Experiments with a Medium

something has gone deeply wrong when "focusing pragmatically on issues you can influence and working to make life better for yourself and your community" is considered an unserious distraction while "endlessly exposing yourself to media about distressing situations you can't control" is considered political engagement

i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service you’re organising" one of the tags responding said "this isn’t about proshippers in here you’re not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.

There's a disconnect happening here because the primary function of social media for most casual users is to form a circle of friends around the usual things that friendships are built on: shared interests and lifestyles and ideas of what is important and what is unacceptable. When people are mainly doing leftism on social media, this encourages thinking of leftism as centered around establishing high-minded social clubs.

For anyone who still isn't getting it from someone who helps people IRL: There's a difference between whom you're helping to feed at the mealshare and whom you're choosing to hang out with for fun after the mealshare. You don't have to invite a hungry person with opinions you don't like to play board games with you, but you do have to help keep them from starving if you're serious about leftist organizing.

Help me jumblr. What was that quote that goes something like "the easiest way to drum up support for a cause is to promise people they'll get a chance to be violent against other people and the violence will be righteous? I thought it was by Sartre but nothing similar is coming up

Is it this?

~Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

That's the one. Thanks a bunch

I want there to be fewer MRAs. Do you want that too? Do you want to know what helps us get there, from a feminist perspective?

You may not like my answer: acknowledge that sexism can affect men. Recognize that, although the patriarchy generally privileges men, they are also subject to restrictive gender roles that are harmful to them (shunning all things “feminine,” not showing emotions, being protectors/strong, never admitting being victims of SA/IPV, having to “earn” their manhood, etc.).

Give young men a place other than the right-wing manosphere to be heard about the issues they experience. If these grifters are telling them “only we understand how hard it is to be a man, the left hates you for your gender” and they look to the left and see “men claiming they have ‘problems’ are losers who just hate women, all men are trash,” do you think they’re going to be drawn towards or away from feminism?

Before you leave an angry response: no, this does not mean to center men instead of women in feminism, it just means including them at all. No, it is not “coddling” men to treat them with human dignity, you can and should continue to hold them (and every other gender) responsible for unpacking sexist beliefs. No, this does not mean it is every individual woman’s and feminist’s responsibility to prioritize men’s issues, it just means at the least not shutting them down when they do speak up about sexism. No, it is not “not all men-ing” to point out that “men are trash” sentiments hurt the feminist movement rather than helping it. Ask questions before you make accusations on this post, please. I have been abused by men too, I get it, this isn’t easy to hear.

All of this. An individual boy is not The Patriarchy, and by making him account for, and atone for, what The Patriarchy has wrought is wrong. (This is not 'not all x', which is acknowledging when the conversation doesn't include you, even though you're x.)

Nobody walks into a counter-cultural space knowing everything about it - else, it wouldn't be counter-cultural. That boy was brought up with the lessons The Patriarchy teaches, and was punished when he strayed, and rewarded when he did not. That's a LOT of unlearning to do.

If we HAD a robust, universal deprogramming curriculum that everyone agreed upon (ha!) and was widely accessible (double ha!) then this message wouldn't be necessary. But every enclave has its own terms, its own priorities, once you get past 'all humans are equal'.

I want to reiterate: it is not coddling men to treat them with human dignity.

Stop being so fucking black-white binary, okay? There is actually a lot of fucking territory between "you have to never ever EVER make a man feel uncomfortable!!!" and "I should be able to say that all men are garbage and would-be rapists and a blight on the face of the world without anyone being hurt by it!!!"

There is even a lot of territory between "sometimes I need to vent to people who share my experience without having to watch my words" and "pointing out that my extremely public, boosted, Discourse Laden posts that are all about how horrible men are by virtue of being men, always and forever, may have negative consequences is SEXIST!!!!"

Social justice does not mean 'which group do I get to stop caring about/do I get to abuse, even 'just' verbally, without worrying about the consequences?'; that is not any kind of justice.

Acting like men are human absolutely includes holding them accountable but it also involves believing that bad behaviour is not "because he's a man", and especially in the case of young men - especially in the case of fucking teenagers and children - that involves actively showing them what behaviour is actually pro-social, desired, good, and rewarded. And as it happens this does in fact involve them not constantly hearing "men are trash, men are all lying about anything being hard ever, men are always bad" in one form or another with nothing else . . . .from anyone but the alt-right.

