I understand why you’re uncomfortable. You’ve got this idea that authoritarianism is only something that appears in totalitarian regimes that tend to target queer people like myself, so you don’t think it’s appropriate to compare exclusionists to authoritarians.
Only, I’m not presenting a tone deaf or ignorant analysis of the problem. The problem is actually that you don’t understand what authoritarianism is, and in your ignorance you send me a message like this.
Authoritarianism isn’t a political ideology, it’s a cognitive flaw that exists in all human cultures. Here’s a quick primer, pulled from similar things I’ve already said on my blog before:
Authoritarians are people who create a social power structure that requires obedience to a core authority, usually an individual but sometimes an ideology. They exhibit the following three behaviors as a core part of what they do.
- Establish an in-group and then police it. People don’t just have to look like you, they also have to talk like you. If they don’t, they’re the enemy and you have to push them into the out-group.
- Identify an out-group. These people are the enemy and must be attacked to keep the community safe.
- Take your biggest, meanest, most violent person and put them in charge. They are now mom/dad and they will keep you safe.
Authoritarianism is, at its root, a cognitive flaw created by emotional immaturity. People who are emotionally immature build power structures that they think will keep them safe, and those power structures work by hurting other people. That’s why they have to imagine that they face an existential threat from people who pose no threat to them. To conservative Christians, it’s everything from leftists to Muslims. To TERFs, it’s trans women. And to exclusionists, it’s aces.
That’s why we keep pointing out that exclusionists talk like TERFs. Because they do. Because both groups are an expression of authoritarianism in the LGBTQ+ community.
Not satisfied? Neither am I, let’s go further.
Exclusionists are absolutely authoritarians. Here’s a short list of reasons why:
- They have an in-group and they police it. To exclusionists, there is only the LGBT community. Anyone among those groups that don’t agree with exclusionists are policed in an attempt to exclude them from the community.
- They have an out-group that they attack. Asexual people. And before that, bisexual people and trans people.
- Their in-group doesn’t match reality. Asexual people have been a recognized part of the LGBTQ+ community for more than 50 years, but since that pokes a hole in exclusionism, they need to lie about it and claim that asexuality was a trend started by David Jay when he founded AVEN.
- People in the LGBTQ+ community have been calling themselves queer for longer than I’ve been alive, but to exclusionists queer is a slur that must never be said by anyone.
- Their out-group directly attacks people in the LGBTQ+ community in an effort to invalidate them, erase them, and deny them resources that they have every right to access.
- Their fear of the out-group is entirely imaginary. Aces don’t take anything away from the LGBTQ+ community. Diversity is not a threat. Exclusionists just think it is because they’re authoritarians and authoritarians are always fearful and xenophobic.
This is not rocket science. Exclusionists argue that aces are a threat to the community because they take resources away from us. When we demonstrate how faulty that reasoning is, they fall back to claiming that aces aren’t actually oppressed. When we demonstrate how faulty and immoral that is, they fall back to their actual position.
Aces are the enemy, so exclusionists are going to label them as cishets and drive them out of the community for the sake of everyone’s safety.
And when we point out how that last argument isn’t just faulty, but also immoral and disgusting? Their true colors show and slurs and insults abound. Scratch an exclusionist and a hateful bigot bleeds.Your position is ignorant and tone deaf. You don’t understand what authoritarianism is and I find it personally insulting that you’d try to shame me into silence because you’re either too ignorant of the facts or too uncomfortable to acknowledge them.
Exclusionists are authoritarians. Learn to deal with it.
This is a good post.
I just want to add this:
When establishing an ‘out-group’ to harass and blame for all their problems, authoritarians frequently – maybe always – aim at people of similar or less social power than themselves, but claim that the designated out-group is more powerful than them.
This paints the authoritarian group as an underdog fighting a great foe, which encourages internal solidarity. But the bonus is doubled because the ‘great foe’ is actually fairly easy to gain political or legislative victories over; pretending this is nigh-impossible makes every victory a huge morale booster.
Examples:
- TWERFs target trans women as the outgroup, but claim they are really fighting cis men.
- SWERFs target sex workers as the outgroup, but claim they are fighting sex traffickers/the porn industry.
