I think we need to shelve the concept of whether or not someone’s nice to people and instead make judgements on how exclusive someone is or isn’t with kindness.
I remember that one post that went around showing an old film of Hitler chatting casually, kindly with a young girl, and the polarized responses tended to be in relation to how footage and narratives of “But look, the monster has a soft side” serve to humanize and normalize really, really bad people. Corrupt and murderous politicians constantly use baby-kissing narratives of their down-home chumminess- often to children- to offset any judgments about them being a bad person, and I’d like to say they should be entirely irrelevant. Not just because that’s a cheap emotional appeal but because I strongly believe we need to understand that niceness is neutral to symptomatic and not at all ‘good’ on its own.
The issue here, while I have other things to say about niceness, is that it shouldn’t matter that the monstrous person is *gasp!* seen doing a nice thing, because the issue should never have been that anyone believed they were 100% evil all the time. The issue is how big or little their sphere of niceness is.
Of course The Bad Person is nice to someone. But whatever warmth they’re showing is simply exemplary of how many people they see as like them. As human.
If the only time the person in question shows kindness is to people superficially just like them then their sphere of humanity is too fucking small. They see more people as ‘other’ than ‘like them’ and THAT is the issue.
Every bearer of poisonous idealogy has someone they like, someone they reward for being like them or suiting their ideals. The issue is how many other people in the world they don’t think are fucking human, or worth recognition and support.
For me the issue has always been is that no one is all good or bad, and we must judge individual behaviors or patterns, rather than trying to lump people into “monster” or “good person” categories. Because, really, that’s what we do a lot of the time. The neighbor of the serial killer says “oh, but he seemed so nice. Do you really think he did it?” as though if one seems nice then nothing bad can coexist in them. Alternately, pedophiles are often left to roam in families because “he’s so nice and helpful, and I know he loves the kids a lot.” This idea than one cannot be a perpetrator if they are capable of human affection is dangerous. It lets people off the hook because they say “look, this person does a good thing,” or “look, I do this good thing, I’m not as bad as this person/group. I’m a *good* *person*” as though this idea of the “good person” means that everything you do is now good and acceptable and should be free from repercussions.
Alternately, this concept allows us as a society to subject people to monstrous and unjust punishments when we do have proof they did something monstrous, because now they’re a *monster*, and we dehumanize them, and put them away in prisons for decades and refuse to hire them and take away all their rights and murder them, because we see no possible good in them.
We all do shitty things. We all deserve consequences for them. Some of us do inhumanely destructively deviantly shitty things. We still deserve appropriate consequences. There aren’t monsters and angels, there are people who do monstrous things and people who do sacred things, and often times people who do both.
I do not like “punching up.” Whatever you mean, I mean that full stop. I do not think punches are as easy to aim as you do.
I think it is generally a distraction tactic: if we spend all our outrage on laughing at cishit fashion sense or whatever the hellfuck of the week is, by the time the powerful cishits in the government do something like take away our rights we’re sad and tired.
I discourage you from mocking people with scrupulosity issues who want to help because not only is hurting them bullshit, but some of the energy you could spend fighting back is used up on attacking vulnerable people who may well be just as oppressed as you but who also happen to be cis or straight.
I do not know what op means when they talk about worrying about our image so they may mean something else…
But If *you* think that’s me worrying about “my image” you have the mental acuity of a pulverized cactus.
Being jealous and insecure is okay. Demanding that your friend or partner stop seeing their other friends isn’t.
Wanting attention is okay. Demanding your friend or partners attention 24/7 isn’t.
Being angry is okay. Taking your anger out on innocent people isn’t.
We can’t control our feelings and we shouldn’t attempt to, but we can and should work to control our reactions to said feelings.
I was told something about expressing anger once, “maybe you needed to say it, but they didn’t need to hear it” to remind me to be careful about how I express things. I have a journal for that kind of thing but I don’t go back to read it because I think that falls under the “doesn’t need to hear it” because all it does is dredge up bad feelings again
Being a decent person isn’t about not having the wrong feelings– believing that leads to a dangerous path of self-denial. It’s about learning to deal with the feelings you have.
so i saw a discussion about feeling empathy toward children where an adult was explaining that they were worried something might be wrong with them bc they couldn’t feel empathy toward children and ultimately always sees them as “little adults” and didn’t want to comfort and nurture or protect them because all they saw was “someone who’d be an adult one day.”
and everyone went on reassuring them that nothing was wrong with them, they just weren’t a naturally parental person, which is fair and true!
but I didn’t see anybody making what I feel is the most important point, which is:
regardless, you still have to pretend empathy for the child.
