Racing Turtles

"you become guilty of misdeeds by even involuntarily benefiting from them" is a fucking psycho ass moral principle to see bandied about as freely as i do

"what you are responsible for = what you control" is such an obvious foundational principle i would not even know how to go about arguing for it

the impression of insanity here is exacerbated rather than diminished by earnest claims that "guilt" and "moralism" are the only things that could make complicity-thru-involuntary-benefit seem worrying. why the need to reach for such radical and vague revisions to our ordinary concepts of "complicit" and "responsible" when it suffices to point out that ppl clearly bear no responsibility for shit they didnt do? leaves me with the suspicion ppl still want to use guilt as a cudgel without the recipients of the cudgeling getting to object to it as such

that and an implicit (well, usually just implicit) demand you accept that you deserve whats coming to you

it also seems like a quick and dirty way of squaring the circle of how people can benefit from privileged social positions that they can't relinquish, in the stupidest most bloodthirsty puritan manner.

like, i absolutely have white privilege; i can't stop being white or end racism; i benefit from something i didn't start and can't stop. however, there are earnest and worthwhile conversations to be had in how i have the power and thus responsibility to recognize my advantages and use them to promote equity in my own relationships with fellow citizens. i can't give up my privilege and it's kinda absurd to suggest i should exist in a state of wretched penitent guilt for it-- but if you're tall enough to reach the high shelf in a grocery store, it's probably virtuous to fetch inaccessible stuff down for the folks who come up short.

Ok: This might sound a bit Loony. I think part of this is a reaction, turned by time and intensity and the generally puritanical cultural climate since 2000 into OVER reaction, against conservative arguments around how history ought to be taught :|

Like, there's allot to talk about on this obvsl, but what it boils down to is that, beginning in the 90s, there started to be a liberal backlash to the conservative backlash against the 60s, which manifested partly in a push to include native and black perspectives in the teaching of US history(in public schools, in the academy, and in popular media like PBS documentaries).

The conservative response to this was(and still IS) to try to roll back these changes, and once again silence those historically marginalized perspectives, through this argument: "including honest discussions of colonial atrocity causes white students to feel "guilty", contemporary white USians shouldn't "feel guilty" for stuff they benefit from but didn't do, so we shouldn't teach colonial atrocity, and should only teach a Morally Uplifting(i.e. Conservative, Pro-colonial, and Triumphalist) version of US history."

My theory is that, in reaction against that line of conservative argument(and inline with larger cultural trends encouraging moral absolutism), some liberals and leftists began arguing "this Guilt is Good, actl" and, as the conservative argument has persevered and strengthened, so has the leftist "pro-guilt" pushback against it, spcl among those demos on the frontline of this fight(ie: kids learning this history). That then metastasized across cultural discourses(and again: this isn't the ONLY discourse or cultural development pushing in this direction; it's just the one I feel 1)centers "guilt" as a concept most directly and politically, and 2)gets the most mainstream attention).

Anyway: I could be wrong obvsl it's just an idea that occurred to me reading these posts.

I routinely forget that periods exist, and its only been like two years since I stopped having them.

The whole concept of them and all the planning and the contingencies involved are just, swoosh, out of my mind. im only reminded that periods are a thing every couple of months or so when one friend or another is in pain and brings the subject up. a friend asked me about how my periods were recently and i was shocked not that she believed i still had them, but that i had ever been a person who'd had them at all.

