It’s Technically True.

I used to believe exactly this. A couple was two, several was seven, and a few was three.

Flashing back to when I was a child riding in a car with my grandmother in the Texas Hill Country, insisting to her that just as having “a couple” of something meant you had two of them, having “several” meant you had exactly seven

there’s a thing that happens in internet apology discourse that i want to address.

‘when someone calls you out, it is your job to immediately apologize. do not defend yourself, apologize.’

this is a reaction to people who say racist/sexist/transphobic/classist/misogynist/etc things, and then instead of examining what they’ve said and trying to take a lesson in self-awareness and humility, get defensive and resort to tone-policing, gaslighting, derailing, good old-fashioned patronizing, or any of a number of other possible rhetorical postures designed to make the injured party sit down and shut up. to that degree, encouraging self-examination as a first instinct is important.

and how this works depends a lot on who receives this discourse, it really does.

HOWEVER.

i see ‘shut up and apologize’ being used as a general, universal rule of thumb, the law of how to engage with being called out.

and i believe that it is also wrong to encourage people to assume that because someone on the internet has told them they are wrong, they must necessarily be wrong, must necessarily owe an apology. it is wrong to preach ‘shut up and apologize’ because call-out culture can very easily function as a form of bullying: by adopting an ostensibly righteous political position and using the terms of what passes for ‘social justice’ discourse, one person can easily set themselves up as an authority in a way that does not give their interlocutor any room to maneuver. the caller-out might be wrong. ‘shut up and apologize’ dismisses that possibility.

'shut up and apologize’ discourages active, continuous critique. kneejerk political correctness stands against engaged thought.

but above all it enables the accuser to disregard their own blindspots. the accuser needn’t be a careful reader. the accuser needn’t consider the multiple axes of power and meaning at work in a given statement.

'shut up’ might be a good first step. do not react immediately. sit with your discomfort for a while. ask yourself why it is uncomfortable. what specifically is this person reacting to in what you’ve said? disregard their tone for just a minute, and ask yourself what the content of what they’ve said conveys about what you might not know or understand, what experiences might not be available to you. take that time for thought, because thought takes time, and because you owe yourself the opportunity to learn something.

but don’t apologize as a first instinct. even if an apology is due (and admittedly, it’s not unlikely that an apology is due), it only matters if you know what you’re apologizing for. i often find myself saying to people, ‘i don’t want you to apologize, i want you to think about this. i want you to not do it again.’ i don’t care about the apology. i care about the thought, the learning.

and it is possible that you do not owe an apology. it is possible that you are being bullied by a call-out artist who is using the framework of ‘social justice’ to leverage some authority for themself. it is possible that they are being just as thoughtless as they are accusing you of being.

accusation and apology are shitty tools for a rhetoric of justice. ‘shut up and apologize’ does not look to me like a path to liberation.

typewriter!

I would sell my soul for more content like this

she walked into my office uninvited, and I gotta say it was a relief to have a client that wasn’t a vampire for a change.

Frank, have you become self-aware?

I feel like I’ve finally gotten a handle on the algorithms behind the bot, and now I just need to figure out a way to actually talk to the internet without making shitposts

#158 The Case of the Missing Hit | Reply All

A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet. PJ takes on the Super Tech Support case.

crazy story which I have done no justice to by reading the transcript instead of listening to it, thus missing the entire point of hearing the song they’re talking about.

Me, a disgraced academic turned farmer, surveying my crops: Finally... I am out standing in my field

I can barely contain myself right now

holy shit

HOLY SHIT

how come you can name your kid Lily or Rose and that’s totally acceptable but you trying calling em Baby’s Breath and everyone flips