mitigatedchaos

slartibartfastibast

Source: ithelpstodream politics

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wirehead-wannabe

nothingismere

Unpopular opinion: intersectional feminism is responsible for a lot of collateral damage that it is becoming increasingly urgent to address. It presents itself as comprehensive in its revelatory powers re: marginalized experience even though it actually enables silencing and reinforced marginalization of the most marginalized of such experiences by virtue of its very theoretical structure. Its ideals are not practically supported by its theoretical tools due to their own structural flaws.

In brief, upholding positionality as a criterion of discourse and ultimately decentering privileged commentary in attempt to define narrative authority ends up fostering oppressive dogma and suspension of necessary critical inquiry in the very attempts to do the opposite, and in ways that large-scale matter to the lives and plights of the most marginalized. […]

This may be a relatively digestible bit of expansion copied from another thread. For context, someone was musing about how third wave feminism seems to have a severe problem recognizing issues like misogyny and homophobia and generally identifying social conservativism within Muslim communities:
Honestly I think this is partially wrought by intersectionality theory itself. It tries to unravel and juxtapose nuanced experiences within marginalized groups, but is absolutely ill equipped to do so because it falls into the trap of crystallizing identities and experiences to the testimony of visible community voices without interrogating those voices to begin with, because its very model undermines interrogation. It hinges on mechanisms like positionality to center the voices and experiences of oppressed people, such that representatives of those people are granted authority and outsiders are considered incapable of accessing the knowledge and experience to challenge that.

Except when those representatives given authority by virtue of their positionality are themselves bound to a conservative institution and dedicated to a cultural zeitgeist that is at odds with the values underlying intersectional theory to begin with, while intersectionality itself put roadblocks against any capacity to question or challenge such positionality and upholds a model of specifically decentering critique from outsiders, you get people who believe they are being the most authentic and supportive they can by refusing to extend models of critique that are not necessarily limited by their position as outsiders by sheer virtue of how they are positioned. So they eat all the BS up and the Linda Sarsours of marginalized communities continue to be upheld as representatives beyond reproach. And that’s third wave feminism ‘done right’.

There’s something perversely lacking in self awareness about the very theoretical models people take as authoritative right now precisely because they attempt radical self awareness.

I think a symptom of is that the moral and epistemic clarity of posts like http://nothingismere.tumblr.com/post/154828689842/ozymandias271-questions-that-will-apparently-be is weirdly uncommon. Like, this is such a bizarre exchange:

Querent - “How can I figure out what I should be doing to fight racism without burdening people of color by constantly asking them what I should do?”
@ozymandias271 - “You have a brain? Presumably you can use it to assess the quality of information yourself? Why are you making people of color do this for you?”

It’s one thing to recommend a debiasing intervention (e.g., ‘people under-weight evidence in the form of self-reports of others’ experiences when those people have lived very different lives; assign more weight to compensate’), and another thing to act as though the debiasing intervention replaces normal weighing-of-the-evidence altogether.

First-hand accounts from the disprivileged are a weight on the scale, not a qualitatively higher form of evidence/argument; obscuring that fact and talking in non-quantitative terms encourages epistemic learned helplessness like in Ozy’s post.

wirehead-wannabe

I mean, the exchange makes perfect sense once you take into account that Querent readers are trying first and foremost to ensure that they don’t get yelled at, and that openly admitting to that would get them yelled at. Ozy’s approach is the one that actually works better for everyone in the absence of any risk of yelling.

Source: nothingismere gender politics feminism

Anonymous asked:

Can you read all your posts under “gender politics” tag and truthfully say that you want to live when the life is like that? I couldn't.

Dearest Anon-kun,

My representation is a bit more dire than how I actually interpret the situation, in part because it’s intended as a counter-balance to mainstream feminism, which strips women of their agency and refuses to critically examine their role in the social dynamics which create these situations.

“Women are powerless” is really quite deeply normalized almost everywhere! It’s very insidious.

Comments regarding even cishet neurotypical women should be regarded as generalizations that do not uniformly apply to the population, and many subgroups don’t necessarily fit them. Additionally, low-status women also exist. In fact, women that don’t fit this mold are more common in my subcultures!

Additionally,

1) I have a reasonable shot at making it to the Transhuman era.

2) I have a close relationship to my ex WRT expressed vulnerability & female companionship, though not sexually.

3) Have you observed the number of self-identified “traps” and other such individuals among the Alt Right? I believe this represents a sign of an impending Male Gender Meltdown, the consequences of which are hard to predict. Overall, I do think progress is being made, as indicated by the appearance of multiple male gender movements.

Also,

All my exes are bisexual (and therefore have no set reason to behave in a certain pattern of attraction), and this blog will continue to not disclose my sex/gender.