- Exclusionists target ace people as the outgroup, but claim they are really fighting straight, cis people.
- White nationalists target non-white refugees as the outgroup (& many others), but claim they are really fighting invaders who want to commit white genocide.
Gatekeepers need excuses for gatekeeping, after all, or they’re out of a job. But it’s not fun to gatekeep when you’re facing real enemies that might hurt you, so keeping busy with the ones you can kick around easily is a common pastime.
Tag: authoritarianism
“The concentration camp was never the normal condition for the average gentile German. Unless one were Jewish, or poor and unemployed, or of active leftist persuasion or otherwise openly anti-Nazi, Germany from 1933 until well into the war was not a nightmarish place. All the “good Germans” had to do was obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, avoid any sign of political heterodoxy, and look the other way when unions were busted and troublesome people disappeared. Since many “middle Americans” already obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, are themselves distrustful of political heterodoxy, and applaud when unions are broken and troublesome people are disposed of, they probably could live without too much personal torment in a fascist state — some of them certainly seem eager to do so.”
— Michael Parenti, Fascism in a Pinstriped Suit
(via vinegardoppio)
“Much of the Christian right views contemporary Russia with a surprising fondness, and it’s a coziness that predates the Trump administration. Christian conservatives including Pat Buchanan and Bryan Fischer have fawned over Putin in recent years. Along with having an instinctual affinity for authoritarian leadership, these men respect Putin’s yearslong rollback of gay rights and abortion access. Franklin Graham, for example, gave an interview to a Russian newspaper in 2015 in which he praised Putin for “protecting Russian young people against homosexual propaganda.” Other cultural conservatives see Russia as “Christianity’s front line” against Islam. Presumably, then, it wasn’t hard for Butina, a friendly Russian gun-rights activist, to curry favor in these same Christian conservative circles.”
— Mariia Butina’s cozy relationship with the Christian right makes total sense.
Shep told his Mom the family architects made him nervous but his 12-year-old brother was probably the least accepting of the project.
One afternoon, not long after the family architects arrived, he grabbed a footstool and put his face right up to one of the Nest Cams.
“Hey, buttholes!” he said. “Why don’t you leave us alone?”
At first, nothing happened. Then there was a crackle of static, followed by a voice on the other end. “That’s a strike,” it said.
(via
)
This is. Absolutely horrifying. These people are licensed, payed child abusers. The casual comparison of their program to ABA (which tortures children for being autistic) should tell you all you need to know.
(via philosophy-and-coffee)
That’s genuinely terrifying. 1984 is not a family therapy handbook.
(via k-pagination)
Another weird and frustrating phenomenon when you get sucked into an argument with conservative types (something I usually try to avoid bothering with anymore) is that there’s this very narrow set of people they’re convinced are key figures, even “leaders” on any given topic. Talk about climate change and they bring up Al Gore. Talk about women’s rights and they bring up Anita Sarkeesian.
To this day I have NO IDEA what any of those people have ever said on those topics, and in most cases, I never even heard of them outside of conservative complaints and memes. I would never know the name Anita Sarkeesian if she wasn’t one random blogger out of thousands that an obscure niche of people went positively ballistic over. I’ve never heard of anyone accepting the existence of global warming just because non-scientist Al Gore said to.
If I tell them this they never believe it. They’re completely convinced that the beliefs they hate actually revolve around some random youtubers or B-list politicians they randomly elevated into their own bugbears and the idea that the people they fight hardest against actually have barely any influence or fame outside their own subculture seems almost impossible for them to accept.
George Soros.
I always see people saying George Soros pays people like me to protest (I wish), or buses people to vote on battleground states, some way or another he has us under our thrall.
I don’t even know who the fuck George Soros IS
I don’t even feel bothered to Google him and find out- he’s utterly irrelevant to my life. But apparently all liberals are on his payroll somehow.
I, too, never heard of George Soros before just recently.
They could make up absolutely any name in these arguments and it would have just as much meaning to me. “You’re only pro-vaccine because you’re shilling for Jiminy Ferpendoodle!!!”
