- South Dakota Becomes First State To Pass Anti-Transgender Student Restroom Bill – BuzzFeed News
Aaargh. And I suspect this won’t be the last state, unfortunately. But wait! There’s an update! South Dakota governor vetoes transgender bathroom bill – CNN.com (Thanks Grace!) - Lawmakers in These States Are Obsessed With Which Bathroom Trans Kids Use | Mother Jones
- “44 anti-transgender bills is more than double the number of bills filed in last year’s legislative session, and this year’s attacks come in more varieties than they have before.” (Pdf link.)
- Conservative Trolls Have Been Suggesting Men Go into Women’s Restrooms to Help Legislators Discriminate Against Trans People – Slog – The Stranger
- The rise of American authoritarianism – Vox
A new poll shows that Americans with authoritarian beliefs are the most likely to support Trump. And even if Trump loses this election, the authoritarians will remain a major force in US politics. - My husband raped two women — and I had to answer for his crimes – Vox
A first-person essay by a woman whose husband raped two strangers, who had her life destroyed, and who had become an advocate of Restorative Justice. - Federal Law Criminalizes Protesting Trump Now That He’s Guarded by the Secret Service
“Free speech zones” are the opposite of free speech. Also, it seems at least plausible that Trump’s security folks racially profile to determine who to kick out. - Talking about racism isn’t dividing the country. Racism is. – Vox
- The kerfuffle over Sanders’ economic plan – The Boston Globe
A short piece by James K. Galbraith. - Standard Fare or Fantasy Economics?
A slightly longer (but still not very long) piece on the same subject, this time focusing on stimulus. - “Dear Lawrence, I Know You Are Only Doing Your Job, and I Truly Wish I Could Help Assuage Paypal’s Concerns About My Donation to Syrian Refugees, But…” – Lawyers, Guns & Money
- How can a woman make more on Ebay? Pretend to be a man | Science | The Guardian
“Men earn 20% more on average than women selling identical new products on eBay, shedding light on unconscious biases which affect buying behaviour” - To Influence Policy, You Have to Be More than Rich | Ten Miles Square | The Washington Monthly
An interesting article discussing the scholarly argument over if middle class people’s preferences influence policy, or if it’s just the wealthy whose preferences are catered to. - Donald Trump is not a fascist
- A New Advocacy Group Is Lobbying for the Right to Repair Everything | Motherboard
Another example of copyright abuse being used to make us less free – in this case, to make it against the law for people to try and repair their own stuff. - The Itch – The New Yorker
A horrifying and fascinating read. “She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.” I’m not sure if I’ve linked this before – the article is several years old – but it’s worth linking again, if so. - The Current Crime Debate Isn’t Doing Hillary Justice | Ten Miles Square | The Washington Monthly
The crime bill during the Clinton administration did not cause incarnation rates of POC to skyrocket. - What happens if you scream out of a window in sweden at night – YouTube
- Artists Covertly Scan Bust of Nefertiti and Release the Data for Free Online
This is very cool. I really enjoyed the video one artist covertly made of the other artist covertly scanning Nefertiti. But why not a third video, covertly filming the covert filming of the covert scanning? - Miss Manhattan – 99% Invisible
” Over 30 statues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art were made in her likeness, and she adorns dozens of memorials and bridges and buildings all over the city. Although the body and face of Audrey Munson have been immortalized in iron and marble, her name is mostly forgotten.” - In Defense of Nonpologies | Thing of Things
- A Feminist Criticizes Feminist Frequency | Houston Press
- Marital Rape Is Semi-Legal in 8 States – The Daily Beast
Most of these eight states have double standards, by which a spouse can only be prosecuted for rape if it can be proven that physical force or a threat of violence was used. - World Population Decline | Acumen | OZY
Although population is still increasing, it’s long-term path will be a decline. - Walmart Wages Are the Main Reason People Depend on Food Stamps | The Nation
” A single Walmart Supercenter costs taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per year in public assistance.” - Across Europe, gay migrants face abuse in asylum shelters
- Bank of Canada urges ‘Star Trek’ fans to stop ‘Spocking’ their fivers | Dangerous Minds
I’m late on this, but now that I know about it how could I not share? - Vermont Senate Votes To Legalize Recreational Marijuana | ThinkProgress
If nothing goes wrong, Vermont will be the first state to legalize recreational marijuana through its legislature, rather than through the initiative process. - neo-neocon » Blog Archive » Want proof that Trump’s a tyrant? You got it.
