Then, of course, there’s also the thing where I’ve run into way fewer problems dealing with genuine white rednecks back home, than with the pseudo-progressive types motivated to do all that whitetrashwashing and set up convenient scapegoats.
They’re generally raised to act better in public, and face some consequences if they do not. That is more than I can say about some other folks.
There’s no fucking way the modern version of antifa existed in fucking copenhagen in the 1990s, It’s gotta be some other group
Antifa has been around for decades. They’re not new. They especially revved up organizing in the 1990s due to the resurgence of fascist street gangs across America and Europe. Antifa already existed when Obama was President. The only difference is the public visibility of anti fascism due to the public visibility of fascism.
Also antifa isn’t really a centralized group as much as a series of localized fronts. They existed throughout Europe often in far stronger numbers than existed in America at that same time.
throwback to antifa defending Seattle in 2015 from hammerscum
Just a friendly reminder that eye contact can literally cause pain for us. Like the pain centres in the brain light up if we’re in a brain scan.
So if you’re autistic, don’t feel bad for not making eye contact. If you know autistic people, don’t make a big deal of the lack of eye contact.
This this this this.
Some of us can maintain eye contact if we’re in a good place mentally but we may break eye contact under stress or when anxious. Or we may simply never make eye contact at all.
I fall under the former. And yes, it does hurt. It’s a crushing burning feeling and it feels… just awful. Please never demand an autistic person to maintain eye contact with you. It is literally torture.
I think a lot about who I am to other people in the world–particular who I am to strangers as a mere concept in their lives.
Today this woman called our information desk and said, “my son’s band is playing tonight. I want to come see him, but he never answers his phone…..I want to be there. Have you heard anything about his band?”
And I felt so bad for this lady but I’m not in the music scene around here so I had to tell her no, sorry.
Five hours later, I’m hiking and run into a group of guys setting up for some outdoor performance, and as I watch them unload the drums it hits me.
“Hey,” I said, “are y’all in a band?”
They said yeah and smiled and I told them “one of your moms called today. She wants to watch you play, but she can’t get a hold of you. Call your mom.”
And they all pulled out their phones and started discussing whose mom it probably was as they presumably dialed their own.
And now, unless we meet again and recognize each other, that’s who I’ll be forever to those guys–some mysterious courier for mom-messages who came out of the woods and told them their mom called.
I didn’t even tell them why their mom called me. Who am I to their mom?? Nobody even asked. They just took my word for it and called their mothers.
Amazing.
I’M LAUGHING!!! THEY DIDN’T EVEN ASK WHO I AM.
Maybe my favorite dead relative episode was the time my mother felt a need to call and pass on some information from her uncle who had died the year before.
Apparently he told her that (a) I was having some trouble, and (b) that was because my grandmother–his sister–was basically some kind of psychic vampire who didn’t want to let people go. That was also apparently urgent enough to call for a dream visit specifically to tell her, the only time she ever mentioned hearing from him.
I didn’t really know what to say to that. But I’m still not sure any of it was actually wrong.
The gender-neutral form of “ungentlemanly”/”unladylike” is “unseemly”.
There you go – now you can express your primly understated distaste for someone’s conduct without making any assumptions about their gender.
Uncouth also works.
A little more context (and expansion) for that Barbara Mann quote I posted earlier. Also the other quote from that talk which came up earlier and prompted me to look at the transcript again.
(Source through those links. There’s more of interest in that talk.)
I don’t have a lot of spoons to comment right now. But, what she’s talking about here is relevant to way too much.
Including some of my frustrations dealing with some people who are coming at things from some very different base assumptions, in a variety of contexts.
Also had to think about that rather disturbing bizarro assertion from a while back that “inclusionist ideas are much more abstract and harder to understand” 🤔
Anyway, long quote time:
And one of the things that tells us is that the One Good Mind of consensus actually requires the active participation of everybody in the community, that it can’t be done without active participation by all. So, everybody matters, everybody counts. And I remember my mother specifically saying, “Don’t leave anyone out, don’t leave anyone out”. And if anything was ever counted up and somebody was left out, you started counting again, from the very beginning. Why? Because somebody was left out. And that’s not acceptable, because exclusivism destroys community. It’s the first and best way to destroy community. Inclusivism, on the other hand, is very important to creating community; it hears absolutely every comment, it hears everything that’s going on, and it hears it in the voices that raised the issue. That’s pretty important.
