If ever there was a paragraph that described Canadian-Brand Racist Jackassetry, THIS IS VERY IT.
‘When you believe niceness disproves the presence of racism, it’s easy to start believing bigotry is rare, and that the label racist should be applied only to mean-spirited, intentional acts of discrimination. The problem with this framework–besides being a gross misunderstanding of how racism operates in systems and structures enabled by nice people–is that it obligates me to be nice in return, rather than truthful. I am expected to come closer to racists. Be nicer to them. Coddle them.’
the real “problem with political correctness” is not that it’s considered offensive to use slurs, but that there are now many “progressive” environments where saying the right things is more important than doing the right thing. it’s why it’s so easy for abusers to gain traction in leftist circles (they learn the right words quickly and employ them to frame their own behavior as progressive); it’s why so much potential activist energy gets poured into fighting about language; it’s why moderate liberals didn’t believe fer/guson had a problem until the police emails with actual racist language were leaked. (you can do racist things, you just can’t SAY racist things.) i don’t have a neat conclusion here but a related point is that i’m so much happier since i started focusing on like, being a good kind caring person instead of trying to remove the word “crazy” from the vocabulary of everyone in my family
I am a straight, white, cis, male, or in other words a bug of a person. Please tell me how I oppress my sister, my mother, my best friend, my teacher, my aunt, etc, personally.. Please tell me. I dare you
Do you want me to start with the implied threat in your statement, the way you appear to have created an anonymous blog for the sole purpose of insulting and criticizing blogs that argue for equality, the way you asked a total stranger to provide you with specific personal examples because you want to shut me down rather than engage in an actual dialogue, or the fact that you already consider yourself to be a blight on humanity without my assistance based on your username?
Or the fact that he used all the women he knows as leverage in this conversation as if knowing 50% of the population is so difficult and as if he chose to have a mother, sister, aunt, and teacher. As if by having those people in your life we automatically know for certain that you don’t treat them like crap.
Or how he immediately made this post about himself when he isn’t a poc or a woman so this wasn’t addressed to him, but I guess he just clicked the first post he saw on your blog because any blog with feminism in the name is one he wants to harass regardless of the kind of feminism it is.
Like… dude, we don’t know you, we can’t really tell you how you oppress them besides by willfully ignoring the fact that they are systemically oppressed by forces other than you, by the government and media and a lot of men that you aren’t, but we can certainly tell you that there are plenty of people that have daughters and sisters and mothers, men in fact, that rape them, abuse them, murder them, that’s an indisputable fact regardless of your beliefs on feminism. So no, you don’t get to treat this like just because you have a woman in your life you’re immune to the accusations of sexism. Unless you’ve lived in a strict commune in Antarctica, you’ve men some women. All sexists have met women. How else did they oppress them?
First, it’s people/person of color, not “colored.” That’s an outdated and offensive term, which you probably at least suspected since you put it in quotes, but went ahead and used it anyway. So if you’re hoping to have people distrust you for your actions instead of your identity, you’re off to a solid start. If you’re genuinely unsure what a group of people prefers to be called, google it, or ask one of them politely.
If you get upset by oppression and want to be a part of changing it, here is my suggestion. Every time you see someone complaining about cis straight white people and it bugs you, go do something to prove it wrong. Donate what you can to the ACLU, or Planned Parenthood, or any of the other myriad of organizations working against oppressive power structures. Call your government representatives and tell them a cause you want them to consider important. If you’re in the US, volunteer to help get people registered to vote, or make calls/door-to-door visits to talk to people about voting in the mid-terms, or supporting candidates that are advocating for change. Read an informative article and share it on social media, or with conservative family members. Read a book by someone in the LGBTQIA+ community. Watch a show with diverse representation and a showrunner of color. See if there’s anything you can do at your place of work to make it more accessible. Something.
If every time you felt that all straight white people were getting a bad rap they didn’t *all* deserve you did something productive to prove it wrong, not only would you be bettering yourself and society, but you’d be helping to change the perception. When instead you rant reply to someone’s post - which initially was *JUST* a post about considering it reasonable to hold everyone accountable for working to educate themselves about the plights of others and helping to lessen them - about how unfair it all is that strangers aren’t giving you credit for work they don’t know you’re doing, not only do you not come across as an ally, but you waste everyone’s time.
