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11:07am July 5, 2013

In reply to that thread about how people shouldn’t be each other’s friends if they hold different political views and how only privileged ppl can afford to disagree like that (WTF)

My tumblr client won’t let me reply in the thread itself, sorry about that.

I am not a fan of dispassionate debates or even the idea that such things make you objective and wonderful and superior.

OTOH I do think it’s possible to be friends with people who disagree with me on many things, even many things that affect me in profound ways. I do draw a line in some places but not as many as you’d think. And I don’t think it’s all that great of an idea to restrict my friends to only people who agree with me politically. And I do have serious issues with the way many anti oppression communities set themselves up as always knowing what is right and what is wrong, and making out those who disagree to be horrible people you shouldn’t be friends with (unless of course you’re willing to persuade them to join your side). Strikes me as arrogant to think you can always know you’re right about such things. Like some things really are that clear but others aren’t as clear as they’re presented in many such communities, and it’s not even always clear which things have a clear right and wrong and which are more complicated.

But I honestly think most things are complicated. Most things, you can never have one clear answer, it depends heavily on what situation you’re in. It might be necessary to come down on one side or another when it comes to making laws, but as to what is actually ethically right and wrong it’s much more situation dependent. I’m wary of any and all rigid moral codes for that reason, and of people and groups who believe right and wrong can ever come down to a rigid moral code.

I’m gay but I have had friends who firmly believe that being gay is a sin against God. I’m pro choice but I have had pro life friends. I’m against legalizing euthanasia or assisted suicide because I believe either one will make it way way way easier to kill people like me unwillingly or persuade us to die, but I have friends who very much want such things to exist. I’m (if you have to put me anywhere on such a ridiculous spectrum) way more left than liberal and I have had liberal and conservative and moderate friends.

And none of this is because I’m somehow not oppressed enough to see where the viewpoints many of my friends have had, could get me. It’s more like not wanting to write off most people for disagreeing with me or for not seeing (or agreeing with) how such things affect me. (And not everyone oppressed agrees on such things either. It’s not like all the people I’m talking about are unaffected by the negative consequences of some of their opinions.)

I honestly find this whole idea horrifying. But not surprising. I’ve already seen viewpoints among the SJ crowd that it’s not only wrong to hold certain opinions, it’s also wrong to be friends with anyone who does unless you spend all your time trying to convince them to agree with you. So it’s not too big a leap to the idea that holding differing political opinions from your friends is something only privileged people can afford to do.

Which is one reason I refuse to be part of the SJ community. (Or the anti SJ community, which… my friend compares the two communities to a monster looking around for more and more ideas to eat, and the same monster having run out of things to eat that turns around and begins devouring itself. I don’t want a post in any of that.) I am terrified of what would happen to dissenters in a world where such a community got any real power.

Mind you, I’m not that thrilled with intense constant vigorous debate either. I’m not much of a debate type. Not with anything libertarian. I just think it’s possible to be friends with people who disagree with you politically, without having to convert them to your side or something.

You’d think, hearing people talk, that there’s nothing more important in a friendship than to have similar political views. That everything else that goes into being friends with someone is worthless unless you both agree. And that there’s only one set of political views that could be held by oppressed people, or that could avoid doing harm to oppressed people.

I think it’s much more important what people do than what they say, anyway, when it comes down to it. And the SJ community seems more interested in what people say (including about their political views) than what they do. And after all, any political view that can be reduced to a sentence or a couple words is more about saying than doing.

Some of my friends who consider being gay a sin, or who crack horrible homophobic jokes, treat me better and more respectfully as a gay person than people who hold all the right political opinions and are careful to say all the right things. And that means a lot more to me than things that are between them and their god.

I’ve met autistic people who want to be cured and have done more for the rights of autistic people than some people who seem to think railing against a cure is the very definition of fighting for our rights.

And I’ve always gravitated more to people who think deeply about their opinions, than to people whose opinions agree with mine on the surface, in words.

I’m also not going to disregard years of friendship, people who have helped me in many ways, people who have helped me grow as a person, people whose personalities I click with really well, people who are among the few people I can communicate with easily or at all about some topics, people I may literally owe my life to… just because I discover they have a viewpoint I strongly disagree with. Yes, even if that viewpoint is one I consider oppressive, or one that may do harm to me or people I care about.

And that doesn’t make me some sort of privileged libertarian type FFS. I mean seriously WTF. I can’t even adequately express what a bad idea this is. And if that loses me friends, they can’t have been very good friend to begin with. This really makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.