No, you don’t have to have your own child, you don’t have to go out of your way to interact with children, and nothing is “wrong” with you if you largely find children annoying. you can tell your adult friends “I don’t have any patience for kids and prefer to not be around them,”
but if you view children as “little adults,” you HAVE to then logically say “but they’re not. they’re children, and I’M the ACTUAL adult, and it’s MY responsibility to treat them well and be nice when I’m around them.”
and I don’t want to see any comments like “must be nice to be neurotypical” on this, because I’m not, and there’s no mental illness that makes it okay to treat others badly, sorry. You have to be nice to children.
It’s just literally human decency. It’s one of the most simple rules of our species. Just be good to children.
I have no desire to raise a child. None.
But if a child asks to borrow my sonic screwdriver at a con so they can pretend to kill the life-size Dalek with it? They get to borrow it.
If a child wants to pretend to be the Dalek and exterminate me, I’ll gladly fall down and play dead for them.
Children live in a different world, and even if you struggle to see that, you can simply do what we all do sometimes: Play pretend.
And no, I’m not neurotypical either, and I do struggle to “like” kids. I find them very hard to deal with, esp. if their NT parents are around. But you know what? If you let them be kids, they are actually fun for a bit and when they aren’t yours you can always give them back ;).
and also, I don’t see how seeing kids as little adults means you can’t have empathy for them O.o like why is that a problem. empathy should be had for everyone, regardless of age…?
and I don’t like kids, either
I think when they say it in a negative sense, they mean not making allowances for the way children see the world differently.
Even when you are legitimately suffering, it is your
responsibility not to be cruel to people who haven’t harmed you. When
you are miserable and feel like lashing out, it’s your responsibility to
control that impulse and to apologize when you fail to control that
impulse.
Sometimes people think their suffering gives them the
right to be as vicious as they like, and that viciousness often lands on
the very people trying to offer them support and care. Someone who
cares about you and who is trying to support you isn’t there to be your
verbal (or physical) punching bag.
There’s a difference between
consensual support – sharing your feelings with someone who has agreed
to listen – and taking out those feelings on someone by saying cruel
things to them, hurting them physically, or making them feel bad intentionally to excise your own
feelings.
If you are the person offering care to someone who
is suffering, you are not required to accept cruelty in order to offer
support. You are entitled to set boundaries that keep you from being
hurt – even when the other person is also legitimately hurting.
Sometimes
people who are suffering get overwhelmed and lash out, because it can be
hard to think of others sometimes when your own pain is great. But if
and when this happens, it needs to be acknowledged and apologized for,
and the person who did it needs to figure out how to stop themselves
from behaving like this in the future. The person who was lashed out at is also entitled to their own feelings about what happened; no one’s required to excuse or ignore their pain just because it was inflicted on impulse or by someone else who was in pain.
No one gets a pass on
harming whoever’s nearest just because they themselves have been
harmed. If someone is consistently treating you with respect, it’s not
acceptable to force them to bear the brunt of pain you received
somewhere else. Find other ways to handle overwhelming feelings.
There’s this really weird mindset on tumblr where a lot of y’all think that just because someone isn’t systematically oppressed for a certain aspect of themself or their life that it means it’s 100% okay to mock or even harass them over it. I don’t even know how many posts I’ve seen where someone has been called out on this and responded with, “um sweatie no one is oppressed for [thing] :)” like
that doesn’t matter, pals?
Bullying people over non-harmful things they are or do is still shitty even if they don’t face oppression specifically for those things. It’s still being mean just for the sake of being mean just because someone is, in some way, different than you and then trying to justify it by acting like it’s cool as long as you don’t go after them for something that “actually matters”.
Me: I don’t know if I ever want to be pregnant, I’d rather adopt a kid or two that are a bit older
Someone: Are you SURE? Older adoptees present UNIQUE CHALLENGES
Me: We are discussing human beings not digital pets
Literally every child every born and/or parented presents unique challenges. It’s like people are unique individuals…..or something………….
An amazing and revolutionary concept
When people ask me, “Why do you want to adopt teenagers?” I always answer, “Because you asked like that.”
I’m real over it.If I become a foster mom to a 17 year old kid and I get the privilege of the option to adopt them? You better believe I am legally making that kid mine.
“They’ll be a legal adult in no time, why spend the money to adopt? They’ll be aged out of the system.”
There’s no aging out of family, Marvin.
“They might be rebellious or smoke or do drugs or steal things! What if they won’t listen to you?”
