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irenedubrovna · 3 years

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A post regarding Euphoria for the benefit of myself and basically no one else

So, it really bothers me when people say Euphoria is groundbreaking, progressive media. Here’s a dissection of why I don’t think it is, because this is what I feel like doing at work:

The character of Rue is objectively great. She by far receives the least overt sexualization, and is treated neutrally in terms of active sexuality. She’s treated like a normal teenage girl with mental issues and an addiction to drugs. She falls in love with a girl who she pines for and places on a pedestal. The reason I think she is written this way is because she is a Sam Levinson proxy. She written with gender ambiguity and with little regard to the experiences she’d go through as a black gay female, probably because Sam Levinson has no insight to that aspect of life. Her performance is heightened of course by Zendaya, who breathes unique life to the Sam Levinson’s artistic extension, and without her performance this show would not get even half the acclaim it gets. Attribute that to Zendaya of course, because the director has done little to deserve this acclaim.

The rest of the females, sans Lexi, are pornified to a disgusting extent, not only due to the fact that they are supposed to be underage, but also because their existence as people is treated as being absolutely secondary to their sexual appeal. They are foremost presented in terms of their relation to sex. Cassie, Maddy, Jules, and Kat cannot be removed from their sexuality without disrupting the plot or their journeys in relation to the plot. Why are the females so intrinsically linked to uber fetishized versions of female sexuality, or uber fetishized versions of blossoming female sexual identity?

Maddy is presented not only scantily clad 90 percent of the time, but also dressed in a precariously unattainable sexual fashion. At any given time she is styled to look straight out of, simultaneously, a high fashion editorial, and a “barely legal” porno. She is airheaded and profane, and promiscuous, her mannerisms dictated by the adult films she’s “studied” in order to project an image of perfect hyper sexual femininity. She’s complacent in becoming a prototypical housewife because it will earn her a comfortable place as a trophy wife. She has no aspirations beyond that. So, let’s unpack all of that. Maddy’s role in the show is mostly passive. The most active thing she does in the plot is revenge fuck a man in the pool of a party. Nearly everything else she does in the show that is plot relevant is of someone else’s volition. Even less of what she in the show is related to anything other than a man. She is abused and then pressured into framing another man for said abuse. She has no agency as a character. The only notable difference to this rule is when she takes drugs at a carnival, knocks a pot of chili over, and calls her ex’s mom a cunt. Removed from her active sexual life and carefully cultivated aesthetic, she’s a trite stereotype of an unambitious girlfriend who gets treated poorly. I see people call Maddy iconic, but if she wasn’t gorgeous and well dressed, I doubt anyone would even think twice about her, let alone create fancams and Instagram pages dedicated to her. She exists as a plot device, and as pretty set dressing to build up the shows aesthetic. Her emotions are not well explored, her motivations are sexist, and she is often there to be demeaned, objectified, or to say a bad word. The most damning part of her involvement in this show is her episode where it is stated that she, as a fourteen year old girl, lost her virginity to an adult man, and it is stated she was in control of the situation. This is a dangerous thing to say about a character, to any audience, but especially a young one. To imply that a precocious young girl was in control during her first sexual encounter with a much much older man implies things that frankly border on rape apologist ideology. This show states this unflinchingly and with no further elaboration. If there’s one thing that tells you that Euphoria is a bad show, let it be that. Also, if there’s one thing that tells you about Sam Levinson as a person, and the way he views girls and women, let it fucking be that.

Jules is a young trans girl. She also likes to have sex with men as a means to “conquer femininity”. Scratch that, she likes to have degrading sex with older men in order to “conquer femininity”. This mindset is shown to be toxic, of course, but I think the problem with this idea in general is that there’s no deeper exploration for what this mindset means. It implies that she believes women are the sum of their intrigue and degradations. This mindset I can only assume would be a cultivation of dysphoria and internalized misogyny, which this series is absolutely not prepared to address in a tactful manner. Jules is a teenager with mental illness, trauma, and is undergoing an identity crisis. There’s something powerful in her character, something worth saying, however we only get trimmings of those meaningful things, and are ultimately left with a hurtful depiction of a trans girl because all of her musings on womanhood and identity are incomplete, and they fail to reach beyond the surface of their thesis statement. She wears colorful clothing, is overtly feminine and artistic in her presentation. Everything about her screams insecurity over her own womanhood. That is the crux of her character. Now, I think we should ask ourselves, is trans person who is insecure about their identity peak representation? Is this what trans people deserve? Is it “groundbreaking “? If this show was run by someone else, I might be inclined to say that there’s nothing insidious about this, but this is the guy that made Assassination Nation, so I think we know what he thinks of young women, the way they should be portrayed (that is, for the capitulation of a man) and realize his inclusion of a trans woman in his cast is no more meaningful than the inclusion of any other woman. Women to him are made to be categorized and should, at the end of the day, be easily palatable for the capitulation of a man. The device of having Jules being interested in older men and rough sex for identity reasons is transparent. Trans women are exploited and objectified with a similar fervor to cis women, the caveat being that they are “a forbidden fruit” of sorts to straight men. Jules is sissified, her presentation fetishistic. Her role in the plot is more involved. Her relationship with Rue is sweet, though toxic on both sides. She is ultimately betrayed, blackmailed, and snowballs into something of a manic episode, all well portrayed by Hunter Schafer, but I don’t think her inclusion in the show absolves it of any of its many sins.

Let’s talk about Cassie. Cassie is the Eurocentric beauty standard exemplified. She is the blonde haired blue eyed girl next store, and her boobs are of course always on display. She is notably promiscuous, something I say right off the bat because that’s how she’s introduced, as a so called slut through the words of the devil (Nate Jacobs). She is a girl with daddy issues, which we are all familiar with at this point. Her sexual boundaries begin and end at the whim of her partner. The terms of her consent are much like the terms of consent of many young girls brainwashed by society and the rising tide of degradation porn: everything is alright as long as you provide them comfort and affirmation afterward. You can touch them roughly without asking, you can use them as a tool to affirm your masculinity. This is the way men prefer their women now: just broken enough to say yes to anything they want. It’s become a joke at this point. Men like girls with issues, but only the ones that will feed their own desires. Cassie Howard is meek. Her inclusion in the plot I suppose ties to themes of drug addiction and how it divides and destroys the people you love. It doesn’t show what it does to her beyond shaping her sexual encounters, which is no surprise. Overall I’d say Cassie is in this roster of females as the most traditional categorically, in relation to how men view women and further how they sexualize them. She has a relationship with someone who doesn’t really love her. That mostly what she does here. Gets used. Doesn’t drive the plot or conflict much. More pretty set dressing. More aesthetics. How this show consists of so many women but is driven so much by men is unsurprising, and, again, very enlightening in the grand scheme of things.

Lastly we touch on Kat. I’d like to begin with the fact that self actualization through sexual exploration, in a show run by a man, is just a cloak for a woman to gratify the audience with her sexuality. Regardless of whether or not she is plus sized, this is overt objectification. She is on this show to be sexy. Beyond that, the fact that a minor using sex work as a form of liberation is disgusting. Whether or not she is portrayed as “owning” her sexuality is negligible, and speaks to the same mindset discussed with Maddy. Minors cannot fucking consent to sex, sexual acts, or anything within the confines of such. It’s crazy that this occurs with two different characters in such a similar way. It has echoes of “Well, she looked older..” and “Well, she wanted it..” or “She’s advanced for her age”. Never, not once in the events of the series is there meaningful introspection on what doing this kind of thing does to a minor. Moreover, these acts are explicit, and made clearly for sexual gratification. None of these things are absolved by the fact that she’s plus sized. If anything, her body type is fetishized in this context. It’s also another case of a “good girl to bad girl” transformation, which are archaic and, of course, sexist. With the rise of adult websites targeting minors for explicit content, this is even more reprehensible. Once again, in terms of representation, is this really what speaks to you as progressive? Groundbreaking? A girl gains control of her own narrative by having sex with lots of men. She gains control by being sexy. She gains control by dehumanizing and objectifying herself. No she doesn’t. Media controlled by men will tell this story to you thousands of times, don’t listen because she’s bigger than a size four.

ALL OF THESE CHARACTERS ARE UNDERAGE. ALL OF THEM HAVE EXPLICIT SEX SCENES, EVEN THE SEXUAL ASSAULT IS MADE CINEMATICALLY PORNIFIED. THESE SHOTS ARE MADE TO BE OBJECTIVELY SEXY. THIS IS NOT A CASE OF SOMEONE CREATING SOMETHING FOR THE SAKE OF REALISM. IT IS ABOUT MAKING SCENES THAT SPEAK TO A MALE AUDIENCE. THAT CATER TO THE MALE GAZE. ARGUE WITH THE WALL.

I won’t go further into the plot, other characters, or the structure or the episodes for sake of brevity, but I felt compelled to air my thoughts on this to the void. I can only hope I was critical enough that Sam Levinson will one day see this and cry because another bad feminist thinks something that he made sucks

#euphoria #I don’t even think anyone will read this but #it’s just not good #sorry #anti euphoria #anti Sam Levinson

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idreamtofmanderleyagain · 3 years

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Hot takes about Severus Snape are a wierdly decent glimpse into how a person with progressive values analyses things. Literally every time someone talks about Snape, it’s like this tiny window into how one-dimentionally people actually think.

Recently saw a twitter post that was a fantastic example. Here’s how it goes (paraphrasing):

Person A:“Snape is POC and Queer coded, that’s why you guy’s hate him uwu lol.”

Person B: “Actually I hate him because he was mean and abusive to children under his care uwu but go off I guess lol”

Both of these takes are designed to be dramatic and/or reactionary. They each use partial truths to paint very broad strokes. These are get-em-in-one-hit quips. This is virtue signalling, if you’ll excuse that loaded phrase. Nobody had a substantial conversation, but now everyone who sees their statement knows the high ground they took.

At least a hundred other people chimed in to add their own little quippy hot takes into play, none of which add anything significant, but clearly made everyone feel very highly of themselves.

So many layers of nuance and complex analysis is completely lost in this kind of discussion. On tumblr, you get more of this kind of bullshit, but you don’t have a word count limit, so you guys just spew endless mountains of weak overblown evidence backing up your bullshit arguments, none of which was really about engaging in a real conversation anyway.

Here’s the thing about Snape.

He is a childhood domestic abuse victim. His abuser is a muggle.

He becomes a student at a magical school that takes him away from his abuser and immediately instills in him the idea that being a part of this magical world is a badge of self-worth, empowerment, and provides safety and security - provided that he keeps in line.

There is a war is being waged in that world over his right to exist (he is a half blood).

He is a marginalized person within the context of the narrative, forced to constantly be in the same living space as the children of his own oppressors who are being groomed and recruited into a hate group militia (the pureblood slytherins). They are in turn trying to do the same to him.

He is marginalized person bullied by children who are also part of his oppressor group, but who have “more liberal” leanings and aren’t direct about why he’s being targeted (the mauraders are all purebloods, Sirius, who was the worst offender, was raised in a bigoted household, the same one that produced Bellatrix.).

He had a crush on a girl who is a muggleborn, and therefore she is considered even lesser than him and carries a stigma to those who associate with her. That girl was his only real friend. In his entire life.

For both Snape and Lily, allying themselves to a pureblood clique within their own houses would be a great way of shielding themselves from a measure of the bigotry they were probably facing. There would have been obvious pressure from those cliques to disconnect with one and other.

Every other person who associates with Snape in his adulthood carries some sort of sociopolitical or workplace (or hate cult) baggage with their association. Some of them will physically harm and/or kill him if he steps out of line. He hasn’t at any point had the right environment to heal and adjust from these childhood experiences. Even his relationship with Dumbledore is charged with constant baggage, including the purebloods who almost killed him during their bullying getting a slap on the wrist, the werewolf that almost killed him as a child being placed in an authority position over new children, etc. Dumbledore is canonically manipulative no matter his good qualities, and he has literally been manipulating Snape for years in order to cultivate a necessary asset in the war.

He is a person who is not in the stable mental state necessary to be teaching children, whom has been forced to teach children. While also playing the role of double agent against the hate group militia, the one that will literally torture you for mistakes or backtalk or just for fun. The one that will torture and kill him if he makes one wrong move.

Is the math clicking yet? From all of this, it’s not difficult to see how everything shitty about Snape was cultivated for him by his environment. Snape was not given great options. Snape made amazingly awful choices, and also some amazingly difficult, courageous ones. Snape was ultimately a human who had an extremely bad life, in which his options were incredibly grim and limited.

In fact, pretty much every point people make about how shitty Snape is as a person makes 100% logical sense as something that would emerge from how he was treated. Some if it he’s kind of right about, some of it is the inevitable reality of suffering, and some of it is part of the cycle of abuse and harm.

Even Snape’s emotional obsession with Lily makes logical sense when you have the perspective that he literally has no substantial positive experiences with other human beings that we know of, and he has an extreme, soul destroying guilt complex over her death. Calling him an Incel mysoginist nice guy projects a real-world political ideology and behavior that does not really apply to the context of what happened to him and her.

Even Snape’s specific little acts of cruelty to certain students is a reflection of his own life experiences. He identifies with Neville; more specifically, he identifies his own percieved emotional weaknesses in his childhood in Neville. There’s a very sad reason there why he feels the urge to be so harsh.

Snape very clearly hates himself, in a world where everyone else hates him, too. Imagine that, for a second. Imagine total internal and external hatred, an yearning for just a little bit of true connection. For years. Imagine then also trying to save that world, even if it’s motivated by guilt. Even if nobody ever knows you did it and you expect to die a miserable death alone.

There are more elements here to consider, including the way Rowling described his looks (there may be something in there re: ugliness and swarthy stereotyping). These are just the things that stand out the most prominently to me.

J.K. Rowling is clearly also not reliable as an imparter of moral or sociopolitical philosophies. I don’t feel that her grasp of minority experiences is a solid one, considering how she picks and chooses who is acceptable and who is a threat.

All of that said, this is a logically consistent character arc. Within the context of his narrative, Snape is a marginalized person with severe PTSD and emotional instability issues who has absolutely no room available to him for self-improvement or healing, and never really has. And yes, he’s also mean, and caustic, and verbally abusive to the students. He’s also a completey miserable, lonely person.

There are elements in his character arc that mirror real world experiences quite well. If nothing else, Rowling is enough of an emotional adult to recognise these kinds of things and portray something that feels authentic.

In my opinion, it’s not appropriate to whittle all this down by comparing him directly to the real world experiences of marginalized groups - at least if you are not a part of the group you are comparing him to. There have been many individuals who have compared his arc to their own personal experiences of marginalization, and that is valid. But generally speaking, comparing a white straight dude to people who are not that can often be pretty offensive. This is not a valuable way to discuss either subject.

Also, I believe that while it’s perfectly okay to not like Snape as a character, many of the people who act like Person B are carrying Harry’s childhood POV about Snape in their hearts well into their own adulthood. And if nothing else, Rowling was attempting to say something here about how our perspectives (should) grow and change as we emotionally mature. She doesn’t have to be a good person herself to have expressed something true about the world in this instance, and since this story is a part of our popular culture, people have a right to feel whatever way they do about this story and it’s characters.

The complexity of this particular snapshot of fictionalized marginalization, and what it reveals about the human experience, cannot be reduced down to “he’s an abuser so he’s not worth anyone’s time/you are bad for liking him.”

And to be honest, I think that it reveals a lot about many of us in progressive spaces, particularly those of us who less marginalized but very loud about our values, that we refuse to engage with these complexities in leu of totally condemning him. Particularly because a lot of the elements I listed above are indeed reflected in real world examples of people who have experienced marginalization and thus had to deal with the resulting emotional damage, an mental illness, and behavior troubles, and bad decisions. Our inability to address the full scope of this may be a good reflection of how we are handling the complexity of real world examples.

Real people are not perfect angels in their victimhood. They are just humans who are victims, and we all have the capacity to be cruel and abusive in a world where we have been given cruelty and abuse. This is just a part of existing. If you cannot sympathise with that, or at least grasp it and aknowledge it and respect the people who are emotionally drawn to a character who refects that, then you may be telling on yourself to be honest.

To be honest, this is especially true if you hate Snape but just really, really love the Mauraduers. You have a right to those feelings, but if you are moralizing this and judging others for liking Snape, you’ve confessed to something about how you’ve mentally constructed your personal values in a way I don’t think you’ve fully grasped yet.

I have a hard time imagining a mindset where a story like Snape’s does not move one to empathy and vicarious grief, if I’m honest. I feel like some people really just cannot be bothered to imagine themselves in other people’s shoes, feeling what they feel and living like they live. I struggle to trust the social politics of people who show these kinds of colors, tbh.

But maybe that’s just me.

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popwasabi · 4 years

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What “The Dark Knight” says about our bad politics

Waaay back in the summer of 2008, me and my dad drove up to Northern California to attend San Jose State University’s freshman orientation.

It was a long drawn out process where first-year students basically were told and shown a bunch of things they would forget and relearn by their first day anyways and culminated with all of us spending one night in the campus dorms so we could all get a taste of the “campus life” experience.

I wanted it to end badly for a couple reasons. Being an introvert, I was not comfortable sharing a room with anyone, let alone a stranger, for a night but more importantly, I was being kept from the biggest movie premiere of the year that day: “The Dark Knight.”

As soon as I woke up the next morning, I rushed my dad to find the nearest theater and purchased tickets immediately for a late-night screening. I was already a huge fan of “Batman Begins” but every trailer to Christopher Nolan’s epic follow-up indicated we were in for an even bigger blockbuster than before and I was beyond pumped.

(Me getting the fuck off campus to watch “The Dark Knight” that day.)

Two and a half hours later I left the theater blown away by the experience. “The Dark Knight” was everything, at the time, I was hoping for in a comic book movie; angsty, dark, edgy (all things I thought I was as a teen), cinematically sharp, thrilling, a fantastic score once again by the legendary Hans Zimmer, and fulfilled just about every fanboy wet dream I had at the time for a perfect Batman movie.

To this day it remains the most satisfying theatrical experience I’ve ever had seeing a movie, not that it’s my favorite movie of all-time anymore, mind you, but that I have never gone into a movie with such high expectations and had them blown away quite like that since.

(Conversely, this^ was my most disappointing experience...)

I’m a different person now, of course. If you were to wipe my memory of the film and had to watch it again today I doubt I would have the same fanboygasm I had then as the cynical 30-year-old I am now but I’ll argue that “The Dark knight” still remains a high mark, if not the standard, for comic book movies today.

That said, parts of this film have definitely not aged well. Visually the film still holds up, the action is still exciting, the performances are all stellar (though Bale’s Batman voice is still bad) but what hasn’t aged well, for me, are the movie’s politics.

“The Dark Knight” is, of course, a post 9/11 movie, in fact, it’s arguably the definitive one as its pop-cultural footprint dwarfs pretty much all within its sub-genre. This Nolan sequel deals heavily in themes of terrorism with its iconic villain The Joker, played maniacally by the late great Heath ledger, wreaking havoc across Gotham with various explosive devices. Though the Clown Prince is more an anarchist than someone with an ideology, like those in Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the results of his beliefs/non-beliefs are more or less the same; cause pandemonium and fear in the masses. Batman, representing the power of justice and order, does battle with this in a war to save Gotham’s soul and again this is still a damn entertaining and thrilling story.