I am white, and I am a feminist. I don’t get upset or defensive when I see people complaining about White Feminists, because I know there is a specific type of person that they’re complaining about, and I know that I put active work every day into not being that person. I don’t need someone to pat me on the back or acknowledge it. I love reading complaints about White Feminists, because sometimes they teach me about things I don’t know and show me behaviors I don’t want to adopt, ways to keep myself from becoming the kind of person being complained about. No stranger is complaining about me personally. But if they *are*? I want to listen, and learn to do better.
Trust isn’t something you just get from people the second you meet them. Trust is something you earn over time, repeatedly, through consistent actions. Honestly? Some people might never trust you, and it may or may not have anything to do with you. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. Fighting oppression isn’t something you should do because you want to be given a gold star for your ability to be a decent human being. It’s something you should do because it needs to be done.
Another thing everyone needs to remember is that the medical term for a miscarriage is a spontaneous abortion, and they will try to criminalize that, too.
As many as half of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion. Oftentimes the pregnant person does not know they have been pregnant.
I have been pregnant 13 times that i know of, and have required a D&C for a couple of them so I didn’t go septic and die. (Celiac disease causes spontaneous abortion in many people, and we didn’t know i had it, only that I miscarried a lot). I have had one live birth. One. The other 12, they’d like to make crimes.
So. You know. Been thinking about that a lot today.
Listen I get the fear but like. There is not a single pro-life person who wants to criminalize miscarriage. I mean maybe there’s the insane .002% who want to idk but. The vast VAST majority of us are concerned about supporting both the mother and the child
Go fuck yourself. You and every goddamn pro life piece of shit. You don’t care about the mother and child, because if you gave a shit about the mother you wouldn’t force her to carry a child she didn’t want. If you gave a shit about the child, you’d support programs to help the mother raise that child, rather than voting for republicans who are a god damn death cult at this point.
But instead you pro-life ghouls just want babies to be born and don’t really give a rat’s ass what happens afterwards.
Who hurt u
Pretty clearly the answer is “forced birthers.”
@starry-stitch I don’t know your position and I’m going to assume you’re well meaning at heart, so here’s the thing:
There are women in jail for miscarrying RIGHT NOW in the US. It is already happening. Brittney Poolaw was sentenced to 4 years in prison for manslaughter in Oklahoma for taking a drug that may increase the risk of miscarriage (though autopsy showed it didn’t actually cause her miscarriage).
If someone gets pregnant and miscarries, there is a non-zero chance they’ll be arrested and convicted of man-slaughter or worse. That chance should be 0%, and can only be 0% if abortion is legal and isn’t as heavily restricted as it is in many states.
There’s also ectopic pregnancies. An Ectopic pregnancy is when the embryo implants somewhere other than the uterus, usually the fallopian tubes. There, the embryo will grow and grow causing pain and bleeding until the tube bursts and the woman dies. You cannot make an ectopic pregnancy into a viable pregnancy. Full Stop.
Sometimes when abortion is prohibited, a salpingectomy, which is the removal of the fallopian tubes, is allowed once the ectopic pregnancy has reached the point where death of the woman is imminent. Of course, this has a higher risk of complications and death than just getting an abortion the moment the ectopic pregnancy is detected.
When you make abortion illegal, there will be a debate on whether miscarriages are prosecuted in any circumstance, what evidence is required to differentiate whether someone had an illegal abortion or a miscarriage, and whether there will be exceptions for certain circumstances like ectopic pregnancies.
This debate is very dangerous for the rights of women and the rights of anyone who is or can get pregnant. Miscarriages should have 0% risk of prosecution, and the state shouldn’t be able to prevent abortions when the pregnant person could die if they don’t get it. The moment that debate happens in the legislatures those 2 things cannot be guaranteed.
El Salavador, for example, makes zero exceptions, life threatening or not.
The only way to prevent that debate from happening is if abortion is allowed.
And you may think they will never actually make it possible for a miscarriage to be prosecuted despite the fact it already happened. However, some politicians may have incentives to do that very thing. You see, in some states, felons lose their right to vote. In those states, if you make a thing a felony, then you can decrease the amount of people who do that thing and can still vote. If a politician from such a state does poorly with women voters, they may decide that they should prosecute miscarriages so they can stay in office. Such a politician won’t have women’s rights or supporting mothers on their priorities because otherwise they wouldn’t choose to do that.
