The Zorro says “Yes!”
6 Likes
Okay, so this is interesting how many people are joining in on this.
Here’s my thought on it. My husband and I have a version of this where we get home after a hard day and we go, "Oh, boy, had a really tough day! I’m tired. The printer broke at work. I’m not feeling well. I think the car needs to go in for service. The cat threw up on my handbag! " And then he says, "Oh, but my day was ever WORSER. I had a longer drive and you totally can’t understand how terrible that drive is. And your printer broke at work, but at my job I had a boss that went bonkers. And your car is newer than mine. And the cat totally attacked my brand new luggage. " And blah blah blah. We are both looking for sympathy and neither one of us is feeling particularly better after our whinefest.
I feel like that is happening on a national level right now. Where there are people who are saying, yes, you have shitty things going on, but look at the history of my people. It’s a history of woe and sorrow. Like, here’s a GREAT example of this.
And I think that maybe it’s not effective for us to say, well, it’s okay for a black person or a Jewish person to complain, but if you’re a white guy, you can’t.
I think that it’s important to understand all the cultural issues, but it’s not creating a very good conversation. I am a member of a facebook group, Pantsuit Nation, that started in support of Hillary Clinton and now is a place where people are sharing stories of standing up to incidents of racism and bullying. There was a very nice story in there of a woman who sat down at a bar with a stranger who was wearing an pro-Trump shirt and ended up having a very deep discussion with him about issues of race and privilege. I’d like to know how we shift the conversation past the “who’s had the crappier history” issue and into a place where we all feel recognized and cared for. I think it’s coming from this one-up narrative that one race or group has to take the place of another for top dog.
17 Likes
This has been going on for years, but it seems to me like it’s one example of “Will Smith flying the alien spacecraft up to the alien mothership to destroy it.” (this phrase rolls off the tongue) He doesn’t really know how it works, but he has weaponized the technology of the enemy (which, in his case, was a weapon to begin with).
I think that when progressive people advocated empathy for people who have been oppressed, people on the right actually didn’t understand what they were doing. They didn’t get empathy for people they didn’t know personally. It sounded like they were saying victimhood was power, that this was a clever tactic (you look like a jerk for going after a victim of violence, for example) rather than genuine caring. They adopted victimhood - a caricature of caring - and weaponized it.
Same with the post-truth. I think it’s roots are in post-modernism that was all the rage with the kids when I was in university. Really the idea that our realities are constructed is a very nuanced one, but post-truth - against, a caricature of the original idea - is now a weapon of the right.
Progressivism moves things forward, conservativism keeps things the same. But conservatives aren’t hunter-gatherers steadfastly refusing to try out baby slings, they are only a few years behind the progressives. They are late adopters, not non-adopters. So basically whatever good idea you have, you get to hear someone who doesn’t really get it parrot it back to you as an insult 5-10 years later.
♫ And I think to myself … ♫
Hell yes! I think we have to abandon most of those terms completely because they are so thoroughly taken over by people who don’t even understand what they mean. Calling something a “straw man” just means it’s wrong, right?
I’m actively trying to remove all idioms and “phrases” from my life and replacing them with plain speech (and, apparently, references to Independence Day) because it seems like literally everything is turning into a racist dog whistle.
22 Likes
How dare they; the sheer nerve of those Blacks, not just meekly accepting racial injustice, or exploitation, or segregation as the way it is!
20 Likes
I think the first time I heard the term “Social Justice Warrior” was when Thinkgeek started carrying merchandise for the different Social Justice character classes.
Can’t find any trace of them on the site now.
5 Likes
Look, we whites don’t mind if blacks want equality, as long as they ask for it politely. They just always seem so angry.
21 Likes
Yeah, many labels for fallacies technical terms that have lost all precision. “Ad hominem” now can boil down to “I don’t like your tone.” Better to use simple English even when it’s a bit more verbose for the ideas those terms condensed. It also might make discussions less like some kind of logical gamesmanship and more like normal communication.
15 Likes
Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.