(Seriously, it’s still a rock solid entry in the comic book movie genre.)

But where the film’s 9/11 politics become problematic is toward the end of the film when the Joker begins his final act to plunge Gotham into unstoppable chaos. Batman becomes desperate; The Joker has eluded him at every turn, always two steps ahead of him, escaping justice no matter what Bruce Wayne does so he concocts a plan to finally to locate and stop the Joker for good.

He creates an elaborate sonar system using every cell phone in Gotham, effectively creating a massive surveillance state to spy on its citizens in order to locate the Joker.

(And it’s the only time we have ever got the real Batman eyes on screen, damn it!)

Lucius Fox, played by Morgan Freeman, appropriately calls this out telling him he’s wrong and that he cannot support this but Batman insists that it’s the only way. Fox reluctantly agrees and tells him he’ll resign once this is over as he can’t morally support such a system. The sonar, of course, works and Batman is able to stop the Clown Prince once and for all and upon Fox entering his name into the sonar computer the program dissolves and is deleted presumably for good.

This is of course to wash Batman’s hands of this deed to the audience. Our protagonist knows this is wrong, the audience is told it is wrong but by ending the surveillance he shows he would never abuse such a program, that sometimes good men have to do terrible things to defeat evil and that makes it ok.

For years, as a bleeding heart liberal (at the time) who grew up in the Bush years but loved the hell out of this movie, I tried to reconcile with this part of the story because Batman was the hero. I thought maybe this kind of action is ok because if the “good guy” is in charge bad stuff is fine because he/she won’t abuse such power. That’s real justice, right?

The problem is in the real world, at the top, there really aren’t any good guys and they are counting on you to believe that they are when they get a hold of such power because that’s how we are programmed.

The Patriot Act, which was the signature Bush-era reform post 9/11, created our current surveillance state. In the interest of national security and ensuring those “dern turrists don’t go killing lil’ Timmy riding his tricycle out in Des Moines, Iowa” our elected leaders, both republican and democratic (make no mistake), effectively signed away our constitutional rights to “ensure our safety” by spying on us basically without warrants. The proponents proudly claimed its necessity in fighting the “War on Terrorism” and those naysayers either shouldn’t worry “if you have nothing to hide” or worse were un-American Taliban sympathizers.

For progressives, of course, this was an evil violation of our civil liberties but for many conservatives, this wasn’t a big deal. They are just trying to keep us safe after all.

But conveniently ignored by many on the left still today is the complicity they had in bringing about this era in warrantless surveillance. Yes, this policy started under Bush, of course, but it continued to be re-upped through the Obama administration and the Trump administration, not to mention revolving majorities in the House and Senate, showing no matter who was in charge they all liked the idea of keeping an eye on all of us with or without reason.

Considering the Patriot Act was made to win the “War on Terrorism” our leaders were never going to relinquish this power anyways because you can’t win a war on terrorism. Terrorism is not a country or a people, it’s an ideology behind many different ideologies. The US, no matter how you see it, be it as liberators or oppressors, will always have enemies and that’s all the reason they need to keep this power it seems.

Having the data on our lives mined like oil can easily be used against us in a variety of ways regardless of if any of us have terroristic or even criminal intentions. But for many in this country, it was only a problem if the wrong guy wielded that power. As soon as their “good guy” got in though, suddenly it was no big deal. I wonder why...

“The Dark Knight” puts forth a problematic view on who can and should wield supreme power, that even terrible choices can be made as long as the “right” person is the one making them.

Liberals are notorious for justifying them when it’s one of them who does it.

It’s a lie. A lie that both parties use to their advantage because they want you believe everything they do can be justified because you happen to be a part of their party; the “good guys” once again. But there is something extra cynical about the way liberals wield it as they parade themselves around as paragons and moral pillars against the Jokers of the Republican party.

For all the platitudes liberals give, that would make some superhero speeches seem benign, they wear masks about as well as the vigilantes do but not for the same reasons. When confronted by this blatant hypocrisy, liberal voters justify all kinds of horrible things as long as the other “bad guy” isn’t the one doing it. For all the shit Bush gets, and rightfully so, for plunging us into a military, financial, and humanitarian quagmire in the Middle East, Obama gets almost zero real pushback by liberals for effectively drone bombing the hell out of the same people. During these past three years Trump has more or less allowed ICE to run rampant on immigrant communities sure and liberals have been critical, again as they should, but who made the cages they were thrown into and who deported more of them during his first three years in office than Trump did?

(And once again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, Andrew Cuomo is NOT your fucking friend...)

Liberals often like to present themselves as the moral purveyors of good in the face of conservative opposition and they use it to their advantage to more or less do many of the same foul things those with R’s next to their name do. Sure, not all their actions are equally as evil but even then, we rarely truly hold either of our leaders feet to the fire because we believe their actions are somehow better because they have a “D” next to their name.

These horrific policies and actions will never see justice as long as we keep justifying them because the “right” person is behind them.

No, this is not an all sides are equally bad take. That discussion requires more nuance and for a different time, but I will say both sides are varying degrees of bad that should be taken seriously instead of not at all and can’t be pushed aside again and again and again because “the other guys are worse.”

We are running into the same situation today as our presidential election features a credibly accused rapist, sexual predator, who supports Bush-era tax cuts, who takes money from major corporate lobbyists, who is against Medicare for All, has open disdain for millenials, and not only supports but openly bragged about the aforementioned The Patriot Act.

Hmmm, sounds an awful lot like someone we know, huh?

You could argue that one of these two men mitigates, or even vastly mitigates, harm if in office and I’m not here to necessarily scold you for making what you feel is morally the least awful choice but the point still remains; we are justifying evil again because our “good guy” is in charge.

Being liberal, just on its own, does not vastly minimize the problematic nature of a bad person.

Regardless of how you feel about this election and what choice you plan to make this November (and again, I’m not here to tell you what to do), bad things and bad policies will be continued to be enacted by bad people because that’s what choices we’ve been given. There isn’t a good one and the most vulnerable will be hurt the most by it regardless of who wins. There is a reason so many are disillusioned with voting and it’s not just voter suppression laws.

I can already hear some of you screaming “OH MER GERD pURiTy TeStS,” but this is far more cynical a standard we have than simply choosing a less than perfect candidate. Many are already making rather tone-deaf comments about people being “privileged” for choosing not to compromise their morals anymore. What’s “privileged” is voting for the guy who will do less harm for you but ultimately still disproportionately harm more people of color no matter who is in office.

(The country and the world can really begin to truly heal when a Democrat is in charge of one of these Freedom Machines once again!)

Yes, I might agree that one is probably a net positive for the world at this point but to act like someone choosing to not participate anymore in what is effectively a never-ending cycle I can’t say I blame them either. At some point, our society has to draw a real line in the sand on these things with our leaders and force a more moral standard for our government instead of the status quo.

We can’t go on this endless “pragmatic” path picking “the lesser of two evils” until we gradually just become evil. You can make the argument that maybe the time isn’t now, and you might be right but when? These folks at the top are COUNTING on us accepting circumstances and justifying terrible beliefs and actions over and over again because of the state of our politics.

“The Dark Knight” believes that sometimes bad things must be done to defeat evil but the real world can be so much less cynical if we stopped compromising on our beliefs. It’s not entirely too late for us to do the right thing. We can’t go on forever letting bad behavior go because the “good guy” will be the one doing it instead of the other one.

Taking money from corrupt billionaires is wrong. Extra-judicially drone bombing the Middle East endlessly is wrong. Throwing migrants in cages like fucking animals is wrong. Rape and sexual assault are wrong. Mass warrantless surveillance is wrong. Doesn’t matter if its Batman or fucking Superman doing any of these things; immoral behavior cannot and should not be ever justified.

Otherwise, we really will live long enough to see ourselves become the villain...

Looking forward to the comments on this one...

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gnostic-heretic · 5 years

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And when I say a lot of t*rf posts end up on my dashboard I mean it and it’s always so hard to try to separate between the people who are ultimately well meaning and didn’t know and those who spread this stuff maliciously. That post is right tho if you know what r*dfem transmisogyny and transphobia looks and sounds like it’s harder to fall for these posts... the shitty thing about t*rf shit is that it trickles down, in a progressive scale from their blogs to seemingly “neutral” (but never actually neutral*) blogs that maybe sound a little iffy but never outright call themselves g/ender critical or name trans people, onto complicit popular discourse blogs and then on people’s dashboards. *Hell one time I saw a blog that seemed like an innocent supergirl femslash blog just to find she reblogged constantly from t*rfs posts that were just on the borderline and never outright mentioned trans people, only buzzwords and this is what I mean by “neutral” blogs that are actually complicit. This blog has a lot of followers. How many of them reblog these posts uncritically? And I wish there were more lists of said buzzwords and how to recognise them but

The reality is that we trans people especially trans women have to be constantly on the watch for shit like this. We know the arguments and we know why they’re bullshit. Meanwhile cis people don’t really know the specifics of their ideology and seem to fall for it over and over. And the worst thing about it is that t*rfs use this as confirmation bias that their ideas are actually good and everyone would agree with them if they just present it without the slurs and mocking. But the slurs demeaning and mocking are a fundamental part of it, and of trans exclusion in general. Fear mongering and dehumanising trans people are the mean to wiping us out of existence.

I won’t explain why those ideas are wrong because I’m starting from the assumption that my followers are not transphobic and don’t find statements like “trans women are women” controversial, but buzzwords include (warning for blunt discussions of transphobia):

- expressing “concern” about men invading women’s spaces or the “purity” of said spaces (they don’t use the word purity but as a concept in general). This concern is never explained, only stated, because once you look into it you find that it’s actually about trans women. As a side note, the whole “invasion” thing is a popular one and it is reminiscent of white s*premacist bullshit ... this idea that since gay trans people are “actually straight” we will eventually outnumber “the real” gay people by calling ourselves gay and invading their spaces. the more you know ... if this doesn’t ring a bell you need to look into actual n*zi theories like “the gre//at re\\placement” and then we can talk again. The jump from t*rf to alt-ri/ght trad mom is shorter and swifter than either of those groups would have you believe

- “males can’t be lesbians” a pretty non controversial statement if it wasn’t that male is code for trans women. “Men who fetishise lesbians” is also a tricky one because while this is indeed a real issue, they’re referring to “auto/g/ynephilia” aka the idea that the reason lesbian and bi trans women transition at all is just because they fetishise the idea of themselves as a woman/lesbian (contrapoints has a good in depth video about this that explains better than I ever could) — on the same note talk about how “male sexuality” is something inherently corrupt, oppressing, and violent, and cannot be healthy ever, without any other context given is also usually code for “trans women are perverts and sexual predators” . The word “p//ornsick” also comes up often so watch out for it.

- the pervasive idea that a group of “straight people fetishising being gay/a lesbian” is out there and threatening REAL gay/lesbian spaces starts from here. I’ve mentioned a/utogy/nephilia but “fujoshi” is usually code for gay trans men, with a similar idea behind it. We’re not really gay men, just straight women who fetishise the idea of ourselves as a gay man... at least that’s the idea behind it.

- which brings us to the point. “straight people invading gay spaces” is usually if not always code for gay trans people.

- kinda related to the above point, honestly you’re all fools if you think the whole ace discourse bullshit wasn’t just eventually a path to trans and bisexual exclusion. Trans and bi people have been saying this for years but no one wants to listen. That’s not to say that exclusionists are t*rfs but those ideas were popularised by them... that’s just to say learn where your ideology comes from before you endorse it and embrace it

- similarly “queer is a slur” started there so you might want to reconsider why you’ve been convinced to tag your posts “q slur” by people who use other homophobic slurs pretty liberally lol . “Queer means straight people invade our spaces!” + any talk about gnc straight men/women and how it doesn’t make them queer or lgbt, Yeah, this was about never about “gnc” it was trans people all along. The implication is that trans people don’t exist, so we can be nothing but gnc “males/females”. Congrats! You’re a fool! Now don’t make me read this bullshit ever again.

- stuff that makes fun of said “gnc people” “queers” , man buns, undercuts, brightly coloured hair, specific names (aiden comes to my mind) careful about posts that mock the concept of “queering heterosexuality” they’re usually about gay couples with one trans and one cis person, or where both people are trans but with different asab. (ie a gay trans man dating a pan cis man, a trans woman and an afab nb person dating will get mocked as “straight people” who are just pretending to be anything but) sometimes it’s also about bi people jsyk but...

- “forcing young lesbians to not identify as lesbians”/“stop telling young lesbians they should be/are men” is also a big thing. implies that trans people are out there recruiting teenagers who would otherwise be cis lesbians (or more rarely cis gay men) and forcing them into identifying as trans. “young lesbians” also doesn’t always mean young lesbians it’s usually meant to misgender trans men who already identify as men (but in this theoretical framework trans as a concept is nonexistent, a perversion, a delusion, so what could we be but porn/sick straight people or delusional, misguided cis gays who fall victim of a conspiracy)

- entire blogs dedicated to d/etransition (or “reidentifi/cation” as they call it now) experiences that don’t bother to acknowledge that their experience is not universal and au contraire seem to want to push detransition as the one way to happiness especially for afab people. Yes I do think that people who detransition should be able to talk about it, but if the conclusions you draw are “this didn’t work for me so it’s toxic and bad for everyone”, and openly advocate against trans people’s existence, you’re full of shit. Only a small percentage of trans people detransition: over 90% of us are satisfied with the results. It’s all just concern trolling.

- posts about how dysphoria is either a “delusion” or a “normal female experience”, posts that sound a lot like body positivity but they’re actually pushing for detransition (ie you should accept your body as is, surgery is mutilation of your already perfect body etc etc) this is also tricky but it’s all in the language. Phrases like “young women who undergo surgery to fix their already good bodies” could refer to a variety of things but it’s all in the context. Words like “reconnect” “reidentification” are usually presented as alternative. Dysphoria is usually not named and referred to as a delusion or social pressure and something that should never be considered real, ie if you see something like “young women undergo surgery to chase a delusion” it probably comes from a t*rf. be wary of any surgery talk in general is my point because it’s usually presenting gcs as on the same level of lip fillers and Botox (ignoring that trans people face infinite struggles to access surgery and social ostracism for pursuing medical transition so it’s not the same AT ALL)

- talk about stuff like “hrt is dangerous actually” and “binding is horrible actually”? Yeah. You can guess where it comes from. It’s important to acknowledge the risks of hrt/binding but sensationalism about how it’s dangerous and could kill you and so on... it’s just overblown concern trolling to convince people that medical transition is mutilation and a conspiracy to kill the above mentioned “young lesbians”

- sentiments akin to “t*rf is a slur used against lesbians” even if not presented this way are also a red flag, sorry. If you don’t want to be called a t*rf, maybe don’t speak and act like one.

- the sad news is in the end there’s no way to discern whether someone is a t*rf or not because a lot of the time these same talking points come from blogs that have little “t*rfs don’t interact tee hee!” Banners on their description. A lot of r/adfem blogs out there are side blogs of people you wouldn’t usually suspect. Maybe they are vocal against trans exclusion, and in support of trans people, and then switch accounts to hurl about how horrible it is that they feel forced to welcome us “sexual pervert straight people” into their spaces. That’s why imo it’s more important to recognise the ideology than it is to look for clues. Again, if it sounds like one, it’s probably one :’)

#sorry i had tk get it out there #discourse /////

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Last week, congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib captured headlines for breaking with House Democrats and Nancy Pelosi on an emergency border aid bill that lacked protections for migrant children.

This wasn’t the first time the so-called “Squad” broke ranks. Or the first time their public disagreement with House leadership has led to sniping in the press (Pelosi told New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd that “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”)

But it’s not just Democratic leadership taking aim. Republicans have tried to paint “the Squad” as part of the “radical left,” and the direction the party is moving in. And on Sunday, President Trump sparked a firestorm — at least among Democrats — when he tweeted that “‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen” should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

So what is it about the Squad that has captured the attention of both Republicans and Democrats? Let’s try to tackle this in two parts: 1) What role do we think the Squad has in pushing the Democratic Party in a new direction? 2) And what, if any, do we think will be the electoral repercussions in 2020?

To get us started, what do we make of the news surrounding the Squad and their split from Pelosi and House Democrats on the emergency border aid bill?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): Well, I can start from providing the view from poli sci Twitter, which tends to be a fairly pro-party group of people (and leans Democratic/anti-Trump). So in response to the Twitter fight between the House Democrats’ account and AOC’s chief of staff, there was a lot of talk like “have these fights behind closed doors, don’t have a big, public blowup.”

But I disagree. Party infighting should not be done in a smoke-filled room. That’s just not what people want from politics anymore, and I think when that does happen, it contributes to further institutional distrust and disengagement.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I’d note that AOC has a Trump score of 18 percent, meaning that she’s voted in line with Trump’s position 18 percent of the time. But according to her data, you’d expect her to vote with Trump about… 0 percent of the time based on how liberal her district is.

So she’s actually proving a bit problematic for Pelosi, in the sense that she should be a guaranteed vote, but Pelosi is only getting her ~80 percent of the time. Except none of this has really mattered since Pelosi has room to spare in the House, and a lot of legislation that passes the House has no chance of passing a GOP-led Senate anyway.

sarahf: Is there at least an argument to be made that Pelosi and the Squad should take fewer swipes at each other over their disagreements, as too much of a focus on intraparty fighting can’t be good for the party?

julia_azari: So here’s my galaxy brain take.

natesilver:

julia_azari: It’s good for the Squad for Pelosi, at least, to take swipes at them. After all, part of the anti-establishment brand is to be in tension with, well, the establishment. And it’s possible that leaders like Pelosi know this! What I’m not really sure about is how good the Squad (so much shorter than typing all their names) is for the Democratic Party.

I don’t think they’re a problem, but it’s too early to gauge their party-building potential. And obviously, they make some people nervous. But if the goal is to engage young people, women and people of color, and keep the left flank of the party somewhat happy, they seem like a good bet.

I am really long-winded today. #sorrynotsorry

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): It would be smart for the party establishment to think of this as natural tension between the wings of the party.

The problem is I don’t think they actually do, which is one of the reasons why this is all so interesting. (The House leadership’s official Twitter account attacked AOC’s chief of staff over the weekend, with the implication that she should fire him.)

sarahf: To Julia’s point about the Squad’s party-building potential, isn’t there an argument to be made that they don’t even need to have that? Their ethos is that they’re here to do away with the old system. They agitate for change; they don’t need to bridge consensus within the party, unlike say, Pelosi, who has a very different role to play.

And the fact that virtually all of the 2020 Democratic candidates have a position on the Green New Deal is a testament to their effectiveness at pushing the party in new directions, no?

julia_azari: Right. Which maybe Pelosi likes and maybe she doesn’t. Obviously, moving to the left carries risks. But (and this is where I got into it with a bunch of people on Twitter on Sunday), it’s not clear to me that Democratic leaders actually want to go back to the 1990s and early 2000s.

