me due to my cerebral palsy. Even now, just typing that sentence as a legitimate theory comes across as, if you’ll forgive my language, d*wnri*ht st*pid.

I have never made that association in my entire life and I plan to continue not making that association, as I’m sure do many others.

The truth of the matter is, humans of various different cultures love to get extensively creative with their range of insults for a person, and hiding that truth behind a veneer of “albeist language” political correctness isn’t going to change that. Nor is it going to change the fact that, as creative insults go, “retard” is actually pretty uncreative and not nearly the worst thing you could call someone (though it is very efficiently evocative).

“I was bullied using the word (because of my disability) and it really hurt me but I’m going to side with the bullies to own the libs”

Is that honestly and truly what you think I said?

If you’d read a bit more closely, you would have noticed my point that I still think the idea that my bullies were using “retard” as an ableist slur pertaining to my cerebral palsy is patently ridiculous. No. They just decided they didn’t like me and found a word that encapsulated their dislike. That’s all there is to it, and that’s all there ever has been to most instances of “ableist language”.

Old Arguments: Feminism Helps Men Too

It’s like this.

Imagine, if you aren’t actually, that you’re a woman. A left-leaning one.

I would guess that you probably don’t like religious fundamentalism, because religious fundamentalists of many kinds are known for their regressive attitude towards women’s rights, and maybe you’ve even spent some fraction of your life breaking away from religious doctrine so that you may live your life more freely.

Now, imagine that you encounter a well-established atheist group. They’ve been fighting the influence of religious fundamentalism on society at large for years or even decades at this point, noting the many general and specific ways by which they suppress various human rights and freedoms. Obviously, a regressive attitude towards women’s rights would be part of that, though it wouldn’t be their only complaint.

With me so far?

So in that situation you might say something like “I think the danger to women’s rights posed by religious fundamentalism merits a dedicated feminist movement to combat their influence.”

How would you feel if, at that point, the atheists turned around and said “Nah, we don’t need feminism for this, we already have atheism. We’ve been fighting this battle for years, and when we finally achieve our goals, it will have the additional effect of benefitting women’s rights anyway. Why don’t you just come and join atheism instead?”

I would imagine that you would find this a wholly unsatisfactory answer to your problems. The way you prioritize social issues in your brain cannot allow it to be satisfactory. You came into this issue prioritizing the rights and freedoms of women. Would you really be okay with fighting for that cause on someone else’s terms? Would you be satisfied with knowing that a victory for atheism is a victory for feminism by tangential association?

I would imagine the answer is “no”. With whatever degree of emphasis you choose to add to it.

Now apply this line of thinking to men’s rights.

For years we have been told “feminism helps men too!” followed by incredulous and scornful dismissal when somehow the idea that feminism fights for men, so you might as well be a feminist, doesn’t happen to resonate with us as well as expected. The go-to follow-up argument is usually something like “Well, obviously they were just right wing trolls who didn’t REALLY care about men’s rights. If they did they would have just embraced feminism like we told them to.”

As I hope I have just demonstrated, that’s not at all how it works. You would not accept a social movement for something that happened to tangentially benefit women as a whole replacement for feminism. You want a social movement that you can engage with on your own terms and prioritizing the causes that you want to fight for. It should not come as any great surprise that we do too.

Men need a men’s rights movement. One that they can engage with without kowtowing to the needs of another group. One that prioritizes the needs and issues of men without qualification. It’s as simple as that.

I have heard many, many arguments over the years for why MRAs shouldn’t exist. With the exception of the thoroughly disproven and largely deprecated “Men don’t have real problems!” argument, they are almost all preoccupied with how an MRM has been implemented in the worst ways, then use that to justify why an MRM doesn’t need to exist at all. Which, again, is not how it works. If feminism, god forbid, was so badly implemented as to cause more overall harm than good, that wouldn’t magically stop women’s rights from mattering. Neither for men.

This may come across as a cynical read, but I think people whose response to the subject of men’s issues is “feminism helps men too!” are on some level afraid of losing control of the discourse. Making all men who are concerned about men’s issues into feminists would be a convenient way of dictating when and how they talk about their own issues - after all, men’s issues are not the priority of feminism, they will just happen to be an incidental beneficiary of all the really important work. If you toe the atheist line and campaign against teaching creationism in publically funded schools like we asked you to, maybe one day everybody will stop seeing virginity as a measure of a woman’s worth before marriage. I know that doesn’t sound like it follows, but it does, trust me.