And yeah, absolutely, this should be the responsibility of other guys - but the fact of the matter is, if there aren't enough of them on our side already, then mayyyyybe even if it's really fucking unfair, since we can't literally just execute half of the human race, we may need some of us to take on the work - especially with the, you know, children and teenage boys - ourselves.

I still believe that deradicalizing men is the work of men, not just because that's what's fair, but because I think it's what's tactically necessary. The people we need to reach - not just men, but the women who help perpetuate sexism - aren't primed to listen to women.

But we need those men to be willing to do the work. And honestly? While it IS the right thing to do, and it IS good for men and not just women? Nobody does their best work while they're being constantly treated like shit by people who benefit from their efforts.

If you can't bring yourself to reach out to men who are actively bigoted (and I understand, I really, really do), at least try to be respectful to the ones who are on our team.

(And again: please note that "be basically respectful" ie "do not make it so they are constantly being told They Are Garbage and no I promise 'you're one of the good ones' doesn't feel any better in this context than any other", does not mean "prioritize them above everything else" or "foreground their work to the exclusion of others" or any other thing other than "maybe we don't use generalized gendered insults/make generalized negative statements about the gender of someone who's supposedly our friend while he's in the damn room".)

between reddit and twitter a huge portion of the internet- including people who self identify as leftist/ woke/ whatever the fuck else- seem to think that anything goes as soon as they dislike the person being talked about

if you do misogyny about a woman you dislike, i regret to inform you that you are Still Doing A Misogyny. it doesn't start being okay because you've decided the woman in question deserves it. don't even get me started on body shaming/ the way fat people get talked about as soon as they're viewed as Acceptably Bad.

either you hold values against bigotry or you don't. there's no invisible line at which point you get granted a Say One Slur card. jesus christ

It’s the same trap that a lot of religions fall into. Do unto others and all that, yeah, but mostly for people of the same religion, because we all know that the people who don’t believe what we believe are the baddies. A certain subset of self-identified leftists are just as toxic as the worst, most hypocritical white evangelical church in America.

One more thing before I go bury myself in a pile of blankets:

To everyone who voted Democrat for the first time, every former trump supporter who voted for Harris, everyone who voted for the first time, every Republican who did not want this result and voted for Harris, thank you.

I got a text from my cousin who has voted third party for decades who voted for a Democrat for the first time yesterday.

My aunt who voted for trump in 2016 and who's husband is a proud MAGA sent me a Snapchat late last night saying she is one of the women who secretly voted for Harris.

A former friend from college who used to be deep in the Republican party posted on Facebook yesterday that he voted for Harris.

I know you aren't the only ones.

I see that you tried.

I know a lot will be said on not appealing to whatever whatever blah I already don't care. The people who turned away from the GOP are *gettable* members of your coalition who can make it a safe place. I have been thinking so much about how the alt-right pipeline begins with wanting to belong. There's a lot of shit to do. It can't be "your vote wasn't enough, prove it to me"

It's gonna be "i want you part of this too."

Yeah, I live in a very conservative state, even my district swung red (tho it was close since I live in the most liberal district in the state). But I was at a diner yday between doctor's appts and despite my ominous trepidation about being around other people right now, I actually wound up between a queer couple and a senior couple talking in concerned tones about the rise of authoritarianism and their plans as retirees going forward. Meanwhile the manager of this podunk southern diner where the staff all said darlin', was clearly also going thru it because every single song that played while I was there had a theme of "it'll be okay" or "we'll get through it" lmao.

We're arguably losing a numbers game and that's terrifying. I mean, i'm a Jew, I know a lot about losing numbers games. But there are people to be relied on, and I really, really hope that the left takes this as a moment to unite instead of playing exhausting purity metrics.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

As a 30 year old man who escaped the Alt-right pipeline, you're not going to be happy about the answer.

All I hear from leftists is how much they hate me for my immutable traits, how much they blame me for everything wrong with the world, how much they want me and everyone who looks like me dead.

Whereas Alt-right types would call me "brother" and welcome me into their ranks so long as I hated the right ways.

Do you understand the difference?

I'm an ally and support equality because I feel it's the morally correct choice to make, but holy fuck is it difficult to reconcile that with the fact that means fighting for a lot of people who see you as the scum of the earth.

Read this and then read it again and then read some fucking bell hooks because this is a legitimate problem on the left.

"To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being." - bell hooks, The Will to Change https://bellhooksbooks.com/product/the-will-to-change/

This. Hating people for how they’re born just makes them bitter.