Yes, the party was more “professionalized,” and less split internally, than it is now. It also won two plurality elections and lost to George W. Bush. Not to mention, voter turnout was low.

So one lesson you might learn from the 2008 period onward is that the party does well with fresh faces, even if it also has to win suburban swing districts that might not view AOC and Rashida Tlaib all that favorably.

perry: But the Democratic establishment (I don’t know about Pelosi, personally) seems to think that the prominence of these four women is not a natural, healthy tension, and instead is broadly bad for the party.

And I think their preferred outcome is that the AOC wing basically stays quiet until December 2020 (after the presidential election). That’s where the real tension is.

julia_azari: We’ve (and here, I specifically mean academics and the media) way overemphasized the concept of party unity.

sarahf: I guess I just don’t understand why the Democratic establishment is making this into such a big deal. But I agree with Perry that they definitely would prefer the AOC wing of the party stay quiet, especially when polls like this are leaked. (Axios wouldn’t disclose the group that conducted the poll, so there’s a lot we don’t know about it, and its findings should be treated with skepticism. But it reportedly found that many likely general election voters who are white and have two years or less of college education had a negative opinion of AOC and socialism.)

julia_azari: For the record, that Axios piece is extremely misleading.

sarahf:

It’s just hard for me to believe that these four women really would have that much of an impact on 2020?

natesilver: I kinda come back to Occam’s razor on this. When you have a bunch of new members who want to push the party in a more ideological direction, it usually entails electoral risk. But the benefit, potentially, is that you also shift the party’s platform in that direction.

perry: Yes, but so many party establishment people want to take away any unnecessary election risks–and I think they would argue AOC talking about getting rid of the Department of Homeland Security, for example, is an unnecessary election risk.

natesilver: It’s also probably a very marginal electoral risk in a world where Donald Trump is president and there’s much bigger news all the time.

julia_azari: Part of the problem is that the lessons of 2016 aren’t clear. You could say that 2016 showed that there was a real push to move Democrats to the left. Or you could say that 2016 was about how Democrats lost groups of voters to Republicans (e.g. the diploma divide among white voters). And those forces push the party in different directions.

perry: The party establishment is probably overstating the rise of the AOC wing in terms of affecting the 2020 elections. But their risk assessment, I think, is driving these tensions–leading Pelosi to bash the AOC wing fairly often, for example.

natesilver: But it’s not crazy for the party establishment to be worried about it! Sometimes I think everyone in this discussion is not always clear about what they think will be electorally advantageous versus what they do — or don’t — like policywise.

julia_azari: Most of this in relation to the Squad is marginal, though, no matter how many hot headlines Axios posts with polls that don’t actually say anything about AOC being the face of the party or about swing states.

natesilver: Journalistic malpractice on Axios’s part TBH to publish a poll without even listing who conducted the poll.

We don’t even know who leaked it. We don’t even know if the poll was real. We should be that skeptical when basic facts and details about a poll are missing like that.

sarahf: That’s fair. And I know we’ve talked about this before, but I think part of what we’re seeing play out here, especially with AOC, is there is now a group of politicians that aren’t willing to play by the old rules. And they will use their large social media followings to get their message across, and on their terms.

So maybe party leadership is scared of losing control?

And so we see Pelosi snipe about how they’re only four votes.

Maybe the Freedom Caucus and the headaches it has caused for the Republican Party has so scarred Democratic leadership that they’ll do anything to stop this faction of their party from growing.

But is this kind of fear misplaced? How much is the Squad really moving the party to the left?

natesilver: Clare said this yesterday on the podcast, but the Squad are very effective at getting media attention, and the media is quite happy to play up the “Democrats IN DISARRAY!” storylines. So in that sense it does seem like a mistake for Pelosi et al. to hit back at them.

perry: About a third of the 235 House Democrats (CNN has this number at 82) support starting an impeachment inquiry into Trump.

Ninety-five support the Green New Deal; 118 support Medicare for All. So just in terms of raw numbers, the positions of the AOC wing are much broader than four people.

I think the big shift for Pelosi is that she has never had a vocal, powerful group saying that she is too far to the right. For basically the entire time Pelosi has led the House Democrats, her biggest tension has been with the right flank of the party — some conservative Democrats in the House thought that she was too far to the left.

But now, Pelosi is being attacked from the left in a serious way, for the first time. And I actually think she and Biden are responding in similar ways to these attacks from the left.

My sense is they both see themselves as liberal icons–the man who helped elect the first black president, the woman who pushed through a huge health care reform that extended insurance to millions. And I think this criticism from the younger generation of Democrats makes them mad. Pelosi seems indignant at times, so does Biden.

julia_azari: Biden and Pelosi also managed to establish themselves as liberals when cultural/LGBT issues were on the rise in the party, and you didn’t have to do anything particularly radical to be liberal enough on economics and race.

In 2019, it takes more to be a liberal icon.

natesilver: I mean… I don’t know that the Squad always pick their battles all that well, and in that sense they are pretty Freedom Caucus-like. On the other hand, they have a lot more star power than the Freedom Caucus. There is a lot of political talent there.

And they’re all pretty young. So a lot of my critiques of Bernie Sanders’s campaign, for instance, i.e. that he doesn’t have a good plan to expand his base, definitely doesn’t apply to the Squad when they can unify leftist Democrats with nonwhite Democrats.

sarahf: Something I think we’re all touching on here is the fact that it is four women of color pushing the party to the left and challenging the status quo. And that matters. Each of them have made appeals to their background and how they represent people who historically haven’t had a seat at the table.

And this probably, to put it bluntly, does make certain older vanguards of the party uncomfortable, because they consider themselves to be liberal, and that now they’re forced to reckon with the idea that they’re maybe not as liberal as they think.

perry: I want to come back to something Nate said earlier that I think is essential.

“Sometimes I think everyone in this discussion is not always clear about what they think will be electorally advantageous versus what they do — or don’t — like policywise.”

The AOC wing at times says its ideas, like Medicare for All, are both the right thing to do on policy AND will help Democrats electorally, by either increasing turnout among people who might not otherwise vote or appealing to swing voters. Whereas the establishment wing often says a policy is bad on substance and that it will hurt Democrats’ chances in 2020.

To me, both sides are overconfident in saying that their policy views are the best electoral position, too.

natesilver: I get annoyed by this sort of question for a couple of different reasons. On the one hand, I think it’s generally bullshit to think that a policy that polls as being quite unpopular will magically turn out to be electorally helpful because it motivates the base or whatever.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of bullshit in which more establishment/centrist Democrats will deride a policy for being unpopular, when their real motivation against it is that they don’t like the policy.

perry: I know it’s our job to analyze elections. But I think it’s really hard to figure out exactly how policy ideas and outcomes affect election results. So I find claims people make suggesting “Policy X is unpopular so Candidate Y will lose” to be way too overconfident at times. At the same time, we can make some judgements.

For example, “Medicare for everyone who wants it’ (the basic position of Biden, Pete Buttigieg and other more centrist Democrats) is probably a safer political position than “Medicare for everyone and change the whole system” (the stance of AOC and Sanders). I say that even though Medicare for All might be a better health care policy.

natesilver: “Medicare for everyone who wants it” is indeed quite a bit more popular than “Medicare for all,” and one of the reasons “Medicare for all” polls well is because people assume “Medicare for all” means “Medicare for everyone who wants it.”

julia_azari: So my view on the policy thing is complicated. Nate has the Occam’s razor view that I think makes sense, but here’s another galaxy-brain take. I spend most of my time in Wisconsin, a state with a long anti-establishment political tradition, and around a lot of younger people (my students), so my sense of how popular some anti-establishment and left-leaning policies are is probably inflated. But in general, I think most people are NOT sophisticated on policy specifics, but they are sensitive to scary images and wording. There’s even evidence that policies that sound too left-leaning or disruptive are especially vulnerable to scary images and messaging. So while it might seem like a lot of people are not happy with the status quo, that does not mean major, risky policy change isn’t still intimidating.

perry: That’s well put. Medicare for All is very vulnerable to scare tactics.

sarahf: Especially when abolishing private insurance enters the equation.

natesilver: I don’t know. I sort of agree with Vox’s Matt Yglesias that people are learning the wrong lesson from Trump. He was actually perceived as a relative moderate by voters in 2016.

perry: I understand many voters said that Trump was more moderate than Clinton.

But I just have a hard time with this idea that the candidate who ran calling for a ban on Muslims traveling to the United States and suggested that he would “lock up” his opponent was the moderate candidate.

natesilver: IDK, I think we’ve shifted from a media environment in which a lot of outlets took an (implicitly center or center-left) “view from nowhere” to one in which the media is more outspoken, and the difference between partisan and nonpartisan media is a little blurrier.

And I think that’s shifted the assumptions about whether centrism is electorally advantageous in a direction that claims that, actually, elections are all about turning out your base. But I don’t think there’s actually any evidence that how you win elections has changed.

julia_azari: I don’t think I read Matt’s piece but that’s not gonna stop me from saying I’m not sure I think the discussion around moderate candidates is useful. Even if Trump was thought of as a moderate, he ran in a way that criticized the status quo.

Basically I’ve become one of those Twitter trolls who reads the headline and then makes a critique.

natesilver: Trump also won independents 46-42 though!

sarahf: We can’t downplay just how much Clinton and Trump were disliked in 2016, though. Yes, Trump won, but that might say more about how we think about women in politics more than anything else.

natesilver: What if Clinton had run as more of a centrist, though? Would she have gotten more than 8 percent of the Republican vote? The Democrats had a pretty darn liberal platform.

julia_azari: My suspicion is that it’s a wash, but I may be discounting the impact of Democrats being perceived as too left/liberal.

sarahf: If Clinton had higher favorables, I don’t think it would have mattered how she ran, i.e. centrist or super liberal.

perry: So that gets to the real question. Would Democrats be marginally better off if AOC

and company were a little less prominent till December 2020?

sarahf: Yes, I think that’s the argument Pelosi and leadership are making. I just don’t think it’s particularly salient. But I also haven’t seen the attack ads yet, I suppose.

perry: My own, non-data judgement, is yes, Democrats would be slightly better off if AOC and her allies were less prominent in the run-up to the 2020 election. Why? Because having issues of race and identity (like immigration policy and four very liberal, female people of color) being central to the presidential election is hard for Democrats. They have become the party of people of color but most voters are white and this is especially true in key swing states (in particular, Michigan and Wisconsin). Also, Trump is likely to run a 2020 campaign about race and identity that raises the question of who should represent America–forcing voters to take sides.

Pelosi, I assume, does not want the 2020 election to be seen by the public as a battle between AOC’s vision of America (even if Biden is the Democratic nominee) and Trump’s vision of America. And I think she is right to be concerned about that. This is not a new challenge for Democrats. Hillary Clinton was probably not helped by the rise of Black Lives Matter preceding the 2016 election, and backlash to the civil rights movement arguably helped Richard Nixon win the 1972 election.

natesilver: I guess the counterargument, which folks were sorta alluding to above, is that Pelosi can push back against the Squad to show that actually she’s the “reasonable,” moderate one. I’m not sure I buy that counterargument, but it’s an argument.

julia_azari: YES, THE GALAXY BRAIN TAKE.

My read on this is that this stuff is always bubbling under the surface, also. Like you can’t indefinitely ignore race issues because they’re tricky politically.

natesilver: Democrats derive certain benefits from having a more diverse coalition, one of which is that the coalition is simply broader — more people identify as Democrats in this country than Republicans. It also entails certain costs, including tension among different parts of your constituency that can have racial undertones (or even overtones).

The hard part for Democrats right now is that nonwhite voters are significantly disempowered by the Electoral College, and especially by the Senate.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

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losangelesleftygayvoters · 6 years

Text

General Election Voters Guide

Vote November 6, 2018

(By and for somewhat Lefty Queers and Allies to that effect).

October 27, 2018 Updates in Blue.

Prepared by: Phil Buiser, Chris Fajardo, Marc Valera, Ella Gabriel, Gabriela Garbim, Zac Hug, Ryan Quinn, Jay Marcus, Kevin Kelly and (updated to include) Ed Center.

Below is the combined effort of 9 10 queer people of varying race, sexualities, and gender identities. We split up the work of researching the various judgeships and candidates and assessor jobs over the course of a few weeks, consulted relevant publications, and where possible, the words and records of the candidates themselves. Then we spent quite a while discussing them debate team style and wrote them up here. As always, we encourage you to vote your conscience. Also your ballot may vary from ours in some cases as we’re mostly West Hollywood and Los Angeles/Hollywood based.

The below offers a perspective that’s fairly liberal, definitely blue state, and skewing toward LGBT rights a little heavier than others. Notably, this year we were lucky enough to gain the help of two immigrant queer types who are both green card holders. They can’t yet vote, but contributed invaluably to this document and honestly we’re prouder of them than we are of any turd you can’t convince to go and vote on November 6th. Seriously, get those kids out there.

New this year is a cheat sheet here at the top with a quick view of our picks. Our somewhat windy analysis follows.

QuickView of The Candidates we Chose:

Governor: Gavin Newsom (D)

Lieutenant Governor: Ed Hernandez (D)

Secretary of State: Alex Padilla (D)

Controller: Betty Yee (D)

US State Representative: Adam B. Schiff (D)

Treasurer: Fiona Ma

Attorney General: Xavier Becerra (D)

Insurance Commissioner: Ricardo Lara (D)

United States Senator: Dianne Feinstein (D)

State Senator, 26th District: Ben Allen (D)

50th District State Assembly: Richard Bloom (D)

The Judiciary:

For the Judiciary, we advocate a NO vote on Justice Carol A. Corrigan for her nonsensical and partisan take on Prop 8 (She IS, in fact, the one you’ve seen go by on the socials). Update on October 27: We have also updated our take on Justice Willhite and can’t advocate a HARD yes for him, but a “vote your conscience.” See this link for details. For ANY OTHER JUDGE, we were fine with a YES vote, much in line with this article from the LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-endorsement-justices-20181004-story.html.

Races where Judges are running against each other:

Judge of the Superior Court, Office No. 60: Holly L. Hancock

Judge of the Superior Court, Office No.4: A. Veronica Sauceda

Judge of Superior Court, Office No. 16: Patricia (Patti) Hunter

Judge of the Superior Court, Office No. 113: Javier Perez

City and County Races:

School Superintendent of Public Instruction: Tony K Thurmond Marshall Tuck

(UPDATED October 27, 2018 - see below for details)

County Assessor: Jeffrey Prang

County Sheriff: Jim McDonnell

Member State Board of Equalization, 3rd District: Sigh, probably Tony Vazquez, but we legit nearly voted Republican on this one.

Ballot Measures:

STATE MEASURE 1: YES

STATE MEASURE 2: YES

STATE MEASURE 3: YES

STATE MEASURE 4: YES

STATE MEASURE 5: NO

STATE MEASURE 6: NO

STATE MEASURE 7: YES

STATE MEASURE 8: NO

STATE MEASURE 10: YES

STATE MEASURE 11: YES

STATE MEASURE 12: YES

City Amendment B: YES

City Amendment E: YES

LAUSD Charter Amendment EE: YES

County Measure W: YES

ANALYSIS & RESEARCH ON CANDIDATES BELOW:

FOR ANALYSIS/BIOS OF THE JUDICIARY RACES, CLICK HERE.

FOR ANALYSIS/RESEARCH OF EACH OF THE BALLOT MEASURES, CLICK HERE.

Governor: Gavin Newsom

Ah! In the age of Trump, at least it’s still great to be a Californian. We live in a state where we can kick off a voter guide by saying: Former SF mayor Gavin Newsom is the clear choice to carry on Jerry Brown’s progressive legacy and expand on it. Newsom is pro-environment, pro-LGBT and women’s rights, and anti-gun. As SF mayor, he challenged state and federal prohibitions and was aggressive in the fight to begin same-sex marriages, proving that he’s been a reliable progressive advocate from the start. In his own words, he’s running to be “the head of the resistance.”

Keep in mind that, aside from driving policy, the governor (like the president) appoints State Supreme Court and Court of Appeals justices. Newsom is likely to appoint justices who will be judicious and liberal-leaning, while his opponent, Republican John Cox, would likely adopt the conservative plan to flood courts with Federalist Society lackeys. California has been a leading check on the Trump administration, and Cox would reverse that stance in addition to derailing the progress Jerry Brown has brought to California. To keep California progressive, and to keep California as a check on Trump, elect Gavin Newsom governor.

Lieutenant Governor: Ed Hernandez (D)

The fact that this race is listed second on the ballot gives it an air of importance, but it really should be listed dead last. Why? Because lieutenant governor does absolutely nothing. It’s where politicians fill a seat while they’re in between jobs, like, say, between being SF mayor and running for higher office. The only way the lieutenant governor becomes relevant is if the governor is incapacitated. And for that reason, we must take this race seriously. Because, well, pipe bombs for God’s sake.

Despite its seemingly low stakes, this race has split Democrats. Both candidates are Dems, thanks to California’s primary system, and both have solid progressive endorsements. But we’re giving the edge to Ed Hernandez, “whose work with underserved communities and poor patients on Medi-Cal ultimately sparked his interest in state government.” He was elected and served in the State Assembly and State Senate, where he just termed out. His opponent, Eleni Kounalakis, served as US ambassador to Hungary under President Obama, who has endorsed her in this race, along with other prominent Democrats like Kamala Harris. But Kounalakis is a major Democratic donor, and we’re a little suspicious that may be the reason that so many elected Democrats have endorsed her. Endorsements aside, Kounalakis has never held elected office, so Ed Hernandez is the better pick to fill in as governor, if necessary. Again, as we always say, we’re willing to be wrong. Vote your conscience.

Secretary of State: Alex Padilla (D)

If you’ve consulted this guide in past elections, you’ll remember that we’ve voted for Padilla several times before. In fact, that’s why he’s the incumbent. He’s vocal about the need for transparency in how money changes hands in government, he’s a big civil rights advocate, endorsed by all the gay groups you want him to be, he’s a big DREAM Act supporter, and he’s more obsessed with voter accessibility than one could ask for--up to an including the support of automatic voter registration. Basically, Padilla wants you to vote and be an American and a Californian, no matter who you are. We’re in.

The other guy, Mark Meuser, is pretty mum on civil rights, except to say that we “really need to clean up California’s voter rolls.” He’s also spent time insisting that we need less dead people voting. Who needs dog whistles when we have Mark Meuser? Knock it off, Mark, those are not actual problems in the real world.

Controller: Betty Yee (D)

The controller oversees the state’s bill-paying, including payrolls for state government and the California State University system. The office also audits state agencies and departments as well as lower levels of government, such as school districts, cities, and water authorities. The controller also sits on about seventy boards and commissions, a range of financing authorities, and the boards of the state’s two largest public employee pension systems. Think of all the meetings she/he has to sit through!

Betty Yee is the incumbent, currently finishing up her fourth year on the job, where she has built a track record that is universally endorsed. Yee was instrumental in calling out the corruption and nepotism problems with the Board of Equalization, leading to Governor Brown stripping the board of most of its power. Yee has not only shown a dedication to making a positive impact, but her actions back up her intentions.

