my issues with sj let me show you them

Splain it to Me

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

{{Title link: https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-me/ }}

theunitofcaring:

fierceawakening:

taymonbeal:

Wow. This is a truly excellent work of Rationalist Social Justice. Status 451 may have just redeemed itself in my eyes.

(Also, I had no idea just how deeply I’d internalized the “nerd model” of communication. Not even just with other people; my internal monologue consists largely of me Taymonsplaining things to myself. Including while reading this article.)

This makes a ton of sense to me. The whole concept that “privileged people” are not supposed to correct “marginalized people” makes me instinctively feel like people are trying to avoid intellectual discussion and trying to evade defending their perspective or ideas. Which bothers me in part because I don’t want to be taken less seriously BECAUSE I’m marginalized – I’m concerned I’ll be dismissed as a politikid if I talk about it at all.

Where to them it might be more like “we don’t have the advantage of a whole long field of study with far-reaching traditions, but that doesn’t make my perspective invalid. Please take seriously the idea that a different way of thinking about that might make sense.”

The opening section about New York listening is a great explanation of competing access needs. 

And, yeah, I feel like different communication norms is a part of what’s going on in peoples’ reactions to learning ‘don’t correct marginalized people’.  To people like me who feel infinitely more comfortable with the information model of communication, “don’t correct marginalized people” almost comes across as “exclude marginalized people: cut them off from the flow of ideas and corrections and debates and redefinitions”. When a conversation is almost entirely about corrections and counter-corrections and reframings, “don’t argue with people” means “don’t take their ideas seriously”. 

Just like if you told the New Yorker “don’t interrupt me while talking”, they might think you mean “don’t behave in a way distinguishable from a flowerpot” and decide you don’t actually care about them as a listener. 

For people coming from a different communicative context, though, “don’t correct marginalized people” means “when people correct me, it’s almost always to assert the worthlessness of my ideas, not to engage with them. I don’t expect, when I’m corrected, that we’ve embarked on a back-and-forth of refining ideas; I expect that you’re corralling excuses to dismiss me. I can’t override this expectation (and it’s usually warranted, anyway) so if you want to actually hear my ideas communicated and fully realized, don’t offer your objections and disagreements and thought experiments. Doing that doesn’t include me, even if it is how you always communicate.”

…huh. I’m having a lot of trouble trying to map this article’s descriptions to my own life, because to me, the defining experience of navigating social-justice culture is constantly perceiving status games that nobody else would admit to seeing and that may not even have existed. (Seeing everything in terms of hierarchies and commands is what They do, after all. We are better than that. (Not that anyone would phrase it in quite that way, of course.)) I have had conversations that I perceived as an exchange of carefully veiled insults and insinuations that the other person should be outcast, and that I suspect (but am not certain) the other person perceived as friendly conversation about, say, the downsides of cleverness-based power fantasies. I have had so many conversations that I suspect the other person perceived as commiserating and that I perceived as them presenting their credentials and demanding to inspect mine.

I feel better around rationalists not because they lack hierarchical thinking but precisely because they acknowledge it. In general, they tend to recognise when things they say might be interpreted as orders and are careful to make it clear when things are not orders. And if it’s not clear, *it is permitted to ask for clarification on whether something was an order*. I use such extreme emphasis because it’s very, very important. Thinking in terms of “mandatory” and “permitted” and “forbidden” (rather than “right” and “okay” and “wrong”) isn’t itself forbidden here! I actually feel reasonably confident that you won’t jump all over me for writing this post! (Slightly less confident than I was before you reblogged this, but still enough that I’m willing to post it.) I don’t know whether you understand how huge a relief that is.

Tags:

#not only am I reasonably confident people from the rationalist-sphere won’t jump on me for writing this #I am even cautiously optimistic some of them might stand up for me if somebody *else* jumps on me #which in the end is the deciding factor in pressing ‘reblog’ rather than ‘close’ #reply via reblog #my issues with sj let me show you them #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ilzolende:

Fun parts of English: A bunch of lectures and videos about how we shouldn’t conform to society but should instead find our passion and not care about external approval. Given by an authority figure, to students, along with instructions to take notes.

Talk about mixed messages.

original post

Tags:

#did you mean my *life* #people order me not to follow orders *all the fucking time* #they never do seem to notice the problem #or maybe they do and consider the logic bomb a fitting punishment #for anyone naturally rule-abiding enough to bother thinking that one through #though the OP is talking about school I’m going to tag this #my issues with sj let me show you them #as that’s where I receive most of my paradoxical orders these days #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

This is my home! This is my home! How can you sit here within it and tell me that nobody lives here?!