Multiple friends of mine have gotten hysterectomies this past year, some after long waiting periods, and its got me remembering that my high school debate coach told me getting one was the single best decision of her life. Ive wondered to myself a few times what all the advantages of it are, beyond the obvious prevention of pregnancy piece, and it honestly took me months of thinkkng to remember that oh, oh yeah, right, some people have periods and some periods really hurt and for some people that is probably a factor.

periods are such a non issue for me i forget about what a massive toll they can take on many other peoples lives. and im only a month post op from top surgery, but i can tell its gonna be the same thing w having tits. im gonna forget how much pain and hassle and work it all was.

and I share this because it shows just how mutable human beings are, and how changeable privilege is.

if i can forget about the existence of a bothersome and dysphoric experience i had every month for decades within a matter of two years -- so much so that i forget other people still have to deal with periods -- then someone who grew up poor but now is rich cant ever be trusted to remember what poverty is like. an adult cant be trusted to remember the fear and powerlessness of being a kid. and a trans man can very much be oblivious to sexism and to the lived experience of being a woman, no matter his prior experience, because that is what privilege does to you once youve got it. it clouds over all the worries you no longer have to think about, separating your perspective from that of all the people that do still have to.

and idk, i think thats important for people to remember. no matter what youve lived in the past, if you get a little money, a little privilege, a little power, it changes you, and it makes you stop worrying about many things, and it makes you oblivious.

great additions thank you

you think you have it so bad here, you think tumblr posts are cursed. this is the height of privilege. i am not native here, and am an immigrant from the foreign website called "reddit". i came here in 2018 because i wanted to make a better life for myself and my posts. on reddit we have nothing. our posts vanish within hours. people do horrible things to earn even the smallest number of upvotes. they quote weather man. they quote weather man again and again and again. thats how it is on reddit, quote weather man or starve. i am ashamed to admit even i have stooped so low.

on tumblr if you make a spelling mistake no one will judge you. in my country if you make a spelling mistake every response will be someone passive-aggressively correcting you.

and the horrors. you here do not know the horrors. you think superwholock posts are cursed. you do not know the horrors of the cumbox. you do not know the horrors of the cum drawer. you do not know the horrors of the cum jar. you do not know the horrors of the woman who stuck rotting meat up her vagina or the ask a rapist thread. you do not know colby.

i have come to your website because i think your culture is beautiful and you are such a warm and welcoming people. i have worked hard to assimilate to your ways. i am honored to say that i, too, am a tumblrina. but please, you must know how good you have it here. when i see your "heritage posts" i cannot help but feel pangs, pangs of sorrow for my comrades who lived and died in a world you cannot imagine. that is my heritage posts. remember how good you have it.

“A lot of native speakers are happy that English has become the world’s global language. They feel they don’t have to spend time learning another language,” says Chong.

“But… often you have a boardroom full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them.”

The non-native speakers, it turns out, speak more purposefully and carefully, typical of someone speaking a second or third language. Anglophones, on the other hand, often talk too fast for others to follow, and use jokes, slang and references specific to their own culture, says Chong. In emails, they use baffling abbreviations such as ‘OOO’, instead of simply saying that they will be out of the office.

“The native English speaker… is the only one who might not feel the need to accommodate or adapt to the others,” she adds.

I’ve been thinking about this post all day, and the article glosses over one important detail. All of the “native English speakers” the article mentions belong to the same niche demographic: white collar/corporate professionals

English corporate speak is it’s own fucked up dialect. 

It’s so incomprehensible and exclusionary that even a native English speaker with a master’s degree in English will have difficulty parsing it. Trust me when I say that nobody who isn’t a business major knows what the fuck “synergy” means.

And the jargon’s just half the problem. The other half is the gross overuse of hobby-specific expressions and analogies.

Go to most corporate offices and you’ll be bombarded with sports analogies that only make sense to someone who spends all their free time watching ESPN.

I tracked down this quote I read in a tumblr post years ago:

- Frances E. Kendall, Understanding White Privilege

My point is,

This kind of poor communication probably shouldn’t be blamed on monolingualism alone. It’s most certainly made worse by an exclusionary and elitist work culture.

You’ll probably encounter far fewer communication issues talking to a cashier at a tourist trap than you will talking to a lawyer or a stockbroker.

assuming it’s other people’s job to understand you, instead of your job to make yourself understood, is characteristic of people with unexamined and unchecked privilege.