I guess I understand that fear on some level. If my time in the MRM has taught me anything it’s that men, especially angry, marginalized, mentally ill, or overlooked men, do not always express themselves in ways that women are used to or comfortable with. Giving those men a dedicated movement to talk about problems with their own voices must seem like a nightmare for some. But no social progress will be made by telling you all you want to hear, and neither by you pretending that what you don’t want to hear doesn’t exist.

alaija:

cookingwithroxy:

earthly–truth:

cookingwithroxy:

earthly–truth:

cookingwithroxy:

earthly–truth:

cookingwithroxy:

earthly–truth:

What are people’s obsession with saying “retards”?

Like it’s just such a gross word.

Oh, oh, I know this one!

It’s that nobody asked anyone what they thought about banning the word, just a bunch of assholes decided that because they didn’t want to hear it ever again, and so declared that nobody should be allowed to say it.

Now, you’d know this if you listened to other people, honestly. God knows that there are plenty of people JUST LIKE ME, who were targeted with that term in our childhoods and just shrugged and moved on. None of us had any problem with the term ‘retard’ or ‘retarded’.

But then a bunch of assholes came out, said none of us could use it again or WE would suddenly be treated as monsters, and we’re left going who the FUCK do you think you are to make that decision FOR ME.

You didn’t ask. You didn’t float the idea around. You made the call and then acted like you had the absolute power to decide what words were good and what were bad.

And then you dared to claim that it was for our sake. That you were doing it for US, the people you never asked in the first fucking place.

We know you don’t care. That you literally never cared. If you cared there are a lot bigger, BETTER things one could push to get there to be acceptance and understanding for people with mental and physical disabilities. But getting a word banned gives you a feeling of power, and gives you the false appearance of being a ‘good’ person.

Honestly, I’d much prefer you just called me a slur and got it over with.

Dawg, this shit you just wrote is ridiculous.

ET, that you lack compassion or the basic ability to understand that other people do not share your life’s experiences?

yeah that doesn’t change that people other than yourself have had actual fucking lives and events in them that create the people that they are.

That you are not capable of understanding or empathising with someone else’s lived experiences does not mean that they never happened.

It just means you lack empathy and the ability to grow beyond the boundaries of your own limited world view.

What you’re suffering from is the concept of ‘Cognitive Dissonance’.

It’s literally not my fault your world view is this limited.

Yeah. I’m pretty certain that’s the kind of person you are, the kind that strains not to swear slurs at people you meet.

It’s not my fault your world view is THIS FUCKING LIMITED. Get over yourself and grow the fuck up. The world isn’t you against racist bigots, that’s just the coping mechanism you use to pretend you’re actually a good person instead of the piece of shit you keep acting like.

You just made two emotional rants because I said calling people “retards” is pretty disgusting. Get some air.

No, I made two emotional rants because people like you keep trying to define what other people can do, out of the false fucking conceptualization that you’re a good person by laying in dictates to others, without ever asking other people what they think.

I mean shit, you are a terrible person who does not actually read or understand what people say, you respond by assuming anyone who disagrees with you is some kind of bigoted monster.

YOU. ARE NOT. A GOOD PERSON.

And I’m tired, very fucking tired, of you in specific and people like you in general, of disregarding what people TELL YOU because it doesn’t fit into your very VERY small world view.

I think the politically correct term became person of retard.

That seems to be how it works now.

Fun story:

I was bullied in primary school by a bunch of girls who decided their go-to insult for me would be “retard”. They would say it every time they saw me, and to my 10-year-old brain there was no rhyme or reason to it. This continued for about a year and a half.

Now, I don’t like the word. I wouldn’t use it myself.

But I understand why other people feel the need to use it to describe people who aren’t me. I get their meaning, and sometimes I even think it’s a fitting descriptor.

It wasn’t until keyboard warriors got really into lazy unhelpful disability activism, and started banning regular degular insulting words like “stupid” and “crazy” and of course “retard”, on the basis that they definitely 100% related to actual cognitive disabilities and mental health issues, that I even considered the possibility that those girls might have been bullying me due to my cerebral palsy. Even now, just typing that sentence as a legitimate theory comes across as, if you’ll forgive my language, d*wnri*ht st*pid.

I have never made that association in my entire life and I plan to continue not making that association, as I’m sure do many others.

The truth of the matter is, humans of various different cultures love to get extensively creative with their range of insults for a person, and hiding that truth behind a veneer of “albeist language” political correctness isn’t going to change that. Nor is it going to change the fact that, as creative insults go, “retard” is actually pretty uncreative and not nearly the worst thing you could call someone (though it is very efficiently evocative).