Source I am a born disabled person and I fucking KNOW when people think I’m lesser. It’s like a black sludge in the core of my soul and I don’t mean cool fun Phyrexian oil I mean congealed rage.

The left is good at pretending that only oppressed people feel that congealed rage, and defining oppression in ways that only certain subsets of “people in understandable chronic distress” count.

That’s bad!

The concept of oppression and societal imbalance is useful to figure out large policy problems like “what do we do about the fact that proportionately, there are so damn many poor black people?”

It is NOT USEFUL for dealing with people one on one. People can and do stubbornly feel pain about things that don’t show up at trend level. They always will.

Suffering men aren’t wimps or pathetic. They’re human.

A decade ago, in leftist disabled activist circles, there were some almost cults just because a few known activists had a lot of Facebook followers who really really believed everything they said. If they got angry at another activist for, say, paraphrasing something or using an image that didn't have enough warnings, it was like watching a swarm descend and suddenly people you admired were acting like overlords aiming their minions at the enemy. And you had to quietly unfollow and step back many steps because you refused to be involved with pointless attacks on a completely innocent individual within their community who was just doing their thing.

I saw this on Twitter and thought tumblr needed to see this.

Yes

Thank you 2015. I needed to hear that 2015.

i've been on this website for almost 10 years. all queer discourse looks like this:

hello fellow queers, don't you just hate those [queer subgroup] trying to harm us [different queer subgroup, "real queers" implied] by [discussing their experiences], which is [bigotry toward queer subgroup 2]. these [fascist dogwhistle] want to [fascist scapegoat rhetoric], because [identity phrenology]. clearly, we must destroy these [fascist dogwhistle, implied queer subgroup 1] because they are a threat to [queer subgroup 2] and queer people as a whole!

The obsession with consent and abuse seems to have left people conceptually impoverished when it comes to breaking down their experiences with bad relationships and shitty partners.

I mean consent is vitally important as a legalism that separates a holiday from a kidnapping and a massage from an assault, but in relationships it’s usually far more helpful to focus on preferences.

If your partner has no interest in satisfying your preferences then they can get your consent till the cows come home and you’re still having a crappy time, and that’s simply because they don’t care about you as an independent person separate from their own convenience.

The trouble is sometimes people can’t find a convenient hook in the discourse to express the idea that “my partner doesn’t care about me” so they try to fit it into the abuse narrative even for cases which might be more helpfully described as disinterest, laziness, conflicting life goals, or pure self absorption.

In some cases this can even involve retroactive revocation of consent – due to the implicit understanding that relationship crimes are only serious if they involve a consent violation – where the consent must have been indirectly coerced or was predicated on an assumption that turned out to be false, like the partner not being a douche. This just muddies the concept of consent and results in people feeling unable to complain even if they are desperately unhappy, because technically their partner asks them for permission before doing things.

If you care about someone then your preferences have to include some level of their preferences, that’s kind of what caring for someone means, and that’s a higher standard than simply obtaining their consent.

Okay I would LOVE if someone could put this in Simple English (I think that’s what it’s called?) not as in simplified just simpler words?

The focus on consent and abuse seems to have left people unprepared to process bad relationships and shitty partners in any other terms.

In relationships it’s important to go beyond consent (what your partner agrees to) and care about preferences (what your partner actually wants).

If your partner doesn’t care about you or what you want then the relationship will not be good, and a selfish, uninterested, or simply incompatible partner can still make you miserable even if you consent, and even if they are not abusive.

Being able to describe bad relationships in ways that go beyond a lack of consent is important.

In a good relationship you need to care about your partner, which means caring about what makes them happy, not just what they agree to do.

Another issue with the separatist idea of "everyone who shares our identity will always understand your experience and struggles, and everyone outside of it will never ever understand" -

You can only enforce that first part by pretending there is an universal set of experiences everyone who shares your identity goes through, and punishing any talk that deviates from it. You make those struggles the defining factor of the identity.

Anyone who doesn't share your identity but says "I experience this too" is seen as an attack on your group instead of a potential ally. They're the enemy, trying to appropriate your struggles and erase you.

Anyone who does share your identity but says "This is not representing my experience" is pushed out of the in-group and basically considered to be aligning themselves with the enemy.