(and say it like it’s obvious, say it with condescension, I am so fucking sick of my lived experience being met with condescension and casual declaration of impossibility, or at best saying that it may well have happened but I should still shut up and just let the first-generations speak, their problems their experiences are more numerous more important the only ones worth public acknowledgement)

(You say you want a world like mine, a world with people like me in it. You say you work to achieve it, to achieve us. Decide now how you will react to us when we come to be, for we are already here. You cannot afford to wait until you deem the tide to be turning in your favour, for the world is vast and contains multitudes and the tide is always in your favour somewhere, even if those places are small. Even if those places are small, they may still be big enough to raise a child.

Decide now. Decide wisely.)

Tags:

#my issues with sj let me show you them #in which Brin hails from a subculture in deep denial about its own subcultural status #did you know? #in the particular SJ sub-subculture where I was raised ‘queer’ *had been* reclaimed #past tense #it was just what you said when you wanted an umbrella term for people who weren’t straight #(sometimes also people who weren’t cis) #you didn’t have to be queer to use it #connotations of the word were neutral-to-positive #I didn’t even know for seventeen years that it had *ever* been negative #that’s how thoroughly it had lost that negativity #I’m probably the only person reading this who actually knows what a successfully reclaimed word looks like in practice #everyone else I’ve met on the Internet comes from places where it hasn’t been done and thinks those places are the only places #I’ve watched that ignorance hinder their own attempts at reclamation #rants #oh look an original post #(I’m not even thinking of a particular person right now this just happens to me a lot) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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justice-turtle:

nuclearspaceheater:

tharook:

northcentralpositronics:

tattoo artist who can encode magic into tattoos but doesn’t want people to know she can so she just puts low-level luck spells on her clients’ bodies without telling them

jeweller who makes body jewellery and pendants which have amulet properties and draw love and luck and happiness to their wearers without them realising it

piercing artist who keeps the remnants from her piercings and puts them all in little jars in the back of her shop to work sympathetic luck spells on all her clients

and then all three of them slowly realise what the others are doing and end up in a poly relationship living in a little shop in the shitty end of town, which gets curiously less shitty the longer they stay, and people think it’s just the development of the area but the three artists know

and they’re never rich and they’re never famous but they’re always happy because they have everything they need

they have the shop and they have their customers and they have each other

and when their customers are happy and content, they pack up and move on, all together now, to find another space with skin to be coloured and jewellery to be made and magic to be done.

this is beautiful

DETROIT – The three body modification artists were arrested today on charges of voluntary manslaughter after a past client suffered a fatal stroke, allegedly due to thaumo-alchemical interactions between her prescribed potions and a luck charm that had been placed on one of her tattoos without her knowledge.

…

“Some potions and drugs are known to react with common charms, which is why it is absolutely essential that your doctor and pharmacist have a complete and accurate list of your active enchantments,” says pharmacist Patricia Patil. “Putting an enchantment of any kind, no matter how minor, on someone without their knowledge or permission is playing Russian Roulette with someone else’s life.”

…

The victim, Carmen Jackson, was 36 at the time of her death and is survived by a husband and 4 children.

“#death tw #yes this #I did not think this *exact* thing #but I did wonder why we were assumed to sympathise with people tricking others into taking spells”

Because consent isn’t part of our cultural narrative. Patriarchalism is – people assumed to be “wiser” doing what’s Best for other people without needing input from those stupid lower-class people who would reject the help out of fear and superstition and who never know what’s Actually Good for them.

Us, the lower classes and poors in this country, we know we’re shat on, but it’s still a long row to hoe challenging this internalized narrative, that if somebody who Knows Better than you (upperclass, educated, ~the Wise~) is doing what’s Good for you, they don’t need your consent or even to tell you what’s going on.

In skiffy, there’s a trope of the person who has to Decide The Fate Of Others angsting about it, feeling unworthy, actually addressing the fact that they’re making big honkin’ decisions about people’s lives without their consent… but the angst isn’t about whether the decisions should be made (and in skiffy there generally isn’t time or any achievable way to get everybody’s input), but over whether THE PERSON ANGSTING is “worthy”, is Wise enough, because they weren’t brought up to feel that deciding the fate of others is their job, they feel it’s the job of those higher up the totem pole who’ve done the deciding on the person’s own fate. If they had more time, the ability to consult, it’s not suggested that they should take the opinions of the people whose lives will be affected, but of their superiors who have more of a “right” to fuck with people’s situations.