I’ve heard this referred to as the central fallacy of the authoritarian mindset: It’s not that authoritarians don’t care about facts, it’s that facts aren’t real until they are confirmed by an Authority. Of course no liberal believed in Global Warming until Al Gore said so! Why would they believe it, until Someone In Charge said it? And moreover, if you can prove That Person Isn’t Really An Authority, the facts will change! See also:
- Why Creationists are obsessed with disproving Darwin – not his theory, but the man himself. As if casting doubt on Darwin-a-dude-born-in-eighteen-fucking-oh-nine-for-chrissake-’s personal beliefs will somehow completely disprove the ensuing two centuries of scientific research.
- Why various idiot politicians try to legislate away Global Climate Change, as if making laws against the ocean will stop it from rising.
I’m sure you could add on ten thousand bullet points but it’s Saturday and I don’t wanna do the research when I could be cleaning my kitchen and playing Minecraft.
I remember when some EDL fucko accused my and my mates at a counterprotest of being in Soros’ pockets.
WE’RE FUCKING BRITISH.
^^^
the funniest thing about this whole “leader of antifa” and “message from the top of antifa” thing is that these people are genuinely unable to conceptualize any group that isn’t based around a hierarchical command structure
I don’t know if this post is a joke but I think it’s impossible to have a group, especially a LARGE group, without any sort of hierarchy or structure.
They may be chosen through basis democracy, or rotate through the whole group, but there always HAS to be a spokesperson there.
Organized protest (or anything organized, really) doesn’t WORK otherwise. Especially not on a legal standpoint.
structure =/= hierarchy
and if all groups need a spokesperson, where is antifa’s?
hi everyone im jerry blackbloc, antifa’s social media manager
This is so funny, bc like being anti fascist isn’t like a group at all. It’s like saying people with diabetes or who are vegan are a group who need a hierarchy.
This shit is literally why the zapatistas invented a cartoon character to put in front of the media as a “spokesperson” because people just couldn’t conceive of the EZLN not having one.
I don’t think you guys understand. Fascists and right-wingers literally can’t comprehend anarchy. There is a reason why in mainstream society ‘anarchy’ and ‘chaos’ are synonyms – right-wing ideology literally can’t comprehend groups without leaders, without hierarchy. The concept is terrifying to them because it destroys their understanding of reality.
Right wingers and fascists are WEAK. They are afraid of a world where people exist voluntarily, and are truly free, and decide their lives on their own. That’s why they are authoritarian, they are afraid of freedom and choice.
Another weird and frustrating phenomenon when you get sucked into an argument with conservative types (something I usually try to avoid bothering with anymore) is that there’s this very narrow set of people they’re convinced are key figures, even “leaders” on any given topic. Talk about climate change and they bring up Al Gore. Talk about women’s rights and they bring up Anita Sarkeesian.
To this day I have NO IDEA what any of those people have ever said on those topics, and in most cases, I never even heard of them outside of conservative complaints and memes. I would never know the name Anita Sarkeesian if she wasn’t one random blogger out of thousands that an obscure niche of people went positively ballistic over. I’ve never heard of anyone accepting the existence of global warming just because non-scientist Al Gore said to.
If I tell them this they never believe it. They’re completely convinced that the beliefs they hate actually revolve around some random youtubers or B-list politicians they randomly elevated into their own bugbears and the idea that the people they fight hardest against actually have barely any influence or fame outside their own subculture seems almost impossible for them to accept.
George Soros.
I always see people saying George Soros pays people like me to protest (I wish), or buses people to vote on battleground states, some way or another he has us under our thrall.
I don’t even know who the fuck George Soros IS
I don’t even feel bothered to Google him and find out- he’s utterly irrelevant to my life. But apparently all liberals are on his payroll somehow.
I, too, never heard of George Soros before just recently.
They could make up absolutely any name in these arguments and it would have just as much meaning to me. “You’re only pro-vaccine because you’re shilling for Jiminy Ferpendoodle!!!”
I’ve heard this referred to as the central fallacy of the authoritarian mindset: It’s not that authoritarians don’t care about facts, it’s that facts aren’t real until they are confirmed by an Authority. Of course no liberal believed in Global Warming until Al Gore said so! Why would they believe it, until Someone In Charge said it? And moreover, if you can prove That Person Isn’t Really An Authority, the facts will change! See also:
- Why Creationists are obsessed with disproving Darwin – not his theory, but the man himself. As if casting doubt on Darwin-a-dude-born-in-eighteen-fucking-oh-nine-for-chrissake-’s personal beliefs will somehow completely disprove the ensuing two centuries of scientific research.
