Part of the reason why SJ tends to think its conclusions are the only ones has to do with how it frames dissent. Check out this constantly mutating phrase, which I’ve seen restated more ways than I can count: “No, Becky, I can’t just be friends with people who disagree about whether people like me should live.”
It makes some sense, to classify disagreements about favorite ice cream differently from disagreements about genocide. And yeah, I think it provides a real reason not to keep members of the alt-right as friends just because you could have fine discussions about ice cream. But SJ also loves to make another move: the elevation of symbolic, discursive, or abstract harms to actual ones.
The examples are numerous: abusive ships -> promote real abuse, not using a preferred pronouns -> othering -> the high rate of suicide in trans people. And the maddening part is that I think all of those “->”s can be replaced with “cause” without actually harming the truth value of the sentence. But SJ never asks, “how strong is that causal linkage” or “how often does it occur.” The question bores it. Someone out there somewhere has had a conversation where their Reylo shipper friend failed to notice the signs of abuse in the first party’s relationship because they read so much romanticized abuse and got a little blurry on which parts of that kinda romance are unacceptable in the real world.*
But these are often rare occurrences and their contributions are minor. SJ doesn’t care. Symbolic harms lead to real ones, and “how often” and “how directly” aren’t worth examining because establishing those facts would take research and time and science and falsifiability. That’s a lot of work just to get to the real purpose of your thinkpiece and no one has time to wait for the gears of study to turn when there are Takes to write!
So suddenly, a whole lot of disagreements about discursive, symbolic, and microaggressive matters aren’t disagreements about minor things but are, by the Transmutative Power of Promoting Abstract Harms to Lethal Ones, disagreements about life and death (so often phrased “disagreements about whether people like me should live” just to make the argument extra-personal).
And so it goes with dissent: there is no minor dissent within SJ, there is only callousness-verging-on-lethal-intent.
*I have a whole extra chunk of thoughts on how SJ’s “what about the children” re: abusive shipping has everything to do with imagining children as perfectly impressionable blank slates as a way of inflating the numbers on how often these causal chains follow.
Oh my god, this is exactly it.
I can’t be friends with someone who literally wants me dead. I can be friends with someone who holds false beliefs about gay or disabled people, because it’s possible to hold hair raisingly terrible beliefs and believe you are being good and kind in doing so.
Conflating these two things is a bad idea.
If you mean “I have personal boundaries,” just say that. It’s a perfectly cromulent sentence.
tbh i am disgusted that ariana grande had to actually disable her comments on twitter because so many people are blaming her for mac millers death from an overdose. like yes his death is immensely tragic and alcohol and drugs are a huge issue in society today but ariana was in no way obligated to stay with someone who was toxic for her health and well-being. and the people who are saying that it was her job to stay and “take care of him” and “save him” can fucking rot
Do they think shes not absolutley fucking shattered too????? Someone she once loved died and they want to attack her saying it’s her fault?????? What kind of actual fucking monsters???????
The concept of purity is banned you may choose between
+ sterility
+ contamination with organic matter
+ contamination with inorganic matter
+ shutting the fuck up and examining why you can’t frame anything that isn’t mired in the mentality of an extremely narrow form of Christian dogma even when you’re taking about like… food.
Can we just.. leave lesbians who don’t date bi girls… alone? I’ve seen to many people complaining about it and honestly, who cares, leave them alone lmao
uh no?? perhaps we as lesbians should…. u know…. address the issues in our community, one of which can be biphobia. ignoring prejudiced members of our community does not make them less prejudiced.
“Who cares?” – someone who’s literally never spent a single moment considering the thoughts or feelings of bi women
I literally do not know what goes through people’s minds that they must defend the right to get all up in someone else’s business about their personal arbitrary boundaries around dating and sex, even when those boundaries are based on silly assumptions. It literally makes you a creep if you decide it’s okay to bother someone about the bad policy choice they are making by being super picky about who they sleep with.
There is no reason to care! There is, I promise you, no connection between being willing to be in a sexual relationship with someone and having a sense of solidarity with them as part of an oppressed community.
There is, I promise you, no connection between being willing to be in a sexual relationship with someone and having a sense of solidarity with them as part of an oppressed community.
