Could I Offer You A Samurai In This Trying Time?

found while looking for my own tumblr

some force compelled me to make this image and share it. this is what happens when you’re up til’ 2:30 in the morning with the willpower to make a vision come true..but god. at what cost..

Today, In Public Speaking Class

The professor was giving us protocols for formal interaction. He said it was important to introduce people of higher rank first when introducing multiple people. As an intuitive Socialist, I was annoyed by all of these, since everyone is a comrade. However, some of these were worse than others:

The order, by rank and status, was as follows:

Bishops before priests

Prime ministers before cabinet ministers

Bosses before employees

Teachers before students

Parents before children

Men before women

…What the serious fuck

thinking about that WoW epidemic

Why does the left - rather than the right - accuse even reasonable and nuanced moderates/classical liberals of #enlightenedcentrism and false equivalencies?

If in the middle of the Red Scare, you barged into the House Un-American Activities Committee and shouted “I THINK BOTH CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM HAVE SOME GOOD POINTS AND WE SHOULD TREAT BOTH OF THEM FAIRLY!”, Joe McCarthy would probably view you as an enemy, and any communists hidden in the audience would probably view you as a potential ally or at least as not their top problem right now. Shout the same thing in Red Square in Moscow, and you’d get the opposite results.

I think a better question is how scared we should be #enlightenedcentrism is an insult that people try to avoid. I think Sacred Principles As Exhaustible Resources remains an underappreciated point, and I think we’re already past the point where “reason”, “nuance”, “listening to both sides”, and “trying to be unbiased” are considered enemy tribal signals and automatic proof of bad faith by a big segment of the population. This was avoidable, but thanks to a bunch of bad actors poisoning the epistemic commons, we failed to avoid it.

Hmm, I rather think that the central question - whether there's a moral difference between action and inaction - is in fact very relevant, certainly in my life and probably in a lot of people’s. Like, I'm really great at negative morality, avoiding doing bad things by simply not doing anything. Which would correspond to someone who feels that they can avoid any involvement or blame by never moving the lever. But intellectually I don’t actually endorse that: I believe that inaction is a type of action, which implies that I should be more active in life despite the risk of inadvertently hurting someone and getting cancelled. Writing this rather than using my tumblr exclusively to reblog others’ posts isn’t much, but it’s a start.

my issue with the trolley problem is, and still will be, for the vast majority of people on the planet, the trolley problem is not, like, relevant

not in the sense that “OH YOU’LL NEVER BE IN THE SITUATION WHERE YOU HAVE TO PULL A LEVER TO STOP A TROLLEY FROM HITTING FOUR PEOPLE THAT A MANIAC HAS TIED TO RAILROAD TRACKS”, but in the sense that when you’re in scary and dangerous situations, you are not as in control of yourself as you think you are.

in a situation like the trolley problem, outside of like… first responders, soldiers, maybe ER nurses? … I doubt most people would be able to react to a situation like that in anything approaching the way that they would game it out from ethical principles. you’d fight, flee, or freeze, and it’d have less to do with “what you strongly believe in as a person” and more to do with “what your hindbrain has learnt is effective to get you to survive emergencies in the past”. 

i think that’s what a lot of discussion about “maybe the person to blame is the one tying people to the train tracks?” is trying and failing to get at.

another day, another dollar, another instance of wanting to write a long post calling out the 2015 discourse’s massive, massive classism problem but not wanting to invite the wank and criticism it would induce

but in short: the rural poor are not your punching bags for jokes about homophobia, trump supporters, and fat ugly americans, and poor people as a whole are grossly underrepresented in talking about marginalization and are not included in discussions about the issues that affect them directly. and a massive part of that comes from there not being a vanguard of like, Poor Academics the way that there are Feminist Academics and Queer Academics and Black Academics and so forth. every other institutionally marginalized group is represented in academia but because of the inherent lack of opportunity to pursue higher education that comes along with being poor, poor people’s voices aren’t really heard to the same degree. 

not to mention that structural and institutional poverty is a problem that can only really be solved by politicians, and the problem is that right wing politicians have a vested interest in keeping poor people poor and uneducated so that they will continue to vote against their own interests and effectively continue to marginalize themselves, and meanwhile said conservative politicians keep their jobs and nothing changes. and even well-meaning leftist economists can’t do anything about it.

and MEANWHILE, youth activism is so intently focused on gender and race to the exclusion of class because most activists are college students, who have not really had to deal with the effects of Poverty with a capital P. see also: the difference between being poor and being broke. and activist language policing is so inherently classist in the first place because it serves to exclude and silence anyone who doesn’t have an academic background or the free time to read blog after blog on the internet to figure out why, exactly, using that word or that asterisk is so offensive and makes you such a terrible person even if your intent is, actually, good. so much of activism requires a significant time investment and a certain level of education that people who work minimum wage jobs and have families just cannot afford. so because they’re insufficiently educated, they’re regarded as insufficiently oppressed or treated like they’re actively part of the problem. 

(not to mention the internet’s obsession with degrading service workers who are employed by problematic – ugh that word, but it’s the one that fits – companies. “we went to party city and threw all the racist costumes on the floor!” “we vandalized the ‘girl toy’ and ‘boy toy’ signs at target!” literally nothing enrages me more than this.)

see also: the co-option of the term “emotional labor,” which originated as a phrase coined to describe the mental and physical toll of the requirement for service industry workers to display cheerful, positive emotions toward customers, which has been bastardized by middle-class feminists to refer to standard politeness and talking about feelings within any form of relationship, be it with a friend, significant other, or parent. 

i could go on and on. i won’t, because i already wrote way more than i intended. it’s a massive, massive intersectionality fail. i’m just so tired of it.

This is one for the OGs

“The people who cling most tightly to this “punching up vs punching down” paradigm are those who really, really want to punch people, and want to know which people it’s okay to punch. Remember, this was originally a moral principle for regulating comedy. Insofar as comedy involves ridicule and mockery, comedy is “punching” as an art form – as entertainment – and “punching up vs punching down” is a professional ethic for comedians, people who “punch” others for a living. As such, comedians have an a priori desire to get on with the punching, and thus a need to identify which targets are fair game. But there’s plenty of other people who just want to get their “punching” on, and are delighted to have this “punching up vs punching down” principle because otherwise they didn’t have any principle at all which said that punching was ever acceptable. As far as they knew, being mean was always morally bad, which is a total bummer if you really, really, really want to be mean but also want to not think of yourself as someone who does morally bad things – or don’t want other people to think you’re bad for being mean. For people nursing this kind of covert aggressive impulse, this moral principle, that it is totally licit to “punch” people of more privilege, was like a declaration of open season. I expect there will be a lot of yowling and hissing about this post from people whose favorite toy I just took away, like cats protesting being deprived of their half-dead mice. Yowling from people who aren’t actually standing up for social justice - just getting their vicious jollies on.”

—from “The Problem with Punching Up”, siderea