💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~locha › entries › 20230720_Cryingwoke.gmi captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:34:49. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Jul 20, 2023
[cw: transphobia]
EDIT: I wrote that piece in one go, way too tired, and it's not on a subject on which I have expertise. I didn't like it. So I didn't change the message, but edited it to be better written. Not 100% it is, but I'm trying 🙂.
I read Ainent's latest free speech rant.
gemini://ainent.xyz/gemlog/2023-07-18-re-re-free-speech.gmi
I'm not going to comment on the debate; this one has been rehashed ad nauseum in every social circle that I've known. I'm curious about the way he communicates, however. If you're curious about the debate, Ainent points to Frankly's gemlog, which links other posts:
gemini://circadian.gemlog.org/2023-07-06-frankly.gmi
I think some people on the right have weird expectations about their audience. Not too long ago, a friend of ours initiated a conversation about "the trans menace". (Btw: not a real thing.) It seemed like she feared trans people would assault people who misgendenred them, on purpose or not. But, and that's the point: I can't be certain, because I didn't really understand what she was fearing.
At some point, she urged us to watch a video, and I told her "We can watch it, but we're not going to interpret it as you do. You see trans people abusing someone, we'll only see jerks." It took her aback. I think that she had been so immersed in transphobic content that she hadn't anticipated that we just wouldn't read it in the same light as her.
I get a similar feeling with Ainent. He clearly fears something, but it's not clear what. Apparently he's afraid of woke supremacist and social justice warriors, but who this represents, I cannot say. His definition is not helpful (what is an alternative lifestyle?), but I'm not certain he grasps why. It's also not clear why they should be feared; it might have something to do with the BLM protests that he alludes to later, which he suggests are more violent that we typically believe. But here's the issue: I think he thinks we already have those concepts. I think hebelieves we already know what he's talking about, but we don't say it out loud because we're afraid, or hypocritical, or actively part of the conspiracy. In fact, we lack the context to read things the way you read them. We're not being obtuse, we don't even understand what it is you fear.
I suspect that the issue is that those ideas don't really lend themselves to explicitation. Maybe Ainent thinks that if he did become explicit, he would face social stigma. Or that it wouldn't stand up to scrutiny (either because it's false, or because scrutiny is a loaded dice in our woke society).
Very often, bigoted arguments feel like they're mounted on a barrage of assumptions that I would challenge if they were given to me individually. I used to think it was a cynical strategy to prevent rational argumentation (by overwhelming with bullshit). But it now strikes me that, if you're deep in an ideological rabbit hole, you might lose touch with what normal people think and understand, and that this bombardment might be, for example, a way to frame a debate as being "honest", as opposed to "politically correct". I'm pretty sure I've made similar mistakes.
However, my position was never so scary. I might have been frustrated that my point wasn't getting through, and didn't understand why, but to them, the point is an existential threat. It has to be despairing.
~~~
The funny thing with my friend is, she never had anything but positive encounters with trans people. I'm not certain of what happened, but I think that when she realized that we didn't have the same outlook as her, she adopted our outlook for the evening, and spoke about a colleague of hers that she really appreciates. It would have been much harder to reconnect on this issue if we didn't have a lot of love and respect for each other. But maybe there's something about adopting the other's perspective that can help here.
🏷 politics, belief
To share a thought or add a comment: locha at rawtext dot club.
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