Absolutely no minority group is a monolith. All marginalized communities are made up of diverse people and life experiences. Any assumption that all of [X] people are the same is a nod towards fascism.

lot of people take the idea they might be an oppressor like it's some kind of curse or marks them or makes them fundamentally irredeemable.

this means whenever someone suggests they might have structural power over some group, rather than being normal about it and going "oh yeah i should be mindful of how i act so i don't abuse that," they take it as a personal attack, and either jump to defending themselves by denying it, or start lashing out.

this makes 99.99999% of all conversations on this website completely fucking unbearable.

People get defensive when you call them opressors and this surprises you? Do you hear yourself? "Oppressor" is not a value-neutral term.

Privilege and structural power and so on are of course nuanced things which you can attest non-judgementally. But someone who gets introduced to them on tumblr would be excused for assuming they are meant as personal attacks. Because oftentimes they are meant as personal attacks.

There's a rhetorical tactic called a motte-and-bailey:

"Oppressor is not an insult, it's a description of material circumstances" is the motte, and calling people an oppressor as an insult or way to discredit them is the bailey. If someone calls an asshole on the shit they're pulling in the bailey, they retreat to the motte- "lol you need to be more MINDFUL, this isn't ABOUT YOU"- but they do genuinely mean the shit they're trying to pull in the bailey.

I've found discussions about ~systemic privilege~ get a lot easier when you come at them from the mindset that most people want to root for the underdog. Most people do not want to be oppressors, and it takes decades of propaganda to instil bigotry in someone. And even then, many people are willing to turn around and help when they see someone in need, even if they're 'supposed' to hate them.

I think most people would be willing to give up their ~unearned advantages~ if they knew and could do so. But most people genuinely do not know about all the systemic injustices in this world, because they've never had to deal with them.

It's a lot easier to navigate a conversation about trans rights or disability benefits with Bubba (43, from Tennessee) if you come at it from the perspective that he probably just doesn't know how fucked up this bullshit gets and would be horrified if he did. If he does know, or if he doesn't care-- well, you've learned something about him.

"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."

Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

Watching the “you will excel at what you measure” trap devour basic moral practice in real time is fascinating in a terrible kind of way

If you spend any significant amount of time studying any social science or people-related policy, you’ll quickly run into the old adage “you will excel at what you measure”. This adage is a warning.

In order to mark progress in any area, we need a way to measure it. So we develop systems to measure complex social systems and behave accordingly. If you want to measure how effectively children are being educated, you can, for example, decide on what they should know by a given age, test them on that knowledge, and grade them in accordance to how well they do on the tests. A higher grade means a more successful student, a better teacher, a better school. Then you can tinker with what you’re testing as necessary, and with teaching methods and soforth to see how it affects scores on the tests.

Except, if you do this, then you’ve defined successful education as the ability to get high grades. You invite cheating (on the student, teacher and even school level), you invite teaching to the test rather than for general comprehension and ability, you invite boiling down the experience of education to test scores. And, of course, you invite massively increasing the inaccuracies caused by some people simply being better at taking tests than others. Someone with low to moderate comprehension who’s good at tests might get a higher grade than someone who understands the material but has anxiety or is unable to properly intuit the meaning of vague test questions. Grades can go up and up and up, while education consistency and quality falls.

This is, as anyone who’s worked in a school or sends their children to school knows, a known problem. ‘Grading systems cause huge problems in education” is NOT by any means a revolutionary and controversial statement. Over time, grading systems have been changed to favour testing comprehension and skill demonstrations, Individual Learning Plans and testing accommodations have become very popular to give a more accurate idea of people’s abilities, and soforth. A good half of my teaching degree was about compensating for the problems in this system. But you can’t patch up all the holes, and the pressure from people taking letter grades way too seriously – parents, school boards, funding systems, those looking to hire teachers – are always going to cause problems, make teaching to the test a matter of survival. We measure grades, so that is what we excel at.

The same problem exists in economics. Most countries measure their health via Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is basically a measure of how much money is swilling around in there and it’s an AWFUL yardstick. A country full of sick, desperate people going into massive medical debt has a higher GDP than an identical country not facing a health crisis, for instance. But it is the dominant model, so it’s what investors look at, it’s what other countries look at, it’s what voters look at. It’s what you must excel at, to be considered to have a ‘good’ economy. Other models exist, and are often proposed as a better alternative, but if one of those were dominant, new problems would exist – we’d excel at what they measure, and drop in what the GDP measures, and cause new economic issues. If you boil a system down to measurements, you will excel at making those measurements go up.

