Yes, at a very basic level. If they think the issue comes down to starting a global thermonuclear war vs hurting some random black people’s feelings,* they’re going with hurting some random black people’s feelings. As was mentioned earlier, this election was all about fear, and about the fight or flight response. This response encourages unwise actions predicated on a faulty decision-making process… such as my vote for Hillary Clinton.
*that’s bullshit, but that’s what they’ve been told.
I understand your frustration.
Technically true. However, is someone who has had it drilled into them that CNN is an extreme leftist news organization that may as well stand for Communist News Network really going to seek out Al-Jazeera? If they do, then their friends and neighbors will quickly convince them that what they just read is bullshit, and Fox News is the only truly fair and balanced source of news. I seek out unbalanced sources from all over the world, but that’s only because I’m a weirdo social outcast misfit and I don’t give a fuck where the hometown heroes down at the bar get their news from.
I will go as far as to say their hatred has not been voluntarily rejected. It’s not as if they started out as total blank slates uninfluenced by any cultural mores, and then chose their culture, but only the worst aspects of it. Instead, they need to realize that their little bubble is not real life, and they need to learn to see outside of it. This is easier said than done when they conflate criticism of the negative aspects of their culture with criticism of the culture itself, or with them personally. It’s all too easy for me dig in deeper in response to some of the criticism, even though I’m socially weird enough where I’m able to question the more problematic aspects of my upbringing while not forgetting where I came from.
For example, instead of saying “white people have round ears, I hate that!” one could say “I hate people with round ears” or “I hate round-eared white people.” Three different phrasings, three different meanings. It seems like very little to ask that people say the one they actually mean, doesn’t it?
I find the best way to speak to a mixed audience is to say exactly what you actually mean instead of counting on your listeners to infer that you meant something other than what you’ve said. Others here clearly feel differently about that. :shrug:
[missing {{usernameLink}} value]… schema is leaking.
I don’t. I hear people’s experiences and I try to learn from those experiences. However, I don’t really associate as any “us” so there’s no us to get. It’s just when someone tries to drag me into “us” (actually, into “them”) that I have to put up at least a little of a fight.
I’d rather her go out in the world and talk. Talking hopefully enlightens people, because while On the Whole we’re all better off and On Average things have never been more fruitful… You try telling that to the family that’s getting blamed for the country’s ills by the fact they dared take government aid, or that student that got told they NEEDED to go to college and oh hey we’ll give you all this money that you’ll eventualy have to pay back oh and guess what that student debt is not something bankrupcy will clear, or that family that’s just discovered one of their own has cancer and kiss your entire financial security and stability goodbye.
Try telling them that and you will see the look of someone on the verge of rage, or breaking down.
More people need to understand what the bottom is like from people who grew up there.
I SORTA know these things, but even though looking back I realize my family didn’t have a lot due to me my special needs twin, and such… due to my upbringing I was insulated from a lot of the worst of it, and even now into adulthood they try shielding me from the harsh realities of things, which has left me something of a cripple when I want to try helping or at least spitball ideas. Or even like right now when I do have a little money but ot enough to do everything i want.
Yes,as members of the empowered group, white men are especially prone to think of themselves instead as untethered individuals. That lack of self-awareness is sad, at best, but often infuriating too.
LearnedCoward has come out as saying he is both disabled and homosexual. So… while ‘privileged’ in not being auto-suspect due to whiteness. Definitely not of the ruling caste you’re trying to make him out to be.
Trust me, disability sucks away a TON of advantages that might exist from default assumptions of white maleness. Like being able to hold down or receive jobs. Being Employed is something tht would be very nice.
So that snideness. Can you… Not? It’s not helpful here. You’re taking people who are nominally on your side that a lot of people are making bad choices that hurt ALL of us and taking swings at this person instead of the people that want to keep us divided and squabbling over scraps.
Conflating rural with Midwestern and impoverished with rural is another such subconscious bias.
Not literally everyone everyone. 70% of the US is Christian, and the Midwest is more intensely religious than the coasts, and the Midwest is predominantly evangelical, with the upper Midwest being Lutheran, Catholics in the major cities, etc. so back-of-the-envelope calculations say the figurative “everyone” is correct. If I were making some statistical model of a random Midwestern person, I would make them Evangelical. However, when confronted with an actual person, I would not make any assumptions about their religion because I would see them as a person. I was talking more about stereotypes and strawmen than anything else.
Would it be fair for me to say you voted for Trump? Barring anything else, I would assume you voted for Trump, but your presence on this board and in this topic seems to indicate otherwise, so I wouldn’t make that assumption.
It’s when people stop seeing the person and start seeing the stereotype when we start to have problems.
Sure. I know what I’m supposed to do, but given that life is confusing and not at all straightforward, I don’t always do it. Sometimes I fall into traps I know intellectually I should avoid, but emotionally I get dragged in. We all experience this, no exceptions.