10 Likes
[quote=“ChickieD, post:42, topic:90681”]
Here’s my thought on it. My husband and I have a version of this where we get home after a hard day and we go, "Oh, boy, had a really tough day! I’m tired. The printer broke at work. I’m not feeling well. I think the car needs to go in for service. The cat threw up on my handbag! " And then he says, "Oh, but my day was ever WORSER. I had a longer drive and you totally can’t understand how terrible that drive is. And your printer broke at work, but at my job I had a boss that went bonkers. And your car is newer than mine. And the cat totally attacked my brand new luggage. " And blah blah blah. We are both looking for sympathy and neither one of us is feeling particularly better after our whinefest.[/quote]
Warning: clip from Deadpool, so it is in poor taste by definition:
11 Likes
A lot of people I know actually do care for people of other races, creeds, etc., but they are not necessarily up on the institutional issues at play. Like, maybe they have lesbian friends that they really see as equals, but, they don’t spend much time thinking about why gay marriage was so important to these friends. Maybe their lesbian friends even mock other lesbians with them so they know it’s totally okay to not feel sympathy for all lesbians because their friends are not “PC.” I feel like some of the issue is that they DO have empathy for the actual people who are other, so it’s like, how can I be homophobic when I totally have these lesbian friends that I really like and dig?
13 Likes
They “like” knowing them but don’t appear to empathize with who they are or anything beyond a casual acquaintance.
9 Likes
Yes there’s a lot of that. Well – you might think they’re ok, but in the end you don’t like the idea of them scissoring.
One of the odd things about race is just how few white people have been to the home of a black person. Sure we work together and might worship together and our kids might attend the same schools, but that’s the extent of the fraternization. I wish I could find the study/survey.
15 Likes
There was a meme – written from the POV of a black person that had
picture of riots: “Don’t riot - protest peacefully!”
picture of football player taking a knee during national anthem: “No - not like that.”
27 Likes
not even Satan could organize secular humanists:
strong coffee can get their attention for a time, but that’s not organization.
26 Likes
Idk, the New Atheist crowd seems to organize well around their disdain for Islam and feminism.
9 Likes
A variant of this I’ve heard is “I think they’re good people but I wouldn’t attend their marriage ceremony”. I’m not sure how to address a person who says something like that, how to even begin a conversation with them, other than to say, How can you consider someone good, how can you even call them a friend, but reject something so important to them?
That’s how I’d want to address the question, by being sincere and serious, but my experience has been that even approached in such a way causes people to become defensive and sarcastic. I think that’s part of the difficulty: it’s impossible to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t want to talk.
12 Likes
Say now, that refutes everything! Could you now please direct me to some videos off WorldstarHipHop to explain away black poverty rates?
12 Likes
I think you are completely right, and I don’t mean to say that in general people with right-wing politics are incapable of empathy (though it does seem like too many actual right wing politicians fall into this category). Those right-wing church going folks are actually more charitable than the left-wing Bill Maher watching folks.
So it’s not a lack of empathy in general, but I think it might be a lack of empathy for people beyond a certain radius around you. It’s easier to care about the Muslims next door than the Muslims in the Middle East.
Anyway, I don’t want to categorize people too much based on their politics, but I think the thoughts of the progressives do find their way into Fox News crowd and we are living in an era of deep moral relativism (of the kind that was imagined by the right wing when they used to complain about it).
I did appreciate the idea of shifting past the “who’s had a crappier history” issue (BB will simply not let me quote that post for some reason). But I think the solution to that problem starts with developing the fortitude to hear someone else’s complaint and accept it and sit with it. I think a lot of the time people interpret complaints (and maybe conversations in general) as power plays, where the goal is to achieve dominance.
But that’s difficult because when I start going down that road and thinking we need to accept other people’s complaints without making it about us, I can just hear white people mimicking that back with regard to black people or Muslims or indigenous people. Why aren’t we more understanding of them? I think it’s very hard for people to accept that, in fact, minorities have always been very understanding of white people because they’ve had to be.
Sometimes someone is just going to be defensive no matter what. I just try to be accepting of people’s emotions while still insisting on limits on acceptable behaviour (basically I treat other adults the same way as I treat my four-year-old). I try to do a lot of “That sounds really rough,” and to cut back on the one-upping (though clearly on message boards I do my fair share of one-upping). I guess I’m trying to “be the change” and hope that works?
I remember seeing a comedian saying something about people talking about their “black friends.” And he said, “A friend is someone you’d call to come look after you kids for a couple hours because you have to take your wife to the hospital. You don’t have black friends.”
If they have taken over the term secular humanists then the rest of us had better abandon it quickly. Or are we confused about whether the terms means “humanists who are secular” or “people who think only secular people are human.”
10 Likes
They self-identify as such, I don’t think they speak for the whole even if they’d love to do so. I think much of the “skeptic community” has fragmented them off, at least.
1 Like
Maybe it’s because I grew up in Alabama, but I know lots of people who have a best friend who is black but also say the N word. I think that in order to fit in, or move ahead of some of the other people around them, a lot of people in minority groups have learned to shame others in their group. Read up on Monica Lewinsky’s treatment by lots of feminists. Guess she wasn’t the right kind of woman to embrace her sexiness.
8 Likes