In this context, “privilege” is not being used as a description of real structural dynamics. It’s being used as a magic word to designate that someone is not allowed to defend themselves from abuse because their pain is simultaneously meaningless and deserved.

*POINTS EMPHATICALLY* YES YES THAT EXACT THING YES. anyone who tells me to check my privilege as a trans man goes on my block list immediately for exactly that reason.

in public spaces where i’m seen as a cis man, men treat me waaaaaaaay better than they used to while women are a lot more cautious around me: they don’t trust me, and it shows in how they’re both more agreeable and more reserved. but i understand completely where women are coming from, and i make a special effort to be considerate and trustworthy to women as well as making a point of standing with them against men in any adversarial kind of situation. 

i definitely benefit from patriarchal norms in situations where those norms are in play, and frankly it’s a really sweet deal, but i’m still not inclined to cooperate with the patriarchy any further than i ever have.

but in queer online spaces where i exist as a transmasculine person, i’m treated like shit and told to suck it. and i think that’s shitty behavior and i don’t feel like putting up with it. that’s not about sticking it to the patriarchy, it’s about individual people who think power is hurting other people and who are out to hurt me, and i don’t have to cooperate with that either. 

it is always hilarious to me that hermione managed to go 7 books with a reputation as a goody two shoes. all the school rules she’s broken…heck all the international wizarding laws she’s violated….kept a person in a jar for a year

As a straight A student with a reputation as a goody two shoes, I cannot begin to tell you the shit I got away with.

Being known as the quiet rule-abiding kid gave me a free shot at electrocuting my entire physics class because no one thought I’d do it

My uncles used to say about my aunt that if the teachers heard a gunshot and ran into the room to see her standing over the still-twitching body of a classmate holding a smoking gun in her hands, they would have said, “Erica! Don’t touch that! There might be fingerprints!”

My Grandma worked toll booths and one time a guy came through being really rude and she called him a stupid bimbo and he went over to the office to complain and her manager called in her booth asking if she called the guy a bimbo and she said “Me?? I would never” and her manager said “See I knew you wouldn’t, that’s exactly what I told the guy. Donna would never say something like that. Sorry to bother you”

I’ve told this story before, but when I was in high school I overheard a teacher chewing out a stoner kid and giving him detention for saying “damn”, knew I hadn’t gotten in trouble for saying “fuck” to my math teacher that same day, and decided to test this. I skipped health, drove off campus, got a fast food lunch, drove back to campus, sat myself down in the middle of the quad and ate it. Like, half a dozen teachers or so walked by and said “Hi” and none gave me detention or asked if I should be somewhere. It was not a time of day when anyone had lunch. At the end, I went to my counselor, said, “I had a bad day and skipped health, can I get a note?”  And she wrote me a note, and there were zero, zip, no consequences to me actually breaking like six rules, and this kid got in trouble for a word that wasn’t even a swear. That was my first true “aha” on the subject of privilege, that I could not get in trouble if I tried.

They’d decided I was a good kid, and confirmation bias did the rest.

This started somewhere very funny and ended somewhere very serious. 

ppl who get critical of like… white middle class extinction rebellion protestors and like… jane fonda, because “they can afford to get arrested” like… that is the point? the point is to use your privilege to put yourself in the way of things. if you are white and middle class in the u.s. and the u.k. you can occupy waterloo bridge, or city hall, or the capitol steps, and you can refuse to move when a cop tells you to, and the worst thing that will happen to you is a fine you can afford to pay. (you might also sustain some injuries, to be fair we must acknowledge that that is not negligible.) the point is you cause disruption by putting your privileged body in the way, where you create disruption that forces attention to be drawn to what you are saying, and you do this because you can afford to. if you are jane fonda you also wear a jaunty hat and smile smugly because you are the safest person on earth, and also it makes the cops look real dumb. it’s the point!

fuck this

Job hunting is so depressing these days

Important point from Trevor Noah on @thedailyshow  👆

For a non-abuse example of that dynamic - I get surprisingly few mean anons, for someone who has a lot of followers and a lot of unpopular opinions. I’ve seen people get about a hundred times the amount of anonymous abuse I deal with because they said things that are significantly less objectionable. 

