luka

Well-known member
The first day at school is intimidating, terrifying, but the process of finding a place for yourself, as the unfamiliar becomes homely can be magical. I like watching new people find their feet.
 

luka

Well-known member
So long as we keep it a boys club no girls allowed that's all that matter eh lads
 
It's not really like the first day of school though. I loved the first day of school cos everyone starts off on a blank slate. I was lying to a few people about my name and life because I could. It's more like the first day of school if you transfer, because the cliques are already established, you're a few steps behind. That's why they set up clubs and societies (in depth threads)
 

luka

Well-known member
It's not really like the first day of school though. I loved the first day of school cos everyone starts off on a blank slate. I was lying to a few people about my name and life because I could. It's more like the first day of school if you transfer, because the cliques are already established, you're a few steps behind. That's why they set up clubs and societies (in depth threads)

Ok, bad analogy.
 

luka

Well-known member
But ultimately some people, damaged people, will see dissensus and feel in their heart that this is something they want to be a part of, will feel this is something they can contribute to. They will think, maybe these are my people, maybe I've come home.
 

kumar

Well-known member
everyone is luka

well i already knew you were

Ego is all about difference. The concept of othering is interesting here. There’s a lot of talk of othering in social justice and woke rhetoric. The irony in it being an accusation is thats a form of othering in itself, like differentiation isn’t a fundamental aspect of creating meaning and how we relate to one other. I think there’s value in realising it’s something that we constantly do in all our interactions

in a grander, or maybe more redundant way, the precedent for developing an ego, and a singular biographical self, requires some differentiation between your nervous system and everything that seems to be outside of that. it would have been particularly important at some point to differentiate between your hand and the snake that might be about to bite it.

and so that can then lead to the evolution of a unified ego that, under duress, feels compromised by the less desirable components of your self.

danny said about sidestepping and uninvolving yourself from this function, moments of fleeting genius where you can clearly locate and feel out all the contradictory disastrous and desirable versions of your self, scroll through your various insecurities and fears and not feel at all threatened by them whilst identifying with them head on.
 

luka

Well-known member
this is what i wanted to talk about in the caveh zahedi thread which was shamefully ignored,

i remember a kathleen hanna interview ages ago where she says how these grubby confessional healing efforts of that whole scene had the unintended consequence of people making zines about how secretly racist they were

sometimes you have to shut up

To look at this a little more closely, we have this popular notion that we are all, or certainly all white people, are all racist and that the avowed anti-racist is perhaps under more suspicion as a kind of double agent.

And what that seems to encourage is an interrogation of our own experience with the intent to uncover this hidden inner racist which betrays itself in flashes of unwanted thoughts, in atavistic fears, in snobberies, in aversions, in assumptions and so on.

And in performing this interrogation, certainly in theory, we find this brazen other, acting against our own professed beliefs. In the pre-verbal, pre-rational, reactive self. We expose, to our horror, the racist we carry within us, the racist, according to the theory, we really are.

And two groups of people ask us to uncover this inner racist. Anti-racists ask us to do this as a consciousness raising exercise, so as we can get right down to the roots of this reaction-formation and cut them out, and racists ask us to do this, so we can discover that the liberal attitudes are merely skin deep, that in the core of our being we are tribal.

The former tells us that our inner racist is socially constructed while the latter would have us believe that it is natural and being natural it is futile and self defeating to try and change it.

And so to the question of the fanzines, what is going on there? You set up a situation in which honesty is synonymous with the excavation of the shameful and in doing so, place an onus on the display of what is shameful and taboo, rewarding the most horrifying confessions and reversing the usual social order. Whoever brings the most terrible secrets to light is the winner of the game.

Which is part of what I was trying to get at when I said "worth thinking about how a commitment to 'honesty' might enable our worst instincts, or even create them."
 

luka

Well-known member
And just to stave off any misunderstanding I'm not suggesting that unconscious bias does not exist and I'm not saying we shouldn't try and root it out on a personal and social level. To give an example, a few decades back some female teachers, who identified themselves as feminists, placed cameras in their classrooms and upon analysing the footage found that they had been giving vastly more time and attention to the boys than the girls. That is a significant finding with significant real world consequences.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
As an aside, I still remember the time you claimed that all your female teachers looked like Dua Lipa.
 
And two groups of people ask us to uncover this inner racist. Anti-racists ask us to do this as a consciousness raising exercise, so as we can get right down to the roots of this reaction-formation and cut them out, and racists ask us to do this, so we can discover that the liberal attitudes are merely skin deep, that in the core of our being we are tribal.

The former tells us that our inner racist is socially constructed while the latter would have us believe that it is natural and being natural it is futile and self defeating to try and change it.

The obvious point im making is that all thought, judgement and conceptualisation of situations is based on prior categorisations, instinct, unconscious, system 1 thinking, implicit biases, shortcuts etc etc. We can’t avoid making snap value judgements and risk assessments constantly, we cant not be judgmental, we can just manage how we respond, If we take this position (do we take this position? Any enlightened buddhists here?) its hard to deny that we all have some racial stereotyping and unconscious bias going on at some level, the controversy is around the source. And whether having these thoughts is racist or not is another charged debate that’s heavily skewed by how honest we can be with ourselves and each other.

And there’s obv a spectrum of awareness and intensity with bias, almost like developmental stages in how we understand and respond, which is heavily contingent on past experience, education, exposure to other people, and cultures etc

So in the interests of the discussion about the impossibility of emotional honesty is it worth thinking about how the positions you set up there can be dishonest? The rift that underpins most sociological positions is the old nature v nurture false dichotomy isnt it? Ie that liberal attitudes or impulsive reactions, multiculturalism or ethno-nationalism are part of nature or not.