- Why various idiot politicians try to legislate away Global Climate Change, as if making laws against the ocean will stop it from rising.
I’m sure you could add on ten thousand bullet points but it’s Saturday and I don’t wanna do the research when I could be cleaning my kitchen and playing Minecraft.
Al Gore was the only major politician talking about global warming 15 years ago, but they haven’t updated their talking points. They also point to Al Sharpton as some kind of currently relevant leader, because again, their talking points haven’t been updated in decades.
The Soros obsession is basically just anti-semitism. He’s probably the biggest Democratic mega-donor, but he’s hardly the only one. The tropes surrounding him are nakedly anti-semitic. It can barely be called a dogwhistle at this point.
Another weird and frustrating phenomenon when you get sucked into an argument with conservative types (something I usually try to avoid bothering with anymore) is that there’s this very narrow set of people they’re convinced are key figures, even “leaders” on any given topic. Talk about climate change and they bring up Al Gore. Talk about women’s rights and they bring up Anita Sarkeesian.
To this day I have NO IDEA what any of those people have ever said on those topics, and in most cases, I never even heard of them outside of conservative complaints and memes. I would never know the name Anita Sarkeesian if she wasn’t one random blogger out of thousands that an obscure niche of people went positively ballistic over. I’ve never heard of anyone accepting the existence of global warming just because non-scientist Al Gore said to.
If I tell them this they never believe it. They’re completely convinced that the beliefs they hate actually revolve around some random youtubers or B-list politicians they randomly elevated into their own bugbears and the idea that the people they fight hardest against actually have barely any influence or fame outside their own subculture seems almost impossible for them to accept.
George Soros.
I always see people saying George Soros pays people like me to protest (I wish), or buses people to vote on battleground states, some way or another he has us under our thrall.
I don’t even know who the fuck George Soros IS
I don’t even feel bothered to Google him and find out- he’s utterly irrelevant to my life. But apparently all liberals are on his payroll somehow.
I, too, never heard of George Soros before just recently.
They could make up absolutely any name in these arguments and it would have just as much meaning to me. “You’re only pro-vaccine because you’re shilling for Jiminy Ferpendoodle!!!”
I’ve heard this referred to as the central fallacy of the authoritarian mindset: It’s not that authoritarians don’t care about facts, it’s that facts aren’t real until they are confirmed by an Authority. Of course no liberal believed in Global Warming until Al Gore said so! Why would they believe it, until Someone In Charge said it? And moreover, if you can prove That Person Isn’t Really An Authority, the facts will change! See also:
- Why Creationists are obsessed with disproving Darwin – not his theory, but the man himself. As if casting doubt on Darwin-a-dude-born-in-eighteen-fucking-oh-nine-for-chrissake-’s personal beliefs will somehow completely disprove the ensuing two centuries of scientific research.
- Why various idiot politicians try to legislate away Global Climate Change, as if making laws against the ocean will stop it from rising.
I’m sure you could add on ten thousand bullet points but it’s Saturday and I don’t wanna do the research when I could be cleaning my kitchen and playing Minecraft.
Without being asked, the Justice Department intervened in a private employment lawsuit on Wednesday, arguing that the ban on sex discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect workers on the basis of their sexual orientation. The friend-of-the-court brief, filed at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, was a striking shift in tone from the Obama administration, which had shied away from that question. The move ended a day that began with a tweet from President Trump announcing a ban on transgender people serving in the military, surprising Pentagon leaders and reversing a year-old Obama administration policy. Also on Wednesday, Mr. Trump announced that he would nominate Sam Brownback, the governor of Kansas and a vocal opponent of gay rights, to be the nation’s ambassador at large for international religious freedom.
“Yesterday was this administration’s anti-L.G.B.T. day,” James D. Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & HIV Project, said on Thursday. “Whether coordinated or not, to have it all happen on the same day certainly brings into focus the profoundly anti-L.G.B.T. agenda of this administration.”
