thinking about how the burning of the library of alexandria is remembered as the most prominent historical symbol of the destruction of knowledge…but that’s nothing compared to the thousands of entire languages killed in America and Australia by the colonialists…
*jeopardy voice* can I get “Diego de Landa burning the Maya codices of Mani” for 500 please
She said this in the context of how incels basically form parasocial death cults when they are ‘blackpilled.’ They come to believe that because they feel terrible about themselves right now, that feeling is objectively true and forever, and even the reality of how the ‘world really works’ and there’s no hope to change it, only to “LDR”. Which is, ‘lie down and rot’, a form of suicide baiting. What’s happened here is that otherwise genuine feelings of pain or insecurity have been validated maybe too much and have evolved into an entire worldview centered around affirmation of pain. And once pain-as-truth becomes social capital, the way people behave changes to maximize its growth and spread.
But I have to say? I feel like I have encountered versions of the very same behavior in my own spaces, on tumblr, on facebook, etc.:
There’s definitely forms of love-bombing that surround mental illness or depression support connections that shower you with confirmation and praise only as long as you reject any steps of managing mental illness, so long as it unstoppably dominates your life. Once you question someone else’s behavior or declare that you’re seeing a therapist or something all your new parasocial friends turn against you.
I’ve seen it in supposedly feminist spaces where women that are otherwise strangers to each other talk each other into hopelessness and heightened fear of sex and fear of other people in their life, especially male figures. Sometimes not even based in a specific personal experience, but instead just this collective ‘dark truth’ of womanhood. TERFs love to do this, and segue younger people into fear of trans women this way.
I’ve seen it happen a lot within lgbt+ spaces where someone’s personal despair about dysphoria, homophobia they face, not being able to find a partner or being judged by family or strangers, or even fear of violence, enters a feedback loop with other people they don’t actually know and don’t have any interests but their own consumption in mind amplifying it, forming these insular enclaves where fear is truth and everyone else is wrong because they don’t feel as terrible about being attracted to the same sex or for being trans as they should. Meanwhile no one struggling within this structure is actually getting the support or help they need, they’re just arguing about it and building cases for, when the mythical support does fall from the sky, why they should get it first.
There’s mounds of discourse where people argue over how because that group couldn’t possibly live as terrible a reality as this group, their lived experience isn’t the order of the universe and therefore doesn’t deserve validity or attention at all. And to argue, inexperienced people fall into the trap of trying to artificially match the despair levels of their critics, or try to counter one black pill with their own black pill which will never be credible to outsiders, resulting in cringy disaster at all vectors. In the red-hot radioactive mess troll accounts prosper.
Which is not to say that all these situations are full of people as baseless as incels– some of them are living very difficult lives, but are using “masochistic epistemology“ as the internal logic of their world. And the effect of such an internal logic is extremely dark self-confirming biases in excess of what is necessary to communicate the dangers of their lives, or cope with hardship. And any similar person who goes off seeking friends who acknowledge their pain is going to find a black hole of people who’d otherwise be peers escalating that very pain in themselves and others in order to confirm it’s all real.
Natalie Wynn herself, a trans woman, struggled with the urge to go to 4chan’s /lgbt/ and wait for the most toxic and hopeless crowds there rip her appearance apart even though it made very little logical sense. The people there shared the same insecurities as her, that they don’t pass, that people will despise them, and in some way hearing those insecurities confirmed rather than denied to her felt more like ‘the real truth’ or ‘what people really think’ than it did to hear praise and encouragement. Even if what they had to say wasn’t anywhere near an objective truth.
The “pain is real” mindset is that hard to shake! It doesn’t matter if you’re smart, prepared to identify the phenomenon with philosophy education, intellectually aware that it’s bad for you. There is a self-harm impulse to ‘face reality’, but a very specific reality that confirms the bias of your pain or insecurity. The comfort zone of discomfort, in a way! It just wants you to not feel crazy for feeling those things and is willing to hurt you even more to prove you’re right about your environment or your life.
When I’m at my sickest, I feel like my pain is objectively true in a way nothing else is. The people who love me are lying or duped by my manipulative nature, the hope I had was false and I never should have tried, etc.
Online communities of a certain kind of political bent really encourage this—present the idea that there’s a way the world is, and that way is not just unfair and unjust sometimes but endlessly destructive. People on the right and the left do this.
