LABELS - The Thread!

[Roaring Biscuit!]

Can't we say that labels are the descriptors that can be most immediately informative?

I mean, as far as language is concerned, labels = descriptors.  Clearly they are both sets of words that describe characteristics.  Are labels the broadest descriptors one might need to get an idea of where another person is coming from.  Are labels actually any different from descriptors as you're using it (I'd say they are exactly the same thing)?  Why have we made some descriptors more important than others and what might happen if that were changed?

xx

edd

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I think the thing that has been bubbling in my brain for a while is that maybe the problem isn't with labels themselves, but with these particular labels and the way we use them.

I'm going to argue that, on account of people being pattern-seeking creatures, who are satisfied when a pattern has been established.  It's wired right into our brains.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Can't we say that labels are the descriptors that can be most immediately informative?

Or the most incompletely informative.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

The problem with labels is they aren't, and can't be, all encompassing.  They ignore tons of bars in our cell.  That's different than, say, descriptors, where you can prioritize bars for another person, you can say those are bars that are REALLY important to you, but it is acknowledged that there are still many other bars that inform the makeup of the individual. 


There are all kinds of descriptors for me.  The Husband.  The Preventionist, The Straight Male, but no single one of those labels defines, or comes close to defining me, the entire person.


That's why labels are useless and pointless.

This and exactly this.

In the other thread, 50% of the opinions rendered were immediately dismissed by the other 50% of the people, on the grounds of a label.

[Faust]

I'd always kinda thought labels were more of a helpful prediction kinda thing.  Like, Garbo said in the OP "biped" is a pretty common label round here, and what I think might clarify that is to say something like:

If it makes sense to expect someone, labelled as a human being, to act similarly to other human beings you've met before, it might also might make sense to expect a similar correlation between other individuals with the same label.

In fact we can actually see that is true.  It is accurate to say that a heterosexual man displays romantic interest in women, this is likely true of all men who are (strictly) heterosexual.  But I think that's pretty self explanatory.  I think the obvious danger in labels has already been pointed out, which is when they are used as tribe-like identifiers instead of descriptors.  I think the thing that has been bubbling in my brain for a while is that maybe the problem isn't with labels themselves, but with these particular labels and the way we use them.

I mean, it would seem absurd to consider a hammer as inherently a bad thing that should always be rejected, just because it can be used to crush someones skull.  It's important to realise that stereotyping is going to keep happening, even unconsciously (anyone taken an Implicit Association Test recently?), maybe part of the answer to affecting positive social change isn't to deny that a process that happens anyway isn't happening, but to be more responsible in usages of stereotypes?  Group stereotypes have the power to aid oppression by creating an in-group and out-group, but, I think it's something I read here years ago:

"If you want to change a system you can't just tear it down, you have to build a better one."  (probably not completely accurate quote, but close)

xx

edd

Some tools outlive their usefulness or are badly designed from the start. A bad tool might roughly serve a purpose but perform poorly or unexpectedly, damaging what it interacts with or even being prone to backlash.

[AFK]

Can't we say that labels are the descriptors that can be most immediately informative?

I mean, as far as language is concerned, labels = descriptors.  Clearly they are both sets of words that describe characteristics.  Are labels the broadest descriptors one might need to get an idea of where another person is coming from.  Are labels actually any different from descriptors as you're using it (I'd say they are exactly the same thing)?  Why have we made some descriptors more important than others and what might happen if that were changed?

xx

edd

In the context of this thread and the other thread, it feels like Labels are being interpreted as something that answers the question "Who Are You?". Which of course is a preposterous proposition.  I have my formal label, my name, but "Who Am I?".


Pull up a barstool. 

[Faust]

"I" wear no uniform.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I ignore them, for the most part. I don't need "lapsed Jesuit straight CIS caucasian former drug addict professional artist felon american right-handed blah blah blah" when "Joe" will do.

I also see that most of us here who could be considered "CIS" don't LIKE "CIS". So what happened to self-determination? When I use a term, I use the ones people generally WANT to be called. Labels that people don't want to be called are known as "slurs". If a label's going to get hung on ME from somewhere else, of COURSE I'm going to swat it off.

Those labels tell Joe's story. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I like knowing people's stories.

I'd rather hear stories from people, not labels. Labels don't tell me what I need to know, anyway, I have to get that from observation. "Professional artist" could mean anything from "creative/successful", to "creative/underappreciated" to "bum". "Felon" only tells me he got popped for who knows what, maybe decades ago. It doesn't tell me what he's like now. Etc.

Saying people are "CIS" has already resulted in the CIS tears debacle and gotten Roger shoved in a box with some fat politician's kid whose darkest hour was probably the time he ended up screaming at the housekeeper for arranging his sock drawer wrong. It's retarded.