Thanks but I’ll trust him before someone else to tell me that the tone of what I said hurt his fee fees.
Then I would hope he’d take some of the category-bound experience he’s had in some terms and apply it to the category-bound experience he’s had in other terms. Saying that one is a member of certain groups that confer dominance obviously does not mean that one cannot be a member of other non-dominant/oppressed groups. He was talking about white masculinity at that point, and so, I did too.[quote=“LearnedCoward, post:397, topic:90681”]
I know what I’m supposed to do, but given that life is confusing and not at all straightforward, I don’t always do it. Sometimes I fall into traps I know intellectually I should avoid, but emotionally I get dragged in. We all experience this, no exceptions.
[/quote]
Oh the deliciousness, given if I said something like that you’d be so beyond condescending it’d border on parody of what femenists supposedly act like. So again. Please stop. You are not helping your case. It’s like me screaming and acting like a jackass about things. It doesn’t help even if it is ‘comfort’ behavior.
I agree, people don’t know how to approach that discussion. I would say you have to show them that you shouldn’t be lumped in with intolerant assholes rather than telling them that you don’t think they should lump you in with other intolerant assholes.
I think that being liberated from buckets that society puts you into is an element of privilege. Black people don’t get to opt out of being black when people say bad things about black people. White people and men feel they deserve that.
And I don’t want to be unfair, here, lots of white people and men think that everyone ought to be able to say, “Don’t judge me by the group I belong to.” Lots of men out there don’t care who what gender you are and they don’t care what colour your skin is. I hear people say things like, “Instead of allowing people to choose an ‘X’ for their gender on their driver’s licence, why don’t we just stop asking people what their gender is to begin with. It really doesn’t matter.” But they are trying to jump ahead a step. It matters in our society what gender you are and what colour your skin is. If we stopped recording people’s gender then our information about the gender wage gap would disappear but the wage gap wouldn’t go with it.
There is a huge problem that being able to separate generalities about a group from what we can know about an individual is a skill that most people (I’m sure there are some prodigies) need education to learn. You can have negative opinions about New Yorkers while having friends from New York by compartmentalizing the two conflicting viewpoints. You can also have negative views about New Yorkers while having friend from New York by recognizing that those aren’t conflicting viewpoints but you need a more careful and refined idea of what it means to have negative viewpoints about a broad group of people that would help you not apply those to individuals. It’s a skill that both the speaker and the listener need to have, too.
I think there is a lot of deep prejudice against those with poor educations by those with good educations. An education is a useful thing to have, sort of like a car, but a lot of the time educated people talk about uneducated people in a way that would mirror car drivers saying, “I don’t know why those people without cars pay so much for groceries, why don’t they buy in bulk from the cheap place across town?” I think that’s a very good example of privileged people having very ignorant views of what it is like to be less privileged.
Then just let it all hang out. Show your true colors and squash me like you’ve always dreamed of.
You’re very much a prime example of why I genuinely wonder why I don’t feel welcome here and wonder why I show up. You constantly act like you’re better than anyone and everyone that doesn’t agree with your particular rhetoric, that often comes across as cartoonishly man hating to the point you literally posted ‘oh you’re one of the good ones’ to a guy that agreed with you. I mean what in the actual hell? If i posted that ‘oh you’re one of the good ones’ about a woman/black person/etc I’d be skewered to hell and back as being a troglodyte, yet you get a gold star and mods preening at how awesome you are.
Just…
Whatever. You win. I’m out. Start making fun of me. Call me every vile petty childish name you can think of. You literally are the face of boingboing. Agree with me or I’ll belittle you to the point that I’ll ensure your voice doesn’t matter here and the mods will love me for it.
Boingboing used to post weird and wonderful. In the past few years though? It’s transitioned to posting at how corporate republican/white male shit is ruining the world. I’m not disagreeing with a lot of what’s being siad but it’s a one note orchestra where no solutions are being offered and there’s no real reprieve.
You can have the place. It’s obvious they love you more than me.
It didn’t hurt me in any way, but it was fucking low rent, and I know you well enough to expect you to be better than that.
Yes, theoretically I can do that. However, in real life I get dragged into fights I shouldn’t be letting myself get dragged into. Even if someone else doesn’t start the fight outright, they pussyfoot around it enough where I feel the need to jump in.
One of the reasons why this issue is so confusing is because it’s okay to say “they’re not attacking you”, but “they’re not attacking me” just sounds arrogant. What do I do at that point besides say, yes, you are attacking me, and I’ve had enough? Having enough is why so many people voted for Trump.
I’m far less involved in advocacy these days because I don’t consider myself intersectional enough. People see advocacy as a zero-sum game even though it really isn’t, and they mistrust someone who they see as more privileged because they think that person will throw them under the bus. I’m not saying their mistrust is wrong, because it’s obviously based on their past experiences, but it is harmful, and having to constantly prove my trustworthiness when others don’t can get quite tiring.