Virtual Eye Pod, 2018. As part of their on-going research into self-driving vehicles Jaguar Land Rover are employing self-driving pods that have large ‘virtual eyes’ to interact with other road users. The intelligent pods run autonomously on a fabricated street scene in Coventry, while the behaviour of pedestrians is analysed as they wait to cross the road. Research suggests that 63% of pedestrians worry about how safe it is to cross the road with the advent of autonomous vehicles. The ‘eye pods’ have been designed to help work out how much information self-driving cars should share with users or pedestrians to ensure that people trust the technology.
I think something more … robotic … could convey the same information without falling into the Uncanny Valley like these do.
[Image description: a photoset of a large, truck-like autonomous vehicle at the crosswalk of what looks like an underground garage or tunnel. The vehicle is painted white, orange, and black. On the front of the vehicle, just above the windshield, are mounted two, round, cartoonish, eyes. The first, second, and third pictures in the set show a woman with long blonde hair approach, and cross, the crosswalk; the vehicle’s eyes move to follow her. Description ends]
People using wheelchairs, trying to navigate crowds of other people, have a similar problem: being ignored, having people walk into our paths without warning, etc.. My aide has said that’s because people using wheelchairs are below the sight lines of most ambulatory people, so what should I expect?
But, funnily enough, ambulatory adults seem to have no problem at all making room for ambulatory children. My suspicion is that most normates put wheelchair users in the same mental category as robot cars: they forget that we are autonomous beings, capable of movement (and heavier than they realize, and not able to react to changes as quickly as they can).
So, awhile back (a search of my Dreamwidth Journal reveals it was just about nine years ago), I got the idea for mounting some sort of “puppet” with a moveable head, mounted at the eye line of the worse offenders in crowds (about 5 feet / 1.6 meters–typically an adult, able-bodied, male – surprise, surprise) that would turn in the direction I’m moving my chair… almost exactly like these “Eye Pod” vehicles.
In any case, as the person with the strongest vested interest in
crowd control, having this falling into the Uncanny Valley is exactly what I want my puppet to do, if it makes people go: “…Oh… erg,” and back up half a step as I approach.
My simplest idea is a to have the head be an emoji-like face – something the brain registers as “human” almost instantly.
My most elaborate idea is to have it be a fully automated dragon puppet, “perched” on the back of my chair, with a flexible neck, roaring sound effect, and a mouth that opens when it roars – to reveal long teeth, and glowing red lights in its mouth. Maybe even movable wings, so I could dope slap those fools who are being particularly obnoxious (ridiculously unrealistic and impractical … But a girl can dream).
This is what a lot of people don’t realize poc have to deal with on a daily basis. Micro-aggressions are very real and are very difficult to deal with. Mostly because these people will claim up and down that they are not racist, which immediately shuts down any conversation around the topic.
This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.
The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.
For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.
German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.
The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.
I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.
So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).
Holy fuck. I was raised Jewish— with female Rabbis, even!— and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important.
“so you just threw gender in there for fun” ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants
I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating.
There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.
Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.
(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage.
The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have.
Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. It’s likely that the event was actually called was (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in people’s minds because the soldiers also went into people’s homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?
Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that “Night of Broken Glass" includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term “Kristallnacht" was reclaimed, as such.
None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.
I think I just had an epiphany. Now I have to figure out how to put it into words.
I was mulling over how everything seems to take way too much effort and then I thought, “It’s like the results aren’t worth it.”
And that’s like…. That’s it, isn’t it? It takes me so much more effort than the average person to accomplish the most mundane tasks.
The results aren’t equal to the cost. I’m not getting a good deal, here. My whole life is like this.
No wonder I’m such a grump.
I used to think I hated sewing on buttons. I eventually got a sewing machine that made a better buttonhole and then I realized that I hadn’t hated sewing on buttons, I’d hated the fact that the buttons were for buttonholes that were absolutely horrible. That bolstered me enough to finally get one of those old gear-driven buttonhole contraptions and then I loved making things with buttons…then I discovered that there was a presser foot that would let me sew buttons on with the sewing machine. I don’t go out of my way to sew things with buttons, but, when I do have a project with buttons, it’s not nearly the problem it used to be.
It’s not the same as your situation, of course, but I hope you can find some sort of similar route with aspects of it.
I hope it’s ok to reblog this even though I don’t have anything helpful to add, I just thought it was a good point.
My dentist: Do you still keep snakes? Me: Yeah… I just got a new one last week. Dentist: Is that why you rescheduled your appointment last Wednesday? To go get a snake? Me:
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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