But more seriously, I agree with everything that you've said and I think that this is a very very valuable point: Well thanks for the fucking warning, I guess we'll write this one off before it starts since if you can't laugh at yourself and have no flexibility in your dogma or ability to tolerate people who have different tastes to you, we can't be friends.
Someone once gave me an ultimatum on friendship. My only ultimatum is that if someone gives me an ultimatum, I am out of there. I detach and move on. That level of inflexibiity is not conducive to basic human interactions of any meaning.
I was thinking back to that conversation we had outside the BFI last year and to a couple I've had with friends of mine on long drives or whatever where we both approach the same problem from our differing perspectives and try to find common ground, because usually regardless of our politics our values are roughly the same. Tumblr strikes me as very fixated on the precise wording of the details and somewhere in that the actual bigger meaning gets lost: like "if i just get the shibboleth right, it doesn't matter what my intentions are".
That level of inflexibiity is not conducive to basic human interactions of any meaning.
Yes yes. Tumblr makes very little sense to me especially because there are so many who claim to be liberal and advocating for minorities but are so, so dogmatic. Like. Liberal dogma? Is basically not a thing. It's a contradiction in terms. But I go on Tumblr and realise I'm apparently a bad feminist. I kind of suck as a woman. And if I'm in a minority group, like religion or nationality (and, on this side of the pond, we know exactly what it is to be Irish), I am probably bad at that too because I don't fulfil the absolute rigid requirements of Tumblr.
I suck as a woman too! HIGH FIVE. And oh, I'm a bad gay, but I'm not a queer, because queers are RADICAL AND COOL AND DON'T WEAR GOLD (this was an actual thing) and I wear gold and am not radical or anything else and I'm really lazy and I just like banging ladies...
BUT MS LANYON EVERYONE KNOWS WHITE PEOPLE CAN'T BE MINORITIES. And you're bad at being Irish because... of ... some reason.
Tumblr strikes me as very fixated on the precise wording of the details and somewhere in that the actual bigger meaning gets lost: like "if i just get the shibboleth right, it doesn't matter what my intentions are".
That's exactly what bothers me about a huge chunk of social media social justice stuff. Shibboleths are useful for setting tribal boundaries, not moral standards, and if you try to use them to establish who the Good People and Bad People are, you end up with something poisonous.
Shibboleths and other internet tribal boundary markers are really easily faked by manipulative people, and there are lots of people who really care and want to help, and haven't been exposed to the particular bits of information, or haven't understood it in the same light, or haven't retained it effectively, and a lot of Tumblr-style SJ stuff is creating a filter that lets on the manipulators while weeding out anyone truly different.
Also, that kind of dynamic (where Us and Them have a perceived moral component) is a really effective way for people with imperfect good intentions (which is everyone with good intentions I've ever met, myself included) to cultivate self-righteousness, cruelty, and narrow minds.
And indeed, a lot of well-documented trolls have picked up SJW terminology and used it for cover so they can attack people for funsies and not have to deal with any consequences. Rather like cuckoos.
But more seriously, I agree with everything that you've said and I think that this is a very very valuable point: Well thanks for the fucking warning, I guess we'll write this one off before it starts since if you can't laugh at yourself and have no flexibility in your dogma or ability to tolerate people who have different tastes to you, we can't be friends.
Someone once gave me an ultimatum on friendship. My only ultimatum is that if someone gives me an ultimatum, I am out of there. I detach and move on. That level of inflexibiity is not conducive to basic human interactions of any meaning.
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That level of inflexibiity is not conducive to basic human interactions of any meaning.
HUMANS GROW! HUMANS CHANGE! yeah.
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HUMANS CHANGE YES.
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BUT MS LANYON EVERYONE KNOWS WHITE PEOPLE CAN'T BE MINORITIES. And you're bad at being Irish because... of ... some reason.
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That's exactly what bothers me about a huge chunk of social media social justice stuff. Shibboleths are useful for setting tribal boundaries, not moral standards, and if you try to use them to establish who the Good People and Bad People are, you end up with something poisonous.
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Also, that kind of dynamic (where Us and Them have a perceived moral component) is a really effective way for people with imperfect good intentions (which is everyone with good intentions I've ever met, myself included) to cultivate self-righteousness, cruelty, and narrow minds.
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