2:02am July 15, 2014

And because a friend is going through some shit right now, I just wanted to say…

Not every point of view is worth considering and responding to. It is perfectly okay to decide that a particular point of view can be thrown out without responding to it at all.

This is particularly true if the “point of view” is not just a point of view at all. What do I mean by that? Sometimes people are mean and cruel, and want to get away with being mean and cruel. So instead of just being mean and cruel openly, they cloak their cruelty inside of a “point of view”. This makes it harder for people to say no to their cruelty. It makes it so that people will try and “consider their point of view”.

Similarly, such people will tell you, “You just can’t handle disagreement.” When what they are doing is not disagreement, it’s cruelty and bullying. Nobody has any obligation to listen to cruelty or bullying, or to respond to cruelty or bullying.

In fact, even if it were a point of view? This is someone’s blog. They have a right to include whatever points of view they want on their blog. They have a right to exclude whatever point of view they want on their blog. It's their blog. Not yours. You have no right to be reblogged or responded to by anybody at all. That’s not a right, that’s something each person gets to decide for themselves. If you think that it’s your right, and demand it as your right, you probably have shitty boundaries and people are probably justified in avoiding you.

Failing to reblog or respond to you is not “silencing” you. Silencing you would mean keeping you from saying what you want to say on your own blog. If nobody is doing that, then quit whining about being “silenced” just because people won’t respond to your bullying in public. Hell, even if all you had was a point of view, even if you weren’t wrapping your bullying in a “point of view” to make it seem more legit? Not responding to you, not considering your point of view, on someone else’s blog, would not be silencing you.

There are ways of silencing people on tumblr, and people do it a lot. Mostly they’re bullying and intimidation tactics. Like the ones being used against my friend. These people are the ones trying to silence my friend, and since my friend refuses to respond to them and refuses to be silenced, they are accusing my friend of trying to silence them. Not that their silencing tactics are the ones I see most often on tumblr, but they still count as silencing tactics. Any time you try to intimidate someone into shutting up, that’s silencing, and I have seen a lot of that from these very same people. I have seen absolutely no silencing tactics from my friend, who actually takes pains not to do shit like that, to a degree that’s more than just about anyone I’ve ever met.

It’s perfectly okay to see bullies, recognize they are bullying you, and avoid them. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Anyone who sticks anon hate in your askbox telling you it’s wrong to avoid bullies, is suspect in my eyes.

And I am really, really pissed off at bullies who try to cloak their bullying in terms of “differences of opinion” or “points of view”. Because what they then do, is say “You can’t handle differences of opinion” or “You can’t handle different points of view”, the moment you exclude them on the basis of being bullies. I’ve had bullies who actually threatened to kill me, and when I shut them out of my life completely, they went around telling anyone who would listen that I “can’t handle differences of opinion” and “can’t handle anyone who doesn’t worship me”.

Actually, I hate people worshipping me, but their aim was to make it sound as if the reason I didn’t like these people was because they didn’t agree with everything I said, or because they didn’t bow down to me in some way. (In fact, I get along great with lots of people who neither agree with me nor worship me. In fact, I get along better with people who completely disagree with me on lots of things, than most people I meet online.) And they were somewhat successful in manipulating people’s stereotypes to get people to believe that of me. So I consider such tactics to be dishonest, disingenuous, and socially dangerous to the person being targeted.

Socially dangerous because once that rumor gets started, it’s very hard to contradict it. It’s very easy for people to believe, for some reason, that a blogger wants to be worshipped, or wants everyone to agree with them. They don’t notice the covert bullying, even when it’s not very covert at all. I don’t know why this is. But it can be very damaging socially to be branded in this way, and bullies want to damage you socially.

Anyway, my friend should not have to put up with any of this horseshit, or any of the other horseshit they have to put up with on a regular basis. They’re trying to do a good thing with their blog, a thing nobody else is doing, and they’re not going to get it perfect, but they’ve done very well so far. And the people who are raising the fuss are bullying, they’re not just disagreeing. And the bullies are not being silenced in the least bit. Failing to give someone a platform on your own blog is not silencing someone. Expecting others to give you a platform on their own blog, no matter how mean and nasty you are, speaks to a massive sense of entitlement.

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