Discussions on fascist misogyny, race and identity politics

[anon50609448]

@PAPPP

Then there’s your last paragraph where you are fearlessly telling me about white men, because it’s OK for you to judge your (partially incorrect, but since I’m arguing against identity-as-legitimacy I’m not about to invoke it) image of me on your value system, but it’s not OK for me to judge you on mine.

My talk about white men was only about you in so much as it was true of you. If I say that people make action movies because hollywood movies cater to young men, that statement is true despite both: a) not all young men like action movies, b) many people who aren’t young men like action movies.

@PAPPP

I do actually mostly agree with your part about the risk of arguing for the status quo, but I’m yet to see anyone proposing an alternative to uniform rules and negotiation around cultural baggage that doesn’t just shift around who gets to impose their values for local advantage, and always to a group that happens to include the speaker.

Where we are right now is the backlash against the system you are advocating for, though. We tried running society in a way where all that mattered was that you followed the rules, and it didn’t matter who you were. The outcome of that has been that adverse outcomes for traditionally marginalized groups didn’t go away (not talking about race didn’t stop black or indigenous people from being targeted), so it did still matter who you were. The other outcome has been a cultural cold-war that has erupted into the current state where no one even remembers how to talk to one another and fascism seems preferable to consensus for a huge part of the population.

We went from outright, named bigotry, to covert bigotry that cast people opposing bigotry as the bigots. The future is figuring out a way that we can accept one another as people not just as other actors in the stage-play that fuels the economy.

@popobawa4u

No, bigotry is hardly ever actually about what the contents of the oppressed categories actually are, it is merely an excuse for exploitation, for consolidating power.

I have no idea where I expressed the opposite of this. It’s an accident of history that we’re discussing white people oppressing black people instead of black people oppressing white people, or instead of people with one cluster of family names oppressing people with another cluster of family names.

@popobawa4u

Exploiting identities and respecting identities are both based upon selfish feelings of personal entitlement, and both rooted in the lazy practice of identification in the first place, a short-cut to thinking, a stereotype.

I don’t think this is true. I think respecting identities is based on saying, “I don’t know better.” I can only question other people’s identities if I’m pretty sure I know better than them. People don’t know themselves, but I don’t know them either.

I think we live in a period of conflict between system thinking that doesn’t see people as individuals but rather as parts of the system and of individualist thinking that is sick of the system telling individuals what do do. I think the way forward is synthesis, and I think that synthesis already exists in activist communities. We accept each individual’s experience (including their experience of their identity) as fact, but no more important than the fact of anyone else’s experience, and we use that to better understand the system of how we relate to one another.

I see the validity in pointing out that we aren’t individuals in the way that most of us think of them. I also think that most people presently experience themselves as individuals, and I need to engage with people as they are.

@popobawa4u

So what they hear is that if you deny their ownership is because YOU are claiming it, no matter how you try to explain, because that “relationship” is fundamental to their world view, and not likely to be examined.

I knew I liked you for a reason.

@lolipop_jones

Intersectionalists are welcome to discuss their feelings and experiences in as much breadth and depth and for every bit as long as they desire.

However, they do not impose upon me an obligation to listen in silence. If I want to find someone else whom I find more congenial to dialogue with, I’ll do it.

Where does this idea that anyone is imposing anything on you come from? Are intersectionalists secretly running the government? If someone else speaks, and you disagree, and they get mad at you for disagreeing and you dismiss them for getting mad neither of you had imposed anything more than the other one. Wishing someone you don’t like would just shut up is not having the power to censor.

This is exactly what I was talking about. You can conduct yourself however you feel is appropriate, but when marginalized groups conduct themselves how they feel is appropriate (that is, by talking about their marginalization) other people interpret that as the marginalized groups imposing something. No, they are just doing the same thing you are doing when you write this.

@lolipop_jones

Using the power of the law to disallow hate speech = authoritarian.

More or less so than using the power of the law to disallow copyright infringement?

@PAPPP

Trying to ‘fix the gender pay gap’ without addressing that men are evaluated by society on money and prestige in ways that women aren’t, giving them different incentives and needs, is a policy attacking men. To be explicit, I am not making a ‘therefore men should be paid more’ argument, or arguing that nothing should be done, just that healthy work-life balance for different people is going to require different things and probably a renewed permissiveness toward external healthy competitive outlets. ‘Punishing’ men for society’s status expectations is not better than ‘punishing’ women for society’s care-giving expectations.

Do you understand that to address the real problems you are talking about with how men are socialized is going to require us to talk about gender? These problems aren’t going to evaporate if we stop paying attention to them and more than neighbourhoods desegregated when segregation policies ended.

Recognizing people’s varied experiences and identities is the solution to this problem, not the cause of it.

@lolipop_jones

What it seems to boil down to is this: Do you desire equality, or do you desire to turn the tables upon oppression? I don’t mind advocating for the latter as long as you are candid about it.

There are presumably some marginalized people who would like to become new oppressors. There are also a lot of privileged people who mistake equality for oppression because they are so used to privilege. If we were to place our bets, a person who concerned about the tables being turned is more likely to be the latter than to be having an interaction with the former.