Then I guess I’ll have to step up and do some fruxking parenting, Stanley.
“You want to adopt problem children then?”
All. Children. Are. Problem. Children. If you’re not prepared to deal with the fact that at some point, any child ever, whether you birthed them yourself or adopted them at any age, could become a problem? Then you are NOT ready to have children, and should really just step off and let the people who actually want to be parents live in peace with their kids.
Homeless people are human beings with immense value. They are members of our families, communities, neighborhoods, cities, and, for a number of people reading this, they are themselves (or have been).
The fact that homeless people do not have housing is a wrong done against them, not a sign they did something wrong. To then try and ban them from public spaces and existing in public (including doing things we all have to do, like sleep or eat), is yet another grievous wrong.
An attack on homeless people is not “protecting the community”, it is an attack on the community. Homeless people aren’t my enemy, those who would ban them from things like sleeping in public are my enemy.
So many people make comments on this post about how they think homeless people are inconvenient to them, as if it’s not more inconvenient being fucking homeless and then facing these constant attacks and being treated like vermin by people who see you as an eyesore rather than as a human being and part of the community.
Being angry at human beings for just existing and trying to survive because you find the horrible conditions society puts them in unpleasant to look at makes you an asshole.
It says a lot about you if you see cops, government officials, rich people, landlords, etc. attacking some of the poorest and most desperate members of society and you automatically align yourself with cop and not the homeless person.
When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.
There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.
But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.
You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.
It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”
Purity culture tells you that once someone says or does something, they can never go back on it. That’s a goddamn lie. While it’s true that some remain unrepentant and never change their ways and continue to harm others, it’s important to allow everyone the chance to learn from their mistakes. Saying something ignorant isn’t murder. Please stop treating it that way. Let people grow.
Still call it out and question it ….
Bruh. No. Listen. Call out what people do now, absolutely. If they haven’t changed, call them out on their record. This post is explicitly not about people who HAVEN’T changed. What this post IS saying is, if someone is making an effort to be a good person, don’t go digging around in their past for evidence that they were once for what they’re now against, or once against what they’re now for, as “proof” of what they “really think,” because people’s opinions and beliefs can change.
The obsession with finding shit in someone’s past and then claiming that a questionable or even sordid past negates all possibility of a good present needs to become extinct. Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.
If someone has changed for the better, don’t harass them about what they were like before they fuckin’ changed. That’s shitty and it needs to stop.
Re-watching Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (the parody movie where the rednecks in the woods are the hapless protagonists and its the bunch of paranoid college kids causing all the problems.)
I’d forgotten how much the situation was escalated by the one teenager who was clearly looking for an excuse to hurt people. The college kid that, at the beginning of the movie, explicitly declares himself a better person than those around him.
Chad.
He’s the one who tells his friends “what’s really going on here is worse than you think.” He’s the one who insists they handle it themselves and not through official channels. He’s the one who casts his opponents as “pure evil” and says “we finally have a chance to fight back without rules.” When some of the other teenagers express uncertainty he’s the one that says if they can’t handle what needs to be done, maybe they deserve to die, too.
“We have to burn this place to the ground. Destroy it completely. You have no IDEA what this is all about, do you Allison? These freaks are evil. And they deserve everything that’s coming to them.”
I’d never realized before how closely every single plot point in the movie mirrors the way mob culture instigators will rile up the masses under the guise of “social justice”:
You assume bad faith in your opponents.
You declare your opponents subhuman and acceptable to hurt by any means.
You discourage the use of peaceful or official methods to address the issue.
You keep your followers in line through fear of the “other” and threats of ousting them into that group if they become “contaminated.”
You revel in as much chaos and pain as you can inflict–
–after all, you’re the good guy.
If I’m stepping out of line, please let me know, and callout culture has definitely been super bad lately, but..
….this applies just as much to anti-social justice stuff, racism, oppression of all kinds, etc. It’s mob violence, period. I’m incredibly, incredibly uncomfortable with this being used explicitly as a “look at this people using social justice as a weapon” thing when the exact same tool is used in the protection of
family values
nationalism
against ‘war on Christianity’
masculinity
capitalism
…etc. It just seems in very bad faith in me to take a very common mob violence issue and make it all about those ‘pesky SJWs’. It doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. It just… puts a lot of the blame on the shoulders of people operating within a functionally flawed culture. Where do you think callout culture even came from? We live in a world that’s finally starting to come around to the concept that being gay shouldn’t be a death sentence for your life or career. It’s not like ‘SJWs’ exist in a vacuum.