Yee’s opponent, Roditis, is a businessman/CFO who has little public service history, no statewide name recognition, and comparatively few donors. His muddy vision of what he would like to do in office makes us wonder if he even knows how the position actually works.

US State Representative: Adam B. Schiff (D)

Adam Schiff is the incumbent and is currently serving his ninth term in the US House of Representatives. He is the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, where he’s been a crucial check on Trump and House Republicans who have tried to interfere with the investigation of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. His opponent, Nalbandian, is a Republican businessman who has never served in the government before, openly campaigned for Trump in 2016, believes in all of Trump’s ideologies, and thinks he can turn this country around. Yeah, nope. Nice try, Nalbandian. We’re wif Schiff!

Treasurer: Fiona Ma

This is the state’s banker—the head person who manages the state’s investments and administers the sale of state bonds and notes. The treasurer serves on several commissions, mostly related to marketing bonds, and pays out state funds that are spent by the state controller. Fiona Ma is a CPA with experience in tax law and balancing budgets. She speaks often of accountability and transparency, which seem pretty vital for anyone dealing with large sums of money. She’s worked at the local and state level during the course of the Great Recession. Some issues she wants to focus on include affordable housing programs, alleviating high student loan debts, making quality affordable healthcare more accessible (she was born with a preexisting health condition), investing in first responders (her hubby’s a firefighter), and protecting the environment. She also has the support of her majesty, Senator Kamala Harris, among others, and has spoken up plenty about equal rights for woman, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ folks, vets, and the homeless. As a member of the Board of Equalization, she was instrumental in sparking an investigation into a scandal involving nepotism and improper use of civil servants for political purposes by her fellow board members. The scrutiny culminated in a 2017 law that stripped the Board of Equalization of nearly all of its duties and staff, leaving it with only the core duties required under the state Constitution.

Greg Conlon, on the other hand, seems bitter and disappointed in big government. He speaks a lot about fixing California’s “broken economy” and “getting the job done”. He served as an Air Force pilot, so I imagine some vets will relate to him, but most of the time he just comes across as a begrudging old white man who didn’t get his way. If only we had more of those! Also, he wants to change the state constitution so that the controller and treasurer are appointed by the governor, rather than the people. Maybe that’s because this is his third run for treasurer and he’s never received more than 40% of the vote. Burn.

Attorney General: Xavier Becerra (D)

Becerra led California into suing, or joining other states in suing, the Trump administration seventeen times in 2017 alone and more than forty times total since being appointed, which is reason enough to get our vote. But looking at what those 2017 lawsuits include tells you what’s important to him: four suits against Trump’s immigration policies, including a suit over his efforts to end DACA; a suit over Trump’s ban on our transgender brothers, sisters, and friends serving in the military; a suit against a policy that would allow insurance companies to withhold coverage to women for birth control; and eight suits over the softening or dissolving of environmental regulations, earning him the title “The Planet’s Lawyer” from grist.com.

Bacerra has earned a shit-ton of endorsements from people we’re fond of including Kamala Harris and Jerry Brown, as well as the California Legislative Black and Latino Caucuses, which represent two of the population’s most vulnerable to violence and injustice suffered at the hands of law enforcement. As our sitting attorney general, Becerra has had a direct hand in shaping the behavior of law enforcement agencies, so endorsements from these caucuses should mean something to all of us. He’s also endorsed by the LA Times, which calls their endorsement a “monumentally easy call” for the above reasons, but also because Bailey, Becerra’s opponent, is a political asshole running on a platform that has California generally standing down against Trump administration policies across the board. He favors the “Three Strikes” law mandating a twenty-five-years-to-life sentence for people committing their third felony, including felonies as minor as drug possession and dealing. The “Three Strikes” law is a disaster. It inherently discriminates by race, and it feeds the prison-industrial complex, causing mass incarceration. Bailey’s endorsements alone are a big fat fuck no: the NRA and California Pro-Life, to highlight two. And oh, yeah—he’s facing twelve counts of judicial misconduct from the State Commission on Judicial Performance. Charming.

Insurance Commissioner: Ricardo Lara (D)

The Insurance Commissioner’s job is to oversee the state agency that enforces insurance laws and investigates health care fraud. Therefore, whoever sits in this chair will have Californians’ backs against large insurance companies. We like Sen. Ricardo Lara, the first openly gay person of color to serve in the State Senate. Lara has spent his entire legislative career being a strong consumer advocate, and he is part of a new wave of progressive Democrats, endorsed by Sen. Kamala Harris and more aligned with Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom than Gov. Jerry Brown. He is a supporter of the “Health4all” coalition, which proposes to expand Medi-Cal to all income-eligible California residents, regardless of their immigration status. And he believes the state needs a universal health care system, now that the Trump administration is trying to tear down Obamacare.

Meanwhile, Steve Poizner, tech entrepreneur, held the position as a Republican from 2007-2011. Poizner strongly opposed illegal immigration back when he ran for governor, and he blamed undocumented immigrants for many of the state’s problems. He believes the state should get more involved in the new market of cyber insurance and climate insurance. Both candidates agree on the need to deal with the growing threat of wildfires, by making sure companies pay off on claims and educating residents on the need to make sure they keep their home insurances up to date after they make improvements. In recent, polls, Poizner had a slight lead with many voters still undecided. We’ve decided on Lara.

United States Senator: Dianne Feinstein (D)

Well, the good news is that the Dems are gonna win this battle between an outspoken progressive and a little old lady who’s had the job for decades and has done . . . mostly all right. Feinstein is endorsed by the LA Times, Obama, Biden, Kamala Harris, and Barbara Boxer, and a boatload of congressmen and congresswomen. That establishment backing has her up on DeLeon by twenty-four points. But geez, we wish she was more progressive. For example, she’s not for single-payer health care, and she’s been for the death penalty.

DeLeon, on the other hand, who is the California State Senate president pro tem, got the endorsement from the state Democratic party by calling them all up and asking for it, while Feinstein took it for granted from Washington. There’s a LOT to like about DeLeon. He’s the son of an immigrant, progressive in all those progressive-y good ways, and hungry to take on idiot Republicans in Congress.

So what’s a progressive voter to do? For the most uninspiring of reasons, we’re going with DiFi. Seniority matters in the Senate, and Feinstein is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a member of the top Democratic leadership. We’d like to wait until we have a Democrat in the White House, and let Kamala Harris gain a little more seniority in Senate (or get Kamala Harris in the White House!), before California gives up Feinstein’s influential seat among Democratic Senate leadership.

State Senator, 26th District: Ben Allen (D)

Allen has held this position since 2016 and is universally endorsed as a force for positive change. His opponent, Baron Bruno (cool name!), is currently a real estate agent who uses a lot of CAPITAL letters on his website. While he did offer to “work until his fingers bleed,” Bruno’s anemic experience seems to be the only thing needing medical attention. Keep your day job, Bruno.

50th District State Assembly: Richard Bloom (D)

He’s running unopposed, and he knows it, judging by the grammar, punctuation, and monotony issues on his website. So it’s either a vote for him or a vote abstained. We give him our vote, as we have in the past. Liberal groups uniformly favor him and conservative groups uniformly dislike him, and that’s a formula we can believe in. A few fun highlights from his agenda: reforming the state’s film tax credit program to stem the tide of entertainment industry jobs fleeing to other states and countries; protecting bobcats; and educating people on how to understand and use the Affordable Care Act. Tiny red flag—he had to pay a fine a while back for not reporting four campaign contributions he received in the final days of his 2014 election campaign, but this failure is widely accepted as negligence as opposed to deception. We bloom for Bloom. There, we said it. But only because we always say it.

School Superintendent of Public Instruction:

UPDATED OCTOBER 27, 2018 to Marshall Tuck

As happens from time to time when we publish this list, various people reach out and talk to us about personal experiences with candidates. In this case, we asked San Francisco’s own, our good friend Ed Center (whom we would have added to this debate team were he closer) to provide his reasoning. And...we were convinced. His notes are here in blue:

Marshall Tuck is the candidate with an actual track record of improving schools for low-income, black, and Latino kids. He is willing to make tough decisions that are unpopular with the status quo: more school options for poor families, bonus pay for teachers in low-income neighborhoods, giving principals leeway to hire the faculty they want. He’s the smartest person I’ve ever talked to about education policy. This is a tough one for me because I like Thurmond and I want to support a candidate from humble means. Thurmond is a career politician with his eyes on the next prize. I would vote for him for senator. But because he’s politically ambitious, he refuses to go against the teachers union which is a big force in maintaining the status quo for poor, black and Latino students. Tuck helped to turnaround a group of underperforming schools in LA under Villaraigrosa. In doing so, he was very supportive to teachers but upset the union by doing things like giving bonus pay. The union said you can’t do that, we have a contract that lays out salary structure and he said, fine, what are you going to do when I tell the LA Times that you won’t let me pay teachers MORE? I’ve heard him lay out his plan for education in CA and I believe in that plan. I think he’s he best choice for CA students.

Our Original Notes: This was a tough pick. If the LA Times’s assessment of the race is credible, both Thurmond and Tuck would be admirable choices, although they give the slight nod to Thurmond. As do we. Both are running on a platform focusing on low-income and at-risk youth, but Tuck served as president of a chain of charter schools and as a CEO in different educational organizations, and while that doesn’t mean he can’t sympathize with the problems of low-income and at-risk communities, Thurmond is in a better position to empathize with those communities, having grown up poor in Philadelphia and then working within challenged communities as a social worker. Assuming all other relevant attributes between Tuck and Thurmond are equal—which they inevitably are not, but nothing we’ve been able to find point to a significant difference in their administrative abilities—we say go with the guy who’s been there over the guy who’s been assessing it from afar. Additionally, Thurmond’s massive list of endorsements includes Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Maxine Waters—plus the California Black and Latino Caucuses, which, again, represent communities who are more vulnerable than most to a problemed education system.

County-Assessor: Jeffrey Prang

Jeffrey Prang is the incumbent and we agree with the LA Times that we should vote to give him a second term. Basically, he’s done a much better job than his predecessor so we should re-elect him so he can keep up the good work. The assessor’s main job is to determine the value of newly built, improved, or purchased properties and business assets. The office also decides on requests to reduce property valuations and hears appeals of the decisions made by its appraisers. Its decisions help determine how much county residents pay in property taxes each year. And the other guy listed his official middle name as “Lower Taxes” on the ballot (no really, look at your ballot) and in all of the press materials. We have NO idea who that works for, because it is legit crazy as hell.

County—Sheriff: Jim McDonnell

The county sheriff is one of the most powerful elected officials in the county, as they influence state policy, run the county jail system, and have the power to find alternatives to incarceration. So pay attention. We do NOT endorse the Democratic Socialist suggestion that you just write in whatever joke candidate you want. (For real, don’t.) This is a runoff election from June and pits the incumbent, McDonnell versus Villanueva, a recently retired deputy. In his time as county sheriff, McDonnell has been able to make some positive changes, especially considering that the last sheriff was sent to prison. McDonnell has much more experience than Villanueva, having had opportunities while on the force to manage large teams and more recently in his role in the past four years as county sheriff. Villanueva, on the other hand, never rose within the ranks of the LASD. Given his past work experience and performance, McDonnell just edges out Villanueva.

Member State Board of Equalization, 3rd District:

TOSS UP, but, sigh, probably Tony Vazquez (D)

Okay, this race is REAL bummer. The State Board of Equalization is a long story and kind of a mess we’ve talked about before. It was established in 1879 to ensure statewide fairness in property tax assessments, but over time the board really turned on its mandate to tamp down on corruption and by 2017 the board was bonkers corrupt and after a criminal investigation (led by Betty Yee!) Jerry Brown signed a bill that stripped the board of its powers and scaled it back from 4,800 employees to 400. So, what will Tony Vazquez or G. Rick Marshall be in charge of when we elect them? The board’s home page now says, “The State Board of Equalization administers Property Tax, Alcoholic Beverage Tax, and Tax on Insurers programs.” So, that’s a five-member board stuck more or less with its original constitutional powers to review property tax assessments, plus a few other things that have become relevant since 1879, like insurer tax assessment, alcohol excise tax, and pipeline taxes. So, it’s important that they not be corrupt. You see where this is going, yes: Tony Vazquez, the Democrat, is a longtime Santa Monica councilman and was the first Latino mayor of Santa Monica. He’s endorsed by some mainstream Democrats like Antonio Villaraigosa, Alex Padilla, and Maxine Waters (as well as a Santa Monica car dealership and a Mexican restaurant!). But there’s a noticeable brevity to his list of endorsements, because . . . you guessed it, he’s under investigation for corruption! He apparently claimed no income for several years during which his wife, a school board member, made votes that favored two businesses that had employed Vazquez as a contractor. And neither of them disclosed the conflict of interest. COME ON! And then, on the other side of the ticket, there’s G. Rick Marshall, who appears to be on the stubborn side of the small-government, fewer-taxes brand of Republicanism. That’s not a good match for California, a progressive state that believes in leveling taxes for worthy programs and investments. Marshall could bring to a screeching halt programs that make California a progressive leader. There doesn’t appear to be a hero in this story, but democracy is sometimes about picking the least worst option, and in this case, we still think that’s Vasquez, because if the current investigation finds him to be corrupt, he’ll be removed from office and we’ll get someone else who maybe won’t screw up the way taxes are collected because of some “survival of the fittest” bullshit. But again, COME ON!

FOR ANALYSIS/BIOS OF THE JUDICIARY RACES, CLICK HERE.

FOR ANALYSIS/RESEARCH OF EACH OF THE BALLOT MEASURES, CLICK HERE.

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icarianfate-blog · 6 years

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Something that’s very important to me and I don’t budge on is Regulus’s continued attachment to his family and connections in the elitist pureblood society. There’s a few reasons for this, which I’ll go into here.

1. Life is Messy

Did Regulus grow thanks to his exposure to the darkest parts of his community, the reality behind their beliefs and his views become less bigoted over time? Yes. But the fact he no longer views muggleborns as filth doesn’t eradicate a lifetime of indoctrination, a need for human connection, a justified fear of rejection, still loving your family even when they’re awful, or utterly pragmatic needs like business partnerships. He’s not Sirius or Andromeda, for Regulus utterly removing himself from the society they were raised in is not an option. Life is messy and sometimes you’re the liberal-ish gay cousin at christmas dinner trying to fend off war flashbacks because your baby cousin just said the word “lake”.

Regulus -- like Draco -- became a Death Eater at 16 and in canon died at 18. By the end of the second war Regulus is 36. He saw and did terrible things at an incredibly young age, then had to totally restructure his whole world view alone with no one to really talk to about it and rebuild his entire life-- all while dealing with the physical, psychological and social consequences of his actions. While it doesn’t take him long at all to mellow out, it does take him longer to defrag his ideology and figure out what the hell he does believe now and how to express those new beliefs accurately. Basically the man’s a mess and that’s really to be expected.

2. Portraying the Spectrum

I also feel it’s very important to have people who fall more on the “Bad Side” who are well, not so bad. While on paper these topics are very black and white in reality they’re not always so clean cut. Something I’ve always hated about Harry Potter is that until about the last 2 books there’s basically not a single “Good” Slytherin even mentioned let alone seen. Yes there are people like Severus who are there from the start, but he’s not revealed to be a “Good Slytherin” until the very end, the rest of the time he’s portrayed as one of the worst ones. This always just pissed me off so much, it’s just such an unnecessary and trite demonization of a whole group-- worse, a group of children. Yes it’s the most likely place for the Dracos of the world to end up, but that doesn’t mean every single child who was ever sorted into it is a Death Eater in the making. But we never see those Slytherins and it really, really pisses me off.

Regulus is not a “Good Person” in the sense he was always secretly good and eventually ~~broke free of the evil mind control and is now Pure again~~. I hesitate to even call him a good person honestly, even though his last and only canon acts speak to someone who is unwavering good and self-sacrificing. In his youth he genuinely believed in some truly terrible things but he had his own inherit limits and morals he could not sacrifice even for his family and their beliefs. That’s important, not everyone on that side is a Bellatrix, and while being less awful than Bellatrix doesn’t exactly earn you a medal it does speak to the spectrum. He’s not the best, but he’s definitely not the worst.

By the time the first war is over Regulus is on a knife’s edge at the near perfect center of the spectrum between acceptance and bigotry. He’s proof that a Slytherin coming from the most stereotypical, toxic pureblood upbringing with all the classic Slytherin traits can still buck a lot of the script and actually manage to not be a complete bastard.

3. Never Burn Bridges You Could Still Use

In true Slytherin fashion, we come to a manipulative, Game of Thrones-y reason. This is one of the key reasons for him IC and also one of the things I think can be difficult for people to get or swallow. Where most people likely feel that the only correct option would be to pull a Sirius and disown the family-- that they themselves could never stomach putting up with all the heinous things these pureblood types say and cannot imagine someone who doesn’t believe it doing just that for any reason-- the fact is that’s not always the right move, and that there are people who can do it just fine.

Regulus isn’t a fool. He’s the well-educated, intelligent son of a rich, prominent pureblood family with lots of connections all over the place in the wizarding community who got sorted into the “win or die trying” house. Publicly renouncing half or more of those connections is frankly a terrible idea for him to do on so many levels. He loses a LOT of power, access and leverage he could actually use to do things that could actually be a boon in the long run. While unlike Severus he wasn’t --and likely doesn’t become a spy ( though that is up for debate )-- those connections could be vital for his continued survival and provide a means of keeping tabs on enemies.

Why on earth would he run around making enemies of everyone he could still use? How does that help anyone? Especially when he’s already mastered the art of placating and maneuvering these types of people.

4. Love, Sentimentality and Loyalty are just as Powerful Weaknesses as Strengths

Something we actually get from canon is that Regulus is an unquestionably loving, loyal and compassionate person. When he has Kreacher take him to the cave he drinks the potion, he sacrifices himself. This is not something someone who is not at their core compassionate, empathetic and loving does. He saw the effects the potion had on Kreacher, he heard what he had gone through, and when the time came he refused to make the elf go through that again.

"And he order-- Kreacher to leave-- without him. And he told Kreacher -- to go home-- and never to tell my Mistress-- what he had done-- but to destroy-- the first locket. And he drank-- all the potion-- and Kreacher swapped the lockets-- and watched ... as Master Regulus ... was dragged beneath the water ... and ..."

"[...] that Regulus changed his mind ... but he doesn't seem to have explained that to Kreacher, does he? And I think I know why. Kreacher and Regulus's family were all safest if they kept to the old pure-blood line. Regulus was trying to protect them all." "[...] I've said all along that wizards would pay for how they treat house-elves. Well, Voldemort did ... and so did Sirius." [...] I do not think Sirius ever saw Kreacher as a being with feelings as acute as a human's ...

This core of kindness and empathy is both what ended up causing him to defect and also what keeps him tied to what family and friends he has left. It’s hard, especially when you are so loyal and loving to cut out people who you’ve known your whole life, who you love and love you back. Bellatrix is a monster she’s easy to cut out but Narcissa? How could he really cut ties with one of his only living relatives, who’s likely his favorite cousin? Who is herself a fiercely loving and loyal woman? It would take a lot for him to finally cut ties with his loved ones still in the purist community and it’s frankly one of his greatest failings.

