RE: Random Thoughts
July 22, 2019 at 9:32 pm
(This post was last modified: July 22, 2019 at 10:26 pm by Rev. Rye.)
Looking up music news for my Anglotopia job, I found this:
It's one thing to point out problematic things, but it's another thing to just insult people for doing something wrong and point-blank refusing to tell them what they did that was wrong. And I've looked far and wide for context into what prompted this insult, and it looks like the "cultural appropriation" Bradford Cox did was... admitting to liking Twin Peaks and making multiple references to it in this concert. Apparently, there was some article claiming it to be problematic. Unfortunately, this woman refused to give any context whatsoever to connect the dots for him. This Catch-22 of "if you don't know what you did wrong, then why should I tell you" should only be acceptable if the person doing it has explained their point of view in no uncertain terms (preferably multiple times) and the other person has demonstrated they're too thick to understand it. Now, there might be some problematic elements in Twin Peaks (I haven't watched it in years, although admittedly, my memories of the show don't really have much to do with Native Americans), but whether or not there actually is is honestly beside the point for me. I'm not going to pretend I know all about the troubles the Snoqualmie people have had to go through, and honestly, given the history of how the White Man has fucked Native Americans over with all their genocides and ethnic cleansings, I can only assume it's been pretty horrible. One thing I am intimately familiar with, however, is being set up to fail. I spent several years being treated like shit at the hands of classmates, who bullied me, and, if they even gave a reason at all, would just give flimsy justifications to why that I couldn't possibly overcome. And when the teachers noticed that I was isolated, they just demanded I make friends, even though those classmates hated me, beat me, and told me to kill myself for no apparent reason (at least not that they told me). To those teachers, all this was not a good enough reason for me to not try and make friends with them. I bear the scars to this day, both emotionally AND physically.
A few weeks ago, I decided to research a new member's point and demonstrate why it was full of holes. I fully suspected this member was a sock, but I still let him know exactly why his arguments about immigration and crime were bunk. Why did I go through all this trouble? Because I know that, if I don't explain why the other person is wrong, they can just easily put it in the "autistic screeching" box and assume I have nothing to say and nothing better to do than to yell it at the top of my lungs (admittedly, I know a lot will just do that regardless, but by responding like I do, it just shows how irrational the other guy is). Christ, she could just have said something like "Google 'Twin Peaks Cultural Appropriation.'" At least that's a step in the proper direction. And Bradford Cox wants her to elaborate on that thought and so do I. To quote Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity, "You've got the ball. Let's see you run with it." She never even walks with it. Just stands there, clutching the ball and having a tantrum, yelling "fuck you" and says "why should I educate you" when she took it upon herself to point out some wrong he was doing WITHOUT ACTUALLY EXPLAINING WHAT THE WRONG IS. And stripping it of the crucial context like she did, what's the difference between her and some Gamergater troll who seek out famous left-leaning people and harrasses them? Well, she's non-white, and she said something about "cultural appropriation," so it's more likely that she's left-wing, but apart from that? Well, there's the fact that she did it IRL and not on Twitter, but I don't see much else. Just a gaping asshole who makes the left look like easily-triggered idiots (and, when justifying her refusal to explain, inadvertently reinforcing the right-wing assumption that left-wing activists fully support the same hierarchical mindset that they do, just with, at least in this instance, women of colour at the top and white men at the bottom) and makes me embarrassed to say I actually think people should be treated like human beings and that equality is a pretty decent ideal to try and live up to.
Thank Jah the right has been taken over by literal Nazis so I'm not tempted to ally myself with them out of spite.