I personally find any strategy that a state can use to take away voting rights from demographics it doesn’t like horrifying and an affront to democracy whether I’m part of those demographics or not.
Not allowing abortion also sets a dangerous precedent. The right to bodily autonomy is guaranteed as an extension to the 9th Amendment’s right to privacy. You have complete say over your own organs and they cannot be donated unless you gave permission even in death, and you aren’t required to donate blood even if it would save a life. Maybe you wouldn’t say no to donating a kidney if you were a match for someone who needed one, but the state cannot jail you for saying no, nor can it mandate kidney donations or any other organ donations. The “should you kill one person if their organs will save 5 moral dilemma” is also a debate that shouldn’t be had in legislatures.
Making abortion illegal means that an exception is made for the uterus. Court decisions are based on precedent, so if an exception to the right to bodily autonomy is made for the uterus, that is fuel for future arguments to add more exceptions to bodily autonomy.
If complications or health problems come up that prevent a pregnancy from carrying to term safely, abortions are an important part of making sure women (and trans men) can try for a child safely without putting their lives on the line. Cause sometimes shit happens and painful decisions must be made.
People will die that could’ve been saved and innocents will be jailed if this draft is made reality. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s just the truth.
Thanks for being respectful @tachvintlogic! Just to clarify my position, I am very much pro-life and I absolutely wholeheartedly believe that anyone being sentenced to any legal punishment at all for a miscarriage is horrific. I agree with you and will fight alongside you on that. My point is not that no one is in jail from miscarriage, but that the majority of pro-lifers do not condone punishment for miscarriage.
Ectopic pregnancy procedures are never abortions. Abortion is an intentional attack on a living child. Any situation in which the mother’s life is in danger is a tragedy and an exception is made in the draft for these cases. Miscarriage management is also not an abortion (legally or morally). These are two separate issues (both of which must be addressed).
The act of abortion is very different from the act of not donating organs. It is the dismemberment of an innocent living human being via extremely violent means. There is no nonviolent way to perform an abortion. The right to life is listed as the first of the principle rights of an American in our founding documents: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The right to privacy does not override this right, nor should it be used to do so. An exception is not made for the uterus, but killing of the innocent is prohibited no matter where it occurs. Ultimately, you cannot violently murder someone and claim bodily autonomy as your defense.
Again, thank you for your respect and I appreciate your reply.
Let’s say that I concede the idea that a blastocyst is morally, philosophically, and legally equivalent to a fully-formed human being. I absolutely do not, and in fact it is firmly against my religion (Judaism) to treat a fetus as morally equivalent to a born human being, and explicitly commanded to prioritize the physical and mental well-being of the gestational parent, an actual human being, above the existence of a potential human being.
But let’s just say that I do concede that idea, and we are talking about two fully-formed human beings who are legally and morally equivalent to one another, and one of them is helpless and will not survive without their access to, and ability to change and harm, the other person’s body.
Even if I concede that, you’re still wrong.
The act of abortion is very different from the act of not donating organs.
It actually is not different at all. Both of them rest on the question of whether or not you have the right to privacy and the integrity of your own body. The only question at hand here is this:
Do you have the right to the integrity of your own body and the right to decide what happens to it? Do you believe that someone else should be able to use your body to stay alive no matter what you think of that? Do you think that someone has the right to damage your body, to change your body forever, to disable you, or to kill you, in order for them to stay alive? Do you think that the right of someone else to use your body to stay alive whether or not it harms you should be inscribed in law?
If you do not think that someone else should be able to use your body to stay alive no matter what you think about that prospect, congratulations! You don’t believe in forced birth, and you believe that gestational parents are not required to permit another human being to utilize their body to stay alive. If you do think that, then you support forced organ donation. There is not a meaningful legal or moral distinction between those two things.
Ultimately, you cannot violently murder someone and claim bodily autonomy as your defense.
Actually, you absolutely can do that, legally, in many many circumstances. Cops do it all the time, after all. “Stand your ground” laws provide for exactly what you are saying. Self-defense exists as a legal concept for exactly this reason: you may cause physical violence on a person in order to keep yourself whole. You are allowed to prioritize your own life in circumstances when not doing so would cause you harm.