5. No One likes a Former Death Eater

The cruel fact of the matter is that regardless of your reformation most people will not accept or acknowledge it and treat you like you are still a monster. Regulus could try -- and does try-- to integrate more with the mainstream, but it’ll always be met with mixed success at best because he was a Death Eater. Unless he moved to a different country, it’d be difficult to really start over again completely with any real solid success. The majority of the wizarding world socially ostracizes him while still engaging with him on a business and political level because of his status. The only people who still want to have a cuppa with him are all in the same boat as him, bigots or purist sympathizers.

He’s human, and however much he’d like to gripe about people and wanting to be left alone forever to become a hermit he craves interaction, especially since he himself is an intensely social extroverted person. If he cuts these people out of his life he basically has no one to talk to anymore and he’s left totally isolated, which would frankly lead to much worse and dangerous places for him.

6. Someone here has to be the Voice of Reason

Having literally no one in that community who isn’t a total nightmare is asking for trouble. Not only because it allows the toxicity to stew and intensify unchecked but it also means no one is there to try and help the younger generations break free of the cycle. If he just left like Andromeda and Sirius he’s just making it worse by removing a more moderate voice from the communal discussion. It’s not even about trying to show them the error of their ways, that’s in fact a terrible way to go about things with people like this. It’s about diluting the toxic ideology, providing the less dangerous paths and laying out the framework that can act as the basis for someone else’s journey out of the quagmire.

For example, when looking at cults and hate groups, the worst way to reach those people is by trying to point out everything wrong and arguing with them, it only entrenches them more. You make more progress by staying close and quietly slipping in the information and tools they need to work things out themselves. Telling someone they’re in a destructive cult will get you nothing, but telling them about this book you read about some terrible cult and all the signs of one you learned from it and isn’t that just wild? These people are bad news huh? Here give it a read yourself-- Is far more effective in the long run.

By being there he acts as a moderate, neutral adult figure who the children can both model and look to for support. He’s much safer than most of their families and willing to be the sounding board for their own debates and give advice from a place of having literally been right where they are now. He can act as a mid-point between the extremely insular and toxic pureblood community, the mainstream wizarding world, and thanks to his time in hiding, the muggle world for purebloods looking to escape or just broaden themselves.

#meta tbt.#reference tbt.#i'm not formatting this more than it is bc i don't hate myself #and i'm not bothering with a cut bc fuck the police #hc tbt #ooc tbt

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voyageviolet · 6 years

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I actually sat down and read all of To Siri With Love since there’s been so much talk about it. I have a lot of thoughts about it; it has several problems that haven’t been discussed much because its biggest problems are so egregious. Writing all of that down would make one hell of a long post, though, so right now I’m just going to talk about the worst of it: the eugenics.

I don’t have page numbers for citations because I’m using the ebook version, but I’ll include the chapters the quotes are from.

Here’s the full quotation of the first time in the book that Judith Newman advocates eugenics against her son, in Chapter 8:

A vasectomy is so easy. A couple of snips, a couple of days of ice in your pants, and voilà. A life free of worry. Or one less worry. For me.

How do you say “I’m sterilizing my son” without sounding like a eugenicist? I start thinking about all the people, outliers in some way, who had this fundamental choice in life stolen from them—sometimes cruelly, sometimes by well-meaning people like me. The eugenics movement can be traced back to psychiatrist Alfred Hoche and penal law expert Karl Binding, who in 1920 published a book called The Liberation and Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life. Its popularity fostered the first eugenics conference in the United States in 1921. The term “eugenics” means “the good birth.” Sample papers: “Distribution and Increase of Negroes in the United States,” “Racial Differences in Musical Ability,” and “Some Notes on the Jewish Problem.”

“Liberation” is such a wonderful euphemism, and in this context many people like my son—and undoubtedly some even less impaired—were “liberated” from the burden of life by those enthusiastic proponents of culling the herd, the National Socialists. An estimated four hundred thousand “imbeciles” were euthanized during Hitler’s rule, but not before they were the subjects of all sorts of medical experimentation. For a while there, Austria seemed to have cornered the market on brains in jars.

The idea of outright murdering “nature’s mistakes,” as the disabled were called, was softened somewhat in the United States. As the psychiatrist Leo Kanner was observing and defining autism, he was also lobbying for sterilization, but not death, of disabled populations. This was considered a progressive view at the time. (He believed there were all sorts of repetitive tasks autistic people could perform that would be good for society, and he wasn’t wrong here, that’s for sure. But we didn’t have computer programming at the time, so he proposed a population of ditch diggers and oyster shuckers.) Around the same time Hans Asperger, the Austrian pediatrician who was the first to identify autism as a unique mental condition, was concluding that “not everything that steps out of the line, and is thus ‘abnormal,’ must necessarily be ‘inferior.’”

That was an even more radical line of thought, and one society struggles with to this day. But wherever you stand on this question, when you start considering how the history of disability is inextricably intertwined with the history of euthanizing and enforced sterilization, you come away unsettled. I began to question my certainty that Gus should never have kids. There is a good success rate in vasectomy reversals, and surely there will be even easier, more reversible methods for men soon. And when there are, I’m going to be the first in line to sign him up. Kids at twenty or twenty-five? No. Thirty-five? I can hope.

I know this is a long quote, but I wanted to share it because I think it’s noteworthy that Newman is aware of the history of eugenics. She knows that it’s the ideology that Nazis used to justify the Holocaust; she knows that it’s been used in the United States to discriminate against disabled people. She knows that it’s a racist and antisemitic tool of oppression. And yet, she still wants to forcibly sterilize her son.

She reiterates her stance in Chapter 13, after watching her son go on a date.

Newman repeatedly emphasizes that vasectomies are reversible, as though that’s a justification for medical abuse. That’s not always true, though:

It's best to consider a vasectomy to be completely permanent. Although the procedure is reversible, and advances in microsurgery techniques have made vasectomy reversal far more successful in recent decades, it is not always a guaranteed success.

...

If fewer than three years have passed since the original vasectomy, patency success rates are around 97 percent and pregnancy success rates are 76 percent. But success rates can fall over time. In men who had a vasectomy 15 years or more before their reversal, the likelihood of restoring the vas deferens is 71 percent and chances of subsequent pregnancy hover around 30 percent.

Since Newman states that she wants to have power of attorney to make a decision about a vasectomy when her son turns 18, and since she later says that she “can hope” her son might have children at 35, it’s most likely that the lower rates of success would be the relevant statistics.

More importantly, though, I think we can all agree that abuse is still abuse even if the medical effects truly are reversible.

If the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy is such a major concern, wouldn’t the best solution be sex education, the same as any child needs? Newman has some thoughts on this in Chapter 13:

Nobody really thinks she has to teach her children about sex. I mean, not really, not in the way you might have to teach them, say, how to use a credit card (amazing how fast they catch on to that). Kids learn the basics of reproduction, what goes where, and then their natural curiosity takes over. They ask a zillion questions, of either you or their idiot friends, and eventually they figure it out.

This strikes me as rather irresponsible. Newman assumes that all parents share her position on this, but I find that very unlikely; at the very least, my own parents were much more proactive than Newman seems to be. Sex education is too important a topic to leave up to chance. Especially when you consider that a key part of autism is struggling with communication, it’s irresponsible to assume that an autistic child will be able to know the right questions to ask, and also that he’ll be comfortable enough to talk about it on his own.

Newman mentions trying to discuss sex with her son, again in Chapter 13:

... it was very distressing that he seemed to not understand anything about reproduction and sexually transmitted disease, never mind anything about affection and romance. Could I let him be in high school—even a high school for other special ed kids—with this degree of ignorance? But I just didn’t know how to broach the subject, because when I mentioned it—“Gus, do you know where babies come from?”—he’d say, “They come from mommies,” and then continue talking about the weather or sea turtles or whatever happened to be on his mind at that moment.

At another point in the book (Chapter 8), Newman describes a time when Gus’s brother teasingly asks him where babies come from, and Gus changes the subject. From this, and from the above quote, Newman assumes that her son knows nothing about sex, but she never considers the possibility that he might be embarrassed to talk about it. This may be because of her bizarre belief that her son can’t feel embarrassment.

From Chapter 6:

But what if you have a child who cannot be embarrassed by you—and doesn’t understand when he embarrasses you? What then? Nothing makes you appreciate the ability to be embarrassed more than having a child immune from embarrassment.

Later in the same chapter:

Do I want my son to feel self-conscious and embarrassed? I do. Yes. Gus does not yet have self-awareness, and embarrassment is part of self-awareness. It is an acknowledgment that you live in a world where people may think differently than you do. Shame humbles and shame teaches. One side of the no-shame equation is ruthlessness, and often success. But if you live on the side Gus does, the rainbows and unicorns and “what’s wrong with walking through a crowd naked” side of shamelessness, you never truly understand how others think or feel. I want him to understand the norm, even if ultimately he rejects it.

This is actually a fairly common misunderstanding for neurotypicals to have: that if an autistic person doesn’t show an emotion the same way that a neurotypical person does, they must not experience that emotion. Still, you’d think that a mother writing a book about her autistic child would make the effort to figure out if her assumptions were true, or at least that an editor might have brought this to attention. Since it seems that no one involved in the book’s publishing process seems to have figured this out, let me clarify: Autistic people absolutely feel embarrassment. In fact, I’d say it’s a major factor in the prevalence of depression and anxiety among autistic people because of the social rejection many if not all of us have had to deal with.

Back to the original point, however: In Chapter 13, Newman looks through her son’s internet search history (ignoring the “tiny flicker of alarm in Gus’s eyes” - because, after all, he can’t be embarrassed, right?) and finds the porn that he’d been looking at. Clearly, then, he has more understanding of sexuality than Newman realizes, but as far as anyone knows, he’s had to learn it from porn rather than his parents.

As anyone reading this probably already knows, Newman has faced a lot of criticism about her book. For the most part, she’s responded to it badly. Some of her reaction can be seen in this article from the Observer:

While Newman’s stories are meant to be humorous, one of the hallmarks of people with autism is that they think literally and have difficulty understanding jokes. Newman knew this and wrote it that way on purpose.

“This book really wasn’t written for an autistic audience,” she said. “It was written for parents, neighbors, people who may love and hopefully will work with someone who is on the spectrum.”

Setting aside the childish implication that anyone who disagrees with her book must not understand it, what stands out to me in this quote is how unreasonable it is to write a book about autistic people and which affects autistic people and then to say it’s not “for an autistic audience.”

A common mantra for disability activism is “Nothing about us without us” - that is to say, we have a right to be involved in things that affect us. In the above quote, Newman stands against this maxim. She assumes that she can say whatever she wants about without being criticized - and that she can communicate her ideas to all of the people around autistic people without any consideration for autistic people themselves.

Newman doubles down on this in a tweet from a few days ago:

Beginning to think well meaning people of #actuallyautistic are in fact enemies of free thought and free speech. Which is not so good, coming from a group who say they’ve been silenced.

This tweet equates us with oppressive censors rather than people who’ve been hurt by her work. She portrays us as unreasonable for opposing eugenics against our community.

We might sigh a small breath of relief from this quote from the Observer article:

��I am much less worried now and hoping to be a grandmother someday,” she [Newman] said. “That’s a result of my son’s growth and my own.”

That may be good news for her son, but it’s far too little too late for the autistic community at large. Her book is still being printed as it was written. We still have to contend with a critically acclaimed book that advocates for eugenics. There is a great deal of ignorance about autism in our society, and now the ideas in this popular book will be what some of that ignorance is replaced with.

#ableism #eugenics #to siri with love #boycotttosiri #OOPS this is still an enormous post #actuallyautistic

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mikhalsarah · 4 years

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This is the most depressing “defense” of a liberal by a liberal in I don’t know how long.

Police unions lead the conservative pillory project against anyone standing for oversight on police and respect for suspects’ rights because it’s not in their interests that the police have oversight or that suspects have rights respected...does it magically become slightly more in their interests when a white man says it, than when a Black/South Asian woman does? I can’t fathom how...

The essential message here is that it’s so very hard to be a Black-identified female that it’s sorta ok for anyone who is, no matter how otherwise privileged, to be an ambitious political opportunist who cares more about getting re-elected than about the values they claim to stand for. For a politician to be so is certainly nothing new, but the idea that people should not criticize politicians much for it if they happen to be the wrong colour or gender because “it’s a problem with the system and its racism” is quite new and dangerous, not least because we are essentially caring more about how “unfair” life is to an educated wealthy person because they might not get re-elected, or might get their feelings hurt, than about the people down at the fucking bottom of the dog pile who might get executed or spend decades in prisons for crimes they didn’t commit. “She did what she had to” sounds an awful lot like, “I only did what I was ordered to do”. Except, of course, she didn’t have to do anything. Nobody had a gun to her head, she chose to do it to fulfil her own vaulting ambitions.

And I’m sorry but all that, “but then she wouldn’t be in a position to do so much good as VP in a few months!” is so much bizarre quasi-fascist garbage like Saruman trying to tempt Gandalf into joining with Mordor on the grounds that at some hypothetical point in the future they might “come to direct it’s courses”. Sorry, I’m not “Woke” or morally compromised, I’m Jewish. I may suck at it, but I’m still good enough at it to not hold with the idea of permitting evil now for the sake of some hypothetical good in the future. A good which is by no means certain. First Biden has to win, after all (which is possible)...then Kamala Harris (along with Biden) has to decide doing right is more important than getting a second term, and then there’s the prospect of becoming “the first African-American female president” which two terms as VP might set you up to be tempted by (so I am not holding my breath but who knows, maybe she’ll do a little of that hypothetical good in her final term as POTUS, 12-16 years from now.)

If we’re going to be hypothetical about things, what if Kamala Harris had never made it so far as an election and instead some other candidate with actual moral backbone had been run and now THAT exemplary candidate was just chosen for VP? Would it be just awful if that exemplary candidate happened to be a man and a WASP? Or perhaps she herself, having stood her ground and earned some grudging respect, might have won later on? Or some other worthy minority candidate?

But, as C.S. Lewis put it, “nobody is ever told what might have been”. You ultimately can’t run life based on hypothetical things that might have been or on hypothetical goods that might appear. You make the best choice you can based on the existing evidence and the likely trajectory it shows. A lifetime of opportunism and ambition does not suggest much to me by way of upward moral mobility so I’m gruntled not to be facing this choice as a voter, which resembles the choice I gave to a preschooler who doesn’t like art smocks this morning...do you want the green smock, or the red smock? (Because you’re wearing a smock or you don’t get to paint.)

This is part of the longstanding trope that “the problem is really racism” and all the wars, profiteering and predatory capitalism would stop if only we had more diversity at the top, because self-evidently BIPOC and female people educated and wealthy enough to run for public office would vote totally differently on the issues than educated and wealthy whites and men.

Do they though? I’m still waiting for it to happen.

And wasn’t that the god-damn point of all the diversity we were trying to get into government, that it was going to smash the patriarchy and white-supremacy and the good old boys’ mutual back-scratching club? And here’s Beinart come along to tell us that it’s actually working the exact opposite way and that all our diverse candidates are way too shit-scared of not getting elected to have more morals than the old white men they’re replacing. This is like Wile E. Coyote sent away for the ACME Social Justice Kit and it’s now blowing up in his face.

What was it, “They can’t afford to have Bernie Sanders’ moral purity”? Why, because it’s such a cake walk being a Jewish socialist starting your political career during the Evangelical “Moral Majority” and Reagan cold-war years? And then running as an Independent in what has long been considered an unbreakable two-party system? Not even Bernie Sanders can afford Bernie Sanders’ moral purity...which is why the Dems didn’t run him against Trump when they should have...yet he still has it, and seems to mysteriously prefer sleeping well at night to whoring himself out for a few shekels and an office where ordering new carpets requires calculations involving Pi.

And the loss of that election was basically guaranteed by the fact that the Dems were all pissing about with identity politics trying to get a *vagina into the presidency even if it lost them the election. Which it did, so thus pissed away all the hypothetical good having a female president might have done, which was only ever going to be symbolic anyway. Clearly they have learned absolutely bobkes from that. *And yes, when the only thing you really care about is the genitalia of the person you’re trying to get into office, you’re no longer running a woman (a person who happens to have a vagina) you’re running a vagina.

This all reminds me of my annoyingly sanctimonious sister. She natters on and on about how many tenured professors are BIPOC and then looks at me aghast when I say I don’t actually give a shit how many educated and wealthy BIPOC people get bit more wealthy and secure. I care more about how many people can’t eat and pay their rent, or can’t afford their utility bills and are getting their power and water shut off. I care about people worse off than I am, not better off. The toejam in the toe-cleavage peeping out of Kamala Harris’ pumps is more privileged than I will ever be, (and I’m not so badly off at the moment) and more privileged than 99% of the U.S. populace, so the idea that she needs a horde of people rushing to her defense is patently absurd. If she didn’t get chosen for VP what...she’d be so oppressed she’ll be living out of a rusted hatchback by next week???

This entire drama of the Biden running mate has basically been “which woman of colour should Biden choose to best capture the vote” as opposed to “which of the available candidates is the best possible choice to achieve our progressive goals” and that’s a bit horrifyingly Orwellian.I It’s like a sort of trophy-wife...which one will bring me the most prestige and help me “win” at life. And, echoing my earlier comments, there’s something distinctly disturbing about the degree of emphasis on choosing a racialized woman. I’m not sure how electing a vagina with more melanin to office is an improvement over electing vaginas in general. Women have been complaining for decades about the tendency of some men to view them as disembodied sexual parts. How did it become something progressive women now cheer about? Whereas if he’d said, “All other things being equal, I intend to chose a running mate that will best embody the Democrats’ commitment to diversity and better proportional representation.”, I would not be feeling like women and minorities were just being added to the ticket to make up numbers, like goods in a packing crate; we need 6 of this, and 4 of that...

If the Dems win are people next going to be discussing which Latinx he needs to appoint to the Senate, and which Indigenous person to the Judiciary and which trans doctor will replace Fauci when he retires? You’re laughing now, but let this sit on the floor awhile and see if the cat licks it up. I was right about the moral trajectory of Israel 15 years ago, something Beinart only discovered this summer, and I feel good about my odds on this prediction. Left unsupervised, these “woke” ideologies will do what all ideologies do, and reach peak stupidity, which will, of course, result in a a wild and reactive attempt to correct for them by rejecting everything about them. The only thing stopping that is for people to look at them critically now and correct for extremism and ideological blind spots before an iconoclastic paraxysm. I’m not societies great hope here...I’m just a woman with a tumblr adding my two cents to the critical mass needed to do that.

I happen to heartily endorse more types of people getting into government who currently are kept out, just not at the cost of *good government itself, and not based on the laughable premise that a room full of people all from the same tax brackets, who all went to the same schools, is “diverse”. Honest to God, America should just stop having elections at this point and start mailing out notices to randomly selected citizens. Then they might get actual diversity, as opposed to La Senza diversity, where there’s only one actual bra but hey, it comes in 37 different colours so, hooray for choice.