Perhaps so, although I distrust anything involving the word “internalised” for actually pretty much the same reason: it tends to carry a very similar note of “we know you better than you know yourself, if you disagree with us on what’s Actually Good for you it’s only because you lack insight* into your problems”. There’s no defence against a charge like that. (You’d think “I’m second-generation social justice; sure, I had some contact with other, patriarchal subcultures, but I’m not a proverbial fish and my native tongue does have a word for water (you should know, it’s the tongue you’re speaking now)” would have at least some effect, but nobody ever really seems to notice when I say that. Besides, we born-and-raised types are rare enough that everyone else routinely forgets we exist, and other people deserve not to have that pulled on them too.)

*Here used in the psych jargon sense of “awareness that something is wrong with your mind”.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #my issues with sj let me show you them #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

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Anonymous asked: Sort of a silly question, but what was your internet community journey? For instance, my first community was fanfiction net, mostly HP and danny phantom stories with frequent lurking on deviantart and 4chan for fanart. Later I shifted to reddit and tumblr, with occasional forrays into lesswrong and some other hubs of interest. Now its just tumblr and twitter pretty much, though I visit other places. Or if you don’t want to get into all of that, what was just your first internet community? :)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

theunitofcaring:

No that’s not a silly question it’s really cool and now I want all my followers to reblog with internet community journeys. 

 I hung out on Yahoo! Answers for a couple years (12-14), lurked various advice columns because I find them fascinating, got into Harry Potter fanfiction on fanfiction.net, found Methods of Rationality and through that LessWrong, where there are embarrassing posts as a record of my age-17 Eliezer-fangirl stage, got into the tumblr Silmarillion fandom, burned out of the tumblr Silmarillion fandom, got into tumblr SJ, and wound up here. The only sites I read reliably now are tumblr, slatestarcodex, and aforementioned advice columns. 

This tracks only slightly with my special interests during the relevant time periods, which from high school forward were the TV show 24 , Crichton/King/Grisham generic adult thrillers, Christian apocalyptic fiction, LessWrong, the Silmarillion, the manosphere and neoreaction, Clara, the Silmarillion again, social justice, and Current Special Interest which is a secret for obvious reasons. 

 

(This ended up much longer and more detailed than the other responses I’ve seen. I hope it’s long and detailed in a good way.)

When I was young, the primary places I went on the Internet were Nethack fansites (though I only lurked), the official Chalkzone discussion board on the Nickelodeon forums (my first fandom (and first perseveration that I can recall*), age eight), and–slightly later–Neopets. These aren’t connected to later events, though.

The continuous journey, the one that led me to where I am today, started when I was thirteen, and I saw that under the “other” section of the Girl Scout day-trip medical form Mom had written that I was autistic. (Her point being that if the supervisors saw me sneaking off to find a quiet spot to recover from all the noise and activity, they should let me.)

She later insisted that she’d already told me a few years previously, but either she misremembered, or she’d told me but not explained and I’d registered it as a meaningless, forgettable word (like I had “Presbyterian”), because it was news to me.

Of course, I had to learn more about this. Some news article led me to The Autism Crisis, which despite the name is a neurodiversity-based autism blog. This led me to other neurodiversity-based autism websites (at one point around this time I read the entire autistics.org library), and from there other neurodiversity sites. (This is why part of me always feels surprised when people who have been hanging out on the Internet for a while don’t have at least a basic working knowledge of multiplicity. Within a month or two of venturing out into the big wide Internet, I knew how to parse a caret in someone’s name.)

(During this time, the summer of 2007, I also read through the entire mental health section of when was then my local library. (It was a pretty big library.) The juxtaposition of these books with the blogs I was reading was an interesting experience.)

Stuff about snake-oil autism treatments led me to the skeptical blogosphere. One of the more religion-focused ones had a link to the Left Behind tag on Slacktivist, which I have updated here to reflect his move from Typepad to Patheos. (If there’s a way to make that show in chronological order, I don’t know it. I’ve linked to what is currently the last page.) I read the posts and left. I didn’t read the comments. Not yet.

When I was bored, I spent a lot of time reading TV Tropes. This gave me a lot of cultural osmosis that still serves me well today, as well as an epiphany about my sexuality. (No, really. It had never occurred to me that “fetish” was a framework that could apply to my particular fascination, but once they pointed out that was a possibility, I realised it made so much sense.)