Cis doesn't lock you into anything, precisely. What you do with you, or what "woman" means to you, or whatever, is still what you determine. If you don't like cis, well, *shrug* I'm going to find another word that means "born into a female body, identifies as a woman" because that's, so far as I know, what your story is. Mostly because I'm not and I need a word that describes people who are. Which I realize and respect that you don't like it, but I need to be able to explain how I'm different and that requires that I understand and can describe how most other people are.

I'm not sure how putting labels on other people helps with your identity. Self-determination.

Am I making sense here? Like, I'm not using the word to box you in (you're still Stella, lady who lives in a town populated by 'you werkin'?' robots) but I need to be able to describe how I, and other people, are different than the dominant set of gender identities, which you, so far as I know identify with, in order to explain myself to myself.

"Now the Star-Bellied Sneeches had bellies with stars,
But the Plain-Bellied Sneeches had none upon thars..."

And then a guy came to town with machines to attach and remove labels until nobody knew who was who, just that they were all broke as fuck.

I'm no stranger to identity issues - I was adopted, remember? My lifetime up through my early adulthood was spent wondering who the fuck I was. But labels don't fix that.

You're not your family.

You're not a label.

You're not a sex, or a gender, or a sex or gender with qualifiers.

[Roaring Biscuit!]

I think the thing that has been bubbling in my brain for a while is that maybe the problem isn't with labels themselves, but with these particular labels and the way we use them.

I'm going to argue that, on account of people being pattern-seeking creatures, who are satisfied when a pattern has been established.  It's wired right into our brains.

Can't we say that labels are the descriptors that can be most immediately informative?

Or the most incompletely informative.

Double touche (imagine that's an acute e).

Or maybe not!  A lot of modern feminism/feminists that I've spoken with (just using feminism as an example cause I'm also reading the patriarchy thread) are big into trying to get media portrayal of women to be less misogynistic, and frankly, it should work because it uses the exact same processes of pattern-recognition that lead to misogyny and minority oppression in the first place.  Let's say for the sake of argument that media outlets started only writing homosexual characters.  Pretty quickly, the stereotype of homosexuality is gonna fall apart, 'cause lets face it, you can't have every character in every tv show as a overly camp caricature, it would be boring.

I think I'm gonna have trouble making this all fit together but what I'm trying to get at is that labels when used correctly could help to humanise/normalise minorities that some people try to oppress.  I think in that way I can see why it might be important for people to self-define as something, in order be like:

"Hey, I have this thing about me that's totally different to this thing about you, but look at all this other stuff that's actually kinda common ground"

Basically, yeah everyone is a human being, but when we live in an evironment where labels exist and are used negatively, one way of removing the oppressive power of the label is to use that same pattern-recognition wetware to illustrate how useless that pattern-recognition can be, or at least co-opt it.  Like in the "everyone is gay on TV" example above, in that situation it seems likely that characters would eventually have to be written in much the same way they are now, you know, as real(ish) people, which would eventually erode the previous stereotype.  Actually I'm being a bit kind to TV there.  I mean if all TV characters were gay and all TV shows were well written...  pretty unlikely huh?

Man I'm really bad at this :/  So if you allow a set of individuals to self-define under a label, it could, presumably, be used to lessen the negative stereotype of that label, by presenting facts contrary to the stereotypes prediction, which remain associated with the label, thereby making the stereotype seems less and less useful.

Maybe :/

As an aside, I'd say in many cases, something like romantic preferences can be a pretty big deal to people.  I mean, if you're a long-term monogamy kinda guy/gal, we're talking about the kind of person that you do or would like to spend a significant portion of your life with.  Obviously that isn't conveyed by orientation, but hopefully you see where I'm coming from?

xx

edd

[Roaring Biscuit!]

Some tools outlive their usefulness or are badly designed from the start. A bad tool might roughly serve a purpose but perform poorly or unexpectedly, damaging what it interacts with or even being prone to backlash.

Triple touche

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I think I'm gonna have trouble making this all fit together but what I'm trying to get at is that labels when used correctly could help to humanise/normalise minorities that some people try to oppress.

Actually, the history of feminism and the patriarchy both give a pretty solid indication that labels merely give the opposition something to target, and a flag to rally around.

100 people label themselves.  ONE of them says something stupid or counterproductive.  The enemy of their cause will use that ONE person to condemn all the others.  For an example, google "Susan Brownmiller"...Who, in a 20 year fit of misandry, gave Pat Robertson and all his brethren a gigantic club with which to beat anyone who wore the same label as Brownmiller.