*whether anything in American (or any) politics resembles actual good government is debatable but we’ve spent the last 4+ years finding out just how much further the GOP can get from the ideal than we’d ever thought it could and Right and Left always mirror each other. To my mind electing and appointing people by identity rather than competence freed from unnecessary stumbling blocks is also a giant leap backward from it.

#politics #things that radicalize me #anti-idpol #anti-woke #democrats #kamala harris #peter beinart #identity politics

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cicadacreativemag · 4 years

Text

The commodification of Black pain: Why "White Fragility" falls short

Jay Serrano, Editorial Director

In the midst of yet another reckoning with the antiblackness that permeates every corner of the U.S., many people have scrambled for ways to make sense of it all. For some, it is a familiar topic of conversation, one that has shaped their entire life. For others, it is an abstract knowledge they may only be exploring for the first time.

For these individuals, self-education has become a common prescription. Social media users who are more well versed in the topic of antiblack racism have curated various reading lists with recommended reading for nonblack people. One title has popped up in several of these posts, often floating to the top of the list. I recognized it from when it hit the New York Times Best Seller List in 2018 and stayed there for over a year. It stirred some controversy then, but it has since reemerged in the wake of the George Floyd protests, once again becoming a best seller, highly recommended and rated on Amazon and endlessly passed around on my Facebook feed.

The book is called “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” written by a White academic named Robin DiAngelo. You’ve likely heard of this book before—or, at the very least, have heard of its central thesis. Her primary assertion is that White people are inherently complicit in racism and that they must do work to dismantle this, defining resistance to this concept “white fragility” or “white defensiveness.”

I am not the target audience for this book and withheld critique because I did not have a strong opinion of it. I’m mixed AfroLatine and thought there was no reason for me to read a simplified version of racism for reluctant White people, but as it became more and more famous, I noticed insidious things about it. Reading it validated some of my more cynical analyses of the narcissism of neoliberal elite establishments, but it also deeply confused me. It appears I was not alone.

The critiques of the book vary. One common critique is some variation of “racism is not that bad, and I’m upset at being implicated.” I view this critique as fundamentally absurd, ahistorical, and demonstrably false. Another critique, primarily presented on the Left, is that DiAngelo uses corporate framing to offer a prescriptive non-solution to a problem that could be more effectively solved by addressing workers’ rights and establishing socialized policy. The idea is that class solidarity supersedes racial solidarity and that to proclaim otherwise is playing into corporate division tactics and identity politics. The Left has very scant media representation and, perhaps predictably, the voices that have succeeded have been almost exclusively White. It is not shocking to me, then, that their critique correctly analyzes DiAngelo’s poor framing and conflict of interest but fails to diagnose the real pervasiveness and seriousness of antiblackness.

I think the real problem with “White Fragility” is that is reads as a self-congratulatory Racism 101 course that centers the White experience above all and sanitizes the experience of people of color, especially Black people—ironically, likely to be more palatable for a White audience. The book is incredibly repetitive and condescending, entirely satisfied in its commodification of racism in the U.S. and once you realize how much money she’s made from this book and how much it has brought her fame, it feels openly exploitative.

Centering the White Experience

DiAngelo is a White woman. A White author being the primary spokesman for people of color would seem to undermine the ethos of the book, which often emphasizes listening to us. There is a strong narcissistic streak to the entire narrative; it is all about White people, even as we are being finger wagged at about how we leave people of color out of conversations about their own oppression.

We hear plenty about white privilege, white fragility, white tears, white guilt, etc. But we hear very little from or about people of color’s experiences outside of being oppression boards. She offers few positive stories about people of color—instead, every interaction regarding racism is combative and confrontational. There’s also a creepiness to the way in which nonwhite people are reduced to props in the backdrop of White people’s journey towards enlightenment.

There is an incredible irony in watching groups of rich White elites argue amongst themselves about racism. There is even more irony is watching the critique of these people come from other White people and watching their arguments still miss the point. It’s a bizarre reminder that we aren’t allowed to be the protagonist even in stories ostensibly about us. DiAngelo didn’t write about us. She wrote about White people’s feelings about us.

The Corporate Angle

This is part of the Left critique of DiAngelo’s work that is actually quite prudent. DiAngelo fills her books with anecdotes of defensive workers she met during her stint as a corporate diversity trainer. She, bizarrely, appears to offer her advice as a corporate consultant without acknowledging this approach would be inappropriate with family and friends. She doesn’t appear to acknowledge this because she doesn’t realize it, which makes it even more concerning.

Prescribed lines come across as insincere and almost cartoonishly silly, furthering the impression that this is about optics and sounding woke rather than about effecting meaningful change. She also often paints coworkers as being the harbingers of inequality but fails to ever acknowledge the way corporations are plagued by systemic racism. To eliminate racism from the workplace would require a reckoning with the capitalist structures that have historically disenfranchised people of color, particularly Black and brown people.

She even often frames racism as…microaggressions in the workplace. Sure, this happens and yes, it is inappropriate and negatively affects people of color. However, it betrays a bias in which it is clear she believes the more overt types of racism—lynching, hate crimes, wrongful termination, being denied housing, poor access to medical care, higher mortality rates, etc.—are either less important or less common than corporate microaggressions. We don’t need to protect ourselves from a lawsuit. We need to foster more empathy for people of color. Now, more than ever, what we need is for White people to see the humanity of Black people. This book does not give us the tools to make that happen.

The Political Divide

Part of what makes this book stand out and, I believe, part of why this book was so instinctively rejected by the Left is because there is a huge ideological rift between the Democratic Party and progressives. DiAngelo incorrectly defines “progressives,” couching it into the term “White progressives,” which feels as though it is intentionally avoiding Martin Luther King Jr.’s naming of “the White moderate.”

Through subtleties like that, it becomes apparent that DiAngelo has a political ideology that is notoriously infantilizing and condescending towards people of color and is diametrically opposed to the politics of racial justice groups, which are typically Leftist in nature. The New York Times is a moderate outlet with a clear ideological bend, and it feels like no coincidence that this book was widely covered by the publication and then began increasing in sales. To be entirely fair, the New York Times and other more moderate outlets have praised Black literature and showcased it, helping to garner attention, but they can be problematic vessels.

One of the largest critiques of White moderates is that they are often incredibly complicit in systems of racism and inequality, but instead of addressing these issues head-on, they offer strong rhetoric that they do not practice nor seem to truly believe. This political divide is, despite popular belief, not a new one. Again, Martin Luther King Jr. criticized White moderates, and although DiAngelo often says the “correct” answer, her rhetoric is insidious in its insincerity.

Letting White Academics Set the Conversation

The fetishization of academia and intelligence that pervades a substantial wing of the Left and Liberals is often our own undoing—we are so impressed by the intellectual novelty of a topic we presume the argument is more substantive than it truly is. We view intelligence as authority, granting them implicit trust. While this instinct is a reasonable one, it is ultimately part of the problem.

When we offer academics a disproportionately large amount of credibility, we allow them to set the tone of the conversation. Perhaps this would be appropriate in the case of something like neurobiology or electrical engineering, but when discussing race issues, particularly the systemic kind, academia is hardly the authority. Colleges uphold and perpetuate systemic racism in complicated, nuanced ways, which is not the primary topic of this piece, but remains incredibly relevant. When considering how this book became so famous, one must consider the systems of power that allowed a White academic to set the narrative.

This critique is substantially reduced with Black academics and other nonwhite academics, but even then, the discourse can be divorced from material realities or become corroded by stewing in a context that is implicitly hostile towards antiracism.

Offering No Solutions—What was the Goal?

DiAngelo very conspicuously offers no solutions as to how to actually improve the material conditions of Black people. She only appears to encourage self-flagellation to absolve oneself of any accidental racism while engaging in said racism. Feeling guilty is centering your fragile white feelings, she insists, as she continues intentionally provoking guilt and centering the White experience. She paints the reader into a corner by taking the possibility of criticism off the table and gives them nothing but the recommendation they attend her pricey racial sensitivity seminars.

It comes across as being provocative for the sake of being provocative and really, the idea is a self-defeating one. The theory of White fragility is fundamentally unprovable because any critique of it is an apparent confirmation of itself. It does not encourage dialogue or move the needle—it simply alienates for the sake of establishing one’s own moral superiority.

At the end of the day, this is a book that reviews the same concepts over and over without offering any suggestions on how to help advance the liberation of nonwhite people. It doesn’t seem interested in endearing itself to the reader and is, in fact, openly hostile towards the reader, who is ostensibly trying to unlearn their racism. It is difficult to believe her goal is to convert the layman. She simply presents her narrow realm of corporate moderate ideology that abstracts our experiences with racism to make White people feel guilty and buy her books so she can profit off our pain while talking about us like cardboard cutouts.

If we are to assume the goal is self-education, there are far better books written by authors of color which we can and should be reading instead.

----------------------------------------------------

Recommended Reading

As Black Lives Matter is the focal point of this newsletter and the framing I had in mind when critiquing “White Fragility,” I am recommending specifically Black pieces. Many Black liberation writers are Leftists, which comes across in their writings, and I strongly believe we need to reclaim that space on the Left. We must be able to discuss our lived experiences without it being erased as being mere identity politics. A great first step is getting truly educated and building genuine empathy for Black people. Here are some of cornerstone pieces that are actually written by Black people, many of whom were/are Black academics and/or activists:

“Are Prisons Obsolete?” – Angela Davis

“The Fire Next Time” – James Baldwin

“Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism” – bell hooks

“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” – Malcolm X with Alex Haley

“Report from the Bahamas” – June Jordan

“When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir” – Patrisse Khan-Cullors

“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” – Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

“How to Be an Antiracist” – Ibram X. Kendi

“Between the World and Me” – Ta-Nehisi Coates

This doesn’t begin to scratch the surface and there are many pieces specifically on intersectionality, exploring queer Black identity, Black feminism, Black disability activism, capitalism’s effects on Black people, etc. At some point, we will hopefully explore some of these concepts in depth here.

#jay #essay #BLM #july 2020

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kvothbloodless · 7 years

Text

So I’m not sure if anyone is interested, but I wrote a feminist analysis of Cheery Littlebottom from Discworld.

@frei-rancken @thebibliosphere @wymanthewalrus

Throughout his hallmark series, Discworld, Terry Pratchett subverts traditional fantasy norms of misogyny by exploring and condemning these ideals in the narrative; this unyielding assault on the xenophobic tropes that characterize fantasy as a genre is even more impressive when one considers the fact that although Pratchett began writing the Discworld series in 1983, his early works still come across as progressive today. By analyzing the character Cheery and the ways her femininity and gendered performativity are delegitimized, I intend to examine the progressive themes that set Discworld apart from the traditional fantasy genre.

Despite its reputation as a liberal and diverse genre, mainstream fantasy has for years been extremely misogynistic in its content; the best-selling series A Song of Ice and Fire, considered by many to be the epitome of modern fantasy, utilizes the offensive, if common, fantasy trope of depicting sexual violence against women in order to make the narrative “darker” and “more realistic”. In her analysis of misogyny in fantasy, Tolmie notes that gender based oppression and violence is so common in fantasy as to be the rule, not the exception (Tolmie, 148). The existence and prevalence of these misogynistic tropes in fantasy is even more disturbing when one considers that fantasy is often the main genre read by children and teenagers; this near ubiquitous depiction of femininity as negative, weak, and violated in the primary source of literature for girls who are still forming their own identities and perceptions of the world was, and still is, a major critique of the genre as a whole. The need for more progressive works in fantasy was obvious, and Terry Pratchett decided to write them.

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series consists of 41 books published over the course of 32 years. Despite being considered a hallmark of the fantasy genre, and its origin three and a half decades ago, Discworld is filled cover to cover with progressive themes that mock and reject the misogyny common in fantasy. In addition to the prevalence of strong and diverse female characters, and a lack of sexual violence, Pratchett’s depiction and exploration of misogyny can best be seen in the character of Cheery Littlebottom, a dwarf who travels to the city of Ankh-Morpork to join the city watch. In Discworld, dwarves are traditionally seen as all male; they all have beards, they all carry weapons, and gender doesn’t exist. Female dwarves are expected to act and appear the same as male dwarves, to the point where female pronouns are taboo. As Cheery acclimates to the city’s more tolerant, or at least less oppressive, culture, she begins to reject the repressive ideologies of her society and expresses her femininity. By examining Cheery’s perspective on gender and identity, her experiences surrounding her gender expression, and the delegitimization and discrimination she faces as a result of her identity, one can see a unique perspective on gender and identity that remains in conversation with academic discussions on the same topic.

A moment perfectly in conversation with our readings appears in Feet of Clay, when Cheery first discusses her dissatisfaction with traditional gender presentation (Pratchett, 80). Similar to Serano’s point that cissexual characteristics are taken for granted and seen as natural, dwarven society doesn’t recognize the difference between male and female; male characteristics are taken for granted, seen as the norm, and deviation from this norm is punished (Serano, 161). Cheery’s situation provides an interesting analogue to Serano’s discussion of gendering and cissexual assumption; dwarves are automatically gendered as male, with the dismissal of their actual gender occurring through the same process as cissexual assumption (Serano, 164). Additionally, this automatic assumption that Cheery is male functions to erase her identity just like trans-erasure, making invisible both her identity and the identity of others like her (Serano, 188). This moment also provides an interesting angle to Butler’s discussion of what defines a woman; Cheery justifies her identity as a woman by stating her distaste for traditionally masculine activities, implying that she feels gender is, at least partially, something one does (Butler, 4). Furthermore, Butler’s statement that gender cannot be separated from the culture that produced it is clearly paralleled by Cheery’s conflation of traditionally masculine activities with being a dwarf; having been raised and indoctrinated in this culture, she is unable to separate her gender identity from her race. Her friend’s response to Cheery’s dissatisfaction with dwarven gender norms also illustrates Butler’s critique of the assumed universal misogyny; her human female friend points out that most human women, who are restricted to traditional gender activities, would prefer to do things the dwarven way, allowed to do anything the men do. Cheery argues that they can do only what the men do, and are thus equally repressed (Butler, 6). When this friend asks Cheery about the apparent contentment of dwarves back home, she responds that they are happy because they don’t know any different. The general isolation of dwarves and their indoctrination into conflating being a dwarf with being a man functions as Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser, 145). In a single page, Pratchett presents new perspectives on gendering, erasure, assumption, identity, oppression, and ideological indoctrination, clearly distinguishing Discworld from traditional fantasy.

Over the next few days, as she grows more comfortable in expressing herself, Cheery begins to wear more traditionally feminine attire, such as ear rings, lipstick, and mascara, resulting in confusion from her boss (Pratchett, 157, 163, 182). These moments are clear illustrations of performance and disidentification as discussed by Munoz; Cheery is publicly and aggressively performing her identity, while simultaneously disidentifying with traditional dwarven gender norms (Munoz, 92). This disidentification goes even further when her friend asks if Cheery is going to shave her beard, an obviously traditionally masculine feature; Cheery begins to disidentify with traditional feminine norms as well, refusing to shave her beard or remove her helmet, conflating these traits with being a dwarf, but not with gender. As discussed earlier, Cheery’s gender identity intersects heavily with her racial identity, but she is beginning to disidentify with the dwarven norm of these two identities being the same. As her gender performance becomes more obvious, she encounters a male adopted dwarf while wearing a skirt, and he delegitimizes her identity, erasing her gender and shaming her for her choices (Pratchett, 199-201). Once again paralleling Serano, he misgenders her, and erases her identity by calling Cheery ‘he’, and then claims she should have had the decency to keep her gender identity to herself, thus reproducing the ideological apparatuses described by Althusser. His delegitimization of Cheery is markedly similar to the delegitimization Truth describes in her speech; because she does not fit his view of a valid dwarf, she is lesser and shameful, not a true dwarf (Truth, 1). When she later encounters a group of dwarves, they again shame her, punishing the deviation from traditional norms (218-219). However, after the rest of the group leaves, one of its members stays behind, nervously asking to try Cheery’s lipstick. By visibly and actively disidentifying with traditional gender norms, and performing her identity publicly, she actually undermines the ideological apparatuses that repress dwarven women. By providing this representation to the other dwarf, Cheery gave her a sense of legitimacy. But perhaps the most striking example of disidentification occurs in The Fifth Elephant, when Cheery has become completely comfortable in her identity and its expression:

“‘Is that what you'll be wearing, Cherry?'

'Yes, sir.'

'But it's just … ordinary dwarf clothes. Trousers and everything.'

'Yes, sir.'

'But Sybil said you'd got a fetching little green number and a helmet with a feather in it.'

'Yes, sir.'

'You're free to wear whatever you want, you know that.'

'Yes, sir. And then I thought about Dee. And I watched the King when he was talking to you, and . . . well, I can wear what I like, sir. That's the point. I don't have to wear that dress and I shouldn't wear it just because other people don't want me to’” (Pratchett, 209).

Cheery has disidentified with both traditional dwarven gender norms and the performative norms she accepted to legitimize her identity. Although she continues to wear makeup and ear rings, she has accepted her identity as legitimate regardless of external perception, and thus performs her identity in a way that she wants. Over the course of several novels, Pratchett develops and explores themes of identity, disidentification, repression, gender performance, and acceptance, once again clearly separating himself from traditional fantasy.

Throughout his novels, Terry Pratchett provides a unique perspective on discussing gender identity; Cheery’s character is a focal point around which themes and situations worthy of academic discussion occur regularly. In spite of its age and genre, Discworld clearly deviates from traditional fantasy norms of misogyny, instead discussing and refuting these themes for over 30 years.

Works Cited

1. Tolmie, Jane. "Medievalism and the fantasy heroine." Journal of Gender Studies 15.2 (2006): 145-158.

2. Pratchett, Terry. Feet of Clay. Gollancz, 1996. Web.

3. Pratchett, Terry. The Fifth Elephant. Doubleday, 1999. Web.

4. Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2007. Web.

5. Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. 1971. Web.

6. Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I a Woman?” Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio, 28-29. May 1851.

7. Butler, Judith P. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Web.

8. Muñoz, José Esteban. “‘The White to Be Angry’: Vaginal Davis's Terrorist Drag.” Social Text, no. 52/53, 1997, pp. 81–103. Web.

#discworld #cheery littlebottom #feet of clay #the fifth elephant #Terry Pratchett #feminism

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judedoyle · 7 years

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Basics

A lot of debate, in the past year or so, has come down to putting a label on people’s politics. So-and-so is A Liberal; thus-and-thus is A Leftist, or A Socialist. Mostly, this serves as a reason to dismiss somebody, whether or not they’re right — you would say that, you’re a liberal, or well, that’s just purity politics talking. But, as a feminist, it’s also my job to at least try to have solidarity with women who disagree with me. In the process of trying that, I realized I’d really never tried to write down a coherent description of my politics before. I’d called myself a “socialist” until maybe 2015, found myself called a “centrist” from 2015 through 2017, took a bunch of stupid political-compass tests where I always wound up on the same square as Jill Stein and/or anarchists (pretty far left, all the way at the bottom toward the “anti-authoritarian” end, to answer your burning question) and still really had no idea how to communicate where I stood or why I stood there in discussions with other women.