You should never, ever let yourself fall into the trap of believing that they tell you anything useful about how the system is doing.

Morality and justice are social technology. They’re a bunch of rules and instincts that both evolution and cultural education have given us to allow us to operate in societies. They’re integral to societies in the same way that math is; you need math complex enough to measure the grain, you need morality complex enough to measure the social harmony. People pretend they’re more than that, but they aren’t. “Good” and “bad” are concepts as real as “millionaire” and “straight-A student”, and nothing more.

In the vast, vast majority of societies out there, the end goal is essentially the same – to minimise harm to the populace. They want everyone to have as much safety and comfort as possible. Most disagreements are about the relative value of different individuals (is one race, religion or culture more important than another? Is one sex more important than another? Is a king more important than a slave?), or about methodology (is it better for everyone to have to follow strict social norms, or for everyone to be free to express themselves how they choose; which creates more safety and harmony? What social norms are best? How much control should one have over one’s property, or one’s animals, or one’s children? When somebody transgresses, what is the appropriate system for judging and metering out discipline? What is the appropriate sort of discipline?). People disagree radically on both relative individual value and on methodology, but the general goal is the same. Morality and justice are social technology, tools to be used. Law and social consequence is how their power is enacted.

People often forget this. And that is very, very dangerous.

People will decide on what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour, isolate it from the system, and proceed to excel at what they measure. They’ll decide that ‘good people’ use certain language and have certain values and ‘bad people’ use other language and do bad things, they’ll look at harmful power dynamics and decide that the world is full of ‘oppressors’ (can be ignored) and ‘oppressed’ (must be supported), ‘abusers’ (should be mocked and attacked) and ‘abused’ (should be believed and coddled), and stumble blindly forward like my robovac with a dirty sensor bumping into every wall in their way. They’ll see a complex social situation and instead of going ‘what’s the best way to reduce harm?’, immediately try to decide who involved is more oppressed and get their answer from that. They’ll see people use language they don’t like and decide that person must have nothing of value to add to a conversation, because they’re a bad person.

Today, I saw someone muse that the fact that American football causes huge amounts of brain damage that compounds over many years might contribute to why USA footballers seem to keep doing random unhinged things. Somebody else immediately attacked them because rape and domestic abuse is common among footballers (footballers being the attackers), so by suggesting a physical reason for unstable behaviour, this person was making excuses for rape. You might notice that this response has absolutely nothing to do with protecting people from rape or domestic abuse, and absolutely everything to do with making sure nobody might accidentally sympathise with a ‘bad person’ by suggesting that brain changes change behaviour. A focus on minimising harm would want to explore this, because removing risk factors for causing rapists means less rapists. Less rape is the goal. ‘Rape is evil’ is the tool used to achieve it. But this person got distracted by the tool of measurement, making sure that the buck stops there.

Yesterday, I saw a post about police violence, pointing out ‘police shouldn’t kill guilty people either’. This was a response to how people often protest police killing innocent people, which is definitely bad, but the point is that the police shouldn’t be killing anyone outside of strict self defense. The justice system is what meters out punishment, not the personal discretion of a state-sponsored gang with too many combat toys. The role of the police to to prevent violence and capture wrongdoers, not deal out extrajudicial executions. I’m sure I don’t have to explain in detail why this is so fucking important, but one set of tags on the posts made the distinction “except for pedophiles and rapists”. I have never seen anybody miss the point of a post so badly. Clearly, this person had once again gotten distracted by the system of measurement – pedophiles and rapists are evil people who do evil things, therefore they should be eliminated as expediently as possible – without considering the effect on the system. No, police randomly shooting rapists does not make a better society. If you support the death penalty for rape, that’s a whole arse different question.

These kneejerk reactions don’t just happen with pedophiles and rapists (although they are very effective for it, which is why dangerous and unsavoury elements like to call the groups they hate pedophiles). I’ve also seen people get upset at historical demonstrations of queer unity and support because the people in them called each other words they don’t like and get all distracted by minutae on who’s ‘allowed’ to ‘reclaim’ what words, preferring to condemn gay men calling lesbians ‘muffdivers’ despite the massive personal risk and great benefit of the demonstration. I’ve seen people quibble over what groups of disabled people experience more ableism than others, and which queer subcommunities are more oppressed, in order to determine who the good guy in a complex situation is or who deserves their support more. I’ve seen people slip all the minorities they belong to into an argument like they’re laying out the cards to summon Exodia (because most oppressed person is most deserving of support person and therefore most correct person), I’ve seen people distract from arguments they’re having in order to try to trap the other person into saying something that can be interpreted as sexist or racist so they can show that their opponent is the Bad Person (and therefore they’re the good person and therefore correct in the argument), I’ve seen people look at two people with conflicting needs (such as an autistic person who verbally stims and one who reacts badly to too much sound) and stop to decide which one is oppressing the other one to determine which one is being ableist.