I think one of the most damaging misunderstanding of Good Mindedness is something that, something that Heidi was just talking about, is the assumption that because everyone is equal, everyone possesses equal amounts of wisdom and talent–and, therefore, everyone should share equal amounts of power. OK, well this is a prescription for disaster if I ever heard one. [laughs] Because people simply do not have the same type or amount of talent or wisdom; everybody has a different thing. That’s why, in the words before all else, we acknowledge the special things that each one is bringing. If everybody was bringing the same thing, there’d be no need for those words. It’s basically patriarchal monotheism that thinks that everybody looks alike. You know, seen one seen ‘em all. That’s a patriarchal idea.
Instead, everyone has a limited amount of wisdom, and a limited amount of talent, and the idea is to make it all work together for the good of everybody. No one person is going to be able to do this alone. And each spirit has a limited amount of knowledge; that goes for human beings, that goes for any of these spirits. For example, if you want to know about corn, what do you do? Well, you go ask Sister Corn, that’s what you do. She sure knows a lot about being corn, she knows more than you and I do. She knows more about being corn than Sister Squash does. But, guess what: if you ask her about Brother Tobacco, she might know a little bit about him, but she doesn’t really know about Brother Tobacco. If you want to know about him, you’d better go and ask him.
And one of the important points spiritually about this is that there’s nothing that’s all-knowing. There’s no all-knowing spirit anywhere. Everything is a collective attempt, we all dump it into the center and see what we’ve got when we’re done collecting up all of what we have…
So, there’s no omniscience… [P]eople have frailties, they have failings, and that’s understood and recognized without any prejudice. It’s just something you’re going to work around. So, no one council arrogates the right to dictate to anybody else, it just is not going to happen, it better not happen… [B]asically claiming more wisdom than you have is actually a crime. It’s actually a crime against the people. And all that’s going to happen is that it’s going to create havoc in its wake.
I wanna Say Things about theory-of-mind failures and how aggravating it is to be the person who actually recognizes them happening (thanks to a lifetime of being forced to git gud at a thing that pretty much all humans are naturally bad at) and is trying to compensate for them as much as possible on her own end, and then is still getting accused of only thinking of themself.
But I don’t know how to say them and tie it in to the topic at hand, without writing a rambling and semi-incoherent essay that only maybe 1 person will even bother trying to read and then probably fixate on some weird detail which is entirely tangential to the point, and miss the actual point entirely. I’ve tried three times and then deleted them knowing there’s no way they’ll hit the mark I’m trying to hit.
I can’t promise I’ll understand but I’d like to see this.
Ok, I’ve had a break and some food and got myself tea and now feel like my brain is being a little less “lol what are sentences and paragraphs”, let’s give it a try. I’ll just reblog here @fierceawakening so you’ll be likely to see the notification, since you expressed interest. Can’t promise it’ll be totally clear, and it’s definitely not gonna be very concise, but I’m gonna have a go at it.
It’s about… well, I’ll illustrate it as I see it, rather than trying to break it down to abstracts (blockquoting the part that’s “illustration of the thing” to make it more clear where the illustration ends and the explaining-my-point begins):
You made a post, in which you didn’t “at” anyone or make any claims about specific people doing anything wrong, expressing a frustration with a thing people do that bothers you.
Some people took issue with that post, thinking that you meant something you didn’t mean at all, complaining that you misinterpreted them (misinterpretation on both sides; a simple mismatch of communication, with both sides having assumed that their meaning should be clear enough on its own to not need further clarification).
They complained of the existence of a dynamic wherein they point out something that bothers them, and someone else starts crying about it and makes their tears the focal point of the interaction – and then proceeded to come to you with descriptions of their tears (in an online, text-based forum where no one knows if you’re crying unless you say so) expecting you to center THEIR feelings on the matter, one which you originally initiated by complaining of something that bothers you.
Now, to be clear, I don’t think they were fully aware of this or being manipulative on purpose. The point I’m getting at is that, to them, I believe they honestly believed they were doing something significantly different in nature than the thing they were complaining about, because they felt differently about it – a theory of mind failure, in that they based their assumptions about objective reality including YOUR motivations and intentions, around what was happening in THEIR OWN minds, without considering that some people’s minds work differently than others for various reasons including both socialization and neurodiversity.