This is a conservative site lamenting Trump’s promise to make it easier to sue news outlets for libel. Includes quotes from conservatives on both sides of the question. - Why Republican criticism of Trump fails
Thanks to Elusis for this link. “Sophisticated people cloak their racism in a well-turned phrase. Romney isn’t criticizing Trump for racism. He’s just ridiculing him for using the wrong fork.”
Major Trump donors who complained of immigrant ‘invasion’ used Mexican workers illegally https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/20/uline-mexican-workers-trump
When I transitioned, I changed my legal name, by going through the court process specified by law in my state. Prior, my legal name was a name most people use for boys. After, my legal name is a name most people use for girls.
I then went about the weary business of getting my name changed in the records of various banks, medical providers, charge accounts, you-name-it. Most places, it was easy; either they took my word, or they wanted me to e-mail a scan of the court order, which I was happy to do. Some places changed my name in their main database, but did not think to change it in other places, like their web software. (I’m still contacting one of those, every few months, to see if they’ll ever change it.) I ended up closing my accounts at one credit union, driving to another, and opening a new account. Got the job done.
And then there was PayPal. They wanted a copy of the court order. I sent it to them. They then wanted to know why I was changing my name. I said, in summary, “Because I wanted to, and there’s a legal process, and I went through it, and you have a copy of the resulting court order.” Then they sent a message that they wanted to know why. I told them again, and pointed out that they had the court order. Then I didn’t ever get a response again, even though I tried several times to get one, and even though I was courteous and even though I gave them plenty of time to respond. Eventually, I simply withdrew all but $0.01 from my account (their interface made it a pain to withdraw everything; I forget the details). Some time later, they sent me a message saying that they were closing my account.
I will never do business with PayPal again. I’ll do a bank transfer. I’ll swipe a credit card. I’ll send you money via Dwolla. But I won’t do PayPal. And if you’re using PayPal to collect a credit card swipe, I’ll try to find other options.
Grace
Did this improve your opinion on restorative justice? I just made me really question the motives of proponents and drove home the need to lock people up and get them off the streets.
This is the best thing I’ve seen written about Trump.
Trumped Up? Is the Donald’s Support Really Driven by Racist Xenophobia?
This video is just hilarious.
Jessica Alba DNA Test Result
I think Pete Patriot has a good point.
A lot of people don’t really care if Trump or the GOP is “racist” anymore, because the term has become so biased.
Essentially, blacks are allowed to organize as blacks, Latinos as Latinos, but whites can only organize with other groups along non-racial lines.
I mean, the same people who think it is wrong to say “all lives matter” in response to “black lives matter” also think that it is wrong to talk about the marginalization of the “white working class” because it is the entire working class we should be concerned with.
In other words, everyone gets racial grievances but them. At a certain point, calling someone “racist” doesn’t matter anymore because they just see it as a racial slur for “white.”
This is an important coment from the Mere Orthodoxy post Pete Patriot posted:
This confirms what I’ve seen in my encounters with Trump supporters, about half of whom are women. It’s an unrepresentative selection perhaps of better-educated and more well-off people than average. They don’t agree with his major policy proposals and will tell you that immediately. They think he’s slimy on a personal level. They support Trump because they think the gatekeepers of acceptable discourse among politicians and the media are self-dealing hypocrites. They want someone, anyone, to get away with transgressing the elites on the left and right that privilege performative scolding over bread and butter issues.
It’s a shame that performative scolding is the main anti-Trump technique coming from all corners.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/death-predicts-whether-people-vote-for-donald-trump/
Alternatively, it’s authoritarianism:
Donald Trump is attracting authoritarian primary voters, and it may help him to gain the nomination. | USAPP
Tables for London School of Economics USA Blog Post — #Democracy (I think this is the regression tables)
Donald Trump’s victories show that authoritarian voters are now in control of the Republican nomination process. | USAPP
The best predictor of Trump support isn’t income, education, or age. It’s authoritarianism. – Vox (not sure whether this is very different from other articles)
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism (overview of authoritarianism in American politics, has a magificent top illo)
I’m pretty sure something’s got to be wrong with at least one of these theories.
