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12:22am August 14, 2012

If you’re an Autistic who feels you can safely lecture me on tone, YOU’RE FUCKING WELCOME.

sherlocksflataffect:

Without people like me, “being reasonable” wouldn’t be an option. Without assholes like me, being “out” and Autistic would be even less safe. Without assholes like me, we’d still be consigned to autiebiographies and asskissing.

So you’re fucking welcome.

Without radicals we’d still be consigned to autiebiographies and ass-kissing.

Some radicals are assholes. Some aren’t. Being an asshole in and of itself doesn’t make a person more of a radical or more instrumental in changing things and making it possible for moderates to voice their opinions. 

(And focusing on individual figures as instrumental doesn’t capture the reality of how this kind of change happens.  It happens because there are lots of people doing lots of work and moving ideas around and supporting other people and listening and reading and taking ideas out and acting on them.  Lots of people who will never get the recognition in the movement that, say, I do.  And the people who get recognized as pivotal are people who are acting on ideas that are “in the air” at the time, and if they weren’t there, someone else would be.  End side-note.)

At any rate.  The people who have created change have used all kinds of different “tones”. I don’t agree with anyone who says we all have to kiss ass.  But I also don’t agree that being an ass is so necessary and pivotal that we’d all be ass-kissing without it.  There’s a big range between kiss-ass and asshole, and the actual radicals who have actually made change (and in the process allowed more moderates the ability to take their positions safely) have come from plenty of different places along that line.  The confusion between being radical and being an asshole was created deliberately to destabilize and destroy radical activist communities.  Unfortunately, it works really well.