RE: I Don't Care
April 15, 2019 at 10:04 pm
(This post was last modified: April 15, 2019 at 10:11 pm by bennyboy.)
Hmmmm.
I don't want to take a position on the various people currently talking about language, but let me say this: I don't think that fighting back, including swearing, is the same as deeply dehumanizing language. People swear-- it's a way to show emphasis to the negative feelings they have in a situation-- without dehumanizing someone, and certainly it's more than possible to dehumanize without swearing.
I'm not so much against word choice as against truly malicious intent-- a clear desire to do emotional harm to someone you dislike.
For me, just getting mad in a discussion and saying "Fuck you man, you're a real asshole" isn't that bad. But a systematic attempt to hurt is.
I can give you an example-- in my thread about rage, I described an incident from about 10 years ago. My intent was to show one case in which rage was fairly functional (it aided me in a real confrontation with another man who was threatening me), and one case in which is was dysfunctional (it was a very unpleasant moment with a loved family member). Since then, at least one member has repeatedly called me a wife / child abuser, a monster, a manipulative asshole, kept saying how unlucky my family is to have me a part of it and so on. This is not just someone venting in the moment-- I believe there's a real intent to do emotional harm, there. You guys can weigh in on whether I'm right about that-- but certainly, it's not something I've ever done or would do to anyone else in these forums, and I don't feel I deserve to be the target of that kind of behavior.
As for Yonadav-- it's easy to look at this thread and see that Yondadav was tilted. Without any context, just this thread alone would put him pretty obviously in the wrong. But I'm willing to bet I could find posts where he was trying to engage sincerely in some issue, and where there was some real asymmetric toxicity that eventually set him off.
I think what it is is that he was venting conservative views in this predominantly progressive social context, and that this is interpreted as an attack, and the response is to attack back. I think it's very much tribal. I don't think I ever really saw him attack an individual member in the way that he was the target of personal attack-- though given some of his positions, I have to imagine he knew what was likely to come.
I don't want to take a position on the various people currently talking about language, but let me say this: I don't think that fighting back, including swearing, is the same as deeply dehumanizing language. People swear-- it's a way to show emphasis to the negative feelings they have in a situation-- without dehumanizing someone, and certainly it's more than possible to dehumanize without swearing.
I'm not so much against word choice as against truly malicious intent-- a clear desire to do emotional harm to someone you dislike.
For me, just getting mad in a discussion and saying "Fuck you man, you're a real asshole" isn't that bad. But a systematic attempt to hurt is.
I can give you an example-- in my thread about rage, I described an incident from about 10 years ago. My intent was to show one case in which rage was fairly functional (it aided me in a real confrontation with another man who was threatening me), and one case in which is was dysfunctional (it was a very unpleasant moment with a loved family member). Since then, at least one member has repeatedly called me a wife / child abuser, a monster, a manipulative asshole, kept saying how unlucky my family is to have me a part of it and so on. This is not just someone venting in the moment-- I believe there's a real intent to do emotional harm, there. You guys can weigh in on whether I'm right about that-- but certainly, it's not something I've ever done or would do to anyone else in these forums, and I don't feel I deserve to be the target of that kind of behavior.
As for Yonadav-- it's easy to look at this thread and see that Yondadav was tilted. Without any context, just this thread alone would put him pretty obviously in the wrong. But I'm willing to bet I could find posts where he was trying to engage sincerely in some issue, and where there was some real asymmetric toxicity that eventually set him off.
I think what it is is that he was venting conservative views in this predominantly progressive social context, and that this is interpreted as an attack, and the response is to attack back. I think it's very much tribal. I don't think I ever really saw him attack an individual member in the way that he was the target of personal attack-- though given some of his positions, I have to imagine he knew what was likely to come.