[Some broken links fixed by Amp]
Or both theories are correct, and what’s happening is that there’s common causation. Maybe some of the factors that make people more likely to die early, also make them more likely to be likely to support authoritarianism.
Nancy, are you aware that ALL of your links use the same study by Matthew MacWilliams as the one and only source of their musings, and that Matthew MacWilliams has defined ‘authoritarianism’ on his own, as “value conformity and order, protect social norms, and are wary of outsiders”… and that he postulates, without any support “And when authoritarians feel threatened, they support aggressive leaders and policies”.
Do you understand how absolutely mushy and manipulative such approach is, and how meaningless all of your links are for convincing an unbiased observer?
Now, I happen to agree with the conclusion. I think that the people who vote for Trump would be voting for Putin, were they Russian, and are not much different, broadly speaking. They feel slighted, marginalized, they yearn for past glories, and are looking for clear villains and easy solutions.
But what Matthew MacWilliams has done is:
– select a set of criteria that correlate with voting for Trump
– label them ‘authoritarianism’
– make an argument appealing to a particular kind of person
– ???
– profit!
Of course, just because his argument is fraudulent does not mean that his conclusion is wrong.
So why do they not see what a blatant hypocrite Trump is? He complains about jobs going overseas, but a ton of products with his name on them are made in China and Bangladesh. He’s suddenly found Christianity after decades of supporting many views most conservative Christians oppose (reproductive choice being the most obvious example), but he seems to have essentially zero familiarity with the Bible. He’s suddenly strongly opposed to most immigration from Mexico and in favor of mass deportations, but many of the hotels, casinos, etc. with his name on them employ a lot of undocumented workers.
If Republicans wanted to pick someone to stand up against the “gatekeepers of acceptable discourse among politicians and the media” because they’re hypocrites, they made a piss-poor choice with Donald Trump. He’s a carnival barker who came along at a time when there were many plausible GOP candidates but no real stand-outs, and he’s taken advantage of that.
Maybe that will change now that it’s realistically down to him and Cruz. I understand why he was so adamant about Rubio and Kasich dropping out last night though – they’re going to get a lot of delegates in Florida and Ohio (especially Ohio; Rubio seems to be flaming out fast even in Florida), potentially preventing him from getting a majority of delegates and leading to a brokered convention. If nothing else, that would be fascinating political theater.
Good point. Instead, they should have gone with… whom, exactly? He is the first candidate with any significant national presence who brought up these issues. Maybe we can’t trust him to build the wall, but he is the only one making it a campaign promise.
His voters don’t really trust him to do everything he says. But they think he is more likely to do so than his opponents who don’t say anything.
“If Republicans wanted to pick someone to stand up against the “gatekeepers of acceptable discourse among politicians and the media” because they’re hypocrites, they made a piss-poor choice with Donald Trump.”
To be fair we are going to get someone who solicited $10 million in speaking fees including almost $1 million from Goldman Sachs alone as our bulwark against the 1% so we sort of take what we can get right?
Pesho, are you aware that your comment about MacWilliams was factually wrong?
The criteria for measuring “authoritarianism” were first published in the early 1990s by Stanley Feldman, and they’ve been measuring the correlations between voting and authoritarianism, using the same criteria, since 1992.
There’s a legitimate point, that the systems of both parties are heavily biased towards millionaires, wall street allies and big business allies. But it’s hard to see how Trump is the answer. And unless the one and only policy you care about is “build a wall,” Clinton seems better on economic policy than Trump.
I know, how sad for US whites that they were never enslaved; that Jim Crow wasn’t used against them; that redlining and government loan programs lifted their economic prospects; that objective tests have shown again and again that being white is a big advantage in the job market.
And as a result of all that any many more things, white people have to suffer the unbelievable injustice of having people roll their eyes when whites talk about white “racial grievances.”
Oh, us pooooor white people.
The criteria for measuring “authoritarianism” were first published in the early 1990s by Stanley Feldman, and they’ve been measuring the correlations between voting and authoritarianism, using the same criteria, since 1992.
Criteria for measuring authoritarianism have been sought forever, with a significant uptick in activity after World War II.
Depending on when you were on the political spectrum, your criteria were wildly divergent. In the 80s, Communist Bulgarian counter-intelligence used a scale that was very, very different from the F-scale you guys developed in the late 40s-early 50s, but we were quite familiar with yours, if only so that we could hit any target on it. (I am now more familiar because I actually looked it up. It was developed by Theodor W. Adorno in 1947, and is so mired in religion and homosexuality that it is completely inapplicable now. For the record, I scored slightly below 20%, which is higher than I expected, and then 3% and 67% when I was messing about. In the 80s, we were told that 60% would be what the West agencies would appreciate in defecting Easterners. So I guess I can still pass… for a Trump supporter?)
As for Stanley Feldman’s work, it was more about perceived threat and authoritarianism used in enforcing conformity. It is not as easy to evaluate a person with it as with the F-scale, and requires calibration with some extra questions… which, to be fair, would look weird in a political survey.
So did Matthew MacWilliams use the F-scale? Did he use the something based on Stanley Fieldman’s work? Or did he use a set of four question on child-rearing, which are basically: do you want your child to be respectful, obedient, well-behaved, and well-mannered or independent, self-reliant, considerate, and curious?
Did you answer the latter? Congratulations! I think that this makes you a decent human being. What does Matthew MacWilliams think? Well, if you apply the same methodology as he applied to say that Trump’s supporters are authoritarian… well, that makes you similar to those Republicans who vote for Ted Cruz!
Are you puking yet? So why are you ready to accept his data for “Authoritarians support Ted Cruz” but not his data for “Decent parents support Ted Cruz”?
Yes, Ampersand, I am aware of quite a few ways to assign people in pigeonholes, according to simply worded questions. No, Ampersand, MacWilliams’s four questions are not universally accepted as a way to measure authoritarianism… leaving aside the fact that being a petty tyrant in your home does not make you automatically more likely to gladly put on the jackboots.
By the way, are you aware that the real scales, staring with the F-scale, are really, really dependent on what you consider ‘undeniably’ ‘right’ and ‘wrong’? In the 50s, it was about atheism and homosexuality. In the 90s it was about fear, outsiders, etc… But do you think that there are no authoritarians on the Left? Do you think they would be detected by their firm belief in the same things as the ones on the Right?
Pesho, you claimed that MacWilliams “has defined ‘authoritarianism’ on his own” and that he “select[ed] a set of criteria that correlate with voting for Trump.” Neither of those claims are at all true, and they are a completely unfair smear on MacWilliams. You can disagree with his work without making up false claims about what he did.
The reasonable thing would be to admit to error and move on. Instead, you’re retreating into hostility and posted a wall of sneers and rather desperate arguments (e.g., saying “No, Ampersand, MacWilliams’s four questions are not universally accepted as a way to measure authoritarianism” – when I never made any such claim).
I don’t think it’s about being decent parents (there’s nothing bad about a parent wanting children to be “respectful,” for example – plus, being decent parents has much more to do with how a parent actually acts than it does with a survey question).
Framing this as an either/or proposition, as you do here, is inaccurate; those four questions on child-rearing come directly from Feldman’s (not “Fieldman’s”) work.
Which is fine; nothing wrong with making errors. There is something wrong, however, with repeatedly making such errors while using a super-snotty “here is the truth, you ignorant peasants” tone. Please try and dial your tone back a little, okay?
“I know, how sad for US whites that they were never enslaved; that Jim Crow wasn’t used against them; that redlining and government loan programs lifted their economic prospects; that objective tests have shown again and again that being white is a big advantage in the job market.”
This is all true, but it doesn’t change the fact that many white people live lives of genuine deprivation.
According to the 2010 census, there were 196 million white people and 36 million black people. The white poverty rate is 10%, the black poverty rate 26%. According to my math that makes for just under 20 million white people in poverty and just under 10 million black people. So there is twice as much white poverty as black poverty. That seems to me to make white poverty worth talking about.
Tamme, I completely agree that white proverty (and also, the problems of white working-class people who are not in poverty) are worth talking about. But talking about that doesn’t require taking on a “everyone gets racial grievances but white people” framing.
Trump voters aren’t that dumb. They’re not under some mistaken impression that Trump isn’t another hypocrite, or that his views on issues aren’t all over the place.
They’ve tried picking leaders based on ideological consistency, and look where they are. The RINO purges have been successful in forcing out any heterodoxy. If the premise is that you can’t trust what anyone seeking elective office says, what criteria is left? For Trump voters, the results are the immediate results of what he says, not the contents.