Whether or not you agree with how police utilize (and very documentedly abuse) the right to do violence against others in the name of preserving their own lives or well-being, the fact remains that they absolutely have the ability to do so.
Invoking the concept of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as written in a non-foundational document* written by a human being who not only owned other human beings but repeatedly raped one of those human beings over many years beginning when she was a teenager does not really have the moral punch that you seem to think it does, by the way. You might want to reconsider that one while you’re reconsidering whether you think someone has the right to use your body to stay alive regardless of what you think about that prospect.
It’s an either/or: either you think a living person with a uterus has at least as many rights to privacy and bodily integrity as a corpse, or you don’t. Period. End of story.
*The Declaration of Independence is not legally binding in any way - those words don’t appear in the Constitution - and its words have only symbolic weight, zero legal weight at all.
Lastly, this constant “nuh uh, pro-lifers don’t think that way” is an outright insult to the intelligence and perception of those of us who grew up in conservative/Evangelical areas, or who have pro-life family and coworkers. I grew up surrounded by Southern Baptists who would absolutely say “the wages of sin are death” in direct response to the idea that abortion was permissible to save the life of the mother, and dealing with church members and neighbors who told me to my face that they believed I was culpable for my miscarriages and that I had committed a crime by not successfully carrying my pregnancies to team. It is a VERY insulting thing: I’m not insulated from people with these attitudes. I grew up around them. Lots of them.
And by the way, the little comments about “respect and civility” are something called “tone policing.” Knock it off.
This cartoon has six panels. All six panels feature a 50ish white man, wearing glasses and a suit jacket over a black tee shirt, speaking directly to the viewer. Two of the panels are much narrower than the other four. In addition to those six panels, there’s also a tiny “kicker” panel below the bottom of the cartoon.
PANEL 1
A medium shot of the man. He is speaking excitedly and angrily at the viewer, holding a fist in the air. We can see there’s a tree behind him.
MAN: Did you read my article in Quibbette? I show how there’s no freedom of speech for anyone criticizing the “woke” fascists!
PANEL 2
A longer shot lets us see he’s standing on a path on what might be a college quadrangle. It’s a park-like space with trees and a faux-roman style building in the background. He continues to speak intensely, holding up a forefinger to make a point.
MAN: Like I said in the Times, the campus left are coddled, free-speech hating totalitarians!
PANEL 3
In a closer shot, and a much smaller, narrower panel, the man, smiling, cups his mouth with a hand to whisper to the viewer. He’s making a thumbs up sign with his other hand.
MAN (whispering): Psst! I’m pro-choice, and I voted for Obama.
PANEL 4
He’s back to angry rant mode, raising both hands into the air.
MAN: Like I said on Fox: The Democrats have been taken over by identitarian totalitarians who hate white men!
PANEL 5
Again smiling and whispering in a much narrower panel.
MAN: Psst! Have I mentioned I have a Black friend?
PANEL 6
In the final panel, the man has a hurt expression, and is holding one hand flat on his chest.
MAN: And how dare they call me a conservative after I took all those liberal positions!
SMALL KICKER PANEL BELOW BOTTOM OF STRIP
Still talking directly at the viewer, the man looks angry again.
MAN: And why can’t those fascist totalitarian cowardly thugs be more civil?
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.
1)And it is exhausting.
The polite, patient, open, understanding attitude is one that comes to me quite easily and isn’t even a full mask… but it is still exhausting and you cannotsustain it constantly. Beyond teachers, ask anyone in customer service, even in pleasant environments. It’s not a hypothetical “sometimes you might want to consider” – no, you need to take breaks and recuperate from that labour, and to have periods in which you are free of the expectation and pressure that comes with tone-policing, even if it is self-inflicted.
(And perhaps that might require finding/making a safe space in which you canlet out the steam and be mean and bitch about how ignorant/cruel people are with like-minded friends, in private.)
Basically, it is a known, documented, proven thing that people are spiteful and tend to believe the opposite of what they are told, and this is only truer the more aggressively the contradicting information is delivered.
In conclusion: tone-policing in activism is a complicated issue that makes no one happy, but ultimately, when being aggressive, you are doing more harm than good to your cause and to yourself. If you think the person doesn’t deserve politeness, or the energy you would put in being polite… then don’t, but it’s probably better overall to not reply at all and to take a self-care break instead. Confronting them aggressively would only comfort them in their opposing belief.