The self- serving dishonesty or wilful ignorance in the racist group might be in over emphasizing or indulging in these instinctual, reactive thoughts and disavowal of masses of evidence to the contrary, with a lot of confirmation bias. There’s a lot of denial of fear, and fetishisation too. And there’s a huge amount of self-deception and dishonesty in nationalism.

The self-serving dishonesty or wilful ignorance in the anti-racist group sometimes comes in the form of denial of the instinctual and implicit biases at the micro (personal) level, or in claims to have arrived, Maybe the idea that the levels of your prejudice can be fully known or realised or excavated can be dishonest too. But I think a common view is that it’s constant work and vigilance, concepts like privilege-checking and the interrogation you describe are now quite embedded.
 

luka

Well-known member
I'm pretty sure you're saying the same thing...


common view is that it’s constant work and vigilance, concepts like privilege-checking and the interrogation you describe are now quite embedded.

One of the things I was talking about is the way in which this eternal vigilance can backfire, or be perverted, or have unintended consequences. About the drawbacks of setting up this policeman in the head.
 
One of the things I was talking about is the way in which this eternal vigilance can backfire, or be perverted, or have unintended consequences. About the drawbacks of setting up this policeman in the head.

I think it's a necessary stage. The danger in getting stuck at that stage of development is what the vampire castle essay was kinda about
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
And just to stave off any misunderstanding I'm not suggesting that unconscious bias does not exist and I'm not saying we shouldn't try and root it out on a personal and social level. To give an example, a few decades back some female teachers, who identified themselves as feminists, placed cameras in their classrooms and upon analysing the footage found that they had been giving vastly more time and attention to the boys than the girls. That is a significant finding with significant real world consequences.

Probably, I should imagine, because boys spend much of their time pissing about, teasing each other and trying to impress the girls - which is consistent with them doing less well that girls in almost every subject.

So it's not necessarily the case that teachers want (consciously or otherwise) to give more attention to boys.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think it's a necessary stage. The danger in getting stuck at that stage of development is what the vampire castle essay was kinda about

That seems reasonable. Two big dangers with getting 'stuck' there are the way it incubates and encourages neurosis and also that what you set out to look for you usually find.
 

kumar

Well-known member
that necessary stage can be dangerous depending on how publicly you broadcast it, like just because there is a vulnerbility to attempting emotional honesty you don't avoid the prospect of shitting all over the group therapy floor
 

sus

Well-known member
@Luka:

I'm tired and I have to go back to work, so I'll be brief and then I'll log back on later.

What, in my view, you avoided: the idea that a lot of straight men are particularly anxious about going to gay clubs, not just because they are in a different space (which, as we both said, people are often in, in a diverse society), and not because they fear being raped (imagine then how women feel 24/7), but because they have anxiety, conscious or not, about their own sexuality. I'm saying this descriptively, not in any moral or other sense. In my view, this is because sexuality is a spectrum and the idea of '100% heterosexual' is pretty laughable - but that's the kind of thing I wanted to discuss, because there is a diversity of views.

I don't ultimately care about the who's right argument, but I do care about this point, and I genuinely do not feel it got discussed.
I've read through this thread a couple times now and decided that baboon2004 has a sort of obsessive fantasy where straight men are attracted to him. It reminds me a bit of women who can't believe that a gay man wouldn't sleep with them. "But I have big tits! Surely you're in denial"

Anyway, we should be sure not to shame baboon, and be kind to him. Many gay men are, it's true, inordinately attracted to straight men, but baboon's particular affliction seems much more severe.
 
The obvious point im making is that all thought, judgement and conceptualisation of situations is based on prior categorisations, instinct, unconscious, system 1 thinking, implicit biases, shortcuts etc etc. We can’t avoid making snap value judgements and risk assessments constantly, we cant not be judgmental, we can just manage how we respond, If we take this position (do we take this position? Any enlightened buddhists here?) its hard to deny that we all have some racial stereotyping and unconscious bias going on at some level, the controversy is around the source. And whether having these thoughts is racist or not is another charged debate that’s heavily skewed by how honest we can be with ourselves and each other.

And there’s obv a spectrum of awareness and intensity with bias, almost like developmental stages in how we understand and respond, which is heavily contingent on past experience, education, exposure to other people, and cultures etc

So in the interests of the discussion about the impossibility of emotional honesty is it worth thinking about how the positions you set up there can be dishonest? The rift that underpins most sociological positions is the old nature v nurture false dichotomy isnt it? Ie that liberal attitudes or impulsive reactions, multiculturalism or ethno-nationalism are part of nature or not.

The self- serving dishonesty or wilful ignorance in the racist group might be in over emphasizing or indulging in these instinctual, reactive thoughts and disavowal of masses of evidence to the contrary, with a lot of confirmation bias. There’s a lot of denial of fear, and fetishisation too. And there’s a huge amount of self-deception and dishonesty in nationalism.

The self-serving dishonesty or wilful ignorance in the anti-racist group sometimes comes in the form of denial of the instinctual and implicit biases at the micro (personal) level, or in claims to have arrived, Maybe the idea that the levels of your prejudice can be fully known or realised or excavated can be dishonest too. But I think a common view is that it’s constant work and vigilance, concepts like privilege-checking and the interrogation you describe are now quite embedded.
We really went mad during that pandemic didnt we. I have no idea what this means!
 
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