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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
I have the same complaints within Republican ranks or within the Environmental-Eco-Warming communities.
I'm a "mix-n-match" ideologue, whereas everything is presented as a choice of Everything-A or Everything-B.
-PCU
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/03/a-…
Bullshit. American liberalism is just as much an anti-individual rights doctrine as conservatism.
Liberals, especially extreme Seattle liberals, are just as bad as conservatives about running people's lives. It's just a matter of what part of our lives they want to run.
Give me an option to opt-out of Social Security (which won't be there when I'm ready to retire anyway) my rights to use a plastic bag without fear of arrest and stop trying to take my gun, and you may have a point.
White dudes who want to stop people from complaining about their violence or hatred = lovers of freedom.
"Liberal" is just a specific type of "white male supremacist". When people are fighting for the right to continue to hurt you, they no longer have any relevance or right to be listened to.
@15 is sadly correct, and it's depressing because I think Goldberg's investigative work on the extreme religionist right is quality stuff.
That would require a book.
http://bitterandcurt.tumblr.com/post/624…
"Social justice warrior" is another word for women, racial minorities, queers and others disenfranchised by people in control. We all flocked to Tumblr because it's the only mostly-safe large space on the Internet. You don't get the direct harassment and violence from other sites.
We're just talking on tumblr, and because we're complaining about being hurt by people in power (almost always white dudes), you dismiss us and label us "social justice warriors". We're not talking about anything new, it's just now we have a relatively safe space where we can connect en masse and people in power can actually see what we're talking about now.
Dismissing "social justice warriors" is just dismissing the experiences of everyone who isn't the standard-issue white dude. Another term for that is "white male supremacy".
>"Social justice warrior" is another word for women, racial minorities, queers and others disenfranchised by people in control.
>Dismissing "social justice warriors" is just dismissing the experiences of everyone who isn't the standard-issue white dude. Another term for that is "white male supremacy".
No, please do continue to fuck off.
>but white dudes as a group certainly don't read or listen to what other types of people say.
If you're building your worldview around "X huge category of people can automatically be written off" you're being pretty fucking dense.
So social justice warriors on tumblr just criticize everyone all day long, but at the same time don't criticize anything. OOK.
If you had any experience with any part of the community, you'd realize there's plenty of criticism, more than probably any other large forum on the Internet. Even that post I linked to is full of criticism. The only difference is that white dudes with power don't control the entire conversation and dismiss just about everyone else, unlike TV, talk radio, Reddit, Slog, congress, etc. Criticism usually comes in the form of actual communication, instead of a downvote, a "fuck off", dismissal, or a slur. Eg, not something white dudes in power are willing to do.
- establishment, std. issue, privileged white male.
@34 - many of us are quite well aware and recall extremely well that libelous attack on genuine criticism - that would be criticism of content not style, on the merits not delivery. That's why it's extremely disturbing to see so many giving legitimacy to what were false charges - suddenly it's making those conservatives look prescient. Or maybe that is your point.
You appear to be confusing liberal with libertarian. Good god.
even the idiots?
People in power attacking unprivileged groups = oppressive, violent, hateful.
Oppressed people attacking people in power for being oppressive = just, transformative, equitable.
When people in power attack unprivileged people it literally impoverishes them and destroys many of their lives.
When unprivileged people attack people in power the most it can possibly do, if they are entirely successful, is make the people in power equal human beings.
How much pigment do you need to have a "get out of bigotry jail card"? Is Beyoncé dark enough? What about Michael Jackson? He was rich, privileged and eventually wasn't dark at all? If you're going to spout this there needs to be a color wheel for acceptable racism. We need to know which races we can generalize without violating any speech codes.
Would Colbert & other comedians make jokes out of racial slurs if he felt any kind of equivalent? Would administration put a statue of a mindless naked man in a women's college if men felt an equivalent threatening image? Would white men backlash against trigger warnings if most of them felt any kind of trigger themselves?
