as small as a world and as large as alone

8:45pm July 4, 2014

chavisory:

nectaresque:

chavisory:

madeofpatterns:

I also just don’t think it’s ever a good idea to hate people based on characteristics that aren’t actually bad. That obscures the actual problem.

Picking groups of people it’s okay to hate has pretty much always been a bad proposition.

I’m lost as to how this has apparently become controversial.

I feel like this tendency to want to introduce new ways of hating on people is actually a kind of appropriation of tactics, which have developed in other groups, by people who really enjoy imagining themselves as activists or allies, but whose actual level of solidarity/kinship I often can’t easily make out. Oof long sentence (not sure if those commas are in the right places either). Unpacking a bit:

So ‘the oppressed’ like to vent amongst themselves about how their oppressors are assholes, and rightfully so, because venting relieves tension and if you’re too tense your ability to survive and fight back suffers. Whenever this venting becomes visible or heard outside of their own circle there is huge amounts of pushback, people are punished, shamed, stigmatization is heavily re-applied, ‘look at how these people are resentful and ill-behaved and unable to adjust to civilized discourse and what the fuck ever’, right? So a move to explicitly and joyously affirm the right to call your oppressor an asshole I can totally get behind. This is a move ‘ex post facto’, I mean it is a (valid in my view) justification of vilification after the words have been spoken.

People who want to popularize terms like cishit, enty, allistic, and probably a lot more that I don’t feel like searching out, misunderstand the function of venting, they seem to think it looks cool and if some groups get to be allowed to do it they should too. It looks like entitlement to me, and the wish to look cool because one is daringly fierce, and the more biting the invective against the designated ‘oppressor’ one can make up the more ideologically pure and desirable one imagines oneself to be. It reminds me a lot of earlier incarnations of net culture too, because it so often goes along with the tiresome condemnation olympics and punching sideways and so on, which are (in a way, there’s more going on, but just looking at how it plays out rhetorically) just the next form of people yelling “wrong!” and “fail!” and “loser!” and “meh” at each other.

Right, like the problem isn’t that people who’ve been treated badly get exasperated and upset and express it.

It’s when resentment and like, target practice, get turned back into ideology.

But people aren’t target practice.

It’s not someone going “Arg, white people!”

It’s someone going “Yeah, let’s apply this dogmatic justification for why it’s cool for us to choose and delineate a group of people to hate on now!”

And that’s not a “power” that actually helps anyone.  In no way does it serve to upset structural oppression or entrenched bigotry.

Hearing it doesn’t make me any less opposed to racism, transphobia, ableism, etc…but it does make me want to stay the hell away from people who talk like that, because I have had it with being target practice.

This is a total tangent but:  Also as much as I dislike the word ‘allistic’, it’s not the same as those other words.  It wasn’t conceived as a hate word.  It mostly is used as a neutral term for nonautistic people.  I don’t like it because I remember its origins (it basically asserts that autism means being self-centered and non-autism means being other-centered, which I think is a horrible and harmful stereotype, but not a hate word), but it’s not a hate word, it’s not like 'cishit’.  People seem to like it because they think it gives them a way t “decenter allism” or something, but to me that’s linguistic gobbledygook that doesn’t justify the offensiveness of the word.  But I’m getting waaay off topic here.

Back to the topic:

Finding new ways to hate people and express that hate is not activism and is not productive.  And it’s not the same as spontaneous venting of rage.

Even spontaneous venting of rage can be a problem if indulged in too much, though.  Because venting doesn’t actually make people less angry.  It makes people more angry.  And it makes them more likely to be habitually angry in response to certain circumstances.  It basically lays down pathways in your brain that make it easier and easier to get pissed off about things.

I don’t think anger is always bad, but it is when it becomes a way of life, rather than a momentary thing that happens.  Anger can fuel amazing things when harnessed appropriately, but too many people let their rage control them, and there’s a lot of collateral damage when that happens.

And hate isn’t anger.  Hate is something worse than anger.  It’s not just extra special intensified anger.  You can hate while feeling almost nothing.  You can hate while feeling happy.  That’s why hate is something more than just an emotion.  It’s a state of mind where you really make someone into an unperson in your eyes, worthy of whatever treatment an unperson can get.  And even if you never have the power to actually act on the hate, the hate will do harm to you, and the hate will do harm to your friends, and to people on your side, because hate directs you, you don’t direct it.  Being in a state of hate is a little like being possessed while thinking you’re in full control.  You’re not.  It will bite you in the ass.

And finding new ways to hate people… not good, not activism, not productive, not useful, not good.  Anger can be good or bad depending on circumstance, but hate is just hate.  I’ll never forget the time someone told me that an adversary of mine deserved my hate, but that I did not deserve my hate.  Meaning that I did not deserve the effect that hating my adversary would have on me.  Because hate isn’t directable.  Hate will hurt the hater as much or more than the hated.  Hate isn’t something fun to mess around with, it ruins lives.  I’ve seen it.

So my way of doing things is with love.  Love and anger, if necessary, sometimes (rarely) even love and violence… but always love.  Because love transforms things just as unpredictably as hate does – but for the better.

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