It's a question of what your motives are.  If you want to make a moral stand and go down in glorious flames, label your cause with something daring.  If you want to affect real change, you avoid labels where possible, and deny your opponent a target...While you go about your business.  It's harder, it's not as personally glorious, but it has the benefit of working.

I personally identify myself as an "eglatarian" if I HAVE to identify my beliefs, because NOBODY - not even a genuine Holy Man^TM like myself - can avoid labels entirely, and "eglatarian" is a particularly dodgy label that's really hard for the current societal structure to condemn.  It implies that ALL people are equal as human beings, which is the very root of feminism, the civil rights movement, everything.  And it's really hard for people living under the American mythology to strike out at, because the American MYTH is that "all people are equal under law".  Obvious bullshit, but the effect is the same.

[Roaring Biscuit!]

Well I can't argue with that, guess I'm just an optimist, I still think it could work either way :/

Maybe meaningless labels are the future

xx
edd

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Well I can't argue with that, guess I'm just an optimist, I still think it could work either way :/

Maybe meaningless labels are the future

xx
edd

"Eglatarian" is anything but meaningless.

It is merely shifty in that it's hard for people to attack without attacking their own mythology.

Guerilla Poetry is one of our staples, no?  This is no different. 

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I think I'm gonna have trouble making this all fit together but what I'm trying to get at is that labels when used correctly could help to humanise/normalise minorities that some people try to oppress.

Actually, the history of feminism and the patriarchy both give a pretty solid indication that labels merely give the opposition something to target, and a flag to rally around.

100 people label themselves.  ONE of them says something stupid or counterproductive.  The enemy of their cause will use that ONE person to condemn all the others.  For an example, google "Susan Brownmiller"...Who, in a 20 year fit of misandry, gave Pat Robertson and all his brethren a gigantic club with which to beat anyone who wore the same label as Brownmiller.

It's a question of what your motives are.  If you want to make a moral stand and go down in glorious flames, label your cause with something daring.  If you want to affect real change, you avoid labels where possible, and deny your opponent a target...While you go about your business.  It's harder, it's not as personally glorious, but it has the benefit of working.

I personally identify myself as an "eglatarian" if I HAVE to identify my beliefs, because NOBODY - not even a genuine Holy Man^TM like myself - can avoid labels entirely, and "eglatarian" is a particularly dodgy label that's really hard for the current societal structure to condemn.  It implies that ALL people are equal as human beings, which is the very root of feminism, the civil rights movement, everything.  And it's really hard for people living under the American mythology to strike out at, because the American MYTH is that "all people are equal under law".  Obvious bullshit, but the effect is the same.

THAT.

There's a set of assumptions that goes with a label, too. You might not know in advance what all those assumptions are goin to be, but do you really want a bunch of shit-flinging monkeys making more assumptions than they do already?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I think I'm gonna have trouble making this all fit together but what I'm trying to get at is that labels when used correctly could help to humanise/normalise minorities that some people try to oppress.

Actually, the history of feminism and the patriarchy both give a pretty solid indication that labels merely give the opposition something to target, and a flag to rally around.

100 people label themselves.  ONE of them says something stupid or counterproductive.  The enemy of their cause will use that ONE person to condemn all the others.  For an example, google "Susan Brownmiller"...Who, in a 20 year fit of misandry, gave Pat Robertson and all his brethren a gigantic club with which to beat anyone who wore the same label as Brownmiller.

It's a question of what your motives are.  If you want to make a moral stand and go down in glorious flames, label your cause with something daring.  If you want to affect real change, you avoid labels where possible, and deny your opponent a target...While you go about your business.  It's harder, it's not as personally glorious, but it has the benefit of working.

I personally identify myself as an "eglatarian" if I HAVE to identify my beliefs, because NOBODY - not even a genuine Holy Man^TM like myself - can avoid labels entirely, and "eglatarian" is a particularly dodgy label that's really hard for the current societal structure to condemn.  It implies that ALL people are equal as human beings, which is the very root of feminism, the civil rights movement, everything.  And it's really hard for people living under the American mythology to strike out at, because the American MYTH is that "all people are equal under law".  Obvious bullshit, but the effect is the same.

THAT.

There's a set of assumptions that goes with a label, too. You might not know in advance what all those assumptions are goin to be, but do you really want a bunch of shit-flinging monkeys making more assumptions than they do already?

Personally, I want them thinking that I'm a rather dim loudmouth asshole who can't be bothered to think.

That way, someone else gets blamed for the horrible sneaky shit I do.  Usually it's the dumbass with the tie-dye hairdo, the ANARCHIST label tattooed on his forehead, and the cranial piercing who's desperate to show how clever he is in public.  Thanks for the camouflage, asshole!