I'd love for empathy to happen on its own, but it's clearly not.
Yes.
There's no such thing as a "just world" if you authorize yourself an ideological gatekeeper who knows a person's experiences and politics just based on the category the gatekeeper assigns to/at them.
You allow yourself no room to be wrong, no room to grow toward someone from your out-group whom you may have misjudged, no room to draw away from someone in your in-group whom you should have judged, and no room to consider that "oppression" isn't so simply experienced, let alone countered. You're advancing a cartoonish world where only white men are evil/misguided/clueless and everyone else are victims in need of "safe spaces," as though "safe spaces" mean shit at voting booths, or when applying for mortgages, or when the police show up after you've smoked some pot, or what sentence you get after being arrested for that pot...
This presumption that "If we just tell white men how awful they are until they 1. shut up and 2. beg forgiveness" is an academic fiction, a conceit, that has no efficacy in real world politics. I assure you, the Koch brothers know exactly what kind of power they wield in this world and they do so without apology. In the meantime, we fight about the artistic interpretation of a naked male statue as though this means something in a world where female genital mutilation is but a cultural practice.
The arguments that consume this faction of the left are, in themselves, an indictment of "the privileged" in how asinine, pointless, intellectually lazy, and politically self-damaging they are.
To put it more simply: I am a queer woman. I do NOT find that statue offensive. So, clearly, I am self-hating. Or I've internalized my oppression. Or I just am not aware yet because I'm blinded by my white privilege. Or I'm not in a "Safe Space" so I"m not able to speak freely...
.. how about I just fucking disagree with you? Or am I not allowed that within your Oppression Rubric?
The Wellesley statue thing is very clear-cut whether you're offended by it or not. Lots of people who are actually there are saying that it's hurting them. People who want to keep it there don't care that it's hurting them and won't accept even a small change.
That's the whole point of this post. People (usually not white men) who say "you're hurting me" and people in power (usually white men) say "I don't care" and won't even make the smallest change because they believe hurting people is somehow noble ("freedom").
@44 - maybe I was too delicate before: I read "social justice warriors" on tumblr because they are unintentionaly funny self-parodies. I watch Colbert because he is intentionally parodying the same type of idiocy.
All the meta-crap gets tiresome - Derrida gets tiresome. You want to criticize something, do it on the merits, on substance don't play word games policing vocabulary.
--Atticus Finch
Or that by people I criticized I meant only people of color. Didn't say that either. Have you ever tried teaching a class on racism with a few self-declared "white allies" in the room?
You did EXACTLY what I was complaining about: my whiteness is the only thing you had to go on instead of engaging with the substantive points I raised.
The vast majority of elected officials, talk show hosts, news reporters, movie stars & makers, and business owners are white men. There's no mass-media counter to Colbert making racial slur jokes except on tumblr/twitter. There's no resourceful counter to Seattle journalists interviewing fellow white men about how increased wages would hurt them. We've only had one woman mayor of Seattle, and that was a hundred years ago.
The reason for that is that white men (as a group) don't listen to anyone but themselves unless they've decided to use someone for a strategic reason like Obama (and still, Romney won the white guy vote by a 25% margin). They don't vote for them, they don't read what they say, they don't watch them on TV. Other people (as a group) do listen to white men, which is how they so easily gain a majority of support despite only being 33% of the US population.
If white men continue to demonize and ignore other people, while everyone else is OK with this and continues to submit to them, we'll continue to have only white men in power who listen to white mens' concerns.
We, as a culture, can't influence white men's culture if they refuse to listen to us. We can, however, influence our own culture to stop submitting to white men. We're 67% of the US population, and if we vote and listen to and buy from people like us, we'd solve the political power differential immediately.