This is all fucking bullshit. It’s meaningless nonsense. The only reason any of this matters is in how it relates to causing actual real world harm. I’d rather be called a tranny bitch by someone who votes in support of my healthcare than the most polite and up-to-date language by someone who votes against it. I’d rather know about risk factors that make someone more likely to be an abuser or rapist than shy away from such things because I don’t want to risk thinking of them as anything other than an Unknowable Evil. I don’t fucking care what Problematic ™ views someone holds about a cartoon and I don’t care who’s the Most Pure or the Most Oppressed or who used to say slurs online when they were fifteen if they’re behaving appropriately now. None of that fucking matters, and it’s not justification for harassing or hurting people.

Your sense of justice and morality are social tools. Sharpen them, clean them, look after them. And use them to build with purpose, rather than blindly hacking at whatever’s in front of you. Or you’ll just make a mess.

i feel like it's absolutely crucial in the social justice world to take "he a little confused but he got the spirit" and similar sentiments/situations as a Win. intent is so much more important than saying it right the first time! if someone is approaching with scuffed language and incorrect terms but they're visibly being as polite as they know how, that person is a friend and should be treated better than what their words might invite in someone else's mouth.

the most disturbing trend in online leftism is outright hostility towards any kind of community building tools and forgiveness whatsoever.

prioritizing cruelty in the pursuit of justice is still prioritizing cruelty

a friend had the experience of a very observant and analytical person pointing out to him that he seems "fixated on purity in your culture. which is keeping you from joining community because you expect purity from your circles."

and ngl, this has been fcking me up since he mentioned it bc i really don't think he's alone. it seems like part and parcel of The Problems talked about above.

the fixation upon Gomez Addams as a hypothetical "rich to be eaten/guillotined" as opposed to discussions of radicalizing the Addams family into redistributing willingly (which is arguably in character for most adaptations if not all) shows how deep seated the idea of necessary punishment is within modern leftist ideals. In spite of the strength of Gomez's sense of justice, honor, and equality - traits everyone including the jokesters at large unanimously adore him for - the prevailing attitude is one of antagonism and absolutism. Forbes said the Addams family are Rich, so we would need to Kill Them.

Tumblr has simultaneously painted the Addams as a family that would take in anyone, house students and newcomers, generously give their time and money and assets away; and at the same time, claims the resources that allow them to do these things we laud them for make them inherently evil and in need of destruction.

It Says A Lot about how people don't understand that the phrase "eat the rich" is not a call for class genocide, its a warning about what desperate working dogs do when starved and beaten ad infinitum. This is all hypothetical discussion. Gomez Addams, and indeed any "good rich" people, does not actually exist.

But I do find the way we discuss him and his hypothetical wealth very interesting. I'd sooner put Scrooge McDuck against the wall, because he can't be changed. But the Addams family? They're inherently counterculture by existing as a fun house reflection of nuclear family values. Pick you battles kids, cmon.

This is a brilliant way to frame many of the online misunderstandings surrounding class/wealth issues and social change, but mostly I'm just reblogging for the phrase "I'd sooner put Scrooge McDuck against the wall."

I mean, the Adams also occupy a very special niche of rich people: they’re fictional. If the Adams were real, then all of the money they constantly give away would either be peanuts compared to their actual wealth, (in which case they’re buying our affection with their vast reserves of power, eat the rich), or their wealth would dry up and they would no longer be rich. In the real world, you cannot become rich except by exploiting people, (and usually by exploiting them harder than your competitors, to boot), and you cannot stay rich without either continuing that exploitation, or being miserly, (Or investing in the stochastic exploitation of others). Class based analysis of the Adams family can then only be tongue-in-cheek at most serious, as they don’t exist in a class that really exists. They are not labourers, they are  not property owners, they do not continue their wealth by relation to property owners . . .

