7:38pm July 21, 2013

➸ no, seriously. shut up.: I’d like to take a moment to point out the absolute uselessness of...

amorpha -system:

warlocksexalways:

youneedacat:

I’m the one who came up with the concept of hateability. Because I was looking for a word for little everyone thinks it’s fine to hate, without even questioning, yet wouldn’t push buttons the way “oppressed" does because there are certain requirements for oppression they don’t currently meet. (And somehow that they are not oppressed means they’re even more okay to hate. It’s basically another word for fair game.)

Hateability is such a useful concept in a community that takes oppressed identities very seriously, but also rigidly defines those identities. It always seemed like a red flag to me when people who were supposed to be for justice and compassion would throw all those things out the window and join anti-SJWs in bullying a very small population of people.

FFS THIS, so much so.

And the most disturbing thing is that we saw instances of trolls playing on and manipulating some people, by trying to appeal to some sentiment that would provoke knee-jerk outrage from them, like “they’re appropriating real oppression by claiming to be persecuted.“ Nevermind that the vast majority of hateable people weren’t actually claiming to be persecuted, never mind that quite a lot of them also overlapped in groups that the SJ community regarded as legitimately oppressed, like trans people.

And some of these people who were manipulating the parts of the SJ community where they could get others to explode with hate at any target offered up to them, were basically playing double agent, in that they were also calling trans people delusional while playing on cis people who considered themselves trans allies, trying to make them go after hateable groups with all the “they’re appropriating oppression” crap. As far as we could tell, it was a deliberately structured ploy to set parts of what they perceived the SJ community to be against each other.

Some of them, as far as we could tell, were secretly getting shits and giggles out of the whole thing because they actually regarded the entire SJ community as stupid and mockable, but pretended to be part of it or share the opinions of people in some cases when they saw a chance to incite others to attack hateable groups of people.

And, well, for complex reasons, we don’t consider ourselves “with" either the SJ community or the anti-SJ community, even if we have a lot of causes in common with the SJ community. But claiming to be about justice and compassion just doesn’t seem compatible with engaging in flat-out bullying behavior to “punish" someone you perceive, rightly or wrongly, to be appropriating another group’s oppression. There are tons of ways to deal with a situation like that, if it really is occurring, that don’t involve bullying or mockery in any way at all. So I have to admit that we don’t hold the people who did that entirely blameless, either— when you hear secondhand information about a relatively small and obscure group of These People Who Do This Thing, especially in a place like Tumblr where misinformation gets around so fast, we tend to think it’s your responsibility to go to the source and check out what Those People are really saying (and not just the cherry-picked worst examples being pointed out by trolls and bullies), and form your own opinion based on that.

-Tamsin and Mirai

Yeah I saw a lot of that going on too. Then some of the obnoxious things trolls were posing as hateable people to say, spread through hateable communities like wildfire as actual legit things to say. Which did exactly what the trolls wanted, and only fueled the flames.

BTW someone actually seems to believe I invented the word hateable and worked hard to explain it, because I really secretly meant oppressed. And then people started discussing what they thought I really meant by things instead of, like, asking. Felt like widget city. But seriously I have too many language problems to bother coming up with new ones if I really believed oppressed was what I was after. Which I didn’t. But that’s what happens when you read stuff between the lines that nobody actually wrote there. It felt like the first person wanted me to mean oppressed, because then they could just get mad at me and not take in what I meant.

I’m also not sure people understand the difficulty involved in verbally covering every possible misunderstanding at once, while coining an entirely new concept, around a contentious topic, with a word limit. With language disabilities. Because it seemed like people were mostly upset about things that would have taken ten posts to explain everything I meant. I’m still wary of that happening even in this discussion, because if I don’t put a disclaimer on every other word, there will always be something I didn’t cover in total precision.

Notes: