I want to talk real quick about something really important to me:
When you have something important to say on the internet that you care about, you will be most successful at changing people’s minds if you take care to state your ideas in an understanding, non-aggressive, and non-accusing manner.
There has been a conversation a while back about how people of color should not need to be “nice” and “polite” when they are resisting being dehumanized and abused. This is true and I 100% agree with it.
However, it seems like some people have taken from that a principle that “if you really care about the truth, you should be willing to accept it even if the person saying it is not ‘nice’ or polite” and applied it to everything.
This is not good.
Emotional discomfort at being nice to someone who disagrees with you on a topic you are very emotionally invested in is not the same as the dehumanizing and demeaning experience of being “nice” in response to oppression and prejudice from people who think your life and the lives of people you love don’t have value.
What I’m saying is, if you are talking about why spiders are important to the ecosystem, why cats should be kept inside, or why public transportation is a good idea, it will not hurt you to be patient and kind.
You may not feel like the person arguing with you deserves kindness. You may not think that being kind will help them get their stubborn opinion unstuck. But not only is understanding and patience much, much more persuasive, it makes people comfortable enough to ask questions. If they don’t ask questions they will never get past their misconceptions.
People that would otherwise say “huh, I didn’t think about it like that but now I see what you mean” get defensive when people present new ideas to them like an attack.
I have done it. You have done it. When someone on the internet is making what feels like nasty, rude accusations about you, demeaning you for not knowing a piece of information, or haughtily proclaiming how Right and Correct they are, your instinct is to get defensive.
So put your ego up on a high shelf and show grace and kindness to people who are ignorant. This is just how persuasion works.
The indoor cats debate is the biggest and worst example of this I’ve seen recently.
People feel like they have to defend themselves when they are called an animal abuser that doesn’t care about their pets. Most people love their pets a lot, and most people think of “animal abuser” as an unspeakably evil category of people.
I get defensive about the indoor cats thing, because I had outdoor cats as a kid and bad things happened to many of them, and I used to feel incredible guilt about that even though I couldn’t have done anythingbecauseI was a kid.
The main things that people are actually getting stuck on with the concept of indoor cats are:
they grew up with outdoor cats, everyone around them growing up considered keeping cats outside normal and harmless, and it’s just weird to have a Literal Stranger expect you to accept that literally every person that ever loved you or who was kind to you growing up is an Animal Abuser
they think that cats, as a species, literally need to roam around outside or they will not be having their needs met.
These people are not at all wrong to worry about how to provide enrichment to an indoor cat!!! Cat furniture and puzzle toys and ipad apps with fish swimming around for your cat to paw at are not known to everybody. There’s also a persistent myth that cats cannot be trained and therefore training one to walk on a leash or play fetch is absurd.
(It also at least deserves mentioning that there are public outdoor spaces, activities and sports events meant for dogs.)
It has literally never occurred to many people that cats are an invasive species. They don’t know where cats are native to. They don’t know that there were no cats in their area before humans brought them there. It seems strange, I know, but you are ignorant about something that seems obvious to someone else, so please stay humble.
When you describe cats as “cold-blooded serial killers of native wildlife” or things like that, it really does sound like you are moralizing an animal being a predator. Cat lovers grew up suffocated in cutesy animal books, shows, and cartoons that demonized cats and other carnivores for being carnivores. Assigning morals to animals goes all the way back to Aesop’s fables and Pliny the Elder. You have to make sure it’s clear you’re not doing that. 
I write this because I wrote something about the harms of outdoor cats in a reply one time and went back and read the tags on that post later, and the sheer number of people who had written that my post specifically had changed their mind because it was the first post they had seen on the subject that wasn’t needlessly hateful and aggressive blew my mind.
Educating effectively requires you to think about the effects of your words. You can’t just say things you Know are right and consider your job done.
