By David Futrelle
Sorry I’ve been AWOL for a couple of days; I’ve been taking care of some personal stuff (nothing dramatic, just very time-consuming). But there’s so much going on in the world I thought I’d put up an open thread.
Talk about Trump’s shittiness, the shutdown, the dueling Fyre Festival documentaries, the blizzard here in the US, or maybe those snot-nosed racist high school students harassing Native American elder Nathan Phillips, a veteran conducting a ceremony to honor the war dead in DC
On that last point, here are some videos; watch only if you are ready to be enraged. The students, from a Catholic high school, were in DC for the “March for Life,” evidently ran into Phillips by chance, and decided to harass him for being Native American, I guess.
On a somewhat lighter note, there was the whole Ben Shapiro/Baby Hitler thing. Here are several , er, enhanced versions of his remarks at the March for Life on the classic time-travel quandary — “would you kill Hitler when he was a baby?”
Despite Ben’s qualms about killing baby Hitler, he doesn’t actually give a shit about babies and other civilians from enemy countries killed in wars.
In other news:
Speaking of crappy food:
Valentin You wrote cis white gay men have a habit of..(doing a particularly crappy thing). Not Many white cis have that habit. Not white gay men often have that habit. No, just white gay men as a group….and it’s habitual, meaning we can’t help but be that way.
@Hexum7
I’m sorry if it hurts when you’re called out on your privilege, but no one is required to give a fuck how you feel about it. Also, don’t say “transgendered” and if you don’t know why fucking look it up.
What? I never said it’s “habitual” or that “we can’t help it” don’t twist my words.
I said that the privilage of whiteness makes people behave ignorantly. Gay cis men are marginalised for their sexuality but they have the privilage of being cis and being white – which means they are not immune from behaving ignorantly and harmful.
Don’t twist my words to look like I am saying something unreasonable.
Edit disappeared – and I wrote gay men specifically becuase of your comment to cyborgette about why she mentioned white queer people so I gave an example of white queer people who can behave harmfully. Simple! ?
There was no assumption involved, that’s what you’ve been doing this whole fucling thread.
Kupo. Sorry auto spell error .
Are we playing oppression Olympics now? Punching up,at privileged people? It must be nice to feel self-righteous that way
.
Nope, I did nothing like she described. You can raise or lower the gaslights all you want, but that just ain’t factual.
No, I didn’t miss the adjective – it is an adjective that describes a group,p …a group of oppressed people. so replacing that group with any statement women or Jews is analogous.
I may have the privilege of being white, but I also have the privilege of knowing that there a strong chance that I may be physically attacked wallowing at night. Or that I will be looked down upon as lesser than anyone else who is white. Is my privilege really all that all-encompassing? This sounds weirdly similar to,the attitude of TERFS towards transgenders that this blog discussed a few days ago.
I really have nothing more than this to say about this
Are cis gay men not human?
If you prick us, do,we not get pricked?
If you act like assholes, will you not get told to fuck off?
Dallilama.
That’s what you decided I was doing
Hexum7,
just because you belong to some marginalised groups and identity does not protect you from behaving in harmful ways. this is not opression Olympics, and by trying to claim that you are derailing. being queer means you will be marginalised, but being white means you have some privillages and privilage means there will be some ignorance in your veiw which means you can behave harmfully even when you don’t mean to.
And also marginalised people can also behave harmfully towards marginalised people in their same group too! Your identity doesn’t give you excuses to say or do harmful things.
@Hexum7
I said:
You said:
White people are oppressed?!?!?!
I also think it’s absurd that you seem to think people here are implying cis gay men are not human. It is because we know that white cis gay men and everyone else is human that we are holding you accountable for your harmful words and ideas. If we truly believed that cis white gay men are helpless and are all harmful and all say horrible things we will simply say “oh just another white cis gay man doing what they all do”. but instead we ask you to look critically at your veiw of the world and understand how your privillages, as well as disadvantages, make that veiw.
Everyone here belongs to marginalised groups; at least one, but that is not something that means they will be ever protected from critisism for harmful actions and words.
your privilage is not “all encompassing” but it is still powerful and it is not cancelled by your disadvantages and marginalised identities.
Also stop calling trans people “transgendereds” that is basically a slur. And considering you are trying to tell us we are behaving like Terfs, try not to talk like one yourself.
And it’s “If you prick us, do we not bleed,” and you have a hell of a lot of nerve applying that quote to yourself.
Kupo: white QUEER people are oppressed. Duh
Were those goal posts heavy?
strange becuase I think you should be able to answer about the weight of goal posts… Since you are the one shifting them away from the adjective of “white” which is what we are talking about, not queer. White people are not opressed. White queer people are not opressed for their whiteness. but they might behave harmfully becuase of the privilage it gives them.
Caution here. You’re thinking in terms of narratives. This is a way of thinking that is comfortable and easy, but it’s very, very easy to be misled by your own drives when you do it.