TL;DR: If you're going to go through all this trouble to call someone out, let them know where they went wrong so you can actually lead them on the right direction and maybe they'll figure out what not to do in the future. Otherwise, you look like you're just looking for an enemy to fight. And many of them will see you and willingly step up to the plate, and before you balk at the connection between watching jackasses like this woman and supporting the sort of far-right ideologies that normalise Charlottesvilles or the migrant camps at the border where children are torn from their families and told that if they want water, they can just drink out of the toilet, look up the alt-right pipeline. And these YouTubers I've subscribed to (among many others I haven't) have their own stories about how they fell into that trap before they finally got the sense to get out and go left:
It's one thing to point out problematic things, but it's another thing to just insult people for doing something wrong and point-blank refusing to tell them what they did that was wrong. And I've looked far and wide for context into what prompted this insult, and it looks like the "cultural appropriation" Bradford Cox did was... admitting to liking Twin Peaks and making multiple references to it in this concert. Apparently, there was some article claiming it to be problematic. Unfortunately, this woman refused to give any context whatsoever to connect the dots for him. This Catch-22 of "if you don't know what you did wrong, then why should I tell you" should only be acceptable if the person doing it has explained their point of view in no uncertain terms (preferably multiple times) and the other person has demonstrated they're too thick to understand it. Now, there might be some problematic elements in Twin Peaks (I haven't watched it in years, although admittedly, my memories of the show don't really have much to do with Native Americans), but whether or not there actually is is honestly beside the point for me. I'm not going to pretend I know all about the troubles the Snoqualmie people have had to go through, and honestly, given the history of how the White Man has fucked Native Americans over with all their genocides and ethnic cleansings, I can only assume it's been pretty horrible. One thing I am intimately familiar with, however, is being set up to fail. I spent several years being treated like shit at the hands of classmates, who bullied me, and, if they even gave a reason at all, would just give flimsy justifications to why that I couldn't possibly overcome. And when the teachers noticed that I was isolated, they just demanded I make friends, even though those classmates hated me, beat me, and told me to kill myself for no apparent reason (at least not that they told me). To those teachers, all this was not a good enough reason for me to not try and make friends with them. I bear the scars to this day, both emotionally AND physically.
A few weeks ago, I decided to research a new member's point and demonstrate why it was full of holes. I fully suspected this member was a sock, but I still let him know exactly why his arguments about immigration and crime were bunk. Why did I go through all this trouble? Because I know that, if I don't explain why the other person is wrong, they can just easily put it in the "autistic screeching" box and assume I have nothing to say and nothing better to do than to yell it at the top of my lungs (admittedly, I know a lot will just do that regardless, but by responding like I do, it just shows how irrational the other guy is). Christ, she could just have said something like "Google 'Twin Peaks Cultural Appropriation.'" At least that's a step in the proper direction. And Bradford Cox wants her to elaborate on that thought and so do I. To quote Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity, "You've got the ball. Let's see you run with it." She never even walks with it. Just stands there, clutching the ball and having a tantrum, yelling "fuck you" and says "why should I educate you" when she took it upon herself to point out some wrong he was doing WITHOUT ACTUALLY EXPLAINING WHAT THE WRONG IS. And stripping it of the crucial context like she did, what's the difference between her and some Gamergater troll who seek out famous left-leaning people and harrasses them? Well, she's non-white, and she said something about "cultural appropriation," so it's more likely that she's left-wing, but apart from that? Well, there's the fact that she did it IRL and not on Twitter, but I don't see much else. Just a gaping asshole who makes the left look like easily-triggered idiots (and, when justifying her refusal to explain, inadvertently reinforcing the right-wing assumption that left-wing activists fully support the same hierarchical mindset that they do, just with, at least in this instance, women of colour at the top and white men at the bottom) and makes me embarrassed to say I actually think people should be treated like human beings and that equality is a pretty decent ideal to try and live up to.
Thank Jah the right has been taken over by literal Nazis so I'm not tempted to ally myself with them out of spite.
TL;DR: If you're going to go through all this trouble to call someone out, let them know where they went wrong so you can actually lead them on the right direction and maybe they'll figure out what not to do in the future. Otherwise, you look like you're just looking for an enemy to fight. And many of them will see you and willingly step up to the plate, and before you balk at the connection between watching jackasses like this woman and supporting the sort of far-right ideologies that normalise Charlottesvilles or the migrant camps at the border where children are torn from their families and told that if they want water, they can just drink out of the toilet, look up the alt-right pipeline. And these YouTubers I've subscribed to (among many others I haven't) have their own stories about how they fell into that trap before they finally got the sense to get out and go left:
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
![[Image: harmlesskitchen.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/yxR97P23/harmlesskitchen.png)
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