Here is another truth: the most effective tactics to create social change are not necessarily the easiest to sustain. If you can’t sustain being mild and approachable and patient while people ask the most frustrating, repetitive questions…
that is a sign that you need a break, or that you need to consider devoting yourself to a different kind of trying to do good in the world for a while, or that you need to rest. You do not have to be a teacher at all times. This is good, I say (as a teacher) because being a teacher takes work and skill and hard emotional control, especially when you are trying to teach people about something that you care very intensely about. Teaching is skilled labor, but it is always labor.
Speaking as someone who has done that work on the marginalization end as well as on the animal welfare end, on the science literacy end, on a lot of things I’m very earnest about: you have to set limits on education, and you have to be extremely clear with yourself about what is teaching work and what is self-protection from things that make your soul ache. When you’re teaching, starting from a non-confrontational place and encouraging people to view you as a trustworthy, safe figure who won’t judge them is absolutely crucial when it comes to establishing the basic safety necessary to consider changing our beliefs. The moment you make it an Us Vs Them fight, you lose the game. Doing it the hard way takes time and it takes effort and patience, and not everyone is suited to that work and no one is suited to it all the time.
When you’re trying to just keep the space from punching you in the soul on a deep bruise one more time, though, you have other goals. You don’t act from the desire to change the hearts and minds of the people you’re talking to; you’re acting from a desire to just get that crappy thing away from me. And sometimes we can orchestrate that within our social spaces, depending on who is watching and what our relative positions are, and sometimes we can’t.
The danger, the riptide that will drag you under, is calling yourself a teacher when you are acting like someone trying to preserve the comfort of a community for yourself and other people like you. That second goal isn’t necessarily a bad one to have! Sometimes we all have to engage in that kind of social behavior, because everyone needs a space in which they can feel safe to relax sometimes, even if that is a space that only a few kinds of people are allowed to come into. But lying to yourself that this kind of behavior is teaching, and that you are engaging in a higher form of moral wossname by doing so–when you don’t have the bandwidth to do that properly–that can really get you into trouble. First, it can get you into trouble by encouraging you to frame picking certain fights as a public service rather than an act of survival, which can cause you to overweight the possible successes of starting a conflict and underweight the possible consequences. Second, it lets you frame behavior that can be really quite bad for the overall project of changing minds in the general public as effective activism, even to yourself, which leads you to forget that activist initiatives should be measured in terms of efficacy rather than in terms of how they make you feel at the end.
Now, I’ve seen the scars from people who always focus on efficacy over being able to feel safe and to rest. I have those scars. People with the best intentions and the highest moral goals have thrown one another into a meat grinder of yearning for a better world that way. I’m not saying you always have to drop everything and be a teacher.
I’m just saying that you should keep your tactics distinct, your short term goals clear in your mind, and above all else, figure out where you can find a place to rest.
i’m never getting over the fact that romance as a genre, as the HIGHEST selling genre, exists largely because straight women fantasise about being loved and treated kindly by men and men constantly make fun of this because they think it’s just that unrealistic that they could cherish women and that women are stupid in the first place for wanting such an impossible thing
Just one of those thoughts that floated through my head today… Prefacing this with: I haven’t watched Picard yet, so I’m not sure if they explore this at all.
Something I would have LOVED to see in the context of Voyager, which utilized every resource and asset at its disposal to survive the delta quadrant, was to see Seven presented with the opportunity to become fully human: no implants, magic nanoprobes, or borg collective knowledge, and have to grapple with the real possibility of what those trade offs will mean to her, her relationships with the crew, and her value to the ship…
not sure if any have explored this. if theres a fic like that send it my way
I think you are meant to stay in my heart, but not in my life. I love you, but I can’t keep self sacrificing so much for you. I care about you, but I have to care about me too. Please understand.
Yehudim Baim - 10 Commandments (with English Subtitles)
This is just glorious. It’s effectively an amusing modern-day exposition on the 10 Commandments that will make you think, with a punchline at the end that’ll crack you up. Worth a watch!