Think in terms of truth and compassion instead. Maximize those things.
There’s tragically not really any book I’ve seen that is much good at that. You can’t clear away prejudices that you’re not aware of, after all, so you need to learn how to discover your own prejudices first. This is a difficult thing.
I can try to help, though.
My advice, at the moment? You’re on tilt. I.e., your pinball board isn’t flat and it’s skewing your thinking.
I think this is the case because of your mis-typing. You used the term “transgenders” to refer to trans people, twice; the second time in the same post as your apology for the first. I think that’s a sincere mistake on your part – I don’t think you’re transphobic – but it does suggest that you’re not really reading what you’re writing.
Slow down. Think about your responses. Read them carefully before hitting send. And, as above, place truth and compassion above questioning or seeking to displace a narrative.
Valentin – , “transgendered” was another attack of the auto spell- I spelled it transgender the other time I used it.
I dont think here thinks gay cis men are inhuman. That was a joke- I was paraphrasing from the Merchant of Venice- Shakespere: i was being high fallutin as my grandmother used to say, but for hopefully humorous effect. So, there’s that.
So, for the record, I acknowledge that I have some privileges that others don’t share, and that can leave me with blind spots.
I could go on about other ways I am disadvantaged, but that would be just self-indulgent right now
And, yes, I’ve been involved in some activist groups, so I’ve seen first hand how some white gay men can be ignorant of how others perceive the world- and I’ve seen them criticized for it ( not first hand, lol)
The only thing that bugged me was being lumped in with a negative stereotype. And that being used as if it were anything but an ad hominem attack. I think you can guess why that ruffles my fur.
Extended version of video linked to by weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee above is here:
https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/dont-doubt-what-you-saw-with-your-own-eyes-1831931203
Scildfreja “Truth and compassion” I agree.
It’s difficult to live in that perpetually, but I’ll try to shift focus to that.
You are right, I do press send far to quickly. Especially when I feel attacked. Was called a vile piece of shit and habitually ignorant among other slurs today. I got ready for a fight- A father who beat me regularly… knee jerk defensiveness- Though, as kupo pointed out that no one is required to care about my feelings. But I felt like a pariah here, and I’m used to that treatment, too.
I appreciate your taking a kinder approach
You were being called out on your behavior.
That’s not what an ad hominem is. “Your argument is invalid because you’re [insert characteristic]” would be an ad hominem. Your behavior being called out is not an ad hominem.
Because you don’t like having a mirror held up?
Hippo: agreed. I do have a hell of a nerve.
ildi’s link isn’t working for me. For those who have the same problem, try this one.
Hexum – I went back and re-read your post suggesting that the Interwebs had blown this event all out of proportion.
If your intent was *not* to suggest very broadly that the redhats were being unfairly stigmatized for their behavior, you failed. It read very much as if you were suggesting that very thing. I believe that the negative commentary subsequent to your post was inspired directly by that.
As a cis white gay man myself, I can verify that hideously regressive attitudes can be easily found among us.
Kilo. Yeah, no . I didn’t do what cyborgette accused me of, which was letting white people off the hook for antisemetism or homophobia. Not even implicitly
That was exactly what she accused me of doing, (“a sterling example of (that) example of ) not being ignorant of how privileged I am. That charge had nothing whatsoever with anything that I wrote, then, or after.
I know you feel perturbed that I questioned what happened, but I swept no antisemitism under the rug
In my opinion that was an ad hominem attack, because in saying that is the kind of person i am, everything I wrote on this subject is tainted . At least that was how I interpreted it .
I think Cyborette and some others might have confused things I wrote with some other posters who took a similar tact. I did not let the boys off the hook for any of their actions. I said they were racist and disrepectful assholes – but antisemitism and homophobia? Where did that come from?
Because I didn’t mention that the kids were homophobic and Antisemetic when I said I am disturbed by the black Israelis homophobia? That’s a stretch, but maybe to be clear, that I wasn’t sweeping white folks’ bigotries under the rug.I should have, but that’s the only thing I can imagine she was getting at
Yeah, you did, and everyone here interpreted it that way, and Scild explained why your words came off that way, so I’m not sure why you’re still trying to say you didn’t do that. You did that. Own it.
Robert- to be clear, I only meant the people in the Internet who were sending death threats to the kid and entire school and campaigning to have him never get into college, up to the people who didn’t call those trolls on it. That was what I was questioning as an overblown reaction I ought to have spelled that out, and I should have emphasized that I didn’t mean anyone on this thread, or anyone who criticized the behavior. I did so myself in that same post, I believe
I guess that sounds like back-peddling. Those were really the reactions really I was questioning, though.
In retrospect, it was kind of a dumb thought, as most people would agree that such reactions are over the top, so it didn’t even need to be said. I was trying to work things out in my head at the time.
Now someone will probably accuse me of being a fascist for thinking those reactions overblown.