I don’t think you’re out of line.
I 100% agree with you that this is a lens that affects all those issues. We like to frame ourselves as the good guys and we are very susceptible to issues being placed into the black and white of moral certainty. An article that has stuck with me hard through the years pointed out how people use their value structures to justify their actions–whether good or bad–rather than the other way around. (Hilariously, it was written by Orson Scott Card. I assume the irony was lost on him.)
I think you have misread my issue when you frame it as a complaint against “those pesky sjws.” I consider myself to be highly involved in social justice issues. I consider this to be a social justice issue. What I specifically wanted to point out was the instigators. The way in which abusers can use our blind spots to manipulate us and our movement. Cloaking oneself in the language of righteousness is a VERY common abuser tactic.
We need to learn to recognize warning signs of the people that want to herd us into being their weapons. We need to recognize the danger of ever applauding ‘this group is okay to enjoy hurting.’
The idea that we can be the heroes in the story where the other party are “pure evil” and “real monsters” and all the answers are really simple and easy is a very, very appealing narrative. And one that shelters and feeds abusers.
I guarantee you there are plenty of young people on tumblr doing their very best to Be A Good Person and make change for the better, and they are learning what is a healthy, safe, constructive method for going about this by watching the rest of us. We NEED to make sure they are hearing voices that point out “anon hate campaigns are harmful.” “Here are some warning flags.” “People that show up in your inbox and tell you to shun someone or you’ll be contaminated and shunned too are NOT THE GOOD GUYS.”
It just seems in very bad faith in me to take a very common mob violence issue and make it all about those ‘pesky SJWs’.
If I frame a broader issue around a specific way it COMMONLY and DIRECTLY affects me and people I care about, I promise you it is neither out of bad faith, nor out of any desire to minimize the importance of other ways in which this issue manifests. (Some of which also affect me. Some of which I have argued against on other platforms.) ((This, by the way, is the only portion of your post I take issue with. I’m totally cool if anyone wants to springboard off this to apply it to other issues or contexts. It’s a neat topic.))
And, since you asked, and I think it’s a pretty interesting and valuable question–personally, I think call out culture came from a very reasonable push to encourage people with more privilege in a situation to not remain silent and to speak up in situations where people are being harmful. It just, like many useful principles, goes awry when stripped of nuance and dogmatized into a black & white cure-all for humanity.
There’s also some really interesting ways call out culture (and more extreme SJ culture in general) parallels the way a lot of us were taught to approach moral issues in conservative evangelical Christianity. (Namely: you assume personal moral culpability for other people’s behavior if you don’t proselytize or chasten them constantly; all people are sinners/prejudiced; all sins are equal; and any sin can lead to hell/ small wrongs contribute directly to a culture which leads to deaths of innocents so all issues are ultra high stakes where anything could be fair game.). I reallllly want to write a post about that some day when I can get my thoughts straight.
Thank you for such an eloquent response! I think that part of my post was influenced by the amount of pushback in my particular part of the community, e.g. “SJWs are telling us we’re awful people for shipping this so we’re going to be deliberately homophobic/racist/etc. in response”, etc.
What I specifically wanted to point out was the instigators. The way in which abusers can use our blind spots to manipulate us and our movement. Cloaking oneself in the language of righteousness is a VERY common abuser tactic.
We need to learn to recognize warning signs of the people that want to herd us into being their weapons. We need to recognize the danger of ever applauding ‘this group is okay to enjoy hurting.’
Thank you so much for this. You’re right, I read your post in a specific way, but as somebody who is still suffering the consequences of this exact tactic, this is very important. One of my most common things that I tell people is that the one posting publicly, the one asking you to choose, the one giving you an ultimatum – that has to be the person you look at with a critical eye instead of whoever they’re directing you towards.
(The ‘all sins are equal’ thing is definitely resonating with me as well. I would love to read that post once you have the energy to write it.)
As a point of how right you are that this is applicable to mob culture in general, I realized tonight that every single one of the five points I listed above….
….can be found in Gaston’s Mob Song from Beauty and the Beast.
Gaston is a *Chad*
“the one asking you to choose, the one giving you an ultimatum – that has to be the person you look at with a critical eye instead of whoever they’re directing you towards.”
This, a hundred times. Since I reframed part of my personal ethical system (still a work in progress of course) to place the highest suspicion and burden of proof on the person demanding I choose, I find it easier to identify/avoid certain types of nastiness.
(It also threw into painful light certain tactics being used on certain family members. But I can’t do anything about that, much as I’d like to.)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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