All the people who Trump voters who believe have been breaking promises or otherwise keeping them down are thrown into a state of apoplexy every time the guy opens his mouth.
He speaks, and the GOP donor class trembles, holding emergency meetings discussing why they’re so powerless after decades of pulling the strings.
He tweets, and the kind of people who can’t talk about working class white problems without a bunch of caveats about how the rest of the Oppression Olympics roster has it worse start talking about packing their bags for Vancouver.
If you can’t trust promises and nobody delivers results, the best you’ve got to go by is the reaction – when all the people you believe are arrayed against you are quaking in their boots.
So, sort of like how the punk movement spawned the white-supremacist skin-heads and how 4-chan went from being a den of vulgarity and absurdity to being a hang-out for Nazis.
If what appeals to you is being shocking and offensive, flagrant open racism works really well (it doesn’t offend everyone, but it is really efficient), but as well as appealing to people who want to épater the bourgeoisie, it also appeals to flagrant open racists, which is why, as well as the people here who are Trump fans but insist that they aren’t racists and don’t necessarily support his policies (wink, wink), the people at Trump rallies who assault black protesters have been open white supremacists.
I suspect that is also how Trump ended up with a message of racism and xenophobia, as that is the message that simultaneously shocked the establishment (and decent human beings) while garnering active support from an established constituency (and gave voice to the hidden bigotry of millions).
You don’t get a response of “Finally someone is saying the things no one can say!” if you aren’t saying things that people wish they could say. If he’d gone with a message of how we really all like to fuck pigs and strangle kittens instead of a message of how we really all hate muslims and fear latinos, it would have been shocking and offensive, but it wouldn’t have had the same built-in constituency of pig-fuckers and kitten stranglers (since white supremacists are more comfortable admitting to being white supremacists than to being pig fuckers and kitten stranglers… ;| ).
Feminist Frequency may be feminism 101, but that article is “How to criticize a white feminist 101.”
Okay, Sarkeesian doesn’t talk about racial or trans issues much, but can I just ask…
Do you really want her to?
This is a genuine question. Do you really want to hear this white cis lady’s opinions about stuff she has no personal experience in? Really? Because I’ve read a lot of people be vocally opposed to exactly that.
Maybe she should cite more non-privileged people in her work, but maybe she doesn’t know who. Maybe someone else, like, say, Jef Rouner could point her and us at some diverse voices in video game criticism. Maybe we don’t have to wait for Sarkeesian to do all the work for us.
I have an unrelated video games 201 question: I’ve been wondering for a while what people like Rouner actually mean when they talk about “objectification” in video games. I thought that was a process that involved treating a woman like an object, but of course a video game character IS an object. We can’t treat it like a person, because it isn’t one.
@Ampersand
You know how a lot of times disabled people talk about how they are expected to “perform” their disability, otherwise people will tell them that they must be faking it or they don’t deserve accommodation?
I find that I have to be more performative about my disability in left-wing internet circles than anywhere else.
Because I am otherwise quite privileged. If I tell you that I’m kind of tired of being told that as a white guy I run the world and have it real easy, I can add that my only job is minimum wage day labor, but that’s still small potatoes compared to my clinical depression.
The first thing I have to do to get people to in left-wing circles to actually listen to what I’m saying, let alone sympathize, is find and display the way I’m not privileged. Because otherwise people will straight up tell me that I’m too privileged to listen to.
And it is, just like people say, exhausting and dehumanizing.
I mean, you start out with “oh boo hoo, white people have it so hard” and then, when people go, “Well… Yeah, millions of them do have it really bad” you go, “Okay, well, yeah, they do, but they really need to frame their argument better.”
Is it any wonder that the white working class gravitates towards people who will accept their complaints at face value rather than making them jump through hoops for grudging sympathy?
PS – I think privilege and racism are powerful forces in the US, so nobody needs to prove to me that they exist.
That isn’t how one asks a genuine question.
Do you actually play video games? We treat video game characters like people all the time (we treat lots of objects like people in a wide variety of ways). We play video games in which our character develops a romantic relationship with another video game character. We play video games in which we feel sorrow when a character dies. We react with a full range of emotions prompted by interacting with imaginary people, in video games, in books, in movies. That those imaginary people are variously constructed from rules, words, and actual people is not the salient point.