Your "substantive" points are basically telling people who are being hurt to fuck off. That's bullshit. The only reason why you're not being laughed out of the room is because liberal white folks are bristling at the idea that their worldview is being challenged, sometimes forcefully, and have rallied around noted famous folks like Savage and Goldberg who dare to speak power to truth, who provide cover for those who think that we magically live in an equal and just world and don't want those angry people affronting their "decent" sensibilities.
And the solution is so fucking simple that it's almost terrifying why there's such a backlash against it. People just need to listen, be open to criticism, roll with the punches sometimes, and proceed on from there. It's not that fucking hard.
I'm missing something.
http://fascinasiansblog.com/post/8160144…
Enjoy, Raku.
Errybody fucked this one up. But this "anti-liberal left" horseshit sounds to me like a privileged person saying, "Stop bitching, oppressed classes! Being responsible about my speech and aware of the effects of my words is inconvenient for me!"
... that you're completely full of shit.
Want some irony? My dissertation was a critical analysis of white liberal racism!!! Try again, honey!
She was writing against cyberbullying and harassment against activists. That's obviously a serious issue, but has nothing to do with the article you posted about valuing hurtful speech. It bolsters the point that some "free speech" is harmful -- whether it's harassment or racial slurs or triggering or whatnot.
And, regardless, you clearly know that saying "I have an Asian friend who agrees with me" or "I have a gay friend who agrees with me" is a garbage argument. Everyone has different experiences.
Again, the point is that when someone says "you're hurting me" -- LISTEN TO THEM especially when they ask you to do the smallest possible thing like to stop using racial slurs or to stop making rape jokes without warning.
"You only see it this way because you're white; you're silencing those who are suffering."
"Well, this person isn't white and he/she agrees with me."
"Oh, so now you have 'an Asian friend' as cover? Please just listen."
Why is it so hard to concede that these traps will lose people, and not just white people, who are genuine progressives and not racists, whether conscious or otherwise? You're advancing a tacit rule of forced deference, thus denying the possibility of genuine disagreement or debate. Not all disagreements are psychological dodges.
The reason why the Colbert shakeup and the statue are poor examples of the self-masking of white/gender privilege is because **reasonable people can disagree about them.** When you turn every incident, no matter the context or the debate, into, "You just cannot handle having your privilege challenged so you have to silence all suffering of people of color," YOU'VE LOST THE ARGUMENT because you're not being intellectually honest. I cannot speak for everyone here, but I think it's quite unfair to characterize this forum as a bunch of unthinking blowhards who just cannot hear the truth.
The SCOTUS decision this week? The gutting of the Voting Rights Act? The incarceration of an entire generation of men of color for minor drug offenses? GOP gerrymandering and Voter ID laws? The disproportionate loss of wealth by people of color after the 2008 crash? Disparate rates of unemployment after the 2008 crash? The increasingly successful turning back of affirmative action? The attacks on the social safety net? The collapse of public education (vouchers are token racial covers, not progress)?
Are you really gonna tell me that Colbert doing the satire he's always done is more important? That every microaggression ever experienced anywhere is grounds for this kind of endless cycles of outrage-a-thons? Yes, microagressions are very real and very common--but no one is going to effectively build a movement around them.
If someone says you're hurting them, just stop or accept that you're being a hurtful/oppressive person, especially if it's something as simple as using racial slurs or rape jokes. You seriously think that's something reasonable people can disagree about? You're fighting for the right to feel good about ignoring people's complaints about oppression.
Give me a break about there being bigger issues. Might as well give up abortion rights, gay marriage, and suffrage, since there's still genocide. People can do things simultaneously.
Criticism of cultural oppression (race, gender, ability, etc) are clearly building a movement. Check tumblrs with hundreds of thousands of followers, extremely popular black/latinx/native/feminist/trans/queer blogs, even mainstream sites like Jezebel. Even Colbert's anti-Asian joke was supposed to be satire of an issue that bubbled up from Native cultural criticism blogs. We're deep in the 3rd wave now.
Your posts are hurting me. Stop it.