Here, just because I imagine the question will come up again, is an attempt at a description of my politics — economic, identity-wise, role-of-Nazi-punching-wise, what have you. It’s not much, but as women increasingly have more good-faith arguments on the direction of our movements (which is lovely; I would rather do that than hear some man explain Why Identitarianism Is Ruining The Left any day of the week) it might give some grounds for an assessment of what I’m saying and why I’m saying it. I mean, assuming an “assessment” is the point, and not a Twitter fight — my optimism is boundless, I guess.

1) The center point of my political engagement, the thing everything else revolves around, is feminism — ending misogyny and default male power in America. I don’t think it’s inherently superior to any other locus; your activism could center queerness, black lives, economic inequality, and be just as meaningful, if not more so. But I choose feminism, because feminism chose me. By the time I left elementary school, I had seen two instances of near-fatal domestic violence within my immediate family. In one of them, a woman was shot in the spine and left paralyzed for life. I knew about other cases where women’s boyfriends or husbands controlled what they ate, or “accidentally” killed their pets. I knew two girls who had been raped by my sophomore year of high school, and that count only increased once I got to college. And, of course, I experienced my own share of violence. Basically, by the time I was sixteen, I knew I lived in a world that violently hated women — that hated us enough to kill us, and that did kill us more often than anyone wanted to admit. I have spent the rest of my life figuring out what to do about that. It’s what I care about, and I admittedly care about it more than anything else, including my own self-interest at times. You’re free to choose your focus. This is mine.

2) There is no useful feminism without intersectionality. In fact, feminism, arguably more than any other cause, is bound to intersectionality, just because every single group in the world has women in it. This makes it practically impossible to craft a universally true statement about “women,” or to issue a blanket call for “women’s solidarity.” Women will probably always have opposing interests, or disagreements, and (as long as we live in an oppressive society) some women will always be able to oppress or exploit other women. I’m pretty obviously a flawed vehicle for intersectional feminism, given that I’m white, and straight, and cisgender. So I try to stay educated about the interests and experiences of other women, to reflect on those in anything I write as best I can, and to keep those women in mind before assuming my own experience is universal. I try to fight for the interests of all marginalized groups — or at least to support fighters, where I’m not qualified to speak up myself — because all of that is essential to supporting women as a whole.

2a) One place where you might disagree with me: I do believe that even extremely privileged women experience misogyny. Misogyny is a structural factor that impacts women because they are women, and for no other reason; I also believe that misogyny alone can ruin or kill a woman, even if she has everything going for her. So I don’t necessarily view even very privileged women as “enemies” — any woman can, potentially, be enlisted to the cause — and I try to frame any criticism in a way that steers clear of misogynist tropes.

2b) Another place for good-faith disagreement: I believe that getting women and other marginalized people into positions of power has real, positive impact on its own. Of course, you have to take into account what those women believe — no-one is saying Sarah Palin or Ivanka Trump are feminist sheroes — but if a woman is reasonably progressive, she represents a concrete improvement over the white man who currently occupies that position. There are different value levels to this: Getting women into government is far more important than getting women into corporations. But giving women higher-paying jobs matters, too. Sexism, like everything else, is economic; the reason women face economic discrimination is the same reason that over 90% of all abusive relationships involve financial abuse, which is that patriarchy wants to instill dependence in women. Patriarchy wants to make it impossible for a woman to survive without a man’s patronage and approval, and thereby render those women passive, submissive, and (this is important) unable to resist violence or walk away, because they cannot survive outside of the relationship. Ideally, all women would have equal access to resources. In the meantime, women should be supported in building bases of economic power within the world we have.

3) And, speaking of economics: I believe that American socialism is the goal, but that it’s not exactly a short-term goal. Which is to say: Everything I’ve read suggests that structural and identity-based oppressions are in fact improved under socialism, because the marginalized have that base of economic power from which to resist their oppressors. And, in America, class is deeply tied to identity; poverty is reliably caused by bigotry, and fighting poverty therefore fights bigotry. Yet I’m skeptical about getting there quickly, and don’t think any of us should live as if “the revolution” is going to happen tomorrow, or in five years, or in ten. The nation that elected Reagan in a landslide within my lifetime, the nation that made George W. Bush a two-term President, the nation that recently elected Donald Trump, does not seem like a nation that’s going to turn into Scandinavia (or even Canada) before I turn 40. I think we are more likely to get there via a gradual leftward culture shift, and pragmatic policies aimed at increasing the social safety net in specific ways (like the FAMILY Act or Obamacare) than we are through one huge victory or grand deluge that changes everything.

4) And, speaking of the deluge: I would prefer my activism to remain as non-violent as possible for as long as possible. Yes, I know the state is violent — more violent than any black bloc or riot could be — and I know that intolerable conditions inevitably generate violence. Still, my activism has its roots in resisting violence, and in witnessing violence, so I can’t romanticize physical force easily. I think violence tends to generate chaos and harm as many innocent people as it helps, and I can’t participate gladly in hurting or killing people.

4a) I do, however, make a distinction between violence and self-defense. Edward Crawford is not “being violent” in this picture — he is throwing a weapon that was intended to harm him back to his attackers, sparing himself from their violence. A woman who speaks up about being raped, harassed or abused is not “being violent” if that man loses his job or goes to jail, nor is she “being violent” if, in a one-on-one confrontation, she fires a warning shot into the ceiling; she needs to get the abuser or harasser away from her, to stop him, and if he will not respond to requests, she will have to use force. Taking Milo’s check mark or book deal away is not an act of aggression. Nobody reasonable has a problem with Nazi-punching. I believe that the oppressed must sometimes use force to limit or contain the oppressor’s violence, basically. Where that fits into the greater picture of limiting or containing state violence, or of “revolution,” I don’t know, except that I don’t want to shoot people.

5) Because those most impacted by economic oppression are women, people of color, and other marginalized folks, any leftist movement should be led by women, people of color, and other marginalized folks. In many cases, like Black Lives Matter (which is largely led by women, including queer women) this is already the case. But if I look at a group of “leftists,” I should see mostly women — or, at least, 51% of the attendees should be women. The reasons for this are practical, not ideological. For example, I recently saw a leftist say they supported the “Norwegian model” for abortion. Norway limits abortion at thirteen weeks. This is before any substantive genetic testing to ensure the viability of the fetus can be done (even the most expensive cell-free fetal DNA testing, which is normally done at around ten weeks, would take a while to return results) let alone before the 20-week test when many fetal abnormalities are first detected. It’s eight weeks earlier than Donald Trump’s proposed 20-week limit, which is already barbaric. Norwegian women & trans people can theoretically get an abortion at up to 22 weeks (still only two more weeks than a ban endorsed by Donald Trump, for fucksakes) but they need the government’s permission, and doctors are allowed to flat-out refuse at any point in the pregnancy for reasons of “conscience” — not exactly “pro-choice.” This is a socialist paradise, and their abortion laws are worse than America’s. There are other instances of this, like the racism of the New Deal, which have been rehashed endlessly. In short: The reason for leadership by oppressed people is that, if your socialism or leftism doesn’t specifically take their concerns into account, it will end up specifically leaving them out.

6) There are also a lot of old-school, probably “liberal” values I hold dear: I think people have a god-given right to disagree with each other, or with The Movement. I ultimately believe in democracy, no matter how frustrating it gets. I believe that it must always be safe to note that the Emperor has no clothes — and it doesn’t matter who this week’s Emperor is, or how “progressive” he claims to be. Hate speech and abusive speech needs to be checked, but “unity” isn’t a positive goal if it means you’re not allowed to make your own choices or say what you think.

7) But she voted for Hillary Clinton! Yes, I did. I grade a candidate on gender politics first (see Item #1) and didn’t much like those of her opponents. I also just like her, as a woman, for reasons I’ve gone on about before. But Hillary Clinton lost four months ago, and won’t run again, so she’s really not the most important part of my work to anyone except people who hate Hillary Clinton. More generally, I believe that voting for mainstream, left-of-center candidates in a general election is not incompatible with further-left activism. I think the two are interdependent. You vote for the candidate who has a chance of winning (which means taking into account all Democrats, not just your own stripe or social group), who will preserve gains rather than rolling them back, and who will be at least somewhat responsive to leftward pressure. Then you apply the pressure through protesting, marching, striking, and creating media and culture change. Some people understandably harbor anger toward those politicians (my husband is intense about Obama and drone strikes, for example) but I mostly don’t — they work in a system designed to limit them, and it’s our job to alter that system. Electing Clinton, or Obama, or whoever, isn’t the end goal of progressive politics. It’s the beginning, setting an acceptable battlefield in the ongoing work of activism — which belongs, not to our elected officials, but to us, and which will not end within our lifetimes.

Well, those are the basics. I imagine there are a thousand points I’ve left unaddressed. But this is the core of what I believe, so that we can argue about that, rather than someone else’s fevered imagination about what I believe, the next time we talk.

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newstfionline · 7 years

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Has Political Correctness Gone off the Rails in America?

By Philipp Oehmke, Der Spiegel, Jan. 5, 2017

It’s a Friday afternoon in Oberlin, Ohio, around one month before the country heads to the polls to elect Donald Trump as its next president. The final classes and lectures of the week have just ended, and a young woman comes walking by in bare feet with a hula hoop gyrating around her waist while others are performing what seems to be a rhythmic dance to the African music that’s playing. Two black students are rapping.

It’s the kind of scene that could easily play out on a beach full of backpack tourists, but this is unfolding at one of the country’s most expensive universities.

Many female students here have dyed their hair green or blue, they have piercings and their fashion sense seems inspired by “Girls” creator and millennial star Lena Dunham, who, of course, also studied here.

In such a setting, it seems almost inconceivable that this country could go on to elect Donald Trump as its president only a few weeks later. Yet pro-Trump country is just a few miles away. Oberlin is located in Ohio, one of the swing states that made Trump’s election possible. Drive five miles down College Road toward town, and you start seeing blue “Trump Pence 2016” signs on people’s lawns.

Places like Oberlin are the breeding grounds of the leftist elite Trump’s people spoke so disparagingly of during the election campaign.

Only a few months earlier, a handful of students claimed they had been traumatized after someone used chalk to scrawl “Trump 2016” on the walls of buildings and on sidewalks at Oberlin and at other liberal universities. It triggered protests on some campuses, with students demanding “safe spaces” where they would be spared from hearing or seeing the name of this “fascist, racist candidate.”

In the months prior to the election, “safe spaces” had been one of the most widely discussed terms at Oberlin. The concept has its roots in feminism and describes a physically and intellectually sheltered space that protects one from potentially insulting, injurious or traumatizing ideas or comments--a place, in short, that protects one from the world. When conservative philosopher and feminism critic Christina Hoff Sommers was scheduled to give a speech at Oberlin last year, some students did not approve and claimed that Sommer’s views on feminism represented “microaggressions.”

When Sommers appeared anyway, leading some Oberlin students to create a “safe space” during the speech where, as one professor reported, “New Age music” was played to calm their nerves and ease their trauma. They could also “get massages and console themselves with stuffed animals.”

“Microaggressions” are the conceptual cousins of “safe spaces”--small remarks perceived by the victims to be objectionable. In addition, there are also “trigger warnings”--brief indicators placed before a text, image, film or work of art alerting the viewer or listener of the possibility that it could “trigger” memories of a traumatic experience or the recurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder. Such a warning surely makes sense for people who have experienced war, who have fled their home country or who have otherwise been exposed to cruelty and violence.

But at Oberlin, one student complained to the university administration and requested a trigger warning for Sophocles’ “Antigone.” The student argued that the suicide scene in the play had triggered strong emotions in him and that he, as someone who had himself long been on suicide watch, should have been warned. In an article he wrote for the Oberlin Review, the student, Cyrus Eosphoros, compared a trigger warning to the list of ingredients on food items. “People should have the right to know and consent to what they’re putting into their minds,” he wrote. Eosphoros has since dropped out of the school.

The call for safe spaces and trigger warnings in addition to complaints about microaggressions all fall under the term “political correctness” in the United States.

Few other expressions are as ideologically charged and contested as this one. It is most widely used as an invective: Coming from the mouths of the right-wing, including Donald Trump and his millions of followers, the term is used to describe self-censorship. They consider it an expression of a victim culture, within which the hypersensitive “leftist mainstream” (also used as an epithet) seeks to isolate itself from every deviation from its own worldview. Opponents of political correctness consider it to be an overwrought fixation on the needs of minorities and one’s individual identity, on skin color and gender.

Now, two months after the election, those looking for clues as to how Trump’s victory became possible quickly arrive at the refusal of many Trump detractors--including members of Hillary Clinton’s own campaign team--to confront the uncomfortable fact that there are legions of Trump fans all across the country. It’s almost as if, in the face of Trump, liberal America collectively retreated to a “safe space.” And when they finally resurfaced after the election, Trump had won.

There was a time when political correctness wasn’t yet synonymous with hypersensitivity, feel-good oases or censorship. Originally, it was associated with the counterculture, not as a project of the academic elite and the establishment as it is today. Initially, it was an attempt to free the public debate from prejudices based on race, gender and background--from the apparently casual yet hate-filled and disparaging comments that frequently caused suffering, particularly among minorities and the weaker members of society. It was intended as an effort to get the voices of these minorities heard in the first place.

One of the primary assumptions of political correctness is that thinking starts with language. Those who use disparaging language must think that way as well. Another assumption is that of constant progress. That people evolve over time, that discrimination and inequality diminish over the centuries, from the elimination of slavery to women’s suffrage to same-sex marriage and the growing acceptance of transgender people. Progress was seen as the integration of the formerly suppressed and of minorities. At least in theory.

In the last decade, however, the obsession with minorities and their victimhood may have gone overboard. In a much-discussed opinion piece for the New York Times last month, Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University, argued that American liberalism in recent years has been seized by hysteria regarding race, gender and sexual identity. Lilla says it was a strategic error on the part of Hillary Clinton to focus her campaign so heavily on African-Americans, Latinos, the LGBT community and women. “The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups,” he wrote.

Even as the white working class and lower class flocked to Trump in droves, students at Oberlin were busy organizing a protest against the food served at the Afrikan Heritage House. A few students had pointed out that the dishes there were at most Westernized interpretations of the original recipes, a state of affairs which showed a lack of respect toward African traditions. This offense, too, has a term: “cultural appropriation.”

Meanwhile, Asian students complained that the cafeteria served bánh mì using inauthentic ingredients, prompting accusations of cultural imperialism.

The college took the complaints seriously, as it does with all grievances lodged by students. It has a reputation to protect--and must also protect itself from the lawsuits that many of its students’ parents can easily afford.

The cafeteria had to issue a public apology. But it shouldn’t have been only the Vietnamese students who felt insulted--it should have been everyone. After all, another term often used at Oberlin is “allyship.” The theory basically goes like this: Someone who has spent his life as a heterosexual white male will never be able to understand how an incorrectly-made sandwich could trigger a trauma. Nor would he ever truly be able to comprehend the systemic microaggressions that a black woman might be exposed to. But he could make himself her “ally,” by taking her experiences seriously and accepting them at face value, whether or not he is able to comprehend them personally.

For some professors, it has gone too far. One of those is Roger Copeland. On a recent Friday afternoon, he made his way to the Slow Train Café, the only place at Oberlin where everybody meets up during the day--professors, students and activists. He has come to talk about everything he believes has destroyed his profession. He has recently accepted an early-retirement severance package and will be leaving the school in a few weeks. Professor Copeland has taught for over 40 years at Oberlin. He is a theater professor and he looks the part. He arrives wearing a Hawaiian shirt and speaks, even in normal discussion, as if he were reciting Shakespeare from the stage.

Copeland himself took to the streets in protest in the 1970s: against the Vietnam War, against Watergate--the big things. On two occasions, he was arrested.

Today, though, it’s personal pronouns that his students are squabbling over and Copeland has little understanding. He says students no longer want to be addressed as “he” or “she,” but as “X” or “they” or newly created personal pronouns. At Oberlin, terms like “Latina” or “Latino” for people with Central or South American backgrounds have been replaced with the gender-neutral “Latinx.”

Two years ago, Copeland asked a young student who was editing a video during rehearsals for a stage production if she would manage to finish editing the footage by the end of the week. He didn’t get the immediate response and things were hectic. “Yes or no?” he called out in his exalted way. “Yes or no?”

The student, who Copeland says is an Asian-American lesbian woman, stormed out of the rehearsal, not that uncommon of an occurrence in theater. Later, the dean ordered Copeland to his office and accused him of having berated a student and of creating a “hostile and unsafe learning environment.” There was that term again: “unsafe learning environment.” The dean handed him a document and asked him to sign it. Copeland refused and provided the names of others who had been present and who could attest that he hadn’t berated the student. The dean said it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the “student felt unsafe.”

The matter led to a formal Title IX investigation for sexual misconduct. Copeland hired a lawyer and the probe was dropped after a year. The whole thing cost Copeland thousands of dollars. Worse yet, he says, he lost his ideological compass.

What was going on? Where, if not here, did young men and women have the opportunity to mature into citizens, into people who could also confront unpleasant views?

Copeland self-identifies as a leftist. He’s a man who has fought for social justice, for the rights of the weak, for freedom and for free speech. Now students were dismissing him as some old, reactionary grandpa who knew nothing about the vulnerabilities created by identity, skin color and gender, whether it be male, female, gay, lesbian or transgender, the full spectrum of LGBTQ, as people call it today--or “cisgender.”

Cisgender is a relatively new word and Copeland only recently became aware of it. He also learned that it is often used as an insult. It describes pretty much to a “T” what he is: a white, heterosexual man who is certain that he doesn’t want to be a woman and isn’t even a little bit bi-sexual.

Copeland isn’t the only victim. Across the country, “social justice warriors,” as they are disparagingly called, are leaving a trail of destruction in their wake, attacking professors, artists, authors and even DJs along the way.

At a bar at the University of North Carolina, a student named Liz Hawryluk complained to the DJ on a Saturday night in 2014 when he played Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” The song was a major summer hit, played at nightclubs around the world, but Hawryluk demanded the DJ immediately stop playing it.

The song includes the line, “Good girl? I know you want it.” Allegedly words a rapist would speak.

When the DJ refused and the girl continued insisting, she was asked to leave the bar. She then wrote about her experience on Facebook, arguing that line in the song is a “trigger” for victims of sexual assault that can reawaken their trauma. After her post got shared a number of times, the bar publicly apologized and fired the DJ.

In 2015, feminist film researcher Laura Kipnis, a professor at Chicago’s Northwestern University, became the subject of an investigation after she published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education about sexual paranoia in academia. The subject of the article had been a new ban on sex or relationships between students and professors at the university. Kipnis also criticized what she described as obsessive discussion among female students about traumas and sensitivity. She described it as a fallback to traditional behavioral patterns--the vulnerable woman, the helpless victim and the man as the perpetrator.

But the supposedly defenseless female students struck back--first on Facebook and later in the form of a protest. Two students then lodged a complaint against Kipnis for alleged sexual misconduct, arguing that Kipnis’ essay had a “chilling effect” on female students who wanted to file sexual harassment complaints. Kipnis had to hire a lawyer and the charges were dropped after a 72-day investigation. In a later article, she described the proceedings as an absurd drama reminiscent of a Kafka novel.