When the camera focus slides slowly from legs to crotch to belly to emphasized breasts to face, the mental process it is intended to invoke is the same whether the camera is simulated and the objectified body is simulated or whether the camera was real and the body belonged to an actual human being. When the female characters in video games are reliably thin, huge breasted, and scantily clad, that isn’t some random thing that spontaneously generated out of the rule structure, and the player isn’t expected to react to that as though the characters’ bodies were the little metal tokens in a Monopoly set. When the game designers develop a special component to the physics engine to make the boob jiggling sexier, that isn’t just out of an interest in emulation of reality and it is absurd to think that they simply expect their audience to appreciate it merely in the same way they expect their audience to appreciate the quality of the light-on-water physics.
Fair enough, but you could still answer it as though it was.
I mean, obviously I’m a troll and unworthy of real engagement, but maybe someone else might genuinely wonder. This very site had a guest post a few months ago about how damaging it can be for cis people to write trans characters, and I think maybe similar issues might apply to a cis person explaining trans politics.
I think you’re making a lot of assumptions about what I think.
For example, you seem to think I’d disagree with this paragraph. I don’t at all.
But look at a game like, say, World of Warcraft, which gives female player characters armor which is quite clearly designed with the goal of being sexy to straight male players. The way the PCs are designed is clearly aimed at the male gaze, but the PC is also a proxy for the desires of the player. The way the game is designed means that the PC doesn’t have any goals or personality other than what the player gives her. It makes no sense to ask “What would my Night Elf be doing if I wasn’t controlling her?”
You can’t even give her an appearance of her own subjective desires without massively redesigning the way the game works.
But the results aren’t; to objectify a human is to override her own thoughts and desires or even deny that she has them and to objectify an object is to… What?
When one of my appliances malfunction “I sometimes say something like, “Work you dumb piece of shit!”
On one hand, that’s personifying it, acting as though it has ears and can understand my words. On the other hand, I would never say that to a person. I only talk like that because I’m dealing with an inanimate object.
Even if I treat it like a person, that has different consequences than treating a person in the same way.
Is killing a video game character meant to evoke the same mental processes as killing a real person?
Can you please quote where I’ve said any such thing? Like, a direct quote, with a link?
For the record, I don’t think that any individual white man “runs the world and has it real easy.” It would be trivially easy to find examples of me saying otherwise, for instance, from what is probably the most widely-read post I’ve ever written:
I don’t think anyone can fairly parse that as me saying that men run the world and have it easy.
You said:
But I didn’t “start out” with “oh boo hoo,” it was a response to someone complaining that “everyone gets racial grievances but” white people. I don’t understand how you missed that this was a reply to an ongoing conversation, not me starting out of the blue with “oh boo hoo white people.”
If I had said “no white people have any legitimate complaints ever,” then pointing out that this is unfair – because some white people are members of oppressed and marginalized classes, as you correctly pointed out, and I’d add also because even a straight white cis male ablebodied thin Christian wealthy (etc etc) person might still have real problems and legitimate complaints – then I think your response would have been on-point.
But I didn’t say anything even remotely like that. I responded to someone complaining that it’s horribly unfair that white people’s “racial grievances” aren’t taken seriously. Note that they specifically said “RACIAL grievances,” not “grievances in general.” And my comment was clearly a response to that in particular.
And it’s completely unfair of you to respond to me saying, in effect, “I don’t think white people have general racial grievances that should be taken seriously,” by acting as if I’ve said “no white men ever have any legitimate grievances.”
ETA: To make it explicit: Your comment really pissed me off, because I felt that you
flat-outeffectively lied about what I wrote. I would really appreciate it if your future comments were more careful.Please stop making comments like this one. Thanks. (It seemed particularly unfair since Charles did, in fact, offer you substantive engagement in the same comment you were responding to.)
Not to that question, though, which I meant very seriously. If it’s dumb I’m happy to hear why. Or just ignore it! It’s really frustrating to just have someone go “Try again, dude” especially when the question of whether and how cis people should write about trans experience has been argued emotionally and at great length on this very blog, to say nothing of the rest of the world.
You’re right that I was a lot less careful than I should have been; without thinking about it I switched from addressing you specifically to a generalized “you” that was just about my experiences with progressives in general. I apologize for screwing up like that.
I might try to clarify my thoughts later, but either way, sorry for that.