Because dealing with real problems means dealing with other people in a place where your online minions can't chase them away, and you might actually have to deal with being wrong.
If you want things to change, get out there and work for it. Don't spend all your time on your blogs with your internert buddies parroting the things you want to hear.
I mean yes you shouldn't be an asshole to people. Especially about things like their sexuality, what gender they identify as, their race, or how their physical appearance isn't to your liking.
But at the same time learning to cope with disappointment is an important trait for people to have.
You are going to get your feelings hurt, things aren't always going to go your way, and sometimes you won't get what you want. But I think real maturity is doing the best with what you've got even when the situation is less than ideal.
And too often what 'you're hurting me' really mean is 'you're not agreeing with me, giving me what I want, pumping up my ego'.
Raku, remember this - self expression feels good, but only accomplishing change means anything. Please be sure to assess everything you write, whether here, on tumblr, or anywhere else, through that lens if your goal is to make a difference.
Besides, exposure to both real conversational exchange and rhetoric of various sorts is healthy. Free exchange of ideas and all that being a tenet of both classical and American liberalism, one might expect those who claim to support liberal ideals to welcome the addition of even shrill new voices. The trick is to do rhat while being engaged, open, thoughtful, and not letting oneself get pushed around. One might say, I'm glad you're here, but I disagree with you and your approach for these reasons. Let's talk.
Raku might be confrontational and strident, but she's no Seattleblues. She's not openly advocating for the oppression of minority groups the way he does. In fact, just the opposite, she's challenging most of you to dig a little deeper.
And the reaction of most of you (presumably) liberal white folk - including you, Dan - is to pile on, misappropriate her words, and dump all over her instead of trying to understand what she's saying or engage with honest intent. Cuz she's a "troll," right? Her points are so easy to dismiss and ignore, since she's clearly a "young white [woman] desperately trying to make [herself] feel special by being offended by everything and ignoring real problems."
Hey, way to erase all of the POC who consider themselves social justice warriors, msanonymous.
I haven't seen her post anything offensive enough to warrant the vitriol you people throw her way. In fact, she raises salient points - that oppressed groups should be the ones who define what constitutes offensive language and actions towards them. Not the people using the offensive language, not Stephen Colbert, and definitely not Dan Savage -- even if they call themselves allies.
Man, I was considering moving up to Seattle from the Bay Area, but if Slog commenters are representative of the community, that's enough to make me reconsider. Y'all a bunch of progressive poseurs, a stereotype of overprivileged white liberals who are just "open-minded" enough to take a conservative stereotype like Seattleblues out to the woodshed on every thread, but not enough to listen to someone to the left of your side when she points out to you that you're all showing your asses.
Raku, I feel ya, girl. This is clearly not the place to discuss intersectionality, though. Peace, Slog, I don't need you. And Dan? I thought you were a better ally than this. I'm disappointed in you.
If/when raku can get over her simplistic, racist and sexist myopia, I'll be happy to engage. But as long she continues to approach melanin-challenged penis-havers, like myself, with ears closed and knives out, she is merely a hypocrite who is more of an enemy to what she thinks she supports than those she dismisses.
She's already made it clear that what she wants is attention and asspats, not any sort of discussion or debate where she might have to acknowledge being wrong.
And what is she doing off-line to support her causes? Is she working at soup kitchens? Volunteering? Giving blood? Is she helping in anyway besides ranting on Tumblr?
Sarah Silverman makes a great point in one of her bits that people modify their language/behaviour according to who they are scared of, rather than any deeper principle. This is why Colbert could comfortably make the joke about 'ching-chongs' and not about 'nig-nogs'. Suey Park may have misstepped by calling for cancellation over it, but it's amazing how this misstep among a couple of others is being escalated over and over again into a discrediting of online dissent, while the point that some Asians could be genuinely bothered over the satirical use of the slur, and have a right to say so, is taken as preposterous.