I distinctly remember these discussions of eat the rich and Adams family going in the direction of ‘Gomez Adams would love to be eaten, he would bring his own guillotine, he would make the revolutionaries uncomfortable with how enthusiastic he is about it’.

Is that really a fixation on eat the rich that suggests a call for class genocide? Or is it not the fun house mirror inversion at play? Have I just been absent of the more dogmatic turns that this conversation has gone through?

Also, if we really want to take this thing totally seriously, I always figured the Adams Family in this case were a stand in for real world loveable rich people. Like that one meme of a crying child having to put down Tony Hawk when the revolution comes, a meme that got a lot of use when Tony Hawk started trying to sell NFTs!

I'm gonna probably repeat myself a bit based on this first reply.

Much like whether or not the jokes are "on brand" for the Addams humor is irrelevant, I find the source of the Addam's wealth to be a non-issue, because they are fictional. This is not me trying to debate the ethics of where their fortune comes from, though I do have thoughts I would share. I find it to be to the left of the point, though.

I am more trying to discuss how people dehumanize their enemies, in this case, our class enemy of the rich, with Gomez Addams as an example due to him being a relevant meme at the moment. He works well because he is charismatic, likeable, and most importantly, fictional. Because he is fictional, he cannot exploit us. Because he is fictional, his wealth is as immaterial and conceptual as he is.

Yet, we still act like we would need to kill him. That is the center of the joke, and I don't disagree with the fact that a good part of that focus is the absurd morbidity of the Addams Family Humor. But doesn't it kind of spit in the face of their established character traits to ignore the reality that they would reduce themselves to impoverishment to help The People? If the Addams Family were real they wouldn't be rich because they would have given it all away.

Kill The Rich is a fun mantra, certainly, but without understanding of theory to flesh out the rest of the idea, it can be used to justify horrors. And I worry that a lot of us are getting pushed to a breaking point, filled with violent rage and a sense of righteous justice. That atmosphere creates tension. People do evil, dangerous things.

I personally know an older woman who is anti-Union because when she was young she knew of a teen girl who was a scab, and was violently murdered by union men for it. Just typing that makes me want to cry. As the tags in the reply I linked mention, the dehumanizing violence against Marie Antoinette and the Russian royal children was disgusting. We can't do such things to each other. Even towards our oppressors. But we've greatly desensitized ourselves towards the idea of committing acts of violence against members of an oppressive class because we dehumanized them.

I think it's fair to say most people would gleefully cheer inhumane violence against, say, Bezos or Musk. We hate them, they exploit us, they are uncharismatic, they are heinous and bland. But, to quote my other reply, "[...] when it's fictional characters [and parasocial relationships with celebrities as well] - when it's something these people actually relate to as human - there is conflict and remorse. When people make these jokes about killing Gomez Addams because he's rich, they are [nearly always] framed with a perspective of regret. They connect to Gomez, they love him, they see him as human; it create distress to imagine a situation in which he must die."

I don't think we need to kill all rich people. I think we need to kill "rich" as a class, we need to destroy the systems that create rich people and in effect kill the power rich people wield. But I have no interest in actually ending the lives of Tony Hawk, or Kim Kardashian, or Keanu Reeves, or anyone whose only crime is being more financially fortunate than myself by way of birth or time or luck; and especially I do not want to kill their children. We have a serious problem with refusing to let people change on any level, small or large, to the extent that it includes holding children responsible for the crimes of their parents. We need to separate the concept of "rich" from the people who possess it; Kill The Rich, Save The People.

Again, all of these characters we're discussing are fictional, and it really doesn't matter what they do or what we would do were they real, because it's all just laughs and jokes. I'm not trying to take away from that, because I also like the laughs and the jokes. Meme away.

My overly long rambling about this is entirely because I've been thinking a lot about how the idea of "inherent/immutable sin" pervades the thinking of a lot of people around me, regardless of their political leanings or intentions. I feel like this attitude being so strong in online leftists circles is a strong reason why I have only seen "Kill And Eat Gomez Addams" jokes, and not "Radicalize The Addams" jokes. It doesn't matter that they're good people, they're Rich, so they have inherent sin and must die for it to be cleansed.

I don't have a neat way to tie this up neatly nor do I really have a grander point than this. It just makes me sad how disconnected we seem to be from our own humanity, to the point that even when we define ourselves by our love of humanity and our support for basic human rights, there's always an asterisk. But boy do we feel sad for the fictional character who we wouldn't even need to kill anyway if we were actually in that position. Fuck other humans though.