Christopher,
If you want to be read as asking a honest question, I suggest not using “Really?” in the framing of the question.
Who is the “you” in your question anyway? Opinions vary, that you guess that some people would believe something based on something else they believe does not mean that other people believe that same thing. I imagine that the proportion of people who would appreciate a cis person including critique of how trans people are represented would depend a lot on what the critique was like.
Christopher:
Has it? I’d be interested to read that discussion. Got a link?
Charles S:
Personally, I’d read such a critique from a cis person (and have). Why not? They might say something worth thinking about. If I had to bet money on whose thoughts are more likely to be correct on that particular topic, I’d bet on the trans person, but individual pieces and individual people aren’t probabilities, and should be judged on their merits whenever possible.
Grace
Christopher,
Just a heads up: You are never going to get your arguments tight enough on this website. They won’t even consider your point, you are going to get hounded for “links please” (which will be ignored if you make the effort) and collaterally attacked and nit-picked and told, from a self-righteous place far, far above your station, that you need to improve your arguments before they will be considered. Then, when you make a particularly good point that would provide insight in most normal people, you will be banned.
I don’t think Sebastian was suggesting that Trump is the answer. He was just pointing out that people choose from the candidates they have. All of Trump’s flaws only matter if there is another candidate with fewer flaws who addresses the issues he addresses.
Yes, to you. But obviously those who support Trump have a different idea about what constitutes good economic policy. The point, I think, that Sebastian H was making was not that Trump and Hillary are equivalent, but that Trump supporters are making the same kind of compromises on candidate character that you have to make (and really, that everyone has to make), although they are coming at it from a different angle.
Oh, are you the Christopher who kept demanding resources on how to write about groups you don’t belong to, and then ignoring all the ones I posted?
Would you like them again? Or perhaps to explain why they don’t work and you would like others?
Grace, I thi he’s referring to the argument I had with Veronica about whether cis writers should write stories about *being* trans (as opposed to stories about trans people doing stuff and being other things). I still disagree with her, but I think her position was less severe than Christopher implies.
Esjay,
Out of curiosity, do you think you are in that cycle? Was that a devastatingly good argument which should have convinced me?
I’ve banned Esjay, and also two Esjay puppet accounts, from “Alas.”
Christopher,
This assumes the player is a straight male (or at least a gynophile who isn’t much bothered by the trappings of sexy objectification of women), which is rather the problem (or one of them, anyway). Yes, WoW female PCs are not depersonalized by being sexy, because they are purely avatars, but female players are being expected to use sexy avatars if they want to play female characters, and to put up with being surrounded by sexy avatars intended to be objectified by other players if they want to play at all. So in the case of MPORGs, the argument that it doesn’t matter how we interact with the characters in a video game because they are only objects do not apply.
This problem of games being routinely designed for the subliminal sexual gratification of men applies as well to single player games. It is (a) an annoyance to many women and (b) a giant blinking sign saying “We didn’t design these games for you!” pointing at women.
I’m not going to take you up on the switch from objectification to killing. While training people on shooting human looking targets is an important part of military training, to get the experience of starting to shoot an actual human to be closer to a routine exercise, and the military has solidly funded FPS development as a recruiting tool and a training tool (so yes), most of us have no experience with actually shooting or stabbing another human being and never will. The same is not at all true of visually objectifying women. Most people have experience with either objectifying or being objectified.
Does the constant presence of invitations to engage in objectification of not-real women in games have no effect on people’s expectation that sexual objectification is normative? Is the experience of feeling sexual gratification at watching a virtual woman’s breasts jiggle sexily in a non-sexual context not intended to evoke the experience of feeling sexual gratification at watching an actual woman’s breasts jiggle sexily? I find it hard to credit a “No” answer to either question, and the fact that the context is fictional does not mean that they don’t condition our real world experience.
Now I’m off to shoot and kill people in a video game with extraneous sexual objectification of its female characters…
“I responded to someone complaining that it’s horribly unfair that white people’s “racial grievances” aren’t taken seriously. Note that they specifically said “RACIAL grievances,” not “grievances in general.” And my comment was clearly a response to that in particular.”
Here’s a more nuanced (or to be less charitable to myself, nitpicky) question. Obviously talking about the problems of the white poor as a product of their race is silly, because while being white doesn’t insulate you from poverty, it makes it less likely.