Administration officials insisted that the timing of the three actions was coincidental. Wednesday just happened to be the deadline for the Justice Department to submit briefs in the employment discrimination case, they said, and Mr. Trump’s tweets about transgender troops unexpectedly skipped past lawmakers and the military brass who were considering the issue. But whether by accident or intent, the result was a striking reversal from Mr. Trump’s predecessor, who repeatedly used administrative actions and legal arguments to press for protections for gays and lesbians. And taken together, the administration’s actions are a prize for religious conservatives who backed Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign but were far more enamored of his vice-presidential pick, Mike Pence.
why “spanking is harmful” studies will, ultimately, never matter to parents who want to hit their kids:
@fandomsandfeminism wrote a great post recently about the fact that we have, essentially, a scientific consensus on the fact that all forms of hitting children, including those euphemistically referred to as “spanking”, are psychologically harmful. they’ve also done an amazing job responding to a lot of
parentsself-admitted abusers who think “I hit my child and I’m okay with that” and/or “I was hit as a child and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me” are more meaningful than 60 years of peer-reviewed research.unfortunately, I’m here to tell you why all of that makes very little difference.
in 2014, a couple of researchers from UCLA and MIT named Alan Fiske and Tage Rai published a book called Virtuous Violence, the result of a major study of the motivations for interpersonal violence. Rai wrote a shorter piece about it in Quartz, which is a pretty light but still illuminating (hah, I did not see that pun coming but I’m gonna leave it) read.
the upshot of Fiske and Rai’s work is that most violence is fundamentally misunderstood because we think it is inherently outside the norms of a supposedly moral society. we presume that when someone commits a mass shooting or beats their spouse they are somehow intrinsically broken, either incapable of telling right from wrong or too lacking in self-control to prevent themselves from doing the wrong thing.
but what Fiske and Rai found was that, in fact, the opposite is true: most violence is morally motivated. people who commit violent acts aren’t lacking moral compasses – they believe those violent acts are not only morally acceptable, but morally obligatory. usually, these feelings emerge in the context of a relationship which is culturally defined as hierarchical. in other words, parents who commit violence against their children do so because they believe it is necessary that they do so in order to establish or affirm the dominance which they feel they are owed by both tradition and moral right.
when abusive parents say that they are “hitting children for their own good”, they are not speaking in terms of any rational predictions for the child’s future, but rather from a place of believing that the child must learn to be submissive in order to be a “good” child, to fulfill their place in the relationship.
this kind of violence is not the result of calm, intellectually reasoned deliberation about the child’s well-being.
for that reason and that reason alone it will never be ended by scientific evidence.
history tells us more than we need to verify this. the slave trade and the institution of racial slavery, and their attendant forms of “corrective” physical violence, for instance, did not end because someone demonstrated they were physically or psychologically harmful to slaves – that was never a question in people’s minds to begin with. for generations, slavery was upheld as right and good not because it was viewed as harmless, but because it was viewed as morally necessary that one category of people should be “kept in their place” below another by any means necessary, because they were lower beings by natural order and god’s law. this violence ended because western society became gradually less convinced of the whole moral framework at play, not because we needed scientists to come along and demonstrate that chain gangs and whippings were psychologically detrimental. this is only one example from a world history filled with many, many forms of violence, both interpersonal and structural, which ultimately were founded on the idea that moral hierarchies must be maintained through someone’s idea of judiciously meted-out suffering.
and this, ultimately, is why we cannot end violence against children by pointing out that it is harmful – because the question of whether or not it is harmful does not enter into parents’ decisions about whether or not to commit violence in the first place. what they care about is not the hypothetical harm done to the child, but the reinforcement of the authority-ranked nature of the relationship itself. the reason these people so often sound like their primary concern is maintaining their “right” to hit their children is because it is. they believe that anyone telling them they can’t hit their children is attempting to undermine the moral structure of that individual relationship and, in a broader sense, the natural order of adult-child relations in society.
and that’s why the movement has to be greater than one against hitting kids. it has to be a movement against treating them as inferior, in general. it has to be a movement that says, children are people, that says children’s rights are human rights, that says the near-absolute authority of parents, coupled with the general social supremacy of adults and the marginalization of youth, have to all be torn down at once as an ideology of injustice and violence. anything less is ultimately pointless.
^^^
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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