Kind Regards,
Miti

P.S. If you are secretly the tumblr user known as BA, this blog hopes for your swift recovery regardless of whether that is low in probability. If you are secretly tumblr user RO, this blog hopes for an increase in your available useful energy.

gender politics

argumate

mitigatedchaos

Rightists see threats where there are none.

Leftists don’t see threats where there are.

misanthropymademe

Rightist: accusing me of paranoia is undermining the security of our nation!
Leftist: I don’t see the problem with leftists remaining calm in the face of possible danger, better than giving in to fear.

argumate

Centrists fail to see important threats while fixating on nonexistent threats, yay.

mitigatedchaos

C'est moi?

I’m identifying as somewhat of a social centrist these days, whatever that means. I watched as rightists wastefully burnt through dragon hoards’ worth of social capital fighting The Gays, and for years I thought that meant Leftists/Liberals were more broadly correct and Conservatives were just prudes.

Then I started to see that atomic individualism isn’t what humans are ‘made’ for, and looked on in horror as I realized the only group that might stand in the way of legalizing polygamy (with all its problems) no longer has the social capital to effectively do so. Also that random casual sex isn’t what most people find healthy/fulfilling, and so on and so forth.

Which lead me to post the OP.

Source: mitigatedchaos gender politics politics

Anonymous asked:

Joke: accusing centrists of being wishy-washy clueless triangulators Woke: accusing centrists of being cryptobonapartists

This has been such an exciting year, politically, I must admit.

politics anons asks

ranma-official

taxloopholes:
“ fromrushhourwithlove:
“ [sees a long, long history of prima facie good ideas from the sociopolitical extremes having amazingly brutal consequences and blowback even on the rare occasions when they’re adopted after tons of...

Source: berniesrevolution politics

slatestarscratchpad

I follow dozens of people online ranging from centrists to communists to alt-right to libertarians, and I haven’t seen a single person who supports the latest strikes on Syria. But all of them have been posting articles about how worrying it is that “the mainstream” supports the strikes.

Who is this mainstream and what are they doing?

mitigatedchaos

Brian Williams waxing poetic about American destroyers launching missiles into Syria on national television. Hillary Clinton supporting airstrikes on Syrian airbases before they happened.

politics

bambamramfan

slatestarscratchpad

I’m really curious what I’m unintentionally selecting for here.

bambamramfan

Source: slatestarscratchpad politics fury the echoing tentacle

silver-and-ivory

are you a “makes fun of otherkin” anti-sj or are you a “writes thousand word posts about intersectionality and the evils of normativity” anti-sj

mitigatedchaos

I’m “thinks otherkin are ridiculous since that’s not a realistic variation on human brain designs, but supports their right to morphological freedom in the transhuman future”.

identity politics gender politics

mutant-aesthetic

twitter.com

Julian Assange 🔹 on Twitter

“10/ Here's Singapore's long term prime minister Lee Kuan Yew:”

a-sleepygoldenstorm

What neither side of US politics wants to admit: the promotion of identity politics combined with the declining white super majority has led to turbo charged white identity politics. Since Dems catered for non-white identity politics, Trump and the GOP took hold of white identity politics.

Most countries that do not have a 70%+ super majority ethnic group have ethnicized electoral politics.

mitigatedchaos

Yes, my fear is that Lee Kuan Yew is right.

Source: a-sleepygoldenstorm politics torches in the night racepol

diarrheaworldstarhiphop

Anonymous asked:

RE: Centrists: The question then becomes, how does real change become possible? Revolution isn't a good option, since it tends to kill lots of people without much actually-good change.

diarrheaworldstarhiphop answered:

i legitimately dont know, because it seems any democratic option is instantly suppressed

maybe a mass uprising like in tunisia or egypt demanding politicians step down or make reform.

but reform to what?

mitigatedchaos

“Suck less” isn’t a good option, since the people will disagree dramatically on just what, exactly, that means and how to accomplish it.

However, the system will produce the candidates that the incentives within the system make possible, so it seems to me that a new system, something beyond liberal democracy, that hasn’t been invented yet, is necessary for something lasting and good.

Even in my damaged state, cruising with multiple engines non-functional, I’ve been pondering a system in which the legislature is replaced with think tanks that voters delegate their votes to across multiple categories, funded by public funding according to their votes and percentile standing in a prediction market based on the outcomes of the legislation. (Edit: After all, we can conceive of political policy having two axes - values and effectiveness - and many policies that suck have okay values but are ineffective.)

But the question then becomes, who prevents the prediction market and the state’s instruments of measure for outcomes from being sabotaged by political operators, who notoriously don’t care for empiricism?

politics policy

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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Julian Assange 🔹 on Twitter