The Matrix vs Ghostbusters

[linebaugh]

I have a mutual, white as me culturally and visually, suddenly reclaiming his native american heritage in the past year, which I think is especially embarrassing. maybe its more complicated, who knows

 

[Clinamenic]

THAT SAID

I am all for supporting cultural preservation, diverse aesthetics, cosmologies, religious and iconographic systems, etc.

From the POV that these folks are, in fact, preserving and disseminating these cultures—all for it.

It's just this implicit "one-drop" ethos underlying it, and which gate-keeps who "is allowed" to preserve these cultures, that grates.

I do think it is grating, but I also think it ought to be, at least from certain perspectives, which isn't to say there cannot be found less grating avenues to arrive at the same place.

 

[sus]

Yeah, but the point is it's difficult to make that argument whilst also claiming anyone apprehensive about the vaccine is evil/stupid/deserves to die and should be treated as second-class citizens.

Or imagining that "blacks" as a monolithic "whole" all have "good reasons to be suspicious" based on their informed readings of the Tuskegee experiment, whereas "white redneck Trump voters" couldn't possibly have any good reasons to be suspicious, as a monolithic whole.

 

[linebaugh]

my familiy is actually card carrying members of a specific tribe and Ive always looked at that like a secret shame

 

[sus]

Don't you just viscerally feel how gross it is to talk about groups this way? Even when they're the "bad groups"?

 

[version]

Yeah, I think the irony is that these same groups are doing a top-down cultural imposition, from sheltered positions on the coasts onto far-away locales in a way that can be fairly called "colonialism."

"Open borders discourse is Victorian settler ideology updated for 21st-century liberal elites. Elite millennials have been brought up with the expectation that they can move to Berlin or Belgrade tomorrow without needing to learn the local languages. But this seamless mobility depends on a new capitalist imperialism to work—the prior task of terraforming those places into interchangeable “no places” that the globally mobile can recognise and feel safe in. US popular culture and social media perform this work."

 

[linebaugh]

on the other hand I have a few hispanic friends going through a kind of quarter life existential crisis as they realize their culture has been robbed/kept at bay from them and they dont know how to re approach it without running into the awkwardness were describing here now

 

[sus]

I think this is also because a lot of liberals seem to think in terms of property and transactions.

It's true, it's amusing that white "settler allies" talk constantly about how American Indians didn't have property concepts, shared everything, bla bla bla were so perfect and so wise (more essentialization/idealization of the Other—there were thousands of tribes that ranged from brutally imperial to pacifist). And then they turn around and say, "White people can't use the phrase 'spirit animal,' that language belongs to indigenous peoples"

 

[sus]

It's just like, for the love of God, I want people who pretend to care about abolishing racial categories to actually act like racial categories are invented abstractions, instead of constantly reifying them by performing ever-more essentializations. (Only this time, spreading "good stereotypes")

 

[Clinamenic]

I also think, on a more basic level, any vehemently anti-toxic efforts are just as liable to breed toxicity as whatever they aim to oppose.

In practice, I'm most likely not gonna nag someone about this or that off-hand socially unsavory statement, but I will attempt to demonstrate how one can address these things without seeming pious or condescending. For me its a question of pragmatism: are you more likely to arrive at the desired end (people being more considerate) by nagging and prodding them, or by simply being considerate yourself and hoping they recognize that?

 

[sus]

I do think it is grating, but I also think it ought to be, at least from certain perspectives, which isn't to say there cannot be found less grating avenues to arrive at the same place.

Expand?

 

[Clinamenic]

But here again my approach is largely based on reacting to people who are less progressively inclined than I am.

 

[sus]

I also think, on a more basic level, any vehemently anti-toxic efforts are just as liable to breed toxicity as whatever they aim to oppose.

In practice, I'm most likely not gonna nag someone about this or that off-hand socially unsavory statement, but I will attempt to demonstrate how one can address these things without seeming pious or condescending. For me its a question of pragmatism: are you more likely to arrive at the desired end (people being more considerate) by nagging and prodding them, or by simply being considerate yourself and hoping they recognize that?

The cognitive supremacy of ideology over pragmatism is humanity's greatest software bug.

 

[Clinamenic]

Expand?

I mentioned this with the talk of terms like "privilege" and "systemic racism" and how constantly feeling like you are being called a bigot can be grating, when really racism I think is broader than bigotry and progressives thus shouldn't just frame anti-racism as anti-bigotry.

 

[version]

It doesn't help that you've forever got hordes of NGOs and careerists waiting in the wings to latch onto any sort of well-meaning cause or movement and turn it into a market.

 

[sus]

I guess what's really happened is that an old-fashioned "prejudice" model collapsed under the weight of continuing inter-cultural tension, and was replaced by a general opposition to power, which operates as our new axis for deciding which people are bad and which people are good.

The problem is that prejudice, even when it is held against the powerful, morally corrupts you, as the prejudiced. This is an old, Ellison/Du Bois-era argument, but one that bears preserving. Prejudice—the de-individualization of the Other—is as bad for he who holds it, as he who is its object.

In part because it abnegates you, the individual, of moral responsibility as individual. (And abnegates the responsibility of the Other in turn.)

 

[Clinamenic]

Really most of the decisions that comprise systemic discrimination seems to be made in self-interest, interest that isn't externally incentivized to take into consideration the perspectives of other demographics.

 

[Clinamenic]

It doesn't help that you've forever got hordes of NGOs and careerists waiting in the wings to latch onto any sort of well-meaning cause or movement and turn it into a market.

Yeah that does seem to make it considerably harder to make a sober analysis of the various influences upon one's opinions.

 

[Clinamenic]

I think there is a set of parallel trends of methodologies becoming precise, as in precision medicine, precision marketing (psychographics) as opposed to general-purpose broadcasting marketing, and maybe what can be considered precision social justice (hyperintersectionality).

 

[sus]

Really most of the decisions that comprise systemic discrimination seems to be made in self-interest, interest that isn't externally incentivized to take into consideration the perspectives of other demographics.

One of the great things about Farscape (there are many) is that every time something bad happens to the crew of Moya, they assume it's some agent acting with malevolent intent toward them, someone who's after them, someone trying to destroy them.

But then they realize, actually, some alien is optimizing for their own welfare, without considering the crew. Conflict born not of "evil" but the necessary antagonism of goals: If I take your ethical worth seriously, it makes my optimization problem more difficult.

So, e.g., a bunch of space cockroaches colonize the ship to use for a re-spawn, which threatens hull integrity/internal liveability. The crew keeps insisting they have a virus on board, or some "parasite"—but what's a parasite? Not someone out to "get" their host. Someone who's optimizing for their own well-being and your well-being's just not a part of their considerations.