And probably one of the most frustrating experiences of being neurodivergent, for me, is noticing things like that happening and knowing that I’m the kind of neurodivergent that’s stereotyped as “bad at theory of mind” (autistic), but recognizing that I’m not actually impaired at it more than average but everyone’s just kinda bad at it in general unless they put in a lot of work to get better at it, but because neurotypicals are a significant majority and people tend to naturally gravitate into social groups where everyone’s had similar socialization and has similar preferences (boys hang out with boys, girls hang out with girls, jocks hang out with jocks and nerds hang out with nerds), most people can skate by on the assumption that other people think the same way they do, because in the majority of their social interactions that assumption is more likely than not to be correct. But for neurodivergent kids, it doesn’t work that way – we’re unlikely to end up having much of an option to mostly socialize with people who think the same way we do. In most of our social interactions, the assumption that the other person’s motivations and likely reactions to various hypothetical actions we’re considering is more likely to prove false. So we’re forced to learn that we can’t rely on that, and to try to learn how to predict people’s behavior and suss out people’s motivations who are very unlike us – the whole time being saddled with 100% of the blame for all failures, because OBVIOUSLY if everyone ELSE in the room thinks what you did was rude, YOU should have known it would be rude as well – it’s… understandable, to an extent, but it really really sucks for neurodivergent kids, particularly those who are undiagnosed and thus being expected to behave “normally” and assumed to be acting out on purpose if they don’t…. anyway, the point is, all that childhood punishment for not being one of A) neurotypical or B) good at theory of mind, forced me to get better at theory of mind than probably most neurotypical people are – simply because they never had the impetus to notice their lack of skill and practice it, while for me it was a necessity if I wanted to have any social life whatsoever.
Because I notice theory of mind failures in both myself and others, but they’re near-impossible to correct without everyone involved being on board with “ok, we all know that not all of us here have the same thought patterns, access to information, and motivations, right?” And it’s next to impossible to GET everyone on board with that when at least half of them have probably never even heard of theory of mind before, have never had reason to question their assumption that their own mental patterns are near-universal, and just flat out don’t even have a frame of reference for the subject at all, and I know that I only have any power over HALF the equation of communication anyway. And also because it’s only very recently that I gained the vocabulary to discuss the matter at all, rather than just kind of realizing that There Is That Thing Happening Where Other People Assume Silly Things About The Inside Of My Head and not being able to articulate it at all beyond just “no that’s not what I meant/why I did this/etc” (and then getting blamed for “not being clear”).
Anyway, hopefully that at least kinda got the gist of the thing. Feel free to ask for clarification if stuff’s confusing.
things i am going to teach my children later: the “pick one favourite” syndrome embedded in our culture is stupid and useless
it starts at fucking pre-school, in those little get-to-know-me books, and it never ends. favourite colour? mother tongue? favourite character? best friend? favourite sport? song? movie? book? series? band? toy? no you can only pick one
and i am deeply convinced that this is intrinsically linked to one of the things that annoys me the most, which is that in our society, it’s considered a sign of maturity to prioritise one thing, and often specifically one person, above everything else. i mean, priorities are definitely important, but you are also absolutely allowed to equally enjoy/love/feel connected to different things without constructing some kind of hierarchy where one of them always wins out
“you can only like one gender, you can only be one (of the two “biological” – ha) genders, you can only have one partner, you must have one best friend, you must have one favourite activity (preferably your job, bc that makes you a functional member of society) because clearly if you love multiple things, you must love them less than if you spent all that love on one thing”
this rhetoric creates so much guilt and jealousy – as if love is a finite concept.
(incidentally it is also possible to genuinely love something without it being one of the things you love the most, and that doesn’t make that love any less valid, but that’s another discussion)
I agree with this so much. My entire life, it’s been impossible for me to name my favorite anything. The closest I can get is “one of my favorites.” I know I like things, but I can’t choose a favorite, and I’ve never known why it is supposed to be important!
Struck again by that last commentary on the eatin’ sock, that I really am pretty glad I grew up around some more matter-of-fact attitudes about actually a lot of things. But disability definitely included there.
Not that this set of approaches can’t carry its own failure modes. (Ask my brainweasels, or rather please don’t rile them up more.) But, it would honestly never occur to me to get all creepy about the need for an eatin’ sock. Whether it’s for a cat or anybody else.
I still get shocked sometimes, when I think I understand just how different a set of assumptions some other people are working from. That can also make for extra fun when you’re encountering them aimed at you, of course 😵
And I know this is one of those things that people with sufficiently different experiences would have a hard time believing.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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