But the experiences of white people are shaped by their race, which goes for the experience of poverty as much as anything else. If we talk about the specific experience of white poverty, is that treating it as a racial grievance? Few would say so. But if we take that experience to start to discuss solutions that might work particularly well for the white poor, given that white poverty is a discrete social and cultural phenomenon from PoC poverty, are we then reaching a point when we’re effectively discussing a white grievance, even if the grievance isn’t actually “being white” or “being poor because you’re white”?
I mean I am very impressed by the core thesis of intersectionality that a black woman’s experience of sexism and racism can’t be unpicked. Might it not follow that a white woman’s experience of sexism and identity as white similarly can’t be unpicked? Because even though her identity as a white person isn’t itself an experience of discrimination, she doubtless feels her identity just as strongly as the black woman does. And if that’s the case, we shouldn’t demand that white people separate their experience of poverty from their race any more than we demand that black women come to discussions of sexism simply as women without any other identities.
I know that’s a bridge too far for some and that to many the crucial thesis of intersectionality is on the intersection of discriminations, not just identities. But I wonder if the people commenting here would agree with that, or with me, or take some other perspective.
I’m not suggesting that Trump is a good answer. I think he is the most horrible development in US politics since Rush Limbaugh. I’m suggesting that he is the only candidate other than Sanders who even comes close to approaching the serious middle/lower class issue that seem to be resonating.
My point was that voters are offered choices. They don’t usually get perfect choices, and often get very flawed choices. Obama may have been one of the few undeniably good choices in my whole lifetime.
Clinton is a VERY flawed offering. She is a huge warmonger, she is deeply out of touch, she is firmly in the pockets of Wall Street, she exhibits scary secrecy tendencies, she is highly authoritarian, and she has recurring brushes with corruption. She looks good mainly because the Republicans are complete clowns.
And we will vote for her. So there are dozens of legitimate ways to criticize Trump voters. But to be mystified by how they can consider a candidate with flaws shows some lack of self understanding from us.
I pretty much agree with what you said (although I’m not as anti-Clinton as you seem to be, she’s certainly not the candidate I want). But I don’t recall ever saying I was “mystified” by how Republicans could consider a candidate with flaws.
ETA:
I think that maybe the topic has drifted?
Certainly, I understand that people vote for the lesser evil. Everyone does that. At least, that’s always what I’ve done – I’ve never voted for a presidential candidate that I was 100% enthused about. Not even Ralph Nader. :-p
Thanks so much for acknowledging this, I really appreciate it.
Tamme:
I think it’s partly a matter of tone and context? I don’t see anything wrong with discussing the particular problems of white poverty – or of white just-above-poverty, for that matter. (That last category has gotten discussed a lot in mainstream media in recent months, due to the release of a study finding that white working-class middle-aged adults seemed to be having a faster increase in death rates than other demographic categories.)
I don’t think that many people would object to a discussion which didn’t carry some pretty obvious undercurrents of resentment at attention being paid to the specific problems of non-white people. For example, I’m sure somewhere someone objected to this article on racism grounds – it’s a big internet – but on the whole, people did not respond to that article, or the flood of similar articles, by saying “how dare you talk about white people’s problems!” Most of the reactions I saw were a mix of concern, and speculation about what’s causing the rise in mortality. (Plus, of course, discussions about if the paper’s findings were accurate.)
So I’m a bit bewildered when I see people say that it’s not possible to discuss the economic problems of white people without being accused of racism. (I’m not saying you’ve said that.) It obviously is possible, and I see mainstream media doing exactly that fairly often.
Tamme:
I know that’s a bridge too far for some and that to many the crucial thesis of intersectionality is on the intersection of discriminations, not just identities. But I wonder if the people commenting here would agree with that, or with me, or take some other perspective.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
Ampersand:
That last category has gotten discussed a lot in mainstream media in recent months, due to the release of a study finding that white working-class middle-aged adults seemed to be having a faster increase in death rates than other demographic categories.)
They’re actually having an increase at all compared to other demographic categories, not a faster increase. Mortality in other demographic catgories has continued to decline, not increase. (Probably you knew that and just wrote sloppily?)
You’re right, CP, thanks for the correction.
Fun song from SNL making fun of feminist over-scrupulousness.
https://youtu.be/YfiLAcERNQ4