I tended to assume that this was just because tumblr is a hivemind, and that’s probably part of it, but I think the other part is people sizing up the bounds-of-what-they-can-get-away-with. I am an incredibly privileged person in a lot of ways, and my blog does not come across as a blog where you can get away with a lot of stuff, and so I tend to get, like, the occasionally mean anon often followed up an hour later with an apology. 

Whereas people who are having a bad time, and who have fewer social and emotional resources to shut people down, and who sound vulnerable, often read as if the bounds-of-what-you-can-get-away-with are quite wide, and they’re a magnet for nasty bullying. They attract it constantly. This is not their fault. It might be over an opinion they mentioned, but it’s not really about that. What’s causing it is the perception that people can get away with doing it, and what causes that is complicated social power stuff.

This is one of the reasons I’m so against hurting people because they ‘deserve it’. I basically expect it to in practice always be punching down, no matter how hard people try to aim it otherwise, because one of the more important kinds of social power and privilege is the ability to set the bounds-of-what-people-can-get-away-with towards you. 

”[Denmark] is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, [and] the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their ‘toughness’ had melted like butter in the sun; they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage.

That the ideal of ‘toughness’…was nothing but a myth of self-deception, concealing a ruthless desire for conformity at any price, was clearly revealed at the Nuremberg Trials, where the defendants accused and betrayed each other and assured the world that they ‘had always been against it’–or claimed, as Eichmann was to do, that their best qualities had been ‘abused’ by their superiors. (In Jerusalem, he accused ‘those in power’ of having abused his ‘obedience.’) …The atmosphere had changed, and although most of them must have known that they were doomed, not a single one of them had the guts to defend the Nazi ideology.”

I want everyone to go read that link about Danish resistance, please, because it’s a very good example of what to emphasize:

The countries most successful at protecting their Jewish populations from German extermination were not those with the strongest military (USSR) or most successful violent resistance (Yugoslavia, Greece). In fact, the regions of greatest violence quite naturally suffered the greatest death toll.

It was in Denmark and Bulgaria, where communities refused point-blank to collaborate in the Holocaust, that Jewish citizens were most successfully protected.

Even the Nazis, even at the height of total war, had trouble dealing with principled nonviolent resistance by a large community.

Well, the Danish and Bulgarians were able to focus on rescuing Jewish people because the Nazis were ruling with an extremely light hand in those countries. Nazi rhetoric viewed Danes as racially pure, and Germany wanted to win Denmark over. Bulgaria, in the meantime, had joined the Axis of its own free will, and was thus similarly well-treated. Non-Jewish people had enough freedom, and governments had enough autonomy, to take action on behalf of Jewish people.

Many countries weren’t given an option of whether or not to collaborate in the Holocaust. Poland is the best example; the Polish resistance was violent because the Nazi occupation was bent on murdering as many people as possible – Jews, Gentiles, they didn’t really care. The mission was to eliminate Poland. This being the case, non-Jewish Polish resisters had very little time to focus on helping the Jews, because they were fighting for their own lives. Had they attempted nonviolent resistance, they would have been slaughtered in even greater numbers.

Whether violent or nonviolent resistance is more appropriate seems, to me, to depend on what the oppressor is bringing. If they come under a pretense of compromise, offering collaboration, nonviolent resistance will work – not that violent resistance won’t also work, but there’s opportunity for a wider range of tactics. If they come with violence, they must be met with violence.

I’m finally going out so I’m leaving you with this hot tea (source)

Lmao

i hate this so much lol

Must be fucking nice

So ole girl got a free job a free house and then was like “see it’s not that hard!” i’m crying

This is how most rich people think though. They think they’ve gotten to where they are in life because of dedication hard work, but its mostly because they’re even richer parents gave them a bunch of free shit.