Roger Copeland spent a long time contemplating where these vulnerabilities and sensitivities might have come from. “The relationship my students have with the world is constantly mediated. They only have access to it through their iPhone screens and through the social networks they have joined. What we would call the virtual is the real for them.”

It’s only when they are in the lecture halls, when someone like Copeland is speaking to them, that this filtered reality is suddenly suspended. This suspension can evoke a defensive reaction in those who are only used to receiving select news from a politically correct world in which everything has been furnished with warning labels and freed of any microaggressions. Internet activist Eli Pariser calls the serving of information to users using algorithms that predict what they think the reader will want to see the “filter bubble.”

Socio-cultural advancement has become something of a fetish for many students--and many have lost sight of everything else in the process.

Professor Marc Blecher, who teaches political science at Oberlin and enjoys lecturing on Marxism, had warned at a meeting one month prior to the election, likewise at the Slow Train Café, that the millennial students of today’s generation may talk a lot about social transformation, but they have lost sight of one truly decisive issue: class.

With their focus on skin color, gender and sexual orientation and the microaggressions associated with them, he argued, students were overlooking what Trump was able to recognize: Most people in the United States aren’t unhappy or angry because of their gender, their personal pronoun or the lack of a trigger warning in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (due to misogyny). They’re angry because they aren’t able to pay their rents, and they have the feeling that nobody cares--that the liberal-progressive public is more concerned about whether the bathrooms used by transsexuals should be those of their biological or perceived gender. Shouldn’t the discussion be about the fight for wealth redistribution rather than definitions and identities?

Sidestepping such issues often underscores just how helpless many of these students have become, Blecher says. Still, he doesn’t want to create any misunderstandings. “They are not spoiled sons and daughters. Oberlin’s brand is social progressivism. The school wants to admit students from financially weaker families, students from Hispanic or African-American families, some are kids from the streets. Some have spent the last five years trying to get in and then their guidance counselor at high school gets them into a place like Oberlin. They were the most promising students we could find. And you know what? They arrive here and it is hell for them!”

Academic expectations are high, which he says makes the students feel like they don’t belong here--and, in a way, they don’t. “At its core, Oberlin is a highly exclusive place that wants to be inclusive. It’s an unavoidable contradiction. So some lash out.” And how do they do that? They look for a discourse, for a language. What they find is language like “microaggressions,” “safe space” and “intersectionality,” meaning the traits that some minorities have in common. “Their frustration keeps growing to the point that they start attacking the food in the cafeteria!”

The interesting thing, says Blecher, is that the students’ feelings of outrage are correct--they are just misplaced. “What’s really keeping them down are class dynamics and racial segregation. But we don’t talk about that.”

In places where microaggressions lurk and trigger warnings become necessary, certain things can simply no longer be discussed. The children of the 1968 student protest generation took for granted the freedoms that their parents fought to obtain, holding them to be self-evident. The grandchildren of the 1968 generation now want to retract some of those freedoms. Free speech--once the highest achievement the leftist student generation had fought for--is now largely and paradoxically being invoked by populists and the right-wing.

When Donald Trump calls Mexicans who cross the borders rapists, when he cracks jokes about women, and when, at gatherings in his honor, people lift their arms in Hitler greetings and fans of his top adviser Steve Bannon tweet “Sieg Heil”--that all falls under “freedom of speech.”

The roles have been completely reversed. Whereas today’s leftist student movement is willing to sacrifice the freedom of speech--fought for by their political predecessors--on the altar of trigger warnings and “safe spaces,” this right is now being defended by the very same right-wing whose political antecedents sought to prevent it back in the day.

This new right can be seen every day on Fox News. The cable network interprets freedom of speech to mean the right to insult. And that freedom of expression also provides a license to spread untruths. That’s also a problem with Trump’s new America: One part of the population is growing increasingly sensitive and no longer wants to read “Antigone,” while the other is growing increasingly brazen, calling Mexicans rapists and seeing all Muslims as terrorists. In Donald Trump, they will soon have a president who emboldens them.

Their narrative holds that they would love to say what is actually on their minds, but the “social justice warriors,” the guardians of political correctness, led by the “liberal media,” won’t let them. They too feel they are victims--at least they act like it, complaining that you can’t say anything in this country anymore. Indeed, they feel much as the leftist students did in the early 1960s. The only difference being that there really were things that you couldn’t say back then.

On the day after the vote, Oberlin College held a symposium called, “Making Sense of the 2016 Election.” A few days later, 2,400 students, staff and former employees called for Oberlin to be made a “Sanctuary Campus,” a kind of “safe space” for the illegal immigrants that the incoming Trump administration has said it wants to deport.

A few days after that, news of the vote breakdown in Oberlin came in: 4,575 votes for Hillary Clinton against 412 for Donald Trump. They now want to find those Trump voters. And confront them.

#political correctness #Oberlin College #microagression #Democratic politics #2016 presidential campaign #liberals #conservatives #US politics

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We cannot share in the Great Commission that Jesus assigned every Christian without effectively communicating with others. (Matt. 24:14; 28:19, 20; Acts 1:8) If an intimate family of husband and wife, father and children, mother and children, struggle to communicate with each other, how are we to be expected to communicate well with strangers?

We must empathize with the people whom we are trying to evangelize. Individuals live busy lives, and then they face people trying to sell them things, people trying to get their vote, people trying to debate and argue ideologies, people trying to do them harm, and the list continues. This can force most people to shut out the noise by not talking with strangers. The good thing is we as Christians can communicate a message to strangers even before we say one word. How? We send a nonverbal sign to others just by being different in our appearance, conduct, or behavior. If we were to go to a very big mall [1] and sit watching people for a few hours, would we be able to pick out the Christians in the crowd? Therefore, before we say one word, we communicate by displaying a humble, unassuming personal appearance.

In addition, to communicate effectively, we must not be anxious or appear worried. If we are anxious, then the stranger we approach will be apprehensive. If we display a sense of calm and ease, he will more likely listen to us. What makes us less anxious? The Apostle Peter said that we must “always to be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope.” (1 Pet. 3:15) Certainly, a well-prepared person is going to be less nervous than someone not prepared. We will draw people to the Good News when they sense this peace of mind that dwells in us.

Communication is a two-way street. If someone tends to dominate a conversation, others will not want to listen to us and may leave. Christ followers need to learn how to be better listeners. If we ask a question, the other person must have their opportunity to speak, not be overcome by one’s zeal of sharing our message.[2] Moreover, we must demonstrate evidence that we are listening by looking the other person in the eyes and nodding your head in agreement. You can also ask to clarify questions that dig deeper based on what the person said. Obviously, we go out to talk to others, and we have planned the things that we want to discuss. However, those whom we speak with may have things they want to talk about, so we must be flexible.

One of the most difficult adjustments that must be made is one’s attitude. If one views himself as superior in any way, the other person will notice it. Christianity is the truth and the way, but one cannot be dogmatic in his or her expressions. Moreover, one will talk to liberal Christians,[3] who must be witnessed to just as any unbeliever because they must be led back to the flock. Therefore, suppose one witnesses to a liberal Christian, who is repeatedly making comments that are unbiblical. Correct his unbiblical view, but one ought to not go on a rampage of one correction after another. If this is the first time one speaks to him, overlook correcting him now. Build a rapport and establish a comfort level by finding common ground if possible. Yes, this may require a measure of self-control, as well as skillful tact. When you meet a second time, choose a topic that you know he raised the first time, and see if you can get him to reason on that one matter. If the other person jumps from subject to subject, it would be best to confine it to one area, but do that with discernment and sensitivity.

Reason With Them from the Scriptures

Again, do not sound dogmatic in communicating, but instead, reason with them from the Scriptures, just as Paul did on many occasions. In fact, it says, “As was his custom,” meaning that Paul regularly went to the “synagogue of the Jews,” to reason with them from the Scriptures, trying to convert them to Christianity. (Acts 17:2, 17; 18:19) To do this, one must be well prepared, which is exactly what any believer must do when one faces liberal or progressive Christians or others who have fallen away because of doubt. (Jude 1:3, 22-23) As one sees much wickedness in the world today, the pain, the suffering, and death have caused many to doubt the very existence of God.[4]

God has tolerated evil, sickness, pain, suffering, and death until today to resolve the issues Satan raises. People become self-centered in thinking that this has only pained us. Imagine that one holds a rope on a sinking ship that 20 other men, women, and children are clinging to when your child loses her grip and falls into the ocean. Either hold the rope, saving 20 people, or let go of the rope and attempt to rescue your child. God has been watching the suffering of billions from the day of Adam’s and Eve’s sin. Moreover, it has been his great love for us, which causes him to cling to the rope that saves us from a future of the same issues.

Nevertheless, he will not allow this evil to remain forever. He has set a fixed time when he will end this wicked system of Satan’s rule. (Eccles. 3:1-8) Galatians 4:4 says, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman.” However, this was over 4,000 years after he had made the promise to do just that. (Gen. 3:15) Similarly, it has been 2,000 years since God’s Word has made the promise to end pain, suffering, and death. When the fullness of time comes, he will do that. One can take the person back to the beginning, and establish that it was man, who willfully entered human beings into this world of imperfection, and the issues raised, offering illustrations why those must be settled first, reasoning from the Scriptures.

What It Takes for Effective Communication

Matthew 11:28-30 Updated American Standard Version (UASV)

Jesus’ Yoke Is Refreshing

28 “Come to me, all you who are laboring and loaded down, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy,[5] and my burden is light.”

Yes, if we are going to be an effective communicator, we must learn from Jesus. What do we learn from Jesus? First, Jesus is “gentle,” which is the English for the Greek word praus that is found “three times in Matthew and once in 1 Peter … means ‘gentle, humble, considerate, meek in the older favorable sense’ (BAGD).”[6] In what sense was Jesus, “lowly in heart”?[7] With his knowledge and understanding, as the Son of God, he could have taught in Jewish schools, having some of the greatest Jewish minds as students. He could have taught the Jewish teachers themselves if he so desired.

However, Jesus chose to teach the lowliest of the Jewish world, from the seaside, fishermen. He lived and taught among the poor and the low in social position. It is a privilege to pattern ourselves after such a teacher as he was. This humility and lowliness of heart qualified him as the greatest teacher ever so it will qualify us, as we are taught by him, to be teachers of others. When we are lowly in heart, following in the footsteps of Jesus, we too will refresh others. A teacher who is gentle, humble, considerate, meek, will appeal to both the low and high in social standing. As those with a receptive heart found Jesus refreshing, this will be the case with us as well.

In Acts 20:19, it says that the Apostle Paul served the Lord “with all humility,” with “humble-mindedness” or “humility of mind.” The Greek (tapeinophrosune) literally reads “lowliness of mind.”[8] It is derived from the words tapeinos, which means to “make low,” “lowly, “humble” and phren, “the mind.” Paul told the Philippians that they were to “do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility [“lowliness of mind”] count others more significant than yourselves.” (Phil. 2:3-4) Paul also told the Corinthians, “Let no one seek his own good but the good of the other.” (1 Cor. 10:24) This quality of “lowliness of mind” will stop us from assuming a superior attitude or tone when we speak to others about God’s Word.

Additionally, if you want to be effective in your communication, one must follow Paul’s counsel found at Colossians 4:6,

Colossians 4:6 Updated American Standard Version (UASV)

6 Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.

Yes, this is the reason that anyone has purchased The Evangelism Handbook, to “study how best to talk with each person you meet.” Certainly, patience and tact, which is skillfully expressing oneself when another person’s feelings are involved, are two qualities that establish effective communication. When one communicates with others, one’s words must be in good taste. Good speech will keep lines of communication open, but unwise, foolish, and careless comments will close those lines of communication.

A prepared person will not be anxious but will be relaxed, which will have a calming effect on their listener, too. But allow the listener to do most of the talking, to get at the heart of their thinking. One can never adjust another’s thinking because one does not know what is going through their mind. For example, someone could make a comment, and one could choose a phrase and give several minutes of feedback, which proves to be irrelevant to what the person meant. It would have been better to ask, “What do you mean by …?” Once the person explains themselves, then we can offer our thoughts.

Loving Communication

The characteristics of being gentle, humble, considerate, meek, modest, lowliness of mind, tactfulness and patience make the qualities of a good communicator. When a person also has selfless love, he or she becomes a great communicator.

Matthew 9:36 Updated American Standard Version (UASV)

36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and scattered, like sheep without a shepherd.

Mark 6:34 Updated American Standard Version (UASV)

34 When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. And he began to teach them many things.

“Harassed is from a verb meaning to trouble, distress. Scattered is from a verb meaning to throw down. The past tense used here implies the thoroughness of their oppression and its persistent effect on the people. These people were completely and perpetually discouraged.”[9] The Jewish religious leaders of Jesus’ day did next to nothing in offering enough to make common people feel pleased or content in their spiritual hunger. Rather, they made their lives even more burdensome with all of their rules and regulations that they tacked on to the Mosaic Law. (Matt. 12:1, 2; 15:1-9; 23:4, 23) The religious leaders revealed their true heart condition when they said about those listening to Jesus, “this crowd who does not know the law is accursed!” (John 7:49) Jesus’ selfless love moved him to “find rest for their souls,” getting on the road to life. Today, we have a message that is filled with love as well, and believers must offer love to people in a selfless way, too.

1 Thessalonians 2:7-8 Updated American Standard Version (UASV)

7 But we became gentle[10] in the midst of you, as a nursing mother tenderly care for[11] her own children. 8 So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were well-pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God but also our own souls,[12] because you became beloved to us.

2:7. Instead, Paul and Silas chose to be gentle. There is no tenderness quite like a mother’s, and Paul dared to identify with maternal love and care. Greek writers used the term gentleness to describe those who dealt patiently and with a mild manner toward those who were difficult—obstinate children, unmanageable students, those who had not reached maturity and were experiencing the inconsistencies and struggles of development. Whatever difficulties the Thessalonians may have presented, Paul and Silas recognized that these new Christians were not yet “grown up.” So rather than dealing with these people in an authoritarian manner, they chose to be patient—like a mother.

It is a great lesson for the church today, because we have not always been patient with new or young believers. Sometimes we have cut a mold and demanded that they fit it—now. Instead of this approach, we need to see each individual’s need for help and encouragement as he or she struggles to conform to the image of Christ.

2:8. Here is a classic understanding of biblical love. To Paul, love is always a verb, it is doing. Feelings may accompany love, but they do not define it. Instead, the commitment of acting in the best interest of another opens the way for feelings: We loved you so much that we were delighted to share … our lives.

It is easier to teach theology than to love, easier to share lists than time. Paul gave not only the message of the gospel, but the example of it as well. He spent time. He shared joys and headaches. Parents and teachers, coaches and mentors, pastors and leaders know what it means to give part of their heart away to others. Love is not just a job. It is a way of life.

But note that Paul did share the gospel of God. He was balanced. He gave his life and love. He gave content as well. It is not enough to visit people in the hospital or prison, or to show compassion to the poor or those new in the faith. Somewhere, carefully and candidly, they must also hear the truth of the cross and what it means to trust and follow Christ.

Arguing whether the church should meet people’s physical needs or whether it should limit itself to preaching the gospel is like debating which wing of an airplane is more important. Both are essential![13]

The Apostle Paul started numerous congregations, one right after the other, from Antioch of Syria, throughout Asia, into Macedonia, down through Greece and Achaia. What made Paul such an effective evangelist? Was it his zeal for spreading the Good News? Yes! The above says that Paul was “affectionately desirous” of the new Thessalonian congregation. “Here is a classic understanding of biblical love. To Paul, love is always a verb, it is doing. Feelings may accompany love, but they do not define it. Instead, the commitment to acting in the best interest of another opens the way for feelings: We loved you so much that we were delighted to share … our lives.”[14] The love Paul had for God and his neighbor made him a successful evangelist.

If our message is repeatedly rejected, is this a sign of poor communication skills? It could be, but keep in mind; most are going to reject the Christian message. The majority of the world will not be converted to true Christianity by the time of Christ’s second coming. In addition, when we consider Christianity as a whole, most are false. We are only after a select few, which are actually many when we consider there are seven billion in the world. Believers must be in search for those that are open and true, modest, and seeking. Have you done your best to be an effective communicator of God’s Word, when any opportunity presents itself? If you answered yes, and people still have rejected the message, they are not rejecting you, but they are rejecting God. If you answered no, then there is work to do.

Review Questions

Why must we be emphatic to the people whom we evangelize? What does the Apostle Peter exhort us to do, which will help us overcome the anxiety of witnessing to others? How is communication a two-way street? How do you address repeated comments that are unbiblical?

Why is it important that we improve our reasoning skills from the Scriptures?

How was Jesus lowly in heart?

How did Paul serve the Lord? Expound on the Greek behind the English translation.

What does it mean to “study how best to talk with each person you meet?” How can we get a correct understanding of what the other person means?

How did Jesus, as a teacher, as a disciple maker differ from the religious leaders of his day?

What made Paul such an effective evangelist? Why may we not be at fault, if many reject our message?

[1] A mall is a large enclosed building complex containing stores, restaurants, and other businesses and facilities serving the general public.

[2] However, people can get off the subject at hand, and begin jumping from one topic to the next. If this proves the case, do not overtake the conversation; just lovingly guide them back on topic.

[3] Christian liberalism is based on a departure from the traditional tenets of biblical Christianity. Often, liberalism within Christian groups begins with a denial of the absolute reliability and historical accuracy of the Word of God. Hindson, Ed (2008-05-01). The Popular Encyclopedia of Apologetics (Kindle Locations 11793-11795). Harvest House Publishers. Kindle Edition.

[4] http://www.christianpublishers.org/suffering-evil-why-god

[5] I.e. easy to bear

[6] Leon Morris, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Leicester, England: W.B. Eerdmans; Inter-Varsity Press, 1992).

[7] The heart ([kardia]) is the core and center of man’s being, the mainspring of dispositions as well as of feelings and thoughts. It is the very hub of the wheel of man’s existence, the center from which all the spokes radiate (Prov. 4:23; cf. 1 Sam. 16:7). All of this also applies to Christ’s human nature.―William Hendriksen and Simon J. Kistemaker, vol. 9, Exposition of the Gospel According to Matthew, New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1953-2001).

[8] W. E. Vine, Merrill F. Unger and William White, Jr., vol. 2, Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, 314 (Nashville, TN: T. Nelson, 1996).

[9] Stuart K. Weber, vol. 1, Matthew, Holman New Testament Commentary, 130 (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2000).

[10] Some MSS read babes

[11] Or cherishes

[12] Or lives

[13] Knute Larson, I & II Thessalonians, I & II Timothy, Titus, Philemon, vol. 9, Holman New Testament Commentary (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2000), 23–24.

[14] Knute Larson, vol. 9, I & II Thessalonians, I & II Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Holman New Testament Commentary, 24 (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2000).

Becoming a Better Apologetic Evangelistic Communicator We cannot share in the Great Commission that Jesus assigned every Christian without effectively communicating with others.

#Apologetics #Christian Apologetics #Christian Evangelism #Evangelism #Preevangelism #The Work of an Evangelist

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