basically emotional manipulation and guilt tripping as social justice praxis is pointless and not sustainable imo. it doesn’t promote real growth or solidarity if the entire basis of your activism is stemming from guilt or fear
it’s also worth pointing out that it turns “social justice” into something uncomfortably like religion. it establishes patterns of behavior that you’re expected to follow, not necessarily because you understand them or agree with them, but because you are afraid of the consequences if you don’t. it turns communities of “activists” into self-aggrandizing moralistic pissing contests, where the pecking order is defined by who knows more of the rules, and who is more willing to enforce them on others (usually, by any means necessary). it encourages ideological purity and discourages debate, discussion, education, and subsequent individual and community growth.
“So when I found activist culture, with its powerful ideas about privilege and oppression and its simmering, explosive rage, I was intoxicated. I thought that I could purge my self-hatred with that fiery rhetoric and create the family I wanted so much with the bond that comes from shared trauma.
Social justice was a set of rules that could finally put the world into an order that made sense to me. If I could only use all the right language, do enough direct action, be critical enough of the systems around me, then I could finally be a good person.
All around me, it felt like my activist community was doing the same thing – throwing ourselves into “the revolution,” exhausting ourselves and burning out, watching each other for oppressive thoughts and behavior and calling each other on it vociferously.Occasionally – rarely – folks were driven out of community for being “fucked up.” More often, though, attempts to hold people accountable through call-outs and exclusion just exploded into huge online flame wars and IRL drama that left deep rifts in community for years. Only the most vulnerable – folks without large friend groups and social stability – were excluded permanently.
Like my blood family, my activist family was re-enacting the trauma that we had experienced at the hands of an oppressive society. Just as my father once held open the door to our house and demanded that I leave because he didn’t know how to reconcile his love for me with my gender identity, we denounced each other and burned bridges because we didn’t know how reconcile our social ideals with the fact that our loved ones don’t always live up to them.
I believe that sometimes we did this [..] in part so that we could focus on the failings of others and avoid examining the complicity with oppression, the capacity to abuse, that exists within us all.
And I believe we did it in part because sometimes it’s impossible to imagine any other way: We live in a disposability culture – a society based on consumption, fear, and destruction – where we’re taught that the only way to respond when people hurt us is to hurt them back or get rid of them.
weird and horrible how as soon as a girl turns 18 she loses any protection from being taken advantage of… 17 and a half is a child but just turned 18 is fair game for male sexual predators
the fact that men think an 18 year old girl has all the wisdom and capabilities of an adult woman is bad, but it’s particularly barf-worthy to realize that they don’t actually think 18 is the line between a girl and a woman. it’s only the law that says that. men think a girl is ready to become a woman and do things women do as soon as she “looks” like a woman or begins to imitate women. male sexuality is inherently wack and we are failing girls by exposing them to it.
when jeff goldblum understands makeup criticisms better than anyone i’ve ever seen defending makeup in the name of self empowerment all in a stupid over/under interview
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms)was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905.
The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.
“[Four-year-olds’ can even classify different shapes, textures, and emotions (like angular, rough, and anger) as male and female. This is why the triangle-headed creatures from outer space mentioned earlier were categorized as male–all those angles. Indeed, so powerful are these metaphorical gender cues that five-year-old children will confidently declare that a spiky brown tea set and an angry-looking baby doll dressed in rough black clothing are for boys, while a smiling yellow truck adorned with hearts and a yellow hammer strewn with ribbons are for girls. This is truly remarkable, when you think about it. Heaven knows, I’ve heard enough parents openly labeling certain toys, activities, behaviors, and personality traits as being for boys or girls. In one month alone, I heard people referring to coloring in a dinosaur, playing soccer, being noisy, and wanting to press elevator buttons as boy things. But you don’t often hear a parent exclaiming, ‘No, no, Jane! Angles are for boys, not girls. Take the curved one.’ Yet even before they reach school, children can go well beyond the surface of gender associations and make inferences about nothing less than male and female inner nature itself. They also seem to learn, uncomfortably young, that females are ‘other.’ When Barbara David asked four- and five-year-old children to choose items that would show a martian what human beings were like, the girls chose a mix of female and male objects (such as guns and dolls), whereas the boys chose almost only male items.”
The myth that panic, looting, and antisocial behavior increases during the apocalypse (or apocalyptic-like scenarios) is in fact a myth—and has been solidly disproved by multiple scientific studies. The National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program, a research group within the United States Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), has produced research that shows over and over again that “disaster victims are assisted first by others in the immediate vicinity and surrounding area and only later by official public safety personnel […] The spontaneous provision of assistance is facilitated by the fact that when crises occur, they take place in the context of ongoing community life and daily routines—that is, they affect not isolated individuals but rather people who are embedded in networks of social relationships.” (Facing Hazards and Disasters: Understanding Human Dimensions, National Academy of Sciences, 2006). Humans do not, under the pressure of an emergency, socially collapse. Rather, they seem to display higher levels of social cohesion, despite what media or government agents might expect…or portray on TV. Humans, after the apocalypse, band together in collectives to help one another—and they do this spontaneously. Disaster response workers call it ‘spontaneous prosocial helping behavior’, and it saves lives.
I’ve been sharing this article a lot recently! I think it’s important
I intended to help someone, but it turns out the thing I did kills people. The only moral option is … Doubling down and killing more people.
It all boils down to the different moral foundations people use. For progressives, care, equality and “freedom to” are the main building blocks for deciding whether something is just and moral.
- Does it harm people? - Does it result in inequality? - Does it prevent people from engaging in society?
As long as the proposed idea (behaviour, policy) clears those two hurdles, it’s good to go for progressives.This type of thinking is super compatible with consequentialism.
For conservatives, there are more foundations to consider - authority, loyalty, fairness, purity and “liberty from”.
- Does it violate established social hierarchy? (in this approach, hierarchy is good and beneficial). - Does it damage in-group bonds? (again, strong in-group loyalties are considered to be good). - Does it fail to reward contributors and punish wrong-doers? (this is a big one - fairness is about just desserts and consequences for actions, not equality). - Does it breach the sanctity of the body? (this is a complex one, rooted in cultural notions of disgust and body as a temple). - Does it force people to engage in actions they disagree with? (this is the freedom from taxation, PC, and so on).
Libertarians pretty much care only about Liberty from things, usually the government.
This complex set of values means that the same idea or policy will get different moral evaluations. Let’s take a few examples:
Legalising weed: all fine in terms of the progressive foundations. But it breaches purity (the body is a temple) and to an extent interacts with conservative version of fairness by removing a punishment on what they consider to be morally wrong behaviour.
Universal healthcare: again, all clear in progressive values. This policy will help. But in the conservative value set, the policy fails at fairness by ‘rewarding’ non-contributing behaviour (poverty and illness). Let’s not get into a debate over how this is even classified as behaviour rather than a condition. It also breaches freedom from for people who are mostly focused on being free from government, rather than private insurers. The interesting caveat is that purity should favour healthcare - if the body is sacred, we should as a society value accessible ways to keep it healthy and clean. However, because many health conditions have contributing behavioural factors, it can be considered unjust to help people out of the consequences of their actions - even at a net loss to society.
If anyone is interested, Jonathan Haidt writes a lot about the moral foundations, and while he’s often annoyingly centrist in how he presents the ideas, the research is pretty solid.