As demonstrated by a huge number of straight men
I don’t think anyone is trying to force OP to sleep with bi women I think people may be trying to get them to examine just what quality they think all bi women everywhere share that disqualifies them from the dating pool. The important part there isn’t “disqualifies them from the dating pool” it’s “assumption about all bi women everywhere.”
If people like OP just quietly didn’t date anyone with x characteristic no one would get on their case. It’s the constant shouting about how you’re unattractive/unsafe/disgusting based on x marginalized factor of your identity that gets to people.
You really can’t pinpoint the Famine as a specific genocidal event when the economic and legal policies of England had been setting up the conditions for 400 years at that point.
The British did something incredibly similar in Bengal during WWII, where a famine killed millions. They deliberately shifted the distribution of food toward Britain and away from India.
Both cases lack intent to wipe out an ethnic or religious group, but both cases show that a long history of colonization make a population completely disposable to the colonizer.
An Gorta Mór was doomed to happen the moment the Pope created the Kingdom of Ireland as a personal fief for the King of England. The Potato Blight was a match, while the English had been stacking kindling and pouring on lighter fluid for centuries.
Many intellectuals, economists, and politicians knew it was coming. The potato blight had burned through most of Europe, causing minor damage, before it reached the British Isles.
So when it struck and the English were like 🤷♀️ the population of Ireland was halved and the British definitely took advantage of that. The population still has not fully recovered. Ireland could support (and should have) 20 million people, but it barely has 5 million on the whole island. This is because the inherently violent political and economic system didn’t go away when the crisis ended. More and more people emigrated, decimating the cultural/linguistics strongholds of Ireland.
If we compare genocide to attempted murder, famine, being the economically and politically constructed tragedies that they are, should be compared to criminal negligence.
I don’t call the Famine a genocide. It’s just yet another relic of how damaging English colonial rule was to the island and to my ancestors. You can’t isolate the Famine from the rest of Irish history. Just my onion.
given that this event wasn’t the only time that the english used a famine to deliberately cut ‘undesirable’ populations down in their colonies, i don’t think there’s anything wrong with calling it a genocide. yes, the existence of famine alone is usually attributable to poor administration, but when purposeful malicious intent enters the picture the event becomes both a famine and a genocide.
population death caused by poor food distribution by the administration during times of weak harvest: famine
population death caused by purposeful withholding of food or other forms of purposeful food mismanagement by the administration to affect specific areas during times of weak harvest: famine & genocide
The latter is also enforced by plenty of (white) women in both the west and slightly more progressive nations in the Middle East. One of my friends was proudly telling me about how his very white friend was part of some feminist coalition in Egypt trying to ban hijab.
Its still primarily a patriarchy issue, but the latter is definitely also a “white savior” issue.
Yes. That is literally what they mean. They benefit from turning “lesbian” and “radical feminist” into synonyms, so they insist on using them as synonyms constantly.
The end result of this is, of course, that anyone who distrusts radical feminist rhetoric avoids lesbian spaces, meaning that young lesbians are surrounded on all sides by radfem propaganda and, unsurprisingly, become indoctrinated into the authoritarian radical feminist manner of thinking.
I’ e noticed this too, such that I find myself wary of anyone online (offline is very different imx) who identifies as “lesbian” and immediately go searching to see if they mean “radfem but maybe some trans women can come in as long as they’re not bi or nb” or if they mean “gee golly I love me some girls and never found men sexy”
for real though if they ever do find the ‘’’’’’’’’gay gene’’’’’’’’’’’’’’ pls can straight allies claim to be gay and baffle the scientists because they cant find a gay gene within them and therefor we can undo the notion that the gay gene exists
because we all know the only reason why they want to find the ‘’’’’’’’gay gene’’’’’’ is because they want to
find out before birth which babies are gay so their parents can abort them/give them up for adoption based on that
try to forcibly remove the gay gene from those children when they’re born because being gay is still seen as something bad
make homosexuality go right back to being classed as a disease that needs to be ‘fixed’
literally no good can come from ‘’’’’’the gay gene’’’’’’ being found
Replace every instance of “gay/homosexual” with “autistic/autism” and you’ve got Autism $peaks’ end goal.
Anyone trying to discover the gene for [insert anything here] is gonna fuckin skyrocket us into the Eugenics War from star trek and kill us all.
Every European country with surging neo-fascist parties have universal healthcare and low wealth inequality, spare me the bullshit about how Trump is the product of neoliberalism’s failures.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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