It was probably from TV Tropes that I found the Protectors of the Plot Continuum. (Their sporkings are a little mean for my tastes these days, and I haven’t read any new ones recently, but I still like their characters and worldbuilding.) Back in the day, I even posted on their forums for a while, under a name I never used elsewhere.

Since I was in the general realm of sporking, there were more links to the Left Behind posts. I went through the “oh, right, that exists. *catches up on posts* *leaves*” cycle a couple more times. At one point, sometime around the autumn of 2010, I decided to stay. I read the non-Left-Behind posts. I read the comments.

In the comments, I discovered a thriving (if sometimes flame-y**) community of people. They used the comment threads like a forum, discussing not only the original post, not only tangents that could diverge quite widely from the source, but new topics that they brought to the table themselves. They also had the Greater Slackti-sphere, the blogs written by people who commented there, most of whom also commented on each other’s blogs.

On Christmas Day, 2010, I got up the nerve to join them. I took on a new name. I became Brin.

(I kept reading Slacktivist long after I should have stopped, after I began to realise that social justice was literally driving me insane, because of this importance to my history and development. I do still read and comment on some of the less sanity-draining Greater Slackti-sphere blogs.)

In May of 2011, we were having a conversation in a Slacktivist thread about Star Trek: DS9. Lonespark, a fellow Slacktivite, told us about this place called DS9 Rewatch, where people gathered in a chatroom to watch DS9 together and talk about the episode as it was happening. Like watching TV with your friends, only text-based and with people scattered across the world.

If you followed that link, you’ll have seen that I now run the Rewatch. The thing about “like watching TV with your friends, but with people scattered across the world” is that said scattered people pretty quickly become your friends. Not including me, only one of the people who was there when I joined is still there now, but I maintained friendships with some of the 2011 rewatchers even long after they left. (*waves at justice-turtle​*) (And of course, I also made new friendships with the relatively new rewatchers.)

It was probably also from the Slackti-sphere that I learned of Ozy, who at the time was a co-blogger at “No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?”. I liked them–in hindsight because they were the least sanity-draining feminist activist I had ever met–and followed them through a couple of blogs before losing track of them for a while.

I don’t remember whether it was through them that I heard of Less Wrong, but it was sometime around then. I read a couple of posts, a few comments, felt extremely intimidated, and left. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake.

(I liked the idea of HPMOR, but didn’t hear of it until after I reached the “perpetually buried in reading material” stage of Internet usage, and have never gotten around to it. I did read Luminosity, and greatly enjoyed it. The protagonist’s clever exploitation of the local laws of nature reminded me of the books of Jewish folktales I loved as a child***, and I found it very refreshing that said protagonist was allowed to not only want, but seek out immortality, without the desire being seen as a character flaw. (I’ve had transhumanist sympathies probably since reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as a pre-teen.))

One of those Greater Slackti-sphere blogs was (and is) Mock Ramblings. I not only read it, but kept an eye on his blogroll, reading any posts that looked interesting and occasionally following a blog if it was interesting consistently enough. Michael Mock reads Comparatively Superlative, and as it was consistently interesting, so did I. At one point, shortly after I commented there using a profile containing a link to my Tumblr, I received a “comparativelysuperlative is now following you” notification. I read his Tumblr archive, found he was consistently interesting there too, and followed him back.

A few months back, he reblogged a post from you. I don’t remember which one it was, but it was interesting enough that I looked into the rest of your blog.

It was…I’m not quite sure how to put it. It was like seeing a braver version of myself, saying publicly the things I had hardly dared even to think. I…may have read your entire archive, and been disappointed when I found you had only been blogging there for eight months. I spread my net, reading other rationalist Tumblrs you linked to. I found that when I had encountered some particularly unhealthy piece of social-justice writing and it was getting me down, reading them helped me feel better. I realised that this was where I needed to be.

*It was also the first that I could recall at the time; I remember being surprised when it shifted.

**The thing that we now call “callout culture” tends to get treated as a Tumblr-specific or at least Tumblr-induced problem. It’s not. I experienced it in the comments of a Typepad blog, before Tumblr took off. Back then it was called “nuking”, and we lived in fear of the nukers then just as we do now. (Sure, one’s posts didn’t gain as wide a reach there, but it was a lot harder to block the nukers it did reach.)

***Possible factor in the disproportionate Jewish-ness of rationalists?

Tags:

#long post #Brin talks about herself for a *reason* this time #the story of my Internet life #overly enthusiastic parenthetical use #the standard tag for this sort of thing is #my issues with sj let me show you them #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost