What I saw happen from Duke, Mindy, Kathy, Myself, and a few others in that thread.
Was trauma.
I am actually traumatized by public discourse on the internet now. I realize that. That is why I pull back so much now. That is why I don’t share what I wish I could with people. That is why I think regularly about nuking this account.
Holding this space and sometimes that means we act a bit more like bouncers than hostesses. It has become special to me because to this cis het white southern probably-not-left-enough woman it was once the ONLY space at one time where I felt I could exist as myself and talk about literally anything with my honest opinion. And here it is, the people I saw hold that for me trying to do the same, trying to figure out which ones of them are to blame or which of them could use therapy, but no one really has a solution to the underlying cause… I can forgive it but apparently some people cannot.
I have been coming to these boards a long time including a couple of the darkest periods of my life and in some way I’m here because of some of those people in a big way.
Are you absolutely sure that in 100% of cases, they are reacting to a microagression and not just a point with which they disagree or a simple misundesrstanding? Does every single “free-for-all” involve 10 members of marginalized communities and their allies againts a single white cis male?
If you answer “Yes” to both of those questions, then that is enough for more me, because I respect your judgment on this matter. I just want to be clear on this. If pile-ons only ever happen in response to microagressions, then I do not see that as a problem. If there are outliers where that is not the case, then I think that it’s a little more complicated.
How could someone be 100% sure of that without reading and remembering 100% of the threads here?
So, if in some outlier, once a month or so case a kerfuffle (i hate “pile on”) was initiated by a misunderstanding, so what? Why is that a proverbial hill to die on here?
And if such cases really do strike you and others as a big deal, how about thinking of them as “collateral damage,” then licking your self-inflicted wounds and, you know, moving on in life?
I am fine with chalking them up to collateral damage if that is what the community wants and needs, but I want to be sure about this because this kind of decision will affect how people interact here. If we are acting on the assumption of microagressions rather than good faith, then that is going to affect how we use flags, for example.
Because long-standing users of all stripes have repeatedly expressed exhaustion and frustration to the degree they feel they can’t even participate anymore and have left. That degrades the whole purpose of this forum.
Again, this isn’t a “we” (you and i) thing. We are (i know for me, i think for you) white men. We don’t decide what is a microaggression. We learn by keeping a community safe for the othered groups to tell us what hurts them. If doing so gets them flagged, modded or worse, they are going either shut up or leave. Neither of us wants that.
I’ve only seen mansplaining, he-peating, and similar macro- & microaggression directed at and villification of marginalized folks. It’s always a relief when bad actors are given the stage hook treatment.
I’ve seen those who are being harassed getting in trouble for defending their point and themselves. That, happily, is decreasing.
When people express themselves well, misunderstandings are less common, and I’ve V frequently seen explanations that cause “Aha!” moments, and all’s well between the posters again.
Isn’t that the point?
Whatever one’s gender or orientation or ethnic background, this is the case.
I suppose the message that I wasn’t getting before is that these “kerfluffles” are how some (not all) people express when they are hurting. Maybe I have been looking at the whole kerfluffle phenomenon wrong.
I still think that the kerfluffles often only serve to magnify and spread the hurt around, but far be it from me to tell marginalized communities how to handle the situations that they are forced to handle every single day.
I still feel a bit ambivalent about misunderstandings, though. It really feels like a “The Lottery” situation, especially when the person loses their cool and gets banned. I still think that was what happened in the conversation about Triangle of Sadness and the conversation about the flooding in Germany. But those conversations are long gone.
I’ve been working within the framework you outlined above, in which the majority of such interactions are actually responses to microaggressions and a small minority of them are misunderstandings.
What it seems you are asking for is for people to not challenge microaggressions on the off chance that they are misunderstandings.
If that’s what happens here, we’re going to lose the majority of those voices, and if that happens, this Nazi bar will no longer be a place I want to be.
It’s not an assumption. Microaggressions are real and tangible. It’s not assuming bad faith to challenge them. It’s assuming bad faith for the priviledge-blind to assume the challenge is unwarranted!
No, I would just prefer if the clarification stage came before the fire at will stage BUT only then in cases where it is unclear. Again, this is just a suggestion and not an edict.
And since we only have one example to work from, the Michele Obama thread that was deleted, I can tell you with 100% certainty that’s exactly what happened.
You know, I have faith in the people (including myself!) who call out a comment once in a while. Having faith in someone or in a group of people doesn’t mean you think they’ll do the right thing 100% of the time. But 98-99%? That’s high enough for me to have faith, and to realize I’m dealing with human beings when the 1 or 2% happens.
How about those who feel “exhausted and frustrated” (whatever their “stripe”) think about why that’s so? It’s clearly not because their comments are constantly misinterpreted. I think it’s because they’re either failing to understand that they’ve committed a micro (or worse) aggression, or because they’re nursing a wound over that one or at most two times when something they said was instead misunderstood.
Okay, I can work with that framework. If microagressions are unmistakable to a trained eye, then I (a person without a trained eye) can safely assume that the target of a kerfluffle involving people who do have trained eyes must have committed a microagression and so I can act accordingly.
OMG, that’s already the situation here. But historically, that collateral damage has been to female-identifying people, POC, and other marginalized groups. Do you want to know why I haven’t commented in this thread yet? This. This is why. I can’t handle this shit anymore. It’s exhausting. So now some people want to flip things around and have the collateral damage maybe land on more privileged people and that’s not acceptable? Come on.
100%. I had a substitute professor for one of my law school classes yesterday. She’s currently a US Magistrate Judge. She told us lots of fun stories, but she also mentioned something in passing at one point that I would love to talk to her more about. She was talking about how sometimes she would like to just be really direct with a lawyer and tell that to quite screwing around, but she can’t do that because she would then be “shrill”. This stuff we’re talking about in this thread happens everywhere in society. And we’re tired.
What is obvious to those being harassed is not always obvious to the rest. I’m willing to trust the responses and reactions of those who are feeling/being harassed. If the person viewed as being a bully is capable of clarifying what they’ve written as a reasonable statement, that’s one thing. If they don’t, then it was deliberate abuse.
I never side with bullies. Been bullied off and on my entire life.
I mean nursing a wound, or really, poking at it until it festers, instead of just brushing it off in the first place. In this context, I mean a wound that’s still a wound because the person hasn’t let it heal.
The user in the “cat taste buds” topic is another example, and one that I think better fits the original concern expressed here. In that case the user even went into one of the general topics to state that they were bad at communication and trying to make amends.
They continued to fuck around after things were halted, so they got the boot. But they spent a good amount of time trying to make amends while they were getting jumped.
Those comments are in the ether now, but perhaps you’re able to see them.
